by Mona Simpson
She sucked in her breath when she got off the phone. I was absolutely still; I knew the less excited I looked, the faster she would tell me.
“Well. She said there’s not a thing she can do while we’re here. But, she said, the minute we get to LA, to call and she’ll make us an appointment.”
We skated around, skidding over the black and white floor in our socks, our hands clasped together in the center as we spun.
“So what do you think, Ann? Isn’t it something? Everything just seems to be falling right!”
When we stopped spinning, I was so dizzy I collapsed against the kitchen counter and hit my head. I remembered the rented furniture, the kitchen which seemed so still and permanent and permanently ours, branded by afternoon light. We would be leaving. The house on Carriage Court wouldn’t be our house anymore. That made me sad and tired with the burden of decisions. We wanted too many things.
Then, there was a contest. The spring before we left, the Red Owl Grocery Stores gave you one stamp every time you bought your groceries. They had new bags printed, saying YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON. You had to get an A, B, C, D and an E stamp, with consecutive numbers on them. The winner would get ten thousand dollars. My mother and I didn’t really become interested until we had a consecutive A and B. Then, we got a C.
We stood outside the Red Owl Grocery Store pasting the stamp in and looking at our card. I licked it and smeared it on, and my mother pressed it down with her thumb. Our grocery bags sat around us on the parking lot.
“Oh, I think we’re going to win, Ann, I can just feel it.” My mother sighed before she opened her wallet, carefully, to slip the card in. “On second thought, why don’t you keep it.”
I slid it in my back pocket and felt the tiny raised shape of it under the denim.
Ted sat watching TV when we ran in. We showed him our card, climbing over him, on the couch. He smiled. “They’re not going to let you win. The thing’s rigged. They just want to get you in the store to spend your money.”
“Yeah, mmhmm,” my mother said, shaking her head and winking at me behind his back.
Three or four times a night, my mother would think of some small item we needed and we would get in the car and drive to another Red Owl. Ted would shake his head and smile when we decided to have hot fudge sundaes at midnight and when we drove to the other side of town to buy the ice cream and, at another Red Owl, the fudge. When we came back, he’d lift his book down from his face and look at us, bemused. He wasn’t absolutely convinced we wouldn’t win.
So the night we came racing from the car with thirty dollars’ worth of groceries we didn’t need and the fourth consecutive number, the D, he smiled and examined the book. In his subdued way, Ted was becoming excited for us.
Before I fell asleep, my mother tickled my back. I lay facing the wall.
“What would you like when we get the ten thousand, I suppose I should say if,” she said.
“Go to California,” I said, “and boots.”
“Do you really want to go to California?”
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe when we get the money, we’ll just move.” I thought I knew what my mother was thinking from the light way her fingers drummed and swirled on my back, her wrist dragging behind. She was thinking of the beach, the wide road dipping down to the ocean, all the things we’d seen on television. But she worried. She pinched my shoulders to keep me awake. “Would you like that, honey?”
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, good. I would, too, I think. I think I would too.”
We bought marshmallows, detergent, whole wheat bread, Rock Cornish hens for the freezer, shish kebab skewers, new sponges, herbal teas, raisins for me to take to school, but we still didn’t get the fifth consecutive number on our stamps. We didn’t even see an E. We began to talk and compare with people around us in the checkout lines.
Ted became smug with renewed conviction. “That’s it,” he said, laughing, his arms bursting up extravagantly like a jack-in-the-box, suppressed too long. “They let you come just so close and then you go buy up the store, hoping you’ll get the last number.”
That was the night we came home with seven bags. My mother nodded, agreeing with Ted. She sighed when we’d hauled the bags in. We still had all those groceries to put away.
“He’s right, you know,” she whispered to me later, sitting on my bed. “Sure, they’re going to try and rig it. If they let you win, they’re going to have to pay up. This way the people keep coming in and buying. Of course, they’d rather have you lose. And I think he’s right—I don’t think there’s an E in Bay City. Uh-uh. But I have an idea. Probably a lot of people here have everything but the E. So I thought tomorrow I could call in sick for both of us and we can drive up to Door County and go to a few Red Owls there.”
“Okay,” I said, grateful, looking up into her eyes. My mother was so smart. I felt excited, lying in my bed.
We didn’t tell Ted. We wanted to come home that night with the completed card and surprise him. Mr. Know-it-all. We waited until he left in the morning and then I ducked down under the dashboard until we drove out of the neighborhood. All the kids were walking to school, I didn’t want them to see me. I wouldn’t be there all day, it made me feel creepy.
But it was all right as soon as we were on the highway. Fifty miles north and we started stopping at every little town and asking where the Red Owl was. Penfield, Egg Harbor, Fish Creek, Kiwaunee, Sturgeon Bay; we bought small items at each one; gum, razors, toothpicks, matchsticks, new soap. We walked into each store several times, taking each thing separately to a different cash register.
“What if they see?”
“Just say you forgot. You went out to the car and thought, Damn, and just remembered. So you ran in again.”
