by Mona Simpson
A tall man swaggered over to our table and, yanking a chair with him, turned it backwards and sat on it like a horse.
“Howdy, ladies,” he said, extending his hand. “I was wondering if I could, uh, borrow a match.”
“Honey, do you have a match?” If I had had a match, my mother would have killed me.
“Honey, I asked you a question.”
“You know I don’t.”
She smiled at the man. “I’m terribly sorry. I’m afraid neither of us smoke.” She rummaged in her handbag. “I sometimes carry them, for candles, but I don’t seem to have any just now.”
The man stayed. He didn’t ask other people around us for matches and he didn’t go back to his table in the corner.
“So, my name’s Lonnie,” he said. “Lonnie Tishman.”
My mother stepped on my foot, hard, under the table.
“I’m Adele and this is my daughter, Ann.”
“Your daughter? You two look just like sisters.”
“Oh, no.”
“You sure do. I said to my friend over there, I’ll ask those two gals. They look like they’d be smokers.”
“I’m twelve years old,” I said. My mother kicked me, then pressed her shoe over my foot again, driving in the heel.
My mother and Lonnie Tishman were both moving. He stood up and turned his chair around and sat on it the regular way, then he crossed one leg over the other, like a woman’s. He seemed rubbery, all joints. His top leg bounced off the other knee. His fingers drummed on the marble tabletop. My mother seemed to be in slow motion, her spoon abandoned on the saucer, her ice cream melting in a puddle, no hot-cold contrast anymore. She gradually realigned herself so everything, her legs, her shoulders, her hands, faced him.
I was the only one still. I’d learned when I was young to be very still and not move when I wanted something. I wanted Lonnie Tishman to leave. My knees pressed into each other. Later, I found tender bruises. But he stayed, breathing loudly. Lonnie was a mouth breather.
“So how are you gals tonight?”
“We’re great, aren’t we, Annie? We were just saying how we love this weather. We’re new to LA and we really love it.”
“Just got here? Where’re you from?”
“We’re out of Bay City, Wisconsin.”
Lonnie slapped his top knee, setting both legs jiggling.
“Golly. Wisconsin.”
My mother looked down at the table and lifted the tips of her fingers.
“So, what are you two gals doing out here?”
“Well, I teach. I’m a speech therapist in the LA Public School System.” There was something tiny about her pride. It killed me, I loved her. “And she’s an actress,” she said.
I stared down at my ice cream as if eating required all my concentration. They both looked at me hard, as if they were tracing me, drawing outlines on the sky.
Lonnie whistled through his teeth. “She’s an actress.” His chin fell down and the way his face turned, I could see, in his cheekbones, he was handsome.
“Mmhmm.” It sounded like my mother could say more, but wouldn’t. It was her imitation of modesty. Of course, there was nothing more to tell. I wasn’t an actress. I only wanted to be.
“Whewee, a kid actress, huh? I knew a guy whose daughter was on TV. Little blond kid with the braids down the back. What was that show called. Her name’s Linda, I think, or Lisa. Lisa Tannenbaum.”
“Do you know her, Honey?”
That was harsh, like a twig snapped at my face. There wasn’t any possible way I could have known Lisa Tannenbaum. “No,” I said.
“Where do you gals live?” Lonnie pushed his chin close to my mother. He had short bristles on his face, which made me think of an electric field, things crackling, lightning on dry ground. I wished my mother would feel it, too, and pull away. It was something about men. When I was a child, I went to my cousin’s house. I locked myself in the bathroom and looked at things. It was all different from ours. I felt something like electricity when I put their towels to my face. I thought it came from men, the smell of men. I imagined it had something to do with shaving.
“In Beverly Hills,” my mother said quietly, dropping the words.
“Well, hey, what do you say, why don’t we get together sometime.”
“Sure,” my mother said.
“Why don’t you give me your phone number and I’ll call you and we’ll hook up?”
“We’re 273-7672.”
