by Mona Simpson
“Did you see when we walked down the hall and he walked down the hall?” I was carrying the square marble cake we’d bought and my mother kept elbowing me in the ribs.
“I looked and I saw this HANDsome man, I mean, boy, is HE good-looking, I mean REALLY, and I thought, Hey, he’s not with another woman, he’s here alone. He must be divorced or even a widower. I’ll bet a widower, the way he walked with his head down. And every few minutes I’d be walking along and he’d sort of look at me, like, Hey, who’s she? And I’d sort of look at him and he’d look at me and sort of smile, you know. So then, we were both in front of your cake—say, wasn’t that something, a hundred dollars. You should be proud. You and Daniel should both be proud—”
My mother unlocked my door. “Oh, Honey, do we really want to put that gooey thing in our nice car? Let’s not, Ann. Really. Why don’t you run over and throw it in the trash. There’s a can. Nobody’s going to know and I can just see if I have to brake, it’ll be all over the leather. And that’ll never come out.”
“I’ll hold it on my lap.”
“Honey, just throw it out. We can go get ice cream cones if you’re hungry for a little something sweet, but I don’t want that messy thing in my car. I’m sorry, Ann, but I just can’t. I’m not. I have to keep this car nice.”
I crossed the street and dumped the cake in a garbage can. It was a good cake, it smelled like mint. A girl named Isabel had made it and her cakes had a reputation for being messy, but good. She used liqueurs in her batter.
“We paid seven dollars for that,” I said, when I sat down in the car.
“Oh, Honey, the money’s for the school really, not for the cake. Ooops.” She braked as a man holding a child’s hand walked in front of the car. She was always a distracted driver. “Tell you what. Let’s go get ice cream cones. That’s better for us anyway.”
“I don’t want ice cream.”
“Well, I think I could go for one. Anyway. Where was I? Oh, in front of your big galaxy. I was standing and he was standing, but not saying anything. And that’s when you came up with your friend, and she said, ‘Oh, Ann, this is my father, Dr. Spritzer’—that’s interesting, isn’t it, that she said Dr. Spritzer, not just my dad, she must be real proud of him, obviously. You know, Hon, you should really introduce me as Dr. Adele August in situations like that.”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“I am. I have honorary PhDs from a couple of places.”
“Where? I’ve never seen them.”
She sighed, steering with two fingers. “I don’t know, packed somewhere. Maybe at Gramma’s. I really have to get all my things organized. But anyway, it doesn’t matter, because you were real cute the way you said it anyway, real nonchalant, just, ‘This is my mom.’ Really, you did it just right.”
“I’m relieved.”
“And boy, did HE look then. ‘Oh, what kind of doctor are you?’ I said, but just real casual.”
I’d heard all this—I’d been standing right there, but you couldn’t stop her once she’d started. I looked at houses out my window as we drove.
“And when he said, ‘Orthodontist,’ I said, ‘Really. That’s funny, because I’ve been looking for an orthodontist to see if Ann’s going to need braces.’ Remember, Hon, how you came home your first day and said the girls told you you needed braces? It’s a good thing they did. Lucky.”
Right there, in front of our cake, Dr. Spritzer had leaned over, taken my head in his hands and opened my mouth. He had doctor’s hands. While he held my head, I felt like sleeping.
“Yup, I’m afraid she will,” he had said. “She’s got some pretty big toofers in that little mouth.”
I thought he and my mother should get along. They both used the same dopey slang.
“So, did you hear when he said, ‘Bring her in anytime and we’ll see what we can do’? And then he sort of winked at me. Real subtle. Sort of half a wink. I suppose he didn’t want you kids to see. So. We’ll just have to wait. But I think in a week or two I’ll call his office and see about braces for my little Bear Cub.”
She reached over and patted my knee and I stiffened. She parked in front of Baskin-Robbins.
“You really don’t want one? Just a single dip.”
“No.”
She held out money to me. “Well, I’d like a double, the top scoop chocolate almond, the bottom, pistachio. On a sugar cone.”
I just sat there.
