by Mona Simpson
A few minutes later, she runs back up the redwood stairs, two at a time. “It’s thick with them. They’re all over. You just can’t see them from here.” She takes pails from the garage, stepping over the carrot cake, and we fill them with water from the hose. The buckets feel heavy and the slap of water on my leg is cold as we lug them down to the beach.
It takes my eyes a few seconds to adjust. But then, I see them everywhere, wriggling like corkscrews in the sand, silver on one side. The shore comes alive with them.
“You catch them with your hands,” my mother yells, running, her arms low to the ground.
Holding a grunion is like holding a muscular beam of moonlight. It’s that fast. They try to squirm up out of your fist. Some flop down, slithering back into the dark shellac of water. The ones we catch clap against the sides of our pails.
There are hundreds of them. When you put your foot down in a cluster of grunion, they spread away from you in starlike migration.
I look up at the bowl of the sky, alive with stars and stars. They seem to be wriggling, too, burning holes in the dark. My mother knocks the pail over, giving a slush of fish back to the water. We turn it right and start again. It seems we can go on all night. My hands grow quicker and bold.
Our buckets thump like hearts and we keep running. It seems they will come all night, the wet fish we can touch.
“So you didn’t buy a house.”
She sighs. “I really want a house in just the RIGHT spot, where I can see the mountains and the ocean, and where there’s a little artists’ colony and I can take a ceramics class and make stained-glass windows, all these various things. I’m just going to wait until I can afford a real choice place. The house can be little, cute, but small.”
“You bought the car, though.”
“Yes,” she says, cautiously, not sure what she’s admitting.
We leave the beating pails on our balcony and take our clothes off there, letting them fall in soft piles. I don’t know what time it is. The sand still glitters with grunion. Now I see them everywhere. We run the cold hose water over our bodies, before we go inside.
In the morning, we take showers, still smelling of seaweed. I pack. We step over the carrot cake and the murky buckets of dead black fish in the garage, into the white car in the sun. I bring my suitcase with me. I’m leaving my mother to deal with the stink and dead things when I am gone.
“Today is Sunday. It is the third of March, 1979.” There is a sign on the fourth floor of my mother’s convalescent home in Santa Monica. The bright crayoned letters continue, “The weather today is mild and sunny. ‘Nice.’ ” I follow my mother through the nursing station where she flips through charts, marking files. She moves with competence, the flaps of her lab coat brisk behind her. Everyone knows her here.
“I told you about Miss Eldridge,” she says. “She’s the one who had beautiful, beautiful things. This may be hard for you, but it’s good, I think. You should see what happens.”
My mother told me about Miss Eldridge; she came to Los Angeles from Medford, Oregon, during the First World War and lived with her fiancé, who was in the service. She waited for him and he was killed in the war. Then, she worked all her life as a legal secretary, never married.
The curtain is drawn, separating Miss Eldridge from someone else in the room. What I am not prepared for is her beauty. She sits up on the bed, perfectly clear, her hands the conscious hands of anyone.
“Claire, I told you I’d bring my daughter to come meet you and I brought her. Here she is, here’s my Ann.”
Miss Eldridge looks at my mother and then at me, and shakes my hand. Miss Eldridge is crying without any noise, and my mother begins to cry too. I go over to a bulletin board and study the pins. There are three postcards. I remember now that Miss Eldridge has no children. “I’ll change it again this month,” my mother says.
“Thank you for bringing her to see me.”
“I told you I would. And I did. I brought her. And now she’s off again.”
Miss Eldridge nods.
We sit in the car.
“She’ll never leave there,” my mother says, “it’s really sad, because she’s mentally as clear as you or me.”
My mother’s open eyes are as motionless and blue as a fish’s. “But they don’t have it that bad, you know?” She looks down. “I feel like you’re always leaving.”
“I always come back,” I say.
“But not for long.”
I shrug. “That’s what kids do, they leave.”
