Casebook

by Mona Simpson

  “Well, the answer is …,” Sare said. This seemed to be her refrain. The answer to sex was once a week, in the morning. “Get it over with,” she said. “I always feel better after. It’s just before. The dread.”

  I pushed the tonsil-like buttons to disconnect, as if by accident. I didn’t want to hear my mom talk about sex. It was bad enough to have heard Sare. I started to think about Sare without clothes on and had to stop. I hadn’t understood that people their age—like our parents even—kept on doing it. Or maybe I’d known, but I hadn’t thought about it.

  “The answer,” Sare was saying, when I let the tonsils spring up, “is gratitude every day.” To our lunches, paring vegetables all at once and decanting them to glass jars in the refrigerator. Decanting seemed to be the final answer.

  But I hadn’t breathed dust balls to hear about vegetables. I didn’t like picturing Sare nude with Dale, Charlie’s bookish dad who wore wire-rimmed glasses. Did he take the glasses off when he undressed?

  More than an hour and the moms never got to Survivor.

  I’d heard the Mims complain once to my dad that they should be having an endless conversation. “And what would that conversation be about?” he’d asked.

  This was an endless conversation.

  I did the cut-my-head-off sign and set the extension down on its cradle.

  3 • Faking Sleep

  While I rummaged in my mom’s drawer, I heard my parents laughing as they came up the steps outside. I dived under their covers when I heard the crunch of them unlocking and I made myself completely still. They walked in and hangers in the closet cymbaled. My mom kicked off her shoes.

  “He has a crush on you, all right,” my dad said. A crush! Crushing was what girls did, I thought; every day it was on someone different. At the end of the bed, my father flicked on news. Through eyelashes, I could see him rubbing his socked foot. “Did you hear him stammering, ‘I’m besotted with your wife’? He practically couldn’t get the words out.” My dad laughed. “I guess he really liked your paper.”

  “I’m surprised anybody noticed.” My mom had published one paper, about animal locomotion. When two copies of the journal came in the mail, my dad had brought home flowers and they’d gone out to dinner. The dork guy had been at UCLA, making a site visit for an NSF grant to the department, and he’d picked out my mom to be friends with. He said he’d read her paper, but she thought it was because he wanted a running partner while he was in LA.

  “I’m not worried,” my dad said. “He’s a less-good-looking version of me.” In general, my dad only minded taller men. “It’s not an ugly baby they’ve got. Not like some potatoes we’ve known.” What baby did they think looked like a potato? Would my dad call his own daughter a spud?

  “His wife asked me to talk to him. She said, I tell him he’s smilier than other babies. She thought he’d come around because he’s good with the cat and the dog. So I told him, ‘You’ll fall in love with him. Everyone falls in love with their own children.’ And he said, ‘Well, with your babies, sure.’ ”

  “Miles was the most beautiful baby,” my dad said. “And Emma! Those curls!”

  Boop One! Beautiful? A startling idea. I was alive when the Boops were born and I had eyes. Two lumps that wailed was more like it.

  “The wife’s kind of a dishrag,” my dad said. “What’s with the Heidi braids?”

  “You know what she said? After that whole thing about how he didn’t love the kid, she told me she was planning to get pregnant again right away. I asked if she thought that was such a good idea, given how he’d taken to this one. She said, in that little-girl voice, ‘Well, if he’s unhappy with everything anyway …’ ”

  “Still, it can’t hurt for you to have a friend at NSF.”

  My dad cared about the Mims’s position in the math world, where she felt she was still a beginner and too old to be. She’d made a miscalculation. She’d tried to solve an open problem and not published anything for five years. Now she had to teach more and didn’t get paid her summer ninths. I pretended sleep. They had a little scuffle then over whether to let me stay. “But she’s always in here,” my dad said, meaning my sister.

  “So let him this once.”

  My dad sighed. But he didn’t move me. And I slept beautifully, between them.

  4 • Eavesdropping

  My mother went running late at night, after we were supposed to be in bed. She loved for us to sleep. She could do things then without missing time with us. One night, I happened to be sitting in the crook of a tree when I heard voices rise from the street.

  “That proved to be irresistible.”

  “But this is?” she said. “Resistible?”

  You could tell from the sound of the wind in the leaves that it was no longer summer.

  “I’d probably leave everything,” the male voice, not hers, said.

  “It would never work,” she answered. “We’re allergic to animals.”

  It took a moment longer than usual for the words to line up into sentences. Possible meanings assembled, like a puzzle that could be put together different ways but that still left extra pieces until the real form used every one of them. Was it the dork guy offering to leave his wife for the Mims and her letting him down easy? I didn’t think it could be that. But the words pressed on me, like sharp cookie cutters.

  One Sunday, I saw my dad pacing on the porch and climbed up to the roof. “I could get away for a long weekend maybe,” I heard him say. There was no one else there. He was on the telephone. “Not a month. She wouldn’t want to either. The last thing she’d want is a beach with me! When I get a night off, she doesn’t elect to go out. She has me take the kids so she can work. And I get that. I really do.”