Lonnie took a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote our phone number on his wrist. He stood up, shoved the chair in towards the table, pulling the back to his leg. “Well, I’ll be a-seeing ya,” he said.
My mother put her hand over the bill. “Should we get going?” I’d finished my ice cream; my mother no longer seemed interested in hers. She quickly looked over her shoulder to see he was gone and then bent towards me, her face greedy with excitement.
“You know who that was, don’t you?” There was something hard and individual about her face; her beauty was her beauty, her luck was her luck.
“No.” I ground a stone under my shoe.
“Didn’t you hear him say his name? That was Tishman: Lonnie Tishman. Haven’t you seen those signs on Wilshire where they’re building? That’s all Tishman. They’re everything. All the high rises. Those condominiums in Century City where we drove by, don’t you remember? I said the top ones would be gorgeous. Who knows, I’ll bet he’ll give us one of them. He’s all over. Believe me. Ev-ery-where.” There was something about the way she said it. I can’t explain.
I knew I was supposed to be glad and excited; if I were excited, it would be like praise. She would shake her hair and bask. But I didn’t believe her. He didn’t look rich. Something about the way he rubbed his hands on his pants when he stood up.
“You know what this all means, don’t you?”
“No.”
My mother sighed, dragging her spoon in her coffee. “Boy, can you be dumb sometimes.”
I was quiet, knowing I could be. I looked up at the sky and understood, without exactly thinking, that it was late on a school night again, eleven or twelve o’clock, and that I hadn’t done my homework and I wouldn’t do it. That tomorrow would be like other days, the hall of my school with old wooden doors, closing and closing, me coming up the stairs, alone and late. The sky was a dark blue, through the branches of the trees. The stars seemed very dim.
“You’re going to make it, kiddo. Why do you think he came up to us?” My mother’s voice curved; it was like a hook. She was scolding to get me back.
“He liked you, I suppose.” I hated saying that. Her face lit up from her eyes.
“You think so?”
“I don know.”
“Did you really think he liked me? Tell me, Ann.”
I guess.
“Well, he’s going to put you on television.” My mother clapped. From a lifetime of working with children, all my mother’s emotions expressed themselves in claps.
“He’s not an agent.” I said that, but I could feel the beginning of something in her insistent, lilting voice. She worked with that voice, as hard as if she were building something both of us could see. Sometimes, I felt my mother climbing up a long, long series of stairs, above what seemed true—my school, the hum of electric clocks behind closed wooden doors, my steps, late, the messy locker, my books, heavy and unlooked at, and I followed her to up to the clear air. At the top, there was a sky, but when she pushed at it, it broke like so many sheets of colored tissue paper. She began to climb to the other side. I stood still below, next to her legs, but I could see air, feel the wind, from the other side.
“Oh, come on. Didn’t you hear the way he said, he has a friend whose daughter is on TV? What do you think that meant? He was just testing you. That was his way of asking, do you really, really want it? You know, a lot of kids say they want to be on television, sure, but then when it comes right down to it, they don’t have the commitment. Not really. We’re different. We re
ally do have it. This man’s not the agent, but I’ll bet his friend is, the one he was sitting with. I’ll bet he’s the agent and this Tishman’s the producer. We’ll just have to wait and see, but he has our number. I’ll bet you land a TV show. And now it’s all in the offing.”
“When?”
I pulled closer to her and waited. She didn’t have to build anymore or fight: we were there. Now, she could be slow. I needed every word. I moved close and watched her face, attentive, like a person holding a bowl, trying to catch single drops of rain.
She tilted her head for a moment, thinking. Her cheekbones seemed high, she looked thin, as if the bones in her face were very frail. When I was little, I’d once held a velvet-lined box with a glass cover, a perfect bird skeleton laid out inside. My grandmother had lifted the lid with her fingernail.
“I would say soon. Very soon.”
It was all different now, where we were. I didn’t snap or mope or sulk. I sat at the edge of my chair, leaning across the table to be near her. She was distracted, aloof—sure of me.
