by Mona Simpson
My mother tried one more thing. She said she felt too weak to take me to the airport, but she could in the morning, once she got back her strength. I said no and that time I did start dialing a taxi. She got dressed then and drove me.
I had taken something from her apartment. It was a pin like a bobby pin with an enamel picture of a dog’s head on it. I’d found it in a little dish with buttons and pennies.
“Well, honey, I was scared. It’s very frightening. You know your hormones get funny. You’re not as much a woman anymore.”
She taught me, during our years alone, to forgive her absolutely anything.
When I got back, I took out my textbooks. I wanted to get down to business. I’d brought them along, but I hadn’t opened them. Every time I meant to and didn’t.
My mother once told me something, I could still repeat the grim dreamy smile, an I’ll-get-you smile, of complete power and its satisfaction, the smile a parent has banding back the pleasure his face can barely contain when he says to his child, “Take your pants down and go to your room,” before a spanking. But I was a girl. You cannot mark a girl’s soul just through her body. Girls’ bodies are used so much anyway. Girls, more than boys, learn to unhinge the two.
The thing my mother said to me that lasted was “You’re an over-achiever. You’re not really that smart. I am, but you’re not as high. My IQ is much better than yours, yours is just a little over average, really. You do well because you work hard.”
I believed her that day and nothing exactly changed. She watched, waiting. I willed myself absolutely still but what had been natural I now forced from memory. This foot before that foot was walking. I kept myself the same. I didn’t cry. Her eyes searched, her lips nervous with hunger. I don’t think I gave her anything. I cannot be sure. Her message, though, left me still on the outside, but fell deep and stayed. I learned that I would always have to work harder. This came to feel like something I could accept.
I liked school and I began to find interest in it, to get something from it for myself. I ended up a college student who needed vast hours to draw plans on paper. I drew buildings and cities, highway ramps, roads around mountains. I drew while I tinkered in the lab, waiting for results. My mind spread and serened with the ticking of that soft pencil on paper the way another person’s might among the constant wood sound of prayer beads.
I was behind now, though, with my books. I settled down and made coffee and just decided I was up for the night. Sounds filtered down through the ceiling from the man upstairs, his TV.
I’d never used my own good habits to find my father. He was something else altogether. He was not school. He lived in a universe away from my cup of strong coffee and list of things to do. I never believed he was a regular man.
I had a matchbox, painted, full with faint papery violets, picked perfect, wild in the back fields when I was eight years old. I had used hours that way, picking the frail stems one by one. I had fasts written down, a line for each day on the cardboard insides of school notebooks. But superstition, deep as it ran, hadn’t gotten me any closer to him. And time was falling, falling. My father now would have been almost sixty.
I determined to try. I’d bought a black notebook, the kind students used as sketchpads. I liked that. I think every doctor or lawyer would kind of like to be an architect or an art student with a new clean sketchpad, beginning. I wrote down Venise King’s name. The Salvation Army. See a therapist. My mother had always told me I had two uncles in the United Nations. They never contacted me, never sent a card. I was always promised things like that—a rich family somewhere else, royalty, uncles in the UN—as if any of these people could have helped us, where we were, in Wisconsin. Once from California we wrote them a letter asking for money. I hardly believed they existed.
But Tuesday, the next day, I took off early from the hospital, well, at six o’clock. I suppose that’s a normal time to leave most occupations behind in buildings and to step outside. Not medicine. Leaving medicine at six o’clock felt like ditching school at noon, stepping into that bright flat dangerous quiet midday sun. It was October.
On the East Side, men carried light coats over their arms, women rubbed the skin of their elbows, their bare shoulders. I marveled at the colors. Orange seemed to be fashion this year. Orange and a kind of greenish turquoise.
