Casebook

by Mona Simpson

  “Leave a list of your teachers,” my mom said, “and who should get cakes.”

  I wrote down every teacher. I figured I’d need the help.

  By the weekend, the letter was gone from the mail basket.

  She still took us where we needed to go. She signed our permission slips. She gave off a feeling of trudging through an obstacle course with no appetite or hope of pleasure. Even Pedro, the security guard at our school (who earned hardly any money, she’d once told us, which was why we had to look at him and say his name when we said good morning and why she’d stayed up baking him a miniature Bundt cake, to go along with the twenty-dollar bill), he asked me, “Everything okay your family? Your mom look like she be sad.” I worried about all those twenty-dollar bills, too.

  In hac spe vivo. Now what didn’t seem a question anymore. We would go on like this for months, I thought. Years, maybe. My dad put Post-its on his glass doors. Tell Malc to send cases of pinot to Susan, Jeff, Adam, and Bailey. People he worked with and his bosses. My mom baked cakes for janitors and secretaries.

  No wonder he made more money.

  Our mother slept. In our family, we all looked like my dad, but though he woke up at four in the morning and cycled through frets until it was light, the three of us came out true great sleepers. Nine hours was nothing to us. I could do fourteen. The Mims had always loved to sleep. My dad had joked that they’d have a fight, he’d stomp out to let off steam, and when he came back, she’d be sleeping. Soundly, he’d added for the laugh. Since October, though, I’d woken at odd times in the night to her crying. I never told that I heard; a measure of her despair was the fear that she was failing us.

  I hadn’t known that happiness was a requirement for parenthood. I didn’t know how I’d ever manage. But now, the noise had stopped: she went to bed early, and we had to wake her in the morning.

  “I bought pajamas at lunch,” she told me one day, coming in with a bag. She seemed to live for sleep. I’d seen her computer open to a consumer page, comparing mattresses. Maybe I’d have to go to college nearby, I thought, if things didn’t improve.

  Twice, Sare drove us home from school. Those days, my mom pushed up from bed and made supper in her pajamas. She slept, burned food, cut herself with the knife slicing an Asian pear. She’d become less capable, overnight.

  “Remember the Christmas lights?” Hector said.

  “Fucking Christmas lights.”

  “You got ladders from the gardener. Every year, you kept thinking Eli would do it.”

  “He probably put up lights on that house we saw with his kid.”

  “We could go look. We could appropriate the bug. I can drive, remember?”

  I let him spin out the adventure in my small room in Santa Monica. Pasadena was thirty-some miles away. When his mom was out, we’d have to drive off without her or his aunt seeing, in Kat’s old powder-blue VW.

  “But what if we got caught?” I said. “Like by police!”

  “They’re only allowed to stop you if you’re breaking the law. My dad said that.”

  We google-mapped the address, planned a route without freeways, but I didn’t think we’d ever use it.

  My mom showed us pictures of puppies from a breeder. The one she said had poodle hair, apparently good for allergies, was butt ugly. Hector thought so, too. Sare, when she came by, said it looked learning disabled. You had to love Sare.

  “I don’t want that dog,” I said.

  My sisters chorused me. Only Philip thought he wasn’t so bad. He and the Mims talked on the porch. Hector and I climbed up to the roof to hear.

  “You can’t yell somebody into loving you,” she said. So she must have told Philip. I liked knowing that they talked.

  Philip knocked on his old briefcase. “Eighty student interpretations of Hamlet.”

  “I worry that you’re not liking this enough,” the Mims said.

  “I worry about that, too,” he said, and then called Hector.

  We hugged the eave spout, then dropped to the ground, our hands smelling of grass and the cold smear of mud.

  One Wednesday, I came home to the box of cookies we’d ordered waiting on the porch. I hid the red tins under the Mims’s bed so the Boops wouldn’t consume them before the holidays. I peed in her bathroom then and, for no reason, opened her medicine chest. I found a bottle of pills still in the pharmacy bag. Xanax. I googled it and learned it was a tranquilizer, then opened the small plastic bottle and lifted out the cotton. The pills were tiny, innocent-looking.