“Come on, Honey. Just run in and do this one thing for me. After all I do for you. Go on.” She pressed the money into my hand.
In the two weeks before the appointment, we dieted. We ate salads at Hamburger Hamlet for dinner and my mother gave up ice cream altogether. The Saturday before the appointment, we went shopping on Rodeo Drive. In one of the dressing rooms, a room that was so big and pretty we could have lived in it, my mother sat down on the love seat and cried, quietly, so the salesgirls hovering in the hallway wouldn’t hear. She lifted the beige ticket from the sleeve of a suit she was trying on. It cost seventeen hundred dollars.
“Well, so why don’t we go somewhere else?”
“There is nowhere else.” She shook her head, unzipped the skirt and began to step out of it. She looked ruefully around the room, glancing at herself from different angles in the mirrors, flexing and arching her foot. She looked over her shoulder at the backs of her thighs. Then she sucked in her cheeks.
“I’m pretty, but that’s not enough. Nobody wants a woman my age who doesn’t dress.”
“I thought he liked you. You said he winked.”
“Well, he saw me in the yellow. He only saw me in my best thing.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Don’t kid yourself, he’s no different from the rest. He can have anyone he wants, let me tell you. They want rich women. Not a schoolteacher with a child to support.”
I started putting the clothes back on their hangers. The skirt kept falling off.
“Just leave it,” my mother said. “They’ll do it. It’s their job.”
“I’m just going to cancel,” my mother said. “Oooh.” She swerved, just missing a garbage can. “I don’t have anything decent to wear. He’s not going to want me in these old fuddy-duddy clothes.”
“Why don’t you wear the blue?”
“That’s out of date. The collar’s no good.”
“Well, should I come home or not?” The appointment was for two o’clock, I’d have to miss an afternoon of school.
“Just come home and we’ll see. I’m not making any promises. We’ll just see.”
When I walked in, at noon, my mother’s six best dresses were lying out on the sofa. She stood in her lace underwear with her hair in rollers.
“Tell me, Honey, what would the other kids’ mothers wear, do you think?” She stood soaping her face with pink organic geranium soap. “What do you want me to wear?” I sat on the arm of the vinyl couch and she sat next to me, still soaping. “I even thought of calling Cassie Swan and asking her. Should we go, Honey, or not? Or should we just cancel?”
She felt frightened of people here. I’d gone to school and made some friends. But she still didn’t know anybody. The women we met all seemed to have about twenty times more money than we did. She tried, but it wasn’t like with Lolly. My mother thought they would be judging her, picking her over for faults. We’d come all the way here and now she was scared. And she’d had so much courage in Wisconsin.
“Wear the blue, it’s pretty,” I said. But I wasn’t sure either.
“You think? Even with that collar?” My mother looked up at me as if I could save her life.
“I think it’s pretty. He won’t be looking at your collar.”
She went back to the sink to rinse. Then she started on her eyes. Suddenly, she banged her hand down on the counter. “I’ve got it. I’ll wear the Gucci scarf. That’ll cover the neckline and then it’ll be smashing.” She started crying again. “Oh, that’s it, Ann, we’re going to make it here after all. I know it. I
really do.”
We stood in the elevator. “Look once, Honey. Do I have any on my teeth?” We’d arrived forty-five minutes early to Dr. Spritzers building and so we’d eaten hot fudge sundaes in the drugstore downstairs.
“Open a little wider, Honey,” Dr. Spritzer said. He looked even better than he had at the cake sale. His good face seemed to pop out of the tight-necked green smock.
“So how did you survive your cake?” he asked my mother over my head.
“Ours was very tasty, actually.”
“Let’s see here.” He moved something suspiciously like a pliers in my mouth. “Well, it looks like she’s going to need some braces for da teef, I’m afraid.”
“She is.” My mother patted my shoulder. “Well, Honey, it won’t be too bad. I guess you’re just going to have to have them.” She tried to look concerned and suck in her cheeks at the same time. “How long will she have to wear them, do you think?”
