by Mona Simpson
The runways of the Bay City Airport were just clearings in the low woods, rimmed with aspen and pine. When the plane shuddered and rumbled and bumped, we closed our eyes, clinging. When I opened my hand, a few moments later, my mother’s nails had bitten in so hard there was blood. We both felt terrified of landing.
We walked into the airport slowly, dragging our one heavy suitcase. We saw Betty Dorris, the fat woman, still standing behind the ticket counter, wearing a blouse with a white ruffled collar. She had written my father’s plane ticket when he’d first flown away. Betty Dorris had always liked my mother’s men. The last year we’d lived in Bay City, she had invited Ted over to dinner. Now, she wouldn’t look at us.
“God,” my mother said.
Years ago, in December, my mother and I drove to her house and bought Christmas tree ornaments, styrofoam balls she had covered with velvet and lace. We bought them out of pity and then gave them away.
“I think it’s rude that she doesn’t say anything. She sees us,” I said.
“Oh, of course she does. But you know, it’s her way of snubbing me. I suppose she figures Bay City’s hers now that I’m gone. Well, she can have it.”
We braced ourselves, waiting for someone to find us and take us to a car. We didn’t know who it would be. It was a relief not to see them yet. I knew the minute one of them looked at me, it would all begin.
My mother slipped the bag off her shoulder and set it on the floor.
“God, doesn’t it all look small?” She looked around and then back at me. “I mean, the airport, everything, just seems TINY.”
It’s funny how close you get, closer than in life, except for the seconds you touched, and then you were both moving, not seeing, exactly. Looking down at Benny, I thought there was something wrong with the way his nostrils joined his lip. They looked strange and fishlike, inaccurate. I leaned over to kiss him and tasted powder on my mouth and felt the hardness just underneath, like metal.
It was a brass-banded cedar box, lined in pleated pale blue satin. A piece of lace I recognized from my grandmother’s house lay under his head. It had always been draped over the davenport.
Carol stood on the carpet in her nylons, her high heels next to her feet, facing forward.
“They used to water the greens,” Jimmy was saying. “See, then they let them golf free. So he was there with Susie and a whole group of them. And Jay Brozek was there too, he had his own car. So Ben got in the one car with Susie and all the rest.”
“He was in the car?”
“He was in the other car and then Jay called him and said, Hey, Ben, come on over and ride with me, I’m all alone. So he did.”
My mother crossed her arms over her chest and then she wiped her glasses on her silk scarf. She was wearing a black pantsuit, belted. “In the millions,” she said, frowning. Pews lined the center of the room, so people gathered at the edges, where floral arrangements stood on the carpet. Smaller bouquets were set on draped tables. “Absolutely, they’ll be rich from this.”
“He can sue for companionship, for loss of income.” Hal bent back his fingers, counting. “He’ll be able to retire.”
Carol moved from her shoes, which were still planted on the carpet, facing the coffin. “I wanted you to see.” She pushed the back of my neck, dunking me over a bouquet of long-stemmed dark roses. They looked tinged, almost black. “From that little Susie.” My aunt looked at me. “See, I always said, if Ben grew up and wanted to marry that Susie, we would have been glad, Ann. And they’re not rich either, the parents both work. But it’s a clean nice family.”
The couple who owned Krim’s bakery tapped Carol’s shoulder. Grilings shuffled behind them.
“When you were little, you always thought you were adopted,” Theresa told me, “because your mother had blond hair and you had dark.” She reached out to touch my hair, the way she always had, as if black hair were amazing.
I asked Theresa and Mary how they liked the academy. “Fine,” they each said quickly. “Good.” They had known Benny, too, more than I did the past few years.
They told me Rosie had gotten married and moved to Milwaukee and Stevie had gone into the navy. He was on an aircraft carrier going around the world. Theresa said she planned to enlist in the air force when she graduated. On her coat, she was wearing small tin silver wings, from American Airlines. I recognized them, they had been mine. A stewardess gave them to me once when my mother and I flew home from Las Vegas.
“You’re going to join the army and leave Mary all alone?”
