by Mona Simpson
“No traffic.” She shrugged.
Boop One crossed her arms and stuck her head down and said she wasn’t going to school. Chin on her chest, she shook her head, saying, “You can’t make me.” My dad pushed her into the den, which wasn’t so far, and we could still hear.
“Why do you take her to Hawaii and not take me?”
“Dad, we’re late!” I yelled, aware of Holland standing there, looking down at her miniature suitcase.
My dad finally quieted Boop One, but she didn’t say a thing all the way to school. She looked out the window, mad and proud. A tiny queen.
The last day of school, it seemed a lot of the kids were leaving for somewhere else. Everyone asked, Where’re you going?
Just staying home, I said.
And some people asked, Are you still in the same house? That was how I could tell they’d heard about the separation. I mean, as if you say to a normal person in a normal family on a normal day, Are you still in the same house?
I couldn’t stop thinking about money.
Eli wasn’t coming to Thanksgiving either—he was working in an animal shelter. He liked to volunteer holidays, the Mims said, because that gave the people who worked there a chance to be with their families. This was admirable, I knew, but I kind of wished he were just coming, since Dad wasn’t. Charlie’s family was supposed to eat with us, too, but then his older brother wanted it at their house with just the family. Sare called my mom the day before to explain, not apologize—it went without saying that what Reed wished trumped us. The Mims cried without making any noise. She hung up the phone. She’d invited them a month in advance to make sure we had a full house. Postseparation, holidays became obstacle courses. We weren’t enough by ourselves.
Marge arrived, carrying in a bowl of warm nuts with rosemary, trailed by three Chinese mathematicians. My mom hadn’t had friends like Marge before. Marge wore cotton pants and T-shirts, like what they put on little kids, and those same colors. Pastels. Not a good look on a woman of a hundred and eighty pounds. I supposed none of that had mattered when she’d had a husband. She’d solved one of the world’s open problems when she was twenty-nine. Only a handful of people in the world ever do that. My mom didn’t think she could. Marge’s mind, the Mims said, was incredibly elegant. And she turned out to be an amazing cook. She fried Japanese peppers on our stove and slid sunny-side-up eggs on top, because Boop Two wouldn’t touch the turkey, which had once had a face. Marge said she’d tasted this in a restaurant, then pushed through the swinging doors to the kitchen and badgered the chef into teaching her to make it.
The day felt easy, light, and impersonal, the way it can be in a packed movie theater with all those people you don’t know laughing at the same time. I was glad when everyone finally left.
“Marge is thinking of Internet dating,” my mom told me as we cleaned up.
I didn’t think that had much chance.
“Remember, she can read a demographic chart, and she’s decided it’s promising. She’s looking into one called Science Connect.”
My sisters were in bed by the time Eli’s cab pulled up in front of our house. He didn’t have his borrowed car. He walked in carrying a suit and a white shirt on a hanger.
Later on, I heard them talking. They sat on the porch steps, a blanket over their knees.
“I never asked why you had the affair.”
“I, I didn’t tell you this, but, at the time, Jean and I weren’t having sex.”
“Not much or not at all?”
“Not at all. She’d always said she wanted to be a virgin for her husband. But then, by the time, by the time we got married, I knew there was a problem.”
“Did you work on it?”
“She was seeing a therapist. We always made that a priority. I assumed they were working on it. But then, I found out later that she’d never even mentioned sex. She said it was too icky to talk about. I tried to get to know her other ways. I didn’t want to hurt her.”
“It sounds like a case of serious abuse.”
“I thought that, too, but it wasn’t, apparently.”
“What was it?”
“I guess I wasn’t her type. Later on, when we were in therapy, that came out.”
“So you were married, but you never had sex?”
He didn’t answer that. I guess it didn’t need an answer. Now the Mims asked if he’d been in love with Lorelei.
“It wasn’t like that. I told you. It was an affair.”
“You never said you loved her?”
