by Mona Simpson
I’d mimicked people all my life, but that was the first time I’d done her. I looked up again. My legs felt like Gumby. The men had been quiet, both of them, and now they were laughing. One clapped. I had screamed. I thought they must have felt terribly sorry for me. But I was a little elated, too. I knew there was a chance I’d done something good, good enough to change my life. “Okay,” the one with the cigarette said, taking out a gold case, lighting another. “Do they teach you to read, too, over at Beverly Hills High?” The whole time there, I forgot I was wearing that orange hat.
When I came out of the building I spent the whole three dollars I had left on a hot fudge sundae at the Westwood Will Wright’s, and I ate it in about a minute, standing at the takeout counter. I was so hungry all of a sudden. Then I went to go home. Nobody picked me up on Wilshire, this time, when I hitched. I stood at the corner of Westwood Boulevard, in front of two huge office buildings at a bus stop, still carrying my bags. About fifty people in gray business suits milled, waiting for the bus. I went up to each one, I swear, each one, I said, “Excuse me, I live in Beverly Hills, I go to the high school; I lost my wallet and I don’t have any money. Could I possibly borrow forty cents for the bus and if you give me your address I’ll send it back to you?” I got two nods, fast, flickering, almost like sleights of hand. Other people just looked away, into the hills you couldn’t see for the smog, as if they didn’t hear me. I ended up walking home. I got there at eight o’clock and stood looking in the refrigerator. It was empty. My mother must have thrown out all the food.
After a while, I knocked, lightly, at her door. “Mom, are we going to get some supper?”
“Leave me be, Ann. Just go away.” Her voice was flat and totally different. I scuffed up to the Kellers’ and went in the back and the cook fixed me a ham sandwich.
What I was afraid of never happened. My mother just talked about Dr. Hawthorne less and less. In the evenings, she still wore her peach-colored robe, but she tended to lie on the couch flipping through magazines. I didn’t find any more red envelopes in our mail. I’d been walking around waiting for the day she’d fall apart. But she didn’t. She hadn’t with Josh Spritzer, either.
One afternoon, late, she rushed in dressed up, her white lab coat over a pantsuit.
“Well, I’m back at Palm Manor and guess what? They gave me a party, they were so glad to get me back. They said no one else they’d had in either convalescent home was good with the people the way I was.”
A tear formed on the corner of one eye.
“Control yourself, Mom.” I could be such a pill.
She dabbed her eye with a sleeve. “Well, I suppose I understand these old people. A lot of them are out here from the midwest or somewhere else, you know, and here they are in a home. All alone.”
“I’m glad you’re working again,” I said. I was so cold. I walked away to my room. She should just work and make money to pay for my school and clothes and for college. For me to go away. I didn’t want to hear about it, about her trying, how she felt. She should just do it and make it look easy.
“’Course I suppose they’ve got it pretty good there. There’s a lot worse, I’ll tell you,” she said, mostly to herself.
The gas and electricity was cut off again and I stayed home from school to pay the bill. We both did it rotely, something we were used to. Now, the people in Pacific Gas and Electric knew my name.
“I’ll catch a father for you yet, Ann, you just wait.” My mother patted my knee. We sat parked in front of Baskin-Robbins and she sighed.
“Not for me, anymore. You should look for a husband for you. But I don’t need a father anymore.” We both knew I would go away in one year.
My mother sat up straighten “Well, sure you do. For when you’re in college, you can have parties and bring your kids home. And just to have a man you can look up to a little and talk.”
“Even if you marry someone, he won’t be my father. I had a father.”
“Yeah, well where is he.”
I shrugged. “Anyone else’ll just be your husband. I won’t really know him that well.”
“Just wait and see. You plan too much. You’re thinking and analyzing, you’ve got to learn to just be. And besides, you might like to have a man to look up to, to ask for advice once in a while.”
A piece of my mother’s hair hung near her ice cream cone. I reached over and hooked it behind her ear.
