by Mona Simpson
Anyway I left.
The Saturday after my last shoot for “Sante Fe,” I made an appointment to get my hair cut. I told my mother in the morning.
“What are you going to have, a trim?”
“More like a cut.”
“Oh, Honey, no. Don’t, Ann. You’d be crazy to get more than a little trim. Why do think you got Marie Iroquois, that’s what’s cute about you, Honey. And don’t think that doesn’t matter at college, too, believe me. Really, it’s the truth, Ann.”
“I’m just telling you. For your information. I’m not asking for advice. I’m just saying, I’ll be gone between eleven and noon. You better find something to do with yourself, that’s all.”
What she found to do with herself was drive to the beauty shop, sit and read magazines in the front, by the window. I’d never had my hair cut since those boys chopped it off on Halloween when I was eight. Just trims. I’d always had long hair. It had seemed important.
I watched the woman and her scissors in the mirror, the little wet pieces falling everywhere. A circle of hair stuck around my shoulders on the cotton smock and a wider circle fell on the floor. The little pieces felt sharp, they itched my neck.
My mother ran up. “What are you doing? She only wanted a little bit. Oh, Honey, look. You just wanted a trim.”
They each stood over me, one of them holding scissors.
“That’s not what I said.”
“You sure did, that’s what you told me at home this morning. You said just a little. She’s got six inches off already, it’s going to look awful. What are you letting her do to you?”
“Please sit down, Mom.” I looked at my hands lying there, on the beauty shop smock. They could have been anyone’s hands.
My mother turned to the woman cutting my hair. The woman, pivoting on one foot, leaning close, cut in quick, decisive clips. “Why don’t you at least undercut it, so it turns under, not up? That’s just going to flip up when it dries. It’s going to be awful.”
“I am undercutting it,” the woman said.
“Jeez, Honey, I could have taken you to the man who does me in Glendale. You should see the beautiful cuts. The girls your age come out with this full, long, bouncy hair. And it just curls. He cuts it so it goes under.” She picked up a panel of my wet hair and dropped it back onto the cotton smock. “She’s thinning it,” she said. “You’re thinning it.”
“I am not thinning it,” the woman said.
“May I ask you where you learned to cut hair?”
“Mom.”
“I’m just asking her a question. She can tell me.”
“I studied in New York and in London.”
I smiled for pretentious Westwood, where PhDs worked at the post office and my hairdresser studied in London.
“Where in New York?”
“I studied with Christiane at Michel Heron and with André.”
“Oh. I haven’t heard of them,” my mother said. “Oh, stop, please. You’re not going to take any more off, are you?”
“I’m going to shape it, so from the bangs down to the shoulder, it’s one line.” The woman gestured with her comb. “Okay?”
“Oh, God. I don’t know why you do this to me. Well, fine, it’s your life. But you just have to rebel, don’t you? You have to make yourself ugly. Don’t you see, Honey, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
“My hair. I’m cutting my hair.”
“Are you jealous of me? Is that it? Because, Honey, you shouldn’t be. I’m your mother. I can help you. If you’d only let me. You should see the cute cuts they’re giving.”
She walked out of the border of the mirror. Then she came back. “I can’t stand it. I can’t sit here and watch her doing that to you.”
“You’re not sitting,” I said.
The woman kept turning on one foot and snipping. The hair was now an inch above my shoulders. I turned and saw my mother in the front of the store. She sat back down in her chair and opened a magazine.
Next to me, a man blow-dried a young girl’s hair, pulling the brush tightly away from her face. The two hairdressers smiled. “Is she always this way?” The woman looked at me in the mirror.
“Just about my hair. She always wanted me to have long hair.”
The woman turned her blow-dryer on. In a minute, my hair began to look beautiful, a neat thick clean line next to my chin.
My mother appeared in the mirror again, holding her magazine in one dropped hand, moving around the chair, circling me. I wouldn’t look at her. She stared at my face in the mirror.
