by Mona Simpson
“You could give them so many advantages that I can’t,” my mother remembered saying.
“I need some time to straighten myself out and get me better” is what Mrs. Briggs repeated to Emily, years later, what she never forgot my mother saying.
We still knew nothing. The lady stopped her crying and dabbed at her face with a striped handkerchief. We toyed with our pie crusts; the banana cream insides all eaten, we pushed against the counter wall with our feet, making our stool tops spin.
“Kids, sit still,” my mother said and I remember how piercing sharp the order.
She must have worried that we’d change the Briggses’ minds.
Later, when we were alone, my mother told me I would move in with the Briggses.
“For how long?” I asked.
“Just for now,” she said. “I’ve got to get away for a little and then I’ll come back for you and we’ll move somewhere else and find a house for the two of us. But for a while, instead of just living with Gramma, who’s getting old and can’t do so much anymore, you can stay at the Briggses’. And they’ll give you a nice bedroom with a canopy bed, would you like that?”
I nodded yes I would like that.
She continued. “And they’ll get you nice clothes from their store and they have a piano, I bet if you ask her someday, just say I’d love to learn how to play, they’d arrange piano lessons. You wait and see. Really, they can give you anything you want, honey. Just think, you won’t have to pay for things in Briggs’s.”
I was supposed to get to know Emily so my mother could be friends with the parents. I knew that. And I would try. Things like that did seem easier for me. My mother always told me it was because I was a kid.
In school, I wandered during lunch to the orchestra room, slipped around black music stands to the piano. When I looked at a piano, so ordered and tensely ready, it seemed it would just play. It was a shock—those first few sounds. I didn’t know how, I really didn’t. Notes from my random fingers plinked thin and odd in corners of the room. I lifted my hands up, thinking I’d start again, this time some music would just … go. Footsteps voiced into the room. I stilled, caught. Eli Timber, the district music teacher, slid down on the bench next to me. Uh-oh. Now I’d be in trouble.
“So you’ve discovered a musical calling?” He talked like that.
“No,” I said. I was shy then when men talked to me. “I don’t know.”
“But would you like to learn anyway?”
I nodded yes that I would. I couldn’t think of what to say.
“Do you have a piano at home to practice on?”
“No, but I might have soon.”
He put my hands on top of his hands the way my father, when I was a little girl, danced with my feet on top of his feet. He’d pull me by the arms so I went generally in the right direction. My hands over his like that, Eli Timber began to play something I remember and have been looking for ever since.
“So you and your mom might move and then she might buy a piano? You can rent one, you know.”
“No.”
He kept playing. It was faint, like people going away through a woods of all birches rising from a single plane. “No? So. How does moving help the practice problem? Because, Ann, in music, practice is everything.” Then he ran a flourish up the keys, leaving my hands behind.
“I mean, I might move. Not my whole family.”
“By yourself?”
I nodded. “And where I’ll move they already have a piano. I’m probably going to live with the Briggses.” As soon as I said that I thought I shouldn’t have, I was telling a secret. “But I’m not supposed to tell.”
Everyone knew who Briggses were.
“Well, and is that good, moving in with the Briggses?”
“Yes,” I said. But it made me nervous that he asked. He should know. “I’ll get my own canopy bed.”
For three months I went to the orchestra room during lunchtime and afternoon recess. Eli taught me scales.
When he wasn’t there, I made up a song of my own. My father had wanted to be a songwriter. It galled my mother. She wanted him to be world famous or at least make money.
My song went, When you are/All alone/And you’re so unhap-py/You just sing this lit-tle song/And try and make it snappy.
But it turned out the Briggses wanted a boy. They wanted Ben, not me. And when my mother mentioned the idea to her sister, Carol of course said no and started another family fight and the Briggses just left it that we kids should all be friends. That was how Emily and I first got to know each other. Years later, Emily fell in love with Ben with a straight, steady concentration no one had ever seen before in her.