“There’s my dad,” Mary said quickly.
“Air force,” Theresa corrected.
Then Jay walked in the back door, flanked on either side by Chummy Brozek and his second wife, Darla, who was so fat she had to make her own clothes. She wore a huge brown smock with regular terry-cloth house slippers.
“She probably can’t get shoes that wide,” my mother whispered. “Look at that. Each foot is like a little dog.”
Jay hovered taller than his father, but his neck wilted, he looked bad in a suit. His dark hair seemed wet and there were cracks and scabs on his lips. You could see the tremble. I stared at the scratch on his cheek. The three of them moved together, sideways, into a pew.
“I know it,” Carol said, somewhere behind me.
All our lives, Brozeks had lived on Lime Kiln Road, Chummy delivered Morning Glory milk.
“Older,” Jimmy said. “They’ve got two in the marines, one in the air force. The air force one is stationed somewhere in Germany, the other two are over in Vietnam. But they’re all alive.”
“He’s going to be a pallbearer, Jay is,” Hal said.
“No,” my mother hissed. She shoved her fist in her mouth.
“That’s what we said too, but Benny would have wanted it this way.”
I’d never seen her before, but I recognized her from the school photograph my grandmother had sent, with Benny’s girlfriend Susie written on the white border. They’d met working on a float. They’d stuffed thousands of square toilet paper tissues into chicken wire to make the top of a covered wagon.
“But the phone rang in the trailer and Carol got it. And they told us he’d been in an accident. They had him in the hospital at Bailey’s Harbor. We had to decide right then if we wanted to fly him down to a big hospital or let the doctor work on him there. Hell, we didn’t know. He was unconscious when we got there. And this dumb doctor is fussing, working on the leg, pinning the leg, and here he’s concentrating all his energy on the leg and the heart stops.”
“But—” I couldn’t finish. I couldn’t imagine Benny without a leg.
“I don’t think he was too much on the ball. You figure, a country doctor up there.”
“A GP probably,” my mother murmured.
Carol, still without her shoes, clasped a hand on Jimmy’s arm. “Look, both of the parents came and brought that Susie. They work, so they must have both taken off.”
“See, if that was you, I would have had you on the next plane to Chicago to the best doctor,” my mother whispered as Carol and Jimmy walked away. “A specialist. Some dumb country doctor sitting the night shift. No wonder, you know.”
“Then he could have died on the plane,” I said.
My mother pushed her face next to mine. “That’s why we moved. So we could be there, living with the very best. Of everything. You should be grateful once in a while, you know? For all I’ve done for you. You don’t see now, but you will someday.”
Susie inched into the pew behind Jay, and laid a hand on his shoulder. They were friends, there was a whole system of love and danger nobody who wasn’t young would see. I was thinking of Benny speeding in the dark, swimming at night with his friends, holding their cigarettes up over the water. All I’d missed the three years since we’d moved. Undressing Susie, screwing her on the dirty sand. Things I didn’t really know, drinking, drugs. I looked at Hal. There was definitely something. All of a sudden, I felt so jealous: Benny had known everything first. Then, as soon as
the return of a breath, I hoped he’d done it all, the things my mother most feared, the worst.
Susie wore suede fringed moccasins, tied around her ankles, under her dress. She had thick ankles and the moccasins made them look thicker, but she didn’t seem to know. Benny wouldn’t have ever noticed either and that made me think that life here was simpler than ours in California. We felt acutely aware of everything wrong with us. I’d been studying with a guy named Peter from my school, and his maid brought us a tray of cookies. “They’re good, you should have some,” he’d said, “or on second thought, maybe you shouldn’t.” The next time I’d stood up and crossed the room to sharpen a pencil, he cupped his hand on my thigh. “That’s where you put it on,” he’d said. My mother and I weren’t the hits we’d hoped to be.
At the back of the room, Hal’s wife, Merry, handed Tina over to Hal’s arms. Merry and Tina lived in a trailer now, twenty miles up out of town.
“They were nice together, that Susie and Ben. They were good kids.” Carol sighed.