The night had the same blue perfect air as the inside of a bubble. I felt elated to touch the marble of the table under my hand. I slept that night easily, thoroughly pleased, the knowledge dissolving in me.
Lonnie Tishman called the next day. I answered the phone. I recognized his voice and for a moment I believed it was the call that would deliver me. A sound stage. Cameras. A voice would say, You have been chosen. You. But he just asked, “Your mom around?”
Then the usual came back. Brown doubts and suspicion. The wooden backs of doors.
“It’s for you.” I shoved the receiver away.
My mother, three feet to the left on the carpet, stood still in her tracks for a full minute. Then she walked the four steps to the night table, breathed in and picked up the phone. The mattress jiggled as she squirmed. She changed her legs, from the left to the right, on top. She laughed, but I could hear she was puzzled. She was trying, with her pauses and tones, to weld whatever he was saying into the shape of a normal date.
“Well, okay, I suppose. But actually, I don’t cook very well.” With one hand, she redistributed bobby pins in her hair. Her mouth was working. “Oh. Oh. Well, really, it’s our kitchen. To tell the truth, I think I’d just as soon go out.” This—a more aggressive statement than she liked to make to a man, especially at the beginning—was followed by an avalanche of helpless giggles. “Okay,” she said, finally, bouncing her shoe off her toe. “We can do that.”
She stood and clapped after she hung up the phone. “What do you know, Ann! We’ve got a date this Sunday night.”
I stayed on the bed, doing nothing.
“Hey, Little Miss, you better paste a smile on that face, because this could just be your big break.”
“Oh yeah. How’s your date going to be my big break?”
She stuttered a second. Even speech therapists stutter. “He probably wants to check me out first and see if I’ll really let you do all this. You know, a lot of mothers wouldn’t cart their kids around to rehearsals and try outs and to the studios. But I will. I really will. And that’s probably what he wants to know.”
We both got haircuts. My mother only let me get a trim, half an inch of split ends, so I was finished a long time before she was. I sat under the turned-off dryer and leafed through old movie magazines. I studied the dotted pictures of dark men. I thought it was possible I’d see a picture of my father.
“So this man wants to hide it,” my mother said, to the woman teasing her hair. At the same time, she watched her curls fall around her face in the mirror. She tilted her head to the left. My mother held her face like a jewel, always moving a little to glance off another facet of light. “He doesn’t want me to know.”
“Could be,” the hairdresser said. “There’s supposed to be one Tishman brother left and they say he’s a little nuts.”
“This is the man. I know it.”
By the time we left, it was raining outside. My mother took my magazine and tented it over her head as we ran to the car.
“These people play down their money. Because they want you to like them for them. Lots of people are probably after him for his money. Sure. And this is his way of testing us.” She nodded, preoccupied, as she warmed up the car. “Mmhmm. See, at first, I was upset, because he didn’t want to go out to eat, and then when I kind of suggested it, you know, he wanted this Love’s Bar-b-que, a really cheap place. No atmosphere or anything. Here, I thought, well, with all his money, he can take me somewhere a little better. But I can see now that he wants to find out if we really like him for him.”
Again, the car screeched going down into the garage. “After all, we met him in the Beverly Hills Will Wright’s. And anybody in there is somebody.”
“What about us?” I said.
She shrugged. “You’re right.”
Sunday was the date. It was all we did. We woke up early, at six, when the alarm clock rang, for once. We cleaned, then shopped. We bought candy to put out in a bowl and things he could drink if he wanted to. In the afternoon, I sat on the bed, watching my mother dress. She’d already taken her bath. She moved around the small floor space in her bra and pantyhose, running from the closet back to the bathroom mirror.
I picked up a book to read, but every two minutes she interrupted, and I was glad to quit again. This was fun.
“Ann-honey, tell me something. Which way, up or down, what do you think? The hair, come on, concentrate a second. Down? Are you sure? Why?”
“Makes your neck look longer.”
“It does, good. Are you sure?”
