by Mona Simpson
Then there were dim streets where we didn’t know anybody and the boys pressed up to the screen doors first. They were down to the next houses before Theresa and I got our bags open. But the heavy drop of candy in the paper bag was a pleasure, it seemed we were making progress. When we ran, the hard candy knocked on the sides of the bags and the bags banged against our thighs.
Later, we lost the boys and sat on a curb where we couldn’t even find a street sign. I don’t know how long we stayed there. But finally, the boys came back out of the fields. New guys were with them, riding wobbly circles on bikes. Some of them were smoking.
“Where’s Benny?”
“I dunno,” someone said. “Went somewhere with David.”
“He’s supposed to stay with us.”
“Who says?”
“My mom.”
“Her mom says.” The smokers giggled, cigarettes dropping in the dark.
We started running again, Theresa and me in front this time and the guys on bikes bouncing over the fields. Then they came right up next to us, almost hitting us with their wheels.
“Watch out.” I didn’t know yet what they were doing, I didn’t know I couldn’t say no, that they didn’t care. “That’s my foot.”
They pushed us down in the dirt and we both screamed. One pulled up my sheet and grinned at me. He had a crew cut and pimples and dirty hair on his upper lip. There was nothing in him that I recognized.
The other guy was pressing down Theresa’s shoulders. He leaned over and kissed her, making fake smooching sounds like farts.
“Stop it,” I screamed, kicking, before he did anything. My ears were cold and humming. I had a headache like one jagged line. He bent down and clamped his hands over my wrists and he was sitting on my legs. But when I looked up, I thanked God, because there was a circle of boys and I saw Benny. “Benny. Make him stop.”
I was so relieved to see Benny I closed my eyes, but then when I opened them again, he was talking to the guy next to him as if he hadn’t seen me.
“Benny!”
But he didn’t look down at me. He wouldn’t. Then, all of a sudden, I felt it. A cold blade against my cheek, under my hair, on my neck. It was a scissors. The guy was cutting my hair. I heard the scissors clicking, the short, snuffling noises the hair made when it came off. Benny knew about my hair, he knew I’d been growing it all my life. It was unusual. Everyone said that about my hair. It was pure black. It was going to be one of the things that would help me get on television. My grandmother said it was so dark you could see other colors in it. I started to cry, but quiet. I didn’t even care about Benny helping me anymore. It was too late. My hair was half gone. I just wanted it to be a dream, but I knew it was true. I just wanted my hair back, that was all I wanted and all I could imagine ever wanting.
The two older guys got on their bikes and rode away. That was the way they were, older kids, worse than lawless. They could just come out, get you alone and hurt you and then ride away. The rest of the guys, our guys, the guys we knew, started running across the uneven field. Theresa staggered up, she was crying, too, but she started following after them.
“Stevie,” she was yelling and running, “Stev-vie, you’re gonna be in troub-bel, I’m telling Da-ad,” but she was falling forward, tripping and then getting up again, heaving harder, and I doubt her brother even heard her, she was so far behind.
I just stayed on the ground till they were far away. There was noise from trucks on the highway somewhere, but I couldn’t see it. Then somebody was running back towards me. It was Benny, but I didn’t want Benny then. He stood ten feet in front of me and screamed.
“Come on. Get up. You want to stay here all night, that’s your business, but I’m supposed to bring you home.”
I’m not going to say anything, I was thinking, I knew I didn’t have to. There was nothing anyone could do to me now because I didn’t care.
“Please, will you please come on. Just this once.” Benny knelt down in front of me, moving his hands, wanting me to look at him.
I was trying to collect all my hair from the ground. The pieces felt light and soft and it was hard to see them in the dark. Mostly, I was doing it by touch. Benny scratched under his sock, but I didn’t care what he did. He took off running then, yelling so the rest of those guys didn’t go without him. I let him. Let them all go. I was wadding the hair in my hand and then dropping the balls in the bag with my candy. At least they didn’t take my candy. The hair wadded up in balls, it was neat, it just made these puffs with air inside. When I reached, my knee touched the scissors. They were still there, little rounded elementary school scissors, the same kind I had at home. They lay open, a thin blue metal. I wasn’t going to touch them.
