by Mona Simpson
My mother sighed when she handed me the alarm. “I set it for six,” she said, in the dark. “We’ll feel better when it’s clean.”
We slept a groggy sleep until eleven. When we woke, the apartment was warm.
“Are you up?” my mother said. She sat, hugging her knees under the blanket. From where we were, we could see the opposite white wall, where the paint was cracking, and the bathroom door. “Well, Merry Christmas, Little One. Should we open our presents now or should we best leave them wrapped a while? They look so nice wrapped.”
“We can leave them. We know what they are.”
“You know, I know I said we’d go out to breakfast but we slept so late I’d almost rather just stay here and finish so it’s done. Then we can go to your friends’ this afternoon.” We had been invited to one Christmas party by a friend of mine from school, who lived near us in an apartment. Her mother and stepfather were giving an open house. It was the only Christmas thing we were doing.
“I’m hungry.”
“Have a little eggnog, Hon, and let’s get started.”
“What do we still have to do?”
“Not too much, really. We’ve got to vacuum, and especially the closets, because they’re full of dust. Then the windows and polish the silver and that’s it. Then just decorate.” She shrugged. “I just can’t really relax until it’s done.”
For maybe the first time in my life, I went without being asked to the closet and took out the vacuum cleaner. I began in the bathroom, banging on walls.
My mother walked past, still wearing only her sweat shirt, drinking from a carton of eggnog.
I pulled the plug on the vacuum cleaner.
“Could you PLEASE not drink from the carton. Could you just pour it in a glass?”
“I can see you’re in a pleasant mood for Christmas.”
“There’s germs.”
“The other one’s unopened. Drink from that.”
I plugged in the cord again and pounded against the floorboards. A few minutes later, my mother tapped my shoulder. I jumped. “Honey, we should really call home. Let’s do that now.” She sat on the bed and crossed her legs. “You know, I don’t know why they can’t call us. It’s later there, you know.”
I opened the new carton of eggnog, poured some into a glass. I took the carton to the living room closet, where I kept my school-books.
“So did you get the sweater?” my mother was saying, into the phone.
“Let me talk,” I said softly.
“You didn’t! You’ve got to be kidding. Well, they sent it two weeks ago! You didn’t get a sweater? Are you sure? It was a, a brown sweater. Are you sure, a brown sweater, with, let’s see, a shawl collar and yellow buttons! Oh, it was beautiful, Mom.”
The way she was yelling, my grandmother must have been holding out the phone.
“It’s not her fault,” I said, but my mother didn’t hear me. I was sitting on the floor, gulping. I didn’t know if there really was a sweater. I’d never seen it or heard about it. She could have gone and done it without me. But then, why wouldn’t it have gotten there? Other people’s things always worked.
“It was from Saks. They said it would get there for sure. Oh, I’m sick, I’m absolutely sick. It was a beautiful sweater, gorgeous wool. Oh, and it had pockets. Well, you’ll see. It should come any day now.”
The sweater never arrived. Neither did Carol’s nightgown or Jimmy’s scarf or Benny’s sweat shirt or Hal’s blazer. And my mother did it again and again, every holiday. It got to be a joke with the rest of us, “Did you get the sweater?” And it got so my mother didn’t trust the United States Postal Service. If you said you were going to send her a letter, she wanted you to insure it.
We went back to cleaning. Every few minutes, she would stop and shout. “She could do a lot more to help you, you know? You’d think she’d want to help, her own daughter. But no, not her.”
By the time the apartment was ready, it was after three. I ran to the kitchen to throw away the dirty paper towels from the windows. The open house at my friend’s was from one o’clock until six. We had to hurry.
Then my mother handed me the car keys to get the cedar boughs from the backseat.
“Can we do that later, we’re going to miss the party.”
“Honey, it’s going to take three minutes. This is the very last part. Just let me feel like it’s finished, so I can at least think we’re going to come back to a clean house. Here. Go on, Ann.”
