by Mona Simpson
In spring, three years before we left, my mother had gone to Las Vegas and married Ted. She came back without any pictures of the wedding and we moved into the house on Carriage Court. She said she hadn’t wanted a big wedding, since it was her second marriage. She’d worn a short dress she already had.
When my mother and Ted came home from Las Vegas they took me for a ride in Ted’s car. He turned into a development on the west side of the Fox River and they told me they’d bought a new house. Before, we’d lived all our lives with my grandmother.
“Guess which,” my mother had said, looking back at me from the front seat. Ted drove a white Cadillac, with a maroon interior and roof.
I knew, I could tell from their faces. They’d bought the rectangular house with no windows. “I hope it’s not that one,” I pointed. “Because that one looks like a shoebox.” They didn’t say anything, Ted just kept driving. Finally, my mother sighed.
It turned out a young architect had built it. He loved the house. He was only leaving because the house was too small for another child.
After we moved into the house on Carriage Court, my mother and I stopped taking lessons. Ted could fill up the ice with other students and that way he made more money. I quit skating altogether. Eventually, my mother stopped, too. Then Ted went to the rink himself every day, like any other man going to a job.
My mother and I seemed different in the new house. I was always in trouble. Neither of us could remember a time anymore when I wasn’t always in trouble. There were rules. We were not supposed to open the refrigerator with our hands, which would smear the bright, chrome, new handle, but by a sideways nudge from an elbow. “Here,” my mother demonstrated, showing me how to pull my sleeve over my fist like a mitten if I really had to touch the handle with my hand. Now that she was married, my mother decorated the inside of the refrigerator. All our jars were lined up according to size.
Sinks and faucets were supposed to be polished with a towel after every time you used them. Then the towel had to be folded in thirds and hung up again on the rack. Ted went along with all this, I suppose because he loved her.
And now that we lived on our own, we had the same thing for dinner every night: thick, wobbly steaks, which my mother served with baked potatoes. She also gave us each a plate-sized salad. Ted thought salad dressing was gauche, so we sprinkled the lettuce with salt and red wine vinegar. We didn’t have any furniture in the house, except for two beds. We sat on a bed and balanced the plates on our laps.
My mother read health books. She read books by Gaylord Hauser about how he kept movie stars on sets in California looking fresh at four in the afternoon by serving them health food protein snacks. She served us protein snacks. Once a week, she broiled a chateaubriand, which Ted sliced for her. She arranged the pink rectangular pieces on a plate and kept them in the refrigerator under a sheet of Saran Wrap. We ate them cold, with salt. She made us steak tartare for breakfast. She bought ground tenderloin and mixed it with pepper and capers and two egg yolks. We ate breakfast at the counter, standing up. We spread the meat on buttered whole wheat toast.
There were nights I remembered before they were married, when Ted and my mother had eaten late in the gray television light of my grandmother’s living room. They sat in chairs with standing TV trays. I saw them when I came down for a glass of water. Then, the rare, thick steaks, moving on their plates when they touched them with knives, running with the shiny, red-gold juice, seemed to make my whole face swell with longing.
Now, in the new house on Carriage Court, I wanted anything else. All meat tasted the same to me. It tasted the way my skin tasted, like a sucked piece of my own arm. I asked my mother for tuna casserole. But she only laughed.
She told me other people ate tuna because it was cheap. Plus it wasn’t healthy. Anyway, she and Ted liked meat.
“Very few men are as clean as Ted,” my mother told her friend Lolly. There was nowhere to sit in the new rectangular house on Carriage Court, so they stood, holding their coffee cups. Lolly was another woman from Bay City who’d gone away to college and then come back home to her mother. The way my mother sighed and drummed her fingers on the bare wall, it made you think she was a little sorry Ted was so clean. She might have wished he weren’t always malleable. She sighed again. Still, she wasn’t sure. There was a row of unpacked brown boxes, and I perched crosslegged on one of them. “I’m neat,” my mother said, “I just always have been. I can’t stand messes.”
