by Mona Simpson
I was thinking of Ben again, I imagined him drinking margaritas, banana daiquiris, the way he danced, stamping his feet, spinning, lightly touching Susie’s breasts by the side of the house, driving, speeding in the night. “You can smoke?” I said to the priest.
“Sure.”
“He’s a super-duper-modern priest,” Carol said. “They give guitar masses now. Oh, it’s all changed since you left. They go to Michigan on retreats. I’ve seen this one in blue jeans.”
The priest laughed, his soft voice dissolving quickly in the air.
“Can you drink?”
He nodded.
“So can you screw now, too?”
“Ann,” my mother said. She and Lolly warmed their hands over the barbecue pit. “I don’t know where she learns that language. Two days here. She doesn’t talk like that in Beverly Hills.”
“Some things haven’t changed,” the priest said.
Jimmy leaned over the table. “Annie here asked you, Father, because she was interested.”
“Oh, Jimmy,” Carol said.
It was too early for crickets, but it seemed we could hear the night coming slowly, before the light dimmed, a shifting of the earth. The trees moved as if they were pulling into themselves.
“Oh, and he’s a good preacher, too, Ann. You should hear him. They come all the way over from the West Side.”
“We go at night now,” Jimmy said. “Guitar mass.”
“You didn’t know your aunt and uncle were such swingers.”
“Me, I don’t go to church,” Hal said. “I pray by myself. God knows what I’m saying. I just ask him straight. None of this bullshit.”
Nobody paid any attention to Hal, but that was normal. We were all used to ignoring him.
“Different for you,” Hal said, pointing to his daughter, Tina. “You have to pray out loud. And you know why? Because I said so.”
“I do,” she said.
The five o’clock train came, a long faltering wail in the distance.
“Are you too cold?” Jimmy asked me.
“No, it’s okay.”
“’Cause I can go get you a sweater. You’d fit in one of his.” It broke my heart, Jimmy like that, kind.
“So do you like California?” the priest asked my mother. His forehead had no lines, he seemed so innocent, local.
She shrugged. “Well, yes and no. I do and I don’t.” Her arms spread out, glamorous, over the pit. “I mean, I work nine hours a day and drive two more and just so we can live in one room where she goes to a decent school. So there’s no time, really, or money, for me to have any fun. But, yes, I’m glad to be doing it. I’m glad to be giving her this opportunity.”
No one said anything. The ice cubes knocked together in Jimmy’s glass. Even Lolly seemed embarrassed, looking down. Our leg waxes, the days of facials, hours in tight pink masks, then the steam room at Elizabeth Arden’s. I got to go, too, Saturdays and her date days with Josh Spritzer. The opera dress with windows of sheer fabric, revealing printed scenes of other cloth. Palm Springs, the ocean, the desert. We had fun. But I didn’t say anything, either.
Jimmy stood up, he was always the worst with my mother. Carol seemed to have a genetic patience for her.
“Let me tell you something, Adele. We all work too, we—”
“Jimmy, don’t,” Carol said.
“I’m going to go get another drink.” He went in through the sliding glass doors he’d built himself, years ago, when Benny and I were pests, underfoot.
My mother appeared injured. “Well, sure you work, too, but you have the house, you have the trailer—” My mother moved her face, looking around at it all.
I stared at her. “You wouldn’t want it,” I said.
Lolly reached out and touched my mother’s arm.
“Just today, let’s not have any fighting once,” Carol said.
My mother and Lolly started whispering between themselves. “Well she …” my mother was saying, as I moved away.
The night before, we slept in my grandmother’s house. We needed to be alone. We’d snooped around, opened drawers just to see the things once again where they’d always been, picked at food in the refrigerator. My mother sat on the kitchen floor with her legs spread out, searching the bottom cupboards for hidden cookies.
“They’re in here somewhere.” She’d been happy. I could have let her look, but she had this grin that bothered me.
I told her. “She stopped making them years ago.”
“No,” she said. “Those round flat butter cookies. She hides them in here somewhere.”
