by Mona Simpson
“We’ve really come a long way, you know, Ann, when you think about it?” My mother turned, her chin bobbing on the surface, her neck smeared with the mud. Then her eyes shut and she smiled.
I thought of what my mother once said about her dying. She didn’t want to be buried with the rest of our family in the cemetery above Prebble Park. She wanted to be mounted in a glass case, like a diorama at the Bay City Museum, only it would be in her grandchildren’s house. They would change her clothes and accessories according to the season.
I was with my mother the day she’d thought of wanting a scarecrow. We rode and rode past farms until she found the one she liked. It stood alone, set back in a cropped corn field. We couldn’t see it without squinting. The wind still lived in the scarecrow’s sleeves. The barn and farmhouse were miles away, tiny in the distance.
She bought the scarecrow from a farmer. He accepted her yellow check. The scarecrow’s clothes were faded and patched, the thinnest cotton. “He’s really a work of art, you should see in back, the way his overalls have been mended. It’s like an old quilt. He’s all hand done.”
The scarecrow had made my mother think of having herself mounted. It had been a joke in Wisconsin, when she’d been full of mischief, when we drove to the cemetery where our family plots were already owned. Now she’d never go back. She’d probably want to be cremated, scattered on California land, somewhere you could see the ocean and the mountains. She hardly ever made fun of things anymore.
I pushed my hand up to the lip of the tub to find her hand, but I could barely feel through the wet mud. Her hand was like something solid your fingertips hit when you’re digging.
I’d been back to Wisconsin a million times, on slow Greyhound buses during college, where there was always one very young woman in back, her hair in a bandanna, hitting her kid, saying “Shit-up,” softly before each smack, her voice pure as resignation, the kid wailing, arching higher every time, screaming, all the way to Bay City, where I skipped down, light, onto the snow-dusted pavement in back of Dean’s ice cream parlor.
I remember the winter town, my grandmother asleep in the country at nine o’clock. Taking the Oldsmobile and driving by the Fox River; the old, old buildings of the men’s Y, buying chili and pie at the lighted diner. I sat on a stool smoking, looking out the window. And liking it so: the yellow streetlamps, coal and sulfur piles, smokestacks by the river. A girl going home to a mill town, the familiarity and the strangeness.
I drove to bars at night. Pool tables. Boys sheepish in army coats, home whole from Vietnam. Some. Bashful with me because they knew I went away. I’d gone to college.
To one I said, “I look much better at home.” It felt easy here in the old bars, stained walls, the thick inside air. I knew these boys.
“Jeez, you must look great there because you sure look pretty now.”
I almost got arrested for stealing a hot fudge pitcher at Dean’s. A manager from somewhere else made me take it out of my purse, hurt my arm when I twisted away. Then I had to walk out of the store, in the aisle between warm glass cases, where the intricate-colored German cookies worth a million dollars blinked.
I always drove the Oldsmobile. My mother had never let me touch our Lincoln, even when I was learning. She felt terrified I would ruin it and then she couldn’t get to work. I learned on Daniel Swan’s ancient Triumph and on Peter Keller’s Mercedes. But my grandmother walked with me to the garage, wearing her plastic rainboots, a clear scarf covering her head, and patiently got in at the passenger side and folded her hands in her lap. The Oldsmobile smelled like my grandmother. The tin cans with their coffee labels worn off that we used for watering at the cemetery rattled in the backseat.
It was a smooth, easy car, heavy on roads.
The last time I went, Carol picked me up at the airport, thin in a lemon-colored pantsuit, taking me to a new American car, a convertible.
“He builds now,” she said as we pulled into their gravel driveway. When I stepped out, with my suitcase, Jimmy stood in work boots, on top of the roof, holding huge coils of something silver.
He’d retired from the Rug Doctor and now he built in their wide backyard.
It was nothing like it had been. There was a laned Olympic swimming pool, a garden, blond rocks planted among petunias, an elevated redwood deck, with a redwood ladder to the hot tub. It looked like pictures of California.