It didn’t turn out so bad after all, my mother said. “You’re getting in good with Emily, she can introduce you to a lot of the nicest kids, you just watch, when you’re older they’ll probably get you invited to Cotillion.” We’d read about Cotillion in White Gloves and Party Manners. Marion Werth directed the Racine Cotillion, with Eli Timber, in the old Elks Club the first Friday of every month. The girls wore fancy dresses and gloves and there were little pretty refreshments the boys delivered to you on a napkin. Sounded good to me.
OUR TRIANGLE OF friendship broke up after Emily grew her hair back in. She wanted to be a girl again. After I talked her into refusing for three years, she finally said yes to Cotillion. She wanted my cousin Ben to go too. She felt all she’d ever known for him. Even now, I don’t understand why he didn’t like her. Ben never cared about rich girls. I felt faintly responsible, though I know that was not exactly right either. But if he’d been able to bring more good out of himself for her, some allowance, it would have made all our lives better—his, mine and Mai linn’s too. Emily’s parents watched her with a long love bent for protection. All of their consternation settled on the simple fact that the one thing they could not do was to make Ben look at her and act towards her the way she wanted. This was only a sixth-grade crush. But Mrs. Briggs called my aunt Carol and when Carol apologetically told her she didn’t know what she could do and invited Mrs. Briggs to her bridge club, Mrs. Briggs resorted to my mother. My mother talked to Ben. That only made it worse. Then Emily begged her parents, sobbing face down, slanted on her bed one Saturday afternoon, legs swim-kicking the pillows, to leave him alone. Helpless, they instead yielded to her greedy wish to remove every obstacle in her way. First and most difficult, there was me. But the Briggses shied around me, always. I was Ben’s cousin, I could see him whenever I wanted. The only thing they took away from me that I knew of was that piano practice. That and I didn’t get invited to Cotillion. Mai linn proved to be an easier problem. Mai linn was just a stem-thin girl, the first one Ben ever wanted to touch. When she found out they were going together, Emily went to bed for five days.
I spent time in the house on the hill but the Briggses never felt to me like family. Mai linn came closer to that than Emily. Mai linn lived next door to us with my aunt and uncle when she was eleven. She’d been with another family in Racine and before that, the orphanage. The trouble was she came with a saxophone. My aunt Carol, try as she did, could not bear her practicing. We tried setting her up in the barn, and a few nights, I took her out there with the flashlight and she played under the one bare bulb and the sheets of moon through splinters in the old wood, but she felt afraid of mice and just empty darkness and so she left us.
But finally, it was Ben’s desire that delivered Mai linn to the Greyhound bus that took her to the foster home where she was never cared for. The Briggses saw Mai linn as the fever infecting their sturdy blond girl. And then Mrs. Briggs found out what Mai linn had made Emily do. Practicing for boys, Emily told her mother. We’ll never know but we all felt sure that Mrs. Briggs made scarved missionary visits to all the prospective good houses in Racine and warned the mothers, begging them, for her child’s sake, not to take in the Asian orphan. So by the time Eli Timber, in his odd straight jeans and small-collared shirt and wrong tie, knocked to implore the women, they stood
warned and implacable.
They found her a foster home in Hebron, North Dakota. Eli Timber acted as her sponsor with the church. He tried to place her with a musical family in Racine first; he asked the Briggses, the way he’d tried, on my behalf, to convince them to let me come practice on their Düsseldorf grand piano every day after school, and both times they refused because of Emily.
We didn’t say anything, my grandmother and I. In a way it was always simple when people left. The night after Mai linn left, we were sitting at the kitchen table in our pajamas, spooning the rough ice cream from a square box, and my grandmother said, “I suppose sometimes you wish you were over there in that fancy house on the hill too.”
“No I don’t, Gramma,” I said. I never did.
EMILY TRIED to take solace from the future. She was sobbing on her bed, and my mother and her mother sat down over her. “You watch,” my mother told her, “he likes her now, but when he’s older he’ll go for girls more your type. You wait and see.”
I was sitting in a chair in the corner. My mother was doing this to get in good with the Briggses. I just waited, my hands on the chair arms. “She’s a real cute child, sure, but she won’t grow. She’ll be short when she’s an adult and that little face will just get rounder. And once you cut that hair off, she’d be nothing. A little chipmunk. Really, you’re much prettier, Emily Ann.”
