by Mona Simpson
I’d invited Leslie over because I thought my mother would still be gone. Finally she left to drive to the convalescent home. Leslie had never seen our house. She came to the front; I sat, waiting on the curb, and led her through the gate, past the courts, to the backhouse. I’d thought all morning of how I could make it seem the big house was ours.
I did that whenever people dropped me off. They just dropped me outside the big house and I dallied by the fountain and then walked around the block. Mrs. Keller asked that I not use the front gate. We were supposed to walk in from the alley.
Inside the backhouse, I’d shut all the doors, so you could only see the big room. We sat on the old red and blue striped couch, sipping Cokes. I looked at the white closed doors. It seemed to me there could have been long hallways, terraces, dens and bedrooms following off behind them in every direction. I hoped that was what Leslie imagined.
She stared at the pinball machine. “Does it work?” she said.
I nodded.
“Is it just you and your mom, here?”
“I have two brothers,” I said. I gestured with my arm up at the closed doors, indicating their rooms, their wings. “But they’re at camp.” It was April, but I didn’t remember that until later.
“Oh,” Leslie said.
We played pinball three or four times. I was anxious for Leslie to go, because I hadn’t told her my mother had come home. I didn’t know how to explain it, and I was afraid she’d walk in and open the doors. Especially now that I’d said that about brothers. Finally, Leslie said, “Since your mom’s not home, you want to eat dinner at my house tonight?”
I shrugged. “Sure.” I liked Leslie’s house. It was pink brick with ivy. Any time of the day, when you walked in, there was a hum of quiet activity somewhere behind doors. Once in the afternoon, while she was changing to tennis clothes, I’d stood and stared at the dining room table, the six chairs.
They were brown wooden chairs. There was something permanent, meant, about their placement, the way the trees had seemed to me, back home. Every day, these chairs waited, absorbing light all afternoon, while in the kitchen, soft clicks and knocks of bowls and the whirring of beaters progressed, the evening meal in preparation. I stared at the back of one chair. It seemed the security of a whole childhood. It stayed there, all day, the wood worn and glossed like a held chestnut.
When Leslie had come down, swinging her racket in the still air, I’d been startled. “I like your chairs,” I said.
She shrugged. “These?” She squinted, as if looking at her dining room table and chairs for the first time. A bowl of peaches sat in the center of the table. “You always love everything so much,” she said.
That afternoon, I didn’t leave my mother a note or anything. We ran up the alley and through the back gate to Leslie’s house, over her lawn, into the kitchen door, where she shouted, “Rosario, I’m ho-ome and Ann is staying for dinner.”
Later, I remembered: we’d walked around our pool to the alley gate. Leslie had seen our house from the outside, she must have known how small it was.
It got worse with Peter and me. We did it all the time, always sneaking off. I got meaner and meaner. He did everything I told him. Sometimes he just rubbed me. I would turn over on my stomach and he’d rub my legs.
My mother and I were invited to more dinner parties at the Kellers’ and for Easter and Christmas and Thanksgiving. My mother started calling Mr. Keller Bert. After that, she always left the rent check on their hall table by the first of every month.
In the big kitchen, afternoons with Peter, I felt free to eat. I ate and ate and ate. Everything I wanted.
And Peter got money from his father to take me to restaurants. Peter’s father liked me, Nan Keller didn’t. But we rode in taxis to expensive restaurants where I could order anything I wanted. I picked the most expensive thing and two desserts. Peter didn’t like desserts, so it looked as if we were each having one. I ate the cake in front of me first and then we switched plates. I worried more about what the waiter would see than what Peter would think of me.
After I was laid off from my wrapping job, I got Peter to buy me clothes. He had a charge account at the store where everyone from our high school bought their jeans. At first, he seemed reluctant. But I showed him the slip. “It just says the price. It doesn’t say boys’ or girls’. It doesn’t even give the size.”
We went in every few weeks. I wore a larger and larger size. At the cash register once, Peter patted the swell at the top of my thigh. “We should start playing tennis,” he said. I felt furious. He’d touched me like I was something he owned.
