by Mona Simpson
I decided I could go to Nibbler’s. I had money, I had time. I could eat breakfast and then go to school. But my mother and the apartment had something on their side, a card to play against the bright, moving air: night. I had nowhere to go.
I kept walking. The air was cool on my skin, a leaf dropped on me—it tingled, the serrated sharpness of its edge like a scratch, then softness, a belly. I turned around. I kept expecting someone to stop me. But no one did and so I kept walking, now afraid to look back at the apartment.
Then I came to the street Nibbler’s was on; it seemed large, a decision. I turned. Now if my mother or Lonnie left the apartment, I would be out of sight, gone. I was halfway there when I heard a car behind me that sounded like my mother’s. I didn’t have the nerve to turn around, because it seemed like something I’d made up, but I bit my lip and stood still. The tires sounded like ours. Then a Mustang pulled in front of me, forest green. My heart fell several inches lower.
I started walking again. I could hardly believe this was me. The noise of Wilshire Boulevard came closer. The day seemed to start in many places, like gears catching and moving, a huge machine. Beverly Hills was a city all of a sudden and I had six dollars and some change. I walked past the glass reflecting door of Nibbler’s and stopped at Wilshire Boulevard in front of a purse shop. Then, somewhere behind me a car skidded and I heard heels and my mother was there, grabbing my arm, her fingernails biting my skin.
“Annie, Honey.” She hugged me, her rib cage heaving, I felt her breasts move through her blouse. I just stood there and didn’t say anything and then it was back to normal. “Let’s go and park the car right and we’ll have some breakfast at Nibbler’s. He’s gone, Honey. He’s all packed. I told him he had to get out and he’s gone. So it’s just us again, thank God. I told him when he yelled at you like that, that was the end. No one, not anyone, can get between us.” My mother’s face seemed shallow and concave, like the inside of a pan. “I’m hungry,” I said. I started walking fast. Now I was thinking of time again, of not being late for school.
“Well, okay, wait a minute.” She grabbed my arm. “We have to go a little slower. It’s these damn heels.” She lifted one foot and pushed something with her hand.
I felt the money in my pockets, the soft paper of the dollars. The buildings were just buildings again, what they seemed, familiar. The city looked beautiful and strong now, bright and silver, like a perfect train, drizzling light off its wheels as it moved. We could hear the fountain splashing behind our backs.
Lonnie was gone and we ate a big breakfast and I still had my money.
She paid.
8
A DOCTOR’S APARTMENT
The cake was my idea. Daniel Swan and I were both bad students, underachievers, according to our mothers. Neither of us did any homework. We were weeks late handing in our maps of Johnny Tremain’s Boston. We made the cake with mixes, cut it in the shape of Boston and drew in the streets with a fluted frosting tin. For the first time I could remember, I got an A on something. The class laughed and the teacher left the room and came back with a serrated knife and brown paper towels from the bathroom. She cut the cake in little squares and gave them to the first person in each row to pass back.
They were good. Sweet and airy. That’s the thing about mixes; they are good the first day. After that they get hard.
From then on, Daniel Swan and I baked cakes for all our high school projects. We stopped using mixes. We tried out different recipes and our cakes improved. I kept a notebook and wrote to my grandmother to ask why things turned out the way they did, to learn about icing.
There was an annual high school bake sale and everyone was supposed to bring something. So I was at Daniel’s house, high in Benedict Canyon, making the Milky Way galaxy, all the planets and planet rings and moons in round cake tins. It was a big project. We mixed a different kind of batter for each planet and they’d all have to be frosted. My mother had bought us the ingredients. She’d taken us to the store the night before. Daniel had raised his eyebrows when the checker totaled the bill.
“That’s pretty high. You shouldn’t have to do all that, Mrs. August. I can ask the Witch.”
“Oh, no, don’t be silly, it’s your kitchen.”
