by Mona Simpson
I kept calling the Uncle and getting his machine. I left messages with my number and each time a different request. This was my tenth or eleventh message and he still hadn’t called me back. After a while if someone didn’t call you back it became easier and easier to pester them. I called the Azzam woman with the pretty voice too. I was up to about seven on her machine. This seemed time most likely wasted. Calling people who might have no relation whatsoever. I felt I was way in now, looking for my father. But so far, all I’d really done was talk on the phone.
MAI LINN LEFT RACINE in 1969. I moved with my mother to California in 1970. Emily was left alone then, her friends safely gone, but Ben was still never more than decent to her, in his regular way. That, perhaps, was bearable until he met Susie—a girl none of us had ever thought about before or known. That was in the high school. He was with Susie until he died, in the car accident, three years later.
When we were children, I loved games where you sat in a circle cross-legged and closed your eyes and someone else came around and touched the top of your head. Duck duck goose. But this was what I imagined: one day my hair would be touched and he would be there and that would be the signal and he would take me out of my life, out of my first-row desk, out of the classroom where the nun would still be teaching the parts of the plant and photosynthesis.
Later I hoped it would be the Hollywood agent in a long coat who would be in the cafeteria and see my good table manners and pick me.
I always knew I would have to leave the circle of game.
I don’t know. We were children. We had that too. We had the other but we had that too. I put on my red cowboy boots with my cousin and Mai linn and we danced hoedown to country western music. We ran silently, like the truest stealth of light and shadow through tall fields of wheat and corn where no one minded us, we made ourselves invisible to no one looking. Mai linn grew up in a small North Dakota town, climbing hedges, making holes, yelling for other children to follow her and they did. There were moments, sure, for each of us when we stood still and fixed on a thing, a car on the highway, the moon in the sky and thought of our parents, who they were and what their absence made us. But that too was not all. There were other children, songs. Other children lured us back into the game, at least I sat in the circle, my hands in their hands, even if in my spirit, I was chasing other far things. And both of us had, most of the time, turned our backs on that truer self, and gone running, arms open, to join in the game.
6
IT WAS AN ORDINARY Wednesday morning, but I woke up wanting to be pretty. I stood in front of the mirror. I didn’t know, really, what I looked like. It started out when you were a girl staring in the mirror and seeing your face. You recognized yourself but didn’t know what that was, if that was good or not. The way you learned was only people telling you.
Emily had said once, “Someone in love with you could really find you beautiful.” She said that like she’d discovered something where everyone else had looked. I had been trying on one of her hats.
Once, when I’d cried in a whole loop to my boyfriend, Paul, about everything, he’d said, “Oh, come on. You have a lot going for you.” People agreed too readily when I told them I felt bad about my looks. They quickly mentioned other things that were good about me.
The last time I saw Merl Briggs, she’d said, “You look glamorous. You didn’t use to think of yourself as glamorous but I guess you do now.” Her voice was wistful, as if all that had been good in me was gone.
I don’t know why I was thinking about this just then. Maybe I wanted to be presentable to my father.
It was something I never talked about long with anyone but my mother. I was embarrassed when other people mentioned my appearance. I thought I was plain, but not completely. And like with her paste jewelry, my mother could make me valuable, but she could take it away again. Most things my mother said, I’d stopped believing years before, discarded. Almost everything she said, except about my body. And that was bad. I had legs I couldn’t show and a neck that wasn’t as good as anybody else’s, but sometimes, when she was happy and we were alone in a way that made the room small, she could look at me and say, oh you’re beautiful, with awe in her voice.
I didn’t want to give up the chance of that.
IT WASN’T too many times I’d had said to me the word beautiful in my life, and it never really rested still. It had the tentative quality of a butterfly’s landing, or the hurried tripping whisper people get when they lie. Bud Edison told me I was beautiful, and my mother. Two people. Even Stevie Howard, who’d said he loved me, never did that. I tried to warn Bud Edison, when he told me he loved me. “You see, you’re only the second person who’s said that to me in my life. I’m not somebody who a lot of people say that to.” It made an impression on me.
Most people, even liars, want to be telling the truth. I’d met few men in my life who could look in an ugly woman’s eyes and tell her she is beautiful. But my father might have been that kind of man.
FIRST THING in the morning, I went and knocked on Timothy’s door. We didn’t have an appointment, but I brought food. A wooden box of winter clementines.
He let me in and showed me to the couch. He was holding a white mug of coffee.
“Do you think I’m pretty?” I asked.
He was quiet before he said anything. And then I could hear, it was a question he didn’t like to answer. It was going to be bad. I knew the second before he started talking.
“In the conventional sense, no. But—”
I began a spiraling fall. I’d always thought really I was somehow.
“But when you’re relaxed you can look very attractive.”
“Attractive is a euphemism.”
“Well I didn’t mean it that way.”
Sometimes it is almost a relief to hear the truth is what you most feared. Because though everyone else had lied and flattered, their flattery was never truly consoling. Even in those committed to kindness, there is a vague sabotaging wish for the truth.
