The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  I WORKED in a hospital ward for money. It was a job I found through school; I was supposed to assist a man named Dr. Chase, but he was busy with his research; he studied the masoteric response of cats in different stages of sleep, spent as little time with his human patients as possible, and so I hardly ever saw him. Usually, he left me a pile of charts and I did the rounds, taking temperatures and pulses. Sometimes I drew blood and elicited urine samples. When I walked in, in the afternoon, and put on my white coat, it felt like I was entering the slow TV time of children in pajamas having sick days at home.

  Once, two men in bathrobes were dealing cards at a low table in the recreation room, and that made me think again of Nevada. I didn’t remember if I’d ever called directory assistance in Reno or Las Vegas and if I had, it was a long time ago.

  I ran down the three empty flights of hospital stairs and heard my steps behind me like a summer school, empty and echoing. I wiped the pay phone receiver on my shirt. It was oily from use and slightly antiseptic. People had urgent pale conversations from hospital booths. First I had to call the operator for the area code of Nevada. 702. Even these numbers made me feel warmer. I dialed and then heard a metallic sound. “I’m sorry. All circuits are busy now.” It was a recorded voice—you couldn’t talk back. I dialed again. Same thing. My childhood wish had been satisfied. You could dial anywhere in the world quickly. But even in this country, a person could still go unlisted if he wanted to.

  I gave up and did my rounds. They were all routine except the old woman from Michigan who felt pain in her chest and the girl with hepatitis, who whimpered while I took her blood. She had deep veins, hard to get in. I kept Emory’s room for last. In the corridor, I took two trays from the dinner cart. I hadn’t eaten for a long time, it seemed like. I knocked twice, Emory didn’t answer, and so I turned the knob and set the door opening. Nothing was locked here, except supply closets. Patients weren’t allowed locks. I shut the door behind me and took a sharp breath. I’d forgot how cold Emory’s room always was. His desk was completely covered with toothpick boxes, paper and glue, as was the small medicine table. Emory sat at his desk holding together a new joint in his conservatorium. I swung out the tray from the metal arm of the hospital bed, set both our dinners there, and slid on top of the sheets. The bed felt good. My legs, on their own, fanned a little.

  Emory was ten years older and my favorite. I always had a favorite and that was who made me like my job enough. He was an artist and a thief. He had a record. He was losing hair and graying at the same time and he had overlapping front teeth. His features seemed fastened, close together in the middle of his face. The skin was loose and blotchy, his features uneven, but he could cast a look of intent insulted torment that made him almost beautiful. He spent the day in his hospital room working, making miniature buildings of toothpicks and Elmer’s glue. He was in for nine weeks, the time the state insurance for indigents allowed for his diagnosis, which was periocarditis, water around the lining of the heart. His buildings were all civic centers or temples, places of worship and imaginary factories and bridges. He called them models. His life in the hospital, he said, was not much different than outside except that here he did not have to worry about making a living. He had another six weeks.

  I lifted the cover from one dinner. Steam rose with the smell of overboiled peas. It was stew.

  “You always start with the dessert, that’s your problem,” Emory said. And he was right, I was already eating the pudding. One thing I’d discovered from years of institutional food was that a certain kind of custard survived the huge kitchens, even flourished there. The little odd square dessert in TV dinners; the airplane cobbler; I still remembered a butterscotch pudding from a dormitory cafeteria. And it was impossible to resist a dessert when I hadn’t had enough sleep. This was warm custard with berries. The rest of the meal, the overcooked unapparent greens, looked bad.

  “Can I have yours then?”

  Emory still sat holding his toothpick joint. Then he leaned his face close and blew on it. Gently, his hands opened out and he slid the white enamel chair back. It worked. The joint held. In this small room, Emory’s sketches, made with pencil on brown grocery bag paper, were taped on every wall. His own toothpick structures stood on all surfaces and on the floor.