That was a total lie. But Lolly nodded, sipping her coffee. I was thinking of the inside of my mother’s purse, of all my mother’s purses. In the house on Lime Kiln Road, she’d kept them in a closet, lined up on a shelf. In each one was a nest of old things, brushes, hair, bobby pins, makeup spilled and then hardened, so that the old orange powder and ink stained the lining, broken pencils, scraps of paper, little address books, all worn and woven together into something whole. But no one saw inside them except me.
“Honey, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times, don’t sit on those boxes, for God’s sakes! You don’t know what’s inside where! I swear, if I open them and find broken dishes, you’re going to go out and work to buy new ones.”
I jumped off and went to the kitchen. I had no doubt that I’d always be in trouble from now on. There were so many things to remember. Even when I tried I made mistakes. A minute later, I was in trouble in the kitchen for eating grapes from their stems, instead of breaking off my own little cluster.
My mother reached down, out of nowhere in the morning, and laid her cool hand like an envelope on my forehead.
“Where does it hurt?” We didn’t have a thermometer in the house on Carriage Court; she would have to decide. She worked and she always ran late in the morning, so she would have to settle this fast.
“All over,” I said. “My throat.”
She was looking out the window, running through the day ahead, far away, in the out-of-town school. She didn’t want to make a mistake. Well, it could never hurt to rest, she seemed to be thinking. She sighed. “Okay, stay here and sleep. Just stay home. Tomorrow, I’ll write you a note.”
Now that we lived in the new house, I stayed home alone when I was sick. The moisture from my mother’s hand felt good on my forehead and the distant slamming of the front door sounded like relief in my side. I spread out in my bed and moved, falling slowly into another red warm sleep. It was familiar to be sick, I was returning to a place already known. Turning in bed, under the cool sheets, all the sick days seemed the same, crystallized like cabins along one lake, spanning all my childhood years. Outside the smallest hung my red and blue plaid jumper, my first-grade Catholic school uniform, and in a corner my grandmother stood shaking a thermometer, reading it by the window light, where a beating hummingbird fed at the red glass dropper just on the other side of the screen. In another cabin, I was nine and pretending to be sick: the distant bell rang, faintly, and a test was being given in the gray-green public school. In the fourth-grade trailer, children handed papers back from the front of every row. The harder glittering objects of my healthy passions expired in my exhaustion. I loved the familiar here. The nicked wood of my old dresser, the kitchen table from Lime Kiln Road. I wanted my own mother’s hand.
When I woke up, snow fell softly at the window and the black and white television was on. Lucy and Ethel were trying to steal John Wayne’s footprints from the cement outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in old Hollywood.
I stayed in bed and watched the reruns and time fell off in half-hour segments. Then I got up to get something to eat. The kitchen was dry and bright with sun. It was late morning. Everyone was out to work. I made a big breakfast to make me feel better. I scrambled eggs and mixed up frozen orange juice. I finished and went back to my room. I wasn’t sure anymore if I was sick or not.
And then I heard the noon bell from school. Out my window, there was an aluminum fence and a vacant lot two yards down. I saw my friends from school come back on the path for lunch
, their parka hoods down, their black rubber boots unbuckled and flapping.
I ducked. I didn’t want them to see me. I wasn’t sick enough not to care.
I decided in the glittering noon light that I would get dressed and go to school. I’d tell my teacher I was sick in the morning but I felt better now. I would bring a note from my mother tomorrow. Afternoon was easier anyway. Geography and science and an hour of reading before I would come home, at three o’clock with the others.
I went to my dresser and got tights. Standing up too fast made my head spin and I had to sit down on the bed for a while before it was still again. Then I went to my closet and pulled on a dress over my head. I felt dizzy and hot inside, but I went to the bathroom and brushed my hair. I could hardly feel it. It was like brushing someone else’s hair. I steadied my hand on the cool tiles.
