by Mona Simpson
“You’re fine, Ann,” he said. “Forget it.”
Once, at night that summer, Benny rode me on his handlebars, down by the tracks. We let the bike fall on the ground and we walked to the creek. Then Benny ran back to his bike and took off.
He threw me his flashlight so it landed in the field.
I screamed no, but he rode away anyway, the light on the front of his bike farther and farther away like a match going out.
I was afraid of the dark. Benny knew. A dog barked in the far distance. Then the country seemed immense, as if there were only small houses far apart and small clearings around them, not networks of electricity, of sound. It felt like a randomly settled wilderness, where you could disappear and no one would know. Then, I picked up the cold flashlight from the ground by my feet, touched the metal, fumbled it on and the night changed. Benny was right. It wasn’t him. The world softened instantly in light. For the first time I could imagine angels, the halo looked so real. I walked slowly and the sounds receded to crickets and a hum of far-off power lines. With the flashlight, you could see one thing at a time, the fitted seeds of one weed, a rough milkpod stem.
When I came to our road, I could see the shades of gray with just my eyes. I turned the flashlight off. The fields went on to the bare plain barn, a pure black. The land seemed different at night, another place, belonging to anyone who saw it. The light changed everything, made it look still and permanent, meant, like a city.
At the edge of our lawn, I stood on the worn spots by the mailbox. My thin grandfather and my grandmother, my own mother and Carol had walked exactly here, secrets in their hearts, opening the mailbox door, and now it meant nothing, the dirt had no memory, they were separate days, different years, all our thoughts were gone, lost on air. My grandfather had taken long walks at night. He had walked over his lawn, touching the tops of weeds. In blizzards, he had liked to strap on snowshoes, walk out and listen to the quiet under one of his trees. People we wouldn’t recognize, strangers, would touch the land after us, pack down the same earth, without ever knowing how beautiful we found it, how troubling.
Sometimes I thought it was Benny who gave me everything. When I ran into the yellow-lit kitchen, he sat eating an orange. He shrugged.
Every fall, when we went back to school in town, they lined us all up by the nurse’s room to test for ringworm. You went in one at a time, to a closet, where two hygienists shone a black light on you. If they found ringworm, they would shave your hair off right there and they’d give you a cap to wear when you walked out into the hall again. You knew the kids at school who had the ringworm, they wore stocking caps until their hair grew back. Sometimes, during a wet recess, you would see a gleam of white skull on the playground, when kids ganged up and pulled a cap off. You’d see the kid snatch it back right away, picking it out of the slush and putting it back on.
In line, in front of the nurse’s office, I thought I could feel something on my head. Theresa Griling, behind me, stepped down on the heel of my saddle shoe and I had to bite my lip not to cry. I loved my hair. It was my most prized possession. My mother told me that hardly any other kids in America had hair like mine. It was going to help me get on television. “It’s the best hair to have,” my mother had whispered. “Your black. The very best.”
Walking back, I touched my hair lightly. It had been over in a minute, the black light, the hygienist asking my middle name to fill out her form. In the classroom we were supposed to wait in our seats for all the pupils to return. Sitting there, doing nothing, I thought a terrible thought; my mother herself had blond hair. I looked at the other girls around me, the redheads, the blondes. Maybe they could be beautiful too. The Hollywood agent might not pick me.
Theresa Griling walked into the classroom then, not crying, wearing a stocking cap. She just sat down at her desk.
A nun called the girls from the bottom of a wide scrubbed staircase, the steps soft and nicked and scarred. We were picking up orphans from the orphanage for Christmas. We got two girls every holiday, never the same two, and despite my persistent request for boys. A scraggly, flocked wreath hung at the top of the staircase, over a window.
“Probably donated,” my mother whispered, seeing me look at it.
Every holiday, the girls bounded down, slumped over, shy and eager in fancy dresses too light for the season and short socks that they were too old for. They usually had sturdy, women’s legs. Their hair was pulled tightly off their foreheads, so their white faces seemed startled, like naked bodies. They looked clean. The nuns didn’t care about pretty, but they wanted you to know their girls were clean. The year before, we got Mary and Theresa Griling. Bub had taken off somewhere, to Florida, and they had been in the orphanage again.
