by Mona Simpson
I stood still there on those steps. I didn’t want to hear more.
“Maybe,” you said and I could almost see you shrugging.
The next day, we put you on the Amtrak train, Gram and I. You had a duffel bag and a huge sack of peaches from the yard. That was the time, you told us, you fell in love, you wrote that you stayed up all night with him, eating peaches and watching the stars in the observation car.
Well, I didn’t have hair then. I was still wearing the wig. All my burns from the trailer fire healed but I still didn’t have my hair back. Such a thin down grew all over my head. I’ve seen it on some women with cancer.
That night, I stayed up late, Jimmy was out, it was his Elks night, they played poker. He kept up a social life, more than I did. When he came home, I heard him on his side of the room, undressing, hanging his clothes.
“Jimmy, are you hungry?” I whispered.
“You up, Carol?”
He switched the light. I was wearing an old nightie and I still had my wig on. “Let’s have some ice cream,” I said.
In the kitchen, I spooned out from the carton. He opened the sliding glass doors, never mind the bugs, the air smelled sweet, alfalfa and the hay. It smelled like a million dollars.
“Should we go outside and eat it?”
I took the blanket from the davenport in the breezeway and we spread it on the grass in the backyard. I dug out some Hershey’s chocolate syrup back in the pantry from before we started the health. It was a loud summer night. The crickets were loud, the stars were near. Everything was dark around us. Next door, Gram had been asleep for hours, Griling’s was dark, too. Bub had been gone quite awhile already then.
All of a sudden we were living on a road with mostly old people. We finished our bowls of ice cream and then Jimmy said, “Want some more?” He went in and brought out the whole carton and we ate from that with our spoons. Then that was done for, too.
I shivered a little and Jimmy rubbed his hands on my arms to warm me. All of a sudden, I felt shabby. It was an old flannel gown and I didn’t ever bother with the falsie at night.
We lay down there on the grass and we started to sleep. I didn’t know if he’d even want to touch me like that, the way I was. It wasn’t like when we were young. But then it started. He put his hands under the nightie and rubbed my legs. He pulled the whole thing over my head. The wig caught on the collar and came off.
“Oh, Jimmy,” I said.
“Shhh. Nobody’s up.”
I felt like our voices were drowned out by crickets. I remembered, I didn’t want to kiss. I tucked my chin over his shoulder, I felt our legs moving on each other, crossing, and recrossing, the wetness of the grass.
We did everything but kiss. That seemed silly to us, maybe, kid stuff. When we woke up, it was still the middle of the night and the ground had grown cold beneath us. My shoulder was wrong. Jimmy said his hip hurt. So we lugged everything in and went to bed. We didn’t find the wig, but we didn’t look hard, I said, just leave it, we’d get it in the morning.
And we went in Ben’s room and both slept in his little bed. We seemed smaller that night. In the morning, the whole room turned shades of gray, us too, our arms, our legs. I woke up and went to get breakfast ready, I left Ben’s door open, Jimmy was still asleep, and then when I was standing in my robe by the counter mixing a blender drink, I remembered my head. I looked out the glass doors to the backyard and it seemed fresh and strong, the way the fields and grass here get in July. July is really our nicest, and it all looked the same, as if we’d never been there. Then I thought I saw a dark impression in the middle of the lawn. The grass was pretty tall, so it was darker there, crushed down. But I didn’t see my wig and I wasn’t going to go outside and look for it in daylight.
That morning, Jimmy talked to me, reminding. We paid for Adele’s divorce, we were still at the store, trying to make a go of it, get out of the hole. He wanted to retire and build A swimming pool, a Jacuzzi, the solar, a house in Florida. He wanted to give the Rug Doctor to Hal, for Tina’s college education.
I felt something dissolving in me. Jimmy turned, made me look around. “We could have a nice life yet, Carol. We don’t have much time left.”
I said okay. We sued.
There where we’d slept, that’s where Jimmy put in the swimming pool.