“Yes, look at how pretty you were even without the hair.” Mrs. Briggs ran a finger along her daughter’s widow’s peak. She was glad the hair was back.
Emily stilled on the bed. She rubbed her eyes and tried to think of Mai linn as a dull college student, maybe not even a college student because she was an orphan and who would pay? Even then Emily knew to take for granted that her father owned shares of the Press Gazette and the Fort Howard Paper Mill. She bittered her life for what she didn’t have but she already believed to the bottom of herself that she deserved all she had been randomly born with. She tried to picture Mai linn older: round-faced, four-eyed, unpopular. Average.
A new gale of sobs winded Emily. “It’s good to be short, all the popular girls are short!”
“Now it is, but it won’t always be,” Mrs. Briggs promised, glancing down the length of her own leg. This exasperated her. She had always been long-boned, light-skinned. That was how she’d become Mrs. Briggs.
“You don’t know anything, Mom.”
“No, honey, really,” my mother said, pushing herself in. But no matter how hard she tried, Emily never liked her.
Mr. Briggs stood at the bottom of the stairs yelling. “Emily. Get down here this minute. Emily, come here.”
“I don’t want to,” Emily mumbled.
“Emily Mae, I’m going to count to ten. One, two, three—”
She ran down with a huff and Mr. Briggs took her off in the car to buy her the ruby and pearl ring she still has.
My mother and Mrs. Briggs ought to have taken a different course in consoling her. There were better things to teach a child than to wait. Because the envied never go away. They only change faces and bodies, names, fan into multiples, so the future becomes an ever expanding staircase of them. You can wait your whole life for someone to come and for the others to go away.
Emily didn’t quiet down until after Mai linn and I had both left. Then, inexplicably, she missed us.
Ben and I had always been close but we had been rivals too, over my grandmother. “You gave her the hand without the purse.” My mother tried to console me. “She likes you better. I can just tell,” she said. My aunt Carol would never have done that.
“I like you both the same,” our grandmother always said, like she was slicing a loaf of her bread open with a knife, into even parts.
AND WHAT MADE Mai linn a compelling child was never a matter of size, hair, or face shape anyway. Of anything material. She was a child with an already clear character.
She was able to give things away. She did her homework, all of it, lying on the floor, the hour she came home from school. She always had a sense of order. Even young, Mai Linn lived a way we somehow knew would be permanent and irrevocable. She had almost nothing. She shed things, keeping her life portable. Her rooms all felt the same. She’d paint them white, hang a bamboo shade and put sisal on the floor, and she’d lay a futon in the corner, maybe one slim black modern lamp, a few books.
Once I had the two of them over to my dorm room and we went through my closets. “Throw,” Mai linn said, “throw.” Her arm would bend in a perfect right angle. Emily watched in horror. She was a saver and unlike me, she never worried about it. After Mai linn left, Emily and I snuck things back from the garbage.
Mai linn always surprised me with her ruthlessness. She seemed to have no regrets.
I understood I wanted to know her always, to stand over a sink rinsing vegetables together at the end of life and learn age from her, from the sharpness of her slightly bitter belly laugh. She would lose nothing to time.
Neither of us talked too much about our parents. Little had changed since our childhoods; there was still almost nothing to say. But they were a fact in us, like a number.
MAI LINN WAS MOLESTED by her foster father every Sunday in the basement room until she ran away forever, at sixteen. To other people, she was many other things first. But to Mai linn that was what she was first.
Eli Timber had assented to the man because the social workers had said he directed the Hebron High School Marching Band.