I went to the front closet and got on boots and my coat and mittens—I wanted to be all ready to go. I stacked my schoolbooks up on the kitchen counter, my pencil case on top. I stood in the closet and rummaged through my mother’s and Ted’s coat pockets for money. I took a dollar from Ted’s jacket, the paper folded and soft as a Kleenex, and put it in my mitten. Then I sat down in our only chair, waiting for it to be time.
I was floppy in the chair. I felt whatever strength I had seeping out into the upholstery. The walk would be the hard thing, then I would be at my desk at school. Finally, it was time to go. Early, but time. I got up and went to the kitchen to get my books. I was counting things off. I took the balled gray string with my key from my pocket and locked the door behind me. I walked down our driveway to the street. The snow had soaked into the ground already. The plowed, wet pavement seemed very bright.
With each step I felt less sure of myself. I felt myself walking like my grandmother walked, as she stood up out of her car when there was ice on the drive, dizzy.
I turned around and went back home. I closed the door behind me and locked it, pulled off my boots and hung up my coat. I took my clothes off and got into bed again. I fell into a light, warm sleep. Now I didn’t care.
I woke up later, hearing the shouts of my friends on the path, coming home from school. They looked fine, themselves, through for the day. You weren’t finished with a sick day at three o’clock. You didn’t get through being sick until the next morning. I’d still be wearing my same pajamas tonight when my mother and Ted came in from outside. I felt the back of my neck under my hair. I turned on the TV again for the after-school cartoons.
It was dark then and I was glad, because all the other kids would be inside, doing homework and getting ready for supper. There was something about the stillness of our house, though. It was empty and dry and I wished my mother would come home.
The front door slammed. I knew it was my mother, not Ted, from the way she moved around in the kitchen, the double echo of her high heels. I heard the pan I’d left on the stove clatter against the porcelain of the sink. The refrigerator door opened and closed. Then her footsteps were coming and she stood in my doorway, clicking on the overhead light. I was still watching television, another “I Love Lucy,” an older one, back in New York.
“So what did you do all day?” She looked over the room, her hands on her hips. “Besides making a mess. I thought you might at least vacuum or do a little something around here. I can’t do everything, you know. I can’t work and shop and clean and then come home and clean up again after you. You could’ve eaten a can of tuna, like I do for lunch, but no, you had to dirty a pan and there’s crumbs all over the counter.” She clicked the TV off and I felt the loss of the small apartment, the tiny furniture, like a quick pain.
“I’m sick, Mom.”
“You’re not that sick. I’m sick too, I have a sore throat and I still went to work. Now, come on, get up and you’re going to clean that kitchen.”
Maybe I should have vacuumed. I could have. Maybe I wasn’t that sick. There were obvious things I didn’t seem to see. I never in a million years would have thought of vacuuming.
I started doing the dishes. It was easy. I felt warm inside and dizzy. I kept scrubbing and scrubbing at the pan, looking out the window into the dark. The water felt good on my hands.
My mother came up behind me and touched my hair. “I’m sorry for yelling like I did. I guess I’m tired, too, you know? We both just need a rest.”
We weren’t popular on Carriage Court. My mother and Ted didn’t talk to other people. You saw the others out grilling in their front yards and settling sprinklers on the grass after dark, but my mother and Ted stayed inside. Our first summer, a posse of three fathers from the end of the block came to tell Ted how to mow the lawn. I stood behind the screen door, listening. They were all nice, looking at their hands while they talked, their shoes shuffling on the porch. Ted was nice, too, inviting them in for a drink.
When the men moved towards the door I ran to my room and cried. From the open windows I heard the shouts of a kickball game starting up. I wouldn’t go outside then, everyone would know. They must have known already. They probably thought of me as the girl with the overgrown lawn.
A little while later my mother came in and sat next to me on my bed. “Aw, honey, I know just how you feel.”
