Anywhere But Here

by Mona Simpson

She moved the wooden spoon in the pitcher of lemonade as if her arm were some electric appliance.

  “So, why are we going over there? Are we buying a new house?”

  “Shhh,” my mother said, her eyes casting down the hallway to detect Ted, who hadn’t left for the day yet. Ted taught skating classes now on Saturdays and Sundays. He was hardly ever at home. I looked down to the empty rooms. I wouldn’t have minded a new house, that was for sure. Two years and we still didn’t have furniture. For a while, they’d said they were going to put in a pool, but that fell through, too. Most of what my mom and Ted planned didn’t work. It turned out they couldn’t get the bulldozers in to dig the pool without going through another yard. And when they asked the neighbors, they said no.

  “No, silly, shush.” She looked around the small yard, then, at the two trees, the fence. “He’s just a friend of mine, that’s all.”

  It took her a long time to get ready. She touched up her fingerand toenails with light pink polish. We drove to the old section downtown. My mother explained that the company had bought a house for its office and remodeled. We walked up the stone pathway and Dan Sklar opened the door, even before we knocked. Wind chimes hung over our heads on the porch.

  The office was empty, he was the only one there and he didn’t offer to show us around. My mother leaned against a desk and smiled at him. “Well, so, how are you?” she said. Her bright voice made me angry, she had a way of smiling and looking at the other person and paying absolutely no attention to me.

  Dan Sklar slumped over as he stood. He looked like a tired person. His small nose was sunburned and peeling.

  “The Japanese gardens in front look fan-tastic,” my mother said, leaning back and crossing her arms. “They’re gorgeous, very elegant. Just like they are over there.”

  Over where? I wondered for a minute, and then I knew what she meant. I looked at her. There she went again. She’d never been to Japan. She looked down at the rug, into the shag.

  “Have you been there?” he asked.

  “Mmmhmm.”

  I knew better than to say, When? or anything, and anyway, what did I care. She’d lie to me, too, in a minute. She was like that.

  We were standing by a sliding glass door. Outside, young maples moved slightly, trembling in the stillness. My mother picked up a paperweight and held it in her hand. “A-yun,” she said, still looking at the paperweight, turning it, making it snow. “You didn’t get a chance to really see the rock garden. Dan’s rebuilt a re-yall authentic Japanese rock garden outside.” Vowels and consonants rolled and spiked in her mouth, and her eyebrows lifted as if she were talking to a very young child. “Why don’t you go out and explore.”

  I just looked at her. Then at him. It was getting so I always turned to the other person to help protect me against what she said.

  But he nodded at me, weakly. “There’s a waterfall in back,” he offered.

  “I don’t want to go outside,” I said. I pretended to be dumb.

  “Oh, well, okay,” she said, looking down at the carpet. She lifted her eyes then, up in a straight line to Dan’s face. She tossed her head and took a breath.

  “Why?” she said.

  He couldn’t have missed the sharpness in her voice. But his eyes meandered out the glass doors, to the garden. It was high summer, just turning.

  “Huh?”

  “Why.”

  “Why don’t I want to go outside?”

  “Yes. Why don’t you want to go outside?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I don’t feel like it. Is it like a federal case, I have to have a reason?”

  “It’s just a nice day and I thought you might like a little sun, that’s all.” She exhaled through her teeth. “But, no, not you, anything to be contrary, to be the center of attention.”

  Dan Sklar’s head turned. His breath came out of his mouth so slowly, it was like something ticking.

  “Adele,” he said, “leave her.”

  But then the same thing happened that always happened, when someone tried to stick up for me.

  “No, I’m not going to leave her because she’s going to have to learn.”

  Dan Sklar swiveled his chair so he was completely facing out the window. We could see his back and his hands. He’d picked up string from his desk and he was lacing it, cat’s cradle, through his fingers. Behind him maple leaves fluttered and moss on the ground seemed wet. Then my mother made a face at me. The face was like a mask: sour and menacing, recognizable, at the same time. The lines around her mouth carved deeper. Her cheeks pushed out, round and young. She looked like she was innocent and just now saw me for what I was: a devil.