My mother was serious about the cake. Except for the one old woman at the Lasky House and Julie, the real estate agent, my mother didn’t have any friends. It seemed easier for me to meet people. I had school. She was hoping for a divorced father. Or a widower, better still. Maybe one where the wife ran away. For good, of course. She didn’t know, but she’d already planned what she was wearing. She had a new dress, yellow, with her ivory jewelry and black pumps. She was counting on the auction. And she felt glad I was up at the Swans’ baking cakes. “See and this way, we’ll at least know the Swans,” she’d said.
“I know other people, too.”
“Well, I hope,” she’d laughed. “And I hope they have fathers. Single.”
We slid three round cakes in the oven. I mixed batter for a yellow cake while Daniel melted unsweetened chocolate. There were two ovens, one regular and one microwave, built in. Whatever seemed new and expensive and could be built in, the San Ysidro house had. When I looked at the long row of ingredients, the colored boxes and bags and jars, I felt bad my mother had spent so much money.
“So maybe we can all go together, your family and my family.”
“You want to go with the twins and Rod, you go ahead. They’re terrible. They’re uncivilized.”
“And your mom and dad.”
“They won’t go. Maybe the Witch, but she’s probably got something for work. And the Failure’ll be in Mexico.”
“When’s he coming home?”
“Depends on the deal. But probably the end of the month. No. Definitely the end of the month. Because to come home sooner than the end of the month, something would have to go right. And that’s impossible.”
I sifted. It felt quiet in the house, we were almost alone. The twins were at Scouts and Rod was visiting his best friend, Harold.
But from the room off the kitchen, a wedge of bluish light came from the TV and we heard the steam of Darcy’s ironing. Riley sat at the low kitchen table, the children’s table, doing his homework. His glasses dropped to the bottom of his nose and he sometimes looked at me from over them. At the same time his shoulders shrank down and he sank in the chair under the table, his black high tops sticking out the other side.
“Riley.” Darcy pulled him up by the collar. “Get to work now.” Riley was Darcy’s son and she was harder on him than she was on the Swans. “You children makin another cake?”
It was hard not to smile at Riley. There was something about his face. When you looked at him, you felt like you knew what he was feeling. He was already rich from commercials; the Witch’s advertising agency had started him when he was three years old and now he got parts on his own. But Darcy cared about school, too, even though he didn’t. We all understood why. He’d have plenty of money. Darcy drove all the Swans and Riley to El Rodeo and the high school in the station wagon every morning.
The house seemed empty while we worked, but it was a house that always felt empty. Dull white ceramic candlesticks with hinged doves stood on the windowsills. Frank Swan was a land developer in Mexico. He took trips down there two months of the year, but nothing had come of them yet, nothing worked. “He doesn’t make any money,” Daniel simply said. “The Witch makes all the money and the way they spend it, even that’s not enough.” He called his mother the Witch to her face, but he never would have called his father the Failure.
We both looked around the house while we mixed, grateful and helpless. “It’s nice that your kitchen is so good,” I said.
“We may as well use it while we have it.”
Daniel said the Swans might lease the San Ysidro house and move to another, rented, place, if the Failure’s deal didn’t come through. They’d lived in a lot of houses before, all rented. This one they had built. I neve
r could talk about our money problems, even though I worried all the time. But Daniel had seen our apartment. It seemed different for us. It was obvious. You could see what we didn’t have.
“Here,” he said, sweeping the walnuts into a blender. And we watched the dust coming up, whirling against the glass.
When we set the last cakes in the oven, Daniel asked Darcy to watch them for us and we climbed the back steps to Daniel’s room. The children’s hallway was narrow, littered with socks and T-shirts and baseball cards. Another stairway led to the parents’ room. They never came to this part of the house. Paper blinds moved a little from the open window. Outside stood a pool house that was supposed to be for the kids, but so far, it had only one big bean bag chair. Nothing in the San Ysidro house was done yet.