“With the ground hickory nuts and powder sugar on top.” I shook my head. “It hurt her eyes too much to pick the nuts.”
“Oh.”
An hour later, my mother came and touched my shoulder and said, “How did you know she stopped making those?”
I shrugged. “I just knew.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that,” she said.
Then she called Josh Spritzer. The way she talked there was no possible way he could imagine our kitchen. She sat in the corner, her bare feet up on the vinyl chair. The electric clock above the stove buzzed, the cuckoo thugged, the refrigerator churned and the fluorescent curved tube of lights over the table hummed. The inside of houses in the country were like that then. Because of the silence, like a long throat, outside.
I could tell from the way her voice rose in waves of enthusiasm—too much music, nerve and light—that Josh Spritzer didn’t want to be listening. Her breath gathered as she began each sentence. “And my sister, on the day of the funeral, was counting the flower arrangements.” She laughed, trying to make it light.
After, she went humming through the house, filing her nails. But the phone call hadn’t gone well; when she hung up, she’d stayed where she was and stared ahead at the wall for a full minute.
“Maybe we should go back early, huh?” She stopped in the living room doorway and looked around. “Our life isn’t here anymore, you know? It’s there.”
Tina was fidgeting and when Hal yelled at her, she started to cry. He picked her up, then, and spanked her and her yelps escalated to screaming. Our heads bent down over the table.
“Hal, just leave her be once.” That was Carol. “Ogh, Hal, she’s overtired.”
He pointed, with the hand not holding Tina, to his chest. “She’s my kid, mine. She’s not yours. I’ll do what I want with her.” Tina stopped crying. She hung still now, limp off his shoulder.
Jimmy was standing at the sliding glass doors. He let them pass.
“I mean, if I’d had half the help she did from my father.” My mother had been talking to Lolly but her voice rose loud in the pause. “The house and every year a new car.”
Jimmy just stood with his drink, inside the open glass doors. “Adele, come here a second.”
She looked up. She was sitting on the edge of the stone barbecue pit, a leg swinging over the side. “What for?”
“I want to show you something.”
“Show me what?”
“I want to show you the deed and the mortgage for this house I’ve been paying on for twenty-one years and that I’m still paying.”
My mother shook her head. For a moment, I blushed. I thought she was ashamed. But she looked up again. No one could beat my mother. “You know who helped me when I got married? Nobody.”
“Come in here.”
My mother started crying. “I’m not going in there with you, Jimmy. You’ll hurt me. I know that’s what you want.”
The priest sat chewing on the end of a weed and the evening train went by, a low crooked moan from the tracks. The young priest looked wistful then, as if he wished he were going somewhere.
Carol stood and held her elbows in her hands. Her mouth opened, but she must have thought better of it. She just shook her head.
“You’ve got your chance to see. Either look at it or shut up from now on.”
My mother lifted her head. “I won’t be talked to like that, Jimmy, b
y you or by anyone. I’m going home to Mom’s now, because really, I’m very, very tired.”
She started walking. Lolly stayed a moment longer, staring down at the fire. Then, reluctantly, it seemed, she stood and followed my mother over the lawn. A little smoke rose from the pit, and I watched the light from the priest’s cigarette.
My mother was almost to my grandmother’s porch. Then she turned and called me. She slapped her thigh the way people do calling their dogs in from outside. Lolly stood halfway across the dusky lawn and then she turned and walked to her car. It was almost dark. I stayed in my chair. In back of my grandmother’s house the fields spread still and empty. A dirt road ran to the barn, then the highway, above the little houses with yellow lights on for suppertime, where a wagon and a wheelbarrow lay tipped. There wasn’t much.
The land—it was the same, only small, the trees seemed lower, the houses simple compared to those we’d seen. Still, I understood things here. I knew how to be comfortable. We weren’t doing so well in California.
My mother stood across the yard, her elbows pointing out, hands on her waist, like a harsh letter of some other alphabet. She was waiting for me. And I wouldn’t move.