This year, their names were Dorie and Diane. My mother, who usually slowed the car to an almost halt in front of every expensive store, made only one stop; we all got out to see the Christmas windows at Shreve’s. The orphans stood with their hands in their jacket pockets, their legs turning dull red between their dresses and their socks.
“Isn’t he lovely?” my mother said. “Aw, look at that little wolf. Wouldn’t you just like to bring him home?”
The orphans frowned between their eyebrows. They must have been cold. We stood in front of each mechanical scene too long, like people in a museum who look at each painting for an equal length of time, people not intimate enough to laugh and sigh in relief when they can leave.
My grandmother was rolling out dough on the table when we came in the back door. Carol stood rubbing her hands together, meaning to help. “Well, how do you do, I’m Carol. I’m the mother.”
My mother snorted in the corner. She sat there, dialing Lolly on the phone.
“Yes, Adele too, sure. I’m the boys’ mother. Now, we haven’t had you two before, have we?”
“No, Carol,” my mother said; then she started whispering into the mouthpiece.
“Oh, no, you’re right. Now I see. But this one looks a little, you look a little like one we had last Easter and was she ever a pretty girl. What was her name now? I just can’t think of it. Was she a Linda? Well, what is your name?” Carol extended a wet, doughy hand.
“This is Dorie and this is Diane,” I said.
“Oh, no, it wasn’t a Dorie. I’m sure I would’ve remembered a Dorie.”
My mother snorted again into the phone. She was talking to Lolly about why it had been a good idea not to invite Ted for Christmas. Ted didn’t have any family in Wisconsin, and he would be eating at a restaurant. “There’s no reason he has to see it all, before,” she said. “And he’ll get a good prime rib, rare the way he likes it.” Lolly seemed to agree.
I took Dorie and Diane upstairs to their bedroom. They had their nightgowns and toothbrushes along in one brown paper bag. Dorie hit the window with the back of her hand.
“You got a lot of room,” she said.
Dorie’s fingernails looked scrubbed clean, transparent. I’d seen where they lived, the huge rooms with rows of bunk beds in the orphanage. The cement floor in their bathroom sloped down to a metal drain. There were ten sinks, all on one wall. She smelled like dust or the air in a closet. Like something clean but old.
In the living room, Jimmy Measey yelled at Carol for stepping in front of the TV. She was standing next to the window, trapped, bunching the curtain in her hand.
“Well, Jimmy, I just wanted to look a second and see if they had their Christmas tree lights on.” She let the curtain go and started to walk back towards the kitchen.
“Wait till the commercial, Carol. You can just stand there and wait,” Jimmy said. “Don’t you dare move while we’ve got the ball.” Looking straight at the screen, he asked the orphans questions.
“What grade have they got you in over there?
“Do you like it with those nuns?”
They answered quietly, in unison, staring down at the rug.
“Fifth and sixth.
“Yes.”
“Are there boys in there
with you, too?”
“Yes, but more girls.”
“More girls, huh.”
“The boys run away.”
“How long you been in there?”
Jimmy’s eyes followed the game, the slow motion accidents and gentle falls, black and white on the television. While the girls talked, answering his questions, our team intercepted and he began yelling, thumping his knees, as Dorie said she’d been in the orphanage since she was eight years old. When the replay was over, Jimmy turned back. “Oh, ’scuse me. I had to see that. But go on.”
“What happened to your parents?” I said.
They looked at each other and shrugged. “Mine are dead. They had a car accident when I was just a little baby,” Diane said.
“What about yours?” I asked Dorie.
“I never saw my dad. But my mom’s dead. Got to be, I used to get cards from her but not anymore for a long time.”
“You remember your mother, you’re lucky,” Diane said.
“Yeah, me and my mom, we used to get up every morning, go buy the newspaper and a box of Milk Duds. We’d share them. She always had Black Jack gum in her purse.”
“What happened to her?”
“Ann, shut your mouth. They’ll tell you what they want to tell you,” Jimmy said.