I regretted my own clothes. I felt all covered up, square, not anything. I forgot, living near school and in the hospital, responding to its schedules, its food, its noises as to an enormous mother, I forgot how there were other worlds, simultaneous and brilliant. These women outside, my same age, looked made of entirely different things. Their hair benefited from effort, their arms stretched thin and bejeweled, legs bare, dark and hairless, thighs shyly touching soft fabrics. The tendon behind the knee of one woman was as delicate and taut with skin as a bird’s wing. I stopped in front of the United Nations buildings, by a fountain. My parents had been in New York for a while when they were first married, and one of the things my mother always talked about was the United Nations. I didn’t know for sure if they’d really lived here or only visited, she was pretty vague, but when she was here she would have been like these women, not like me. She would have known about dresses and parties, different kinds of shoes. She wouldn’t have been studying something off in a quiet place for years and years. The United Nations reminded me of the New York City in movies. I didn’t expect to see anyone I knew over here. Women in sling-back shoes rushed up the stairs, the white flash of their heels eager—but for what? I felt overbundled in my jeans and running shoes and like a man in a regular button-down white shirt. I rolled up the sleeves of my lab coat. A little spray from the fountain moistened the inside of my arm and I remembered sex. This was a time of day, early evening, I hardly ever saw outside.
I forged up the white steps and pushed inside. A round information desk stood with a glass vase of tall, branchy flowers. Things like that intimidated me, I don’t know. Anything could make me feel not good enough then. The place reminded me of fancy things or Beverly Hills. For a long time, I’d worked in public service where rooms were plain and bare. Luxuries like those flowers seemed almost immoral. A twenty-eight-year-old woman who felt insulted by papery red-orange poppies and waxy lilies, tissue-thin irises that would be gone tomorrow—I was in trouble. I didn’t really want happiness at that time. It was hard to imagine the man who could love me.
I thought I would forget today. It seemed flimsy and pretty. I didn’t really think an agency could help a person like me.
The woman behind the desk had a mole on her cheek. This had been a sign of beauty when I was a child. We marked our lower cheeks with our mother’s makeup pencils and debated the difference between a freckle and a mole. I hadn’t seen one for years. Mary, her name tag read.
“Yes?” she said in a foreign voice. Something settled in me right.
I asked her if an Atassi was listed.
“What do they do? You know what department?”
“No, I don’t. I think maybe he’s my uncle,” I said. I felt the black book in my lab coat pocket. I began to doubt that an uncle even existed.
Her eyebrows worked down. “Yes? Oh, okay.” I love the way foreigners say okay. “I have a Salimiddin Atassi.” She told me how to get to him. He worked, apparently, in the horizontal building closer to the water. So I would really see an Atassi. I thanked the woman, whose gold buttons marched equally in two lines on her wool red jacket. Halfway across the lobby, I turned back to her. She was talking lushly on the phone now, her voice hilting and skidding.
“What nationality are you?”
She saw me and stopped, covering the receiver with a hand. I noticed that her hand was plump and also carried two moles in the fleshy part between thumb and first finger.
“Excuse me?” she said, eyebrows moving.
“Where are you from?”
“Oh me?” she said. “I am from Poland.”
Moving down the stone steps in a crowd, the small, hard cli
cks of high heels echoing around me, I thought of going home to change. But it was a long way, it was late, I was here. Tomorrow I had a test.
I would meet this Atassi. The adrenaline in me rose a little. I felt a certain excited elation whenever something my mother told me turned out to be really true. It made the world seem magically alive. The names of those Uncles in the UN had hovered and chimed around my childhood, like dark moths. One was Atassi, one was something else. Allam, I thought. Or maybe that was a first name. My mother had an ability to imbue the things we had with value. Our bracelets were museum pieces, we ourselves, no one was supposed to know, were royalty.
These buildings, with their tiara of rushing fountains, made somber by flags, my mother loved them. They would make her inhale with an upwards shudder, basking in their intended posture of importance. Her profile would lift a little higher in front of the rushing water. I didn’t like them much. They could have been simple and great. Le Corbusier had wanted to build them. They would have been the monument of his life. He got killed by a committee. Somebody thought the architect should be American. I knew a little about architecture. Pat Briggs got me interested in Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe when I was a child. He lent me books. No one else, Merl or Emily cared a hoot. Then, later, I majored in it.
