by Mona Simpson
Well, it was a hot day and I suppose Adele thought she wanted to cool off. Can you imagine, a hundred fifty people, all drinking, and one bathroom, locking yourself in for over an hour? By the time she came out, most of the people were gone. Pretty much just Jimmy’s family and our relatives from Malgoma were still there. And the bridesmaids. My sister always did manage to get herself right in the middle of everything. Jimmy still blames her for ruining our wedding. We were planning to party all night! My dad had set up a record player downstairs, in the basement, and his Polynesian room was all set for dancing. But everyone had gone home already! My mother cooked for the relatives and Jimmy and I went out with the bridesmaids and the ushers to a supper club, Jantzen’s. I remember we drank lime bitters.
Really, outside of the war, my life has been pretty much in the ordinary and I suppose that’s been okay with me. I don’t think I would have liked moving around and always having to look right and talk right, like your mother does. But you know, I wish I had gone to college. I listen to Adele and to you talk and you just say things so very well. You know how to speak nice, you do.
We went to Niagara Falls for our honeymoon, just the typical thing, but we had fun. I remember the first night, I suppose from the excitement of the wedding and the party and then traveling, my period came on. It wasn’t due then, it was over a week early. I told Jimmy and he said, okay, and said I should just put my hair up and do whatever I needed to do to get ready before bed. See, he knew, he had sisters. And we each got into our single bed and said good night. Every night then, when we came into the hotel room, he’d look at me and I’d say no, not yet. Then our last night before we had to go home, I winked and said, “Tonight.”
I don’t remember ever deciding to build right next door to my mom and dad, somehow we just knew that’s what we were going to do. The land was there already, so at least we had that. My dad helped a little with the foundation, but mostly Jimmy built this house by himself with one other fellow he hired. He was already in the water softeners then. Sullivan Water Softeners. All those years, it was us against Kinsley. That was the other brand. I remember once after we were in the house, I looked out the window while I was doing the dishes and there were all these silver water softeners, shining like torpedoes, leaning against the back of the house. Well, of course, we put in a water softener and Jimmy gave one to Mom and Dad one Christmas. Adele would have gotten one too, but she was never settled down long enough anywhere.
I suppose if I could do it again, I’d build farther away from my parents. It really was just too close. But then, who knows, if I did it again, if I would even marry Jimmy.
And it was a help to me those first years with Hal, to have my mother right next door. And then when Dad was sick. Your mother was out in California at that time, doing something or other in school. We called and called and she wouldn’t come home. She was lucky; she barely made it.
When she finally did come, your dad was up here all the time with her. I liked Hisham, he was a nice fellow. Not responsible, well, you know that, but nice. And oh, he was a very handsome man. Tall and dark, with big, big white teeth. I remember him at Dad’s funeral. He didn’t like the open coffin. He thought that was such a barbaric thing. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, he fainted. He was with Adele and she bent down to kiss the cheek and I’m pretty sure he fainted. He was just appalled. The Muslims didn’t do that, see. Over there, they cremate them. I suppose maybe they don’t have the room to bury.
We did something around here that my dad had started and all the neighbors took it up, too. When a baby was born, you planted some kind of bush. If it was a boy, you planted a bush that would have berries, if it was a girl, a bush that flowered. With Hal, we planted raspberries, with Benny, currants. Those raspberry bushes are still here, they’ve spread. The idea was for the kids to be independent. When they were children they could go outside and eat the berries and pick the flowers. My father always thought of things with big ideas; he thought if worst came to worst someone could live on nuts and berries. And then when someone died, we planted a tree. I don’t know why a tree. For my father, my mother wanted two; a hickory and a birch.
When my father died, he left money in his will for me to get my nose fixed. He wrote a letter with it that said he had had a big nose all his life and he’d never done anything about it, but that he’d been the one to give it to me and he wanted me to be able to get mine fixed.