“Come on, you coming or not, last chance!” I thought I heard Benny but I wasn’t sure anymore. I was lowering my head to the ground, it was almost there, then there. My head felt intricate like an ant farm. I thought I could hear blood moving in tunnels.
But in a while my joints got wrong. My arms felt twisted in the shoulder sockets. I knew I’d better get up. It had been a long time, the trucks were still running somewhere and there was nobody else around, there hadn’t been anybody for hours maybe. I’d have to do something myself. So I started walking with my bag towards the lights, the nearest lights, which were far away.
Ringing the doorbell, I almost fell asleep and a man came and let me in to use the phone. The kitchen gleamed bright and I didn’t even have to think about the number. It was there, the first thing I knew. My mother answered and when she heard it was me, she started screaming. I couldn’t listen to it and the phone dropped down so it was just hanging, knocking against the wall.
The man who lived there picked it up. I sat in a kitchen chair. When he put the receiver back on the wall, he told me she was on her way.
“She’s got the address and all. It won’t be long for you now. You’re pretty far from home, you have to be careful on Halloween, you know, the things you read.”
A chair skidded back on the linoleum and he was across from me at the table, wearing black plastic glasses, with corn-colored hair. My eyes slumped to sleep. I didn’t want to bother with anything, talking, nothing. It seemed she would be there as soon as I opened my eyes.
“Would you like an apple?” Something in his voice made me lift my head and see his hand lingering on one of the apples in a bowl between us. They were red, streaked with beads of other colors, beautiful all of a sudden. I wanted one but I was afraid. I couldn’t decide what to do and then lights washed in the front window and I recognized the sound of my grandmother’s brakes, like a voice. I thanked God it was my grandmother’s car. I ran out with my bag in my arms and got into the backseat. Then we were all inside, my grandmother driving, my mother in the front bending over and looking at me.
“Oh God. Oh, my God, give me strength.” She was kneeling on her seat then and pulling the short hair out from my face.
“What have they DONE to you? Who did that, tell me right now, who did that to you. Gram, would you look at her? They’ve ruined her hair, they’ve just ruined her. I can’t believe it. How could you let them do this to you?
“You were the one, you had to go out. You were so smart, you thought you could keep up with the big kids, well, look at you now, just look at you. Sure, now you cry. Well, you’ll have to live with it. It’s your head, not mine. How could you let them DO that to you? Couldn’t you run and call home? Couldn’t you call me? Tell me, Honey, what happened?”
I was lying with my face pressed into the crease of the seat, eating my own breath back like another person’s. I could taste the vinyl. I knew my mother would go on and on. She’d just keep yelling and yelling and pretty soon all we’d hear was her voice going up and down like a siren.
It was all noise. She was mad, she hated my weakness and wanted to beat it out of me and then she’d knock her hands against her own chest, killing the air there, too. I felt dry. I was a piece of wood. My grandmother just drove. We
did things while my mother felt. We were still. Furniture. She took up the room in the car, sucked all the color out of us, eating the quiet for herself and all we heard was her collection, and we hated it. We could have punctured the air with our hate, it was that sharp, it had been turning for so long.
In the house, my mother marched right to the bathroom and called me. “Ann, come in here a second.”
My grandmother grabbed my arm before I went. “Listen here, you, don’t you worry. Tomorrow, I’ll take you to the Harper Method and she’ll give you a good cut. It’s good to get rid of that heavy hair, anyway. It’ll look real nice short.” We stood in front of the bathroom. I gave my grandmother my bag of candy before I went in.
In front of the mirror, my mother combed my hair. She closed the door and locked it.