I squeezed the keys in my hand so it hurt and ran outside. The street was deserted and the air was cool so my arms had goose bumps. It felt good. The light was soft and gray, as if it might rain. In another window in the building there was a huge fake tree with colored lights that blinked. An older woman lived there alone and she hardly ever came out.
Most of the cars were gone. I sat inside ours for a while, smelling the clean air from the cedar. I put my hands on the steering wheel. I wished I could drive. I knew how, but my mother would never let me. Benny drove lawn mowers and tractors, over the fields in summer.
I piled all the cedar branches in my arms. Needles fell on the car carpet, but my mother could worry about that later. I didn’t care. I dumped the branches just inside the door in one heap.
My mother stood placing her gingerbread house on a polished silver platter. We’d draped a card table with green felt. Then she began sticking the cedar boughs around it for a wreath. She draped cedar boughs on the moldings a foot down from the ceiling, on the bathroom mirror, anywhere she thought they would stick. She was right, they did change the apartment. The air felt like the outside. It seemed the ceilings were higher. You could feel it in your lungs. It was clean.
Finally, she finished. The last cedar branch was placed. We both stood back to admire it.
“Well, there. Now we just have to vacuum up these needles and we’re done.”
I started stripping my clothes off. It was four o’clock, there wasn’t even time to take a shower. I pulled on clean knee socks. “This is the one fun thing we can do for Christmas and it’s going to be over in an hour and I’m not sitting here and vacuuming.”
“Okay, don’t. You don’t have to. I’ll do it.” And she dragged the old Electrolux like a dog out from the closet. And then I knew that she’d never get ready. There wasn’t time. Because after that was done and put away, she needed her hour-long regime for dressing.
I yelled so she could hear me over the vacuum cleaner. “I’m going. I’m writing the address down here, so you can come if you want.”
“No, don’t bother. I won’t come. I wouldn’t go in alone. I’d really rather just finish here. To tell the truth, Honey, that’s what’ll make me feel best. Just so I know it’s done. But you go on and have a good time.” She didn’t seem mad.
I walked outside. The clouds were moving fast above me. I jammed my hands in my pockets. I walked down the sidewalk and everything looked closed. You couldn’t see inside the apartments. I thought of the door opening, the noise and color when I first walked in. All of a sudden, I didn’t want to go. I turned towards my friend’s street though, anyway. I’d walk around the block and then see. I walked all the way to the high school. It stood there empty and cool like a castle over the tiered lawns. Two men ran back and forth playing tennis on the green courts. There was no one else around. I was wearing my best jeans, which I’d ironed for this, and high platform shoes and now I wished I had on my sneakers so I could walk over the lawns. For some reason I wanted to put my hand on the pale pink stucco of the school’s walls, as if I could leave a handprint. But walking across the wet lawn would have ruined the suede of my Korkease. And I thought of things like that.
I turned towards home and walked slowly. There was no hurry anymore. The apartments looked like everyone had left for Christmas, as if only people who owned houses stayed. I didn’t want to see anyone. I started to cry, the tears stinging my skin, for no reason. It was pretty outside and calm and I felt glad to be in new clothes.
Finally, the door opened and my mother shrieked. “Oh, Ann. You scared me. I was coming to look for you. How long have you been here?” She wore a coat, opening the door, nothing on her legs. Her hair was still pulled back in the pink rubber band. She was carrying keys.
“Come on, let’s jump in the car and just get an ice cream cone.”
“Now?”
“Mmhmm. I’m just in the mood.”
We turned the heat on and I realized as my mother’s coat fell open that she wasn’t wearing anything. She was planning to have me run in and get her cone, as always. But the Baskin-Robbins was closed, a small crooked sign in the glass door.
“Damn. Damn, I really wanted one after all that work. We should’ve just spent the money and had our steaks. And I want an ice cream cone. Damn.”