  A sweet dark twirl of air floated up to me. Thinking he was alone, my father had lit a cigar. He didn’t suspect I was above him. We weren’t supposed to know that he smoked. My mother had found some statistic that children of parents who smoked were more likely to smoke themselves. The Mims loved a good statistic.

  That night, I stood outside their door. They were talking about the new chairman of the math department, who’d come from MIT after her husband died. “I worry about her,” my father said. “She’s just not attractive enough.” Then he burped. “Great meal.”

  I burst in and said I needed a tuck. She followed me to my room and put her hand on my forehead. I loved that. Her hand was always cool. It erased my thoughts and let me fall asleep.

  Then, it happened: the permanent thing.

  When they told me, my lungs went out of sync. I lost the rhythm of breathing. I had to remember, Suck in, exhale, the hunger for oxygen no longer automatic.

  My father went to the sink to get me a glass of water.

  My mother told me to breathe.

  “Drink,” my father said.

  “I never thought you two” was all I could whisper, my face in his shoulder.

  5 • Guessing Who Left

  My father moved out a month after 9/11. Even that didn’t keep him home.

  In school, we drew pictures of the Twin Towers to send to faraway New York City firemen, and during Life Skills, when the rock came to me in the circle, I said my parents were separating and that made me sad.

  My mom got up early now. She fixed our lunches, the same as before, but she moved stiff and fast, like a general, dragging us up.

  I taught the Boops to say Jawohl. And Heil Hitler.

  “Who do you think left?” Hector asked.

  I really didn’t know. “They said they decided together.”

  It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, after the Boops being born. Even with all my sleuthing, I’d never suspected this. A day in October my mother sat at the kitchen table staring at an index card where she’d penciled the numbers of our friends’ moms. I watched her make herself dial. I learned from the conversation she had with Sare later that Simon’s mom had asked, Did you guys ever think of doing some counseling?

  “Yeah, right,” Sare s
aid. “You ever think of that?”

  They laughed frighteningly. So my parents had gone to counseling. I hadn’t known.

  But Hector’s mom, Kat, had said, “I’m about six weeks behind you.”

  I counted. Six weeks passed, then seven, then eight. Nothing happened. Hector didn’t know his luck. I felt bad, but I wanted it to happen to him, too. I thought it would make us better friends.

  6 • How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

  My father told me we were going to see The Sound of Music as a family.

  We’d never done anything as a family before. “Do I have to?” I said.

  They made me. Hector went, too, with the aunt who paid his school fees.

  “My family,” I said to him at Intermission.

  He shrugged. “My mom says your parents get along because it wasn’t about sex. No one had an affair.” Meaning, I supposed, that sex was the dangerous element. I acted as if I’d already known that. “Simon’s mom says you have the best divorce.”

  “We’re not actually divorced. We’re here as a family, remember? My dad’s gunning for an A in Separation.”

  When he picked us up Saturday mornings, he called ahead from the car to say, Put Emma in the black headband. He still cared about our hair. He usually ran late so we had to wait on the porch with our hair combed and then run down to his car. My mom came out in socks. He’d open the passenger window and hand her something—a cup with a straw, takeout containers, crumpled napkins—and say, Could you throw this out?

  She took it. And we beheld our handsome dad, the distant ocean unrolling behind his profile, framed by the window of his new, heavy car.

  “Your dad moved out,” Hector said. “Maybe he’s the culprit.”

  My dad would be the one to fall in love. He walked into walls, pratfalling. He said himself he was the stupider of the two. He didn’t say he was also the better-looking one. Neither of my parents was especially romantic. I remembered the way they said in love, with spin, as if it were pathetic or a joke. My mom saw love as a trap to catch females. “You don’t really believe in that romance stuff, do you?” I’d asked her once, after a Disney princess movie with the Boops.

  “I think it’s more or less stuff and nonsense,” she’d admitted.

  Maybe my dad had left her for the Dutch.

  Hector looked at me with pity.

  You don’t even know how close you came, I thought.

  His aunt walked over, balancing two supersize Cokes and a popcorn. His aunt was the age of our moms, but she wore boots and scarves because her boyfriend was married and she didn’t have kids to spend money on.

  Boop One had moved three rows down to sit with girls she knew from school.

  “I want to go home,” Boop Two whispered. “I’m homely.”

  “Lonely, you mean. You’re lonely. Not homely.”

  “I just want to go home.”

  “Me, too. But we can’t.”

  My mom waved to the Bennetts on the other side of the aisle. Sare had draped her leg over the movie-chair arm, onto Dale, as if to prove separation wasn’t contagious.

  Out on the sidewalk, we met Holland for the first time, straining at the leash of an enormous poodle. She was tall and Brentwood-looking.

  I asked her if she was Dutch.

  She said, “No, just American,” and looked as if she had no idea why I’d asked.

  I couldn’t have been the first person to ask that. More like the eighty-third.

  7 • A Kind of Suspense

  For a long time I woke up abruptly. At attention. I lived in a kind of suspense. We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don’t know that, don’t know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

  Over a year after she said she would, Hector’s mom moved out of their house, to a cottage in Topanga. A week later their dog ran away. Hector and I stapled up signs with Rebel’s picture and the offer of a fifty-dollar reward.