I only left home once and that was years ago.
My mother drives a freeway to the Valley. She turns onto an exit I don’t recognize and slows at a gas station. Across the street is a school, fenced with high aluminum.
She pulls up around the back and then I see it: our own Lincoln, up on cinderblocks.
“Do you want it, Ann? I’ve had them keep it for you. He says it’ll only cost two hundred to spiff it up and it might still run a long time. I’ve got the keys for you.”
She took them out of the glove compartment, but I say no.
“Are you sure? It’s a good car still. You just may need it.”
But we drive to the airport, leaving it.
In front of the terminal, I gather my suitcase. My mother doesn’t want to park in the lot. “Somebody could really bump it, you know? Sit a second, we’ll just talk, we’ll wait here,” my mother says. “You have time.”
My flight is not for an hour. We sit, not moving, in the new car.
Against the window, she looks perfect. Her scarf falls and ripples at her collarbone, her hair curls under. For a second, I feel like she is leaving, not me. Then I glance down at her hands.
“My hands are my worst feature,” she says. “These age marks. But they’re getting better. I put E on them.”
We turn and see each other.
She says, “Life is just too little, isn’t it?”
“Mom.” I kiss her, then I run out of the car.
CAROL
16
A LOT OF PEOPLE’S SECRET
Nobody knows it to this day, but my husband almost killed Hitler. That was the most exciting time of my life, those three years I was in the service. Before and after, I’ve been pretty much in the ordinary. I’ve stayed here close to home. My sister has had the excitement; she’s been all over, she went to college, did everything. But my big time was during the War.
Before that I was real shy, not like Adele. My mother said even when I was just born, I was always a quiet baby. Apparently, I slept all the time. I didn’t wake them at night, nothing. I was real easy. Well, I can attest that Adele was never that way.
I was eleven years old when they had Adele and I didn’t even know my mother was pregnant. I was so dumb, naive. Just all of a sudden, I had a little sister. I didn’t like it much, either. No. I had to baby-sit. I was the one who got up in the middle of the night to change her. And she cried plenty. There was always such an age difference, too. We were never really friends.
My parents didn’t tell me anything. I remember when I first started menstruating, I didn’t know what it was. I was in church and here I was bleeding. And when I came home I was still bleeding. Well, I was so upset, I didn’t know what to think. I told my mother and she said to me, “Didn’t anyone ever tell you about that?”
And I thought later, many times, Well, gee, who was ever going to tell me, if my own mother didn’t?
When Adele was that age, she had plenty of friends to teach her the ins and outs. She always had a crowd. But I was too shy. I never even had a date or anything and this was in high school. I was so shy that if I walked down a street and a fellow was coming towards me, I’d go all the way around the block to avoid him. Isn’t that terrible? I think it is.
After high school, I wanted to go in training to be a nurse. But my mother didn’t like the idea of nursing, I don’t know why, she just didn’t see me as a nurse. I still think I would have liked it.
But she k
new someone who did beauty and that woman, a Mrs. Beamer, convinced my mother that beauty was really the thing. So I went to beauty school here downtown and then I worked at the Harper Method Beauty Shop. It was okay, it wasn’t too bad, I didn’t mind the work one way or the other and I got in with a nice group of girls.
It did help me with my own hair. Now I can go with once a week in the beauty shop and in between, I keep it up myself. I don’t give myself permanents or tint my own hair, but everything else, I do. And when I lost my hair in that trailer fire, I knew how to style the wig.
And I learned a lot there, from the other girls. Upstairs from the beauty shop was a doctor my father knew. The doctor’s brother was a veterinarian and my father had him out once or twice a year to look at the mink. Well, this particular doctor treated all the girls who lived at the Silver Slipper. That was a tavern at the end of our road. I’d meet them on the stairs as they went up to see Dr. Shea and we nodded. I’d say hello, they’d say hello to me. We’d seen each other on Lime Kiln Road. Well, eighteen years old and until the girls at the beauty shop told me, I didn’t know what they were. My mother never said a word. She told me to stay away from there and I knew my dad was real mad when they opened the Silver Slipper Tavern and put the beer sign up, but I thought he was mad about the drinking.