I thought: maybe I am not more than this. Than what I am. Maybe this is all.
I RAN OUT and it was a slow morning. A woman pushed a supermarket cart filled solid with belongings, she herself was wearing two layers of coat with the double hem of a frilly cotton dress below. Her legs were bare and had sores. Her face, though, could have had a kind of beauty. It was twisted too hard around the mouth and there was an unevenness, but the cheekbones were right, the placement of the eyes, light gray and shot with unattached rage.
In a clothing store on the corner, I saw a short-haired woman sitting on a stool. She was overweight, eating a bagel.
Two young men walked by, hands in coat pockets.
Not everybody else around was so damn gorgeous either.
I needed a haircut.
Call Shawn, I wrote on my list, after my class notes of all I had to study. Shawn was a genius. He cut my hair a certain way so I looked better than I was. He’d touch the shape of your head and he didn’t make me feel embarrassed. He worked in a place with a waterfall and marble floors. Once, my first month here, I saw a woman on a bus with a brown bag of groceries, the ferny tops of carrots sticking out, she was dressed well with hair something like mine and I just asked her and she told me this man at that place. Shawn looked like an apostle. His blond hair fell almost to his shoulders and he was always changing it. He’d say, I liked Madonna’s hair in the play last night so I did mine that way. Or he’d watch an old movie and be impressed by some actress’s long bangs. And he stood, snipping, telling me to lift my chin or drop it, he made my hair so it would be good even if I didn’t do anything to it. He showed me how to pin the front back, told me where to put one hot roller before I tied it in a ponytail. Tricks like that. I needed this kind of help. But I still hadn’t gotten around to buying hot rollers.
“You’re getting so expensive, Shawn,” a woman in the chair was saying, the last time I’d gone in. I always stood like a goon, waiting. I knew how I compared. I’d put my
smock on right away and then I stood unevenly not knowing where to go. One look at the lady in the chair, you knew she could afford it no matter how expensive Shawn got. Those were the people who joked about money. I looked at the floor where curls of hair settled like leaves under a tree. The lady in the chair bent down writing her check. An assistant in soft shoes so they made no footsteps delivered cappuccino to my hands. This was such luxury for me. The air in the place pressed so warm you could wear nothing, it would force open budded flowers. It reminded me of doctors’ offices when I was a child. All clean, chemical and astringent. And since I’d moved East I’d never gone in to a doctor. I tried to look up whatever I had in my own books. I figured I was spending my health care money on hair. I needed this more.
“You’re costing me more than the shrink!” the lady said, handing Shawn the check.
“Mmhm,” Shawn said, “but this is your head and it shows.”
The lady in the chair was my age. I didn’t see that until she stood up. It dismayed me, the rings on her hand. It was easier to be poor when you were young. Pretty soon I’d have to begin to say never.
I studied for once. All morning. I got through two systems. Respiratory and blood. And when I called the hair place a girl told me Shawn Timmelund was on a shoot in Hawaii.
Could she make an appointment?
Oh no, she said. Not without Shawn.
Then Emily Briggs came over at her lunch break and we ran. It was cold, clouds banking the sky in pale ridges over the Hudson. The pines shook with a hint of water.
She was on this thing about how her mother wasn’t very smart but her father was really brilliant. Even if he wasn’t a lot of other things, she was lucky to have been, well, like him, or did it always go like that when smart men married, well, you know, not dumb but lesser women. Lesser, she said again.
And I was thinking, but Emily you’re not that smart.
Now she was listing all the couples in Racine, whose wives were smart and whose were lesser. I didn’t like to talk while I ran anyway.
Then she got to my parents and was going on about what my father would be like, how he had to be smart because I was and I got what she was saying and I stopped running.
“Oh. But my mother’s not dumb,” I said.
“I didn’t say dumb,” she said, “just less—”
“Oh but she is,” I said. “She’s really smart.” She was. My mother was crazy. That was the problem. She wasn’t stupid.
We started up again. “I’m smart,” my mother told me once, “and so was your father. We had good genes. And you got them from me. Not your grandmother.”
Emily sighed, which isn’t the easiest thing to do running. And then she said, “It’s scary when you think how many men did that, men we grew up around. I mean, married down.” It took her a while but then she continued because I didn’t take it up. “I’m still going to be really curious to see what your dad’s like. You sure you want to do this?” she said, her voice thin from breath. “What if you don’t like what you find?”
You don’t have to answer things running.
“Aren’t you afraid?” she said. Easy for her to say. She had her father. She had everything from him and that was a lot.
This was not a new question, anyway. People’d warned me all my life. You might not like what you find.
I shrugged. There was a gesture I had as a child: a series of shrugs, meaning, don’t ask me. Emily, when I first met her, was a sturdy, two-parent girl, ribboned at the ends of her braids, coming up to me, while I dance-stepped down the pavement. I didn’t walk at that age. I shuffled and two-stepped, waltzed, arms doing something showy and reaching.
“What are you doing?” she’d said. There was a hill in her voice. She was the voice of second-grade convention. And the genius of Emily is that she’s perfectly conventional without ever copying. The standard came to her absolutely naturally. She could have been great in advertising.