Benny walked in, carrying a bowl of potato chips. “Annie loves orphans because when she was little she thought she was one,” he said. “She used to go around telling everybody she was adopted because her mother’s got blond hair. She used to paint fake freckles on herself so she’d look more like her mom.”
A commercial flickered onto the television, a waxed floor, and a woman on her knees. Then a vacuum cleaner, and the woman stood up. Jimmy said, “Okay, Carol, now you can go.”
We set a plate of broken cookies out on our shoveled porch. “Oh, Honey, Santa doesn’t mind, he likes the pieces,” my mother said. “He likes to know we’re only hu-man.”
The new snow blew on the ice under the porch light like tiny balls of styrofoam. I opened a box of C & H sugar cubes from Hawaii for the reindeer. Then we put on our coats and hats and trekked over to Carol and Jimmy’s house. Hal led the way, stamping a single channel of footprints in the snow. Benny and I were still light enough to walk on the high crusted banks with our arms out to the sides for balance. It was like walking on water, we stepped softly, feeling the peaks of the ridged banks. We stood as tall as our parents.
Snow lit the dark. It covered the fields as far as we could see. Small, sharp stars seemed embedded deep in the sky and the noise of the highway was muffled and far away. There were only a few headlights, they must have been trucks, long-distance interstates, carrying perishables, winter fruit.
Ahead of me, Carol slammed the screen door and began to pull off her boots. She walked through the house in her nylons, turning on lights. Carol and Jimmy owned one of the first artificial Christmas trees in the state of Wisconsin. It was expensive and innovative when they bought it, and each year they added new lights. This year, families of colors blinked at different times. Carol passed out Tom and Jerrys, and Jimmy told her to sit down. Then she brought in my grandmother’s cookies on a plate the shape of a Christmas tree. She’d made the plate in a ceramics class and Jimmy had installed tiny electric lights around its rim. She set it on a low table near an outlet.
“Now, sit down,” Jimmy said.
But she walked on her knees to the tree and selected packages for each of the orphans. The rest of our presents had name tags. She gave Dorie a pink plastic cotton-ball dispenser, a coin purse and a scarf. Diane opened a toy gumball machine and a set of lipsticks made to look like peppermint candy. Lippersticks, they were called.
Carol went shopping for the orphans every year at end-of-the-summer dollar sales. She also kept a cardboard box full of wrapped general presents in the closet, which would do for any occasion. Diane and Dorie sat quietly on the carpet, holding their gifts in their laps.
Hal opened the first large box; it held a snorkel and flippers, a new installment in the series of sports equipment Jimmy bought for his oldest son. Jimmy thought sports would make Hal normal; he immediately ordered Hal to try the flippers on. Carol stood to throw away the tissue paper. “Sit down, Carol,” Jimmy said.
My mother gave me a blue velvet skating suit. I ran my finger over one of the embroidered flowers.
“Did you make it?” Dorie said. She was sitting at my mother’s knees and staring up at her. My mother liked attention, she liked to be watched.
“Oh, no, Honey, it’s much nicer than I could do. It’s made in Switzerland,” she said. “But don’t touch. The velvet’s very delicate. Real fine.”
My other present was a chemistry set. It looked too hard for me. It said on the box ages eleven through fourteen, and I was only eight.
“What’s that you got?” Jimmy took the box from me and studied the drawing inside the lid. It said you were supposed to prick your finger and look at the blood through the microscope. Jimmy rummaged in the box. He lifted a needle, about two inches long, in a sealed clear plastic packet. “Here, give me your finger.”
I sat on my hands and shook my head.
He stood up. “You shouldn’t even have a chemistry set if you’re going to be a baby. If you can’t prick your finger, you’re not old enough.”
“She can grow into it,” my mother said.
“You spoil her, Adele. It’ll hurt her a second and then it’s over.”
“Not on Christmas, Jimmy.”
He looked at the orphans. “You two, hold out your hands. Come on.”
They each opened one hand, slowly, palms up, uncurling close to their bodies.
“See, they’re old enough. It’ll do her good to see that.”
