by Mona Simpson
“Well, she may be wonderful as a person, but as a tenant, she’s a nightmare.”
When my mother came home, the landlord was in the front yard talking to the gardener. My mother bounded upstairs to see the painted shutters and then marched down again. “Well, the shutters are better, it’s an improvement. But now what about the carpets? They were supposed to be cleaned two months ago. I don’t even want to walk around without socks and shoes. They’re filthy.”
I watched from the window upstairs. The landlord dropped the green hose she’d been holding.
“I mean, Geraldine, I JUST CAN’T LIVE LIKE THIS!”
“Adele, it’s been shampooed twice already and let me tell you something. You say you can’t live like this, with the shutters a shade off color, and meanwhile you can live in an empty apartment with no furniture, with a daughter in school for three months.”
“Well, the furniture’s all picked out, it’s just WAITING at Sloane’s to be delivered. I just want everything RIGHT before it comes.”
They talked a while longer in low voices and then the landlord slid into her brown Mercedes and drove way. But she’d gotten to my mother that time. At dinner, in our booth at Hamburger Hamlet, my mother seemed distracted. I tried to talk about different things. She had a piece of her hair between two of her fingers and she kept turning it, studying.
“Split ends,” she said, in the middle of my sentence.
I stopped talking and she seemed to notice. She looked up at me. “You know, she’s right, Ann, living all these months with no furniture and I’m worried about the carpets. She’s right.”
I loved her then. I was so glad, that seemed so normal and reasonable. I thought now we might start living the way other people did.
But the next thing that happened was my mother found another apartment. It was smaller, but cheaper and already furnished. “I mean, it’s not great furniture, but it could be cute. I can see already. We could make it real cute with some felt draped and different things around,” she told me.
So maybe that was it all along. Maybe we just couldn’t afford our apartment.
“But she could sue us for the whole rest of the year,” my mother said. She was scared about our lease. So we moved out late at night, carrying all our stuff in bags and suitcases to the car and driving to the new apartment in the dark. “I want us all out of here, before she knows.” Even without furniture, it took hours before everything we had was moved. We left the bare, almost new mattress and box spring. The studio had only one room, with a small alcove to sleep in, and the alcove already had a bed in it.
When we finished moving, we didn’t go to sleep. The new place was still too new and we didn’t want to look around carefully, then. We drove out Sunset in the dark to see the beach. We parked on the Pacific Coast Highway, and sat in the car with the doors locked, looking at the waves. We did that whenever things got too bad. You couldn’t see much, the ocean was just black, but you could hear the waves and sometimes we saw foam. We waited until it was light and the sand changed and then we drove back to town and had big breakfasts at Nibbler’s. My mother called in sick to her school. We were both going to stay home and work on the new apartment.
Then, when it was nine o’clock, we drove right up to the landlord’s house. We’d never been inside, but we knew where it was, we’d driven by. I pressed myself hard against my car seat. But then we were there parked in front and my mother was taking off her seat belt, saying, “Okay, here we are. Let’s get it over with.”
There was a long lawn in front of the house. The grass seemed wet from the night. It was a pinkish brick house with white statues by the drive. There was a fountain but it wasn’t running yet. The whole house looked closed as if the people inside weren’t up.
“Can I stay in the car?”
“Hon, I think it would be better if we both went. I really do.” Her voice was kind. She was being nice. “Come on, Hon. Let’s go.”
We stood there on her porch, our car far away over the lawn, knocking on the brass knocker. We must have looked like refugees. We’d been wearing the same clothes all night to move, we hadn’t slept. I could feel my hair matted in the back.
A maid answered and then we waited for a long time while she went to get the landlord.
Finally, the landlord walked to the door. We’d never seen her like this, she was barefoot, wearing only tennis shorts and a T-shirt. She was obviously surprised to see us, her eyebrows pressed down, but her voice stayed measured and pleasant.
“What can I do for you?”