  I called Hector. “They’re sleeping pills. But she already sleeps all the time.”

  “Are you worried she’ll hurt herself?”

  I remembered the night of keening outside our old house. I guess I thought it was possible. “I don’t know. She’s on day seventy-four. But she doesn’t seem much better. She might even be a little worse.”

  “We could go to CVS and find vitamins that look like the pills. Then we can switch them.” It occurred to me again that Hector was the smartest person I knew. Philip forbade him to leave on a weeknight, though, so I had to wait for his sister to fall asleep so he could shinny out their window. Two hours later, Hector knocked at my back wall. He’d come on his bike. We rode to the all-night Rite Aid. I’d brought a Baggie of the pills. They were white and oval, with XANAX printed on them in tiny letters. I worried about the writing. It was hard to tell in the pill aisle what the vitamins looked like. We couldn’t open the jars without getting caught. “But wait,” Hector said. “Will she even remember what they look like? Probably not. Let’s just get vitamin C. She’ll never think somebody’s swapped them out on her.”

  I emptied the Xanax pills into the toilet and flushed them down, filled the jar with vitamins, and stuffed the cotton back in.*

  “Miles!” my mother called later that night. “Were you in my bathroom?”

  My heart went stone. “Yeah.”

  I waited, suspended in the stretched air.

  “Please remember to put the toilet seat down.”

  Another thing my vexing report said, besides the grades, was that I was behind on community service hours.

  “Same,” Hector told me. That had to be wrong. So we went to see Mrs. Fisk. Even though we’d done tons for FLAGBTU, since it was a club, she said, it didn’t count. Same with Specials tennis. Specials didn’t count because I’d done it for so long. Mrs. Fisk said if I wanted to do something new, like run a bake sale or a raffle to benefit the Specials, those hours could count, because they’d represent a different activity. I asked the Specials director, and he said, “Well, city supplies rackets and the van. They buy balls.” He shrugged. “They don’t really need money.”

  “So community service isn’t actually to serve the community,” Hector said. “It’s for us to develop ‘new skills.’ The way scholarships here aren’t for the recipients. They’re for us to ‘experience diversity.’ ”

  Philip made him do Clean Up the Beach. Charlie said you just put trash in a bag, and you could claim eight hours’ service. Philip dropped us off at the bottom of the California Incline, which was kept intact by murdering chipmunks.

  “Was your grandfather a psychopath?” Hector asked me as we trudged over the sand. “Women are supposed to fall in love with men like their fathers.”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, she saw him like four times her whole life.”

  We had to sign up at a table, set in sand. They gave us each four huge garbage sacks and balled-up litterbags for dog poop.

  “I thought animals weren’t allowed on the beach.”

  “They’re not,” the woman said, “but you know. People.”

  “My mom got a four-hundred-dollar fine,” Charlie said, walking with us; his head was already pointed toward the clump of standing girls, who held their sandals. I looked at their legs, wondering if I was like any of their fathers. Maude Stern’s legs were shaped like scalene triangles.

  I tied my laces together and hung my shoes around my neck; Hector stuck his fli
p-flops in his shirt pocket. We headed south toward the pier, bending down every few minutes for garbage. It was amazing the shit people dropped. You kind of expected pop tabs and candy wrappers, but we found condoms, barrettes, a green sparkly high-heeled shoe, cigarette butts, two combs, one stray earring, and pennies. People left food, too: sanded watermelon rinds, gritty French fries, a whole carrot.

  “My aunt is back in the hospital,” Hector said, wiping the carrot on his shirt.

  “Oh. That sucks,” I answered, the surf roaring at our backs. What could you say?

  “Don’t tell anybody.”

  I wouldn’t. “You want to know something bad?” I wanted to give him a secret of my own, to prove it. “My mom thinks she’s not a good person.” There was no one else I could tell this to, not even the Boops. Hector loved my mom a way you couldn’t love your own mother. “Remember Eli told her if she was crippled that would be better than what was wrong with her because a bad leg wouldn’t get in the way of a relationship?”