  I walked across the carpet, quiet—because of my sneakers. I opened the sliding doors and moved outside past Dan Sklar. He didn’t matter anymore. He wasn’t going to help.

  The sun was weak but a definite yellow on the sidewalk. This part of town was still, today, and empty. As soon as I was outside, I was glad. I didn’t know why I hadn’t left earlier, I should have. It was like stepping into another room, with clean, aquatic light and thinner air. Across the street was a small bank and its empty parking lot. Down the road, pigeons sat on the painted game circles of the playground at Saint John’s School, where I used to go. The spires of the steeple intersected with telephone wires.

  Then I heard my name. Dan Sklar slumped in the open door, his arm above him on the wall. “Ann, there’s a pond with goldfish down on your left, and in back, there’s a waterfall.”

  “And all over the sides, he’s planted flowers. Oh, and Ann, you’ll never believe, there are lily pads on the pond. Remember, when you were a teensy-weensy girl, we used to go see the farms and the lily pads?”

  I just stared.

  She was talking to him. “We were living at Mom’s and she was always the first one up at five or six, you know. So we just jumped in the car and went to see the farmers milking their cows. And she used to love lily pads, where the wee little frogs sat.”

  I stayed where I was sitting, on a stone. I drew my knees up and hugged them. “Okay,” I said.

  They shut the sliding glass door and pulled the beige curtains closed. My mother poked her head out once more.

  “Ann, be careful where you step. Don’t squash any flowers. Look where you’re going.”

  The wind chime moved above the door as if someone was running their fingers through it. This old neighborhood was near Saint Phillip’s Academy, the Catholic high school where my mother had gone. She had taken me to Dean’s, the place she’d gone after school for hamburgers and malts—that was around here, too. I felt in my pockets, even though I knew already, I didn’t have any money. I could walk off, but then I’d only be in more trouble later and there wasn’t anywhere much I could go. There was a car lot a few blocks away. From where I was, I could see the string of flags rippling.

  I tried to be very still and forget about myself. I pictured a refrigerator sitting in Griling’s dump, the sun on its dry white sides.

  Then a boy I knew from my old school rode by on a bicycle. Paul, whose father was a beekeeper. I didn’t want him to see me. For two years, he had sat behind me in the row of small desks at my old school, where I went before Ted and the house on Carriage Court. It was possible he would go by and not know me. It was years now since we were in school together. I stayed, crouched there on the rock, like the Land O’ Lakes Indian. A fly settled on my arm, but I didn’t move.

  He looked at me and kept walking his bike. Then, a few squares of sidewalk later, he looked back and stood there. “Ann,” he said. “You’re Ann August, aren’t you?”

  I stepped forward, my hands conscious and awkward at my sides. We sat down on the steps together by the goldfish pond. There was a patch of smooth black pebbles. I took a handful and pitched them in one by one.

  “You’re at Oak Grove now,” he said.

  “Yeah. Public school.”

  “I see your cousin around. Ben. I used to come over to your house in first grade, I remember once
we caught butterflies.”

  “Yeah, I remember that.” I was embarrassed all of a sudden. I didn’t want him to ask what I was doing here.

  He was hitting two rocks together. “You were living with your grandmother then, out there. You told me once you liked your cousin better than me.

  “I’m sorry.

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. We were just little kids.”

  “Do you still live on a bee farm?”

  “Yup. Got a thousand more bees now than we did then.” He opened his hand and counted on his fingers. “Clover, alfalfa, wildflower, orange blossom, grass”—his fist was closed—“and mixed. I get out honey myself now. I have my mask and my gloves and my own colony.”

  “My grandfather had mink,” I said, stupidly.

  “Yup, I remember the sheds.”

  We both just sat there with our elbows on our knees and our chins in our hands.

  “I guess I better go now,” he said, standing. “Do you ski?” he asked suddenly, looking at me while he kicked the kickstand up on his bike.

  “No.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I ski now.”

