by Mona Simpson
We’d been in school with Zeke since kindergarten. Simon told me he’d been caught with a joint in the parking lot. One joint. Zeke played tennis, too. On the team.
“Suspended or expelled?” I said.
“Like forever after.”
I jammed my hands down into the pockets of the new suit pants. “Hey, man, you didn’t tell your mom about me selling soup, did you?”
“No, Miles, for the ten millionth time.”
We took egg pies on napkins from a tray. Girls huddled outside, their dresses blowing up in the wind, so they batted them down not to show too much. I made myself stop staring at their legs. Simon said his sister had learned two hours of Hebrew. My parents had decided before we were born no Christenings, no Bar or Bat Mitzvahs. Because we were half. But people hauled in thousands of dollars at these things! I thought about that money during the long, long service. Almost all my friends were half, too. Simon and his sister were just half. But their parents were still married.
After the candy throwing, they showed a montage and Boop One was in a bunch of the pictures, Boop Two not in any. The grown-ups ate outside, where wind snuffed out their candles. Only the girls who took dance every day after school danced.
At ten, I went to ask my mom if we could go home, and just then Eli came and put his hands on her shoulders. “Would you care to dance, Ms. Adler?”
They went off to the windy dance floor where my popular sister hopped around. My mother couldn’t dance. Eli moved strangely, too. He kind of jumped up and down. They matched. Before my parents had gotten married, my father had arranged for ballroom-dancing lessons, probably worried about how they’d look at the wedding, dancing their first dance. He’d given my mom the lessons for Valentine’s Day. (A joke in our family was that she had one big talent and none of the small ones. He had all the little ones. And they came in handy!) My dad was like Boop One; he’d been popular all his life. Boop Two and I were like her, bad dancers.
I wished I were more like my dad.
Walking to our car, my mom held on to a pinch of Eli’s sleeve. Which suit was this? I wondered out loud. “The second suit, or the one they gave him for free?”
He looked at my mom keenly. “This is the one they made right,” he said, in a weird way, faltering. Eli drove our car home, and she leaned her head back and started singing “Blackbird.” The Mims couldn’t drink. She couldn’t sing either. At home, she kicked her shoes off and flung herself down on her bed. Eli dabbed a washcloth to her forehead. When Hector arrived, Eli was pulling a T-shirt down over my mom’s head, like she did for us when we were young. She sat, lifting her arms. Seeing her arms stick up like that, I remembered the feeling of a shirt pulling down darkness over me.
“Do we own Rear Window?” I said, flipping through the pile of DVDs on her dresser. Eli flopped onto the bed next to her.
“Okay, I can die now,” she said, banging her head against the headboard, happy but drunk. She might have been the happiest she’d ever been, but she wasn’t the smartest. With our dad, she’d been sharper, her wit chased by his lower knowing laughter. A terrier circling under a cat in a tree.
A few minutes later, Eli appeared at my door holding Rear Window. He showed me where he’d alphabetized the Hitchcocks, and then he went outside to feed the dog. That was the first night Eli slept in the Mims’s room. When I went to get chips from the pantry, I heard him stammering. “But maybe you don’t want to, maybe this is enough for you, one or two nights a week; the rest of the time you can run your little empire.”
Her voice unrumpled itself. “I want to be married! Don’t you?”
“You know I’ve always wanted to marry you.”
Eli’s kid wasn’t there, but his friend’s dog was sleeping under the tree with the swing; it was a small full house, and everyone had somebody. I had Hector. He’d sunk into my beanbag, where he always slept at the new house.
“Was it fun?” he asked.
“What?”
“The Bat Mitzvah.”
“Oh, I gue-ess, kind of.”
“Good,” he said. He sounded wistful, like he wished he’d been invited. But the only reason I was, was that Simon’s mom thought the Mims had the best everything. It wasn’t ’cause of me. I told him that. He was quiet then and it occurred to me that, even divorced, probably my family seemed better-off than his. I tried to share whatever I had with him, but there were things you couldn’t share. “It wasn’t that fun,” I said. “You know.”