My mother bent over the steering wheel and she wouldn’t stop crying. I kept looking out the car windows at the empty street. Then I’d shake her shoulder and say, “Mom, Mom?” but that only made her heave harder.
I took the keys out and walked around to her side of the car. I pushed her over to the passenger door and drove home, dizzy, wobbling some, down the deserted wide streets. My mother was quiet now, her eyes closed.
A long time ago, once, in the cab of Jimmy Measey’s red truck, it was a bright afternoon and the fields were blue with snow. On the highway, Benny perched up on his father’s lap driving. I remember his green and yellow striped shirt. There were times when we were happy. Then, turning onto our road, Jimmy said, “Ann’s turn, Ann, do you know how to drive?”
I said yes, but I was terrified. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know where things were, anything. I knew we would all die, but then someone lifted me up on Jimmy’s lap and I could see: the telephone lines for miles, patches of mud in the field, tall grass poking through, snow sparkling out the windshield all the way to the barn, I was so high up. I turned the wheel with Jimmy’s hands outside my hands and felt the car move on the road, as if we were sliding. I could feel Jimmy’s weight behind me, his hands hovering on either side. They let me steer, swiveling up the road, the great truck rocking with all of us in it, under the power of my hands.
In front of our apartment, a policeman stopped me. I looked up at him as he bent to our window. He was staring at my mother, crumpled against her door. He asked me where we lived. I pointed. He shook his head, Okay, and tapped my shoulder with a piece of paper rolled up. He let us go and drove away slowly, on the empty, holiday street.
I opened the door with my own key. We left the room dark, except for the tree lights. I went over and took a Christmas cookie, tree-shaped, with red and green sprinkles on top and sat on the felt-covered sofa. My mother hung up her coat and got into bed. I sat there and ate my Christmas cookie, slowly, each bough of the Christmas tree first until it was just a blob. When I was done I looked down at my empty palm and licked off the crumbs.
“Was it over?” my mother said. She was propped up in bed, using both pillows.
“What?”
“Your party.”
“I didn’t go.” I hated admitting that. Instantly, I wished I’d lied.
“I know just how you feel. I’m happiest right here in our own cute little place. Just relaxing. It is cute now.” She yawned and stretched. She was still wearing her gray nighttime sweat shirt. All that Christmas Day, she never did get dressed.
6
LAS VEGAS, DISNEYLAND, EGYPT
It felt like two hands of air opening inside my chest when my father lifted me on the bottoms of his feet. He lay on his back, his legs sticking up, supporting my belly, his hands holding my hands. I swam in air and light. Kaboosh was what we called that game, Kaboosh, Kaboosh. I didn’t know whether it was a word in Arabic or something he made up.
I didn’t know anything until he was gone. And then it was like any death: absolute and very slow. My father left while we were still sleeping. He drove away in our brown Valiant, without his vacuum cleaners or vacuum cleaner attachments. He took a new suitcase with new clothes.
The door would have been locked and the air outside must have felt cool. His footsteps would have broken the web of dew on the lawn. The six-fifty train went by every day, setting the bushes and trees trembling in the yard like teacups. Perhaps they surprised him and he looked back at the house, remembering each of our round faces. Rows of old mink sheds sagged in back of the clotheslines, with patched red tented roofs. There may have been sheets, white and fluid, on the line. Everything would have seemed pure and distinct in the waterless, early morning light. He must have rubbed his eyes and then left.
He had to turn at the end of our road, onto the highway, our white house in his rearview mirror shrinking to the size of the building on the back of a penny, then nothing, a spec of dust on the glass. The sound of our car, now his, mixed with the other traffic, which we always heard and would hear, even in sleep.
We woke up late and dizzy the next morning. The sun felt high and generous, soaking the white curtains and softening the corners of the room. Lilacs seemed to beat against the screens.
“Where did he go?” I asked my mother. We were tucking a corner of the white chenille bedspread into the dark wooden frame. Together we bunched the cloth down, her hands pressing over mine.