“You’ll just let anyone be your mother, won’t you? You let anyone but me.”
I never did hear from my father. I used to think, he might see me on TV and write me or call me or something, but nothing ever happened. I don’t know, maybe he tried or maybe he didn’t have a TV or whatever. I suppose it could have been anything.
I left lightly. Everything my mother wanted, I gave her. She kept all my baby things, my first teeth in bottles, my skates from when I was five years old. There was a work shirt she liked, I gave it to her. She pointed to things and I left them in the backhouse. Anything to get away. And when she took me to the airport, she walked me to where I got on the jet, she walked to where they wouldn’t let her come any farther without a ticket and when she kissed me, she looked at me, so I pulled out these new jeans I bought, they were Jag, and Jag was just a new name then, they were like my favorite thing, and she knew it and I gave them to her.
“You may not see me again,” she said, real softly, because other people were passing, busy, with little suitcases, and I guess they could hear.
I stuffed the jeans in her hands and she looked at me, eyes all grateful, huge like a pet’s. But that night, when I called her from Providence, she answered the phone on the first ring, jangled, and said, Well, the pants didn’t fit her, I’d obviously bought them for me not for her and I didn’t understand the meaning of a present, I’d never learn how to give.
That night she talked about the insurance policy again, the cliffs of Big Sur. I called her back and she didn’t answer and then I called her and couldn’t find her for three days until I reached the Kellers, who told me she was out practicing on the tennis courts.
For years, I didn’t go home.
CAROL
14
THE STONE AND THE HEART
It was like a stone, something in me. The way a hook needles a fish, it hurt when I tried to move away from it. And then it turned and I was worse. Love sunk like that in me once. Like a hook so I couldn’t think of anyone else.
It was a long long time, too long. And I was alone, dwelling. I passed Benny’s room every day, we kept the door shut and I was the only one who went in. I said I had to clean and I did clean every day, wiping dust with a soaked rag before it ever had a chance to settle. I oiled that old wood dresser, wiped the windowsill. We’d built the house ourselves when we were married, so it showed just how many years had gone, that wood. And then I polished each one of his things. He had that fish hanging on the wall that he caught in Florida, they each had their rifles mounted over his bed, and then there were all his models. He spent hours putting those together when he was little. He had such patience. I started with the hotrods and I dusted them with a real soft piece of chamois and then I stood up on a footstool to do the planes. (He had planes and you had stars. He gave them to you—you put them up yourselves on your ceiling, those glow-in-the-dark stars. I remember because your ma was mad. She wanted me to pay to repaint. But then, later, Gram and I stood in your room once—after you’d gone and moved away—and we figured out those were real constellations. We found Big Bear and the Little Dipper, Pleiades. You must have stood by the window and copied it all down.)
I used to take his shirts and socks out of the drawers and wash them in a special laundry. Then I put them all back where they were. I remembered exactly which T-shirt was on top that first day when I came in, and how each went underneath. It took four hours
to clean the whole room and I always felt sorry to leave. I used to pick up that rock from Pikes Peak and just stand in the middle of the room and hold it. Those windows are small, I don’t know why, that’s the way they were doing them that year we built the house I suppose, so somewhere on the floor, there’d be one small square of light. I slipped off my shoes and stood on the light in my nylons and held that rock and looked down at it. It was an ordinary big rock, gray and dusty. It could have been from anywhere. But it was labeled Rock From Pike’s Peak and Benny had held it, like I was doing. I don’t know what I thought I’d get from that stone, holding it like that, in the sun. I looked and looked at it and saw the same thing: the dirt color, gray, the plainness. But I felt like something would come into me through my hands. I understood then the way I don’t anymore about religion. It is a matter of concentration, a promise never to let anything else come between. I had that kind of bond, then.
I don’t mean going to church and giving charity, none of that, that we still do. I mean the religion that is a private thing, trying to clean yourself out, so you’re an empty house, a dustless vessel.