“You can stay here,” Carol said, “I’ll put sheets on his bed for you.” Jimmy nodded and closed the glass doors. They hadn’t even been in Benny’s room yet. Years later, when I came back on a Greyhound bus, it was exactly the same, his size 14 boy’s sweaters folded in the drawers, his model cars on shelves, airplanes hanging on strings from the ceiling.
My mother called me again. Everyone waited. Cars on the highway moved slowly, nothing else changed. The barn looked old, unused for years. My grandmother had seemed tiny in the hospital. I looked down at my legs, in dark pantyhose, good high-heeled shoes. The names and prices of these seemed like secrets I would be embarrassed to tell. I couldn’t stay here. There was nothing. I’d be like my mother, always wanting to go away.
I looked up. The priest was still chewing a weed. Carol bit her cuticle, her hand close to her mouth, Hal poked the coals of the fire. I did what they all knew I’d do. I followed my mother.
She yelled over the sound of pipes in the bathroom. “You know, I never realized how backwards they still are. They’ve got the faucet for hot and the faucet for cold and you can’t really ever get it right.”
I opened a drawer underneath the telephone on the kitchen counter. The half-sized pencils my grandmother used had ridged tips from the way she sharpened them, with a knife. I’d seen her many times, her broad back hunched in concentration over the wastebasket. Deep in the drawer, I found a folded communion veil, a box of oil pastels, a deck of cards with a scene of Canadian wilderness on their browned backs. There were other things: a tiny Bible with four-leaf clovers pressed inside, so their outlines stained the pages; numerous finished tick-tack-toe games; address labels; glue; a cookie cutter in the shape of a hammer. I flipped through one of the small notebooks. It was mostly grocery lists in faded pencil. A stick of butter, chicken pie, bread, a vegetable. Then I came across a list of the names of my grandmother’s friends. Mabel, Jen, Ellie, April, Sarah, Jude. The women, now in their seventies, she called the girls. She’d sat down once with this little spiral-topped notebook and one of her soft-leaded, knife-sharpened pencils and made a list of her friends. It was something I’d done in Beverly Hills, where I didn’t have many, where we weren’t as impressive as we’d hoped. I couldn’t stand to think my grandmother ever felt the way I did. From the drawer, I stole an old implement, something I didn’t recognize that said Callodean’s Tin in wood-burned letters on its side. It was just some old tool that fit the hand but had no use. I wanted it. I slipped it in my pocket.
My mother hollered from the tub. “And who do you think’d take care of you here? Your grandmother’s in the hospital, she’ll probably die, Carol and Jimmy are being nice, sure, but they’ll get over it with their money and you just watch now that they’ll have something, they’re not going to give it to us. You’d think they’d help me after I’ve been alone all these years, but will they? No.”
“You’re selfish.” I said it quietly, in the kitchen, but she heard me.
“Oh, I can see, it’s you too now. All my life, all I’ve ever done is give to you and do for you and now you go against me with them, too. Well, I can see from now on, I’m going to give to ME.”
I was tired. “I’m not going against you, so let’s just be quiet.”
“I’m not going to be quiet,” she yelled. A second later, she stood dripping in front of me, her face crumpled. “You know I’ve given you everything I could,” she said. She was looking at me, pitiful, I can’t describe it.
“I know,” I said. It was true.
We left the next morning, days earlier than our tickets said. We all seemed subdued when Carol drove past the Oneida land to the airport. I kept thinking that they’d paid for our plane; we were leaving so soon, they might feel like they paid for a convenient divorce. But then again, Carol seemed tired. She probably wanted to be by herself. She was getting like my grandmother. When something was wrong, they wanted to be closed up in their houses, alone.
Carol drove very carefully and slow. Her lips wove, she kept licking them, and her mouth constantly rearranged itself as if any position felt uncomfortable. We wanted her to just drop us off, so she could drive right home, but she wouldn’t, she parked and waited until we boarded the plane.
Once we were in the air, we felt giddy. We both loved airplanes; they were like doctors; they made us feel rich and clean. We were dressed in our best clothes and new stockings charged at Shreve’s. No one seeing us would know anything true.
