by Mona Simpson
That night, my mother wrote a long letter to Len Hawthorne, The Man. She addressed it to his home in Santa Monica and used twice as many stamps as necessary.
“This is Adele August. I’d like to—okay, okay. But please. It’s an emergency.” She sat in her bedroom with the door closed, but I could hear through the wall. That was the day when the envelope addressed to Len Hawthorne, The Man, came back in our mail.
Since she’d stopped going to her job, my mother slept in. She almost never woke up before I left for school. Mornings, I stood at the half-size refrigerator, looking at all the food. My mother kept it perfectly clean and well stocked now, as if she feared a surprise inspection. I used to stand in the quiet, light backhouse with the refrigerator door open. I stared at the fruit. I almost didn’t want to touch it. I wanted it to stay the way it was, cold and hard, the apples beaded with strings of faceted colors.
Then one morning, my mother was moving behind the soda fountain in her peach-colored robe when I woke up. She made us bananas on cereal. She smiled at me weakly while I ate. “Is that good, Honey?”
“Yeah.” When I finished, I brought the bowl to the sink and washed it. We didn’t have dish towels, so I dried it with a paper napkin. Then I went to get my books.
“Oh, Ann,” my mother called. “Could you please stay home for a while this morning. I’ll write you a note. There’s something I need you to do.”
“I should go to school, Mom.” I wanted to go.
“Honey. This is important. I need you to call somewhere.”
“Can’t I do it now?”
“Honey, it doesn’t open until nine.”
I sat back down. I thought of missing Nutrition. It wasn’t even eight yet.
“You’ll be glad you waited. This is for your good, too.”
At exactly nine, I said, “Okay, let’s do it now.”
“Well, just give them a second. I said they open at nine. Let them put their things down and get a cup of coffee.”
If I rode my bike to school, I’d be there for Nutrition. I said, “I have to go.”
“Okay, okay, let me find the number.” She was stalling. She knew it by heart. She dialed and handed me the receiver.
“Now, say you need to talk to Doctor Hawthorne. Say your name is Amy Spritzer. Go ahead.”
I didn’t want to do it, but she was looking at me. A woman said, Good morning, and I said, Hello, this is Amy Spritzer, Could I please speak to Dr. Hawthorne? Just a moment, please, she said. It was working.
“What should I say to him?”
My mother’s eyebrows lifted. “Is he coming?”
I handed the receiver over. “Hell-ow,” she said, in a high, soft voice. “Ye-es.”
I went to her purse and took out two dollars, and held them up for her to see. She shoved me away with her hand. It wasn’t going well.
“I just felt, really, once more … Well, I feel I have some things I’d like to talk to you about. With you…. Oh, all right. I know.”
She hung up the phone and looked straight at me. “See, he just got in. This wasn’t the right time. We should’ve waited an hour. Damn.” She bit her cuticle.
“Mom, if he’s going to marry you, why won’t he talk to you? People who marry you talk to you.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “You don’t know anything.”
I walked outside to where I left my bike. My mother followed me. She stood across the pool, holding her robe closed over her chest.
“You better hope it’s true,” she said, in a warning voice. “You better hope Leonard Hawthorne loves me, because if he doesn’t, believe me, there’s nothing for us. Nothing, do you hear, nothing!”
She walked towards me on the cement, and I took off on my bike. I stood up, pedaling, giddy. She couldn’t seem to realize, it didn’t matter what I thought.
My mother said she was going into the hospital for an operation. Something in her voice made it sound like a lie. I tried to hold my own, I didn’t believe her.
There was something about the way she said things, about the way she was vague—it made her always seem wrong. You couldn’t be sure. It was hard to tell what my mother did and didn’t know. She didn’t use facts. But then, things that had seemed to be her whimsy, in the past, back in Wisconsin, things I’d laughed at with the rest of our family, turned out to be true here. Like the way my mother had wanted to get Hal excused from Vietnam by putting braces on his teeth. People had laughed and laughed. But that’s what Leslie’s brother Dean had done and now he was at Stanford.