  “Like having a wife didn’t get in the way!”

  “She believed him when he said things like that, though, because she’s always wondering: Is she good enough? Could she improve? She wants to improve us, too.”

  “But she’s a really good person. She’s my favorite. Of the moms.” Hector kicked sand. “Eli wasn’t very worried about improving. If he had any conscience, he would have committed suicide by now.”

  I shrugged. “I heard her say once that if two people like them were lucky enough to find each other, there was a God. They said they were going to join a church. And they were going to become birdwatchers.”

  “Him with his two wives. That’d go over well with the congregation. Maybe it’s only good people who worry about being bad.”

  “And her crimes, like forgetting his birthday. They go flimsy against his.” I’d been mortified when the Mims forgot his hometown. I’d felt guilty about my not wanting Eli to move in. Not anymore. If he was evil, did that make us good? We seemed better to me now. It was a relief, in a way.

  We heard the highway, where headlights staggered on, smearing the fog.

  “I’m jealous of you,” Hector said.

  “Me? Why?” I was truly dumbfounded. Why would anyone be jealous of me?

  “At least you got rid of him. I wish I could get rid of Surferdude.” Hector picked up a whole apple from the sand, wiped it on his shirt, and bit into it.

  “I’m not sure we’re rid of Eli forever.” Sometimes, when I was falling asleep, I imagined that he’d come to our door with a stack of wrapped presents and a long, long story that would make all of it forgivable, like in a book.

  When Philip picked us up, he invited me along to see Jules playing Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, but I thought I’d better get home. Then, once I was there, I snapped at the Boops to clean their room.

  The house had loosened its angles. The kitchen floor felt sticky and slanted. I swept every night after dinner, but that didn’t keep it clean. Mail piled up in random stacks on all the surfaces. The Boops’ beds stayed unmade until I yanked the scrambled sheets up before I said good night. Boop Two still didn’t like to read. “Boring,” she said about To Kill a Mockingbird. “Scary” was her excuse for stopping Harry Potter.

  I checked the Mims’s medicine cabinet. Every couple days I counted the vitamin Cs in the Xanax bottle. There were still thirty.

  After the play, Hector’s dad dropped him off. They worried about us now the way we used to worry about them.

  The last day before vacation, we stayed after school to collect the jackets and scarves from the cardboard boxes we’d set out around campus for the FLAGBTU cold-weather drive. Through the glass of a door, I glimpsed Maude in a school desk, facing a wall, her shoulders heaving. I’d been at Cottonwoods since kindergarten, so I’d seen most people cry. But not her. Whenever Maude had any emotion in my presence, it felt off. As if it were an act. What she really meant was Like me. And what I had in me was I don’t. Can’t. But this was different. She didn’t know I was watching.

  I stepped into the classroom and she looked up.

  “We’re probably going to put our cat to sleep,” she said.

  “Wait, didn’t you have two cats?” They had one they kept in the house, I thought, and an outside one that tormented it.

  “Tomcat and Mittens. I’m talking about Tomcat.”

  Hector burst in, then. “Oh, hi, Maude. How did you like the math test?”

  “Not bad,” she said.

  Hector and I looked at each other. “I thought it was effing impossible,” I said.

  “Did you study the supplementary problems?”

  Instead of answering—I mean, it was pretty obvious we hadn’t studied the supplementary problems—I told Hector about Maude’s cat. She said he’d attacked the neighbor’s maltidoodle.

  “Has he ever bitten a person?” Hector asked, with that weird intensity he got.

  “He did!” she said. “Oh my God, this three-year-old was toddling along, with my brother’s friend, and he jumped up and bit his knee.”

  Maude’s mom wanted to give the cat away, but no one would take him. Hector was following this story so intently I wondered, all of a sudden, could he like Maude? She was mine, kind of! Even though I hadn’t decided I really wanted her.

  “If you bring him to the pound,” I said, “they’ll kill him. Cat adoptions are way rarer than dogs.” I knew from my sister that they put down eight or nine cats a week.

