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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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We Are
All Welcome Here by Elizabeth Berg |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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It’s rare for
a popular and prolific author like Elizabeth Berg to write a novel based on a
reader’s suggestion, but that’s what happened with her latest book, We Are
All Welcome Here. Protagonist Paige Dunn contracts polio while pregnant,
and delivers baby Diana in an iron lung in There were
often nights when I couldn’t sleep well. It had nothing to do with getting up
with my mother. Rather it had to do with a kind of anxiety I talked myself
into, a kind of downward spiraling familiar to anyone even mildly acquainted
with insomnia. It came from too many what ifs, too many
uneasy projections into the future that could make you feel bitten about the
edges. But tonight, many hours after our play, I couldn’t sleep for another
reason, and that was because of a wild kind of happiness, because of the
excitement of believing that Suralee and I were at
last on our way toward certain fame. I couldn’t wait to tell Photoplay that I knew the exact night
it had all started. We’d had
what was, for us, a huge audience. Fifteen minutes before the show was to
begin, Suralee and I had stood at my bedroom
window, watching people come. My mother and Peacie
and LaRue, of course. Brenda collected money in a
cigar box, and more than once I heard her say loudly, “Tips are accepted!” Noreen Halloway came, wearing false eyelashes and white lipstick
and, according to Suralee, perfumed to high heaven
with Intimate. Brooks Robbins came with Holt Evers, who worked with him at
the hardware store, making good on his promise to bring someone to “beef up
the crowd.” Most people sat on the ground, on sheets we’d spread over the
lawn (with Peacie’s reluctant permission). But Opal
and Hamilton Beasley sat in the front, in two of the four chairs provided.
Another chair was taken by Dell Hansen’s date, who turned out to be not a
glamorous young woman but rather Rose Trippett.
“She must be two hundred years old!” Suralee said.
Old Mrs. Trippett was the grandmother of Ben
Samson, who’d been almost famous as a football player but had been killed in
a freak accident at practice one day—his neck had been broken. The fourth
chair stayed empty, as though accommodating a ghost. Suralee
said it was good luck in theater, to have one chair empty. Before we
went upstairs, Suralee and I had seen Dell arrive
in a brand-new black Dell
looked every bit as good as before, if not better. He was taken aback when he
met my mother—his face had colored, in fact, when he first saw her—but he
quickly recovered. He leaned down to say nice to meet you. He smiled at her.
He touched her hand. Just
before Suralee and I were ready to go down and
start the show, Riley Coombs came limping into the backyard. He was dressed
up, for Riley. This meant that he had combed his hair and tucked his shirt in
and tied his shoes. I couldn’t be sure from where I stood, but he even looked
clean-shaven. He sat far in the back, putting some distance between himself
and the others. He was like an octopus, I thought, scary-looking but really
very shy. We’d laid
out four flashlights to be footlights. My mother had agreed to let us put all
the house lights on for our performance, and as darkness began falling, they
provided a wonderful glow, which is exactly what we’d intended. When we
were ready to begin, I held up a blanket and announced, “The Night Can Be Measured, a new play written and performed by Suralee Halloway and Diana
Dunn. Tonight’s performance is the world premiere.” Behind me,
while I spoke these words, Suralee climbed quietly
into our garbage-can iron lung, which was lying on its side and decorated with
gauges and portals we’d drawn in with black crayon. Suralee’s
compact served as the overhead mirror. We had cleaned the can with bleach and
lined it with newspaper, but it still had a bit of an odor. Suralee had said she’d be so into character she wouldn’t
even notice. She was wearing all black, something she was otherwise not
allowed to do, and her hair was in a high ponytail, tied with white ribbons.
The hairstyle was modeled after one we’d seen in a newspaper photo of my
mother, just minutes after I was born. In that photo, she lay in the iron
lung with her ribbons and her red lipstick, and a nurse held me off to the
side and above her. After the photo was taken, my mother had asked the nurse
to show her my fingers and my toes, and my mother had counted them aloud.
Then she’d asked the nurse to hold my hand to her mouth and she’d kissed me
and the nurse had dripped tears onto my head. “Baptized,” my mother had said. Our play
centered on a woman in an iron lung whose doctor falls in love with her one
moonlit night. Once Suralee was inside the can, I
dropped the blanket, went behind the lilac bushes that grew in our backyard, then emerged again, transformed into Dr. Larson. I wore a
man’s white shirt someone had recently donated to us, cut at the knees to be
lab-coat-length. I carried a clipboard. In my front pocket, for lack of
better props, were a wrench, a screwdriver, and a pair of scissors. “Well,
well,” I said to Suralee. “And how are we doing
this evening?” I crossed my arms over my chest and stood with my legs wide
apart, as I’d been instructed. “Dr.
Larson!” Suralee said, in a voice not quite her
own. “What ever are you doing here at this hour?” I
hesitated—grandly, I thought. Then I said, “Well, I . . . I
don’t quite know. But I do know that the loveliest faces are to be seen by
moonlight.” I sat on the ground beside her and reached out to touch her face.
“For that is the time when one sees half with the eye and half with the
fanny. Fancy!” Suralee grimaced but quickly
regained composure. The play went on from there, a conversation between the
doctor and the patient that showed how much they had in common, despite their
glaring differences. They talked about their favorite season, their favorite
songs. Something we’d never quite gotten right in rehearsal worked flawlessly
in the play—we said something at the same time, then
at the same time said, “Jinx, you owe me a Coke.” We gaily laughed and then
stopped suddenly, for we realized what we both were feeling. Suralee said, “This can’t be happening. It’s impossible.
