by Mona Simpson
“It’s clear tonight, Ann, look at those constellations.” My mother clapped her hands. “It’s going to be a great day tomorrow.”
A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. Many of my mother’s enthusiasms could be traced. We turned up the heat full blast in the car and I looked out the window, dreaming to myself. I was always dreaming to myself in those days. I wanted so many things. We drove, slowing the car in front of Josh Spritzer’s old house in Beverly Hills and then, not finding his Thunderbird in the driveway, my mother headed towards his apartment in Century City.
“What are you thinking, Bear Cub?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, you can tell me.”
“Nothing,” I said.
“You know, you could say something once in a while, have a conversation.”
It was hard to find restaurants that time of night. Usually, we didn’t have cash and not too many places took checks. But we’d go into one of those restaurants with the little metal “No checks, please” plaques over the cash register and sit down and eat a whole meal. At the Old World on Sunset, there was a bulletin board in the back of the restaurant, with all the bounced checks pinned up on it. Two of ours were there. You passed it on the way to the bathroom. When my friends from school wanted to eat at the Old World, I didn’t have the nerve to say no, but I sat scared, extremely conscious, the minutes any of them left the table to go to the bathroom.
When the bill came, at the end of a meal, my mother would start writing a check. The waitress would usually look flustered and say, “Oh, but we don’t take checks.”
“You don’t! Why not?”
“We just don’t. Restaurant policy. There’s a sign there, right where you come in.”
“Well, this check is good, I can assure you.”
“I’ll have to ask the manager.”
“Please do get the manager.”
My mother would fold her arms and smile at me over the table. I’d shove my chair back and put on my jacket. “I’m going outside.”
“Okay, Hon,” she’d say. “I’ll just be a minute.”
Then I’d wait for her, leaning against our car. I let her do it alone.
We didn’t say anything about it, but we knew we had to avoid the places we’d ever bounced a check. My mother had two dollars in change and she just shrugged.
“Let’s go and see if that little French place is open.” There was a place on Pico we liked, a small restaurant, that served food like my grandmother’s; sweetbreads and pork roasts. “You get your little soup and your salad and a little dessert. I could just go for that tonight,” my mother said. But the windows looked dark when we passed. She sighed. “Should we drive over and get ice cream?”
Some nights we skipped dinner and just ate sundaes. We were usually on diets, so it seemed all right. My mother parked under the trees in front of Baskin-Robbins and felt around the bottom of her purse for stray dollars.
“Here, you run in,” she said, pressing three damp dollars into my hand. She would wait in the car with the motor running. I knew which flavors she wanted and extra nuts and whipped cream.
Tonight, though, I minded. “You go in and get them. Why should I always go in?”
“I can’t, Ann.” There was real panic in her voice. “Someone could see me like this.” She was wearing a terry-cloth jogging suit and tennis shoes. Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail.
“Someone could see me.” I had on sweat pants and a T-shirt and sneakers. My hair was wet because I washed it every night.
“At your age it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Anyway, you look cute. At my age, they expect a woman to dress up a little. Remember, I’m the one who has to catch a father for you.”
“I already have a father.”
“Yeah, well, where is he?”
She had me there. “Hell if I know.”
“Come on, Ann. Please. Just this once. Run in and get it quick.”
“No.”
We sat there under the trees. “Please, Honey.”
I shook my head. My mother started the car with a jolt and we drove home. For a while, she didn’t speak to me, but when I came down to the living room later, for a glass of water, she was standing by the open refrigerator, eating crackers and sardines, wearing the sweat shirt she slept in.
“Want some sardines?”
I shook my head and went back to my room.
“Ann, come and try some. Come on a second. It’s good.”
I heard her lift out the milk carton and drink from it. I hated it when she drank from the carton. I couldn’t stand the idea of her saliva in my milk.
“I don’t want any,” I yelled. “And I’m trying to sleep.”
“Okay,” she called back. The crackers made crunching noises. “But it’s very good. Very, very good.”
I was hungry. My stomach seemed to acquire consciousness. It wanted things. Steaks with melted butter. Fresh rhubarb pie. Being hungry made me cold and slightly dizzy. I remember that feeling of going to bed hungry and waking up light as if it happened more often than it really did. Most of the nights we didn’t eat, we could have. We were on diets. We were always on diets and neither of us ever got skinny. But years later, it’s hunger we remember.
That night I woke up to find my mother sitting next to me on my bed, looking down at my face. “I was just thinking to myself how lucky I am to have a daughter like you.”
None of the rooms in the backhouse had locks. After she left, I got up and shoved my dresser against the door.
My mother’s room was right next to mine and the construction of the backhouse seemed flimsy. Even with the door shut, I could still hear her breathe on the other side of the wall. I imagined her curled up, pushing into the plaster, trying to make a cave and bore through.
She knocked on the wall. “Good night, Sweetie.”
I slept on the outermost edge of my bed.
Josh Spritzer seemed to be dropping my mother. Her dates with him were down to once every other week. Even now that she had better clothes. And he seemed to be taking more out-of-town vacations.