I’ve lost that. That I don’t have anymore.
I spent half my day in that room for a year, the first year. Nobody bothered me much about it. Jimmy kept following his own map. We didn’t have too much to do with each other. We’d always had the twin beds that made up together to be a queen. That year, I didn’t even bother pushing them to the center in the morning. I started sleeping facing the wall. I liked that sour cold air in the crack. That’s how I was then. It tasted to me like hosts on my tongue, dust dissolving.
Then once I was in Ben’s room, cleaning, and Mary Griling was riding outside on the lawn mower. Jimmy hired her to help around the yard and I don’t know why, with the noise and all, but I dropped the rock I was holding in my hand and it fell and shattered on the floor.
After that, I didn’t go into the room. We could keep things the way they were more by not looking than by care. I shut the door then and nobody ever went in. I drove in the car and got a rock from the quarry and taped the label on and put it back. I never once touched it again.
Time hadn’t stopped, I just had. The next year, eleven months, Jimmy went in the hospital for the heart. He was one of the first in Wisconsin to have the open heart surgery. I don’t remember anymore if I was scared. I still lived in another world; the darkness. I didn’t mind the waiting at all and in the hospital, that’s most of what it was. I didn’t mind anything as long as they left me alone. I’d settle in my chair and sink down and then I’d be off. It was as if I had work to do and when they left me alone I could take it out and begin unraveling and get started on what needed to be finished.
I thought about the leg. I worked that night over so much in my mind and every time it hurt. I was like a person with a loose tooth, running his tongue over the sore place again and again, activating the pain. If it was still there, I wanted to touch it.
We were in the trailer, Jimmy and I, the night they called. We were already asleep. The phone there was on a wall in the dinette. We both got up when it rang, we must have known, it was so late at night and we sat across from each other at that little dinette table.
Jimmy talked in the phone but he held it away, so I heard everything they were saying. Right then we had to choose. We could fly him down to Milwaukee to a big city hospital or keep him where he was, in this little Emergency Room. And we couldn’t ask anybody, we didn’t have time. I was wearing rollers, I touched them to make sure and then I remember staring at Jimmy’s hand and my hand on the dinette table. Both our hands looked familiar and old, like gloves, something you’d wear every day that would take on a shape.
Well, neither of us knew.
And I was surprised, because for all Jimmy’s wanting to be the man, he looked at me and asked me what to do. Real even. And I knew he’d listen.
“I don’t know, Jimmy,” I said. I looked and just begged for him to choose. We saw into each other’s eyes and they went back and back and back and neither of us knew. He waited. And so I said, “Maybe we’d best keep him here.”
He told the man on the phone and in no time, the next thing I knew, we were in the car, on the highway, driving. I don’t know how we ever got our clothes on. Times like that, there are miracles you hardly notice.
I remember riding that night. It was eighteen miles to the hospital and Jimmy drove fast. We were the only car on the road. We didn’t say anything to each other, but we had the windows open and I could smell. That was the only time in my life, there in the car, when I really felt the word married. We were married. Other times words like that meant other people.
Outside, earth rushing in, and the wetness of pine. Jimmy turned the radio on to country music, a woman singing, “I Fall to Pieces”; her voice whining like the whine of green air just out the windows, clinging. “Always,” she sang. And I felt almost happy.
I’d been to the Emergency Room in Bay City so many times with Benny. He’d had to have stitches, he’d had sprains and once the cast. When he was real small, he’d tried to jump off the garage roof. He wanted to fly like Peter Pan. He had you up there too, but we didn’t know. I’d found him, curled and bloody, and raced him off to the hospital in the car.
You had been afraid to jump. You kept so quiet up there that even after we came home in the station wagon, nobody knew to get you down. I fixed cinnamon toast and Benny was watching cartoons in the breezeway, and it was Benny who remembered you all of a sudden.
