by Mona Simpson
My mother waited to start eating her pudding, watching her hostess’s spoon, the way she’d been taught when she was a girl. Unfortunately, Mrs. Keller was fussing with the coffee service on the second dessert cart. My mother looked to her right and her left, where people sat eating, and she smiled with anticipation, fanning her dessert napkin out over her thighs and folding her own hands politely on her lap.
Outside, in the open air, walking down the street to our car, my mother grabbed my arm. “Did you see Tony Camden, how he kept looking at me? I’d turn the other way and then I’d peek back and he’d look again. This dress was really great. You know, it was expensive when I bought it, but boy, every time I get looks.”
“Mom, he’s married.”
I kicked a wheel of our car, hands in my pockets, stamping. We were shouting because my mother walked eight feet away on a driveway so she wouldn’t wet her heels on the grass.
“Boy, he sure is and did you catch how much younger? But I’ll tell you, he was attracted to me, Ann. And does HE look great for his age. I’m going tomorrow and get us some wheat germ oil and cod liver oil and we’re going to start. Now, what did he say, a tablespoon of wheat germ and a teaspoon of, or no, was it the other way around? Anyway, I have it written down.”
She opened her side of the car. We both stood there a second. “Honey, look at the stars. It’s a real clear desert night. Dry. Feel that air.”
“Mom, open my door. Let me in.”
“You’re really not romantic, are you?” she said, looking at me, perplexed.
“Just cold.”
She shuddered loudly, sliding in the car and turning on the heat. “Brrr. Me, too.
“I’ll tell you, Honey, that Peter is in love. The way he looks at you.”
“Do we have to drive by Josh Spritzer’s tonight? You know he’s gone,” I said.
“Oh, let’s. I feel like a little ride, actually.”
The next time I saw Peter Keller in school, he told me, “They all liked you. They didn’t like your mother, they thought she was strange, but Tony Camden said you were cute.” Peter looked at me with a tilted face, as if he were offering something. I felt like pushing him so he fell hard on the concrete floor of the hallway.
But I didn’t. I was scared of them, too. I smiled back and made polite conversation.
I probably picked the wrong time to ask. It was a weeknight and my mother seemed tired. We licked our ice cream cones, driving past Josh Spritzer’s apartment. He’d been home from Canada four days and she still hadn’t seen him.
“When are we going to call that boy’s agent?” I was trying to sound casual. I remembered the boy’s name perfectly well. Timmy Kennedy.
“Well, Honey, to tell you the truth, you’ve got to take off about ten pounds.” She slapped her thigh. “Right here. I’ve been kind of waiting to see when you would, but you just gobble down the milkshakes.” That night we’d eaten dinner at the Old World, which claimed to make milkshakes with entirely natural ingredients.
“You’re the one who drags us out to get ice cream cones every night.”
“Well, one little dip isn’t going to hurt.”
My mother drove to the Linville Nutrition Center, a wholesale health food store decorated in old-fashioned pink. She bought an electric juicer and huge bottles of cod liver oil and wheat germ oil. The grocery bags said KEEP IN THE PINK.
“So, I just don’t know about this man,” my mother said, her legs crossed, leaning out of her chair towards Mrs. Keller. They sat on the terrace overlooking the yard. I’d been on the courts with Peter, trying to learn to hit the ball. Now Peter rallied with his teacher, starting his daily lesson. Mrs. Keller offered me a glass of lemonade from a cart as I sat down, eyeing the court while she poured.
“Hi, Honey,” my mother said to me. “He’s just not stable, Nan. You know, one minute he says one thing, the next minute, it’s something else. I can’t plan. Sometimes, I even think of just calling up his psychiatrist and saying, ‘Hey, what’s going on with this man?’ ” My mother laughed, an asking laugh.
Mrs. Keller responded with a smile that was less a show of support than an act of charity.
Encouraged, my mother went on. “I’d like to tell his psychiatrist a thing or two.”
My back stiffened and I pulled my knees up to my chest. I knew my mother shouldn’t have been telling Mrs. Keller those things. Mrs. Keller stirred her drink and put the swizzle stick down on a napkin.