My mother started shaking her head. “Géraldine, we have to talk. It just hasn’t worked out for us, the apartment. The rug, the shutters, everything. And I think I have grounds to get out of the lease, given all that’s been done and what was said would be done.”
“You want to get out of your lease? Is that what you want?”
“Well, yes, I think given—”
“Fine. I’ll be happy to let you out of it. No problem. I’ll rip it up right here.”
My mother and I looked at each other, following her into an office. The house seemed large, solidly furnished, quiet. It must have been wonderful to wake up in the morning and walk around heavy things like that.
The landlord scribbled on the lease and attached a note to the top, signing it and stapling the pages. “Fine, just let me know when you’ll be out.”
My mother laughed oddly. “Well, actually, we’re already out.”
The landlord looked at us fast and hard when she heard that, her head steady in one position, as if we really were crazy. “Okay,” she said, slowly. “I’ll write you a check for your deposit, then.”
“Believe me, Geraldine, we left it clean as a whistle. You can ride right down and look.”
Her dark head was already bent down, writing. “I believe you,” she said and handed us the check.
The next place was worse. I never liked it. But we cleaned and then we got used to it. At least there was furniture. My mother had plans; she wanted to make new curtains and slipcover the vinyl couch, but for a while we didn’t do anything.
We had a loud, cheap alarm clock that rattled on the floor when it rang. Every night, my mother sighed as she set it. She sat on her side of the bed, next to the telephone, naked except for a T-shirt, and handed the clock to me. We never had our work finished, so sleep always seemed a small surrender. Our work was as simple as my homework for school, the books piled up on the tiny, wobbly, dinette table and whatever my mother was supposed to do with the stack of manila files she carried in from the car every evening and then brought back the next morning. Our work was simple, but it hung over us so constantly that we lost track of what exactly it was we hadn’t done. We always knew we were behind. So my mother set the alarm for five o’clock. We both felt so tired at night we could excuse ourselves, with the idea of the long empty hours that would hang in front of us when we got up.
I knew when my mother turned and sighed in the night, I had radar for her. I always moved before she inched anywhere near me. I slept with a closed fist full of blankets and sheets. Our life together made me selfish.
We kept the clock by my side of the bed and when it blared out, rattling, in the morning, my mother would turn and say, “Five minutes. Five more minutes.”
This happened six or seven times. Then at eight or eight thirty, she’d bolt up to a sitting position and say, “Oh my God,” with a low hardness that made my heart stop.
“Hurry up,” my mother yelled while I sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on my knee socks. She stood naked, across the room, pinning her hair up into a showercap. She paced. I just looked straight back at her, pulling my sock on slowly.
“Okay, fine, you can make fun, but I’m leaving without you if you’re not ready.”
I was ready twenty minutes before she was, the same as every morning. I sat on the edge of the bed with my schoolbooks ready on my knees.
“I’m going as fast as I can, Honey.”
“I�
�m going to be late again.”
“Well, so am I then, and believe me, my job is more important than the seventh grade.”
When we stepped outside, it was already too bright and my mother’s heels clicked on the raked cement going down to the garage. As she drove the Continental up, pumping gas with her shoe, it scraped the cement side of the ramp. The space we had to go through was almost exactly the same width as the car and so, every morning, it made an awful, shrieking noise.
“Damn,” my mother said.
“Could you please shut up.”
“Jeez. You think you’ve got something a little decent once that you’ve paid a lot for, and then, before you know, it’s just another piece of junk, too.”
I did feel bad about the car. I knew how she thought. We were one by one getting the things you needed for a life. We didn’t expect to get ahead or get extra things, not since we’d moved. We just wanted what it seemed everybody else already had. But things didn’t keep. We’d never have them all at once. It made me think of the junk in Griling’s front yard, back on Lime Kiln Road. All those parts of things. I could understand it when my mother sighed. When she did that, some part of me opened and closed again.