And I did. Here I was already married and with a five-year-old son and I went on the train to Chicago alone to have the surgery. There wasn’t anyone who did it in Bay City. It was sort of a scary thing. I thought I’d better have a picture to give the doctor an idea of what I’d like; at the Harper Method we’d always told people to look through the magazines so they could show us what they had in mind. So I had my photograph folded up in my purse. It was a picture of Katharine Hepburn. I thought if I was going to get a new nose, I may as well go for something really good, huh? Why not.
Well, I went and it was really awful. Chicago seemed very different from what I remembered of it during wartime, and I was just alone and out of uniform. I couldn’t just go anywhere like I did then. And I suppose, I was older.
I remember the night before, I ate dinner in my hotel room because I had no idea where else to go. Then, I still didn’t know what to do, I had the whole night ahead of me, so what did I do, I sat down and wrote a letter to my mother. Oh, I was such a goody-good. I really was. I was really too good.
Then the next morning I woke up and I was so scared. All of a sudden, I liked my nose, and I thought, what if I end up with something worse? But I had the appointment already, the doctor was all lined up and I didn’t know if I’d even have to pay him anyway, if I didn’t come. So I left the hotel and on the way to the hospital, I walked by such an arcade. They had one of those booths where you put in a quarter and it takes your picture four times and they come out in a strip like an up-and-down cartoon. I took my picture. I decided I wanted four pictures of my nose. I still have them. It really wasn’t too great a nose.
The funny thing about the operation was that the doctor put me under, but I could still hear him working—I wasn’t completely asleep. I heard crunching noises, like the way my dad ate chicken, he cracked the bones with his teeth and sucked the marrow. Then I heard a clipping, like with a shears.
I’d given him the picture beforehand and he said he’d do his best. He told me he had to work with what was there. And I think he did a good job. I’ve always been glad I did it.
Still, I’ll never be pretty like your mother. She has those long legs from Granny. And one thing I have to say for her, she always did keep up her figure and dress herself nice. She has a knack for that, anything with colors. She has that and my mother and Granny had it, too, but I never did. I’ve never been good that way. I never could just put things together the way they do. I’ve always had to buy the whole outfit.
And Adele always did the exciting things, too. She’s been all over, she mixes with the real rich people. She’s never been happy with just the ordinary. I don’t think she ever really liked Bay City.
She called once when she was in California and said she was going to a party where she was going to meet George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn. Jimmy talked to her, he answered the phone. We didn’t know who George Cukor was until she told us, but we knew Katharine Hepburn.
“Katharine Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn!” Jimmy was yelling. I think he’d already had his gimlet. “You know your sister has her nose!” Adele remembered the story, too. And she called the next day and said, yes, she had met Katharine Hepburn and that she was a very icy person, real aloof, and all night she’d sort of stood apart, but then Adele had gone up and said, Excuse me, Miss Hepburn, but I wanted to tell you that my sister has your nose. Adele told the whole story, about me working at the Harper Method Beauty Shop and taking in a picture and all and she said, for the first time that night, Katharine Hepburn smiled. So thanks to my sister, somewhere out there Kathar
ine Hepburn knows that a Carol Measey in Wisconsin has her nose.
ADELE
17
THE COURSE OF MIRACLES
I don’t plan anymore. I used to. I used to try to control. Now I just sort of let things go with the flow. I live in The Now. And I find, everything just comes the way it’s supposed to.
I’ve learned To Give Is to Receive. And when I can, when my billings are up, I look around for things for her. Even when I shouldn’t, I do. I saw an adorable Calvin Klein black and white evening dress at Robinson’s. It isn’t cheap, but it is ADORABLE, it would be just smashing on her, and she needs to have one or two good things. It’s fine to be the intellectual, but once in a while, you should dress up a little, too.
