by Mona Simpson
“Dorie,” Dorie said quietly.
Jimmy’s voice grew. “You must’ve been bad.”
Then, Carol and Hal struggled in, carrying the enormous Easy-boy chair. It had been in my grandmother’s garage, next to the old lawn mower.
“Oh, Carol,” Jimmy sighed. His relief seemed great enough to almost equal happiness. They lifted the chair in place and Jimmy sank into it, working the lever, cranking himself up and down.
Now, Carol took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. “Oh, Jimmy, I’m so glad you like something I got you this Christmas.” Carol always carried ironed handkerchiefs and she had unfolded a white one, embroidered with green and red holly.
Jimmy leaned down and picked up the wristwatch. “You’ll have to show me how to use this alarm.” He buckled it onto his arm.
My grandmother stood up stamping her feet. “It’s getting to be time for B-E-D.”
Benny was still sitting, clutching the arms of his chair. Jimmy maneuvered the Easy-boy to an upright position. “Oh, listen, Ben, would you do me one favor?” He tossed Benny a set of keys. “Would you go and look in the garage for me? I think I left something there. By mistake.”
Benny’s face flew into an anxious happiness and he ran out through the breeze way. Then he came back, letting the garage door slam and lunging into Jimmy’s arms. I hated to see them like that, pasted to each other, as if you couldn’t pull Benny off if you tried.
“Here, you sit down a minute, Carol,” Jimmy said, giving her his chair. He followed Benny. The two of them ran into the garage and we heard the motor putting. When the rest of us left, to walk back over to our house, Benny was still in the garage, riding around in circles on his dirt bike. And when we came to our porch, the broken cookies and the box of C & H sugar cubes, which had been under the light, were gone.
I stood at the window and watched Benny’s garage, the chalky yellow light seeping out of the seams. I wanted it to be dark again. I heard my grandmother walking through our house, turning off lights. My mother came into our room, slipping her hand underneath my pajama top, and telling me it was time to go to sleep. She led me away from the window and pulled down the shade. I lay banked and quiet on the bed, only breathing, not moving otherwise, trying to feel nothing but her fingernails on my back. The sensations were black, delicious the way a cut can be.
It seemed it would have been easy to die like that, doing nothing, feeling nothing but pleasure, like underwater sounds or lights inside the dark bowls of closed eyes.
But I knew that it would always end and I would need it again and wanting it so made me smaller. After she left, going into her closet and pulling on the light or down to the kitchen to call Lolly, I couldn’t summon and recall the pleasure I’d just felt. I couldn’t remember pleasure and that was why I needed it so often and succumbed, again and again.
Because it was not easy anymore. The night my mother pushed my pajama top down off my shoulders and felt the soft hairs under my arms, I became less than a baby, a blob, a primitive living thing she could do anything to as long as she fed me with tickles. She liked to pull off the sheet, push down my pajama pants and pat my buttocks, they clenched at her touch. She wanted to look at me and blow air on my tummy with the full pride of possession. She kissed me on the lips and I shirked. When her hand reached down to the elastic of my pajama pants, I stiffened and bucked away from her. “Don’t.”
“I don’t know why not,” she said. “Why won’t you let me look, you’ve got such a cute, twussy little patutie. Can’t I be proud of your little body that I made?” When she stared at me like that, it seemed she could take something, just by looking.
“Could you talk like an adult, please.”
She sighed. I was already beginning to accept the back rubs I needed, with one eye open, guarding myself from my mother taking too much.
I thought of the orphans in the upstairs attic room. They didn’t belong to anyone. The nuns had clean dry hands, light on the tops of our heads. I knew nuns.
“Well, good night then,” my mother said.
A swallow of cold air came in when she opened the door and left. I thought of the orphanage, worn sheets, the one rough blanket, how in winter they may crawl into a bunk together, both girls thin and dry, one of them might wet the bed.
The next day, at noon, the orphans were served enormous portions, as if they had been underfed all year and this was our one chance to make up for it. During a lull in the conversation, my mother suggested that our family sell the land behind my grandmother’s house. That started an argument—my mother against everyone else.