I did weird things, too, by myself. At night, when we went to dinner, I said I had to go to the bathroom and walked upstairs to the wall of phones and phone books. The Hamburger Hamlet had thirteen different phone books for LA. I looked in two or three a night—that’s as long as I thought I could be gone before my mother would miss me—for the first three letters of my father’s name. I’d gone through every phone book and it was never there, but still, any time I was anywhere near a phone book, I had to check again, as if it could be. I was never surprised when I didn’t find it. I didn’t think about it too much. It was just something I did.
The last day of school before winter vacation, Daniel Swan started walking home with me. I guess like my mother said, it was easier for me to meet people. He was a guy in my class. He always kept a stash of square Kraft caramels in his jacket pocket, sometimes he’d give me one, sometimes not. I didn’t want him to see where I lived, so every few blocks, I’d stop and say, This is out of your way.
He’d start ahead of me, digging his hands in his parka pockets. “I’ll go a little bit farther.”
Finally, we stood in front of my apartment building. “Okay, I’m going to go now.” I put out my arm like to shake hands.
But he didn’t leave. I didn’t invite him in, even though I had my key in my hand, and he didn’t ask. Our apartment was on the first floor, you could see our front window. But I didn’t tell him which door was ours, or anything, and we just sat on the landing doing nothing. He gave me a caramel and started opening another for himself, the cellophane one small glitter in the dull late afternoon sun.
Then I heard the scrape that was my mother’s car going down into the garage. It made an awful sound. I just sat there.
“Hi, you kids!” my mother shouted as she hurried up the ramp, pitched forward because of her high heels. She dabbed the edge of her eye with a sleeve. She was carrying a stack of files, as usual. It was December, but in Los Angeles, December can be like autumn. The air was dull and cool and smelled as if the earth were about to change.
“Hey, why don’t you help me carry in groceries!”
We both ran down the concrete to the garage, glad to be told what to do. Then, I was grateful for the car. The leather smelled rich and good. I was glad my mother kept it clean.
My mom had gone shopping, so she could offer us things to drink. She’d been to the Linville Nutrition Center and bought pomegranate juice and carrot juice and celery juice and three kinds of kefir. Daniel seemed used to that kind of thing. When she asked him, he said he wanted peach kefir.
My mother brought out bags of cranberries and brand new needles and threads. She told us she’d seen gorgeous strings of cranberries on a Christmas tree in a store window, prettier than popcorn, and so she thought we should make some. They were opening lots already, all over Westwood, the trees bundled together and stacked against walls.
We sat on the floor and started stringing. It was hard. The needles seemed thin and flimsy against the berries. We pricked our fingers and broke the cranberries and after a half hour, we each had only a short little stringful to show for it.
“Well, we’re going to have dinner at the Hamburger Hamlet, Daniel. You’re welcome to join us, if you’d like. Or if you can, if your mom’s not expecting you.”
“But you mean, we’re going to give up on the cranberries?”
“I think we should, don’t you?”
Daniel stood and wiped his hands on his pants and followed my mother to the sleeping alcove where she pointed to the phone. In the little space between the bed and the wall, there wasn’t room for two, so she moved out of the way for him.
“The Witch will still be working, but I’ll call the rest of them. They’ll be glad I’m not there. More food for them.”
“Oh, Daniel.” My mother laughed as if that were a joke.
In the living room with just me, she sighed and her shoulders dropped and she looked tired again.
We crowded in our regular booth at Hamburger Hamlet, all three of us.
“Hmmm. They’ve raised their prices, I see,” Daniel said.
Neither of us ever would have said that. It seemed odd and happy for someone to talk about money.
My mother put her menu down and smiled. She was charmed. It was a relief to know other people thought about money, too. “You may have whatever you’d like, Daniel.”
“Hmm, I always like their halibut, but it’s gone up since the last time I was here.”
“Oh, go ahead. Get it,” my mother said.
