by Mona Simpson
“I’m calling myself John now,” my father said, glancing over at Uta. Uta nodded, looking down at her purse.
“John,” my mother mulled. “How come?”
My father shrugged. “People recognize it. They know how to spell it.” He laughed. “I’m applying to be a citizen.”
Uta took a small white box from her purse and gave it to my father to give me; it was a gold bracelet, with one charm, a tree with turquoise leaves.
“Well, it’s real, all right,” my mother said, examining it later under the lamp. We stayed at the Disneyland Hotel, my mother and me in one room, them in another. She showed me the tiny stamp of 19K printed on the gold. “It must have been expensive. But it’s gaudy, you know, she’s got money, but no taste. That’s one thing about us, Ann, we have taste. We can go anywhere and they’d think, Hey, what a great-looking mother and daughter. And that’s class.”
For years, I’d watched “The Wonderful World of Disney” on TV. Sometimes in bed, before I went to sleep, I imagined us—my father with more hair than he had now, my mother’s swooped up on top of her head, held with a diamond pin, and me, blond like my mother and prettier than I am—in our old brown car, with rounded fenders, floating down a long canal. A fairy with a wand of flies’ wings perched just at our backs, touching the tops of our heads. I’d feel her fingers on my spine and lean against her knee, but I wouldn’t turn back to look at her, for fear she wouldn’t be there. The brown car drifted slowly and trees above us bent down with the weight of their fruit. When we touched it, it was ours, the way, when you cup your hand outside the window of a moving car, you imagine something solid and then you feel it. We passed animals on the banks of the canal and at one turn, I saw an elephant carrying the Las Vegas circus children dressed in leopard skins and sequins. The lighted castle stood in the distance. The banks of the canal were a simple yellow, the trees green, the sky and water blue. Disneyland looked like the crayoned city I’d drawn on my grandmother’s floor when I was a child and we floated in the Valiant, farther and farther in.
I’d wanted to see Disneyland for so long and now I was there. All day the five of us bought things. My father and my mother kept peering down into my face and saying, “Having fun?” I felt like they could see all the things I’d imagined to myself, the private things I’d pictured with my eyes closed, in the dark. I’d shrug and say, “Yeah,” and look at the granddaughter. I turned out glad she was there. The two of us got to pick out the restaurants we wanted and what we wanted to order in each one. Nobody talked about money. Uta always paid.
They all kept looking at me and asking what I wanted to do next. I shrugged and said, “I don know.” But that made them nervous. My father walked with his hands in his pockets, looking high up, towards the sky. Then he talked to my mother about cutting my hair.
“We’ve thought of it, but I think it’s better long,” she said.
He seemed to agree. “No, she’d have to be thinner if it were short.”
“Sometimes, I think about bangs,” my mother volunteered.
On Saturday, Uta rented a limousine to drive us to a famous restaurant. It was on top of a tall building so we could see lights of the whole city below us. One side was pure black and my father said that was the ocean.
My father spoke French to the waiter—I watched my mother and Uta look at him and sink back in their chairs. There were some things women couldn’t do and those were the things my father was good at. My father ordered for all of us, something I’d never heard of, tournedos.
When Uta went to the ladies’ room, my mother laughed, leaning over so her face came close to my father’s in the reddish light. She picked up the candleholder in her hands and looked up at my father.
“John, I’m trying to see you as a John,” she said.
He laughed, moving the salt shaker. The granddaughter looked at me. “When you go home, we can write letters to each other and be pen pals. Will you write to me?”
As I watched my mother laughing, I wasn’t sure if it was a real laugh, from happiness, or if it was for our TV.
I was full before my tournedos came. But they were steak and delicious. I asked my father if I could wrap them in a napkin and take it back in a doggy bag. He stamped his cigarette out and looked at my mother, smiling. “No, Ann,” he said. “Not here.”
My mother joined in quickly, “Oh, no, Honey, not in a place like this.”
