by Mona Simpson
We found out later that for months, even years, we had been talked about, famous for our cake inhospitality. “And there they sat with the cake perfect on the cake plate for everybody to see. They’d invited us for strawberry cake and vanilla ice cream and we sat and we sat and they never offered us a thing. Finally we left. It was suppertime!” Stevie Howard from across the street told me that years later when we were together in the barn.
I learned to wait with no end. After the birthday passed, we began to understand that all clocks were not the same. It did not matter to him how old we turned. We could not accurately predict or expect. Waiting became our deepest habit, my mother’s and mine. We did not need to remember.
For a long time, I set an extra place for every supper. An extra knife, an extra glass, an extra fork. A cup and a saucer. He had always had both coffee and ice water. He and my mother relished their liquids.
Then, one evening, my grandmother asked me to stop. I obeyed immediately and without a fuss. Of course, what she said made sense, but at that time, I changed my chair at the table and wouldn’t sit with anyone on my left. That was where he sat. At the long school cafeteria, I had to have a chair open on my left side. I couldn’t explain. I didn’t use my left hand as much anymore. I was saving it.
I wouldn’t wear rings, after a while I forgot how it started. Even now I didn’t like jewelry. All aesthetics trace to superstition. Taste is the deepest strand in us, holding all our time.
People assumed I kept my hands bare for hospital work. Some young women doctors took off all their rings and bracelets, one by one, before an operation, slowly pulled on the gloves. After, they put each metal thing on again. I admired them this, it seemed a deep and secret feminine prayer, as long-known as my own, other ways.
After three years, we had ceased to expect him back to such an extent, it embarrassed me to say the words “Our Father.” The Lord’s Prayer, mumbled every day in school, made me think people were staring. Still, we waited for something to happen to us. We expected a great event. I would never have said, “I hope my father comes home.” My father, by that time, seemed vague and large as the sky. If the man we’d once believed in did materialize, in a car say, turning down our long driveway, we would not have felt ready. All our daily rituals of preparation were so deeply assimilated, we knew them only as the way we lived. They no longer had anything to do with him. I probably wouldn’t have let him sit on my left side at the table, either.
If someone asked me, when I was a child, what it was like to be growing up without a father, I only shrugged and said, “Nothing.” I didn’t want to talk more. I didn’t understand questions that went, what is it like. I didn’t know any different. It seemed I had a life the same as anybody.
My mother had given me a sentence to say when people asked if I missed him. “No, because I didn’t really know him.” That was not true. But truth was not what I needed. Truth hurtled small and dense, an object, like a tiny building loose, turning in the sky. I hated pity and just wanted to ward it away. “Say you’re very close to your mother,” my mother said.
“We did know him though,” I told my grandmother after I’d lied the first time. Amber Felchner had been asking me. I wanted things straight with my grandmother anyhow.
“Ugh, no you didn’t. None of us did. If you think you know him so well, then tell me where he is now.”
She had me there.
TIMOTHY AND I watched movies at the Pleiades and he told me what was wrong with each of the leading men.
Jimmy Dean was a masochist, Alan Ladd was really short and Errol Flynn was everything.
Emily and Mai linn and I used to lie around the Briggses’ house in the summer when we started really reading and pick apart the books for which ones we could marry. “Darcy,” I decided. They turned over like bugs on their backs shrieking and then told me everything the matter with him.
On the chaise longue, I told Timothy what was wrong with Jordan. “Do you think I’m nuts?” I said.
“No. I don’t think you’re nuts. If you don’t like the guy you don’t like him. You’ve got to like him.”
I STOOD IN Emory’s empty room, back to its institutional plainness, waiting for the janitor’s sopping to make it thoroughly anonymous again. I just stood there for a while with the windows open to feel his absence.
I put my hand on the back rung of Emory’s old chair and thought, let’s get money straight for a moment. It was just going. Fast. My inheritance from my grandmother was almost half gone. When the phone bills came in, and everything I’d been charging, it would be down to five thousand, maybe less. I stood for a moment looking out at the blind snow, the city stunned to softness. One year for Christmas I told my mother I wanted nothing but to be on a TV show called “Shenanigans.” “Shenanigans” was a kids’ game show that was kind of an obstacle course, and at every corner you got something big, a TV or a dirt bike or a thousand dollars’ worth of clothes or money and it seemed by the end of the hour you had everything imaginable, so that there was nothing more—not one thing—to want. My mom was with Ted then and they tried to get me on the show. They wrote to the network and everything. I think my mother called long distance. We stopped in New York City on the way to visit Ted’s parents in the Catskills and we got a tour of the studio where they filmed “Captain Kangaroo” and the people in black clothes referred to me as the girl who wanted to be on “Shenanigans.” I was embarrassed. That was the last time it was like that. That I wanted just one thing to end all wanting.
Or maybe looking for my father was just the same.
My eyes stung a moment in the odd dim light like a woman just now realizing she was grown-up, at, say, a supermarket, where she must continue to reach and bend filling her metal basket to prepare dinner for a family—but she just this moment understood her parents were dead and in their graves and that she would never be cared for that way again.