“I have you.”
“Yes, but you need a man, too. You’ll see.” She started the engine of the car. “Who knows, maybe you’ll be better off not growing up with a man all the time. Because with my father, you always compare and nobody else ever has that real closeness you did with him. Maybe you’re better off never knowing it. I think so. I think everything’s just going to go right in your life.”
We got the call, union scale, sixteen weeks shooting the first season. The part was Marie Iroquois on “Sante Fe.” They’d changed me to an Indian.
We had habits, but we never admitted them. We ate out every night, but every night, it was as if my mother felt freshly surprised that driving in the car and finding a restaurant was, at ten o’clock, our only alternative. We never bought food for the half-size refrigerator anymore. All we had in the house was carrot juice and wheat germ oil.
It was stubbornness. My mother didn’t want this to be our life. She’d do it a day at a time, she’d put up with it, but she wasn’t going to plan for it. We didn’t pay bills, we didn’t buy groceries, we bounced checks. Accepting our duties might have meant we were stuck forever. We made it so we couldn’t keep going the way we were; something had to happen. But the thing was, it never did.
My mother had to pick me up from work now, in Studio City. She came late a lot of times. I’d hang around with this boy, Clark, a guy from the Valley.
It wasn’t anything like I’d thought it would be, television. I just had to stand around and say lines, once in a while I got to say one word more than another word to make people laugh, but it didn’t really matter what I did. It was work, like my sophomore part-time job in the PE office. Mostly they wanted pictures of black hair. Before, I’d imagined the movies were the center of the world, and people loved you, people like my father came up and saw you and told you you were beautiful. But this was like nothing. The places we shot were in the Valley, just gray lots and studios, trailer dressing rooms. We stood around waiting most of the time. Nobody thought we were anywhere. Even people like Clark, who wanted to be actors, and who walked funny, he sort of bounced to make himself seem taller, they all just wanted to get somewhere else.
But other people, outside television, treated you different. Teenaged girls on Beverly Drive giggled behind, turned shy if I stopped, and looked up at me.
I was still going to leave her. I’d go to college, a clean, safe, normal escape. I’d have the money. Before, she used to tell me I had a trust fund. I asked her about it a lot. The first time, when I was fourteen or something, it was, “Don’t worry, I arranged this with your father’s family when you were a baby. There was money set aside for your college then, from Egypt.”
“Like the whole country of Egypt is just going to send me money.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve worked it out. On your seventeenth birthday, it’ll come.”
The second time, it was, “Well, I’m worried, I haven’t heard anything from the Egyptians and I’m very worried.” I asked about papers, documents, even names. She had nothing. The next time I asked was the June before Marie Iroquois. We sat in the car, licking ice cream cones. She put her fingers to her throat. “My jewels are your trust, Ann, so just be quiet.” Once the checks started from “Santa Fe” I never mentioned it again.
The point of the fight was always, “I don’t know why you can’t go to UCLA like all these kids I see, they’re getting good educations, they’re studying to be nurses and lawyers and female doctors. I see them in the convalescent homes.”
I had no answer so I didn’t give one. And the fights
always passed.
I got into a better school than I deserved, with my lousy grades. But even colleges thought you were different if they saw you on TV.
We both knew I would go. We joked about it.
“You know after we’ve worked so hard all these years, you could really just stay a while and help out a little, so we could get ahead once, you know, after I’ve worked nights and at Hamburger Hamlet and as a maid, and everything, you know? It wouldn’t kill you.”
I knew.
Something I found when I was packing to go away: a newspaper clipping, in a shoe box where I kept things, from the Beverly Hills Courier, March 2, 1972.
13-YEAR-OLD SEEKS HOME. NEAT, WELL-BEHAVED
OKAY STUDENT. B + PRETTY (DARK HAIR, THIN).
