Casebook

by Mona Simpson

  Whatever made Kat a MILF, that day she was a MILF squared. Blonde curls sprung from the rubber band as we trudged over the dunes. The ocean looked like the Pacific in the movies. But Surferdude was old! He looked a generation older than Philip. His skin was like suede, from the salt, wind, and sun. We paddled out and waited for waves in the lineup. I clambered up to my knees and got pitched over, thrown into the churning mess, rag-dolled by the current and, flailing underwater, miraculously bobbed up again, salt in my mouth. I wished I were home in my room, with the sound of Gal scrabbling. Balancing on the thing was impossible. I wiped out every time. But Hector and Jules could wobble up to a stiff stand, knees bent, hands out to the side.

  I lost track of time, lost track of everything. I paddled out, waited, and took the big ride that worked me again. The water felt old on our skin.

  “I don’t really see why you guys hate Surferdude so much,” I said.

  “I’m not sure either,” Hector said. “But I really do.”

  Jules was standing by the lifeguard station with Kat and Surferdude. She was talking to him.

  “That kid we saw in Pasadena?” I said. “He’s got a life like, like Charlie’s. He probably thinks his parents are happy.” Once Eli’s phone had rung, and we’d heard Jean Lee’s voice—a teachery, lilting Hi-eye. “She sounds happy,” the Mims had said.

  “Well, that’s all for Timmy,” he’d answered.

  “ ‘There’s nothing deeply wrong with their marriage,’ ” Hector quoted. The Victim had said that in her interview, about the couple in her book. “But it’s not true. They’re not happy. There’s a lot wrong with their marriage.”

  “Neither is Christmas true. But it was fun to believe.”

  “I like it better now. We get the tree; we put shit on. We make it.”

  “You’re better at that,” I said. “You have talents.”

  “You just want to believe in magic. So does your mom. So does that wife. But Eli knows there’s no Santa Claus.”

  “I said I’d like to be his kid. I wouldn’t want to be him.”

  “No. He’s a marked man.”

  Late the night of the big Thomas Wolff lecture at Caltech, I heard talking in the kitchen. My mom and Marge slumped in ball gowns, drinking Ovaltine. I crouched in the hall against the heater grate.

  “… I went out and called him every hour. He seemed grateful. But then, I told him what the doctor next to me said about Dalmane and, well, you heard him.”

  “I heard him all right, I just about swerved off the freeway, he’s screaming, I don’t want you talking about my life!”

  “I hadn’t even said Hugo’s name.”

  “He’s crazy,” Marge said. “Crazy and jealous.” He was still jealous! Even now?

  “You know, the doctor was talking about the Once Born and the Twice Born. People who are good just because they’re raised that way he calls Once Born. Those who’ve struggled for some kind of faith in the world, they’re the Twice.”

  “Stanley was definitely Once Born,” Marge said. “Maybe not even.”

  “Cary, too. Eli’s different, though. I guess that’s why I put up with all this.”

  “You might be putting up with too much.” Marge paused. “Philip’s crazy, but he’s not mean.”

  What did Philip have to do with it? Did Marge think my mom should date Philip?

  Just then, the phone rang. The Mims asked Eli if she could call him back after Marge left.

  All of a sudden, I thought, What if he proposes now?

  I crept back to my room and called Hector, waking him.

  “He might be a polygamist,” he said.

  “That’s illegal, though, anyway.”

  “It’s illegal, but I don’t know how you get caught. I mean, those databases Ben Orion checks—do people who marry people have to check them?”

  It was hard to think of priests and rabbis from faraway states calling Ben Orion to do background checks on their brides and grooms. That’d be a good business, I thought. Maybe better than reality shows even.

  I finally texted Ben Orion to deploy. It wasn’t any one thing. It was like finally turning in an assignment that had been due a long time ago.

  56 • Then Came the Day

  Then came the day. When Sare dropped me home after Specials, Boop Two was sitting on the porch. She looked up at me through her glasses and smiled the smile of a creature with no ambivalence. The house was quiet. I looked at the clock in the hall and went to find our mom.