I followed numbers down an upstairs corridor. I tried to remember what my mother had told me about the Uncles. “Let’s see.” Her voice went low and authoritative. “The younger one is short—I’m pretty sure he got married. A Yugoslav, I think. Yah, uh-hum. I’m sure of it. And the older one, the older one is a ladies’ man. He’ll never marry. Huh-uh.” I could see her in her bathrobe, pink or peach, and her hair up in a ponytail, with a rubber band. Her hair now took her hours to prepare and she would be just home, in her big room. Nothing to dress all up for.
Then her voice went queer, whenever I asked her too much about anything near my father. “You’re not trying to look around for him, are you? Because if you are just tell me.”
“Why?” I said.
“Well because. I might just have to make some decisions of my own, if after all these years you decide to find him, sure you go on ahead after I’ve drudged and worked and—”
“I’m not, okay? Don’t even think about it.”
I’d always pictured the UN a huge oblong mahogany table with men around it, clean good hands on the surface. Different colors but all regular faces. Now I wondered which one I’d find, the ladies’ man or the husband, and how I would tell the difference. Even when I thought my mother was lying, I believed her.
I’d always assumed weird people traced family trees—unfortunates, spinsters who saved their money for a bus trip to Maryland to meet children who could not have cared less that they were so-and-so’s second cousin and distantly related. Relative seekers always seemed to me the unendowed, the ugly, tirelessly searching for superior cousins and aunts and nieces to prove that traces of beauty lived hidden in their bloodlines. And why? So what? What good did it do them? Better to spend the time and work on yourself. But here I was.
I knocked on the door and a man answered, his hand on the wood. “Yes?”
I explained my father’s name and that seemed to mollify him some. “Come in, then. Come in.”
He stood rubbing his hands together. “Well,” he said, in his office. He was an older man than I’d expected. “So you are an Atassi. How is your father?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what I came to ask you.”
Then we were a man and a woman, descending the steps in the light. I looked at him when I could without being too obvious. This was the first relative of my father I’d ever met. He seemed a well-fed man, his bald spot stretched and gleamed, his skin evenly dark: you could see he was sort of handsome. This is my uncle, I thought. It seemed easy. I still didn’t know if this was the playboy or the husband.
He nudged me into a restaurant, where, it seemed, everyone I’d noticed on the street was also dining. There was the orange dress, there the turquoise chiffon scarf, there the red sling-back shoes, one white fleshy foot escaped and up on the seat, in hand. I’d been slipped into a corner chair, with the uncle at an angle to me. I switched so the place at my left was empty. I could never sit with someone on my left. “Claustrophobic,” I explained.
His hands worked at the backs of chairs, lifting your coat right off your neck. He was probably the playboy. Just then, the Polish woman with the mole, Mary, entered the restaurant, her face moving as she looked for someone. I felt surprised: standing, she was no taller than a child.
“So you’re my father’s … brother or cousin?” I said.
“It’s not that close,” Salimiddin Atassi said. “In Egypt, you know, we all have very big families. You know there are a lot of Atassis in Egypt. Like your Smith or Jones. But he is Atassi and I am Atassi. And you are Atassi. And all the Atassis are somehow related. Way back. Your father’s family I think is from Alexandria. Or is he Luxor? I don’t know. My family is in Cairo. I don’t know the Alexandrine side. I’ve been here twenty-three years.” He smiled saying this and I saw gold fillings which seemed just right with the rest of him. He had a thick voice, with the soft clicks of an accent, maintained like a fine car.
So he wasn’t really an uncle after all. But still a relative. I looked at his face for some resemblance to me. He had a gourd-shaped head, full and round at the bottom, narrower at the top. Maybe that was Egyptian.
“Do you know my father?”