I even thought of it for me, I drove out at noon and tried it on, but my arms are just too old for it, you need a young arms and back. So I put it on lay away for her, she may as well wear it now when she’s young. When you’ve still got the good arms. And those little white outfits I sent her like mine, they’re two twenty-five, two fifty, actually, no, they’re two seventy-five.
It’s the most important, beautiful, fulfilling thing I’ve ever done in my life, being a mother. And I look at her and think, Hey, I didn’t do such a bad job. But she holds in her fear and her anger, she hasn’t learned to let go yet of her fear and just love, the way I do. I have no guilt. Not anymore. I’m living in The Now. I’ve found a real inner peace and nothing can really disturb it. She hasn’t learned to forgive yet. But, you know, I look at her and think, If I was such an awful mother, the way she paints me out to be with her friends, she LOVES to play the poor child, the martyr, POOR, POOR Ann, then she wouldn’t be so great, what she is.
I see the kids right here in Beverly Hills where the mothers were too busy with their manicures and their thises and their thats, they never took the time to give the real total love, the emotional closeness I did. I see it, I see it all the time in the convalescent homes. I have two girls, one is nineteen, the other’s twenty-six, and neither will ever walk again, from the drugs.
And I started from scratch, from nothing, she saw the house and the dead-end road I grew up on. I was on my own, raising her, when I was her age, who does she think helped me? When I think of what I grew up around, the old mink sheds, a dead-end road—nothing, and I look at what she’s had. Beverly Hills High School, college. And the lessons. And the clothes.
I think to myself, How did I get out of there. Other people just stay in the same rut all their lives. It must be something in the genes, our genes, that pushes us ahead. My sister is the totally opposite of me. And yet, it’s the gene characteristic that’s so incredibly, magnificently universal. That makes me believe there has to be a master plan, a universal power. Something in the genes way back, whether it’s centuries ago—and here we are that we, a few of us, all these chromosomes meet and become something. We’re all only electromagnetic particles. And so is a rock, a fish, a bird, a butterfly. And that’s how you know. That’s how I know, that I’m more than just this lifetime.
I’m part of all that went before and all that went after me. These are my beliefs. They’re very strong and very deep. I was always different. From the kids I grew up with. I was the same and yet I was different. But then everyone feels that.
Everything was meant to be and if she has to rebel to find her own independent self, then I can let her. And I know what I’ve done, I know it in my heart, in myself, I know she’ll thank me someday.
She could have been a poor nothing girl in a factory town in the midwest. And here she’s in with a great crowd, going to the best schools, she can go anywhere, mix with anyone. Absolutely anyone. She’s really a member of the intelligentsia, the real cream, the upper crust. And she’s there because I got her in when she was young enough to learn. I was already thirty-nine when we moved here. I was young and good-looking. Sure, she’s smart and she’s pretty and talented—the works, she’s got it all, the best of everything, I tell her—but I’ll tell you, there are plenty of them there in the midwest who are the same and you’ll never see them, because they’ll never get out and rise up. Like Lolly. They just sink.
They tried—to make me and more than that, my child, into their mold. I had to let myself and my daughter go free. And mold in another way. I didn’t see the joys and the happinesses I felt life offered. If only to look at a sunset or to look at an owl on a fence or to see the glories of Yosemite. I think the real ordinary is just to be simple with yourself. But they weren’t simple. They were highly complicated people. They lived by the negatives, rather than love and joy.
My mother could have come out once and visited me. Never once did they think that I could need. That has hurt me. But I also know it was Carol’s doing. How selfish people can be! To think they don’t have to do anything.
It’s very hard to change social classes after a certain age. I have friends, the Swans are lovely really, and Bert Keller, they’re very good to me, having me up for parties and dinners and screenings, brunches, whenever I want, really, but I’ll never be in the way that she can. You really need the man and the house. And you don’t just find a man at my age. They’re all looking for a woman who has money. And like Nan Keller used to say, if you don’t learn your tennis before a certain age, before you’re twenty, you’ll never get your form just right. But I’m practicing, with tennis I don’t agree, I am learning.
