by Mona Simpson
Emily rose to baldness. You could see her article “Baldness Is Freedom” in the January 1969 issue of Seventeen magazine. She stopped wearing the wig and her new appearance yielded a kind of dignity and status. She really did look good bald. She had a pretty-shaped head, all the knobs and bumps were in the right places, the two strings of her neck rising up gracefully like stems. She ran for vice president that spring and won. By then she was shaving her head to keep it bald and wearing long very thin earrings her father bought for her in New York City.
The three of us had vowed not to spend any time on the dumb girl things in life. We tried not to want to be queen. Years later we each, separately, set our alarms to get up at four and six o’clock—Pacific and Central time—to watch Princess Diana getting married on television. Jackie Kennedy didn’t help but the others did. With the other presidents you’d rather be them than their wives.
We cautioned each other away from clothes and makeup, the charms that attracted boys, parties, homecoming queen nominations, jangles on one chain. Why? I believed we couldn’t afford that. “While they’re learning eye shadow,” Mai linn said, “we can learn Latin.” And we did, Emily straggling in late and drowsing through Cicero, but passing anyway. Even the old nun who taught Latin couldn’t quite keep immune from our fervor.
With Emily it was only a matter of time. Her father owned Briggs’s, Racine’s largest department store, which supplied the high school girls with all the tools for their ascensions. He opened a boutique, on the second floor for mod, far-out teenage clothes, called The Id.
“We can go when we’re twenty to a department store and buy all the clothes we need then,” I said. It was amazing to me, the stupidity of girls. We marveled over them, girls who spent their afternoons lolling by pools, pulling the elastic of their bathing suit legs out to check color, their nights talking on Princess telephones about dresses and mascara and shoes, their only progress measured by getting their braces off. These afternoons we were studying our Latin, reading it aloud, declining.
Why? Because Mai linn was an undersized Vietnamese girl in Racine, Wisconsin, in the late nineteen sixties, and with me it was because of my mother. All she did was her looks. While she was married to Ted, she spent hours plucking and preening for Tom Sklarr, who I already knew wouldn’t marry her years before she found the chest of letters from other women in the bar where he stored wine on his boat. I knew he wouldn’t be any good for a father anyway. When my bike was stolen right in front of my own house he didn’t even think of buying me a new one even though he had all that money. He just said it was too bad.
We promised ourselves not to try anything for men, never to go out of our way at all. No makeup, fancy clothes, anything. We each cheated a little and tried not to tell the others. At home, my mother whispered to me that I would be a movie star. Mai linn and I caught Emily once with an ankle bracelet.
Of the three of us Mai linn was the least. But she was an orphan. She had no money.
She came and sat on my bed one day after school, we were studying at my house. She hugged me and said if she were ever to want anything with a girl it would be me.
“No, Mai,” I said. Emily and I and Ben were the only ones who called her her real name. At school, the nuns all said it was too hard to pronounce. They said her American name was Lynn.
She got up and went to the other bed across the room. “Okay,” she said.
A year or two later, Emily confessed that she’d let Mai linn do it to her five or six times.
“You’re one too then!” I said.
“I really only liked the back rubs.”
“Why’d you do it, then?” I said. I hated that they did that together. That way.
She just shrugged. Emily was that way with boys too, later, even more so. We’d lost her for good by high school, but by then Mai linn and I had both moved anyway.
When my mom and I moved to California, I found another girl to boss. Calla and I were the first feminists in Los Angeles. We hadn’t heard of it from anyone. We came to conclusions by ourselves. It wasn’t hard. All you had to do was look.
“I’m never going to cook for a man,” Calla declared one day in her empty kitchen. We were standing around there after school. Nobody cooked in that kitchen. Rosario, a small, frightened Mexican maid who seemed to speak utterly no English, came every day and cleaned, but she darted out whenever we marauded through and the only thing I ever saw her cook was a soft-boiled egg fot herself.
I wasn’t so sure about not cooking. I thought it was fine, all this learning in school now. But I did want to get married. “Well, what are you going to eat?”
“He’ll have to be satisfied eating yogurt for dinner like I am.”
I didn’t say anything. Who wanted to eat yogurt for dinner? At least my mother and I ate a real supper when we went out at night. Ted would have never put up with yogurt. Yogurt’s fine, he’d say, but what’s for dinner?
Calla’s mother was pretty too or at least my mother thought so. She was tall and bird-faced and she floated in her thirty-four-room house like a ghost, often in a bathrobe and puffed slippers. The house held silent as a convent, but dressed up in striped flowered wallpapers and matching elaborate skirted furniture. The living room and game room and den were huge done-up alleys no one used. Calla’s mother lived stringently, treading a line only from her bedroom to the bird-print-walled dining room where she ate her silent pilgrim’s breakfast of eggs and toast with coffee in a decent china cup and saucer and sat looking over bills, for the electricity or phone. Bills seemed to be her most important business with the world. Those were the two signs of life Janine Canter exhibited. She either sat in the dining room doing bills, dressed up in her prim lady’s clothes, or she mooned through the cluttered dim space in slippers. She was a first wife.