I pushed her and she faltered and fell off, onto the floor. It took a moment to get up. “Oh.” She was genuinely shocked. I studied my hand. I was surprised, too. I didn’t think I’d pushed her that hard. She looked at me again, brushing off her white sharkskin slacks. “Oh, you little monster.”
Her arm came near my face and I hit her.
After that, she left. I heard the two of them moving in the kitchen, but no one came to my room. The house seemed unusually quiet, I could hear the refrigerator humming. Finally, I got tired of being in bed and walked to the garage. I took out the lawn mower. We had the thin, manual kind you pushed, because my mother thought they were more elegant. We had a black one. My mother hated the noise that motors made, mowing.
It was really hard. I’d cut an uneven row of four feet, when Ted tried to take it from me.
“I’ll do it, Ann.”
My mother stuck her head out the screen door, holding the handle, as if, now that I’d hit her, she was afraid. “Annie, he made arrangements with the Kokowski boy to do it tomorrow morning. It’s all set. We even paid him already.”
But I couldn’t think of anything else except getting the lawn done then. Ted had to pry my fingers one by one off the black handle. I was surprised when he held them, palms up, in his hand. The fingers and knuckles were red and scraped; I was bleeding. He looked down into my face, not letting go.
“Take it away from her, Ted.” My mother, still inside, poked her head out, yelling. “She’ll kill herself with it. Look at her, she’s going crazy.”
Ted’s voice was gentle, almost a whisper. “I know you want it done now. I understand that. But I’ll do it. Let me do it.” I thought there was something wrong with his smile, though, his teeth looked like a zipper.
I stepped back, crossing my arms. I was looking down at my tennis shoes. The right one was ripped over the toes and there were grass stains, too.
Ted was stronger than I was. Each of his lunges mowed a five-foot row evenly.
“Oh, Ted, don’t now,” my mother called. “Why? We already paid him.”
“It’s all right, Adele. It won’t take me long.”
She let the screen door drop shut. “I just don’t see why she always has to get her way. Every time she throws a tantrum, we give in.”
I ran to the end of the block to the kickball game. When the Kokowski boy stole second base, he saw Ted on our lawn.
“Hey, your stepdad’s mowing your yard. I was supposed to do it tomorrow.”
“You better give him his money back,” I said.
“So, how come he’s doing it now? He sure waited long enough before.”
“Want to fight over it?”
He said no, forget it, even though he was bigger than I was. I’m glad he did because the way I was
right then I know I could have hurt him.
I lay on my stomach on the kitchen floor, drawing. My mother moved at the counter, washing food. It was four o’clock on a Sunday and the world, from our windows, stayed still.
For a long time, I colored my picture. All my drawing took a long time. I didn’t like there to be any white left on the page. My third-grade nun had tacked my pictures up on the bulletin board in the hall. She had dunked my head over a drawing on a table to see the first-place blue ribbon in the crafts fair. She told me I was the best artist in primary school because I was patient. Then another boy moved to the district, a boy they didn’t like because he couldn’t sit still and because he wore clothes that were too small for him. Tim drew all the time, on everything. He could pencil psychedelic drum sets on the edge of his lined paper in three minutes and they pulsed against your eyes. Nobody else thought he was any good, but I didn’t mind moving so much when we went to Carriage Court, because of Tim. I knew he was better.
I still drew at home, on the floor, and my mother never looked at the pictures. No one saw them except me.
That day she was standing at the window by the sink and I stopped. I put all my crayons away in the box and turned over the picture to the floor. Her shoulders were jumping.
I went over and touched her. She didn’t seem to notice. “Mom,” I whispered, ever so quiet, not wanting to disturb anything.
Then she looked down at me. “Was it better just the two of us?” She bit her lip, then shoved knuckles into her wobbling mouth. I looked up at her, still holding the end of her sweater. She’d stumped me, guessed what I always meant. If it was still just the two of us, we were going to move to California. So I could be a child star on television.