  “Take it. I, as you know, cannot stand the sweet.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “Yes.” Emory twirled the flat dark-green strands of vegetable on his fork as if they were pasta. Emory was a vegetarian and he ate slowly around the meat.

  I shifted a little and felt something hard underneath me. I reached and found an empty spool.

  “That’s mine,” Emory said, grabbing it from my hand.

  “I wasn’t going to take it from you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, already shaking his head, “but I need that.”

  Emory’s room worked this way. Papers and objects teetered on every surface, thrilled by breeze. Needed things rose and Emory pocketed them, saved them to lose them again. As an absolute rule, he threw nothing out. Order was not natural to Emory. He accepted this. He lived in a filled world and feathers appeared in his hands, spools survived, you could see the shadows of his toothpick structures, with the air inside them. The only living thing in his room was a red full rose.

  When he finished eating, I tied the rubber band around his arm and asked him to make a fist. He looked away while I took blood.

  “I decided something, Emory.”

  “I knew she was gonna do this. I asked you just last week and you said no.”

  “I’m not leaving, Emory.”

  “Oh. So, what you saying?”

  “I don’t think I ever talked to you about my father. But I haven’t seen him since I was a child.”

  “Good riddance, probably.”

  A knock at the door stopped me. It was a clean, hard knock, even like a woodpecker. “That’s Lynn the candy striper. I like her, let her in,” Emory said.

  I was sitting, my legs M’ed on the bed, changing the full tube for an empty, and I thought of standing up, but Emory, I could see, was observing me and I decided to stay where I was.

  Lynn pecked in on her hard high heels, hitched for a moment, seeing us on the bed, then decided, apparently, to go on as usual. “Medicine time, Mr. Sparn.”

  She held a paper cup of water and two pills. She was a nurse, in a white uniform. He grabbed them, swallowed quickly, and then she reversed herself, left.

  “Anyway, I decided I’m going to find my father. I don’t know how yet, but I’m going to really try.”

  “What for? Hardly nobody I know got a dad, ’s a white girl hang-up. Most of them aren’t worth having once you’ve got them anyway. Mine was nothing. Junk.”

  “But just to know him, to see.” I shrugged. It wasn’t worth arguing. “Okay, now close your arm. There. Hold it.”

  Emory, who was capable of great economy of movement, true stillness, began jiggling his left knee. He did that when he wanted time to go faster. That was how I could tell he wanted me to take my tubes and leave.

  By then it was three-twenty. Circuits rang free. I told the operator that I didn’t know if it was Las Vegas or Reno that I was looking for. I gave her the name. Residence, I said.

  “I have no listing for a residence in either Reno or Las Vegas,” she said.

  “Okay, business,” I said.

  “Just one moment,” she said. “I show no listing under business either.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Spell it back to me, please?”

  “A-T-A-S-S-I. Atassi,” she said. “We have nothing.”

  The thing about doing that was, when it’s over, it was still me in the hospital, hearing the same light rumble I didn’t notice for a moment. It was only my life.

  THE LAST PLACE I saw my father was California. My mother and I lived in a rented room with rented furniture, the two of us. We’d left my mother’s husband, Ted Stevenson t
he ice-skating pro. My grandmother was in her house alone again. I’d wanted to go to California, even though it hurt like a shock whenever I remembered her. But then in Los Angeles, my father turned up. I’m not sure if my mother knew he would be there or not. Nobody told me much. Just one Saturday, he came over and kind of sat there, acting something like a divorced dad. We knew he was married and living with Uta in Pasadena, but he didn’t bring her along that day.

  My mom was getting dressed. She was still putting on makeup when he arrived. He slumped in the corner chair wearing tennis clothes, cream-colored and clean. I remember the cloth looked light against his skin. His racket was propped against his knee and he seemed comfortable on our furniture. He thought nothing of taking the best chair. He’d allegedly come to see me, but I guess I was still an age that required translation. My mother, I suppose, was easier to talk to.