DOES NOT SMOKE AND HAS NO INTEREST IN EXPERIMENTING
WITH DRUGS. PLANNING TO GO TO COLLEGE.
I WOULD HELP AROUND THE HOUSE. MAY BE THE DAUGHTER
YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED. NO TROUBLE. PO BOX 254.
I remembered I wouldn’t let the guy who took my money for the ad open the envelope until I left. He was cute, redheaded, he looked like a college kid and he flirted with me, but after he read my ad, which must have been as soon as I walked out of the office, I didn’t want to see him again.
I never went and checked my post office box for replies.
Another time, I rummaged through the jumbled suitcase from home. It was a little library of me. First-grade report cards, average, average, average, one above-average—in penmanship—a list of friends to work on stuck in a book (some who already liked me, some who might), a large photo album with one entry, pressed yellow roses and a faded orange clear hospital identification band. Wisps of hair curled in envelopes. Baby teeth in eyedropper bottles. Beach ball photographs.
I remembered it only dimly, the place on the highway, Kelly’s, a small brick store with a house in back. Mostly, they developed film, you parked your car on the gravel and went in to pick up your packet of snapshots. It was a dim rainy day when we went, a carpeted room in back. The man looked young and dull. My mother was the brightest thing there, full of light and authority. I wore an orange raincoat with pink dots over my tiny swimsuit and thongs. I remember them posing me with the beach ball, remember lying on the carpet, arching up, for them to slide the swimsuit off. I don’t know, I must have been six or seven. I hated the way my hair looks in the pictures, up in a bun, and my forced big smile, the way my leg tilts, posing. It’s funny for me to think of us in that little dim place by the highway, taking nude pictures of a seven-year-old with a colored beach ball. At one point, my mother took a powder puff out from her purse and powdered me.
She still has that little orange and pink raincoat. She keeps it in dry-cleaning cellophane at one end of her closet.
Leslie and I shopped together for college. Used clothing stores on La Cienega for broken-in Levi’s, we tried on hundreds from the wooden apple barrels, chose the ones that fit and then tore the knees. We bought tiny used T-shirts with numbers on them which we wore so tight they bound our chests and a strip of skin escaped uncovered above our belts. Her parents kept asking me over to dinner, but her family got on my nerves. It was the same every night. Her father, her mother, her little brother, where they sat, the bowls of food moving around the table like a clock.
They all kept quiet, only Leslie complained. “So why don’t we do these things, why don’t we boycott grapes?”
But Leslie’s parents never yelled. They remained soft-spoken always. “You have to choose your causes,” Leslie’s mother murmured, “we can’t do everything for everyone. Or we’d be boycotting the whole store. We’d have nothing to eat. Your father and I have chosen the Jews. When you go away to college, you’ll find the one or two things that mean the most to you.”
Leslie rolled her eyes at me. Later, in her room, she shook her head, “I’m counting the days. Sometimes I think all my mother cares about is getting her nails done and her legs waxed. She’s like a mannikin in a store window.” That’s what I thought of Leslie’s mother too, I would have agreed if I didn’t know that kids really love their parents.
When we walked downstairs later, a huge fight started between Leslie and her father over Häagen-Dazs. Häagen-Dazs ice cream was just new in the stores. Leslie’s parents said they wouldn’t spend two dollars on a pint of ice cream, no matter what. Leslie screamed, Dana’s father bought it for his kids.
I just wanted to go home. My mom and I sometimes bought two pints and each ate one, right from the carton, with a spoon.
One day I brought the rent check up to the big house. I went through the kitchen and while I stood talking with the cook, Mr. Keller walked in. I realized I’d never seen him in the kitchen. He looked slight there, out of place among the huge stainless steel sinks and counters.
“May I have a word with you, Ann?”
We walked through the living room to the back terrace. We stood looking over the lawn and the tennis court. His face twisted. “Do you have all the money you need, for college?” he said.
I shook my head, yes.