On our week’s vacation, my mother and I wandered into a store on Brighton Way and bought two suede jackets to give each other as presents. They were expensive, but they were on sale and my mother said they would be good forever and you need one or two smashing things.
So we had those and there weren’t going to be any surprises. We’d received wrapped boxes of presents in the mail from home in the middle of December and we opened them as soon as they arrived.
We didn’t know what to do with ourselves during vacation. We saw Julie once and we took an old woman from the Lasky House to the Hamburger Hamlet for dinner. Beverly Hills put up elaborate decorations on the streetlamps, but except for them you wouldn’t have known it was Christmas. When we drove out of the commercial district, the long residential streets looked bright as always. The lawns were thick and tended, green, the palms tall and dry, and we heard the hollow thonks of volleys on hidden tennis courts.
My mother said we could get steaks for five dollars at the Chart-house, a new redwood restaurant on the water, so Christmas Eve we drove down to the beach. We argued, I thought the place would cost more. But by that time our car was looping on Sunset over Westwood. From the hills, the pink roofs of UCLA looked quaint.
But I was right. When we stood inside the Charthouse, waiting, my mother raised her eyebrows and said, “Let’s go.”
I wanted to stay. You could see the waves through a glass wall. It was warm and softly lit, the Beach Boys sang from the corners, a woman had already taken our names.
“I told you,” I said.
We walked out on the gravel parking lot to our car. “Honey, they’ve gone up. You used to be able to get a steak here for five, six dollars,” my mother said. “Well, anyway, it was a nice ride.”
We drove back to the Hamburger Hamlet. Later that night, my mother rewrapped the presents we’d gotten from home in better paper, paper that all matched, and she wrapped our jackets and whatever empty boxes we could find around the house. “Just to make it a little Christmasy.” She’d bought thick shiny dark green paper and red satin ribbons.
Then, at ten o’clock, my mother decided she didn’t want to do any more decorating until the house was clean. “Let’s just stay up and finish it. Then we can wake up in the morning and it’ll be all do
ne.”
“Can’t we do it in the morning? Why don’t we just put the felt up and the cookies out and go to bed.”
“Well, I don’t care what you do but I’m staying up. I couldn’t sleep with that kitchen floor the way it is.”
“You’ve slept fine every other night.”
“Honey, I’m not going to fight with you just because I want something a little nice once in my life, at Christmas. I’d like to wake up Christmas morning and have the place clean, okay?”
I didn’t argue anymore. My mother started on the kitchen and put me in the bathroom. She told me to scrub every tile and then the insides of the tub and the toilet. I was down on my knees with a pail of water and ammonia and a plastic cylinder of Comet. I swiped pieces of dirt and strands of hair from the corners. I stopped for a second and looked down into the toilet water, blue from Comet. Then I went into the kitchen to get something to drink.
My mother knelt, fiercely scrubbing the floor.
“Don’t tell me you think you’re done already.” Some hair fell out of the rubber band and a vein in her forehead was raised. She looked strained and awful, like a dog pulling against its leash.
“I just wanted to get something to drink.”
“Oh, okay.”
“You bet, okay,” I said, carrying my glass back to the bathroom.
“Shhh, the whole building can hear you, these walls are like nothing.”
“I don care,” I shouted. And then I turned the shower on before she could say anything else.
The bathroom did look nice, the tiles glistened, clean, but there was something about our apartment that still didn’t seem worth the work. It felt like a toy apartment, nothing was big enough, and whether it was a little cleaner or a little dirtier, it still wasn’t right. That was the thing about working hard on it—while you looked close at one little thing, scrubbing, you forgot. Then when you finished and stepped back, it was always a disappointment you couldn’t change more.
At two thirty we quit. We peeled our clothes off right onto the laundry pile. We still didn’t have a hamper. It was another thing, like ice cube trays, that other people always had. The clothes smelled the way a refrigerator smells when you defrost it.