“You know, Adele, he does have a reputation as something of a ladies’ man. I’d be careful of him.” Her gaze drifted back to the tennis court. “Good shot, Peter,” she said softly.
My mother took Mrs. Keller’s remark as an invitation for further disclosure. She thought about Josh Spritzer so often she needed to talk. The less she saw him, the more she craved talking. Just saying his name seemed to calm her.
“Well, I heard that too, before I started going out with him. But he wants to change, he told me that at the very beginning. I have to say this for Josh Spritzer, that he WAS honest, he told me he had a fear of commitment. So I suppose, for a while it was fine. But now, I think he’s getting scared. He got himself in deeper than he planned.”
“Hmm,” Mrs. Keller said. “Well, are you seeing anyone else?”
My mother fell back in her chair, her hands loose on the armrests. She could have talked for ten straight hours about Josh Spritzer, speculating, analyzing the intricacies of his character and planning strategy. She would have loved to.
I wondered if she ever thought of Lolly and our old porch, looking over the fields, with the constant running sound of the highway. Maybe that was the real happiness in her life, sitting with a friend, easily plotting, yearning, planning out romances—more than the romances themselves. My mother’s two passions were for difficult men and expensive clothing, neither obtained by the usual methods, but with a combination of luck, intuition and calculated risk. She could also talk for hours about how she acquired an Alan Austin green leather coat from a cleaner’s in Covina for almost nothing, how an old woman gave her a Chanel suit, twenty years ago.
“Oh, sure,” she said, recovering. “A few. There are a few other people.” She didn’t feel quite happy with that, though. She wanted to turn the conversation back to Josh. She wanted to turn every conversation back to Josh. “But you know, Nan,” she whispered, leaning forward, “I really don’t care for any of them.”
“Well, you never know what’ll happen,” Mrs. Keller replied. With that, she stood up, carrying her drink, and walked over to the terrace ledge. “Look at those lime trees. We pay a three-quarters-time gardener and I don’t know what he does all day. Plants weeds. The help situation is impossible. And when you think, really, of what they get. The pay’s not bad and our backhouse is quite a nice place to live, when you consider what’s on the market.”
“Oh, it’s fabulous!” my mother burst out.
We all stood, looking over the yard, Peter and his tennis teacher swinging languorously, the still pool behind them under the trees. No one said anything for a while.
“Well, I suppose we should skedaddle, Ann.” My mother slapped her hand lightly on her side.
She left it so Mrs. Keller could insist we both stay for dinner, but Mrs. Keller didn’t. She just turned around, mildly smiling. “Good-bye.”
When we got desperate for money, my mother decided I was thin enough to see Timmy Kennedy’s agent. “Who knows, maybe you’ll land a series and then we can buy some decent furniture. Who knows?”
I wore tight ironed jeans and a pale green midriff shirt that left two inches of my belly bare. My hair hadn’t been cut for a long time, and the ends of it curled under, so it touched my back on the bare spot. It felt creepy, like fingers there.
We started early because we didn’t know exactly how long it would take to get there. Ellen Arcade’s office was in Riverside. All the way, my mother just drove and we didn’t say anything. I hadn’t eaten much since my mother made the appointment. And fo
r the past week, I’d sat out in the sun every afternoon, my towel on the overgrown grass of Roxbury Park.
We stopped at two gas stations in Riverside to get directions. And when we parked on the lot in front of the building, we were still a half hour early. It was a huge gray complex and around it were wasted fields and overpasses. I scooched up on the seat to look into the car mirror. All during the ride, I’d kept my eyes closed and my face aimed at the front windshield so my cheeks would get some color. We both sat in the car awhile, back against our seats. We didn’t want to walk in too early.
My mother put some makeup on me. She brushed mascara on my lashes, patted on blush. It was a relief to close my eyes and give my face to her. Then I marked on freckles over my nose, with a sharpened eyeliner pencil. With the car door half open, my mother unzipped her pants and tucked in her blouse again. I bent over from the waist and underbrushed my hair, the way girls in my class were doing it that year.