“Last year, somebody paid two hundred dollars for a stupid model of the school. And they didn’t even frost the roof, they used licorice.”
“Not that we’d get to keep the money.”
“No way.”
A radio snapped on outside to “Jeremiah was a bullfrog.” Home again, the twins splashed in the water. I never got to listen to rock stations and we didn’t have a stereo, so I tried to remember what I could. I admired people who knew about songs. It was like dancing, one of those things like being rich or smart in school or good-looking. I always tried to remember and write the names down when I got home. I kept secret notebooks, neat charts, Group, Song, Album, Refrain. I studied these like I never studied school. It seemed people were born with it, you got it like long legs or an older brother.
“Why, what would you buy? More shoes?” Daniel reached over and touched the platform of my Korkease.
I looked down at my feet. I was wearing good socks and shoes, they looked normal, nothing to be ashamed of. I wasn’t the least bit insecure about those shoes because they weren’t mine. I’d stolen them a week ago from a girl’s open locker. I figured I could get away with it because every girl at school wore these same shoes. I had another pair, older and beaten up, with platforms not as high. The shoes cost sixty dollars.
My mother noticed when I had new things but she never asked about them. “They give you that height you need in the thigh,” she’d said.
I wore them every day. They seemed like mine now.
“You mean, if they gave us two hundred dollars? I don’t know. I guess I’d give it to my mother.”
I reached down on the floor and picked up a card of Uranus. Daniel had cards of the planets and constellations. He went with other guys to Mount Pinos every weekend. One of the fathers drove. There was a telescope at the top. I thought skies weren’t much to look at, in Los Angeles. I would have liked to see stars.
Then Daniel stretched a rubber band between his hands and stared at it. He sat next to me on the bed. “So when are we going to?”
I knew what he meant. His mouth went a certain way.
“What?” I was a girl.
“You don’t know?” He looked at me skeptically, but I wasn’t scared. I said what I was supposed to say and anyway, sometimes being caught lying isn’t as bad as being caught with the truth. “I can’t believe you. You’re so naive. Don’t you know where babies come from?” Daniel made fake kissing noises.
“Kissing, you mean.” I looked down at my feet. My feet looked irreproachable. Packaged. “I think we’re too young. I’m not going to do it until college.”
“What about more than kissing? When are you going to do that?”
“When I’m thirty.”
Daniel snapped the rubber band across the room. “You’re hopeless.” He picked up his jacket from the floor and took out one Kraft caramel.
“Can I have one?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Ask nicely.”
“Can I please have one.”
He tossed it to me.
We heard Darcy downstairs, opening the oven door and shutting it again. A breeze came from Daniel’s window and lifted a paper airplane from his desk to the carpet. There was a sugary smell of caramel on both our breaths.
Daniel stuck out his arm in front of me. “Here, rub my arm.”
We scratched the hard tops of each other’s arms, from our elbows down to our hands. Another person’s fingers feel different on your arm. There seemed to be sparks, tracing down my skin and lasting about as long as something you write with a sparkler holds in the sky. Then Daniel took my leg and pushed my sock down to my ankle, my shoe in his lap. They were precise fine sensations.
When Darcy called us, we jumped and ran. She and Riley were standing in front of the microwave and we stood, too, looking in the glass window watching the pale belly of our cake rise.
The Witch bounded in, calling, “I’m ho-ome,” carrying two grocery bags like any mother. Darcy hurried over to help. “Oh, thank you, Darcy, I’m so tired. Hello, Ann, how are you? I bought dates.”
The twins ran in from outside and fought for their mother’s arms.
“Let’s go.” I liked the noise and disorganization of a family, but Daniel wanted to be alone. I followed him to the living room. The living room seemed to be why they’d built the San Ysidro house. The kids’ bedrooms were tiny like closets, Darcy and Riley’s room was normal, even the upstairs master bedroom was just nice. The living room looked like a ballroom; two stories high, and banked on both sides with tall windows. A fireplace grew out of the stucco. The floor was red clay, Mexican tiles.