“That’s the solar,” Carol said. Jimmy stood installing the silver coils to heat the pool year round. He climbed down and shook my hand. His voice seemed breathless all the time now. He’d built everything himself, slowly.
Carol still kept the books for the store and now she also sold the Herbalife, a menu of vitamins she and Jimmy ate every morning at the white dinette table, looking out at the new backyard.
Hal was changed entirely. He was thinner and he’d moved back home, into the tiny bedroom he and Ben had shared when they were growing up. He slept in his own small bed. When I stayed there, I slept in that room too. Every day, Hal woke up and dressed while I was asleep. I heard him moving around; he seemed exceptionally neat now, spare of movement. He worked at Three Corners, managing the pressure-cleaning machines, renting out the Rug Doctor. He drove to work before seven in the morning. On the bedside table rested a large, hardback book with a pink padded cover like a Valentine’s candy box. Our Daily Helper, read the title, and the pink satin ribbon was always placed in that day’s prayer.
I told Carol my mother still had both breasts, the last time I’d seen her.
“I thought so,” she said. “You know the funny thing is we get along now, your mom and I.”
For some reason that made me sad.
Mostly, my aunt drove me around places. Museums, antique shops, flea markets, the huge untouched Goodwill and Salvation Army stores by the river. I liked to find old things.
Friday night, we went out for fish fry. The restaurants flew in the fish, frozen, from Canada because the Fox River and the bay were polluted by the paper mills. Carol said the Wildlife Preservation Center had cameras out from the local news; the ducks’ beaks twisted, they were born mutated, from eating the polluted fish. “And you should smell the East River, does it stink,” she said. “They say it’ll take ten years to clean it up.”
My grandmother’s house, in the yard next door, had been rented.
“A young couple where they both work,” Carol said. “He’s a floor manager at the Shopko.”
I looked at it every day I was there, a dark house with low windows above the ground. The grass had grown tall against the siding. Carol said they hired Mary Griling to mow both lawns.
It made me think of once when I sent my grandmother a blank notebook covered in fabric for a diary. When I helped Carol clean out the house, the dresser drawers, I’d found the book wrapped in wax paper, the pages thick and perfectly white.
I couldn’t stand the food, after a day or two it drove me crazy. Not one thing was fresh. The lettuce, the iceberg lettuce, seemed old. Jimmy took us all for dinner at the new Holiday Inn. It was a buffet; sweet wine, too much food, races for the shrimp, everything else overcooked. I hated it and hated myself hating it.
I told Lolly, when she showed me her office. She worked for Dan Sklar now, we walked through his Japanese rock garden, our heels sinking in the moss. I told her how I couldn’t stand the Holiday Inn buffet.
“On the west side, oh, you didn’t like that? Oh no, hmm, well, that’s really my favorite place, they have a new chef over there.” She laughed her old sly laugh. “Oh, well, if you didn’t like that, you really have outgrown Bay City. Because that’s really about the best restaurant there is, here.”
Lolly had some kind of diabetic anemia and she had to eat protein every few hours. In the office, she took out a small package of tinfoil from her purse and unwrapped it. It was a cold sliced turkey heart.
Once, from Providence, I’d called information and found Ted Diamond’s number. He still had a listing in Bay City. It turned out he was mar
ried, with five sons. His wife sounded nice on the phone. When she put him on, he said he was okay, tired. “Your mother,” he said with a bad laugh.
Carol told me after they’d put in the pool they ran into Ted and the new wife somewhere. A week or two later, it was in summer, the new wife called and asked if she might bring the little boys over to go swimming. They didn’t know each other, just that Ted had been married to my mother once. Carol said no she had bridge club and couldn’t let them come when she wasn’t there because of insurance. The wife had called four or five times again.
Once I found a Christmas card in the mail, one of those pictures, with Ted and the wife and the five little boys dressed in identical red blazers with gold buttons, in front of a big fireplace with five red stockings. The wife had written on the bottom, “Ted sends his love and he’ll write you a letter after the new year.”