“I think I will call his psychiatrist,” my mother said one morning, while I ironed my jeans before school.
There was another man who asked her out. His name was Jack Irwin and his head was flat and bald as a nickel. He lived with his mother, who was almost a hundred and who had lost control. When we went to visit in their apartment once, she wobbled in her chair, her face jiggled, her eyes loose, wandering, her hands opening and closing, roaming the air for substance, finding nothing, and, at the end, her mouth opened to about the size of a penny and she left it there and said, “Eh,” not like a question but like a word.
My mother had met Jack Irwin in the convalescent home. His mother had broken a hip. Since those days in Palm Manor, Jack Irwin talked about Solvang all the time. “Lovely little village. Rollicking, rolling green hills. And the Swedes. Everything maintained by the Swedes.” Apparently, he’d been there with his mother in 1961.
“He wants to take me there,” my mother said, one night. She’d come home from a date with him and she sat on her bed, curling off her pantyhose. “For a weekend. I can’t even kiss him. Could you come here a second, Ann, and undo my bra?”
“I’m in bed.”
Then there was the slam of a drawer. “’Course I suppose he could do a lot for us, with all his money.” She sighed and I could hear her sit down again on the mattress. “He always asks about you, Ann, he thinks it’s great you’re doing so well in your school. He wants to talk to you about your college.”
I heard her settle into bed. “Well, at least it was a good dinner,” she said through the wall. “And he’ll take us out to breakfast on Sunday.”
The weekend they went to Solvang, my mother seemed very grown up. She snapped the buckles of her suitcase shut when she heard his car in the alley. She seemed older. She wore a suit, with her hair pinned up neatly in a bun.
“Here,” she said, pressing a twenty-dollar bill in my
hand and closing my fingers around it. “That’s for food. Call Leslie and go out.” When she opened the sliding glass door and Jack was there, we both felt disappointed. He stood, hands at his sides, wearing a plaid jacket and a white turtleneck sweater. Every time, we couldn’t imagine beforehand how ugly he really was.
“All set,” he said, clicking his heels together.
“I’ll try to get you a present,” she whispered. When she hugged me good-bye, for some reason I didn’t know, I started crying. I wetted my mother’s collar.
“Sshhh,” she said, kissing me next to the eye. “I’ll be back on Sunday.”
They both looked slow and proper getting into the car. He lifted the trunk and put in the suitcase and opened her door first. She sat in the passenger seat and folded her hands. I threw myself on the couch and pulled up the mohair blanket. And it was me who usually never cried.
The next morning, Saturday, Peter Keller called me on the telephone from the front house. “I want to kiss your lips,” he said.
Peter Keller was a year younger and we rode to school in the same carpool. He wasn’t the kissing type.
“What for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, not if you can’t think of a better reason than that,” I said and hung up.
An hour later, he called back.
“I thought of another reason. I’m wild about your warm lips and I want to squeeze you tight.” I heard pages moving, but it didn’t sound like a joke.
“Yeah?” I was eating a carton of ice cream from the freezer. My mother had stocked up before she left.
“I want to part your lips with my tongue.”
“Yeah?” I dragged the phone to the couch and lay down. “And then what?”
“Can I come over now?”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t even think of changing my T-shirt, which was spattered with chocolate ice cream. When I came home from school every day, I took my good jeans off and hung them up in the closet. Peter was one of the kids I played with in my old clothes. If another friend of mine called on the telephone, I’d get rid of him fast. I didn’t feel bad about it. He was a grade lower.
When he came to our sliding glass doors, he looked the same as always, his hair capping his face. But he squinted and his hands were opening and closing at his sides.
“So?” I said.
“Maybe we should go out some night?”
“Go out some night? What about what you were saying on the phone? Where did you learn that?”
“From a book,” he admitted.
“No,” I said. “We’re not going to go out some night. Come in. Lie down over there and undress.”
I hadn’t planned anything, I was making it up as I went along. I felt taller and powerful, like a teacher, reaching up to the top of a clean blackboard.
“All right,” he said. He untied a sneaker and held it in his hand. “Don’t you want to talk first? It’s not even dark out,” he said, looking at the doors.
I shook my head. It was a spring day. The wind moved in the tops of the palm trees outside. No one was around. Peter undressed, holding his shirt and pants balled up in his hands, as if he were afraid I was going to take them. His arms hung pitifully at his sides.
“Aren’t you going to take yours off, too?”
His underwear looked white and new as a child’s. One of the things that amazed us when we’d cleaned the big house was the Kellers’ surplus. They all kept drawers of new underwear, some in the packages, unopened. In the bathroom closets, there were rows of soaps and shampoo, more than one of everything.
“You first,” I said.
He sat down on the old blue and red striped couch and pulled off his underwear. Guys are so shy, I was thinking.
“Okay,” he said, looking up at me. He took in a breath and held it. He seemed scared, as if I would hurt him. He was very thin and almost hairless. He seemed frightened, like a woman.
I kicked my tennis shoes off with my heels.
“Lie down,” I said.