“What kind of operation?” I said.
She acted like she didn’t want to tell me. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Cancer,” she said, as if it were a secret.
“Where?”
She slapped a hand on her left breast. “But never mind, never mind.”
She did go into the hospital. She stayed overnight. Jack Irwin drove and I rode along in his car to pick her up. She was wearing her peach-colored robe with a white blanket on her lap when a nurse wheeled her out into the parking lot. I climbed over to the backseat. She acted extremely kind to Jack. And for years that was all I heard about her cancer.
I called Dr. Hawthorne from a pay phone at school and gave the receptionist my real name. He came on the line the same way he did when I’d said I was Amy.
“Yes, Ann, what can I do for you?”
A lot. Too much. That was the problem.
“My mother thinks you’re going to get married and I wanted to know if that was true.” My voice sounded small, peculiar.
“I could see you at three o’clock. Can you come in then?”
I said I could and I didn’t go back to class when the bell rang. I walked around the back of the typing building, where smokers ditched and leaned against the wall. I didn’t have a watch. Every few minutes I got up and looked at the clock over the track.
Dr. Hawthorne’s office was on the ninth floor of a Century City high rise. I leafed through a newsmagazine in his waiting room. It felt really odd to think how many times my mother had been here. I could imagine her, distracted, twisting and biting a piece of her hair.
Dr. Hawthorne wasn’t handsome. He was very thin, he wore glasses, and his mouth seemed to hold a permanent expression of distaste.
I sat down in a large, padded chair and looked around. I waited. I’d already asked him on the phone if he was going to marry my mother. I was waiting for his answer.
But he didn’t say anything. “You have a couch and everything,” I said finally. I tried to sound normal and kidlike.
He acknowledged my comment with a smile that was more like a wince and then he was silent again. He looked at his hands intently.
“So are you going to marry my mother?”
He shook his head and something collapsed in me, a faint rumble, the beginning of a very long sound. I hadn’t known how much I’d believed my mother until just then. Everything was going to be different.
“She sees what she wants to see,” Dr. Hawthorne said. He held his hands tentatively, forming a basket of air. “My interest in her has always been strictly professional. I’ve told her that many times.”
My mother hadn’t worked for months, those bills jamming the drawer.
“I’ve done everything I can. I’ve stopped therapy. I refuse her phone calls. I am denying any pleas for contact. I feel that’s the best thing.”
I just looked at him.
“In fact,” he said, staring at his fingertips, lifting them slightly back, “I haven’t received payment for the last five months of treatment.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Somehow, that seemed the worst thing yet.
“It would be best for your mother to see another therapist.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” My throat swelled up on the inside, it was hard to talk.
“I feel this is the best thing. The only thing.”
“What should I do?” I tried to keep my chin in, tight, to lock my jaws.
&nb
sp; “Do you have any contact with your father?”
I was surprised that after all those sessions with my mom, he didn’t know. I shook my head.
“No contact?”
I shook it again.
“Well, that makes it harder.” He looked at me, squinting. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
I found myself concentrating, as he did, on his wrists. His cuffs seemed amazingly white. “Try not to depend on your mother very much. She’s not responsible enough to take care of herself, not to mention another person.”
My chin wove.
“What are your plans after high school?” he asked finally. I suppose I should have stood up to leave.
“Oh, I don’t know. College. Back east maybe.” The way I was going now, skipping school, forget it. My grades weren’t great. I’d be in more trouble.
“That’s shooting pretty high. Well, good for you.”
I held on to the arms of my chair. I didn’t go. “I don’t know what to do.” That came out like a yelp. “I mean, I lie sometimes, too. I lie to people I’ll never see again, and my friends, they don’t really know me.”
He looked at his watch, on a thick gold band, loose on his delicate wrist. He seemed to be thinking I was her daughter after all. I was screwed up, too.