I don’t know why I was like that, so backward. Maybe because of my father. Because of what happened to them, having to get married, he was too protective. And I think they made me scared. Because I remember once, I was in fifth or sixth grade, we were living in the house on Lime Kiln Road and some boys came once and knocked on the door. They were just boys from my class. And my father answered and yelled to my mother. “They’re after Carol, keep her upstairs,” he said. “They’re here after Carol.”
Well. I suppose they just wanted to get my homework or for me to come outside and play. Oh, when I even think about it, they’re after Carol. So he was a part of it, I’m sure.
Then, around that time, after high school, I first started going out a little. I was nineteen or twenty and I used to go with the girls I met working. We went out to Bay Beach. Then, Bay Beach was still real nice. That green and white pavilion was just new and all painted—it was a Public Works Project, for years the men were there building and then they painted those murals for the ballroom. Franklin Roosevelt came to Bay City when it opened. Now they just have those darn pinball machines and computer games. It’s all games where it used to be a dance floor. And I remember, they were just putting in the bumper cars. They already had that little train that went along the beach. We saw beautiful sunsets over the Fox River with the silhouettes of the smoke stacks. Those piles of coal and sulfur would take on colors. The bus went right along the river, north to the bay. You went with the girls on a Friday or Saturday night and the fellows came separately. Our crowd from the beauty shop rode on the bus. There were no dates or anything. You’d just dance. And they got the good bands to come here to Bay City then. Tommy Hill and Sammy Kaye. I remember, Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye. You’d stand by the sides with your girl friends and the fellows would come and ask you to dance and you’d think, Ooogh, he asked me, so excited. There was no go off in the car and do things, like now. It was a whole different way of life. Not everything sex, sex, sex. And then you went home on the bus again. If you did go out after, you’d go to Dean’s and have a sundae with the girls. The boys went somewhere else.
The women from the Silver Slipper were actually older than they’d looked from a distance. They dressed young. I’d thought they were all in their twenties, a little older than I was. Now, up close when they went to the doctor, I could see. They were tired women, coming to middle age. They must have been in their late thirties, one or two were past forty. They had such lined faces. A few looked like Indians and I think those few were the only ones who didn’t dye their hair. When they climbed upstairs coming to Dr. Shea’s, you could see their dark roots. And they must have done it themselves because no one had ever seen them in Harper Method or Billings’, that was the other beauty shop in town then. You could see their veins through their nylon stockings. They always walked looking down, with their hands in their jacket pockets. As if they were ashamed, you know.
The girls at Harper Method told me Dr. Shea gave them birth control. He deloused and deflead them and gave them special shampoo and soap for scabies.
When a woman was sick, Dr. Shea drove out to the Silver Slipper and made a house call. People said when one died, they buried her right there out in back of the tavern, in Guns Field. They didn’t even own that land. The girls whispered to me what the rumor was: that he gave those women abortions. Of course that was illegal then. No one seemed to have heard any more details, though, and I know for a fact that there was at least one child there at the time, a boy. He ended up at the orphanage.
Jimmy knew that boy later, one summer they worked together on a farm. He said that boy and some of the others used to do things with the sheep. Isn’t that terrible? He said they put the ewe’s hind legs in the front of their boots, so she was stuck. They wore such high boots then, up to the knees. And the sheep would sort of buck to get away. Ogh. Jimmy never did that, but I suppose the farm boys used to talk about it, I don’t know. See, that’s what we thought about sex then: it was either real, real bad and a secret, shameful, or there was none and that was all right. I don’t think my mother and father ever really did much of anything. No.