But before he answered the waiter arrived. This restaurant embarrassed me because it pleased me so much. I ordered salmon and felt grateful with anticipation. I couldn’t afford meals like this. I was still paying off student loans from college at the same time I was taking more. I couldn’t really afford anything. Even necessities, like socks, seemed extravagant. And I was like my mother. Once in a while I’d buy something like a hundred-dollar blouse and then I wouldn’t eat for three days.
The Uncle sat heavily, but in the extremely smooth tapered way of a seal. Somebody once told me that swimming caused your body to form an even top layer of fat. “Of course, I knew your father. Momo, we called your father, Momo. Your father when he first came here, he was a student at Columbia.”
He started asking me if I spoke any Arabic.
I didn’t.
Then he asked me if I’d been to the Middle East.
I said no, but I’d like to.
“You know French, though?” he asked.
I almost lied but I thought he might test me. “No.” I shrugged.
“Oh, that’s too bad. Too bad because I don’t think your relatives there would speak English, you know. The women, especially.” He believed my grandparents were dead, but there might be sisters, who would be my aunts.
We worked our way down to food. Did I like Middle Eastern food?
“Yes!” There for the first time I could say yes.
“Good,” he said, patting my hand. “ ’Tis in the blood.”
I tried to ask him about my father but he was unable to tell me much. “I just don’t know where Momo would be now. He married your mother and then he moved away, west.”
“He studied politics,” I said. “Political philosophy?”
“Political philosophy, yes,” he said.
I found out Salimiddin Atassi was not an ambassador but had worked for twenty-two years in the Public Relations office of the UN. His smooth dark hands moved bare of rings. “Are you married?” I asked.
“No, I am a bachelor.”
“How come?”
He smiled and I noticed hair-thin spaces between his teeth. “I haven’t met the right girl, yet,” he said. “But,” he said, first finger lifted, eyebrows pressed into a severe V, “I am always looking.”
He was kind to me, he paid for my supper as he told me he had no idea where my father was. He shook his head as we walked outside, fitting my collar back onto me. “I wonder where he could be.”
The air outside still felt warm and mater
ial. It would have been good to be wearing lighter clothes.
“Oh, he must have been nineteen or twenty when he was here. And he worked, I suppose part time, in a tie shop.”
I imagined my father a young man in New York City. I saw him in a hat and a suit, hard shoes, maybe even a cane. It would have been a different kind of life.
I stood waiting, the high lit flags important and foolish behind running water. Egypt might have felt less foreign to me than these three blocks on the East Side.
“Oh, they were very good ties,” he assured me, features pressed together in the middle of his face for emphasis. “Silk. The best.”
He told me he was about to leave on a trip to the Middle East and that he would make inquiries there. I asked him to call me if he heard anything and please call collect.
“No, no, no. No, don’t think of it.”
I said, “Yes, please.” I was pretty lame. He said, no, no, no. I said, really yes. This was dumb. We both knew he wouldn’t call me.
“We should talk after the new year,” he said. “I’ll be home and have a chance to unpack.” It was now October. That was too long.
My most urgent question was the last trivial item on someone else’s scribbled to-do list. And that seemed always the case. It had been that way growing up, living with my mother. Even my lunch money, that was not high in her mind. I grew up having no rights. That was how I learned to pester. I knew to ask for things more than once if I really needed them.
“Do you know the other uncle who worked at the UN?”
“There is no other Atassi.”
“Allam?”
“Azzam? Oh, Azzam hasn’t been here for years, no.”
I told myself to remember to mark my calendar, Call Salimiddin Atassi, even though he’d said he would get in touch with me. I already felt a grim determination. I knew that I’d be doing all the work. I tried not to take it personally. Before we parted, he asked how my mother was doing.
I shrugged. “The same.” Wind from the other river, the East, seemed to blow a mouthful of rivertaste into me, dirty and with a back gag in it. I pulled my coat collar closed with one hand.