I come about once a week and water the flowers. I pray. I talk to him. I talk to Benny all the time. Oh, I don’t know, I say, “I suppose you’re real disappointed in me, in what I’ve been doing. You must not be too proud of your mother.”
Jimmy wants ashes, he wants to be cremated into that dust. He says I should scatter him in the backyard. He never stops at the cemetery, even when he’s driving past. But he doesn’t really think Ben is here. I do, see.
Gram had seven strokes in all. After the first one, she snapped back in twenty-four hours. With each one it took a little longer. And she’d lost some by the last. “Ben, aren’t you dead yet,” she’d say to me, when she thought I was Benny. “Ben, I thought you died, Ben.”
That last time, your mom called, she talked to all the doctors in the hospital and she had her doctors in Los Angeles give them orders. Gram had things in her hair, test things, wires she really never should have had to have. And all those years, Adele never visited, never once sent a card. But that was your mom. She yelled at me, ooh, in the hospital, it wasn’t nice. But you know, we get along now.
They had to move Gram near the end. That night I stayed up and talked to her. They say the hearing is one of the last things to go. I don’t know anymore what I said. That last night, I was holding her hand, she didn’t seem happy, her mouth looked bitter and she kept calling Adele, Adele. She cried that name all night before she went.
She had a restless time. She’d turn around and toss and switch back and forth. She couldn’t get comfortable. I was there when Granny, your great-grandmother, passed away and she got this big, beautiful smile on her face. And I was waiting for something like that to come to Gram. But it never did. I asked the doctor, I asked, why couldn’t that have happened to her, Granny was really sort of a mean woman, and my mother was so good, and the doctor said, Everyone does it in a different way. Every one is different.
Benny and my mother and my father all share the one granite stone.
Somebody else finally died.
ANN
15
A NEW CAR
Christmases I did nothing. Holidays in repertory houses, huge silver and black, beautiful LA romances on the screen, sipping expensive coffee, I was in love, but I wouldn’t go to his house, either. By that time families bugged me. Other people’s as much as my own. We’d make out, touching each other’s clothes; the same jeans, flannels, soft, worn-in things. We loved the movies; they were black and white, beautiful—everything we needed. We sat in the dark, audiences raucous from displacement, all of us away from home, gay men, foreign students, Jews, laughing wildly at Sullivan’s Travels, The Navigator, or Seven Chances, gasping through Hiroshima Mon Amour.
No matter what, I wouldn’t go to LA.
“Some people remember birthdays,” my mother said and hung up the phone.
Finally, my mother and I rented a car in northern California, a compromise. She said she’d always wanted to see the wine country. We sat in the car, my mother straight in her seat, staring at her hands, looking deserving. I told her Leslie lived in Berkeley and I’d call her, she could come with us or not, whatever my mother wanted.
“I thought you said it would be just us.”
“That’s fine.”
“I’d rather be just us,” she said.
It was spring. We hadn’t seen each other for five years. It was interesting just to look at her.
All day, my mother talked about retirement. “I know just what I want,” she said. “I’ll do it all in French country. I’ll have a brick wall in the kitchen. Just real homey.” In a restaurant, she tilted her head. “What’s this? Is this Bach? I love Bach. Do you know Des Pr
es, Honey? Well, I mean, he’s dead, but there’s this record. I learn these things from Daniel Swan, he’s a double major in music at UCLA. You wouldn’t believe all the things I’m learning.” She nodded in time. “This is Bach.”
She snuck little pieces of bread into her mouth. “I’ve already started to get things. For the house,” she whispered. “See that blackboard up there? I bought two old school blackboards like that. Even nicer. They’re in the Swans’ basement. And the pine chests I told you about are for the house, too. They’ll eventually go in a bedroom. I have another armoire in Nan’s garage. See, and then what I’ll do is I’ll have a big open kitchen and when you bring your kids home, a boyfriend or someone special, or no, just your kids, you always have nice friends, like Leslie and all of them, I’ll have the menu written down on the blackboard so when you come down in the morning it’ll all be written out.”