The thing with Ted is I always know where to find him. And, like with most people that way, since I could call him and talk to him any time, I never feel like it.
They all got a kick out of what I wore, their old sweaters, earrings from the thirties and forties. They thought it was hilariously funny.
“I don’t bullshit them,” Hal said. “Whatever they want to know, I tell it to them straight. I tell them what that life did to me.”
Hal lectured at Catholic schools in Bay City, about his troubles with drugs and alcohol. He told seventh and eighth graders how he lived with Merry in their silver trailer on the Oneida lot by the airport and what had happened to him.
I asked if it was still the same in school with drugs, wasn’t it different then, with Vietnam, the times.
Hal said no, he knew from Tina there was still temptation.
“Tina, come out here and tell your cousin about the marijuana in school.” He looked up at the small, added-on breezeway bathroom, one of Jimmy’s projects years ago.
“Can I wait just a minute, Dad, I’m doing my makeup.”
“She knows everything,” he said. “She knows everything I did and she forgives me.”
Hal told me he didn’t write the lectures. He improvised. He said before he spoke to a class he needed quiet, he needed to be alone in a room. He said he stood in those coat closets, the white tangled safety patrol belts in a cardboard box on the floor, stacked cases of pencils, the gleaming pale green arm of the paper cutter, waiting to see what would come to his mind, some bit of conversation left from his marriage, some morning, drug-laden, in the dirty trailer.
Then Tina came bounding down the three stairs, the wings of her hair swooping out, her chin tilted up, offering us her face.
Carol followed behind. “Look at her, thirteen years old and a half hour in the bathroom already. When she first told me she wore makeup, I said, not around me you’re not, but then I saw what little she did and it does look nice. Isn’t it something, but you know, even at her age, I can tell the difference, she really does look better with that little color around the eyes. Even at that young age.”
Tina flopped down on the couch and operated the TV by remote control.
“So this year, I’m going all over Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Nebraska,” Hal said. “And they’re going to have me do a record.”
Jimmy and Carol showed me the blueprint of their home, in Hanger’s Cove, Florida. They had a brochure with a model of the houses in four color photos. But their house, though model B, was not really like the picture. Jimmy had built onto it, he’d added a patio and a second breezeway.
“We had to go to court and fight,” Carol told me, passing Griling’s house. “They wanted to put in a junkyard here on Lime Kiln Road, across from Guns. The city tried.”
Bub Griling was dead now, his dump overfilled, rotting, a hazard.
Carol mentioned Indians and the Vietnamese. Part of the old water softener store on Three Corners stood empty. The paint shop that had been there closed. Evenings, Carol and I drove over in the car, to show the storefront to prospective leasers who answered the ad in the Press Gazette.
It was a shabby empty space, with concrete floors and low ceilings, not carpeted like the Rug Doctor office next door. Carol and I paced, waiting for a woman who wanted to turn it into a dance studio. The rent was sixty-five dollars a month. “One of these little Vietnamese wanted to rent it. Yah! He wanted to put a fruit market in here and he wanted to write on the window, in Vietnamese. Yah! Can you believe that?”
The week I stayed, I couldn’t convince Carol and Jimmy that the Vietnamese in Bay City were not the same Vietnamese we’d fought.
She stood, shaking her head, looking at her feet on the floor. “We lose so many boys over there and then they come here and get money from the government. Yah. All those little people. There’s lot of them, here, we have the H’mong.
“And the Indians, now they want to put up a hotel, across the highway from the airport. They gave them all that land, to the Oneidas, they said that was their land. Yah! And now they want to put a hotel up. They’ve got bingo games there every Saturday night already.”
Driving through the dark city, I saw apartments; old buildings, pretty like New England, turn-of-the-century stone by the river with glass windows and that yellow light. I’d think of coming here and renting an apartment and living. It seemed amazing, how cheap it was. I could easily afford a pretty place, little rooms off a hallway, an old white stove in the kitchen, crannies, closets, maybe a clawfoot tub. But I couldn’t live there, I knew it. The feeling always passed.