“Better than Hal is,” Jimmy said.
Behind us, two women were talking about Darla Brozek’s cooking, how for a long time, she’d had to cook for twelve every night, five of them big boys. One woman started on Darla’s recipe for chicken: you bone and skin two big chickens and lay the meat out in such a glass baking dish. You pour over two cans of soup, cream of mushroom, cream of celery, one of the creams. And then on top of that, she spread out those Pillsbury frozen biscuits and baked at 350 for an hour and oh, was it good.
“The Tet Offensive,” Chummy Brozek said. “Yes, a medal. No, Hal never went. He was here the whole time.”
I walked over to where Hal was standing, against an accordion wall.
“Where’s the gramma?” someone asked.
“They’ve got her sedated, she’s in the hospital.” The time she’d seen Hal on television was the first stroke. Since then, she’d had two. The first time, Carol called us and said we didn’t have to come home. She was already in the hospital recovering from the second stroke when they’d had to tell her about Benny.
That afternoon, when my mother and I had gone to visit, she seemed indifferent. I sat in the corner of the hospital room, watching as she tossed in her bed, my mother hovering over, saying, “Mom, you look great, how do you feel?” her voice loud and bright, as if my grandmother were deaf.
“Leave me be,” she’d said.
Carol stepped back up into her high heels. People were beginning to leave and she had to stand next to Jimmy and shake their hands. She told Jay where the pallbearers would meet and he looked desperately grateful. He kept repeating, “outside back door, eight o’clock in the morning” as if the words were his duty for the rest of his life.
While Jay walked Darla to the car in the parking lot, Chummy lingered inside. “Go ahead and sue me,” he said to Jimmy. “We’ve paid our premiums all our lives for something like this, first Junie and I paid and now Darla and I do. Go ahead and sue me.”
“He’ll have to live with this, Jay will,” Hal said. “Just like I do.”
“What he did is worse,” I said. “You didn’t kill anybody.”
“Didn’t get a chance.”
He meant the war. Whenever Hal brought up Vietnam, the rest of us didn’t say anything.
For a long time we all stood there at the door. We watched people we knew go down the dim hallway into the brightness. It was after Labor Day, but hot outside. We were the last ones there; Carol walked around picking dry flowers from the bouquets. She stepped out of her shoes again. “Do you think we should turn off the lights?”
“They do that,” my mother said. “Leave it.”
Carol rubbed the arch of her foot. “Do you want me to give you my keys?” she said. “You can drive to Dean’s and pick up hamburgers for all of us.” She was the only one who could dare talk about food.
I turned so our knees touched through our nylons. “I don’t have a license.”
“Oh, no, sure, I guess you wouldn’t. You’re a year younger, always.”
We sat near the door a little longer. They gave my mother Jimmy’s keys, but we were all of us shy to go out into that brightness.
Carol shook her head. “You know, I just can’t help it. He was the one drinking. And now he’ll get married and go to college and do all the things.” No one answered. “Thank God, we gave Ben the skis last Christmas. At least he got some fun out of that.”
My mother shoved her knuckles in her mouth. She wiped an eye with one end of her scarf.
“Oh, Adele, don’t, you’ll ruin it. Silk stains and that’s such a very pretty scarf.”
We drove fast, the two of us, windows down, my arm out damming the air, along Bay Highway, past factories and then the fields, in no hurry to get home. I fumbled with the radio knobs. It was September, an Indian summer day, and the fields smelled rich like corn.
We passed Bay Beach and the rides were still going. My mother skidded to a stop and we sat there, parked on the gravel, watching the slow-moving machines.
“Should we just go once?” she said.
Our seat bobbed and then we were high, at the top of the Ferris wheel, suspended while the boy below hurried children down the runway and fastened them in. You could see all the land, in clear geometry, the baby pool set like a gem in cement. The amusement park rides looked quaint and small, painted colors faded and old-fashioned. We were still at the top rocking, tilting. It wasn’t falling that scared me, but the slow band of time as you’re beginning to go, when you can still see the world in clear patterns, the web of lawns, and your fingernails cut into the soft nicked wood and everything in your body screams Stop. But you’re moving.
