by Mona Simpson
“I suppose it’s good for them to go there. He gets home later than I do, but it’s a lot earlier than he did when we were married. Rosenfeld says divorce makes better dads.”
Our dad wanted us! My hopes flew wild. I liked the idea of being tugged between them.
“Can I read your divorce agreement sometime? You’ve seen everything of mine.”
Eli said, “Sure.”
33 • A Fight About Colors
He stood in my doorway after Hector left, a sagging hour. The checking-on-her-son talk: I expected it to last less than fifteen minutes. School started Monday, he reminded me, then squinted and recited my schedule, what I had each period. The Mims couldn’t have done that. My dad, oh my God, my dad. Then Eli started arranging my books on the shelves. He asked me whether I wanted to sort by authors’ last names or by subject. We alphabetized. He hauled a ladder from the garage and washed the top of my bookshelf. The ladder reminded me of the lights. He’d do them next year, I was pretty sure, if he’d do this.
“Where do you read your comics?” he asked.
He must have noticed my floor. I knew the guy was neat, but I’d never seen anything like this. He’d bought me cardboard boxes the exact width of comic books. We decided to store them by publisher—Marvel, Dark Horse, or DC. He found a basket for the latest ones. He got a cup from the kitchen for pencils and made a place for every small object until you could actually see my floor. Did I know how to run the washing machine?, he asked.
“Kind of,” I said.
He tilted the hamper. It was full. A little more than, maybe. “It’s time for a load.”
“I mean, I’m not sure I remember exactly how.”
He took me down to the basement, and we separated whites from colors. He showed me where to put the soap. “Next time I’ll teach you to iron a shirt.” He told me he’d started wearing white shirts in high school. He’d bought them in thrift stores.
The last thing he did was sweep my floor. “I had an art teacher who’d been in Vietnam,” he said. “He told us that one New Year’s Eve he got so plastered that he threw up all over himself and woke up in a ditch. When he opened his eyes the next morning, the villagers were hanging out clean clothes to dry and sweeping their huts. Their tradition for the New Year was to clean. So he made us clean the clay room.”
I let him go through my backpack, take out the balled assignments, and spread them on my desktop. (Now I had a desktop you could see.) We threw away old papers, then put my wet whites into the dryer and started the darks.
He suggested we walk to Neverland to reward ourselves. It was hard to keep thinking of things to talk about. I felt a gust of relief when I was finally back in my room, with a bag of fresh comics. I thought of my father’s house. I liked the way Eli kept close and remembered everything, but I was exhausted, too. I needed my dad’s house, those empty hours when Malc sat at the kitchen counter reading the trades, and we were left to ourselves. The architect had designed the house so different shades of green slanted in through windows. It was like living in a three-story tree house.
The Mims knocked. She and Eli were going out with Marge and some out-of-town woman named Penny who did mathematics of light. I was supposed to babysit Boop Two.
“Will I get paid?”
“No, you’re a part of this family.”
Eli raised his eyebrows, but she didn’t relent.
When I put my sister to bed, I asked what she was reading. She had to read before bed every night now. She’d learned to count to a thousand before she could really read. “Berenstain Bears,” she said.
“That’s way too young for you. When I was your age, I was reading Philip Pullman, The Phantom Tollbooth, E. L. Konigsburg. Harry Potter.”
“I know.” She shrugged. “You’re a much better reader.”
I went to my bookshelf to pick a Dahl. All the Dahls stood straight in a row now. Hector’s favorite was the story where the wife kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, then bakes the evidence and feeds it to the police.* But I thought that might be a little gruesome. I took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and read to her until she said, “I think I have to go to sleep now.”
She was different than Boop One, a less annoying person.
I woke up when Eli and my mom came in, fighting.
“You said she looked like the young Audrey Hepburn.” Who looked like who? Whom? Could this have been a mathematician of light? “You said you’d memorized her face!”
“But I’ve never been attracted to Audrey Hepburn!”