  I nodded. Nothing seemed surprising. I fingered the concrete sidewalk, still cool despite the thin yellow from the sun. I liked him but I was glad he was going, because I didn’t want him to be there when my mother and Dan Sklar came out.

  It was a long time. I walked around to the back, telling myself that when I’d stepped on every stone, when I’d seen and said the name of every flower, they would be finished and we could go home. But then I was finished and nothing happened. Birds sat on the telephone wires not moving, even when I threw stones.

  One of the stones landed with a loud ringing on the roof of a car parked across the street. I felt that sound in my heart. I waited then, terrified and stiff, to be caught. But time stayed still, the rectangle of sun, like a room around the parked car, changed, slowly sliding into shade.

  Then the old heavy trees on the street began rustling and it started to rain. I skipped to the door then, holding my elbows in the other palm, like eggs. Sure, she would come out now.

  But she didn’t. I watched the birds fly off telephone wires into the dark trees. The wind chimes on the porch clattered wildly. The pond of goldfish ruffled up and stayed itself at the same time, like the skin on a pan of milk, scalding.

  I walked to our car, getting soaked. The rain felt like dull needles. The doors were locked. I stood for a moment looking into the dry, kept inside of our car. My book was there. Then a line of lightning cracked the sky and I ran back to the porch. I put my ear to the wall and I didn’t hear anything moving. It seemed impossible now that my mother was inside; still, our car was there. I couldn’t seem to hold the two things in my mind at once.

  A few minutes later, there was a strange light, slanting as if it came from the ground behind the house. I still sat, damp, in the porch shade. But everything in the yard, stones, the black telephone wires, our car, the tiny, waxy, mossy flowers, seemed to shine hardly, as if their colors were only painted and there was metal inside them.

  The sun was in the sky again and the dark clouds, now marbled and veined with light, moved fast. Once, my grandmother had been driving with her husband in the old Ford. They drove into a storm. I always thought of them at one place on the black highway, a firm yellow stripe down the middle, my grandfather with his glasses at the wheel, my grandmother, in a blue dress, looking down at her hands in her lap, and the car, half in rain, the back half dry in sunlight. She’d told me that once and I thought of it a lot. It was just one of those things I used.

  I sat in a square of sun, pitching stones in the pond again, trying to rouse a goldfish. They never came to the surface, but sometimes one turned underwater, a quick apostrophe of flame, like sun on a coin for a second, then extinguished again by the green. I looked up and followed the telephone wires, down the road to the string of flags marking the car lot. Something about the stillness of the air made it already late afternoon. My clothes were almost dry now, except for the elastic of my underwear and the rims of my sneakers.

  Finally, then, while I was still looking at clouds between telephone poles, printing my thoughts in black square letters on the sky, the door closed behind me and my mother came out alone.

  She smiled hugely and stopped a moment, rolling her head and smelling the air. “Mmmph,” she said. Then she looked down and found me. She wasn’t angry anymore. She stuck her arm out in the air, her hand open, and clicked her tongue—the way she had when I was little. It was a signal for me to come running and take her hand.

  But I only stood up slowly.

  “Do you have any coins?” I said.

  “Coins?” she repeated, not changing her face—the stupid smile was still there. “Why? Do you feel like running over to Dean’s?”

  I thought of that a second, the silver glistening behind the soda fountain, and the day seemed to close up, small again. We’d get into our car and go, normal. I could taste the beginning of sweetness at the back of my throat.

  “But before that, for here. To throw into the goldfish pond.”

  She stepped lightly over to where I was. She was wearing white patent leather thongs and her pink toenails looked like the washed insides of shells.

  She looked in her wallet, but there were no coins. Then she lifted her whole purse to one side and shook it so everything fell to the corner. She rummaged and extracted a dime and a quarter. She gave me the quarter.

  “Go on, it’ll work even better,” she said. “The more money, the faster you get your wish.”

  My mother looked around the yard. “Isn’t this fantastic,” she said. Her smile stayed, too big, as if she couldn’t stop it.

  “It’s all right.” I shrugged.