It was an old fight. My mother suggested we put the barn on the market and everyone else started screaming. We kids all were sent to the downstairs bedroom, where we balanced our plates on our knees and tried to cut without tipping them. Dorie and Diane sat with their shoulders touching, making quiet references to the nuns, and to some other girl at the orphanage, as if to remind themselves they had a life.
Before, I’d thought Dorie might have scrubbed her fingernails clean in the cement-floored bathroom to impress us, with her manners, her pleasantness, with how little trouble she would be. She might have lulled herself to sleep thinking of flaky yellow light in a kitchen. But it seemed she was just now understanding that her private wish would not be realized, not only because we would not keep her, but because we were not a family she would want. They both seemed tired, anxious to leave.
In the kitchen, my mother was shouting. “I don’t want to be stuck here all my life! I CAN’T LIVE LIKE THIS!”
“Adele, it doesn’t have sewer and water. What do you think we could get for it now?”
Dorie spilled a cranberry on the white chenille bedspread. She looked up at us with terror, holding the berry between two fingers.
“Don’t worry, we won’t tell,” I said. Benny reached down care fully to get his milk from the floor. We didn’t look at each other. None of us said anything. We just waited, eating as if eating was our duty.
Then Benny mumbled something.
“What?” I said. We were all jumpy.
“Salty. This turkey’s salty.”
Dorie and Diane walked upstairs to get their brown bag of clothes. Their beds were neatly made. It was as if they’d never been here. Their presents lay on top of the dresser, with the wrapping paper folded underneath.
“Can we leave these here?” Dorie said. “If you could keep them for us, because if we bring them back to Saint Luke’s, they’ll just get stolen.”
“Yeah, someone’ll take them for sure,” Diane said. “They take everything.”
“Took a necklace watch I had from my mother.”
“Okay,” I said, and then we waited in the backseat of our car. When my mother finally came, she was sniffling and she didn’t say a word to us. She slammed the door shut and started driving. I pressed my cheek against the window, knowing as sure as I knew anything that these two girls would never come back to our house to get their presents. My aunt Carol would probably keep them and rewrap them for next year’s orphans. They would wait in her closet of all-purpose gifts.
I looked over at Dorie and Diane. I wondered if they knew the minute they stepped out of our house that they would never come back, if they’d already forgotten their presents on the upstairs dresser, or if they kept complicated accounts, cataloging their possessions, remembering the names of the streets they would return to when they left the orphanage, to collect the things that would help them in their new lives.
Their faces told me nothing. They were closed and solemn as if they were counting to themselves.
One night, the last summer we lived on Lime Kiln Road, Hal and his friend Dave drove Benny and me out to Bay Beach. It was a night when the air was moist, almost beginning to rain. I felt a mouth of wet like a kiss on my arm and then nothing as we walked through the crowds looking up at the lighted rides, and I waited, expecting it again.
Hal had money to buy tickets for Benny and me. They came ten for a d
ollar in a long green paper string. Benny and I wanted the Ferris wheel, we always wanted the Ferris wheel, and while the man strapped us in, with the old soft wooden bar, Hal and Dave stood at the fence.
We went slowly at first, our hands light on the bar, as the car tilted back and forth gently. Other people were still getting in, their bars snapped shut, it wasn’t really going yet. Then it started, lifting up from under in one cool swoop of wind and we were swinging at the top, stretching, the tilt knocking air out of us. On the way down, falling softly, all the lighted small houses came closer and more real and then the next time up was faster and faster until it was like breathing, our air sucked in and out, our eyes opening and closing, the blur of landscape and lights and dark trees, and our nails biting into the soft gray wood until, finally, our car coasted down. The man swung open the bar and we walked out, dizzy and light, down the runway, where Hal and Dave stood ready to take our hands and lead us through the dark paths. We were happy to follow then, everything was shaken out of us.