Maybe I really was gay, I thought, like I was always hinting to my dad, because the world tonight seemed complete. Hector was there. For a moment before sleep, I imagined saving Eli’s dog, his real dog, rescuing him in the ocean. As I finally fell down the dark chutes, I thought that Eli’s kid could live in my room, I’d make a tent with a blanket. Once, when my mom was pregnant, I was in the bath and I reached out and touched her hard belly and said the baby could live in my room. I knew that was the best thing I could give to her. She’d asked a hundred times if I wanted a baby sister or brother, and I’d said, No, just a wooden one. And then they went and did it anyway! We hugged that night over the tub, me from inside, her kneeling on the mat. I remembered that darkening swoop of feeling.
But that was before I knew there were going to be two of them.
The next morning Eli and the borrowed dog were gone.
* * *
* In both senses of the cliché.
43 • The Story of Eli
The move was turning out to be like the divorce. Not as bad as I’d thought. I’d kind of expected Eli to come more but felt relieved that he didn’t. Even though I liked him. I understood that was strange. He left behind traces, though, the days he taught while we were at our dad’s. One Wednesday I picked up a receipt from the floor, for a sofa bought with Eli’s credit card from a store called Moderne in Pasadena. Pasadena again. Maybe she was renting our house temporarily but still planned to move us there. Where was the sofa? You couldn’t hide a couch! He seemed to have purchased it days ago. It was like cross-country; when was she going to tell me? I thought as long as she didn’t, maybe everything could stay the same and I could continue the way I was, unrunning.
But Hector’s parents, who agreed on nothing, and mine, who concurred about everything, particularly the insane, all loved the idea of cross-country and wouldn’t let us out of it. So Hector and I had to pound dirt two hours after school every day for a coach who was a dick. We lagged behind and that made him hate us. He had to wait for us at the end when he wanted to go home. My ankles jilted me; my knees hurt; I felt fat. I was fat. Clomping at the back, the rest of them no longer visible, Hector said four words:
Stupendous
Tremendous
Horrendous
Hazardous
“Those are the only words in English that end with -dous.”
Guys waited at the Coffee Bean when we staggered in. We ordered ice blendeds with whipped cream and gulped them. I had to buy Hector’s. The next day, I had two words for Hector that the Mims had written on the blackboard. Sedulous and seditious. They sounded the same but meant the opposite.
“But they don’t have the d,” he said.
The next time Eli called, I told him Hector’s words. He called right back. “Check your e-mail. I know you’ve gone text only.”
Paludous = of marshes
Apodous = footless
Rhodous = of radium in lower valency
Voudous = another spelling of voodoo
I passed footless, of marshes, and the alternate voodoo to Hector in class.
Usually, I kept the receiver of the extension off the hook on my bed at night and listened to my mom in the background while I did homework and switched screens every few minutes to ifanboy.com. One night, I’d been lulled into minor attention by their endless discussion of Boop Two’s aversion to The Secret Garden when I heard, “You never wore a wedding band?”
“I want to this time, though,” Eli said. “And I want you to, too.”
&nbs
p; This time! Were they getting married? What about his kid? Would it live with us? Would we have to move to Pasadena with the new sofa? I wanted things to stand still.
He asked her to hold then. He was picking up takeout soup for dinner. “Thank you,” he said in DC to someone giving him change.
My mom and dad used to play with their wedding bands. We’re a family of fidgeters. My dad spun his on the table once, and it fell down a heating grate, in our old house. So the people who bought our house bought that, too, I guessed.
“What kind of soup?” my mom asked.
“Lentil.”
She asked Eli if he’d ever given his wife jewelry.
“No!” he said, as if, Why would I! Then: “I bought her a pin once.”
I heard wind outside, or maybe it was in my own ear. I’d bought my mother jewelry. When I was thirteen. And I didn’t give her just a pin either.
“Cary gave me jewelry,” the Mims said, “but I can live without that.”
“The Irene and Cary Show,” Eli said. That seemed mean. But my mom did talk about my dad a lot and her engagement ring was no ten-dollar trinket from a Berkeley card table covered with an Indian bedspread. It was an emerald-cut diamond with triangular baguettes my father’s grandmother had worn. I wondered where that was now. “I shouldn’t have said that, but what I should have said is, that’s the easy part. Don’t you think I want to pamper you?”
They’d joked about marrying that night of the Bat Mitzvah, but in a somewhere-over-the-rainbow way. This sounded serious. Nothing stayed still enough for me.
“Are you done with the dishes?” Eli asked.