Calla’s mother complained in a tiny bitter voice about how evil people were and she was just seeing it now since the divorce. And it did seem unfair. Membership on all the charity boards where she’d worked hard volunteering, baking tea coffeecakes, hostessing cocktail parties, had somehow been mysteriously revoked, and next thing she heard, the new wife, a Swedish model, had been asked to join. What she did outside the house was shop. She had walls of boxes for three-hundred-dollar shoes she kept in her bedroom, RED SATIN PUMPS, MEDIUM HEEL, she’d Magic-Marker on the outside cardboard. She wouldn’t let us borrow them even to dress up in just around the house. “Because they’re too good for kids your age,” she said.
Calla’s mother every once in a while would consternate for a morning over the UCLA extension catalog, deliberating whether she shouldn’t try to take a course. These mornings her toast would lie ravaged as she sat at the dining room table with a huge heated pot of coffee next to her. Her hair stuck out from her pulling it from the pins. “Go ahead, Mom,” Calla would urge. “Sign up for something.” It was hard to see what Mrs. Canter did all day.
She always studied the catalog, deliberated hard and then decided against. “It’s too late for me to have a career,” she said to us, “I would have had to start earlier.”
She was thirty-six years old.
I ran for school president there my sophomore year. I tied with a boy. We each got three hundred forty-eight votes. The history teacher settled it by flipping a coin. I picked tails and he won.
“You’re gonna let a coin decide?” I cried. The history teacher shrugged. “We can’t have two.”
That day the president—a guy named Ronnie—followed me home and asked me out. After that I worked on guys’ campaigns.
I DIDN’T WANT to waste my life on frippery and look at me now. Better to have bought bras. I’d watched all those girls giving their lives up to men, spending days in preparation, painting toenails, brushing on powder, opening the flower. That was for men who were there. Men who stroked them and gave them things. I was worse.
I was like a nun, making my whole life for a man who wasn’t even there.
AND OUTSIDE, on the street, after class, I saw
men again everywhere, one in a phone booth, hand spread and plastered against the glass wall, his breath steaming a patch around him so I couldn’t make out his face. They were young. I saw it in the tight stretch of skin from the tendon connecting head to shoulder. And so was I.
THE PHONE RANG at eight in the morning. An assured female voice said, “Shawn Timmelund has to cancel his appointment today. His elbow is sore.” This was the guy who cut my hair and made me look better than I did.
I asked if I could reschedule. “You’ll have to call back later in the week,” she said. “Shawn makes all his own appointments.”
It seemed I had to chase everyone. Even paying them didn’t help.
The detective petered out. He hadn’t called at all since I’d left him in the restaurant with the bill. So I began to do more myself. It was hard for me now not to.
But I’d flunked anatomy. The professor asked the three people to stay after class and he told us we would have to take it again next semester. I guessed that was all right.
When I did things to find my father I knew I should really be studying. But I felt like, if I could just get this one thing done, then I could concentrate on everything else, patiently, for the rest of my life.
I WALKED UP the United Nations steps again, the near echo of many heels louder than the steady roar of water splashing the somber Las Vegasy fountains. I’d dressed up. Some. Still, as I stood for a moment at the top, before going in, I saw all that made the place feel important and it was nothing—empty flags, towered rows of high straight loud water rushing. But the buildings and their plazas made no monument, nothing really, that would last. No pyramids. Just another committee’s work.
The same Polish receptionist, who showed no flicker of remembering me, looked up Azzam’s name on a computer printout. “Uh, Said Azzam is not here in New York. He’s stationed at the Geneva Mission.”
She gave me the number in Switzerland. There was nothing to do but hoop my purse over my shoulder, turn around and start back to school. It was embarrassing, what happened next. I spent the afternoon in my same wooden library phone booth. I felt like carving my initials into the already scarred-up wall. I’d found a maze and I couldn’t get out or stop. So much of my life has been waste.
The Geneva Mission seemed to have heard of Said Azzam but he wasn’t there.
They gave me another number in Geneva.
The other number in Geneva said he had gone to Vienna and they gave me a number in Vienna.
The Vienna number didn’t answer.
I tried again eighteen times and when it finally did, they said he had gone back to New York.
I called the UN switchboard again. Forty-one rings. Then they said they didn’t know, on their listing he was still in Geneva.
Okay. All these phone calls I’d charged to my calling card number. Just wait till that bill came. I’d developed a kind of shudder in my back, just below the right shoulder.
Said Azzam, whoever he was, had vanished. It was as if my father taught his magic to everyone with a trace to him.
A day like today. “What points do you get in heaven for hours of this total waste?”
Stevie Howard laughed into the telephone. He was in his Berkeley backyard. I heard his kid screeching behind him, the trees beyond. It was a cool day there and windy. “None. I don’t think. I don’t think you get a single point, Mayan.”
“Great,” I said.
“You’ve got to think, how long are you willing to do this and have days like this before you just give up and decide that even if you could find him, what you’d lose wouldn’t be worth it.”