“We’ll have to stop here.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not going to charge you for this session.”
I still didn’t move. I took off one shoe and pulled down my knee sock and dug into my pockets, collecting all the money. I didn’t trust anywhere in the backhouse anymore, so I carried my money around with me.
“Will she kill herself?”
He shook a little, wincing, I guess that I surprised him. He frowned. “I don’t think so. Your mother hasn’t shown signs of a suicide.”
“Oh.” I looked at him, grateful for that. “Could you see her one more time and tell her you’re not going to marry her? Just once.”
I sat there with all the crinkled money from my pockets and straightened the bills on my thigh. I offered to pay for one more time. I guess that got to him. He shook his head again and said he wouldn’t take the money. He said the appointment my mother used to have was already filled but when there was a cancellation, he’d have his receptionist call.
I didn’t go home. On the high school track field, kids from the four classes competed against each other in sack races and egg relays, an athletic carnival. I found Leslie on the top bleacher, drinking coffee with our sixty-two-year-old French teacher, Madame Camille. Outside the announcer’s booth, there was a five-foot stack of white pie boxes, from the House of Pies.
My mother had been so enchanted when we’d first moved to Beverly Hills and driven around at night. In Bay City, every block or two had a tavern, an old house with a sign outside. “Here, you don’t see the taverns, they all go out for dessert,” she’d said. We had marveled at the House of Pies, Lady Kelly’s, all the ice cream stores. My mother felt she was finally in her element.
Exhilarated, sick of being goody-goods, Leslie, Madame Camille and I stole a pie and sat on the bleacher sideways, eating it with our fingers, half watching the colors move on the field below.
Later, an announcement blared over the loudspeaker.
“The junior class is disqualified because several members of that class—you know who you are—stole one of the prizes. It’s too bad that just a few people ruined the whole class’s fun.”
We stood up, stunned. Madame Camille walked precariously on the bleacher in her high heels. “I will buy another pie,” she said, lifting her white patent leather purse over her head and moving as fast as she could to the control booth. “I will pay.”
I didn’t tell my mother I’d seen Dr. Hawthorne. We went out to dinner that night, the same as always, and after, we drove to Baskin-Robbins. Now, the furtive run inside with the five-dollar bill moist in my hand and back to the car parked in the dark, under the trees, carrying the two cones like torches and eating them in the front seat with the heat turned on, listening to my mother sigh and talk about what we’d have in the pretty-soon future, acquired a settled sadness. Those trees dropping blossoms on the car top and my mother not taking them for real because she was waiting, waiting to be married and to see them as a wife, a doctor’s wife. I knew that I would leave her here, still waiting.
When we called home to ask for money, my mother always had me talk first. My grandmother asked me questions about school. Then, I had to stay near the phone, so close we touched, while my mother begged. My grandmother would ask if we really needed it and I would have to say yes. We’d already gone through the green book of my grandmother’s account for me.
Ellen Arcade finally called us. She screamed into the phone. “You didn’t tell me you knew Cassie Swan, we were talking the other day, and your name came up for this commercial, but we have something even better, there’s a series and with the influx of the Iranians, oh, you know, Adele, you read the papers, any-way, Ann is just perfect, with her coloring. I want her to read next Wednesday …”
My mother held out the phone and we both listened. I scribbled notes of the time and place. It was an address in Westwood on the seventeenth floor. An audition. My mother and I wheeled around the room, falling down dizzy, when we hung up the phone, and I stopped eating for the next five days.
The morning of the audition the phone rang while I stood in the shower. I hadn’t washed my hair for five days. I’d noticed if I let it get totally horrible first, it looked better after I washed it. My mother was talking; I thought I must have heard wrong. “Two o’clock, okay, let me ask you one more thing,” she said. “Not one question? Oh, okay.”
I bent over, shaking my hair dry upside down to make it straight. My mother knocked on the door. “Hurry up in there. I need a shower, too.”