In a little town named Malta, we got an E. It wasn’t the right E, it wasn’t consecutive, but it was our first E. We went to Malta’s three Red Owls, in each aisle, hoping we’d get the right E, E 56614. We picked the items carefully, superstitiously, as if the difference between a package of ovenproof tin foil and a box of animal crackers would make the difference in our lives.
My mother sighed, opening the clasp of her purse. “We’re running out of money,” she whispered. We made our final choices, taking a long time. Holding the things in my hand, I believed they each had magic, a destiny, souls of their own. My mother chose a tin of anise candies. I picked a set of sixty-four crayons. “When are you going to use those?” My mother sighed, but she let me buy them.
We met outside, from our separate cash registers. After six more purchases in Malta, we had one more E, but not the right E, the E. My mother broke down. We walked through the store once more, this time both of us in the same register line.
“Look,” my mother said to the checkout girl. There was a kind of laugh she used when she asked for something outrageous, a helpless, this-is-crazy-but kind of noise. “You won’t believe this, but we just need one E. We need E 56614. Then, if we get that, all we’d need is the C. If you have it in there, could you just please give it to us? We’ve got the three already, and we only need two more. She’s not going to let me go home without it.”
My mother pressed down on my foot, hard, with her shoe. She looked at me for the lie. We already had the C.
The girl said she was sorry but the stamps came in an order, a mixed-up order, but she had to give us the top one in her pile.
“Oh, couldn’t you please just look through your stack a second and see?”
“No,” the girl said.
“Please, I’ll give you ten dollars.” My mother held the money in her hand and the girl stood shaking her head no. She looked sadly and clearly ahead of her into the keys of the cash register. “No, I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t.”
In back of us a woman was bumping her metal shopping basket forward. “That line’s moving twice as fast and this is the eleven or under,” she said. “Meanwhile I pay the ba
by-sitter at home.”
My mother took her money back. “Come on, Ann, let’s go.”
“That’s three eighty-nine for the groceries, ma’am.”
“Forget the groceries,” my mother said. She was mad. She was always mad when she couldn’t convince someone to make an exception for us. We climbed into the car and she slammed her door. “That dummy. ‘No, I ca-yunt,’ ” she mimicked.
We drove home and both took naps until dinnertime. After, when we were watching television, Ted looked at us each and said, “Well, aren’t we going to have our nightly run? What’ll it be? Dessert? Charcoal for next summer’s barbecues?”
Ted was hopeless. “Very funny,” my mother said, keeping her eyes on the set.
My mother fell in love with a car. It was a used car, but barely used, a beauty. It was only a year and a half old. My mother said the owner had only driven it once a week to go to church. A dealer was selling it, but it was still parked on the owner’s curving driveway.
After we gave up on the contest, we drove out to buy ice cream cones at Dean’s every night. We rode by the car, after. My mother smiled and shivered slightly whenever she spoke of the car. It had a white exterior, a white roof and two navy blue lines, thin as pencil marks, running down its sides. I always felt like tracing them with my fingers. It was a Lincoln Continental Mark III.
“I think it’s the most elegant car in the world right now,” my mother said. We’d parked a few houses down and we climbed out to look closer. It was a private driveway, so we kept very quiet, walking. There were dark bushes on either side. The neighborhood was still and lush, perfumed with fallen roses. The dark seemed to gather, secret in the hedges. There was a haze of dusk in their pointed intricate branches. The car had a light tan, creamy interior and an elaborate dashboard with polished wood panels. We pressed against the windows to see more. My mother softly tried the door and grimaced at me, quickly, when it opened in her hand. We slipped in. I was on the driver’s side. We each sat in our seats for a minute, I rested my hands on the wheel.
“It even smells good,” my mother whispered, “feel the leather.” We ran our hands over it, lightly. Then we got out and gently closed the doors again. We each turned back to look at the house we were walking away from. It was large and old and closed.
“Apparently, she’s in her sixties,” my mother said. “A very dignified woman, I’ve heard, very. He’s a dentist. Now, Gramma could be more like that, she could dress up a little and join clubs. But she’d rather just stay out there in her old clothes and make her own little supper and rake her leaves.” She sighed. “She’s really a loner, you know, Ann? And she’ll always be that way, until the day she dies.”
We drove past the car every night that spring. The first week in June the weather turned. It was cool when we walked with our ice cream cones from Dean’s to the car. My mother switched on our heat.
“Listen, there’s something we have to decide.” Her tone seemed more solemn than usual, there was something older and sweet in it. It was what she would someday become. “We can afford either the Lincoln or California, with the money we have saved and what I’ll get from the Teacher’s Retirement Fund. But we can’t have both.” We stared out the windshield in front of us, licking our ice cream cones, placid as cows. She’d said that softly, as if she were apologizing. “Now, if we get the car,” she went on, “we’d still have the house and remember, Honey, we’re at the top, here. There, you’d always be one of the poorer kids. I won’t be able to compete with the families who have fathers. So, you have to think what you want, Honey. It’s up to you.”
Sometimes it seemed years, it had been known between us, decided, we were going to California. But we’d never really said it. It was our secret, a nighttime whispered promise. Now we were sitting in the car in the waning summer daylight, early evening. My mother shifted her ice cream cone to her left hand and started the ignition again, driving with her right. We rode slowly through Bay City. The air was moist now as I dragged my hand out the window. I was wearing clothes I’d had for a long time.