“If you need anything,” he said.
I looked back towards the empty house. “Where’s Mrs. Keller?” I asked.
“In San Francisco for the day.”
Daniel Swan wasn’t going anywhere. The San Ysidro house stayed the same: the Failure’s deal still hadn’t come through in Mexico, the Witch still whipped around the corners like a wind, late and busy. The only one making money was Riley, who had already started a rock band. The summer before we’d been in a commercial together. The Swans weren’t moving, but they didn’t have the money to send Daniel away to college. He was going to stay at UCLA. He didn’t seem to mind. We sat on the steps in back of the house, our heads on our knees, staring at the plain dry canyons. “My grandfather’s jewelry business, he sells diamonds, I might do that and make a ton of money. Or I could work in a bank like my cousin. I might do that or developing. I’d like to buy my own boat, then you don’t have to worry about anything, a sixty-foot yacht and you could live on it and go around the world.”
“What about astronomy? I thought you were going to major in astronomy.”
“I’ll do that too. I could go to school at night, if I make all that money I won’t need a degree, I’d just want the classes, I don’t know, I might do anything.”
Before I left for college, it seemed my mother was working all the time. One night we parked in front of a house on an empty wide street north of Sunset. The palm trees seemed to whisper over the lawn. “Too bad Idie’s dead,” my mother said as we made our way up the driveway. A Mrs. Dover invited us into the kitchen. We followed her as she slip-slopped through the cluttered house. “The shanty Irish,” my mother mouthed.
I sat next to my mother at the kitchen counter, listening while Mrs. Dover made tea and talked about Melly’s heart. Melly’s heart this, Melly’s heart that. Mrs. Dover moved slowly, like a fat person. Mrs. Dover said she could cook only some things now and not others, now they could walk but never too fast, they took rides but not far and all because of Melly’s heart. We listened nicely, my mother smiling as if she understood the moment before Mrs. Dover said it.
“It’s all the same heart,” Mrs. Dover whispered over the kitchen counter, as if she was afraid of being overheard. “Idie was a year younger when she, you know. He’s sixty-five now.”
“But you forget, Trish, that he’s in good shape.” My mother’s voice scolded with conviction. I didn’t know whether she was telling the truth or not. “Idie was fat, Trish. And she didn’t exercise. And do you know what she ate?”
“So you think he’ll hang on a while?” Mrs. Dover laughed a short laugh.
“She ate doughnuts. Jelly doughnuts. That’s all she’d eat. The dietitian forbade the aides to give them to her but she wouldn’t touch anything else. Sure. Jelly doughnuts with powder sugar on top.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, of course. He’ll live another ten years, Trish.
At least. At least. Now, you’re the one who needs more exercise. You know, when Melly’s seventy-five, he’s going to be in good shape and he’s going to want a wife in good shape, too.”
“You think so?” Mrs. Dover looked up at my mother.
My mother and I ran down the gravel driveway to the car, giggling. She drove fast through the residential streets to the store windows on the way to Baskin-Robbins. “Boy, would you look at that suede suit. Isn’t that elegant. That’s what I need, a few good suits that’ll take me anywhere.”
“I’m sure it’s incredibly expensive.” Clothes had been so easy when we worked in a store, like a game, getting more and more, making outfits. Now, they seemed hard and important again.
“Yes, but it’s quality. That’s what I’ve always done. I’ve always bought the best, good fabrics and with a good cut that’s really well made. And then it lasts forever.”
“Fine if you can afford it in the first place.” I worried about my mother managing her money, after I was gone.
She sighed. “You can’t even let me have a little fun, imagining, can you?”
As if it were something unconnected to my leaving, incidental, my mother would mention her plans to kill herself.
“I might just drive over …”
“You’ll get the insurance.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I want you to invest that, it’ll be a lot of money.”
“You’re a survivor.”
I did not believe her and I did. I knew my leaving would make a difference, could make a difference.