“Is she yours?” a man asked.
My mother answered, “She sure is, she’s my little one.” We stood in a dark hallway. Uta was paying someone to find our coats.
“A very pretty child,” the man said. He was short and bald, fat, in a dark suit.
“Yes, isn’t she? And she’s nice, too. She’s a real nice girl, aren’t you?” My mother stroked my hair.
“No,” I said, looking down.
The fat man was not alone. He lifted a silver stole off a woman’s shoulders and followed her into the restaurant. My mother bent down to me. “Do you know who that was? That was Robert Wise, the producer of Sound of Music. Did you see the way he looked at you? You’re going to make it, kid. I can’t believe it.”
“How do you know it was him?”
“Believe me. I just know.”
In the lobby, my father spoke to the headwaiter. He took a salt shaker from his left pocket and a matching pepper shaker from his right and gave them to me. “A little memento of tonight.”
I said thank you and held them the way he held them, in my coat pockets, and looked up, overly grateful. My father always had nerve.
My mother just smiled grimly and thanked Uta and my father, as we crowded in the backseat of the limousine, my mother’s heel catching on the carpet. We felt cowed by their money, both of us.
I worried about the New Sony. We were leaving tomorrow and we hadn’t done anything. All day, I brought up the subject of televisions, but the only one who answered was the granddaughter, who told me that her favorite program was “Gilligan’s Island” and that we could write to each other what our new favorite programs were in fall when the listings came out.
And it wasn’t only my mother, it was me, too. When I slipped my hand in my father’s, I wasn’t sure why. It seemed easier to have another reason. Otherwise, we felt like fools.
My mother and father and I seemed more like a family that trip than we’d ever been and that was because of Uta, because she thought of things. She took pictures of me with my dad. My mother and father each went along with it, but they didn’t seem to like her ideas. They did things because they had to.
It was Uta’s idea that my father and I should meet before dinner the last night, so we’d have a chance to be alone. My mother shrugged as Uta suggested it, as if to say, what for, but she didn’t have the nerve to do anything. In our room, before I was supposed to go down, she brushed my hair out across my back.
I was nervous. I wasn’t used to being alone with my father. I didn’t know what to say to him.
“I’ll bet they’ve got one right here,” my mother said. “In Disneyland.” We both knew what she was talking about.
“I haven’t seen any in the stores.”
“I think I saw one,” she said, winking. “A white one.”
“Where?” I’d been looking all week. It was the only thing I’d known to do.
“In one of those little shops downstairs.”
“Which one?”
“I’m not sure, exactly. But I saw it.”
“What should I do?” I knew I had to learn everything.
My mother shrugged. It seemed easy for her. “Tell him you’re saving for it. He’ll probably just buy it for you. Suck in your cheeks,” she said, brushing blush on my face. She was having fun.
I didn’t want to leave the room. I wanted to close my eyes and keep feeling the spokes of the hairbrush on my back. My mother gave me a short push out the door. I tried to remember everything.
I saw my father’s back first. He was standing by the candy counter in the hotel d
rugstore. Every time I saw him I went through a gradual series of adjustments, reconciling the picture I held in my imagination to his appearance, as I recognized him. He was almost bald now. He was heavier than he had once been. His chin still shot out, but it no longer made him look eager. He seemed mildly dissatisfied, bored. His lower lip seemed to hang a fraction too far out, it didn’t match his upper lip. He was buying a roll of Life Savers, peeling the wrapping paper off one end. He peeled it in a string.
Then he saw me and smiled. “Would you like anything?” he asked, tilting his head to indicate the rows of candy on the counter.
I thought for one wild moment. I could abandon the plan and say yes. Yes I want a candy bar. Two candy bars. He’d buy me two of the best candy bars there and I could stand and eat them sloppily, all the while gazing up at him. If I smiled, he would smile. He would bend down and dab the chocolate from my mouth with a handkerchief moist with his own saliva.