“Where are you looking for this house?”
Her cheeks lifted. She folded her arms on the table. “I want somewhere where I can see the mountains and the ocean. The whole wide scope of things. It doesn’t have to be a big place, I just want a little house, something simple.”
“’Cause aren’t houses in LA like a fortune now? I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars?”
“You wouldn’t believe it. Remember that little house I wanted to buy from Julie Edison? Eight hundred thousand dollars, they’re asking now. Remember how I used to drive by? I could shoot myself now. I knew that area was going to be big, I knew it, if I’d have only trusted my instincts—”
“But we never had the money.”
She seemed clear that day, her face intelligent and thin. Her arms refolded, rueful. “No, you’re right. We never had the money. But I do now. And I’m saving. So just wait. Someday your mom’ll have a real great place for you to bring your friends home to. By the time you’re in graduate school. That’s when you really need it anyway. That’s when the kids in your generation really start to get engaged. I hear it all the time on ‘LA Good-Morning.’ They’re waiting even up until the thirties. Like my dentist.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to graduate school. Anyway, I’m living with this guy.”
“This Henry.” She shrugged. “I wish you’d waited. Pretty soon I’ll have something you could really show someone.”
“Well, I mean, I don’t know if it’s going to work out.”
“But all the others there in Providence must see you’re living with someone, all the real choice boys.”
“Nobody really knows.”
“Sure they do, don’t kid yourself. And they don’t respect you for it either, Ann, no matter what they say. A boy doesn’t respect you when you give him that for nothing. I just remember when I came home from college, what did I have for a boy to see? Lime Kiln Road. And Grilings.”
The waiter came, we ordered dessert.
“Well, I don’t know, I’m not tied to LA, either. And I’m getting sick of all the driving. Maybe I’ll just end up near you, I’ve heard Cape Cod and what is it, something Vineyard, is supposed to be gorgeous, they say they’re the prettiest beaches in the world. I mean, if you really like it there, if you want to stay.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll probably just work for a while, travel around. I might waitress at some truckstop.”
“With your advantages.” She laughed. “I can’t really see you at a truckstop.”
“It could happen.”
“Well, don’t you dare. You know I worked in a cheese factory all through college. It wasn’t so much fun. Speaking of truck-stops, I got a letter from Lolly.” She unfolded a sheet of peach-colored paper from her purse. After all these years and no trips home, Lolly still wrote to my mother. And I knew for an almost fact, my mother never sent letters. After years of saying her mail was lost, my mother wouldn’t trust the U.S. Postal Service. She believed mailboxes in LA were obsolete, that no one picked up from them anymore. She said she opened one and saw cobwebs. If she absolutely had to send something, she’d drive to the post office and pay nine dollars for overnight express. Paying made my mother trust things more.
I’d heard my grandmother complain. “I never get a card, nothing. Even when she calls and I send money, I never even get a card to say thanks.” It wasn’t exactly laziness. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten them. I’d seen my mother trying to write something down. She would sit at the table with a card or a piece of fancy colored paper and she’d write and cross out and finally give up. She had it in her mind that she would get married and be rich and then she could make up for all she didn’t send by wiring a plane ticket out for her mother to visit and taking her to see everything and buying presents. That’s just the way my mother was.
She smoothed out the soft paper of the Bay City Press Gazette clipping; a photograph of Lolly hitting the one-million-dollar mark, lifting her left arm up to a chart. Lolly sold real estate now, she’d gone to school and gotten her license the year we left. “Let me tell you, in Bay City, that must not have been easy. That’s a lot of little houses to add up to a million.” My mother scanned the letter. “And she’s still having this passionate, that’s what she calls it, affair with the ex-priest. She lost her virginity at forty-five, can you imagine that?” My mother wrinkled her nose.
“Do you think she’ll ever get married?”
“No, I don’t think so. I doubt it. But who knows? She does have boyfriends.”
“It sounds like they’re mostly ordained.”
My mother laughed. “You are funny, besides being factual.”