  She sat at her desk, the envelope torn open, her reading glasses on. It was getting dark, but the lights were still off. She just sat there, staring at the wall.

  I stepped in. “How’s about dinner?”

  “We’ll go out.” She didn’t turn to me. “I don’t feel well. But I’ll be back.”

  Back to what? Back to before the bad, before the divorce, before the Boops got born? “To when it was just us?” I said, my voice veering and cracked.

  She swiveled in her chair. She’d had that chair longer than I’d been alive. When she’d been in graduate school, her adviser had found it outside the lab and given it to her. “Better than,” she said.

  I thought of her face in the picture when she was young and how she’d looked laughing with Eli and thought, You’ll never be like that again.

  “Call Jamie,” she said. “We’ll go eat.”

  “Where’s Boop One?”

  “At dance.”

  We went to the place Eli took us the first time we met him, Boop Two grumbling about a party she hadn’t been invited to.

  “You know what?” I said. “Life is fucking unfair.”

  “Language, Miles!” the Mims said. Then her phone buzzed, and she sprang up, the way our dad did during dinner, the thing at his ear. She was pacing when the waiter set our pizza on the table. We ate slowly so we’d still be eating when she sat down again.

  At home, she said she had a work meeting. She’d say good night now. “Take a bath,” she told my sister.

  The doorbell rang. Then I heard a female voice behind my mom’s closed door.

  I snuck around the side yard and stood in bushes, smelling dirt. I recognized Dr. Bach’s voice. Did shrinks make house calls? They seemed to be on speakerphone with Eli. He came through crackly, saying he was thinking of maybe reconciling with his ex-wife. Yeah, right, I thought, pawing a shoe in the dirt. They were so far behind us.

  “I want to be with my son,” Eli said, “but Irene rightly points out that I could be with her and be with my son, too.”

  “Eli, you are legally divorced, aren’t you?” my mom interrupted.

  “Of course, Irene.” The tone he got! Stern, reprimanding!

  “Well, in this article, Jean says, ‘We have seven walls of books.’ ”

  “I think she means she and Timmy.”

  I felt impatient. Why couldn’t the Mims get up to speed? She mentioned the dedication to The Other Woman. So she’d found that, too. On her own.

  “Is C the cat? Coco?” Jean Lee had dedicated her book to a dead cat!

  “Well, Coco was very important to Jean, too.” I detected a foreign strand in his voice. Satisfaction? He sighed then, sounding besieged. He said Jean was going to rent in Pasadena, but she ended up buying. My mom asked when he was going to tell her that. He said he didn’t know how to tell her. Then there was a knock at her door. Boop Two! I skidded around the bushes, back into the house, down the hall. When I slid to the room, both women stood looking at Boop Two, in her pajamas, hair ridged from combing.

  “I’m going to bed now,” she said.

  The standing green board in the bedroom had a long equation, slanting down. Graph papers fanned on the desk. But near her computer and coffee cup, there was an egg cracked open, the blue shell jagged. A real egg. The yolk just on the wooden desktop.

  Boop Two mumbled good night and backed out. I stalled, bending down to pretend-tie my shoe. I no longer heard the staticky phone. They closed the door.

  “Well, I don’t
know how you can believe a thing he says,” Dr. Bach whispered. Hearing that from a doctor set off a shiver in my back.

  I said good night to my sister, kissed the top of her head, then sat in the kitchen, staring at the blackboard.

  YOU MUST SEARCH FOR SOME COMMON FEATURE THAT DOES NOT CHANGE WHEN YOU CHANGE THE ARRANGEMENT. AN INVARIANT.

  I set the extension on my pillow. Sare said she didn’t feel good about anything she was hearing. You had to love Sare. “He’s hiding something,” she said. “Maybe we should go out tomorrow and hire a private investigator.”

  My stomach clenched. What if they paid some PI to find out what we already knew? How much would that guy charge? I called Hector. He said he’d ride his bike over with our file—the deed, record searches, the real estate testimonial. I shoved out of bed and waited for him out by the garbage cans in our alley.