There was absolutely no furniture unless you call a grand piano furniture. There were niches on the side walls to sit in, but the cushions were put away in a closet.
It was a house for crowds. The Witch and Frank had given a party that winter, a benefit for musicians who’d written a musical called Year of the Mushroom. The living room had been lit with candles, torches lined the drive and everyone sat on the smooth floor, listening to the kids in tie-dyed clothes pound the grand piano and shake their heads and sing.
“It’s going to be the next Hair,” my mother whispered.
They planned to perform around the country in mushroom shaped tents, with seating for five hundred. My mother wrote out a check. I tried to stop her but she was excited. It scared me a little, her attraction to them. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be like that.
Daniel and I sat together on the piano bench. Daniel had studied piano for eight years and then quit. The whole reason the Witch liked me was that I somehow got Daniel to practice. The living room was cold. I’d never taken piano or any instrument in my life and my fingers didn’t know where to go. Daniel was trying to teach me. He’d played three or four pieces through, after sorting out the dusty stack of music under the piano bench, slapping the books against his thigh.
Then he played this piece. I made him stop. I loved the melody. It made me think of something in nature. This was the piece I wanted to learn.
Daniel wanted to teach me so we could play it together. But it was really hard. We hadn’t gotten three bars down yet. My fingers seemed to have no memory. We went over and over the same nine notes, going as far as we could until I made a mistake, but I never got tired of it, because I loved hearing the melody, even a piece of it, every time. I liked to think I was learning how to do something, improving myself. Then I saw my mother’s white car pull up outside the front window. She got out, pushed her hair back with both hands and ran to the door. We slipped off the bench and walked to the kitchen, passing Riley. Then we heard the sound of a rough scale. Riley was beginning to take lessons. He wanted to start a rock band when he was eighteen.
In the kitchen, our mothers each had their hands in a plastic bag of dates. “Mmmm,” my mother was saying.
“Adele, I have to take you down there. They’re so cheap. Don’t you think they’d make a nice present, in some kind of basket?”
“With a bow. Absolutely.”
“I have so many clients. And they all have to be Christmased.”
My mother touched my hair and kissed me. “Hi, Darling.”
“You’re lucky she lets you kiss. I wouldn’
t dare touch Daniel, would I?”
Daniel shrieked and ran around the counter. “Ouch! Stay away from me, Witch!”
“So, Adele, Ann tells us you ski.”
“Well, mmhmm, we really haven’t here. To tell the truth, I’m a little scared of skiing on this western snow. They say it’s different.”
The Witch pulled up another plastic bag of dates for my mother to sample. Daniel and I snuck out. They’d talk awhile. We still had time. “To tell the truth,” my mother was saying again, as we skidded through the dining room on just our socks.
But she didn’t tell the truth. To my mother, Cassie Swan wasn’t the Witch, she was a woman who lived north of Sunset on San Ysidro Drive and so my mother was all dull formality. My mother wasn’t scared of western snow. It was money. It was always money.
Daniel said, Move over, and Riley looked at us, over his hornrimmed glasses that were too big for his face, and kept on with his scales. “Come on,” Daniel said. Then finally, he shoved Riley off onto the floor, clearing the piano bench for me. I saw Riley’s face for a moment when he fell, he looked up at me, it was awful, something I never forgot. Then, a minute later, on the floor, he did a back somersault, and landed, smiling goofy again, all charm.
Both mothers walked in to watch. They each slid one foot out of one high heel.
“Isn’t that great?” my mother said.
“Daniel could be so good if he’d only practice. If he’d only once stick to something.”
“Oh, he should, he’s obviously talented. Obviously.”
“I wish he’d listen to you.”
Under the piano, Riley bent over, pounding away at the tiles like a keyboard, with his genius for mimicry.
At the cake sale my mother fell in love.