How many people would have turned back there? I knew girls like that. Girls who would measure, weigh, play the odds. Not a swell guy. And they were right, the smart ones. It is not hard as some people think to admit the mistakes of your life. The real ones that cost years and loosen the cohesion of your only heart. It is easy. The waste is irredeemable, the devastation absolute. I am not afraid to say it—what’s lost is already permanently gone.
I TOLD THE DATE guy anything because I didn’t care. But half the time when I picked up the phone it was him or I’d come home and he’d be leaning against the building wall.
I’d told him silly things. I said I thought men only looked good in jeans and white shirts and knit ties—I talked like that about nothing, just from the top of myself, because he was listening and I wanted to sound absolute somehow—and then there he was with that on, the wind blowing his shirt out from his chest a little, his mouth in that way that was embarrassed of what it showed.
Jordan. His name was Jordan. He was some kind of lawyer.
THE PHONE RANG in the middle of the night. It was the international operator.
Calling Egypt was incredibly hard if what you were calling was information. You called the international operator and she worked on it and said she’d call you back in a few hours when she had someone on the line who could help. So she was getting back to me now at four in the morning. I woke up right away. I was glad. This was more like love than love.
My bedroom shades were up and the moon hung about a foot over the top rail of the building next door. The water tower etched plain and drawn on the night and spires impinged on silver clouds. My bare feet touched the ground. What a sky. I paced, nude. The old man’s TV was running upstairs, dropping shreds of noise through my ceiling. I didn’t even mind. Tonight it sounded like comfort.
I heard the international operator, somebody in Cairo, a translator and all our echoes. I pictured three people standing in a line.
“Atassi in Alexandria.” I heard myself shouting into the phone like my grandmother.
My words were repeated three times, twice spelled in the other language.
Finally, the answer came back. “What is the first name?”
“I don’t know. Any Atassi will do.”
That went back again and then rumbled.
“They can’t do it without a first name,” the international operator finally said. “There are more than a hundred Atassis.”
More than a hundred Atassis. I thought of an old monument standing in the dark on a hill, more than a hundred pillars, slanted moonlight, crumbling stone. “Okay, Mohammed,” I said. My father’s name. I didn’t think he was there, but I only had a few chances. The whole relay wouldn’t stay up all night while I guessed. I wished I had a little book of Mohammedan names. Then I remembered I did. The Bible. Where was it? Damn. I pulled the phone cord as far as it would go. My bookshelf had Anatomy, Organic Chemistry, Histology. That architecture book.
“You’re going to have to spell that,” the international operator said. Even she sounded very far away.
We spelled the alphabet letters slowly and I heard the far ripple of translation. But then after all that, they had no listing. Later I learned that Mohammed and Abdullah are like John and David, the most common names.
Even so far away, it was the same. So that was done. Egypt ended like any other place.
ONE TIME Bud Edison had woken up and walked with his arms out to where I was naked, crouched over the phone on his desk. I felt caught. It was hard to explain. I’d been calling information in Montana. “That was directory assistance. I was trying to see—”
He didn’t even ask what. We had a moment of blunt hug, bones meeting at knee and elbow, awkward, dry, adult. We went back to the bed and lay in the dark looking outside at the night alive and I told him some more about my father. I guess I’d always used men for that. To talk about him.
“It bothers me that he didn’t know me when I was a baby. My mother told me he was back in Egypt then,” I said.
Bud kept looking at me, squinting. He wanted to minister and did, dabbing the edge of my eye with a piece of sheet, but he also looked a little scared. That blue cold night, clouds hung silver-edged, majestic, spread and stretched by wind, a taut wingspan. It felt like a privilege to be awake then, as if all the nights when we slept we were missing this.
We began again, me in hi
s arms, and I was almost asleep when I startled and shocked rigid and then it was over in a minute. That scared him.
The next morning, pulling on his jeans, he said, “You were talking last night in your sleep.”
“What did I say?”
“I’m not sure. I think you said, ‘Say my name.’ ”
That was nicer than the truth. What I really said was just what I said all my life, in that time just before sleep. I didn’t tell him.
I STOPPED AT the office to pay my rent the next morning. My landlord was occupied with a massive suspendered man, who held the thin shoulder of a girl curled over the desk filling out a rental application. “Take good care of her, my daughter here. And the bills come to me, you understand? I don’t want you touching her money.”
The girl’s hair half-obscured her face, but her profile was slight and pretty. Thin gold chains hung from her ears and on both wrists. Tiny even pearls like teeth lay on her delicate breastbone.
“She’s gonna be a surgeon, my girl. Columbia Medical School. Top school. Top top school. Sure I’m proud.”
I had to turn the other way. I left my yellow check on the edge of the desk. I didn’t want them to see me. I had this odd feeling, of, oh that’s right, that’s the way it should be, I’ll leave and she’ll take my place. Those are the people who should be doctors. The fathered.
Walking down the street, I pulled my sweatshirt hood up. That was familiar, seeing girls with fathers. It bothered me. I tried to picture mine. I tried to think of him leading me through someplace big that was his. I worked to imagine a factory that made some American product, rows and rows of beige blenders on a conveyor belt, but I couldn’t hold it. All I could picture was the night sky between empty beams like Emory’s toothpick factory. Empty and abandoned in a high field.