“Mm-hmm, I’m in bed now,” she said, “falling a little bit asleep.”
“Why don’t you get me off first?”
I banged the receiver back on the phone. Maybe they heard that. And then I just sat on my bed, looking at the boxy machine as if it were contaminated. I crawled underneath the fabric and unplugged it. Him saying that to my mother made me feel ugly, as if my body was wrong-shaped and no one would love me. No girl. I wrapped the wires and put the whole boxy telephone under a blanket in my closet. I felt limbless—just a torso.
I wanted to be a man like my dad, safe and indoors, who padded around the house in sweats he called his cozy pants.
I didn’t want to get near the extension, what I’d heard burned, but I couldn’t easily stay away. It took discipline not to listen! It felt virtuous and, like everything virtuous, hard. Still, I had superstitions; maybe resisting temptation would stave off Pasadena. Then one weeknight I went to my mom’s room to ask for her credit card; the answering machine was playing, and a woman yakked on about carpools while my mom rummaged in her bag. Then, Hey, Reen, it’s Penny. I had a nice dinner last month with your friend Eli—
My mom punched the machine off and handed me her credit card. She usually asked me for what and how much. “It’s for a book,” I volunteered. “For Core.” So Eli had seen Audrey Mathematics of Light Hepburn. Like he first said he had.
The Mims’s face stayed tight. The Boops did the dishes after dinner without being asked. We just knew. Then she closed her door, and all night long the phone rang. I thought about re-hooking-up the extension. But she never seemed to answer. The phone rang and rang, and five minutes later it would start again. I began counting. Twenty-nine times, he called. The last time, I flopped over to look at my clock. Ten to four.
The next night, Marge Cottle and Sare arrived.
“He’s a nut. He called me!” Marge said. “I told him, ‘This is between you and Irene.’ ”
“He called me, too,” Sare said. She didn’t seem to think this was at all funny.
They saw me then, and stopped. In a while, they went out to the porch and talked in low voices. And after that, we didn’t see Eli. He’d been around for three years, and now, all of a sudden, he was just gone. Vanished. He didn’t seem to call anymore either. After a few weeks of no Eli, I asked my mom how he was. “Oh, fine,” she said. The next week, I came out and asked if she was still seeing him. She said, “Of course.” I didn’t know what to think. If they broke up, at least we wouldn’t move to Pasadena. I wondered if we had enough money by ourselves, though. I’d noticed that he’d left a suit in my mom’s closet. I wondered if it was the perfect one or the freebie that could never be made right. I felt like calling him myself, but I couldn’t decide if I wanted him back or not.
One morning during that limbo time we were dashing, getting ready for school, and Esmeralda arrived in a fluster, landing a bag of cleaning supplies on the kitchen table. “Mr. Cary has new girlfriend. Yesterday I saw her. She is there! In the bed!” Both Boops’ heads snapped and looked at the Mims.
She kept making lunches. “Cheese or peanut butter?” she asked Boop One.
“Cheese.”
We’d met Holland. There might have been others, too. I didn’t really want to know.
Marge called one night from the bathroom of a restaurant, asking my mom if she could walk out on her date: she’d just found out he was a libertarian. My mom told her she had to stay for the entrée but not dessert.
I was reading to Boop Two about mice. “Night,” she said, at the end of the short chapter.
“I can read you more,” I said.
“It’s okay.”
I bent down and kissed her gummy forehead.
Every time I thought of plugging in the extension again, I stalled. But I allowed myself anything that didn’t involve wires. And even that way I found out stuff I shouldn’t have known. Lying belly down on the roof, I learned that Boop Two had a diagnosis now. There was really something wrong. She didn’t even know herself. That old-fashioned eavesdropping gave me respect for moms. The Mims and Sare talked about educational therapy almost an hour. At the end the Mims mentioned that I wasn’t loving cross-country.
She got that right. Sare of course thought the answer was swim team. “He needs the exercise,” she said. “He’s heavy. And they don’t like that now when they’re beginning to think about girls.”
Hearing her say that, I was ashamed of myself.
We went another month with no Eli. I was beginning to think that was a good thing. Esmeralda came again in October just as we were leaving for school. “Miss Irene,” she said, out of breath. “Mr. Cary asked me to cook for a party. He says you will tell me what to buy.”
“What to buy? But I don’t know what he’s serving.”