  “Well, I think it’s really great. The authentic Japanese. Really, really great.” Then I knew what it was—that smile and the way she was talking—it was as if she was proud.

  She closed her eyes and threw in the dime. It landed half on a lily pad, and wavered on its edge a moment before sliding under. She was crouched down so her sharkskin slacks hiked up and I saw the shaved nubs of blond hair on her ankles. Even her ankles had freckles. She was mumbling to herself, moving her lips the way she did when she said prayers. There was a flat, gold leaf on the pavement. She picked it up, examined it against the sky, then set it on the thinly pleated water. We both knelt down watching it move.

  A long time ago, once, my mother drove me far, I don’t know where it was, to a brick hospital, just the two of us. It was on a long lawn, like the dairy, a low, brick building that went on as far as you could see. We parked in the parking lot in back. My mother told me she had to have a test for TB. I was young enough to misunderstand.

  “For TV? For TV?” I kept saying. “You have to have a test for TV?”

  “No,” she said. She was distracted.

  I had to wait, sitting in the lobby on a chair, while she went somewhere else. A long time later, she came out in a wheelchair, a nun in a white habit pushing it behind her. “Come on, Ann,” she said, without turning her head to me. The nun didn’t say anything; they both looked forward. I hurried up to go and ran a little to keep next to them. The nun left us for a moment in a long hallway. There were glass showcases on both walls. I held on to a small piece of my mother’s sleeve.

  “See, I’ll have to come and live here,” she said. She looked at the handiwork in the cases and sighed. “I guess I’ll learn how to knit and crochet and make things like that. That won’t be so bad. I suppose I’ll like it after a while.”

  She looked down at her hands and smiled.

  “What about me?” I said it quietly, almost a whisper, and just then a huge roaring started in my head.

  “You’ll get used to it. I won’t be able to take care of you anymore, I’ll be too weak. But I’ll knit something for you, maybe a sweater. You can come and visit. Mmhmm. I think I’ll knit you a sweater.”

  The nun came back and said, “We’ll have the r
esults on Thursday.” Thursday, Thursday stuck in my mind, a purple word.

  The nun wheeled my mother to a cement ramp outside the building. My mother stood up and took her purse from next to her on the wheelchair. It was a white patent leather purse with gold clasps. We started walking to our car. My mother looked back, once, at the nun in her white habit, the veil moving a little in the breeze as she turned. The roaring was still in my head, in back of one ear, and I didn’t say anything. It was spring that day, there were irises and daffodils planted along the edges of the hospital lawns. There was a watery breeze like on Easter. My mother drove home and never mentioned any of it again.

  I was sitting on my bed, watching television. My mother came into the room. “Oh, there you are, I called you, didn’t you hear me.” She rubbed away a tear with a cuff. “You scared me. You know yesterday I was watching you from his sliding glass doors, and you were just standing there on that long grass by the sidewalk, you weren’t even in the nice garden, sort of shuffling your sneakers on the ground, in that jacket, with your hands in your pockets and your head down. I saw you looking like that, unhappy, sluffing around like a little old man, and I thought, nothing is worth it, you’re my jewel. Honest, Honey, you are. You’re my absolute precious, long-limbed jewel. I have to get you somewhere they can see you.” Her face folded and she started crying. “In that plain old jacket, with your head down, kicking, I thought to myself, here’s this beautiful, long-limbed girl with potential stuck in a nothing town. You look like a boy in those jeans and that scruffy jacket, some boy at a gas station in some nowhere place.”

  One day, I came home from school and the house was furnished. It had everything. I walked from room to room, switching on lamps and sitting on sofas. I ran my hands over the polished tablet ops. The house had still been empty that morning.

  When my mother came home she explained that it was only rented and temporary. She didn’t like the blue and green color scheme, but it was the best they had. She and Ted wanted to invite the family over for Thanksgiving.

  For three days we shopped. Ted went to work every morning, as usual, but my mother and I drove to the country to buy pumpkins. We placed orders at butchers’ and bakeries. My mother said she’d give me a note for school saying I was sick.