Every day, Jimmy got up at eight o’clock the way he had when he drove to the store on Three Corners, ate breakfast and began work at nine. He still took an hour lunch break, the only difference was that now he hiked five miles, doctor’s orders. He had a machine to walk on in the laundry room for days when it was too cold outside. In the same room, Carol kept a machine which suspended her in the air, hanging her upside down on a series of metal tubes and bars. She said it helped with her back.
I sat in the breezeway talking to Mary Griling, who’d grown up to be six feet tall. She told me what had happened to everyone on our road.
Of the Grilings, Mary ended up being the one who stayed at home. She took care of her father until he died. Now she lived in the house with her brother and oldest sister, she worked in a computer shop in town.
She said she might go to Florida. “My dad’s dead, there’s nothing for me here.”
“But you’re close to your family. To Rosie.”
“I am, then I’m not,” she said. “I am and I’m not. Not like it was with my dad.”
After we’d left, she’d had polio. She limped a little and her smile twisted up to the left. She was still very neat, careful. Theresa was the one who’d gone away.
“Coming tonight, Mare?” Jimmy walked through the breeze-way, lifting a tray of chickens for the barbecue. Hal was giving a party.
“Working. But Terry’ll come. She’ll come with the baby.”
“Yah, Theresa’s home,” Carol said. “She was stationed in Japan and she met a fellow over there who can speak and understand Russian. Oh, and a real handsome boy. So he flies one of those planes out of Japan and listens to what they say over there.”
Carol stood on the porch hollering. “Handy! Handy!” She waited, fists on her hips, until the dog came running through the back field. She bent to pat him.
“You know Ralph Brozek, Jay’s brother? Yeah, he was staying at my place, freakin’ out right and left, one flashback after another. He couldn’t get out of my bathtub once, he thought he was in a ship on fire, that’s where all the other guys with him died. I say, ‘Hey, my brother’s dead, too. They’re in the same place.’ But I don’t know one single person who came back from Vietnam the way they started.
“My mom and pop think I got out because of the leg. But that’s not how it happened. Air force was messing with my head. They decided they wanted to operate. I said no, you’re not going to operate. This went on, I don’t know, six or eight weeks. Then I was lying, they didn’t know
what I was talking about. I was seeing the shrinkologist. I told them a little fairy tale. Asshole doctors. I told them, I’m going to kill myself. You’re going to find me hanging from the rafters. I sat down. I couldn’t control my emotions. They sent me home.”
We sat on the edge of the patio.
“So what made you religious?” I said.
“I needed more than just what was in this world.”
Theresa and I stood breast deep in the hot tub, leaning against the underwater benches with our hands. Theresa was tall now, a woman, no signs of what she had been. She’d left the baby at home with her brother’s wife, she grabbed my arm and said we had to talk. We sat for a long time in the hot water, steam rising around us, the party continuing, further on the patio near the pool, a stereo blaring in the solar house.
“I miss the trees,” she said. She was holding her elbows and shaking her head. I recognized the expression. “I miss the open space.”
She lived outside Kyoto and sometimes her husband was gone, flying, for two or three weeks. She took care of the baby herself. She lived on a base, though she was no longer in the army.
“Just a wife,” she said. She told me the Japanese were very good with children, that they revered infants. She said she was studying Ikebana.
I looked at her and understood the crooked smile, the rue. We both sat staring into the dark yards, the old barn a pure black, vacant fields.
“They told me they rented out your gramma’s house,” she said. “That doesn’t seem right.” I shook my head. “They’re putting my dad’s house up for sale, too, and that doesn’t seem right either.”
The pool gleamed turquoise from underwater lights, tropical plants hung in the bathhouse. “It’s so different.”
“I guess when you go away, you want it to be the same, but when you stay you want it to change.”