“You sound like your mother,” I said.
That day as we were leaving the store carrying bags of clothes, we passed a girl from our school named May. She was tall and thin, with long blond hair, wearing a pale blue shirt with clouds on it, and matching blue jeans. Seeing her, I felt a wave of humiliation. I was embarrassed to look the way I looked.
I turned to Peter, urgent. “Let’s go to the Konditorei for tea.” Tea at the Konditorei meant a silver tray of intricate tidy pastries. Mint green cakes, strawberry kiwi tarts inlaid like mosaic floors. It was four in the afternoon.
“Are you sure you want to?”
“Yeah, why?”
He was watching May’s hair sway as she walked up the sidewalk. He looked back down at me. “That’s okay. I like you the way you are. I like your ass,” he said.
That year, Peter’s parents sent him back east to a prep school, with strict instructions for the tennis coach. His mother wanted to get him away from me. But when he came home for vacations, we’d start again. Any time of the day in the small maid’s room off the big kitchen, the ironing board in the corner, a faded flowered bedspread that held dust which rose like chalk in the sun.
I was less and less nice. I gritted my teeth. I thought of him as anyone, any boy. But the colder I was, he didn’t seem to notice. Holding my waist, when he looked up at me from the bottom of the bed, his eyes half closed in devotion.
During the time he was away at school, I started to have normal dates. Leslie and I traded clothes, I had more than she did, from my job at the store. Some nights, Daniel Swan called me late from the phone in his room and we talked and didn’t hang up. We put the receivers by our pillows and fell asleep, to the other’s breathing. My mother came to my room in the middle of the night and put the earpiece back in its cradle. She thought it was adorable, but she didn’t want to tie up our line all night.
All the while, I had tried to diet. But it wasn’t until Peter went away to Exeter that I finally lost the weight. And then it came off effortlessly.
It was a June day, the summer I was leaving. I was lying on my back on the single bed in the maid’s room with the window cranked open, so we heard the distant slow thonk-pong of tennis balls as my mother took her lesson, and the occasional rousing bark of Groucho, Peter’s dog. My mother took her lessons in the middle of the day, when no one else wanted to use the courts. This doesn’t count, I was promising, no one will ever know, I won’t tell anyone. I was leaving for college. The east. Rain and yellow slickers in cafeterias. Books. Clean things. I won’t ever tell anyone, I was thinking, I’ll make him swear not to tell, it’ll be as if it never happened, this is only sort-of happening …
“Ouch,” I said, jerking away.
“What’s wrong?”
“Your fingernail, it hurt.”
Peter stood up and unlocked the door. He walked into the maid’s bathroom. I heard the soft clicking sound of him clipping his nails. When he came back I was standing up and dressed, shorts and a T-shirt over my swim suit.
“I don’t want to do that anymore,” I said.
“Okay.” He sat down on the bed, where we were, spread out his hand on my impression.
“Ever.” I walked into the bathroom and closed the door. I felt like I’d lost the day already, though it was still early, just noon. I washed my face and ran the maid’s plastic brush through my hair. There was a window over th
e sink and I looked outside. My mother lunged for the ball, all in whites, all heart. Everything else seemed still, hazy in the heat. The clippings from Peter’s fingernails were floating in the toilet bowl. I didn’t flush them. I left.
13
A DOCTOR’S OFFICE
“I have to learn this stuff, Mom. Kids at school have stereos, they know the names of all these songs. It comes up.”
“Okay, okay, but not loud.” She sighed and turned the car radio back on. That was one thing about my mother. She could understand your wanting to fit in. “I can’t bear those drummers,” she said.
Josh Spritzer still seemed to be dropping us. Her last date with him was almost three weeks ago, on a Wednesday. But we kept driving by his house every night, before we went to Baskin-Robbins. First, we drove past the high-rise apartment. My mother couldn’t look for his white T-Bird there because he kept it in an underground garage. You needed a special card to get in, and Josh had never given her one. She had to park on the street. So we craned our necks, counting floors by their balconies in order to find his windows. If my mother saw a light, she sank back in the car seat and exhaled, comfortable at least for an hour.