This was taking over my life. And I was close, real close, to trouble.
THE MEDICAL SCHOOL gang—drinkers—had another party. It was a benefit, kind of, at the Blue Rose Bar. The bartender’s mother needed an operation, kidneys, so they invited everyone for the night and drinks were double price. We played music on the jukebox and some people danced.
I wore my new things, all of them, the pink underwear and matching bra and the golden shoes, with my jeans. I decided to try my best with the here and now.
I kind of danced but mostly I sat and talked to people. All the people I knew from the last time had new boyfriends. It was amazing. A girl I’d had a long conversation with once after class about Bud Edison and her boyfriend, who’d left her, she was with someone new, a pale, heavy guy whose features looked tiny in the globe of his face. But he laughed nicely and said kind, short things. He was always looking at her.
I left early, the jukebox music following me a little ways down the street. At home I sat on my grandmother’s big gray sofa and unbuckled the straps of my shoes. I put them back in the box in the closet. Then I decided to call Jordan. I was going over the other people’s boyfriends and girlfriends. He’s as good as that, I thought.
“WE’LL JUST FORGET that you didn’t call me for six weeks,” he said with a nervous laugh, opening the door.
We were going out to a restaurant. I was wearing my normal clothes. I didn’t have on the golden shoes or anything. I didn’t think this was dire enough for all that. I wasn’t too nervous. But I sort of noticed him every few minutes, like as he told the girl his name and said we had reservations, he was as cute as anybody else’s.
Sitting across from him it still seemed like it would be easy. He was watching me. I put my arms like my mother would. He had that neat collar look, his teeth all even and eagerness. He had a simple niceness.
“So,” I said. He seemed ready and easy to laugh.
“We won’t talk about the obvious,” he said softly.
“What do you even do,” I said. “I know you’re a lawyer. What do lawyers do all day?”
I thought it was probably something like business but he told me he was a Public Defender. He worked downtown in those court buildings by the Brooklyn Bridge.
He asked me what was going on with the detective and my father, so I told him more. I told him my name. He was one of those people who’d met me as just Ann.
“My—what?” he was saying. His brow set a certain way. He didn’t ask me in a pitying voice the way the women had, pulling me against aproned fat all my childhood. I lived in a house with no time.
“Mayan. Like the ruins,” I said. “M-A-Y-A-N.” If I had to spell that, I was thinking …
“What kind of name is that?”
I sighed. “Egyptian. I’m half Arab. My father’s Egyptian.” The guy was definitely Jewish. I shook my head, twirled the wine in the glass. I was beginning to have trouble looking at him.
“Egyptian?” Jordan looked blank. His face was completely open. “The one you haven’t seen? Oh, well, I guess there is only one. You grew up with your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“No, it was just me and my mom.”
“And that whole time, you didn’t know where he even was?”
“Nope.”
I felt kind of bad admitting that. But it felt clean too. My hand stayed around the wineglass. I hoped this wasn’t one of those times I’d wish later I’d said much less.
“So why are you so normal?” he said and then he closed his mouth and his lips looked too big. That startled me because it was the first thing really wrong with him.
He asks that just hearing about my father, I thought. Wait’ll he gets the rest.
A minute later, his mouth was beautiful.
I shrugged. “Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.”
He touched my nose. “You didn’t grow up in the fifties.”
“Sixties, but not our sixties.”
He laughed. He had a nice laugh. “Good answer. True.”
He picked up his fork and moved it around, looking at it. “But it must be hard not having one at all,” he said.
“I never knew enough to miss it.”
“You’re not mad at him?”
“I love my father.” I couldn’t believe I was saying that to this guy.
“How do you know?”
What a question. “Here,” I said, tapping my shirt pocket. There was paper inside. It crackled.
“Do you think that could change?”
I didn’t know what he was getting at for a minute and then it occurred to me that Jordan was one of these guys who are afraid to use the word love. “Change from what?”
“If you met him or I don’t know, even found out something about him.”
Somebody had once told me a story of an adopted girl, my age, who’d gone to look for her real mother. I remembered all the stories people told about children looking for their parents. I don’t think she had a detective, she had aunts who helped and she got to a certain point and the person telling me raised her hand like a stop sign and said, they told her, stop don’t go any further. And she stopped. I’d thought about that a lot of times. I didn’t think anything could make me stop.
“No, I’ve thought of everything possible bad. Nothing nicks it. That much I know.” I just blurted things out to Jordan. He had something about him, so I told him the truth even when it made me look bad. Which it mostly did.
There was something light about the guy like Fred Astaire in a movie. He paid for supper with a laugh to it. In my family, money was never funny. At my door he kind of twirled around and made some joke about the days when women invited men up to their apartments.
That made me, I had to smile. I was inventorying my apartment and smarting at everything I remembered, the running shoes and dirty running socks just where you came in on the floor, the newspaper fanned out in front of the bathtub, my bed unmade.
“Where’d you get Stevenson? Were you ever married?”
Oh God, I’m old enough that the guy thinks I could have been married. “Stepfather.” I shook my head and got out my keys. Now he followed me.