We walked to the pavilion, a damp dim building where we weren’t allowed, but Hal knew the way we were, half asleep and happy, we would never tell. There was a big barn door at one end that exhaled a breath of water. The bay started right there, down old wooden steps, cold and deep and dirty in one smell.
Girls and sailors moved on the dance floor, the boys in full white uniform, with hats. More sailors leaned on the refreshment bar that sold hot dogs and Nehi Orange. There was something about those girls. It was their dark lips, the glitter on their ears; their hair was not like our hair, it was thick and it swept up, and their legs looked tiny in their shoes. Dave took me on his back and Hal had Benny’s hand as we went through the crowd. We could have been lost but we trusted them.
We walked past the games lined with sailors, where there were machine guns, colored ducks, everything with bolted rifles, and went to watch the bumper cars. We stood there listening to the hard thwacks of cars until the showers of sparks slowed above and the power began to drain. I closed my eyes and opened them again to look up at the sparks on the netted ceiling. The blue and white fire seemed magic, like sparklers, and it held a few minutes after in your eyes.
They took us farther into the woods. It was dark but there were noises all around us. Hal seemed to follow the invisible sounds to a place.
Then we were standing in a clearing on pine needles. I could feel the damp tall trees above us. The stars hung tiny in the sky. There were other people on the ground, five feet away, but we didn’t know them. A girl was lying on an old army blanket, her knee out facing me like a face. A guy leaned on top of her. There was a flashlight on the edge of the blanket and the beam hit the marbled orange/yellow bottoms of her feet, hooked over the boy’s white back. He fell, grunting, as he drove her into the ground. It happened again and again. That went on for a while and then he screamed, high like a girl, and he was still for a second, his neck lifted, thick and dead, but his right eyelid and right foot were flinching.
He rose to his knees and she still clung onto him. She lifted a few feet off the ground, her butt spread into separate muscles, her legs around him, hanging on. One by one, he took her hands off his shoulders and let her slide back to the blanket. She sat there picking at the wool. She bent down and I saw her face for a moment. She looked like Rosie Griling. I thought I recognized her; at the same time, I thought it couldn’t be. Her lip was bleeding, she was pretty. A strand of her hair fell over her mouth.
Then another boy stepped out of his pants and lowered onto her, like someone starting pushups. He was still wearing his socks and T-shirt. She rearranged herself under him. I didn’t like watching. It felt funny being a girl.
A flowered dress bunched up under her armpits. Her underwear lay twisted, a few feet away on the dirt. I looked back at Benny like I wanted to go home and he put his hands, lightly, on my shoulders. It felt safe and good to be in layers of old clothes, the same clothes as the boys wore. I was thinking they would never do this to me, I was family. The girl looked all yellow and white and the boy kept pushing her down. Another boy tore open a package of wieners. They got on their knees by the blanket. The one who was on top of her moved. They passed the package of wieners between them, someone threw down the cellophane wrapping. It glittered in the flashlight light. They stuck the wieners in her, first one, then another. She shuddered, then started to sit up, her hands coming to her face.
I turned around and said I wanted to go home.
Nobody had been talking and those boys heard me. They stood and wiped their hands on their pants. Those boys weren’t old. They looked like regular boys, except we didn’t know them. They were dressed in good warm clothes and they started circling around, their bike wheels wobbling in the dirt.
Hal lifted me on his shoulders. “We’ll go now.”
She was still sitting on the blanket, her stomach wet and shiny. She sat there with her legs sprawled out, patting her belly like a baby, as if someone would have to come and dress her. Her hair fell and covered half her face.
“Come ON, if you want a ride,” one of the boys yelled to her.
She hung her head farther down.
“Where’s my lipstick?” she said. She looked up at them and then around. It seemed the first time she saw the trees.
“We’re getting out of here, now,” one of them said.
“You guys want her?” He was talking to Hal and Dave, who were still standing with us on their shoulders. “Go ahead. You can have her. She likes it.” The boy looked back at the girl. “Maybe they’ll buy you your lipstick.”