“He’s gone,” my mother said.
“For how long?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” A string of hummingbirds moved on the lilac bush outside, where someone had tied a red scarf. Flies in slow orbits hit against the screens. My mother started ironing. All her summer clothes that year were seersucker and cotton.
“He’s gone to California to make us money,” she said. “But he’ll be coming back.”
“When?”
For a moment, her mouth wavered and her face began to lift. Her hands stalled on the iron. She picked up a blouse, held it across her shoulders and then took it to the closet. There was a row of empty hangers. Her chin snapped back into a straight line and she began pushing the iron again, over the perforated pink and white fabric.
“I don’t know,” she said.
I sat on the floor, waiting. She ironed carefully, starting every blouse at the collar. When the last one was hung up and buttoned again, I asked her what we were going to do.
She didn’t answer. She turned off the iron and looked out the window, her hand resting on the dresser. “What, Honey?” she asked a moment later.
“I said, what are we going to do today.”
She yawned. “I don’t know. I’m a little tired, how about you?” She reached out her hand and found mine. We stood there a moment and then she sat on the bed. “Come on up, let’s just close our eyes a minute.”
We lay there on our backs. It was where she’d slept with him.
Before we went to sleep, my mother hummed one of my father’s tunes. My father wanted to be a songwriter. That was why he’d gone to California. People told him he was a handsome Arab. He thought he could make money in the movies. As far as I know, songwriting was the only one of his aspirations to remain constant for most of his twenties. Later on, he gave up on music, too.
After my father left, my mother and I slept in the same bed. My mother would slide under the sheet, in her slip that she slept in, and tuck her hands under my arms to get warm. That year, my mother went to bed with me after supper and when I crawled out in the morning, she was still asleep. My grandmother and I tiptoed around the house until noon, when she woke up, and then we were quiet again after four, when my mother took her naps.
The three of us drank large quantities of milk. Our milkman delivered two cold bottles every morning. African violets on the mantelpiece thrived, perhaps because my grandmother and I stopped several times a day to check the moisture of their soil with our fingers. The house seemed to stay effortlessly clean.
And while my mother rest
ed, my grandmother and I stole out of the house on expeditions, to see the maple syrup tapped out of trees in fall, to feed ducks and geese cans of corn at the Wildlife Preservation Center in winter, to search in spring for trilliums and wild violets in the fields. Perhaps my grandmother and I could have lived like that forever, moving quietly, playing, she on top of the kitchen table with her cards, me underneath with my colors; but by summer, my mother regained her strength. We watched it happen. One day she stopped taking naps. The next week she didn’t go to bed with me after supper. And by that time, she was already bored.
She enrolled the two of us in figure skating classes Saturday evenings. She bought us matching short dresses made of stretch fabric and skin-colored tights. The rink seemed silent, the only sound was a humming, like the inside of a refrigerator. The ice was divided into eight rectangular patches and my mother and I shared one.
We concentrated, our necks bent over like horses’, as we followed the lines our blades made. My skates had double runners. Then, at eight o’clock, scratchy music started up on the PA system and we free-skated, wild around the rink.
“This is how you really lose the pounds,” my mother called, slapping her thigh, “skating fast.”
A man did a T-stop in front of her, shaving a comet of ice into the air. They skated off together, while I stood there, wiping the melting ice from my face. That was the first time we saw Ted.
When the music stopped, my mother pulled me over to the barrier, where we ran our skate tips into the soft wood.
“See, when you’re older, you can bring a boy you’re dating here to see you skate. He can watch you and think, hey, she’s not just another pretty girl. She can really do something.” She nodded up to the rows of empty seats. They were maroon velvet, with the plush worn down in the centers. My mother looked at me with a slanted gaze as if, through a crack, she could see what I’d become. I knew what I wanted to be: I wanted to be just like her.