“No, honey, it wasn’t like that.” She didn’t read, he said. After a year, he ended it. “She’d started to say unpleasant things about Jean,” he said in a prim tone, as if that had offended him.
I mean, duh, I thought.
Eventually he told Jean what had happened, and he moved out; he’d thought he should. But Jean didn’t want anyone to know. Then they started sex therapy.
Sex therapy! I hadn’t known it really existed outside of British comedy. But he and my mom talked about all this as if there’d been an illness.
“What do you do in sex therapy?” she asked, in a serious voice.
He stood up and started pacing. “It’s just such a betrayal.” He sounded angry. “I’ll tell you, but it’s a serious betrayal.” He breathed a few times before continuing. “We did exercises. At first we had to undress and lie with a book covering my penis. She put her hand on top of the book.”
Like swearing on a Bible, I thought. Gross.
The next week, they took away the book. My mom asked him how long until they had actual sex. Five years, he said right back. I almost laughed out loud. I calculated: He married at twenty-three, and I remembered the affair happened when he was thirty and that it lasted a year. That would make him thirty-one. Then five years. So they had sex when he was thirty-six, after thirteen years of marriage.
“What made you stick it out?” she asked. Maybe she’d done the calculations, too.
“I thought, I thought who else was she going to be with? Jean always wanted children. I thought she should be able to have a baby the normal way. And she said if we broke up and she dated other people, they’d know she’d been married and think it was strange that she’d never had sex.”
They’d think it was strange all right. A married virgin. That was a type I’d never known existed. Even in British comedy. Now I wondered how many of them there were.
I sure didn’t want one.
“And then once you’d finished the therapy, what was it like?” my mom asked.
“Once a fortnight,” he said. “I always initiated. She never said no.”
“And did it feel like real sex?”
“No,” he said. “Not really.” I wondered what real sex felt like and what the alternative to that was.
It was an odd story. Like the brother. A lot of Eli’s life seemed weird. Sad, too. I felt that even then. But sad in a way that had no poignancy. More like a disease I hoped wasn’t contagious. The opposite of my dad’s family. Just then, I wanted to be a Hart, not a hyphen-Hart.
A little while after that, they came in, and my mom gave him a piece of her pie made from a real pumpkin, which tasted too vegetal. Like squash.
28 • A Double Agent
Upper School was sweet until my mom walked into my room without knocking one December night in her UCLA clothes. Somebody had told her that I’d been selling soup. She said she’d noticed me taking grocery bags to school. “You don’t need to sell soup,” she said. “We give you ten dollars every week.”
“Wait. You object to me selling soup to my people who willingly buy it?”
“You’re allowed to sell soup if you get the dean’s permission to sell soup.”
This was a problem; I’d already checked the Cottonwoods handbook. In the twenty-page Rules section, it said you couldn’t sell anything on campus unless it was for a chartered club. Clubs had to register with the community service woman. And the way the community service woman saw matters, I alrea
dy owed her nine hours.
“Okay, okay, let me get this straight,” I said. “I understand you don’t want me to continue. So I’ll just sell the rest of my inventory, and then I’ll stop.”
“How much inventory do you have?”
I opened my closet and bags slumped out.
Her mouth tightened. “You’re to stop completely as of now. Unless and until you get permission from the dean.”
“Well, what do you suggest I do with all this soup?”
“I suggest you eat it. Bring one a day for lunch.” She glanced at the bags again. “Share some with your sisters.”
I had to find out who told her. What was the good of surveillance if you missed the call that determined your life? Hector and I spent hours speculating about who snitched. We had to come up with better methods of phone tapping. The only conversation I’d heard through the extension that week was Sare urging my mom to switch her credit cards from mileage points to cash back. “Blah blah blah,” I repeated to Hector. “Gobble gobble gobble.” That night, my mom complained that Esmeralda had taken me to buy soup. Sare said to tell Esmeralda that that could never happen again. Sare could be medieval. She believed in castes. But Esmeralda, who cleaned their house on Thursdays, revered Sare. Pretty much everyone revered Sare, impossible as she was.