They rode away, handling their bikes roughly, standing up and pulling. I watched the lights on their handlebars draw jagged paths through the dark and then I closed my eyes against Hal’s back.
The last night of summer, Benny and I slept outside. Benny stood there, scuffing his sneakers on our porch, at midnight, when he was supposed to. We took a blanket and a box of Graham crackers and walked across the yard to the hickory tree. Benny had climbed out his bedroom window and left it open. It was easy for me to get away. During that summer, Ted often stayed late, watching television with my mother in the living room. I crawled out of the downstairs bed, when I couldn’t sleep, and woke up in the tight, cold twin bed across from my grandmother in the attic. Anyway, my mother wouldn’t miss me. She was a heavy, greedy sleeper and nothing woke her.
We settled the blanket on the tall, uncut grass and opened the box of Graham crackers, passing it back and forth. We felt hickory roots under us. There were so many noises; some were insects, some were the highway, and some we didn’t know. It seemed busy outside, like daytime, except for the dark.
It wasn’t cold. The alfalfa field had been plowed and the corn was all picked, but there was a rich smell, like hay, that seemed to come from the ground. Even though school was starting, the air still smelled like summer. And the sky that night washed low and near us. There were white traces, as if the stars had moved and left trails of themselves, chalk dust on the black.
I chewed the end of a weed. I wasn’t tired.
“You shouldn’t care, you like school. You’re good in school,” Benny said.
“I don like it.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“You have a lot of friends,” I said.
Since Theresa and I made friends, other girls didn’t talk to me at school. When they invited me to their birthday parties, they didn’t invite Theresa. And I was afraid of boys. An older boy had come up to me on the playground and teased me, and I’d hit him so hard his lip bled. He’d told and I’d been in trouble with the Mother Superior again.
“I’m afraid of them at school.”
“You have some friends.”
“Theresa.”
“You get nervous,” he said.
“Yeah, I get nervous.” I felt relieved and happy, having said that. It seemed unimportant now that I’d ever been nervous and I couldn’t imagine feeling afraid again.
“S’cause of your mother.”
>
“What?” I’d never thought of that and it seemed awful, all of a sudden, for us to talk about her that way. And it was such a night, I didn’t want anything wrong.
“Your family’s different.”
“No,” I said. “She’s fine. It’s just me.”
“Shhhh.” He put his hand on the inside of my wrist, where the pulse is, and he went to sleep like that, his fingers on my arm. Everything outside seemed wonderful to me, and falling asleep took a long time. I kept sliding down in the dark and then my eyes opened again. I don’t know what was more amazing: that our land was so changed and beautiful at night, or that it was familiar. It was our old barn, standing crookedly, casting a pure black shadow, and they were our houses in the distance with their porch lights on, but the sky was shining as I’d never seen it and each stalk of long grass seemed to hold an identical stem of moonlight on its side.
I woke up first and watched the daylight come into the sky. I propped up on an elbow. I heard the six-fifty train. I had never seen a sunrise and I’ve never forgotten that one. I must have moved, because Benny woke up, cranky because he felt cold and sore from sleeping on the ground. He ran home, dragging the blanket behind him. But I was happy. I felt incredibly light, walking over the field. I ate the last Graham crackers from the box. I felt I’d discovered something new that would change me and that my old problems, being nervous and afraid, were gone; already they seemed strange and silly to me.
The fall before we moved to Carriage Court, I wanted to go trick-or-treating with Benny, but my mother said no. She offered to take me in the car; she and Lolly would wait by the curb while I ran with my bag to the doors. But I cried and so she finally let me go.
Theresa Griling came, too, she was the only other girl. Their father had driven back from Florida and they were home again. None of us ever talked about when he was gone. That was when they took Netty away, at the end of the summer when he came home. At the railroad tracks, we all started running across the plowed frozen fields in one line. I could feel the hard ridges through the rubber soles of my tennies. After a while I didn’t know where we were. The band of my mask hurt my chin and I had to hold up a bunch of sheet with one hand so I didn’t trip.