The car tilted down and I was screaming, probably a long time before I heard it.
When we took her out of the car in the back parking lot of the hospital, the pavement sparkled and she planted her feet far apart, her ankles stiff as if she were on ice. In her room, she felt glad to get out of her clothes. She asked us to close the blinds, the bars of light on the blanket hurt her.
“Don’t you want to talk a little before you go to sleep, Mom?” my mother whispered through the metal poles of the bed. “We haven’t seen you for so long.”
“No,” she said. “Let me be.”
After the funeral, my mother drove downtown to get her divorce. She took a long time dressing for it. Her lawyer told her there would be problems in the way of bills from Ted’s credit card. Ted had ended up paying for our Lincoln. My mother skipped the cemetery. The rest of us went and then followed in a slow caravan back to Lime Kiln Road. Women put on aprons in the kitchen and stood cutting cakes on Carol’s counters. Jimmy stayed outside, tending the barbecue pit. Hal lugged things—silver kegs of beer, trays of chicken for the grill. There was one round table under an umbrella where the priest sat with his feet up. He wore white athletic socks under his sandals.
There was a small stand of pines between my grandmother’s house and Carol’s, in the common backyard. I walked over and stood there, my heels puncturing the dry brown leaves and pine needles. My grandmother once told me that during storms her husband had fastened on snowshoes and trekked out to stand in this grove of trees, watching the snow come down. Protected by the high branches, he stood and watched. She said he loved the silence. The pine smelled sharp and good. This was the place Benny and I buried our pets; a bird with a broken wing we’d fed from an eyedropper, a lame squirrel. We’d sat in here for hours. We’d felt invisible then, inside a dome of different air. Now it was a few scraggly pines. We’d marked the graves with crosses made from clean licked Popsicle sticks and now they weren’t there anymore.
I picked up a handful of dirt and let it fall down off my fingers. Things didn’t stay and for no good reason. My father’s hole in the hedge was a shabby lapse now, almost grown over, as if the bushes were slightly diseased. I thought about our crosses; wood wouldn’t dissolve into the ground, not in five or ten years. No one would take them, but they were gone. Thin
gs just disappeared and we weren’t even surprised. We didn’t expect them to last.
When I walked back to the patio, someone was passing around a large gray rock. “It’s a rock from Pikes Peak,” Hal said. It was labeled in my grandmother’s even penmanship, Rock From Pikes Peak. “I took a trip to Colorado and Ben said he wanted a rock from Pikes Peak.”
“Oh,” the women said, in low voices, as if they were holding a dangerous and beautiful secret.
The rock passed from hand to hand on the back patio, the story repeated in different voices. “He said he wanted a rock from Pikes Peak,” Jimmy said.
Right then, I wanted it to take home with me to keep. I wanted it a lot and I couldn’t think of anything else for a while.
The women stood in the kitchen again, rinsing the dishes and stacking them. Everything outside seemed very clear, the dark green hedge, the corn, the red barn and the highway overpass. The sky was a tender blue with slow pink clouds. Ordinary objects looked precious and defined the way they do sometimes in cold air. It was still early in the afternoon and it seemed as if nothing would change, as if the fields and light had settled into a permanent weather.
The screen banged and my mother tripped, her heel catching in the netted doormat. She let the air out of her cheeks slowly. She stood on one shoe, the other stockinged foot at her knee, her arms crossed over her chest. I was sitting on the warm white stones of the barbecue pit. I waited for her to find me.
Then she saw me and shrugged. “Well, we’re free,” she said. “We didn’t get much, but it’s over. We’re single.”
The trouble with serenity is that it can turn. The trees seem to lose their souls and look again like painted scenery. You hug your knees and kiss them as if chilled. You pinch yourself. Then you turn to other people, talk, you trust only human beings again, as if nature has abandoned you. Christianity must have been born in twilight.
Only the family and Lolly and the priest still sat outside, on the back patio, when the air began to lose its light. The priest lit a cigarette.