But now, the windows of Josh Spritzer’s apartment looked dark and she leaned over the steering wheel biting her fingernails. I felt furious, all of a sudden, that he didn’t have a lamp with an automatic timer.
My mother turned the car around in the middle of the wide Century City boulevard and headed towards the house where Josh’s ex-wife and children lived. She snapped the radio off. She drove at sixty miles an hour through the residential streets of Beverly Hills to find the soothing sight of his car in front of his children’s house.
“But Mom, even if he is seeing his kids, he’s still not seeing you.”
“Shhh, be quiet.” We raced down Little Santa Monica. My mother knew herself. All she needed tonight was to forget those dark windows—to relax, enjoy her ice cream cone, sleep.
It seemed strange that my mother didn’t feel jealous of Josh’s ex-wife, Elaine. When Josh visited, he often sat for hours in the living room of the Arden Street house, having a drink with Elaine. We sometimes saw them as we drove by at night, two silhouettes at a low table.
But my mother had very specific fears. As it turned out, she did not consider Elaine Spritzer pretty. Elaine was short, only a little over five feet, with muscular arms and legs. My mother described her hair as frizzy.
The fact that Josh had apparently once found Elaine attractive enough to marry seemed to escape my mother’s attention. And I sure wasn’t going to remind her. We each held our breath as we went over the bump in Arden Street that would give us a clear view of Elaine Spritzer’s driveway. And tonight we were lucky. The T-bird was there.
My mother parked our car in front of Baskin-Robbins and fumbled in her purse for dollars. That night I didn’t fight. We felt relieved, it was late, we were both tired.
Nan Keller knocked on our glass doors. She seemed bored now that Peter had gone away to school. And the backhouse we lived in had been built to be her painting studio. Now, she rented a huge loft in a renovated Venice hotel on Market Street, but she seemed to harbor affection for our place. Every time she came inside she looked around at the low ceilings and close walls and smiled as if they reminded her of things.
“I brought you some sketches,” she said. “I was just drawing. I thought you might want to take a look.”
My mother made a face, scanning the backhouse. The place looked a mess, but we had to let her in. She was our landlord.
They laid the sketches out on the pool table.
“Can I get you anything?” my mother asked, veering towards the half-size refrigerator. “We don’t have much, but I can make some lemonade, or I have carrot juice.”
Nan Keller waved her off. “We had a dinner at Ma Maison and I’m absolutely stuffed.”
“Oh, they’re Ann.” My mother stopped, seeing the pictures.
“They’re almost Ann,” Mrs. Keller said. “I was sketching other noses, just to see what could happen with a surgeon. I think this one would be fabulous. Turn to the side, Ann.” Mrs. Keller pointed, her cool fingernails touching my face. “A little off, here and here. Just straight. I think it would be smashing. See, she’s got a little bump from somewhere.”
“Her father,” my mother mumbled. My mother’s hands dug in her pockets and she stared up and down from the sketches to me. She started nodding. “I think you’re right, Nan. Just a little and she’d really be something.” Her eyes opened wider in awe of my potential.
“It’s not inexpensive, but now’s the time to do it, the kids all get them in high school, over the summer or even in fall, it’s no big deal. You see them at Beverly with bandages, the boys and the girls, no one minds, it’s like braces, it’s almost a stigma not to have them. And then when they go to college, nobody ever knows. And when the braces come off she’ll be all set.”
“Who would you take her to, Nan?” My mother became studious. It was easy to imagine her in college, with the tortoiseshell glasses, long since replaced with constantly lost contact lenses, her pencil neatly scribbling, following the teacher’s instructions. My father had been my mother’s professor.
“I don’t know, there’s a Doctor Brey on Roxbury. He’s popular, he did Lexie’s daughter, but I think he does all the same nose. It’s a nice nose, but it’s becoming a cliché, you know?”
“Oh, we don’t want that.” My mother acted so humble with these people.