“I mean, it’s what MADE you special. It was your crowning glory. You talk about going to California and auditions for television, well, let me tell you, other kids are cuter. Your hair was what you had going for you. Without it, I just don’t think you’ll stand out.”
She shook her head, pulling a strand of my hair up and letting it fall back on my face, but even then, she couldn’t resist looking at herself in the mirror and sucking in her own cheeks.
“People say my eyes are nice.” I looked up at my mother.
“Who?”
“Lolly said and the ice skating pro said so too.”
“Oh, Honey, they were just saying that. Ted said that, really, because he likes me. Your eyes are green, but some kids have a deeper, richer green. Your green is kind of ordinary.”
My mother herself had blue eyes.
The next morning, my grandmother was waiting at the kitchen table. She had braided the hair she found in the brown bag of candy and sewn the two thick braids into the back of a yellow straw hat. “With the hat on, they’ll all think you still have your long hair,” she said.
I hadn’t seen my mother yet.
That afternoon, my mother leaned against our white Volkswagen, her voice high above, far, her eyes on the telephone wires. “I think I may just go away somewhere, California maybe, maybe just away. You don’t need me here.”
I pulled her blouse, hard, trying to tug her down. Her face tilted up to the sky. “I do, Mom,” I said. Her blouse that day was pink gingham, her initials embroidered over the pocket in white, fancy letters. The sky was pale blue, with a few clouds, the telephone poles, brown and scarred. She looked down at me, took off the straw hat and tossed it on the grass. She ruffled my hair. “You do, huh? Well, okay.”
It only took the smallest thing. No one else in the world, nothing mattered.
11
LIME KILN ROAD
There’s a place in Beverly Hills where my mother and I lived for a little more than a year. From the outside the building looks like sandstone. The concrete seems gold, instead of gray, the slight difference in color of sand, when the sun comes out. On either side of the entrance, a molded lion’s head holds a brass ring in its mouth.
At night, small lamps hidden in ferns lit the lions’ heads. My mother and I always thought the building looked very elegant. For one thing, it was a move up for us, from our furnished studio. The apartments were like ski condominiums—there were six units, two floors each, on either side of a courtyard—and they seemed to be newly built. We felt proud to move in. My mother hired Daniel Swan’s twin sisters to help us pack and clean. We threw out our unattractive odds and ends and we lined the new kitchen drawers with checkered paper. We had high hopes. We wanted to live like other people.
The apartment retained a just-built feeling, even after we moved in. Maybe it was because we had no furniture. The long, newly painted white walls of the downstairs and the beige carpet throughout, its nap still even to one side, stayed bare. But it was more. The insides of closets smelled like fresh-cut wood. We moved a bed into each of the bedrooms. My mother’s room had built-in dressers; I just stacked my clothes in the closet. Ted’s huge radio sat alone on the living room floor downstairs.
We often leaned on the carpeted steps in the middle of the apartment and looked at the light coming in through the porch’s glass doors, hitting our living room walls in spikes and patterns, sometimes splintering into colors. We both felt pleased with the apartment, with the fact that there was an upstairs and a downstairs. We kept the bare place very clean. We ate most of our meals out and when we stayed home, we balanced plates on our knees, sitting on the carpeted stairs. I did homework on my bed.
My room had a cubbyhole, where I stored things. A door opened out of the wall, and inside, there was a plywood shelf. Every night, I put my schoolbooks there. Slanted two-by-fours sloped from the ceiling down into the foundations of the house. The boards were rough and unsanded, light wood. Perhaps they kept the closets smelling new. Between beams was nothing. You could put your hand through. I tried to be careful when I laid things on the shelf, so they wouldn’t fall.
I don’t know why the space was left there. Probably it should have been tamped with insulation or more wood. Perhaps the chute was a carpenter’s mistake, someone else’s careless harm. I’ve thought about that odd construction many times because one day that winter, after months and a habit of nervous care, I knocked my elbow on a corner and my jewelry box fell down.