“Maybe if we’d stayed in Bay City, you could afford a house there.”
“Oh, sure, I could buy a house there now, a great house. But I’d never go back. It’s really nothing, you know, no culture. Nothing.” My mother took a pill bottle out of her purse and broke off a piece of seaweed for each of us. “At my age, believe me, I need all the E I can get.”
As we left the restaurant, my mother noticed a weathervane on the wall, an antique deer, she wanted. I told her it looked like a decoration, but she went back in and found the owner. He accepted her check. We carried the deer to the car. “He’ll fit in a linen closet,” she said. “For the time being.”
My mother had gone to an accountant and now she carried a black checkbook the size of a three-ring binder.
We skidded in front of a church. My mother was driving.
“Since when do you believe in God,” I said.
She told me she wanted to light a candle for my grandmother. “I go to church every Sunday now. The pink Catholic in Beverly Hills. On Little Santa Monica.” This Sonoma church stood empty, plain, with simple pews and a pine altar. But all the candles were either lit or burnt down to the bottom of their glass canisters.
“I’ll blow one out and you can light it again.”
She shook her head no. “We’ll just say a prayer.” Then she dragged out her long black checkbook again. “Turn around, would you?” She wrote a check on my back and folded it up, stuffing it through the coin slot.
I didn’t have to ask the question.
“Sure, it’s charity. It’s a deduction, I deduct all these things now. And they’ll take my check. Gladly.”
She slipped her arm through mine. “You’ll never guess who I saw at church last month. Tony Camden,” she whispered. “I walked in and I saw this very good-looking head. But I only saw the back. You know. He was in front of me. But I thought to myself, Adele, that’s one very good-looking back of the head. So I sort of elbowed, genuflecting, you know, I think I was a little late, and I knelt down next to him, and I look and who is it but Tony Camden. He was kneeling holding the pleats of his pants. And I thought, Boy, would I like to know him.”
“Mom, he’s married.”
“Is he still? I’m not sure, I didn’t see her. Anyway, so I sort of smiled you know and then it was time to sit up and he sort of looked at me and he smiled and I’d smile again and then when we walked out at the end, it was this huge beautiful day, real c
lear, you could see the mountains just like that, and we’re standing on the steps and he looked at me and said, Bye-bye, and I looked at him and said, Bye-bye. So I’ll tell you, I’m not missing one Sunday.”
Inside a dim, windowless room, on a cement floor, we undressed. A woman with feather earrings handed us rough, chlorine-smelling towels, her heavy hair brushing our arms. We’d stopped at the sign that said “Dr. Hickdimon’s Mud Baths.” My mother knotted a towel above her breasts, making an easy shift. My mother’s brilliance is in a lot of things you notice if you’re around a person all the time, but which don’t count for much in the world. While we talked, her hands moved through her hair, taking bobby pins from the edge of her mouth, arranging a perfect bun,
“This will be just what we need,” she said.
The woman led us to a room with two long bathtubs standing in the middle of the floor. Mud filled them to their thick curled brims and spilled over onto the elaborate claw feet. This wasn’t ordinary mud. It seemed blacker, and twigs and roots showed. It bubbled. A wooden plank floated on the surface of each tub.
It took a long time to lower us in. My mother went first. She sat on the plank, her belly falling into a small sag. It was a shock, to see her naked. She seemed both thinner and looser and I noticed on one of her teeth there was a black hairline like a crack in porcelain.
“Eeeeeee,” she said, sliding into the mud. Sweat glistened on her forehead like a cobweb.
Her eyes closed. “That feel good?” the woman asked.
“Mmmhmm,” my mother murmured.
Then it was my turn. The woman kneeled on the floor and pushed the plank so my legs went down like a seesaw. She covered the rest of me slowly, with handfuls of warm mud. You didn’t sink. The mud was too heavy. I could have lifted an arm or a leg but it would have been hard. Underneath you felt a thick cushion, we floated like the wood planks. Over me, the mud was about the same weight a person is, sleeping on top of you.