My mother and Nan Keller continued to talk about plastic surgeons, those who did one tract nose and those who thought they were artists and wouldn’t listen to what you wanted. One took nitrate photographs of his noses before and after and had bequeathed them to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where his wife served on the board of directors, active in volunteer fund raising. Another looked like Ernest Hemingway; recently divorced, he lived in Malibu.
I excused myself. “HE sounds good to me,” my mother was saying.
Later, when I came down for a Coke from the half-size refrigerator, Nan Keller was still there, sitting on the old red and blue striped couch. On the floor in front of them stood the bottle of Courvoisier we’d moved to all the places we’d lived in California and never opened, my mother not being a drinker. We had the one suitcase we’d taken in our trunk when we left Wisconsin. It was printed with my father’s initials, and missing a handle. We’d kept it together with a belt around it and a dog collar clipped to the handle loops. In it, we’d carried a jumble: our precious things and our old ice skates, and this bottle of Courvoisier. We’d taken it all the way from Wisconsin and then from apartment to apartment and now Nan Keller sat drinking it.
“Well, it’s only a rumor, but apparently, he’s been seen with her by a few people at Hillcrest.”
“Damn. That man,” my mother said.
“Who are you talking about?”
“This isn’t for you, Ann, go to sleep,” my mother said, tapping her nail against a front tooth.
I could have killed Nan Keller.
My mother shook me awake the next morning. “Come on, we’re cleaning up a little.” She squatted down in front of a cupboard, taking out pans and setting them on the floor. The house looked more of a mess than last night. She was wearing her gray sweat shirt and her hair strained up in a ponytail. A sponge rested where she’d started to wash the cupboard. Our suitcase of old photographs, mementoes, my skates from when I was five, lay on the sofa, unzipped. Whenever my mother was upset, she took things apart and unpacked.
She didn’t look at me. Her arms rummaged in the cupboard.
“Take that garbage out this minute,” she said.
Four bags sagged against the doors. I carried two. I could hear her starting to bump things and yell as I opened the gate to the alley. “A damn thing around here. I work and work and slave … who does she think she …”
I lifted the other two bags, slower this time. Birds made small noises in the trees. A white
truck whooshed on the clean empty road a block away, at the end of our alley. I leaned against the wall, in back of the house. I didn’t have anything with me.
“Made of money, it’s a thousand for her teeth, now two thousand for her nose and meanwhile, I have nothing, NOTHING!”
I slipped back in and snuck to my closet and took all the money I had, shoving bills in my pocket. It felt good, the slightly oily paper. I crushed it in my fist.
She ran to my room and stood, veering at the door.
“Why don’t you go find your father, you treat me like filth after all I’ve done. I’ll tell you why, because you’re scared. You’d rather stay and sap me. Sure, your dumb mother will always drudge for you. For your bikinis that you HAD to have and never wore after I bought them for you, and your pictures when you thought you were going to be a movie star. Yeah, uh-huh. Well, you’ve got another thing coming, kid, because you don’t respect me. You don’t love me after all I do for you, how hard I work.”
She was waiting and I just stood there for a long curved minute, one rotation.
“Oooh, you—” Then she was coming and I backed into the closet, my arms in front of my face. I knew what I had to do to stop her. Talk. But I held still, I wasn’t going to move. I was a piece of wood. My body turned empty, porous, that was what got her.
Something hovered on the ceiling, a scrap of cloth, I saw everything below, slowly, indifferent, like the blades of a fan, moving at a constant speed. I didn’t want anything. Except to be away, east, somewhere cool. It seemed clear and true. I didn’t love her.
She hit me once, bad, my cheek vibrating like hard metal, and I was falling against the closet wall, the brass hook knocked my head and I was thinking, this is it, it’s sharp like a deep cut, one red scratch in the sky: she could hurt me so bad we would never forget.
And then it turned adult and clean. This person coming at you, lunging, her mouth opening and closing, teeth an ecstasy, and all of a sudden, you know and then, whack, on your forehead and she’s moving and the picture you saw breaks like crystal.