Then, the war broke out when I was twenty-three. It was around Thanksgiving, I remember, I read something about the Wacs and Waves. Become a Wac, you know, they were recruiting. And I filled out an application and sent away to get their booklet. I didn’t tell anyone, I just did it. And then one day this letter comes and says that I’m to be in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on December 18, no ifs, ands or buts. Then I had to go, I couldn’t just change my mind anymore. Well, my mother got that letter and she was furious. She called me at the Harper Method—something she never did, my mother had such respect for any work or school, you know, whatever we were supposed to be doing. Because she never worked herself. She said to me on the phone, “Now what did you do?”
But the service was a very good thing for me. It was the first time I really had fun. That’s when I finally got to know boys. At boot camp, you had one locker—one locker—and in there you had to keep all your clothes, your two uniforms, your cosmetics, your hairbrush, everything. That was it. And there was one big bathroom with a long mirror—so in the morning we’d all be in there lined up, putting on our cosmetics and fixing our hair. You learned some tricks that way, from the other girls.
The girls came from all over and most of them were nice. I stayed six weeks in boot camp in Cedar Rapids, and then we went to Evanston, Illinois. And there, it was a regular base. There were men everywhere, all around us. There were two of us for every ten of them, so we had a ball. And there in Chicago, we got passes to go to plays and movies and musicals, whatever was going on, you know. So even though I didn’t go to college, I still did get to see something. It wasn’t as if I stayed home in Bay City and just deteriorated.
I was in communications. We operated teletypes; we all knew Morse code. I can still do my name on the clicker. The boys there in Evanston were in training to be pilots. They had these little yellow planes and the ensigns had to fly them to Jacksonville, Mississippi, and then back up to the carrier in Lake Michigan. There were a lot of deaths in those little yellow planes. And then we had to send the telegrams to the parents. And that was the hardest, I think, for the family, you know. If you lost a boy overseas, that was hard. But to lose him when he was still here in training, before he got a chance to fight, well, then, you couldn’t even think he died for something. But when they made it, and most of them did, then they’d come back with their wings and their white uniforms all bright and nice.
I had some of the more interesting work there was for women in the army. But communications was actually my second choice. My first choice was to be up in a watchtower, you did the
radar for the planes. And I think that would have been interesting, too. But they were all filled up for that. And there was lots of work that wasn’t so good. Some of the girls had to fix engines and that was dirty work. After that you could never get your hands really clean again. That grease stained the cuticle, around the nail. Like the people who work out at the armory say, they can never get that smell off their skin.
By then I wasn’t so shy anymore. Then I was dating plenty. There was one warrant officer I dated, he was an Italian and he came from Chicago. Then he was stationed in the South Pacific. He wrote me to wait until he was finished and came home, but then already I was dating someone else. Quite a few of them proposed. I could have gotten married several times. I don’t remember anymore why I didn’t. I guess it just didn’t appeal to me.
They sent our unit over to France. Some went to Hawaii, lots went to the west coast, San Diego, San Francisco, Monterey, and we got to go to Europe. First we went to England, then through the Channel and we ended up stationed in Normandy. Well, over there I met a fellow I did like.
And nobody knows it, but I got married over there. It was a real marriage, in the Catholic Church. He wasn’t a Catholic, but he converted for me. He took his first communion the morning we were married. I never did tell Jimmy. He wouldn’t like it if he knew. But I’ll tell you something—he wasn’t even the first. There were two in Illinois before him; an ensign and the warrant officer.
Before I went into the Wacs, I had to have a medical examination. I just went upstairs from the Harper Method to Dr. Shea. And he examined me and he said, “My God, you’re still a virgin.”
I said, “Well, crumps, what else would I be? What did you think I was?” So even then, it couldn’t have been so unusual. But it was a big risk you took every time, because they didn’t have birth control pills or anything. I never got pregnant, I guess I was lucky. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d been pregnant when I came home from Europe. Then I would have had to tell everyone I was married. I don’t know, who knows what’s for the best.