I’d shrugged and then she started copying me, marching, arms out, down the uneven squares of pavement. Emily had never particularly moved well. But if I didn’t think I was anything special, she’d go along with it.
I tried now to think of the worst thing my father could be. What was the worst I could find.
It lay there, metal in my mouth, one word, it always had been there: prison. Federal prison. Every one believed in you being your father’s child and paying for his sins. It was old as the Bible, the good families spreading out, sons of sons of sons punished.
There was still a chance, just a flint chance, he was a great man and then we all were too. Good, I meant.
We ran down by the boat basin. It was very still at the river, no wind, the sky blue and gray. The banks of the Jersey shore across the water were a mossy, inner-lit green. A couple leaned on the rail and kissed. They were not particularly young. But they meant it, you could tell. We passed them loudly, the way you can’t help running. I had gotten to a point where it was hard to see lovers. I didn’t have enough fun.
With the people she had always known, my grandmother moved a certain way. She’d laugh and say, “Those were the days, huh. We had our fun.” She didn’t mean much. She meant just her friends, cards with the girls or dinner out with the mink people.
When would be my days? I looked over at Emily. She really was beautiful. And she wasn’t happy either. I couldn’t talk to her about Tad. Maybe I was just jealous. She would think I was anyway. He was supposed to be the best in the world at this particular kind of deal. She thought together they were this glamorous couple.
On the way back, we passed a group of kids nine or ten years younger than we were, getting out from school. The girls walked, heads back, laughing, in short frilly skirts that looked like paper, the thin ones, the husky-legged girls too. There was a boy in among them and one or two were flirting with him, but you could tell all the references were back to themselves, the girls between one another. In Wisconsin, husky legs were like a tragedy. My cousin Hal’s wife had had them. My aunt always mentioned her husky legs and the bad street she was from as reasons he should have never married her. A girl who her whole life would never be seen in a short skirt. Here they just pulled on black tights and went outside.
Running past the green-shuttered church near where I lived, I thought of Bud Edison. I thought of him whenever I passed a place we’d kissed. We kissed and pushed our hands against each other’s thick winter coats in apartment house doorways, on stoops, against that wrought-iron fence around this old church. It was that kind of romance, jewels spaced on a chain. His stare went intent and steady, his lips groping the air for me the way a puppy does before it has eyes, and I pulled on his collar, tilting on my heels.
I looked at Emily, running next to me, her hair in an arched ponytail. She was running in pearls. They tapped up and down on her blue T-shirt.
I said, “You forgot to take them off,” and touched my hand to my collarbone.
“Oh, it’s good for them to be on your skin. It keeps them nice.” She caught her breath, slipped them under her collar. “They’re these South Sea pearls. My father’s trip to Japan.”
“What’s the difference,” I said.
“I don’t know exactly. Just bigger, I guess.”
I looked again. They were.
On the corner, we stopped. That was our four miles. We stood panting a minute, we always did. I watched, entranced by a boy in a phone booth, fingers stretching, pushing out, the cold making the glass seem wavery. When would be my turn?
I knew Emily was wondering something about Tad, and even walking next to each other, our shoulders touching, we couldn’t either of us say it. When we passed, the guy shifted his position in the phone booth, pressing a knee up against the glass.
INSTEAD OF GOING BACK to the library, I got a manicure. There were Korean nail shops on almost every block now. They were all new this year.
“You have boyfriend?” the woman asked, pushing my hand down into a bowl of viscous water.
“Sort
of.” Jordan had called. He’d left a message and then he’d called again. His voice was too fast and enthusiastic. People like that lacked stillness, I thought. A capacity for wonder.
“You must not be from around here,” I’d said to him.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because a New Yorker, if they’d already left a message and the person hadn’t returned it, wouldn’t call again.”
He’d laughed. “Well, in fact I’m from Michigan.”
With a person like that, I thought I’d always feel like I’d gone home from school and found myself in the wrong house.
There were times in my life, only once or twice a year, when I felt like some door was opened and everything in the world was sexual and I was part of it too. It was there, underlining everything, like unheard music you can sometimes sense the ends of, even if you were taking the pulse of an overweight old man who smelled of urine.
I was wearing the new underwear and wind entered my blouse from the neckline. Falling in love, really falling in love, must be like this. It is there all the time, in the kitchen, drawing itself beneath and around all the everyday fixtures of life, sinks, toilets, dishwashing machines, the music is there, the silent music. If I can keep that door forced open somehow, I was thinking, keep my ear to the right pitch, maybe …
MY DAUGHTER IS WAITING for me to die, my mother was telling her manicurist in Los Angeles, so she can inherit my clothes. But I am planning to fool them all.
My mother has many treasures. She knew how to make an ordinary small thing cherished, the way her own mother could make a jewel nothing, a dull stone of the world. Here take it, she would say, at the end of her life, I don’t care. What am I going to do with it? She had given things up one by one. Finally, she lay in the hospital calling only my mother’s name.