No one else ever died. Granny didn’t. It was the same leg, the left, and they took it off just above the knee. Mom thought a long time whether it was the right thing, but there was a tumor, they had to get it out. They operated in winter. And I remember the shock in spring, when I first saw her walking out with the crutches. She wore big high rubber boots on the one leg and a jacket. But she wasn’t wearing any stockings and you could see where the leg ended against the fabric of her skirt. The skirt was blue, a real girlish print, and the leg was white and wrinkled and old. It came to a point and a knot, they tied her skin at the end like a sausage. She went outside every day to feed that pony. But Mom said later what broke her spirit were those crutches. She couldn’t ever get used to walking that way. She was ninety-one years old. And once she couldn’t be outside, running everything, bossing the world, then she didn’t want to live anymore.
With Hal in the army, that was the left leg too. He said those army doctors thought he was crazy, that second time he came out of the hospital. They made him march and at night, when they couldn’t see, his knee swelled up to the size of a basketball, and it hurt him. But then, when he went to the infirmary in the morning, it fell down again. They made him march. Finally, he said if they’d give him a camera he’d take a picture. And then those doctors wanted to operate and he said no. Who knows what they would have done, those army doctors. And once he came home, it healed by itself. It still hurts him, when it rains I notice a limp.
Jimmy got to be the strong one, after he’d had the operation. When he came home from the hospital, we both worked together and that’s when we really got started in the health. That’s how I learned the vitamins, he had to take so many pills every day. I made an effort to do the right things. I took them, too, we changed our whole way of eating. I did everything the way we were supposed to, fruits and vegetables and fibers. I threw out the frying pan. And Jimmy really was good. They told him to lose thirty pounds and he lost it. They told him one drink a day, that’s it. And that was it. He had to walk five miles and he did, all the way past the tracks on the new road over on Brozek’s land, where they put the developments. He got to know some of the people in duplexes on those spoon-shaped drives. They’d wave at him when they went out to water their lawns. He bought the walking machine and he walks in the laundry room when it’s too cold outside. He built muscle, he kept telling me he was in better shape than he had been for years. And I think that gave him a new lease. I think that was the turning around for
him.
People told me, after the operation, a heart gets scars and creases, wrinkles, lines like a hand.
He took an interest in new things. He read up on solar. He dreamed the idea for a swimming pool. He’d walk in his aerobics clothes past Brozek’s land and come home wanting to sue.
“Not yet,” I told him. “Nothing doing.”
I was still in the dark, with a long way to walk before the end. I’d be doing the dishes, my ring on the sill, looking out the window to the backyard and I’d try to imagine how Ben would have walked on the grass, without the leg. Sometimes I’d see him walking on water, crooked over the wavy green. Then I’d have to rub my eyes. I couldn’t imagine him with crutches, even limping, I couldn’t imagine Ben slow. He always loved speed, for the feel of it. When he was real little, he used to haul a stick in the backyard and spin, he’d go so fast, he wouldn’t hear you if you called. He got like that sometimes when he ran. And then later, the machines. The minibike, dirt bike, tractors, lawn mowers, snowmobiles. And then the car. I think, truthfully, Benny sped, too, on those empty peninsula highways late at night, sure. It wouldn’t have had to be Jay. It could have been Benny alone. He loved anything that went fast. Nobody could keep up with him.
I thought and I thought and I didn’t get anywhere. I felt a place in me where it hurt every time I touched, the stone. It was the darkness I swallowed.
I told myself: he could have died those minutes on the helicopter in the air, between the peninsula and Milwaukee. But the way it was was the only way it was: while that old doctor fooled, fussing with the leg, pinning it, the heart stopped.
You were the one who let Gram see him. When a person thinks the same thoughts again and again, they each take on a shape and a color, almost a taste in your mouth. And my thinking, Well, at least Gramma saw him, was clear relief, like green-white air, antiseptic as an after-dinner mint from a nice restaurant, that cleans out all your head. It let me go on to other things.