I couldn’t sleep. I knew I was going to be letting people down.
For once, the Mims didn’t have to keep waking me in the morning.
“You really won’t let me sell just until break?” I said. “It’s only two weeks!”
“I really won’t.”
I slammed my door. When I came out, I gave each of the Boops two bags to carry. I hauled the other five.
“What are you doing, Miles?”
“I’m giving soup away, Mother. Since you won’t let me make a profit. And I really wanted to get you all good Christmas presents.”
That was true. I’d wanted to buy a necklace for her.
I felt literally dreadful all morning. At lunch, Hector and I waited until people formed the line. Then Hector asked, Who wants soup? And we handed out the cups and walked down the line pouring water from our thermoses. Whoever tried to pay us, we said no. We passed out chips and crisps and popcorn and the yellow Inca Kola. We didn’t announce that we were giving food away, because we wanted to thank our regulars first, but people heard, and by the end of the period, we’d distributed all but one bag of Mexi-Crisps. “Closing down shop, man,” I said. “On the house.” I wished Happy Hanukkah to all the Christians and Merry Christmas to the Jews. I’d brought a six-pack of Mexican Cokes. I gave a bottle each to Charlie, Hector, and Ella. I felt a little better. I liked Ella. I liked giving her something.
“We should have kept more for ourselves,” Hector said.
We counted the cash in my locker. I split it with Hector, even though I’d laid out the seed money. The alley, where we ate our lunches, was just a parking lot. The other private school in our neighborhood had been started as a military academy, and their founders bought up Los Angeles property in the first decades of the last century. Cottonwoods still rented and spent its money on scholarships. Our founder was still a hippie. Inscribed over the gate were the questions: IS IT TRUE? IS IT KIND? IS IT NECESSARY? DOES IT IMPROVE UPON THE SILENCE?
When Eli called that night, he suggested I look at the existing clubs and see if one might partner with us. So I looked around for a club that would let us sell soup in its name. The gay and lesbian club was sponsoring a movie night, it said on the library wall bulletin: Midnight Cowboy, Coke, and free pizza.
“I’d stay for the pizza,” Hector said. His dad usually took them to a greasy Thai place near their house for dinner.
So we stayed and ate and then signed up. Maybe we could get permission to sell soup. I called my dad for a ride. We waited for him outside the admin building.
“So what club is this?” he asked as we climbed in.
“FLAGBT,” I said. “Freedom for Lesbians and Gays. Bisexuals.”
“And Transgendered,” Hector said.
I liked watching my dad’s lip wobble. He was a Hollywood liberal, way Democrat, in favor of gay rights, but his mouth went like a rope when you shook it. Then, on Venice Boulevard, we passed the Thai dive where the Audreys ate. It was an old storefront with a sagging blind.
“We get our food there most nights,” Hector said.
“Yeah, right,” my dad said.
“They do,” I mumbled. They really did.
In front of Hector’s place, I lifted up his hand and kissed it.
“Does Hector like any girls?” my dad asked, driving away.
“He may like some, but he doesn’t have a chance.”
Soup sellers, the girls called us, not in a friendly way.
29 • By the Heating Vent
My mom and Eli talked about budgeting time the way they talked about budgeting money. We seemed to have neither to spare. Since my dad moved out, leisure ended. The Mims didn’t roam anymore with Sare through aisles of junk at flea markets on Sunday mornings. They used to return while we still slept. (Sweet! They got to do something they liked without missing one minute of our waking lives! They’d probably decided about Survivor there, where I couldn’t even eavesdrop.) But the second Sunday in December, they drove to a swap meet to buy Christmas presents. I woke again to the sound of them moving around the kitchen. A blessed return to normal.
“But I don’t want to ratchet things up,” the Mims said. “So he feels he has to spend that much on my present. And I can’t do it again, for his birthday.”
I walked in, still in jama pants. “Can I have a bagel?”