In Chicago, we bought magazines. We drank Kahlua and creams. We felt like busy celebrities rushing home to our lives. And that’s the way Carol must have seen us, too, as she lugged our big suitcase up the ramp, while we held our short dresses down, walking onto the plane. But when we landed at LAX, no one was waiting for us and we had to find our own car parked in the ridiculously complicated system of lots and after we got home, scraping the car so it shrieked against the concrete embankment of our driveway, my mother said she didn’t want to call Josh Spritzer, that she’d wait for him to call her. And the phone didn’t ring at all that night or the next night either.
Once that fall, my mother drove with the Witch to Palm Springs. They came back with bad sunburns and three hundred dollars’ worth of dates. Dates and figs and other dried fruits. Daniel Swan and I sat on the porch steps of the San Ysidro house, watching them haul the bags in.
“Come on, kids, give us a hand,” my mother called.
“We’re absolutely broke.” I turned to Daniel, my cheek on my knee.
He laughed. “We can beat you there. We’re in debt.”
Halfway between home and Palm Springs, a place called Hadley’s sold discounted desert dates (and figs and other dried fruits). My mother decided they were a savings. She and the Witch said they’d freeze them all, then fix them in cellophane and fancy baskets at Christmas and give them as presents to the people they worked with.
“Listen, that’s part of your job,” my mother said, later, as we unpacked the plastic bags into our freezer. “And you don’t know how much things cost around Christmas.” The new apartment had a clean, large refrigerator. We’d moved not long after we came back from Wisconsin.
My mother got home late that winter, sometimes at nine or ten on school nights. We never had much food in the house, so we went out to dinner. Sometimes, when we felt too tired or broke, we’d skip supper and just go to bed.
I started breaking into the stash of frozen dates. I tore open the plastic bags and stood by the freezer when I was hungry, eating handfuls of them, frozen. My mother began to do it, too. We’d stand in our clean, empty kitchen, the freezer open, chewing hard. It was just something we did in that apartment. Every household has its habits. The dates were good but tough. We worried about chipping our teeth.
By November, all the bags were torn open. Sometimes
my mother would shake her head. “A hundred ninety dollars on snacks,” she’d say and sigh.
But we kept doing it anyway. She did it too. We were hungry a lot of the time.
Even though we both liked that apartment, everything went wrong in it. I invited three girls from school over for dinner and when I put the chicken in the oven, we discovered the gas was turned off. My mother had to go knocking at neighbors’ doors until she found one who’d let us cook my chicken. She had to do it, I was too embarrassed.
And around Christmas, the day I had my first real date, my mother called, falling apart, somewhere on the highway.
My date was with an older guy named Ronnie. Daniel Swan and I—kids our age—couldn’t drive yet. This guy had a blue Porsche and he skied, he had that white-eyed, raccoon tan. He’d run for school president and I’d worked on his campaign. His mother’s greatest ambition was for all her sons to be admitted to Stanford. She’d hired a rock band to play at his campaign parties and she liked me because I’d drawn his campaign poster, a huge oil pastel on butcher paper. Probably as compensation, he’d asked me out.
It was a dark day, cool, even for winter. I rode my bike home right after school and washed my hair, taking an hour to blow-dry, curling it under. Then my mother called.
“It’s me, your mother,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“I’m on the highway, can’t you hear the cars?”
I touched a wall. “Where are you calling from?”
“Boy, are you dumb sometimes. I just told you. I’m at a filling station out in the middle of nowhere. Listen to me. I’m not coming home.” Her voice was odd and flat. I tasted metal in my mouth.
While we were quiet then, it came over the phone—the roar of trucks and cars. “Now, listen. When they call you, I want you to say you don’t know anything. And I’m going to tell you now about the insurance policy. The papers are wrapped in tinfoil at the bottom of the freezer. Underneath the dates. You’ll get twenty-five thousand dollars for me. So take care of yourself, sweetie. You’re going to have to from now on. ’Cause I won’t be around. But I know you. You’ll manage fine.”