“Why on earth did you put it there? I told you to watch that edge, for God’s sakes. You knew it could go right through.”
But that came afterwards. First I was just stunned. I didn’t know why. I thought, Why would I leave something precious in the only unsafe place in the apartment? Perhaps there was a simple reason: it was a shelf. I had no dresser or desk for small things. But I could have put it on the floor.
It was the thing Benny gave me before I left, a tin box, with a hinged lid. Inside, I’d nested a ring, a handkerchief, a rolled-up list of my friends’ names. That chute led to nowhere, there was no basement in that apartment. Things that fell down the chute were irretrievable. I imagined the tin box lying on its hinges like an opened clam, still, on the dirt floor among bare foundation beams.
Several times I went to ask the manager. After we moved out, I walked by the building. I’ve written letters to the investment company that owns it. I don’t know what it would mean to me now, the box and its contents recovered. Ben has been dead for years, the box was a collection of childhood things. Still, it must be there at the bottom of that building like the real ticking heart of a huge machine. You remember the places you’ve lost to.
The night Ben died, we still lived in the small furnished studio where my mother and I slept in the same bed. She shook me awake, her hands rough and gentle at the same time. She squatted near the floor, rocking on her heels, the phone to her ear. It was still night and she was screaming.
She told me he’d been in a car. Jay Brozek had been driving. Jay had been speeding and he ran into a tree. Jay was fine, just a scratch on his cheek.
A smile grew on my face, I didn’t have the strength to stop it. I felt the muscles rippling in my cheeks. Her face went crooked with pity. “Awww,” she kept saying, “awww, poor Annie, poor poor Carol.” When we hugged, we both squatted on the floor. I tasted her hair, a burnt taste, and her breasts moved against mine through our T-shirts.
We dressed and waited at the Western Union office with our suitcase. Carol wired us money for tickets. It was still dark out, when we drove to the airport. We didn’t tell anyone where we were going; my mother phoned in to both our schools and said we were sick. It was a Monday morning. We left our car in the airport parking lot. This was our first trip home since we moved.
In Chicago, we changed to a small, older plane with scratchy, red plaid upholstery on the seats. The stewardesses seemed different, too. I recognized their voices. For the first time I heard that we had accents where we’d come from. It was in the way they said their o’s. The stewardesses all wore the same maroon nail polish, matching their uniform belts. Their faces were not as delicate or chiseled as their counterparts’ on the coastal fli
ght. Maybe airlines chose stewardesses for features and the larger, less balanced profiles were left here, caught in the narrow local triangle above the ground where they grew up. Those voices, their ready nasal friendliness, sounded homely. And then I thought of how we spoke, my mother and me. I didn’t think we talked that way anymore. From then on, I started being careful of my o’s.
My mother turned in her seat. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Sort of a dumb accent, when you listen. Uneducated,” she whispered. She bent over me and peered out the window. “But look at all those little farms. It really is pretty land.”
The plane shuddered into its descent. Over the microphone, a stewardess asked us to buckle our seat belts.
Her voice hummed with pride and capability. Theresa Griling had wanted to be a stewardess, either that or a hairdresser someplace where rich people lived, Beverly Hills or Florida. When she’d talked like that, it had sounded brave and dangerous, something I’d never do. But, now these stewardesses seemed perfectly safe. Even in the air, even if they slept with a married pilot when the plane was grounded in Chicago for a snowstorm, even their adventures would be innocent. They would probably end up married and living somewhere within a couple hundred miles of the place they were born. They’d grow firm, righteous, the way good mothers become, their young optimism satisfied and thickened. Even those who’d chosen flight and travel, lightness, the air—you knew, listening to them, they’d never get too far away. Gravity sunk in the bottom of their voices, like the thumping of feet on the ground. Their flights would keep a tight perimeter between Chicago, the Twin Cities and Green Bay. We seemed different, already. I didn’t know what would happen to us.
