Once Upon a Time, There Was You by Elizabeth Berg

Author:Elizabeth Berg [Berg, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-04T22:00:00+00:00

19

Late Monday night, John peers at his bedside clock and tells Amy, “It’s after one, on a school night. We should go to sleep.”

“First tell me just a little more,” she says. “I love hearing about this, and besides, I’m not tired. Are you?”

He considers the question. “Actually, no. I feel like I just had a great workout. Which I did.”

She sits up, leans against a pillow, anchors her hair behind her ears. She does not bother to cover her breasts, something Irene always did, and he isn’t sure how he feels about it. There is a bit of the Puritan in him, he supposes; he embarrasses easily over things such as this. And it makes it hard for him to concentrate on what he’s saying. He sits up beside her, kisses her forehead, then stares straight ahead.

“Do you mind my asking all these questions about you?” Amy says.

“Not if you’ll answer my questions about you.” He looks quickly at her, then away.

She pulls the sheet up over her breasts. Got it, he imagines her thinking. He regrets himself: she is lovely, her breasts are beautiful; and now he has made her self-conscious. But she only says, “So. Erector sets and Tinkertoys. What else?”

“Blocks, before that,” he says. “My mom says I loved playing with blocks. I’d make towers as high as I could, then knock them down and start over. Apparently I did this for hours.”

“In your little striped shirts and corduroy pants and Buster Brown shoes?”

“And suspenders,” John says.

A marriage counselor once told him and Irene that they needed to know about each other as children, that it would help bind them together in important ways. But at that time, he already knew a good deal about Irene as a child; she’d told him things, and he’d asked her a lot of questions. He knew that, all through fourth grade, she used to lie in bed trying to figure out what the highest number in the world was, and she would nearly weep in frustration because, no matter what she thought of, all you had to do was add one and there, it was higher. He knew that when she was twelve years old she once snuck into a church and stared at the crucifix, because a Catholic girlfriend had told her if she watched carefully, she could see Jesus bleed. She said she stared so long she thought she did see bleeding. He knew she made cookies to give away to strangers she met on the street; he knew that for years she longed for a sea horse she saw advertised in the back of a magazine; he knew that, in Brownies, she was too shy to sing the “Day Is Done” song at the ends of the meetings and so got booted out for being uncooperative. He knew that, when she went to the hospital to have her tonsils out, she thought her parents were going to leave her there because they didn’t say they’d be back in the morning.

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