She never told me what he looked like or smelled like, anything physical. He had built her the basement room himself, battening it with insulation for sound. They said they put her in the basement so she could practice her saxophone. But even with the soundproofing, her scales drifted into the ceiling around insulation padding up through the floors to where the foster family slept on double beds. But Mai linn never stopped. She said after he left her Sunday nights, ascending the slow stairs back to the kitchen, she played in the dark, from memory. Above her, she heard him turn on the faucet for a glass of water. He drank it, set the glass down in the sink. She saw it there every Monday morning, empty. She’d made transcriptions, borrowing from the violin and the viola repertoire and, especially, from the cello. For a year, she played one long Bach solo cello sonata, before bed every night, like a prayer. Sometimes this was ten o’clock, sometimes this was midnight, sometimes later. Mai linn never thought anything of transcription. She was no purist in that way.
Practicing, Mai linn told me much later, was the way she ensured that she would have the hours she needed alone every day. She needed time and a room alone to feel right. “Like being inside a clean lung,” she said.
She wrote letters to Eli Timber, but they were almost all about music. For a while, she kept in touch with Ben too. They had a system with pay phones. I saw him running in a diagonal up the junior high school lawn once, with a tearing violence I’d never seen in him. Drugs, I thought. We had read about drugs. Ben told me later a blue uniformed cop had just stood up out of a car. If they’d tied that one call to all the other calls, our grandmother would have had to pay. His parents were like mine. They had no savings.
But Ben couldn’t give Mai linn a place to live. I’m not sure he ever saw how much she really needed. A house, clothes, dinner every night, all those days and years. Eventually, his helplessness dried up her romance. She felt ashamed for the size of her need. She ran away to San Francisco and lived with a guy there. The asshole artist named Kevin June.
She was known for carefulness. In college, she’d taken science for two years and she’d won a big prize in biology. They told her she had good hands. But then she quit. For a long time, Mai linn didn’t talk about the North Dakota foster family. Klicka, their name was. Then she did in a torrent and all the bad came out. For a while she went to a group. Secrets weigh, she said now.
The worst thing was the secret. But if we are lucky, secrets end. You turn adult in a world of people holding your same shame.
I’D ALWAYS BEEN ASHAMED. My father left. What d
id that make me?
I began to tell people about the detective. The guy, Jordan, and other people too. Mai linn knew and Emily and of course Timothy and Stevie Howard. And that made me closer to my friends. I thought of Mai linn with her secret, which was, in a way, the opposite of mine. When we were young, we were sure no one else could understand. But everything that happened to us had happened before. Most of my friends knew my mother from a long time ago. Mai linn’s real parents were saints like on wood or in lockets.
Mai linn owned two pairs of shoe trees. Beautiful old ones, wooden. For a long time, I thought maybe they’d been her mother’s and she’d carried them all the way from Asia the way refugees grabbed the family silver candlesticks. But when I did ask I found out she came with absolutely nothing. A car slowed at her school one day, a long black limousine, and picked her up and took her to an airplane and that was the last she saw of anything. She bought the shoe trees here in an antique store. And she never owned more than two pairs of shoes, not counting sneakers.
She was good at all the possible things you could be good at without doing yourself any lasting advantage. In childhood, they were jacks, marbles, cartwheels, singing, dancing, carrying a tune.
She could have been a scientist. She got A pluses at Berkeley and a scholarship for her last two years. Then she quit to play jazz.
She shrugged, saying, I don’t want to succeed.
She had boys’ dead-end interests too. Pool, cars, baseball. Mai linn was the only girl I ever knew who truly cared about baseball, not to fit in with men. She liked it because it was without general time. It had time subject only to itself.
I TOOK OUT MY SAVINGS BOOK from the accordion file every night and just looked at the numbers. I knew I was going to withdraw more. By the end, it would probably cost all of it. But I still hadn’t called Homer Hollander in the bank at home. I just looked at the printed numbers.
I was always bad with money. I’d never gotten money right. Some people did. Timothy didn’t own a wallet. Crinkled bills stretched the pockets of his leather jacket. We were always somewhere outside and it was cold then, we were in some line for a first-run movie, or in some little side restaurant and he’d reach in the deep pockets of his jacket, greenish from age, getting dollars and fives, tens, with his square fingers, counting them out, paying for me for some small reason and we’d file into the movie, the waiter would hand us our drinks in glasses, like everybody else.