They kept fighting. I faded in and out. They seemed to be arguing about colors, then. My mom didn’t like bright blues or greens; she only liked them mixed with gray. I knew that. But it seemed absurd: Did people care about colors?
“You just see things your way,” Eli said.
They sounded like my mom and dad; it was weirdly consoling.
I woke up again later, in the middle of the night, to someone, a guy, yelling, “What about all those hundreds of times I’ve gone down on you! Happy fucking two thousand and four!” When I sat up in bed, though, the house was still. It must have come from the alley. All I could think of was that Simon Levin got a blow job, and he was a Rabid Rabbit. He still looked the same. The next morning I woke up with an ache in my neck, and Boop One returned home cranky from her sleepover.
“Where’s Eli?” she asked, and I noticed he was gone.
The Mims shrugged. “He left.” I looked at her, her chin in her palm, sitting at the kitchen table.
She was no longer young.
* * *
* Still my favorite.
34 • Our House Had Problems
One day after school the Mims, still in her teaching shirt, crossed her arms and said she’d found us a new house.
What? Since when did we need a new house? This was like a wall opening to wind. Pasadena, I thought, with horror. Those signatures had counted. Now I felt tricked by Eli, who’d cleaned my room and bought me off with comic-book boxes.
She said she wanted to drive us over and show it to us. “Now? I have homework,” I said. “We have a Latin test tomorrow. I wanted you to quiz me.”
“I will,” she said. “After. Come on. Let’s all get in the car.”
She drove toward our school and slowed six blocks from our house, near where Marge Cottle lived. Then she stopped. This wasn’t Pasadena. It was our same neighborhood. We all three sank down into the back. My leg swung by itself, hitting her seat. “I don’t want a new house,” Boop Two said.
“Let’s just look,” our mom said. “Come on.”
I was still reeling from the geography. So Pasadena didn’t seem to be the explanation. This actually looked like a place she would like: white-shingled, old, on a corner, with a porch. Roses. Not my dad’s taste at all. But it was way smaller than our house, only one floor. There seemed to be two normal-sized bedrooms and one minuscule one, without even a closet. There was also an attic over the garage.
“I call that one,” I said.
“You’d live with us in the house.” The way she snapped, I got it all of a sudden: Eli’s schizo brother would move into the attic. I sure as hell didn’t want that minuscule room with no closet. But I knew not to say anything. The Mims seemed to peer into our faces.
“I don’t want three houses!” Boop One whispered. “I don’t even want two. I want one house! Everybody else has one house!”
“You guys, we wouldn’t have three. She wants this one instead of ours.”
“No, she doesn’t!” They both looked up at her for proof.
“Great fireplace,” she said, then, “Let’s go home.”
Nobody said anything in the car. In the house, she took off her button-down shirt and hung it on the doorknob and put on sweats. She had her teaching clothes and her clothes like ours: cotton, tending toward fleece. That night, I loaded the dishwasher. Boop Two helped. For days we strenuously behaved. But the Mims brought up the house again on Sunday. She said if we had a smaller
house we could take more vacations.
“I hate vacations!” Boop One cried.
I was getting the feeling that this wasn’t a choice. It must have been money. Maybe it had already been decided.
My mom pounded a FOR SALE sign into the front lawn.
“I hope nobody buys it,” Boop Two said.
But the Mims loved our house. At first, when I thought it was Pasadena, I’d blamed Eli. Now I kind of blamed our dad. Why didn’t I just ask her the reason? I knew not to, the way I’d known not to go into that room off our kitchen the night I’d heard the noise. She’d acquired a nervousness. She seemed to be hesitant in her steering of us, and we weren’t supposed to notice.
“What about the Jocular Rabid Rabbits’ Pad?” I said.
“We’ll see about moving it.”
“We can’t move it, Mom. It’s built around a tree! Forget it. It belongs here. It should stay. Somebody else’s kid can use it.” More than the separation, this seemed the end of my good life. She was selling the house that smelled like excitement.