It occurred to me that my mother had never been alone. At home, she’d had Lolly, probably even before I was born. Lolly had always been there, bigger, quiet, sitting on the edge of some bed, watching my mother become shinier and shinier, enclosing more and more light in her body on a dull, late Saturday afternoon, getting ready to give herself, brilliant, to one man. For the first time ever, I felt sorry for Lolly. I remembered her scratchy plaid Bermuda shorts, her head bent, looking down at her big hands. At least I was younger. I could still be pretty myself someday.
I was asleep when they came home that night, but I heard the key work in the door and Lonnie’s loud, raucous voice and her hushing him. And then I heard her giggles. That was the worst thing. I was awake then and I waited for it to stop. I wanted him to leave, so it would be quiet again. But he didn’t. He never did. For the first time in that apartment, my mother didn’t sleep with me in the bed. They opened the sofa; I heard the metal mattress frame scraping the floor.
“Shhh, you’ll wake her.”
“I forget you’ve got a child in here.”
We’d never opened the sofa bed before. It must have been a dusty mess. The dark green vinyl sofa was a problem. At Christmas, we’d tried to drape it with a bolt of green felt, but it had looked wrong and you couldn’t sit on it. We’d finally settled for cleaning it and draping a red mohair afghan over the back.
My mother stood a foot away from me, lifting sheets out of the closet. I held absolutely still. As a child, I’d dreamed of burglars coming in at night from the train. In the dream, I’d have to be still. Later, the burglar lined us up in the cellar. He was stealing our television and my mother blamed it on me. The burglar pointed a rifle at us and Benny saved everything by putting his finger in the hole at the end of the gun.
They must have been making the bed. It sounded like they dropped twenty shoes and tripped over each other each time. It seemed it would never be quiet.
“Shhh,” my mother said and then giggled.
“Hell, I thought you said she was asleep.”
“Well, she is, but she’s a light sleeper.”
Another shoe dropped. For what seemed like hours, layers and layers of time, I thought I heard something; the sheets moving, the metal of the bed. The sound of his mouth-breathing changed the whole air. I didn’t want to close my eyes.
But I must have finally fallen asleep in the mor
ning, because I missed the alarm. I put my hand over the buzzing clock, to stop the noise, but I didn’t reset it. My mother woke up on her own and came and sat next to me on the bed. She moved her hand on the blanket, over my back.
“Get up, Honey. It’s time to get ready for school. Upseedaisey. Really, Honey. It’s time now.”
“Is he still here?”
“He’s sleeping.”
I pulled the covers and bedspread around me, and walked into the closet. I put my jeans and T-shirt on there. My mother stepped in and grabbed my arm. There wasn’t room for two. Our closet was small and full, with clothes on hangers and linens on the shelves.
“Ann, I didn’t sleep with him,” she whispered. “I mean, I slept with him, but I didn’t. He didn’t touch me, we just slept. I swear to God, Ann, that’s all we did.” She lifted her palm up like a child, scout’s honor.
“I don’t care what you did.” I walked around him to the bathroom. There was almost nowhere to walk. Opened up, the sofa bed took the whole room.
My mother followed me to the sink. “Well, I care. And I didn’t.”
We were alone in the apartment, making my bed. My mother shook a pillow down into the pillowcase. We’d driven to a laundromat in Pacific Palisades. Of course, there were closer laundromats, but my mother had found this one and it was clean and there was a health food snack bar next door. The main thing was my mother didn’t want to be seen in a laundromat. In Pacific Palisades, it was okay. We didn’t know anybody there. And now that I had friends at school, I felt the same way. I didn’t want them to see me doing wash. When we finished my bed, my mother opened the sofa and put sheets on. I didn’t help her with that and she didn’t ask me.
“The tingling is over. What can I say? That real excitement, the fantasizing—I just don’t feel it anymore. So, let’s just hope some money comes in on one of his deals so we get a little something. And soon.”
Lonnie slept here every night now. We no longer pretended Lonnie was an agent or a producer. Now, it was supposed to be enough that he might have money and give us some, to help us out. And it was enough. We adjusted.