“Sure.” She stood to make it, and I turned back to my room.
“Wait, you can get that, Miles, can’t you? And put it in the toaster?” Sare nodded to the Mims. “Sit down. He’s fourteen!” The woman was a nuisance.
I found the bagels. Since my dad moved out, the Mims had brought us breakfast on white trays—a wedding present they’d never used. (Separation had its perks.)
“Plane tickets are expensive,” Sare continued. “And he’s been doing all the traveling. I think it’s important to keep it roughly even.”
“How many minutes do I put it on for?” I asked.
“Three,” my mom said. “If it just seems too much, I could save it for Miles.”
“Oh, just give it to Eli. You bought it for him. It’s a beautiful watch.”
But I liked the idea of her saving a watch for me!
“Hey, what ever happened to that suit?” Sare asked.
“We never went to London.”
“Where’s the butter?”
“Bottom drawer, next to the mustard you like.”
“He should have just bought you a suit here.” Sare’s voice changed. “Do you think there’s some reason you’re taking it so slow?”
Taking what so slow! I wanted things to stay the way they were. Separation had made me conservative.
The Mims sighed. “He called me up last night and said, ‘Don’t you want to just go to the movies with me?’ And I do. But I have to think of the kids.”
Oh, just go to the movies, I felt like saying. “I can babysit” is what I did say, and took my bagel to my room. I’d burned it.
The year before, we’d had blowout Friday-night sleepovers with six or seven guys every week. This year we’d dwindled to Hector, me, and sometimes Charlie. Several of the Rabbits were hanging out with girls. Charlie was obsessed with Estelle.
I still wanted to find out who’d snitched, but no matter what I said to my mom about not trusting her anymore, she wouldn’t crack. I planned to bring it up with Eli. He’d already told me his ex-in-laws were Nazis.
Hector and I walked a lot that December, speculating about the other people in FLAGBTU. By then, we’d lobbied to get the U added, for Undecided.
I jumped into Charlie’s arms just to see my dad’s face tumble. I was beginning to enjoy this. I said, “You’re against DOMA, aren’t you?” I had to e
xplain that DOMA was the Defense of Marriage Act. He knew that DADT was Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. My mom shocked me by recognizing the term NAMBLA. One of the things my parents still shared was an irrational fear of pedophiles.
Eli had read in an English novel that a man paid his grandchildren to memorize poems, and the Mims offered to give us ten dollars a sonnet, fifteen for longer poems. Since I’d lost soup selling, I needed income. We kept buying lunches—it was hard to go back to the stuff my mom packed. So I memorized “Annabel Lee.” But the Mims turned out to be a stickler. One line off and she sent me back to my room to try again.
30 • The Game in the Front Seat
I hunted for ladders to put up lights. We had two in our garage, but neither was tall enough. I left a note for our gardeners taped to the hose—we had mow-and-blow guys like everyone else we knew in LA—asking to borrow a high one. I got no answer, so I had Esmeralda translate my note. That worked. A tall rusty ladder appeared.
I kept asking my mom when Eli was coming. I hauled the lights from the basement, ran them along the living room floor, and plugged them in to make sure the bulbs all still lit.
Eli finally walked in carrying his suitcase, late the Sunday before Christmas. The tree had been up for days already. My mom warmed his plate, and he ate on a chair by the fire. The Boops, in pajamas, turned marshmallows on long retractable forks our father had once bought. With everyone there, I said, “So, Eli, our dog got adopted.”
“Angeldog!” Boop One cried out. “When? Is it a nice family? With girls?”
My mother looked at me strangely. “Tell Eli when, Miles.”
“November twentieth,” Boop Two said. No one but us had remembered him.
“That’s just great,” Eli said. Then the Boops had to go to bed, and they wanted him, so I followed the Mims to the kitchen, where she whisked milk on the stove with sugar, vanilla, grated nutmeg, and some cardamom. She brought the Boops each a mug with one star anise floating on top.