  “Tomcat has issues, but he doesn’t deserve to die. We’re trying to find him a home. There’s an organization that places animals, but they have a long wait list. My mom asked what would get them to for sure take Tomcat. They said fifteen hundred dollars.”

  “We’ll do it for three,” Hector said.

  “What?” I said. “How do you think—”

  “Ask your mom,” he said to Maude, interrupting me.

  * * *

  * Then I come to this thing about you flushing the Xanax. I didn’t remember you did that. What were you thinking! The point should have been: she gets the vitamin C, we get the Xanax. Win/Win.

  61 • A Revenge Plot

  Maude told us the next day that her mom would pay three hundred dollars, but she needed to be certain nothing bad would happen to Tomcat. They wanted him to have a good life.

  “This couple we know,” Hector said, “they love animals. Even difficult ones.”

  The mammal was huge. It must have weighed half as much as Boop One. Maude’s brother handed us a crate. “Now, I’ll be happy to call the new owners,” their mother said. Maude stood there, barefoot in a skirt, holding Mittens, the fluffy indoors cat. Her legs were very, very long, her feet small. “Can you manage?”

  We carried the heavy thing, me in front, Hector in the rear. Maude walked us to the edge of her lawn. “Where’s his new home?”

  “Pasadena,” I mumbled.

  Then, when she cartwheeled, her skirt dropped open so I saw tight hot-pink shorts.

  I hissed as soon as we turned the corner. “How’re we going to transport this oversize vermin to Pasadena?”

  “It won’t be as heavy without the crate.”

  “We need the crate, dumbo. You can’t tie a cat to a doorknob. What if they’re not home? We’ve got to leave it with food and water. Probably at night, so they don’t see us. You haven’t thought this through. Are you planning for your dad to drive us?”

  “He’d make us tell your mom. Do you think she wants revenge?”

  Confucius had appeared on the blackboard: BEFORE YOU EMBARK ON A JOURNEY OF REVENGE, DIG TWO GRAVES. “She’s not there yet,” I said.

  “I’m there,” Hector said.

  The car sputtered and then spurted forward like a go-kart. “See, I’m not a bad—”

  “Look where you’re going!” My hand hovered in the air, ready to grab the wheel. Not that I knew how to steer. “Don’t talk.” I stayed mad. The vehicle wobbled and veered too close to the parked cars on my side. I ducked in tow
ard the middle. Before we passed under the 405, something changed, and the motion felt different, as if we were sliding on ice. Then the car sputtered to a stop.

  “What? Whoa. You’re out of gas, man! I can’t believe you!”

  “Kat is such a flake.”

  “Don’t blame your mom. She probably would’ve filled it up the minute she took it out.”

  We bickered like a long-married couple. I said he had to call his dad. He wanted to try the Mims. “She’d be kinder,” he said. We blamed each other. Finally, Hector dialed Ben Orion, who sounded extremely annoyed. Forty minutes later, he arrived carrying a can of gas with a spout like the Tin Man’s, still angry. We saw the police side of him. He unscrewed the cap and poured it in. He nudged Hector out of the driver’s seat and silently steered us to a Union 76, where he filled the tank and paid.

  “You guys realize you’ve broken the law,” he finally said.

  We tried to explain about the cat and Pasadena. His mouth stayed in a straight line. “I don’t like this at all.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t expect you would.”

  He started driving. We stayed quiet. Finally, I asked where we were going.

  “I’m driving this car back to wherever you found it.”

  “What about your car?” I said.

  “I’ll have to get a taxi. This time I’m going to let you pay me.”

  We tried to argue that Hector could drive now, but Ben wouldn’t hear of it. In the Palisades, we had to tell him where to turn to get to Hector’s aunt’s house.

  “What about the cat?” Hector said.

  “I suggest we take a taxi to my car, then I drive to where you got the cat, you tell the truth and give it back.”

  “But it’ll die otherwise!” I explained.

  Ben Orion just shook his head.

  “He likes the girl,” Hector said. That was a cheap shot.