  It was after midnight. We stood there, jammed all the papers into a big envelope, and walked around to the front door and shot it underneath, the way women had slid letters onto my dad’s floor at all hours. A stone pinged my chest. Who would she think this was from? Whom, I thought. She’d want me to say whom. The fucking Mims. May I please repeated every time someone said Can I. She would probably assume the wife drove here, stalking us, when that woman, who looked like she’d been washed and put in the dryer too many times, probably slept soundly in Pasadena. My mom would call him as soon as she opened the envelope. She must have already told him about receiving the first batch. I hadn’t heard their conversation in the restaurant.

  Cell phones were a problem. She probably scared the bejesus out of him. He must have thought his wife sent that envelope, too.

  We didn’t sleep for a week of nights. I kept the extension next to me on my bed and felt it vibrate before the ring.

  “I’m going to ask you again,” she said. “And remember, this is a matter of public record, but I want to hear it from you. Are you legally divorced as you told me you were five years ago?” We hovered a long time, she and I, waiting.

  Finally, his voice became someone else. “We had an agreement, but then Jean asked if I would do the right thing for Timmy.” He sounded exhausted, even bored. “I just wanted to be alone this summer. I didn’t want to be with any woman.” It occurred to me that now, for the first time, we were hearing his real voice.

  “Well, you can be alone then,” my mother whispered, and hung up.

  I kept waiting for—for what? Anger, maybe. She got furious with us and loomed like a smiting angel, right and strong, administering justice. But now she sounded stunned, as if she didn’t want to find out more. And there was more. Lots.

  A delivery guy arrived from Domino’s, something she’d only allowed before on birthdays. She hovered around the table, filling our water glasses as if she’d forgotten how this part went. Dinner. After we put the dishes in the dishwasher, she let herself go to bed. This was new for me. Going to sleep after the Mims.

  The phone rang. She picked up, but it was for me. Girls giggling, several of them. “Miles? Maude wanted to tell you”—a cascade—“that she’s, she’s, we’re riding bikes by your house.” Another blurt of laughter. “Wanna come outside?”

  “Well, Hector’s here.”

  It was silent a moment, as if they were conferring, someone’s hand over the receiver. “He can come, too. We’re just riding around.”

  Hector and I looked at each other. I couldn’t be that way. Not now. “We’re kind of busy here,” I said, “but, yeah.”

  I thought I heard the whir of spokes.

  Then, in the middle of the night, the phone trembled. My eyes felt strained, small tents pulled by stakes. It was 2:00 a.m.

  “What’s wrong?” my mom said.

  “Oh, it’s not important. A dog I was fostering bit my hand, and it’s infected. They say I’ll need surgery, and even then it’ll never be the same.”

  I didn’t care about his fucking hand. She never let us get away with excuses. JK got me ten dollars shaved off my allowance.*

  Where was the wife with the curler when he called in the middle of the night? Why didn’t he whine to her about his hand?

  I knew what it was to be busted. Eventually, you sobbed and shook and said everything in the order it really happened. He wasn’t coming clean. He was moving around the pieces she’d found into whatever shape he could to seem less horrible.

  I went and stood in her doorway. It took her a while to see me. When she finally noticed, we flew into each other’s arms. Her face, when she lifted it off my shoulder, was trapezoidal. “I was thinking about that Latin teacher,” she said, pressing her temples. Maybe that’s what adults did. She understood I could see: it was there, the egg on her desk. She couldn’t hide it, so she was trying to give a bearable reason. Maybe that was the parent’s job, to substitute a comprehensible sadness for the horror of random evil.

  Eli was our chaos. I didn’t believe there was any law to control it.

  I wondered what correlation pain had with reality. All this had already been true a week ago, but she didn’t know and she had still been happy.

  * * *

  * At my house, Philip didn’t even allow acronyms. I had to say it out. Just kidding.

  57 • A Place Beneath the Floor

  The middle-of-the-night calls went on three weeks. I kept the extension on my bed, but I only woke up sometimes. Mostly, I turned the other way, the same as I did to my alarm.