Sare sat at our kitchen table with a notebook, listing our house’s problems. I’d never known our house had problems. But apparently a potential buyer had complained that there was no guest bathroom.
“Guest bathroom!” Hector said.
Sare shrugged. “People want to give parties.”
Why did you need a guest bathroom to give a party?
“Couldn’t they put one in?” my mom asked.
“But where?” They walked through the house, opening closets. They couldn’t seem to find a place.
I opened the back door. “Porta Potti.”
Only Hector laughed. “Your house has three bathrooms,” he said. “How many do they need?”
“People don’t like to have to go through a bedroom. And there’s no coat closet.”
Our house had problems because we didn’t have a coat closet?
I really didn’t understand life.
“If your house has problems,” Hector whispered, “maybe no one will buy it.” I just then remembered: he loved our house, too.
35 • A Vent Above the Doctor’s Office
Every Thursday, at Dr. Bach’s, or Dr. Sally’s, as I thought of it, I took the stairs to the basement, but now the door to that huge underworld of boilers and ceiling pipes was bolted shut. So I had no clue what they said. After, my mom walked out as if she’d spent an hour at the beach. Then one Thursday I noticed painters leaving with buckets and rollers as we entered. Once my mom went inside, I slipped out of the waiting room and ran upstairs two steps at a time. The apartment above Dr. Sally’s office was unlocked. I pushed the door free. The rooms smelled of new paint; the windows were staked open. I lay on the floor, my ear to the ground, and only heard faint mumbles.
I found a heating vent, but it was painted closed. With my key, I worked a line around the edges. I could probably get in trouble for this, I figured, though whoever moved here would need to be able to open the vent, right? Then I remembered the Swiss Army knife the Boops had given me at Christmas. I carried it for the tiny ivory toothpick. I had to run down to get it from my backpack. The knife worked. I picked away at the paint and got a corner loose. Below me, the women were laughing. I heard bits:
unglamorous people
Marge
set theory
if I could do
he likes that I’m friends with people like Marge
Eli a class
spring
fly out every week?
I heard words but not enough to make sense. I had the top-left and bottom-right corners free. I used my shoulder and shoved the thing. It sprang open.
“Marge dressed up,” my mom was saying. “She hopes to meet someone. Eli said, ‘What exactly is she trying to preserve? It isn’t as if there’s any beauty there.’ ”
She asked if Dr. Sally thought that was bad.
I didn’t hear an answer. I just heard laughing.
Once on the blackboard had been: MATH = BEAUTY.
But what Eli said did seem bad. My dad had worried that Marge wasn’t attractive enough. It was probably why she was alone. That was no joke.
And Marge said nice things about Eli. I’d heard her.
I liked Eli, but there were shards of something else, too. Maybe that’s how it felt when you grew up. Why would my mom try to sell our house? I thought suddenly. They didn’t talk about that at all. There were so many holes in my knowing her.
36 • On the Other Side of the Trees
Kat stepped out of her bug at carpool, hair blowing across her mouth.
“Your mom’s a MILF,” a kid said to Hector.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Mother I’d like to fuck,” the kid mumbled, ending in low laughter.
Everyone looked at the ground. My mom was single, too. Nobody said she was a MILF. You didn’t want them saying that about your mother, but you felt kind of bad when they didn’t, too.
Hector went home, but I stayed. Winter practice for tennis had started, and my mom had found the coach for the Santa Monica Specials and volunteered Charlie and me to help. I was way behind on community service hours. So after team practice on Mondays, we hit balls to the Specials. It was weird at first—these people were grown-ups, even if they were … whatever—but after a while you forgot. They ran after balls they missed, clumsy but grateful seeming, and it was fun being out on the courts just hitting the balls easy down the middle. I made up things to remember their names. Arthur had spiked hair. Like a crown. King Arthur. Ralph had a belly and incredibly pale legs. I tried to remember to think of him as Mountain, because Alp was in the middle of his name.