The agent’s office was on the third floor and her waiting room was tiny and full. Black and white glossies of children, signed in loopy, slanted penmanships, crowded the walls. Most of the girls’ names ended in i’s and several were dotted with hearts. Some of the photographed faces smiled, some pouted, a few even cried. In one, a starburst glittered inside a tear. Around us, children squirmed in their chairs. A Mexican baby screamed in his grandfather’s arms. One woman, the obvious mother of four blond, freckled children, patiently knitted.
The receptionist gave my mother a clipboard with a form questionnaire. We filled out my name, age, height and weight. I lied about my weight. My mother said I was a year younger than I was. They also wanted to know what languages I spoke, my grades in school and my measurements. When we turned the form back, we were called in, and the others waited, as if they were used to waiting. Ellen Arcade, a woman in her fifties with blond hair, sat behind a large desk in the inner office, stamping a cigarette out in a glass ashtray. She read over my questionnaire on the clipboard, smiling and nodding along. My mother slid me a complicitous look.
“So, how do you like Beverly High?”
“I like it,” I said.
“Well, everything here looks good.” She shoved the clipboard in a drawer. “Would you read something for me, Ann?”
After, the agent leaned back in her chair. My mother pressed forward, cheeks lifted, listening.
“She’ll need pictures,” the agent said. My mother nodded, staring at her. While we sat there, Ellen Arcade called a photographer and made an appointment for me. That seemed lucky, because it cost money. If we’d had to do it ourselves, we wouldn’t have. My mother would have changed her mind. With arrangements set, Ellen Arcade looked ready for us to leave. Her arm listed towards us, but my mother wanted to talk. She gripped her chair.
“We’re out of Bay City, Wisconsin, and once there was a telethon there and that’s where we met Timmy Kennedy. Bay City actually has the biggest CP telethon in the country …”
“Isn’t that something,” the agent said. “He was quite a kid, Timmy.”
“Is he still acting?” my mother asked.
“No, he’s on the football team at Santa Monica High. Had enough of it.” She lit another cigarette, then stood up and held each of our hands in a firm, quick yank. I wanted to say, Wait, does this mean you’re taking me?
But all she said was, “We’ll be in touch.”
We did have the pictures done, and Ellen Arcade selected two for portfolio blowups, which I got to sign. Then nothing happened and the photographer charged my mother a hundred dollars. Which contributed to our financial ruin.
The backhouse was next to the pool behind the tennis courts. It had two big rooms and, up three steps, tiny bedrooms off a hallway and a bathroom with a portable shower. It had been built, originally, to be Nan Keller’s studio. But since she rented a loft in Venice, they had made the studio into a game room. A felt-covered pool table stood prominently when you walked in and there was a working pinball machine in the corner. They left what furniture there was for us: Nan’s old drafting table, the chairs and a couch. There was no kitchen, but there was a bar with an elaborate soda fountain. We had a half-size refrigerator and we always meant to buy a hot plate.
We moved on a week Josh Spritzer was skiing, so we had only the Swans to help us. At first my mother and I cleaned the big house together. We spent long afternoons fighting upstairs over who got to vacuum and who got to dust. Both of us felt embarrassed and we tried to understand each other’s weak points. I never wanted Peter Keller to see me. So my mother did his room and bathroom while he was in school. Then, after a few weeks, I stopped helping. I left it for my mother to do during the day. I went to high school and tried to forget about it.
My mother didn’t last long as a maid. It turned out she didn’t know how to iron. She spent an hour doing each of Mr. Keller’s shirts. He wore two a day, all in shades of white and the palest blue.
“How do you iron your clothes? You must stay up all night,” Mrs. Keller asked.
“Well, actually, since we moved and I was working, I dry-clean,” my mother said.
Another time, Mrs. Keller found my mother standing in her dressing room, with no possible purpose, her arms crossed over her chest, surveying the rows of dresses and shoes.
“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Keller asked.