  We heard her knocking over brushes, things breaking in the little bathroom, which was sectioned off from the rest with a beaded curtain. “Damn,” we heard and a jar cracked. My mother had a lot of sounds.

  My father shouted questions to her about my progress in school. She lied, making me sound better than I was. It wasn’t just that she lied. A lot of the answers she really didn’t know. I tried to make jokes, get them to fuss, prolong this rare concern. I liked being the kid of parents.

  “Well, so, what’s what?” my mother said, stepping out, posing, one leg bent, hands on hips.

  “Why don’t you let me take your daughter out to dinner? Would you like that, Mayan?” He stood up and took my hand.

  I curtseyed, imitating royalty. That was something we did together, my father and me. “Do oy know yow?” I said.

  She looked over me right at him. “Well, I thought we’d all go, if that’s okay?”

  He raised his eyebrows, then did his part. “Do I know you?” He didn’t have to exaggerate. He already had an accent.

  We drove in his car, me in the backseat. I was still at an age when my parents looked so big to me. As big and regular-profiled as people on billboards. Nobody else that we grew up around, even my grandmother or the Briggses, who owned the department store, looked like that. But they did. My parents seemed glamorous, if only to me. They knew how large they loomed to me and I think they found that consoling.

  “They’re thinking of skipping her,” my mother said, “but I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

  “Yes but her name is really Atassi. Do you understand that, Mayan?” My father looked over his shoulder at me. Then he steered over to the side of the road and stopped the car. “Your name is not Stevenson. Your name is Mayan Atassi. I am your father,” he told me. “No one else can be that.”

  My name in school, on the right-hand corner of every page, was Mayan Stevenson. “Okay,” I told him, with my head down so my mother couldn’t see my eyes.

  We ate dinner but we couldn’t have dessert because my father had his tennis game at eight.

  THE LAST PLACE I saw him was a Los Angeles restaurant that same year. It was the Hamburger Hamlet and I’m embarrassed, even now, that it wasn’t someplace better. I’ve heard of divorced dads who took their daughters for hundred-dollar days. The daughter could pick out anything she wanted up to a hundred dollars. I would have wanted to eat in a ballroom with a quartet, but I never would have said so. I imagined waiters who would bring silver dishes they opened with a flourish at the end, their hands in gloves. Me in an ice-blue gown and long white gloves. I wanted my father to give me a velvet box, with a ring inside. I thought that would make me feel like his daughter.

  I was never a fancy child. I didn’t have velvet slippers and sequiny things. I didn’t put my hair up different ways. I was always too embarrassed to be that. I wanted to be but I thought if people looked at me that way they’d laugh. It seemed like they had laughed at my mother once long ago before I was born, and that was when she sealed up herself and learned to shrug and just say, they don’t know, they don’t know at all, these people around here, what I have in me.

  It was only a weekday morning and I was sick. So far in California, my mother had left me alone when I was sick. She had to. She had to go to work. But now, since we’d seen my father that one time, she wanted to call him.

  “Don’t,” I said. I really didn’t want her to. I didn’t know him that well. He seemed like too much work.

  “If he wants to be your father, let him do what fathers do for a change.”

  “Don’t. Please.”

  But then she called and he was coming and I had to get dressed. I already understood that you had to look nice for men. Any time. It wasn’t like being at home with women. I fought on tights and shoes. Standing up, I looked normal but I felt sick at the back of my neck.

  It was a weekday morning and so I guess he wasn’t working. He hadn’t really told us. My mother figured Uta was supporting him. “Are you kidding, why else do you think he’s with her?” I waited, dressed up in my best dress, collapsed in our corner chair. I felt like being in bed, not hot and dressed up, the comb pressed through my limp, sick-day hair. But also, I knew I’d better not miss a chance with my father. I couldn’t tell how many more chances I would get.

  My mother was gone by the time he arrived. I unlocked the door and let him in. “Hungry?” he said, standing there. His keys dangled off the end of his right hand.