Spells can be broken by the person who started them. Some things, once spoken in the daylight, can never be the same. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t want to give up California, either. I never wanted to move from my seat. I wanted my mother to keep driving and driving. She was talking, humbly now, mentioning rent, school systems, putting the house on the market. “Dan Sklar would handle it for me,” she said.
But if we stayed, we wouldn’t have California anymore. We couldn’t whisper at night about moving there when we were sad. We’d never believe it again.
My mother had given me choices all my life and I’d never learned to choose. I always tried to figure out first if there was a way I could have both things. My mother’s face was obvious. I’d learned a long time ago to pick the thing she hadn’t picked, the one she didn’t want. That way she would get me both, because she couldn’t bear to give up what she wanted for me.
My mother loved that car. She had to have it, I knew she wouldn’t be able to relax until we bought the Lincoln. She pulled up slowly and parked in front of the house with the Lincoln in the driveway. She looked over at me, down into my face. “What do you think, Ann? Which do you want?”
“California,” I said.
“Rather than the Lincoln?”
“I think so.”
“Well, be sure now. Think a minute.”
“I’m sure.”
Her hands dropped from the steering wheel to her lap. She stuffed the napkin from her cone in the car ashtray. “Okay.” We both looked out the windshield at the darkening bushes. “You really think you can make it on TV?”
“Yes.” My hands clutched the car seat under me. I was bluffing, I didn’t know anything. I was twelve. I had no idea if there was anything I could do.
“Okay,” she said, apparently satisfied. She looked relieved. She backed the car slowly and turned around. “All righty. Well, then, I guess we’re going.”
We both went solemn. We drove and didn’t say anything. I kept thinking of her asking face, peering down at me, and how now she was settled, looking straight out into the dark. It already seemed too late to change our minds. When we pulled into our driveway, a light was on in the neighbor’s garage and the door was up. One of the older boys lifted the hood of a car open, he was bending into it, searching the machine parts with a flashlight. I knew what would happen to him, to the people who stayed.
We came out of the Red Owl carrying grocery bags and the cars had their lights on already. It was drizzling slightly and the brown paper bags were damp by the time we got to the car. I had on Benny’s junior varsity jacket; it was big and warm, the sleeves too long for me.
My mother sighed once and looked around. That was all. We stood a moment with the groceries on the car top before she opened the doors. You look at a place differently when you’re leaving. I jammed my hands into the deep felt pockets of Benny’s jacket.
“You know we can still change our minds.” My mother started the car and sat back in her seat. We both put our hands near the heating vent.
We drove out into the traffic. It was still early, five o’clock, and not yet dark. The wet pavement made the car wheels hiss and the drivers ahead of us went slow and cautious.
“I know.”
My mother turned onto the highway and pulled on our lights. “Okay, okay,” she said to herself, when a passing car honked and blinked. She wasn’t going the direction of home, but I didn’t care, I didn’t have anything to do. We’d both started the year in Bay City knowing we wouldn’t finish. I liked wearing Benny’s jacket. I felt the inside, serrated seam. We were going over the bridge, the steel underneath roared every ten feet, it was like hearing the hollow height and water. Then we were on the other side of town and my mother drove out to the cemetery.
People were coming home from work, there was traffic. We turned off the road, through a black, wrought-iron arch and then under the trees. My mother’s car bum
ped on a groove, meant to make cars go slow. It always seemed quiet in the cemetery, and that evening there were no other cars. Green vertical pumps stood every few feet on the lawn, to fill cans with water, and most of the boxes were planted. The grass was shiny, bright green under the drizzle.
My mother slowed and parked as close as we could get to her father’s stone. It was alone, the only one on a small slope between two oak trees. The other land was all bought for our family.
It was a pink granite stone, smooth on the edges, polished. Years ago, in summer, when we’d come to water the geraniums, Benny and I had slid down the sides. Now, my mother and I stayed in the car with the rain coming down over the windows. My mother left the heat on but turned the motor off. She kept her hands on the steering wheel.
“Should we go out?” I said, after a little while.
She shook her head slowly, no, over the steering wheel, her chin puckering into a frown.
I shifted in my seat, inside Benny’s jacket, and looked out the windshield; there was fog on the ground, blurring the distant lights down the hill and behind us on the road. The trees above us were dark and heavy; they seemed very old.
Finally, my mother pulled the lights on again and we drove out, the long way, down the winding path. It was the only time I’d been to the cemetery with my mother. I wondered if she came by herself.
We worked on the house. We painted my bedroom floor white and hung curtains to match my flowered bedspread. Ted fixed the fireplace. Now, my mother bought fresh flowers and candy to put out in bowls in the living room. The house was nicer than it had ever been, so people would buy it. But it wouldn’t last. We had to mop up my white floor each time before people came to see the house, the new bedspread in my mother and Ted’s room wrinkled like a sheet if anyone sat on it. The days we’d stayed around the house, though, cleaning and painting and fixing things, were when Ted and my mother and I got along best, most like a family.