“I just made the bed,” my mother said. And she had done that—beautifully, with a corner folded down and a water glass of hydrangeas on the end table. The trouble was my mother and Mrs. Keller liked to do the same things, the little touches, graceful additions. Mrs. Keller needed someone good with a mop. It’s amazing we lasted as long as we did. Finally, Mrs. Keller found my mother crying in the kitchen with the cook, both of them on their knees looking for the piece of my mother’s fingernail that had broken off.
“If I bring it in, he can fix it, he has a sheer, sheer fabric he glues it on with.”
The two-hundred-and-fifty-pound cook crawled on the floor, searching, her arm around my mother, to comfort. The roast sat bloody in the sink, uncooked, and the next day Mr. Keller walked over the tennis court to the backhouse and spoke to my mother about the possibilities.
My mother broke down and cried and talked about her master’s degree, moving her ring around the finger with the now-patched nail. They discussed other possibilities for speech therapists: private practice, convalescent hospitals. They decided we could stay in the backhouse, but that my mother would get a job and we would pay rent.
For three weeks she worked as a hostess in the downtown split-level Hamburger Hamlet, wearing long skirts and walking through every night in a terror, afraid that someone who knew Josh Spritzer would come in. Finally, Mr. Keller arranged for an interview at the convalescent hospital where each of Peter’s step-grandfathers had lived, briefly, before he died. My mother got the job.
I found a job, too, as a wrapper in a clothing store. I went in every day after school and all day weekends. During the holiday rush, my mother asked the manager and they hired her on, too, for Saturdays. We measured our Saturdays, not from our salaries, but from what we took. The way we did it was easy. I would wrap huge packages and send them down with another customer’s bags to the pick-up ramp. My mother would write up a receipt for one small thing. We picked the packages up downstairs when we punched out. It didn’t feel like stealing, exactly. We owned clothes now, thousands of dollars’ worth. Clothes seemed easy, not a big deal. Once I opened a drawer and found a little cellophane bag of rings, untagged. I took the whole bag. None of it seemed dangerous really, it was just a small thrill, something that made you suck in your breath a moment so your rib bones rose. And when we drove home as it was turning dark and the streetlights flickered on, you could touch the clothes on the car seat next to you and feel like you’d gotten something out of the day, something you could use later.
But even though we both had jobs, we were never good with money. The first time we couldn’t pay the rent, my mother called Mr. Keller on the telepho
ne and cried and sent me up to the front house carrying mixed flowers and a check they couldn’t cash until two weeks from Wednesday. Mr. Keller was a kind man. He looked at me, put his hand on my arm, his Adam’s apple bobbing up over his collar, and said, “Okay, Ann, tell your mother thanks. And don’t you worry, huh?”
As I turned to go, Mrs. Keller called, “Bert, ask Ann if she’s had anything to eat.”
I was standing at the back door of the kitchen, the door that led to the fenced tennis court, which separated the big house from ours. A cake, with a third cut out, showing its layers, was standing on a cake plate. The smell of roast beef lingered on its tin foil, left, wrinkled on the counter.
I hadn’t had anything to eat yet. My mother was so upset about the rent, we hadn’t gone to get dinner, but I just said, “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”
Not that I was any saint. I scuffed my feet along the tennis court and when I walked in, I plopped down onto the sofa, my hand on my belly.
“What did he say?” my mother asked.
“I’m starving,” I said. “My tummy hurts.”
“Ann, just tell me what Mr. Keller said. Then we’ll get something to eat.”
“He said okay.”
My mother began to beat her chest with an open hand, like a pigeon preparing to take off. “Oh, thank God. Thank you, God,” she said, her head tilted up to the low ceiling.
I groaned. It made me sick when she got grateful. Everybody else had a place to live and you didn’t see them thanking God for it.
“Okay, okay. Let’s go. You’re just not sentimental, are you? Well, I am. I’m thankful when people are nice like that. Get your jacket.”
We had the half-sized refrigerator but we never kept much food in it. Every night we went out for dinner.
“Brrr, come on, hop in,” my mother said. We parked our car in the alley, behind the backhouse. She stood staring up at the sky. I walked around to my door with my fists jammed in my parka pockets. My mother kept quiet because she was making her wish. Forty-four years old and every night of her life she made a wish on a star.