“That is what I said to him.”
We called my dad in the car.
“Well, you know I’m no cook!” blasted out of the speakerphone.
“But it’s your party. Maybe that fish with the vegetables?”
“Some people don’t eat fish.”
“I don’t eat fish!” Boop Two said. “They have faces.”
“Not clams,” I said back.
“Ask are we invited?” Boop One asked.
“It’s an adult party,” he said.
“What about mom?” Boop One yelled into the speakerphone. “She’s adult.”
My mom clicked the phone off speaker and held it to her ear.
“It’s against the law to drive talking,” Boop One said.
“Well? What did he say?” I asked, climbing out.
“That’s none of your business.”
But I gleaned that though he used her recipes (I found leftovers in his refrigerator—the salad with beans, pasta with eggplant), she’d stayed home with us that night.
Finally, on a rainy Friday in November, an odd ring came from the kitchen. A cell phone, not my mom’s. I shouted Esmeralda!, thinking she must have been hiding somewhere, though I thought she’d already come this month. So I answered it.
“I’m looking for Eli Lee,” a man said.
Eli! But I was alone in the house. “Oh, he’s not here,” I said.
“Could you please tell him Ellis called, in Custom Men’s at Neiman Marcus? I’ve spoken with my manager, and we’ll remake the suit. He can schedule a fitting.” Another new suit! What
was this, his fourth? My mom hadn’t even told me he was coming. I thought they hadn’t been talking. I went to her computer and checked her e-mails. I found one, dated three weeks ago—days after the phone rang all night long.
Can we unbreakup? he’d written.
So I guessed she’d forgiven him for seeing Audrey Math of Light Hepburn.
I sat in the kitchen doing nothing.
SOME INFINITIES ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS was on the blackboard. What the hell did that mean?
An hour later, the Mims and Eli clomped in from running through the rain. Will you melt? I remembered.
“Hi, Eli.” He opened his arms and I fell against him, surprised how good it felt to close my eyes. Underneath the sopping shirt, his chest was hard. My dad, even trim, was softer. When I lifted my head Eli was looking at me, with a gaze that seemed long, sad, and important. But “I’m sorry I’m wet” was all he said. He pulled his shirt off and wrung it out in the sink.
“You got a call,” I told him. “From Neiman Marcus. Somebody named Ellis. Are you here for a while?”
“No, unfortunately, I have to leave tomorrow. But I, I want to measure your room for shelves.”
That night the three of us hung around. Every hour, Boop Two called to say she was going to be a little longer at the shelter. Boop One was out, of course. Eli and the Mims put together dinner. I just sat at the heater grate reading comics. At first I listened to them. I wanted them to talk about the fight. But they knew I was here. Then I kind of got into their conversation. They were talking about his childhood. His cat was sick, and illness reminded him of his mother. By the time he left the next day and from what I’d overheard before, I knew the whole story of Eli. Like a book. I could tell it to Hector, who didn’t come that night for the first Friday in a long time. He’d had to see his aunt.
Eli’s parents had fought bitterly, but they’d had an agreement to stay together anyway, until the boys grew up. Then his father met somebody else. They told the boys they were getting a divorce when Eli was nine. That same year, his father took a job teaching at a New Jersey law school. They’d had to leave Ohio. His voice had a sweetness, saying that his mother had loved being a mom. You mean a stay-at-home mom?, the Mims asked. He nodded. You could hear his love and something else, too—embarrassment, maybe?—as if he knew he indulged his mother further than his beliefs should have allowed. But he was glad she’d had the luxury of being a woman who stayed home, happy her children could walk to a good public school. I didn’t get his sheepishness. I mean, of course, you wanted your mom to be happy. He seemed to think that because she’d managed to have a little more luck, a little more ease, than so many people in the world, she was robbing some other child’s ability to walk to school. I didn’t buy that that was true. Maybe it was, though. Injustice already loomed, an insoluble problem. You wanted the people you loved to have good lives. You just did. And it was hard to imagine that a woman with a life she liked in Ohio changed things one way or another for a person suffering somewhere in the world. In Rwanda, for example. But I was just beginning to understand that we were all connected on something like a teeter-totter, and our up depended on someone else’s down. Our teachers wanted us to believe that. You had the feeling that that was because they thought our parents’ up was their down.