“We’ll just have to see how fast her teeth respond.” He shook my jaw. My mother didn’t say anything about the price and Dr. Spritzer called a girl named Pam to come over and make a plaster mold of my mouth.
“Hi,” my mother whispered. I was asleep, then I opened my eyes and made out the shape of her back. “Are you up? Unzip me, would you? I’m stuck.”
She wriggled closer to me on the bed. My fingers felt heavy with sleep and they wouldn’t move. Finally, the zipper sprang free in my hands. I opened it down to her underpants. My mother stood and hung up her dress in the closet.
“It feels so good to be out of that. But it was absolutely the right thing, the dress. It was perfect. Couldn’t have been better.”
It was coming to me: we’d gone to Rodeo Drive and she’d bought a dress for her date with Dr. Spritzer, and now she was home late, and happy.
“How was it?”
She pulled on a T-shirt, then sat down. “Well, you won’t believe it, Ann. It was marvelous. Just marvelous. We met for drinks. Here at the Left Bank, we sat at the bar, and he was sort of smiling, you know, and I smiled, and then he said, Hey do you feel like a couple of lobsters? I said sure, why not, and he took me to this place. Ann, we’ve got to go there sometime, you’d love it, you would ADORE it, but it’s expensive. It was RIGHT on the beach. And we got in and everybody knows him there. They all say, ‘Oh, hello, Dr. Spritzer, Hi Josh.’ And he’s short. I didn’t realize it before, but he’s this little itty-bitty man. It’s a good thing I wasn’t wearing higher heels. Boy, is that ever lucky, when I think about it. I almost wore the black. Even in these, I came right up to here on him.
“So we talked and talked and we just agreed about everything. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but we really clicked, you know? Sometimes that just happens, you just CLICK with someone. And here we were eating these lobsters and you know how they’re messy and the butter was dripping down my face, oh, God, I thought, here he’s going to remember me with a shiny, buttery chin.”
“What time is it?”
My mother went to the front window and pulled the felt curtain and let it close again. There was a damp spot where she’d been sitting on the blanket, darker than the rest of the wool. I rolled over and picked up her underpants from the floor. They were wet. I dropped them back, I didn’t want her to see.
“It’s pretty late. Almost time to get up. Should we jump in the car and ride down to the beach for a little? The sun will be just coming up. And I bet Alice’s would have a good breakfast.”
My legs still felt weightless and empty inside.
“I’ll just throw on some clothes and we’ll go.” My mother walked into the bathroom and the toilet seat clicked against the wall. “Should we do that, Honey?” She always left the bathroom door open; she liked to keep talking. The toilet paper roll creaked. “We can get some strong coffee. Come on, get up. We’ll have fun. Come on, Ann.”
She clapped her hands while I put on jeans and a loose, old sweater, warm clothes I’d feel ugly in at school, when it was light. But now I needed comfort and these clothes made me feel regular.
It was still dark when we drove up, out of the garage. We could just see the shapes of the trees and buildings in the weak street light. My mother turned on the heat. Bundled in soft clothes with my sneakers up on the dashboard, I was glad to be driving. I didn’t care how far we went.
My mother crossed Wilshire Boulevard, onto Arden Drive. She slowed and then stopped in front of a house. “This is where his kids live. And the ex-wife, Elaine.” The street was dark and empty. We could sit there and stare all we wanted. Beverly Hills seemed as small and innocent as Bay City, as anywhere.
“We should always get up early,” I said.
“He put a lot of work into that house. A lot of work and a lot of money. He did that whole hedge, he told me. He says he still goes over to do the gardening.”
“You don’t think he’ll ever want to go back?”
“Oh, no. I’m sure of it. He loves his kids, though. He’ll always see his kids, I’m sure. Apparently, he worries about Amy. About her weight. Apparently, she’s very insecure.”
My mother started the car again and we drove south. Even Wilshire Boulevard was empty.
“I’m going to drive you past his apartment for a second. It’s gorgeous inside, absolutely gorgeous. See, he had the big house with the garage and the pool and the yard and all, and he said to me, now, for the first time really ever, he’s living alone. So he wanted something small and neat, without a lot of stuff around.”