I sat next to him on the couch. “Okay, you can kiss me, but not my face.” He fumbled, trying to take my shirt off, so I stood up and pulled it over my head. I unzipped my jeans and dropped them on the floor. Then I sat on top of him.
He closed his eyes but I didn’t. I looked around, out the sliding glass doors, while the veins in his neck rose up like a map. The pinball machine sparkled, metal and glass.
“Have you ever done this before?” he asked.
I hadn’t. I hadn’t even thought of it. Not even with Daniel Swan, whom I loved. We tickled the backs of each other’s arms and I thought of wearing a soft white sweater and Daniel kissing me once on each eye. But I wasn’t going to tell Peter Keller.
With Peter, it was different. Touching him was like touching myself. I never thought about him. It was broad daylight.
He sat up, facing me, and took my hand. He looked at me as if this were something big in both of our lives. “Lie back down,” I said, pushing his shoulders. It was amazing the way he sunk back. You don’t think you can do that to another person.
The air didn’t move. I made a ring of my first finger and thumb and took him in my hand. It felt soft, the softest skin I ever touched. I watched. His hands fluttered by his sides. In the slits of his eyes, all I could see was white. He had no anger in him.
I don’t know how I knew what to do but I did.
I put him inside me. His eyebrows pushed together as if he was working hard. A sound escaped from him. His face looked pure as something new. I felt it, he felt it. Then he started to move, lifting his hands to my waist.
“Lie still,” I said. “I’ll do it.” Peter’s dog rattled the metal garbage cans against the wall outside. I looked down; my own leg, the way it tilted, seemed different, separate from my body.
So this is what it is, I thought, not much. I pulled up to my knees for a second. There was a spit of blood on my leg. At the sight of it, I stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Peter asked. “Did it hurt?” His fingers fluttered near my face.
“No,” I said, crushing his ten fingers in my two hands and starting again. “No.”
His face seemed limp on his neck. It would be so easy to kill another person, I was thinking. You’d just reach down. People just walk up and give themselves away to you.
All of a sudden I started moving and I was going faster and faster and I closed my eyes and then, I wasn’t doing it anymore, he was holding my waist and I was afraid, so I tried to be still. I hung on to his shoulders like the edge of something and clung to one word, trying to keep it, quiet. Then, just as sudden, it was still again. And slow. I opened my eyes. My feet flickered the way fishtails sometimes beat a few last moments after they’re dead. It was like falling. My arches and my knees ached and I felt light and tired, but I didn’t want Peter to know anything.
Then I got up and ran outside to the pool. “Hey,” he yelled and started to laugh. “Hey.” And then he was next to me in the pool, his arms around me underwater.
“I love you, Ann,” he said.
He looked at me, waiting. Flat brown leaves floated on the surface of the pool, beginning to disintegrate. The water below felt thick and filmy. I lifted an arm up to the air and it was shiny, as if in a sheer rubber glove.
“I’m taking a shower,” I said. All of a sudden, I climbed out and ran into the backhouse. I latched the flimsy lock on the sliding glass doors. A minute later, when he knocked, I wouldn’t answer. I thought of him watching me as I ran, naked, my breasts and thighs jiggling, him seeing that and it making him smile.
But he was naked, too. He must have run through his own yard and somehow snuck back into the big house.
My mother came home that same night. A door slammed, she ran in and flipped the light on in my room. She unlatched her suitcase and started unpacking right there, on my floor.
“I just couldn’t do it.” She stared at her open suitcase, shaking her head. “I couldn’t touch him. I let him kiss me an
d he swished his tongue around in my mouth and I just couldn’t. I practically gagged.” She walked to my bed and looked down at me. “I’m sorry, Honey. Even for you, I couldn’t do it. We slept in the same bed last night and he’d reach over and touch my side and I’d just cringe. I can’t stand that man.”
She walked to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. Then, she lifted a purple sundress from her suitcase with two fingers. “Well, here. I brought you a present. I went through a lot to get you this so you better like it. Here. Try it on.”
I was thinking of the weak, pale folds of skin, like rippled batter, under Jack Irwin’s belly. I thought of his mouth, rolling r’s against her ear.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “I don’t want it.” I really didn’t. It had a low back and frills. I looked at the dress and hated it.
My mother examined the hem herself. After all she’d said, she seemed surprised and hurt that I didn’t like the dress. “I picked it out. I think it’s adorable. Try it on. You’ll see how cute it hangs.”
I grabbed it and went in the bathroom to change. When I came out, she touched my bare back, inside the long U of the dress.
“Oh, it’s adorable. Go look at yourself. It couldn’t be cuter, Honey.” She sighed. “Well, at least we’ve got that. And it is cute, Ann, it really is.”
My mother seemed to relax then, as if the dress had been worth it, after all.
That night I couldn’t fall asleep again. I got up, it must have been two or three in the morning, took the dress from my closet, balled it in my hands and crammed it down the garbage can in our back alley. It was scary and peaceful out there, dark, with a low wind, moving the palms, making them spill small hard dates on the pavement. The next morning I felt settled and pleased when I heard the clatter of garbage trucks in my sleep. But it was Sunday. The only sounds I could have heard were church bells.