  I told Hector, “The worst part is finding out. After that, they buy you things. I have to say, this year hasn’t been as bad as I thought.” Mondays and Tuesdays Malc, my dad’s assistant, picked us up after school, Green Day blasting in his Honda. We stopped for takeout from Jerry’s Deli. My dad ordered us the same thing every night: chicken, broccoli, and baked fries. He made it home in time to eat with us, something my mom had tried to get him to do, but she never succeeded. A sense of tragedy flitted over his face as he surveyed the takeout boxes and plastic forks, as if we were enduring hardship together. But we preferred this food. Every Monday and Tuesday, we ate layer cake. When we used to have Sunday-night dinners in our house, our mom had said, Napkins on laps, and he’d put his on top of his head to make us laugh. But now he remembered each of the dishes she cooked and spoke of them solemnly. When he called us there to say good night, he asked what we’d had for dinner. With the shrimp? he’d say, or That’s the salad with the beans in it?

  Before, my parents had fought about which one of them would have to go to the class picnic, who’d show up for the teacher conference, back-to-school night, blah blah blah. Now they still fought, but over who would get to. Had to or get to, the Mims always did. Since the separation, she seemed in constant motion. Like Avis, the second-biggest car-rental company, she tried harder.

  Sometimes, I woke up at night and heard her crying.

  “The worst is when they tell you,” I said again to Hector. I didn’t like remembering that. Everything had gone granular. Then, for months after, I kept wondering when the real horror would begin. In the middle of the night, I’d jolt and think, Here it is. But most days, it was as if we’d gotten another life but an okay one.

  I guess I’d been waiting to tell somebody all this.

  “But it’s not like my parents are separating or anything,” Hector said. “She just found a house in Topanga for the summer.”

  8 • We Try Harder

  Hector and Jules never knew where they’d sleep. Often, they ended up one place and a book or a sweater, in the case of Jules, who lived for her clothes, would be in the other. We were separated, but at least we had a schedule. The Audreys decided day-by-day. Hector’s dad, Philip, stayed in the bungalow where they all used to live, with the one bathroom that now never seemed clean. Hector slept over at my house most Friday nights. We never went there because he shared a room with his sister.

  The Mims bought a pizza stone. As soon as she walked in the door those June Fridays, she changed into sweats, made a fire, mixed dough, and set it to rise. I liked seeing fire while it was still light out. Hector and I sluffed to my room, hauling backpacks.

  This was all part of the Mims’s We Try Harder campaign. She made us regular pizzas, but for herself and Boop Two, she sliced pears and spooned on wet cheese and finished with a kind of bitter lettuce. Marge Cottle, the math department chair, brought over poisonous-looking mushrooms.

  “Malted barley in the crust,” the Mims said, biting down. She loved her own cooking.

  “Your house smells like excitement,” Hector said to us.

  9 • How We Felt

  “So I’m dating someone,” she said, in the car. “How do you feel about that?”

  Sare must’ve told her to ask that. The Mims looked at me and swerved. She was never a great driver.

  “Watch the road, please.”

  The year before, Sare had made her assistant a partner in her real estate business, and now she drove twice a week to classes for her MSW. Since she’d started, there’d been lots of asking how we felt. Not that how we felt made any difference.

  “Seriously? I guess I’m kind of relieved.”

  My dad had had Holland awhile already. I was okay with her. I just didn’t want her snively runt moving into my room. I liked my room at my dad’s. It felt like a tree house, with a glass wall and a loft bed built in by a famous architect in 1967. So the Mims had met someone now. Her hands stayed on the steering wheel; she faced forward. I hadn’t noticed when she’d stopped crying at night. I’d thought maybe I�
�d just stopped waking up.

  “Who is he?”

  “Eli Lee,” she said, as if that were a name I was supposed to know. And I did, kind of. Someone named Eli called. Was he the dork guy? I wondered but couldn’t ask because I’d never called him that to her face.

  “Eli. Yeah,” I said. “So, is he going to start coming over and stuff?”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “But he lives in Washington, D.C.”

  I remembered Sare asking once, What happened to that guy you run with?, and the Mims saying they didn’t live here. I pictured a wife with her hair parted in the center and braids on each side, carrying a potato baby. What did he do with her?

  The Mims seemed about a hundred percent looser. She was probably dying to call Sare to tell her I felt relieved. But even so, we didn’t see the guy for months. Still, he called, and I liked yelling through the house, It’s hi-im! Eli!

  I really was relieved. The nights we went to our dad’s in the canyon, I thought, she had someone to talk to.

  10 • Behind a Door

  Eli Lee finally walked up our steps on an October night, and he was the dork guy! I’d thought he was, but his really being who I’d guessed still shocked me. I was used to being told I had a big imagination. Not in a nice way. He stood no taller than my dad and he had weird hair that stuck up on top like an artichoke gone to flower. Boop One asked to touch it. “Was it always like that?” she asked. “When you were little?”