She parked across the street from one of the new Century City high rises and rolled her window down.
“He’s up there on the fourteenth floor. See his window?” She craned her neck and bent out.
“No.”
“It’s dark now,” she said, sighing. “He turned his lights off. He’s probably gone to bed. Sweet.” She smiled to herself.
The car rumbled softly and in the field next to us, already staked for development, light was beginning to come up from the ground. Down Wilshire, in the distance, the Veterans’ building gleamed like a knife. We turned up to Sunset and drove on the wide, clean, loopy road for a long time. There’s a place where Sunset meets Pacific Coast Highway. You turn at a stoplight and then you’re there at the beach. We parked the car alongside the road and got out, to walk. The sand was still more gray than yellow. You couldn’t see a sun yet. But it was lighter than it was dark. The water looked choppy. There were whitecaps. It was cold, we kept our hands in our pockets.
Close to the shore, the water seemed clear. The boom of waves crashing and the plate of green water, washing up on the sand, seemed to wipe out what we said and start the world over, new and clean, every minute.
Farther out black figures of surfers moved, appearing from where we were like letters of the alphabet.
“Look at how early they come out. That’s great. Can you believe we really live here now?” Our hair blew in front of our mouths. “I’d love a house on the beach someday, Josh says that’s what he wants, too. He’s had the house in Beverly Hills with the kids, he’s done that. Now he’d like something else,”
“What about my school?” Beverly Hills kept a strict district. That was why we had to live where we lived.
“There must be a school out here somewhere.”
“Do you think he’ll want to get married again?”
“I don’t know, Ann. We’ll have to wait and see. We’ll just have to see. He’s already paying alimony and child support, you know. And those two will have to go to college, too, still. So I don’t know. It was just a first date. Let’s hope.”
We walked north, against the wind. Sand blew up on my jeans, making a ripping noise.
“He did say, though, at the end, he walked to his balcony and he leaned back and said, Adele, I have never had a first date like this in my life. This was more dynamic and more, close, you know, than any first date in my whole life.
“And I said, I was thinking just the same thing. And it’s true. Really, Ann. I never, never
really feel anything on a first date. I told him, it usually takes me a long time to get to know someone. But this man really, really cares about me.”
“Did he say he loved you?”
“Oh, no, Honey, he couldn’t. Adults who’ve been married before just don’t say that to each other right away. That takes a long time.”
“A month?”
“Even longer. A year, maybe. That’s almost like an engagement, saying that at our age. You might not even say it until you just went, Say, here, I bought a ring.”
That made me remember Lolly and her shall-we-say-ring. My mother never got a ring from Ted. They’d decided to put the money towards the house on Carriage Court.
“But he did something. He did something last night that grownups do sometimes that shows you really, really care about someone.”
“What?”
“Oh, Honey, it’s something adults do in bed. But not many people ever do it. It means you really, really like the woman. You’ll know when you’re older. It just means they’re really, really serious about you. They wouldn’t do it with just any woman.”
“How will I know if you don’t tell me!”
“Well, I hope you’re not planning to go to bed with anyone for a long, long time, Little Miss. Because, let me tell you, it wouldn’t be a good idea with boys your age. The men really still want you to be innocent if they’re going to marry you. They may say they don’t, but they really do. It’s different with me, Honey, because I’ve already been married.”
“So when I’m married, how will I know?”
My mother laughed. “You’ll just know. No one ever told me. The way you know never changes. It’ll just happen. And you can tell. You really can.” She sighed. “Boy, can you.”
Farther up, a line of surfers in black wet suits walked towards the shore. In the shallow waves, they rode one hand on the boards, which bobbed ahead like dogs on leashes.
“So whatever this special thing is that Dr. Spritzer did, my dad didn’t do that?”
“Oh, Ann, your father. Honey, your father loved me and he loved you, too, but he’s an irresponsible man. It wasn’t just us. He left his jobs, everything. He’s a selfish, selfish man.”