  We drove to the Hamburger Hamlet my mother and I went to all the time for dinner. It was an odd time of day, though. And my father asked the hostess to give us a booth in the bar. I’d never sat in the bar part before. TV voices were mumbling in the background and we sat in the dark. I kept an empty place on my left side. I didn’t know where to put my hands, with my father. They seemed wrong everywhere. I sat on them.

  “Coffee black,” he ordered like my mother always did. They said it with a kind of air. Coffee with milk was tawdry, something housewives drank.

  Now that I am grown up, I understand how hard it is to talk to children. Sometimes you just want relief. But he and I, we didn’t light up once that day. I was too tired to help him much. Usually I helped. Then he drove me home and left, telling me to lock the door from the inside. I heard his shuffling footsteps on the landing, then his car, and I took my good clothes off, not hanging them up, leaving them like petals just where they dropped, and fell nude and slender and hot under the quilt and slept. It was a quilt my grandmother had made on her gray living-room carpet. I’d helped her measure with my hands and tied the yarns.

  That was the last time I saw my father. It was a weekday in 1970, in Los Angeles. It took me a while to understand that that was the last time I would see him. I don’t think he knew this at the time either.

  Three weeks later, we hadn’t heard from him and so my mother called the number in Pasadena he had written down. The operator told us it had been disconnected and there was no new number. I called 411 for every city and town in southern California. None of them found him either.

  I decided if I ever saw him again he would not be my father, but just a man.

  AFTER THAT ONCE, it went back to the way it had always been. He lived everywhere and nowhere. He could come back, any day, so we had to be ready all the time. We lived like that, jangled, for years, looking over our shoulders, feeling nervous and watched, expecting. We tried to have everything about us look nice always but we got tired. It took too much effort. When he came, we knew, we had to be there and open the door. We would not get a second chance. And on that day, he would look at us and judge. It was like a surprise inspection. My father was like God. He seemed always to be watching. You’d think it would have made us neat and proper, organized, prepared. But we felt defeated. We were only ashamed.

  I did certain things for him. And I guess they had to do with pain. I was afraid I would forget. Especially when our life looked normal. Once before, my mother married a man and we lived in a house on a road with other low houses, Carriage Court. I stood outside and the sky was immense and our garbage cans stood dented by the garage, our
lawn tools, like other people’s. That was when it was hard to believe. So I touched my tooth in a certain way. I bit my inside cheek so it bled.

  I felt an attraction to fire. Always. I took matches from anywhere that offered them. And then I’d go outside alone and light them one by one. I tried to make them burn down as far as I could, so there was nothing left when they went out. For no reason. I came close to burning my fingernails but I never felt it. A lot of the days and nights of my childhood were spent that way, doing tiny things that I couldn’t really explain to anybody else. I’d stop when I heard the train go by, its rush of air like wings.

  I used to burn food. I started that in the far yard by my grandmother’s house when I was a child and I did it, even in California. I liked the way different things burned. Once, at my grandmother’s I burned a Rock Cornish hen over a garbage tank. We had a fire and other people were roasting hens and corn on the cob to eat. Everyone had been out for hours raking leaves and now there was the burn. I watched until I was alone and then held my hen on the stick over the fire. I did what the others had but I never took it out. First it just went orange and slick, then it turned dark like caramel but still shiny and that was when it was smelling in a curl high up to heaven, but then it got harder and tight, the skin close to the bones like an old face. Finally it flamed. All the while a transparent banner was lifting, the odor, I felt I was feeding the sky. Once it was pure flame it cracked and popped, a shot of liquid struck out and singed the metal, and it burned itself out, still the same shape and I saw it, like a skeleton, the same thing, but like the ribs of a house, no walls, and then the carbon collapsed and one round ash rose into the air. There was nothing like the smell of burning meat in the night country air. It seemed to feed something invisible and high.