what we keep
   Elizabeth Berg
  1998 Random House NY USA
   ISBN: 0375500995


A woman with two daughters remembers a seemingly perfect Midwest summer.

This is a lovely read, filled with rich descriptions and dialogues of the dangers and dramas of a seemingly simple girlhood in a perfect Wisconsin family circa 1958.

"It's funny how, oftentimes, the people you love the most are given the least margin for error. Funny too, the places where the anger ends up surfacing."

Thoughtful glimpses from the adult on her journey of redemption, still struggling with her fears from when her idealized family dissolved the summer she was twelve.

"I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and her reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent-teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up a forty-seven-year old, looking in the mirror to count age spots."

In her memories of her own behavior to her sister, parents and neighbors she begins the rinsing away of the resentment and righteous indignation so long harbored toward the mother who left them. Her insights about her own daughters and her relationship with them are telling of how much she has become her mother even as she strove to be nothing like her.

"I suppose what I now believe is that we owe our mothers and our daughters the truth, and the truth is that my mother was forgiven in the way she was not forgotten. If I tried to shut her out of my mind, there were reminders of her, anyway: the odd way I crook my little finger when I write, as she does. The way I laid my hand across my babies' backs, which is the way I remember her laying her hands on me. I hear her inflections in my voice; I see her knees emerging from my bath water. All my life, when I ate certain things, walked certain places, witnessed certain events, there she would be. Close your eyes and draw a silk scarf past your ear: that is the whisper I heard. That is the soft presence I felt."

I was very pleasantly surprised by what we keep and I relish Elizabeth Berg's skill.
(04/12/99)

Rebecca