But I knew I’d remember. And then I would hate my best memory because it would prove that my father could fake love or that love could end, or, worst of all, that love could exist weakly, without the power to dominate a life, his life. And I couldn’t believe he’d write me letters, I just couldn’t believe it. I thought of my grandmother, years and years, walking out to get the mail.
“No,” I said, “I’m saving up my money.”
“What?” My father smiled down. He was still unraveling the paper from his Life Savers. He hadn’t heard me. I had another chance.
“I’m saving my money for a new Sony portable color television,” I blurted.
He had been looking at me and he stopped. He didn’t move but he lifted his eyes up to something over my shoulder. Then he glanced at his watch and scanned the drugstore.
“Oh,” he said.
I think at that moment he relinquished me to my mother. He was humming “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”; he’d been humming all weekend—other people’s songs.
On the way home, neither of us mentioned it.
“Look at the mountains,” I said.
“Yeah, mmhmm.” My mother wouldn’t even move her head.
It’s funny how we were. The bracelet my father and Uta gave me turned out to be worth money, more than what the televisions cost when they came out a year later. It would have taken a miracle to convince us.
When the plane landed, we didn’t even call Ted. We took a taxi home, my mother clicking her nails against the window. When we were inside, she collapsed on the blue-green couch and looked around disapprovingly. Our suitcases lay scattered on the floor.
“You know what he told me when we left? He said after all he did you didn’t even say thank you. He said he’d open doors and you’d just walk through, he’d offer to buy you candy and you just said no. Not even no thank you. Just no. I’ve taught you how to act and what do you do there? Nothing.”
The days with my father flashed like cards. I hadn’t said no-thank-you.
“And here you use big words all the time and complex sentences. You should hear yourself joking around with Ted. You didn’t say ONE BIG WORD the whole time we were there. I couldn’t even stand listening to you. Un-huh. Yeah-uh. I don know. You didn’t say one smart thing in front of him. Let me tell you, Kid, you sounded dumb.”
“My name is Ann,” I said.
She turned over and sighed. It sounded like air coming out of a balloon. “Sure, Ann. Call yourself whatever you want, I don’t care. Go out and play. Go out and play with your kids.”
I opened the refrigerator door and looked. Ted had made a châteaubriand by himself and sliced it. He’d stacked the rectangles neatly on a plate. Behind me, my mother turned over and knocked the cushions onto the floor. Her shoes dropped, one at a time.
“And you didn’t even smile. Here, you’re sharp and funny. There you slumped and looked down. And you talk about getting on television. You really just looked like any other kid around here. Well, fine. It’s a good thing we’re back because I can see now that this is just where you belong. Here with all the mill workers’ kids. Well, good.”
I walked outside without a jacket, looking for one of my friends. On Carriage Court, kids didn’t knock on each other’s doors. We just went outside and waited. But no one was there. It was a gray, cold day and it looked like it might rain. I was walking when a mother, from down the street, honked. She rolled down her window and asked if I wanted a ride. I got in the station wagon though I didn’t know where I was going. She didn’t even ask me. She just dropped me off at the skating rink. By that time it had started raining. The guard nodded as I walked in and from the lobby I saw Ted on the ice. Just then, I realized it was a workday, a schoolday, Monday. That was why none of the kids came outside. Ted was giving a lesson, bending down and holding a woman’s ankle, pointing her foot into a figure eight.
I walked to his office and took the key for the rental room, from under a certain bench. The rental room was small and covered with cubbyholes, with the sizes of skates painted in yellow. I took a pair of knicked, worn gray fives, with the brown rental stripe in back. When I’d skated, I had my own good skates. In these, the ankles were broken down.
I put them on and ran on points, wobbling because of the skates. Then I stepped onto the ice and skated; I crashed into Ted and held his sweater. He put a hand over my head and told the student something I didn’t hear. When I pulled myself off, the student was gone. I opened my eyes and looked up at Ted; it was different than with my father. I couldn’t bury my head in Ted’s sweater and forget. Here, I knew exactly where I was. Ted was still Ted, standing in front of me. I didn’t expect him to understand.