Neither of them cried when he pricked their fingers. He didn’t set up the microscope. He couldn’t find the glass plates in the box. “Well, it’s good for her to see,” he said. He left the two drops of dark blood glistening on their fingertips.
Carol lifted up a black lacy slip from a rectangular box.
“Oh, Jimmy, now when am I ever going to wear such a thing. I don’t think it’ll even fit me.”
Jimmy fumed. “If you don’t want it, Carol, take it back. The receipt’s in the box. Don’t tell me about it, just take it back.”
“Well, Jimmy, I only meant, I think it’s too small. Are you trying to tell me something? Maybe I should go back on that grapefruit diet.” She laughed an old woman’s laugh. Carol’s jokes were like the nuns’, there was no mischief in them.
“Look at how nicely it’s made,” my mother said, fingering a seam. “That’s all hand-sewn. It’ll be smashing on you, Carol.”
“Ogh,” Carol said, “I don’t know.”
My mother shook her head. “She never appreciates anything. And he has nice taste, you know?”
Hal came back, in the flippers, stepping carefully between boxes and wrapping paper. Benny looked up at him; he was sitting in a big chair with his legs dangling down, quiet because he hadn’t been given anything yet. Benny would get the flippers, though, he got all Hal’s equipment, a few months later, when Hal never used it.
Carol passed Jimmy a small red box and he pulled the ribbon off slowly and let it flutter to the floor. His lips closed as tight as a berry and his cheeks puffed out. What Jimmy wanted and believed he deserved couldn’t fit into this box.
Jimmy was our big spender. The Measer, he called himself at Christmas. Every year he waited until the day of Christmas Eve and then he went out and used cash. That year, he’d gone to Shopko and the downtown Shreve’s. He’d bought a dishwasher for Carol. It had come in a truck early that afternoon. Jimmy had made it perfectly clear that what he wanted for himself was a new black Easy-boy chair with a lever to adjust the seat back’s angle. But he’d snooped around the house and he hadn’t found it anywhere.
His cheek trembled when he lifted the white cardboard lid and saw the watch. The watch looked expensive enough to mean that it, and not the chair, wa
s his big present for the year.
“Carol, I already have a watch. You know that, Carol.”
“Jimmy, I know you have a watch but I thought … here, let me show you, this has an alarm on it. Where are the instructions? He told me at the store how to do it, but—”
“I don’t need an alarm on my wristwatch.”
My grandmother shook her head and opened her own purse. She passed out sealed envelopes with ironed five-dollar bills to Dorie and Diane. She called Benny and me to come sit next to her and our heads pressed together in the small circle of light. Under the lamp, her unpolished fingernails looked yellowish like pearls. She showed us the new green entries stamped in our savings books. She had an account at the bank for each of us. “See the interest,” she pointed, her fingernail tapping the paper. “You’re each collecting interest.”
Carol was whimpering now, wiping tears with the cuff of her sleeve. “Take those fins off and help me, Hal. Jimmy, I just thought you’d like another watch. At the water softener store, and all over, they said this was the newest thing. And you know you always like the newest thing.” She leaned over, scattering the crumpled wrapping paper on the floor, still looking for the instructions to set the alarm.
My mother pressed tiny bottles of perfume into the orphans’ hands. “It’s what I wear, smell.” She pushed her wrist up near their faces and they both bent down, sniffing her arm like puppies nursing.
I went over and stood by Benny. He swung his legs below the chair. His parents were fighting and they hadn’t noticed him. Then, Jimmy saw.
“What’s the matter, Benny, you didn’t get anything from Santa Claus? Look, Ann’s comforting him because Benny hasn’t got any presents.”
Carol stood in the doorway, shaking her head while she zipped up her jacket.
“No,” Benny said. He looked down, afraid of his father. I could tell from the way his cheeks went, he was about to cry.
“You just weren’t good enough, that’s the trouble, Ben. I don’t know any other reason that Santa’d forget you. Lookit, Annie’s got presents and these two, Diane and I’m sorry, what’s your name? They both got presents. What happened to you?”