An hour later, she was dressed. “I’m sorry, Ann, but my work is just more important than your audition. We have to live and you don’t even know if you’d get the part. It’s your first one, you probably wouldn’t. Let’s face it, you don’t really look Iranian.” She stood by the door, her purse over her shoulder.
“You said you’d take me.” My face fell loose. “You haven’t worked for months.”
“Well, Honey, I’m sorry, but something today came up and I just have to go.”
“You’re not going to take me?”
“Try and call and ask them if they’ll schedule it an hour later, and I’ll come pick you up if I can when I’m done. But I’ve got to run. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to do what’s best.” Her polished purse, her heels, the patent leather gleamed as she tripped to the car. I heard the gate slamming. I ran outside undressed, banged on the car windows. She opened her door. “See if you can change the time.”
“I can’t,” I screamed.
She shrugged, looked in the car mirror, frowning, then smiling again, arranging her face. Then I guessed. “You’re not going to work, you’re going to go see Leonard Hawthorne, who doesn’t even want to marry you or anything; that’s where you’re going! It’s not to work for money. You promised!”
She shrugged again and started rolling up the window. “I’m not going to talk to you while you’re like this,” she said and drove away, out of our alley.
Peter Keller was in Massachusetts. I called Daniel Swan, but only Darcy and the twins were home, she didn’t know where Daniel was. I even called Leslie, but her mom said she was out taking her tennis lesson and I wouldn’t have ever said anything like this was important enough for her to hurry and call me back, I never would have done that. When you called Leslie’s family, they answered in another zone and you had to kind of respect their slow time. Then it was a half hour to three o’clock and I stuffed my dress and makeup and hair things and all the money I had in bags and ran down to the corner, stopping every few feet in the alley to bend over and underbrush my hair, and when I came to Elevado, I hitched and a milk truck picked me up. This was 1975 and there weren’t milk trucks any place in the country anymore,
except Beverly Hills had these stores called Jurgensons and for about three times the price of anywhere else, they delivered your food in these white, old-fashioned trucks.
The guy drove me to Wilshire, two blocks from the place, and I took my Korkease off and ran. Then, just before I went up in the building, I was sitting on the curb, buckling my shoes, and I saw this orange, flowered baseball cap with a big bill in the window of a jeans store, on a ladder actually, and I liked it and on a whim, I just went in and bought it for six dollars. It was something I would have never done if my mother had brought me, I would have been checking my makeup in the car, all perfect, and this seemed like something just personally me, and I slammed it on my head and went up the elevator.
I thought once I got there, I could check in with a secretary or casting girl or I didn’t know what and then I thought I’d find a ladies’ room and go and wash up and change and put on my makeup and everything. But when I walked in, it was this ordinary, glass-doored, impressive-looking office, with a big desk, and a big, manicured blond secretary, and when I said who I was, she said my name into an intercom and in like a second, they showed me into this enormous room with windows and striped thin blinds and a view of the whole world and two men were sitting in chairs, leaning back with shirts and ties, saying my name.
They motioned me over to an empty part of the room and I stood there with all my bags just on the carpet and they were laughing, one of them smoked, he leaned down to light his cigarette again, and said, “So, okay, what have you got in there, in all those bags.”
And I don’t know what happened, I went dark. Pigeon-toed and knock-kneed, I bent down and started pulling things out of my bags. “A dress, a ladies’ room, please. Just because I want to clean up a little doesn’t mean I don’t, I have Dignity. Yes Dignity, with a capital D. I may not have money, but class.” I was tripping, leg over leg, and it went on a long time, I put on makeup without a hand mirror, I changed without a bathroom, pulling my dress over my head, I faked those air machines that blow your hands dry. “There,” I said, landing on the floor, my stuff a strewn pile, my makeup smeared, hair two panels in front of my face. “Don’t you feel better clean? Yes, I do, much, much, better. You can seat us now, please.”