“You’re back,” he said. That was all. Ted would never know, unless I could find the words to explain myself, one by one. It seemed too hard.
I looked across the empty rink. The ice was gray blue, the hockey lines pale underneath like bruises. My father was gone for good and Ted was just Ted, another man in the world who had nothing to do with me.
“Would you like me to teach you to do loops?” he asked. His teeth were grinding, you could hear that, it was so quiet on the ice.
I couldn’t say no because of the way he looked, standing there with his hands in his sweater pockets. He started skating in tight, precise loops. I hadn’t figure skated for years and my ankles felt shaky. I was tired. I didn’t have the concentration or drive I’d had before; then I’d been trying to improve. Now, the quick, beautiful loops seemed pointless in the empty arena. I glanced up at the stands around us. But Ted’s hand was tight around mine and I began to follow his lines on the ice. I didn’t know. I thought maybe I could learn.
Ted had an office, deep in the arena, underneath the rink, in a basement hall with no windows. When my mother and I had first met him, his office was like a home. He had an oak wardrobe with clothes, mostly sweaters, all warm things, and a stereo with his favorite records. In the years since he married my mother, those records ended up warped and misplaced, and the office wasn’t neat and tended the way it had been. When we left and put the house up for sale, he began to spend all his time there again, sleeping on the cot against the far wall.
I guess that time in Disneyland was the last time I saw my father. I’m not sure. He didn’t die or anything. For a long time, we thought we would see him. There wasn’t a day. We just never heard from him again. I still wouldn’t be surprised if he found us.
7
A SHOPPING CENTER SOMEWHERE IN THE VALLEY
We used to drive around at night, we didn’t have anything else to do. We didn’t like to be in our apartment. There weren’t places we could sit and do things. If I read my homework on the bed, there wasn’t anywhere for my mother to go. The sofa in the living room was old and uncomfortable. I didn’t like both of us to be on the bed. So we drove around in the dark. We drove down Sunset and slowly through the quiet northern streets in Beverly Hills. Sometimes we parked and beamed the headlights over one lawn. Houses in Beverly Hills still amazed us.
After we
sat for a while, peering out trying to see movement inside the frames of fuzzy, lighted windows far back on a lawn, my mother would sigh and turn on the ignition. “Someday,” she’d say.
“Yeah. Right.”
“I believe it. We’ll have a house. And clothes. You’ll have everything a teenage girl could want, Puss.” She’d reach over and slap my thigh. I’d move closer to the door, stiffening. “I just have to meet the man and catch him. Should we stop and get an ice cream quick before bed, for a little energy? Maybe it’ll even get us up and working. That little sugar in our blood.”
One night, we drove to Will Wright’s, because my mother was dressed up. It was our favorite ice cream place. You could sit down in it. It was overpriced and old-fashioned, the garden circled with Christmas tree lights all year long. We sat outside in the courtyard at a small, wobbly table; I stuck a wad of gum under the metal base to even it. The round pink top was marble and the chair backs were lacy, heart-shaped wrought iron.
“You know, it’s really something, when you think of it. Weather like this in March.” That was one of the public things my mother said. When we were out, she only said things that could be overheard.
“Yeah, so.”
She gave me a reproaching, corrective smile. “It’s nice.” She forced a laugh. “In Wisconsin now, you’d be freezing cold. You’d be in your bunnyfur coat.”
Ice cream was my mother’s favorite food, and in it she loved contrasts. Icy vanilla with scalding hot, hot fudge. Will Wright’s served tiny sundaes: little silver dishes with a scoop of exquisite ice cream, flecked with black shavings of vanilla bean. The scoop was the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Two separate porcelain pitchers came with it: one of whole almonds, the other of hot fudge, which my mother spooned on, a bite at a time, to keep the maximum hot-cold contrast.