It’s like trying to measure the night.” “The night
can be measured,” I said. Suralee laughed. “No, it
can’t!” I told her
how—too mechanically, I realized; I was afraid of forgetting the lines. “Why, that’s. . . that’s beautiful,” Suralee
said, and she was so convincing she made up for my wooden presentation. I
looked into her face, lowered my voice as much as I could, and said, “Very
beautiful.” I made sure not to look away too fast, so that the audience would
understand that it was she I found beautiful. Then, in a fine, tremulous
tone, I admitted my love for her, and asked if it was possible that she could
care for me, too. Could she, possibly? Yes, she breathed—we’d written that
into the script, Yes, she breathes. In
that case, I said, would she come to live with me? Again she breathed Yes, oh
yes. Then our favorite part, the dramatic pulling back just as Suralee and I were about to kiss because another patient
was in trouble and needed me. “Will you wait for me?” I asked, and Suralee said, “I know that the moon brings all things
magical, but just where do you think I might go?”
This was a tribute to my mother’s sense of humor, and I snuck a look to see
if she was smiling, which she was. I ran offstage, concern for the next
patient evident in my face, my cardboard stethoscope slapping against my
chest. I disappeared behind the bushes again, and LaRue
stepped forward and turned to face the audience, a piece of paper Suralee had given him in his hand. He cleared his throat,
smoothed down his tie. “Love,” he began, then
stopped, removed his hat, and started again. “Love does not have legs,” he
slowly read, his finger moving along. “It does not have arms. But it move
mountains.” He put the paper down at his side, obviously relieved, and Peacie leapt up and began wildly applauding him. The
others followed, though I hoped some of their applause was for us, too. We had
cake afterward, Peacie’s delicious buttermilk
chocolate, and everyone was saying how much they had liked the play, how imaginative
we were, what good actresses. When I talked to Dell,
he told me that Rose Trippett was his best friend
Ben’s grandmother. “Ben Samson? That football player?” I asked, and Dell said
yes, that in fact he himself had been a football player, too, on the same
team as Ben, but had quit after the accident. He’d always promised Ben that
he’d come with him to I lay in
bed, thinking about Brooks. It might not have been such a good idea to do a
play about loving a woman in an iron lung; it might have given him ideas. Not that he didn’t seem to already have them. Tonight he
had told my mother that he would like to take her out to dinner sometime. My
mother had laughed. Out to dinner! she’d said. Brooks had said sure, how about it. My mother
had said it would be pretty hard with all her equipment—she could
frog-breathe long enough to get somewhere close by, but then she’d need to
get plugged in again. Brooks had said his friend Holt would come, he would
help carry the equipment, and they’d make sure the restaurant had an outlet
near their table. “But you’d
have to feed me and everyone would stare,” my mother had said, and Brooks had
said he would pick a corner table and she would sit with her back to the
people. I’d been sure she’d refuse him, but she didn’t. “Well, maybe,” she’d
said, and she was smiling. Dell had overheard this conversation—it took place
just as he was getting ready to leave—and had come over to look more closely
at my mother’s equipment. “Seems like you could hook that one box up to a
battery and then build something onto the back of your wheelchair that could
carry what you’d need,” he’d said. “Just a plywood extension would do it.” I loved
that he wasn’t afraid of my mother, that he seemed
to see past everything and acknowledge her as a person. It was a rare thing.
Brooks had gotten all excited and said yes, that was right, he’d thought
about that himself, he’d get to work on a design for it at the store tomorrow.
“I’ll help you,” Dell had said, and Brooks smiled uneasily and said okay. Suralee and I had been
watching this, and I’d said, “Ugh! Look at him! See what I mean?” Suralee had said she thought it might be good for my
mother to have a boyfriend. “Yeah, if it were someone like Dell,” I’d said,
and Suralee had said she didn’t really think Dell
would be interested in my mother. She’d stared straight ahead when she said this,
and I’d seen that she wanted Dell for her own mother. That’ll be the day, I’d thought. Noreen had no more chance than
my mother did. At least my mother was pretty. At least she was smart and
funny. And Dell had liked her, I could tell. You could tell these things.
She’d invited him to come back to visit, and he’d said he would. I got out
of bed to stand at the window and look out at where our play had taken place.
I was eager to do another one and make more money, but Suralee
said we had to do a different project first, one that could net us far more
than our plays did. There was a sweepstakes she’d seen in one of her mother’s
magazines. All you had to do was collect Sweetnuf
cookie and cracker labels and send them in. Send in as many entries as you like;
you could win five thousand dollars and a trip to the World’s Fair—that was
first prize. Twenty-five hundred was second prize, five hundred dollars was
third. There were
five days left to enter. We were always entering sweepstakes, and we had
never won anything. But I agreed to help her find as many labels as we could.
We’d go door-to-door, begging, as usual. Then we’d get started on the next
play. It would be about Noreen—she herself had requested that. I climbed
back into bed and lifted up my pajama top so that the fan would blow on my
skin. It was so hot and humid. Other kids would be out on the lawns, sleeping
on mattresses they’d dragged outside. But I was not like other kids, as my
mother was not like other mothers. Forever and ever. This I would tell Photoplay, too. To their great admiration,
I was sure. Most readers will finish We Are
All Welcome Here quickly, and will want to pass it to someone else to
read, so both can talk about it. Steve Hopkins,
July 26, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/We
Are All Welcome Here.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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