One Monday in February, I was teaching Arthur to put spin on his serve. We’d just hit a bucket and I was leaning over, picking up balls with my racket against my ankle, when I heard my mom and dad on the other side of the trees. They’d come to Open House for my sisters’ class. “I’ll walk you to your car,” she said. What were they trying to prove? You’re separated, people, I felt like saying. But I didn’t want them to know I was here. I liked being outside this late and sweating. Since my report card, home was a penitentiary. Everything good was banned.
I heard my mom’s rasping heels. My dad always walked ahead. “What?” he said. “Why are you looking at me like that!”
“Well, you were forty-five minutes late to the teacher’s conference!”
“Okay, I was late to the teacher’s conference. And because of you, I didn’t have sex for a decade during my thirties!”
I turned back to the steady lines of the court, listened to the thwock of the ball. The sun was lowering. I loved the liver-colored rectangles and clean yellow lines, even the hazy poor-park trees, where dim light settled a jewel on every branch. I pictured my mom’s earrings—all gifts from my father—flung up in the air and landing in the cupped leaves. So I guess my parents hadn’t had sex. That neutered me somehow. Maybe that was why I was fat, I thought, my reasoning zigzagged, looking down at myself. People in my class at school, some of them, they were having sex already. We all knew exactly who. Simon told us. What was sex, even? I’d seen it in movies since I was eight or nine. I’d watched porn on Charlie’s brother’s computer. But was it hard to have? Why didn’t they? I had a flash again of Charlie’s parents, old and naked. It was jarring to hear my parents fight. Usually they got along.
My parents’ divorce became final on February 27, 2006, although I didn’t know that then. I never asked, and they didn’t tell. DADT. When people presumed my parents were divorced, I still said, “Actually, they’re just separated.” I’d made certain deductions. I’d heard Eli promising my mom he wouldn’t pressure her anymore; his voice dropping when he’d asked, was she afraid to get divorced? In a shrill tone, he’d said, “I’m alone waiting in a one-room apartment and you’re with your kids in your million-dollar house!” and, in a calmer mood, “I’ll pay half when I move in. If you ever let me.” Our house wasn’t worth a million dollars. I knew that by the
n. One incidental proof that I’d grown up since my dad moved out was that I now understood the prices of real estate in our neighborhood. I’d heard Dr. Sally’s laughter. I assumed my parents had their reasons for taking their time. But then, in March, in the car, Boop Two asked my mom, in her dyslexic way, “Are we divorce?” and my mom said, “Yes, honey, but we’re still a family.”
My head whiplashed. When had that happened? But I still didn’t ask.
“Can you get a divorce if one person hates the other, but the other one doesn’t want to?” Boop One asked, on that same ride to school.
My mother was bad at explaining. They both were. Half of what the Boops heard about divorce came from the driver’s seat, with them in the back. “Well, you wouldn’t want to stay with someone who doesn’t want to be with you,” my mother said.
“But you and Daddy hate each other,” Boop Two said.
“We don’t hate each other,” she mumbled.
That night at dinner, she asked, “How do you feel about our being divorced?” She’d probably talked to Sare.
“It’s okay,” my sisters said, looking at each other, then down.
“You can tell me how you feel.”
“I feel horrible when you say I can’t watch American Idol,” I told her.
“I can live with that,” she said.
37 • My Sisters’ Question
Boop One asked me what our parents had been like together. My two sisters sat huddled next to each other, waiting for my answer.
“I guess you don’t remember much.”
They shook their heads. I pitied them.
“Were they ever in love?” Boop One asked, her round face brave.
I rubbed my eyes. Once our dad told me that he’d taken her to hear Ella Fitzgerald in her last public concert at Carnegie Hall. They went for drinks after in the Rainbow Room. He’d said that as if I knew what the Rainbow Room was, and I hadn’t asked. But now, my sister did. “I guess kind of a famous place in New York.”