  He never apologized. He never came clean. He whined about his hand.

  “Pretty early on, I’d told her I’d do the right thing for Timmy,” I heard at 4:00 a.m.

  “What about the shrink you were seeing?”

  “I had to lie to her, too.” Had to! “With her, I had to lie the other way. She didn’t understand what I’d promised Jean.”

  Another night: “She asked me to reconcile, and then, I, then I asked her.” He made it sound so polite. Dainty. Like the rounds of a dance. Then I asked her.

  In the silence, I felt those words enter my mother, like four bullets. He’d told her he wanted to marry her. He’d said he’d give us seven thousand dollars a month. I’d heard him! But I’d heard him because I’d eavesdropped, and who else would ever know?

  “So I guess we’re really not going to end up together,” she said.

  She’d still thought they might?

  “I’ve known that for a long time already,” Eli said. “I kept telling myself, I’ve got to stop stringing her along.”

  That jolted me fully awake. You don’t string along someone you respect. Why didn’t she know that?

  At 5:00 a.m., his raspy whisper: “I’ve never touched her. That way, at least, I’ve always been faithful to you. I’ve kept your secrets.”

  “What secrets?” My mom laughed, a bad laugh. “My sexual fantasies? Eli, they’re like the underwear you liked me to buy. Toys for adults who love each other.”

  Half asleep, I heard him talk about his hand; the infection was level 4, to the bone.

  Mornings were worse. She looked the same but moved differently, as if pushing through mud, her spirit stunned. I went to check on her as soon as I got home from school. Every afternoon I found her in the same position on her chair. Marge was substituting her lecture class. One day, I found the room empty. On her desk a scrap.

  2003–2005?

  2004–2007 to Pasadena?

  NSF?

  Key?

  Next to that, the picture from her forty-fifth birthday.

  It could have been any key. Why did we fall for that? I was glad, though, that she wasn’t home. She must have dragged herself up to teach her class.

  In November, the Mims began to cook again. She served us meals but didn’t eat. She used to love the food she made; she could never resist sneaking bites as she baked.

  Boop Two saw her crying in the carpool line.

  Great, I thought. This’ll be the year the Mims bawls in public. I began to think like my dad. How would it look to the other parents? Boop Two had enough
problems.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “Adults cry sometimes.”

  “Over what?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know. They just do. Try not to think about it. Worry about chipmunks.” Her thing now was chipmunks. When the Boops had been small, we pushed them in a double stroller along the cliffs above the ocean with bags of stale bread to feed baby chipmunks in spring, when there were hundreds of the rodents, and in fall, for their second litter. Sweets of chipmunks, Boop Two called them now, and the babies we could see tunneling through the sandy dirt that dropped down to the Pacific Coast Highway were being murdered. Our very own municipality poured poison down their holes with tax money. She’d protested at city hall.

  Overpopulation was their excuse. The tunnels eroded the cliffs, they claimed.

  Nights, Sare or Marge came over, sometimes both. With them, the Mims sounded alive. “I miss it all,” she choked out. “I want what we had. I wish I could send it up again, but it’s like a broken kite. Torn and dirty on the ground.”

  “You’re not going to do that.” Sare’s voice was stern like a good doctor’s.

  They seemed to be talking her down from calling him or driving over there. It made me remember once standing in my crib, when my parents were dressed to go, bawling and trying to climb up the sides. A grim babysitter waited in the corner. Then the door shut, and they were gone.

  Marge said, “This is a guy who lied about where he lived.”

  “I can’t eat. I can barely walk.” Her voice broke. “I cherished him.”

  “But you do walk,” Sare said. “You’re getting the kids dinner. That’s all you have to do right now. I guarantee it will feel different a month from now. And in a year, he’ll seem pathetic.”

  “I’m worried about the kids,” she said.

  “They’re fine.” I liked hearing Sare say that. Maybe we were! “And if you’re not eating, well, I hate to say it, but your ass looks great.”