She’ll have the big house someday and the husband and the beautiful yard, all of it. And, I’m hoping, grandchildren. I’m ready to be a grandmother. I think it’ll be one of the most satisfying emotionally, I mean, beautiful things. I don’t worry about getting old. You’re as old as you feel and I feel young. I’m ready for grandchildren right now.
I’m happy here in my little place, I’ve fixed it up cute. Some day, I’d like to buy, I’d like to have a little house where I can see the ocean and the mountains, real choice. But it has to be the right spot. I’m looking. I’m looking all the time. I’m going to move pretty soon. I’m saving. LA has gotten too big and too busy. I’m sick of all this driving.
And her going to Wisconsin, her doubts, all this playing up how she was poor, working class—I tell her, Honey, you were NEVER working class, your mother always had an MA, that’s not working class—at the time, it hurt me, it really just hurt me right here in the heart, when she wouldn’t dress up, even once, she wouldn’t put on the clothes I sent her FOR ONE DAY, just to please me, but now I understand that was all just rebellion. And I’ve learned to be patient, not to try and change people. And when you do that, they come around by themselves, quicker than if you try to influence. And she’ll never go back to Wisconsin. Never in a million years. She couldn’t go back, after Brown. I couldn’t either, now. I really couldn’t. There’s nothing for us there anymore.
I remember all those stinky mink sheds—I used to go there after school and talk with my dad. We’d stand and stick our arms in, real quiet and still, that was how you got the mink to know you. I’m the one who had my childhood there. And I wouldn’t go back if you paid me. I’d like to know where my furs are now, though, and my dresses. There’s one suit with a green velvet collar and the pinched waist, it’s exactly just what they’re wearing again now, I’d give anything to know where that is now. But Carol probably threw it out or kept it for herself. That’s what happens when you leave.
But it’s worth it. You have to just say, you lose a lot of things that should be yours, but it’s worth it. They’re the ones who are stuck there.
A man? I’d like to meet someone real, real special someday, a man I could really share with, but right now, I’m concentrating on my work. I’ve got the convalescent homes, my patient load is up again, thank God, and I’ve got a few other little things, I’m designing a line of clothes for the bedridden, I have a partner and we’ve hired a designer, this young Japanese boy who’s going out with Betsy Swan, and I’m writing a book. I don’t go to a lot of parties, I live a very quiet life. I’m actually a very shy person. And
before I really want to look for a man, I’m just going to get ME organized first, type up those damn reports, it’s the end of the month again.
And I read before bed every night. I’ve gotten very involved in the spirit, in giving and really feeling a oneness with the world. I read this Course of Miracles and I hope and pray, she’ll read them. I sent them all to her for Christmas, with a few other things of course, clothes and a little jewelry. She laughs. They may not be Pulitzer Prize–winners but they show you the fullness and the openness of life. They teach you to give. And let’s see, what else? I’m reading Zen, all these various philosophies.
Sure, she’s going to rebel.
What I try to tell her is you can be BOTH—you can have the high IQ and the real intellect, you can be the Female Doctor AND you can dress up a little and act a little feminine.
I’ve done it all these years without a man. Not many women have been father and mother both. And I’ve been through lots she doesn’t even know. There are many things she doesn’t know, the things I didn’t tell her, just so she wouldn’t worry, just so she could be a child. I was in jail once for those damn parking tickets, never again will I let them pile up, but for a while there, I was back in school, getting my new California certification and I just put them in the glove compartment when I got them. Well, it happened twice and the first time, Frank Swan drove right down and paid my bail. But the second time I was there till four in the morning, the Swans were in Mexico, they couldn’t reach the Kellers, the Kellers were at a party, four o’clock was when they came home. Well, I was raped by a woman in there. Yes, so there’s a lot she doesn’t know. I haven’t had it easy either.