I talked too much all the way upstairs, lying but dumbly. I told him I had house guests for a long time, they’d just left and they were really messy. That’s why the place was so bad.
I opened the door and it was worse than I thought. The shadowing room looked like an antique store, one of those dim places where a heavy-sounding cat bounds down, shocking you, from some unapparent shelf.
He looked at me now like I might be seriously crazy.
I excused myself to the bedroom, leaving him in the dark, and kicked all the clothes from the floor under the bed.
“What time is it?” He probably wanted to get out. “I have to get up early for work tomorrow.”
“Time, I don’t know.” I lived in a house the way my mother did, with clocks all over the place, unwound. Watches busted on me. I lived in a house without time.
Later, on the gray couch, I told him, “I’m not really normal.”
“I know.”
“I cry almost every day.”
“You’re kidding. Over what?”
I shrugged. “Just a few minutes, usually.”
“That’s not normal,” he said.
SO THERE I WAS trying something with a random guy in the city. He left in the deep middle of the night. After he did and I heard the elevator, I got up myself and sat on the window ledge. I shoved open the back window, expecting a wind and it was there.
At work the next day, Jim Wynne showed up. He was standing at the nurse’s station with an envelope, when I came back from my rounds. “Ya left in a bit of a rush the other night. Didn’t take our report. I was in the neighborhood so I brought it by.”
“Oh, good. Anything new?”
“We got the guy checking passports. We should hear in from him, I don’t know, couple a days. For sure before Christmas.”
MY MOTHER WENT AWAY and came back a hundred times during my childhood. She never had the courage just to leave. And every time, she was different for a while when she returned. My grandmother and I understood that we had to let her be alone. She seemed to make many trips west, to California, but she also went north to Alberta, Canada, and sometimes just to Iron Mountain. When I was first in school she went away for a long time, months, and when she came back it felt like something was over. My mother seemed nervous during that time, preoccupied and perhaps sad. She always wore a certain long raincoat, a bluish-gray color, belted loose like a bathrobe. She didn’t work. She lived with us in the house and spent most of her time with me. She seemed to have decided that: she would spend time with her child. But she did not seem to know what to do with me. She’d stand outside the school, against the brick wall, and always look a little surprised to see me when I filed out in the line of children. She’d take me to a restaurant then and she’d sit by the window with an end of her hair in her mouth. I’d tasted her hair too. It was like a pill or like metal.
We had no rules. She’d order tea and keep getting more hot water from the old waitress and I’d have to remind her that I needed to do my homework.
“Oh, okay,” she’d say and move the white scalloped place mat to make room for me.
I tried to arrange my workbooks on the surface of the wooden booth. There wasn’t enough room.
“I need light,” I’d say. My pencil had to be sharpened. My grandmother did that with a knife, over a brown paper bag.
“Oh, I see.” My mother sighed.
She would have let me order anything, even a hot fudge sundae or a lemon cake, but I didn’t want to.
I had to remind her what time dinner was.
“Dinner’ll wait,” she said, “it’s only us. She won’t start before we get there.”
Dinner had always seemed fixed, dinner. This view made my grandmother look small to me. She was waiting too but only for us. Time for both my parents was a private thing they
carried with them in hidden pockets.
ON ONE OF HER TRIPS, my mother bought fancy sailor suits, one for Ben and one for me. Mine was a dress and his was shorts, both were shiny white-and-blue material with satin ribbons. We wore them with new socks and white shoes, first at Easter and then again one Saturday morning in April. She took us to Boss’s Tobacco and Magazine Shop. The square store felt strange and downtown. It was a glass cube with nickel metal over the doors and windows. The glass looked greenish from the outside, where everything told spring, the blossoms heavy, vibrating their stiff branches, clouds moving in the sky. Inside, it smelled old from tobacco and heating oil. This was the most male place I knew. A machine revolved, displaying pipes and lighters and cigarette holders and cases that never ceased to draw our hands to the glass. Our close breath clouded it, obscuring the very things we wanted to see. The man behind the counter gave us pipe cleaners to amuse ourselves. We sat on stools at his counter, eating pie and fooling, making figures with the colored pipe cleaners. My mother stood in her raincoat by the magazine rack and browsed.
That was when she met Mrs. Briggs. The way we always heard the story later, Mrs. Briggs saw us in our sailor suits, just children fidgeting on the stools, and she took out a crumpled handkerchief and started crying. And this pealing of female tears changed Boss’s. She had just been to the doctor’s office and found out she couldn’t have more children. Emily would never have any brother or sister.
Bald Bruce Nadel moved briskly behind the counter, wiping. My mother approached Mrs. Briggs and they talked. The Briggses were people we would not ordinarily know. They were rich; everything kept them separate. They owned thick-walled cars, they lived on a hill in a big house architects had come from Chicago to build, they looked neat and quiet and normally there was no excuse to get near them. I had seen them before in clothes like you only saw in movies: long dresses and fur stoles. Doc Briggs owned the largest department store in Racine, called Briggs’s.
