by Mona Simpson
But things of the world had not disappointed her daughter. Materials hadn’t proved themselves empty to her. My mother knew her pine chests and the riding bench and the metal bed, her purse made of silver and a seashell. She had intimacies with her clothes, her jackets and each of her blouses. They were loyal to her. They were still. And there was the constant drama of fear and recovery: the button lost that she talked a salesgirl on Camden Drive into matching for her, snipping one off the racks of hanging new clothes for sale, for the cost of a lunch; the belt lost but found just in the nick of time; the satin flower from the garment district at one tenth of the price. And now, the last half of her life, my mother became the anxious reverent custodian of her things.
When she broke a nail, she recovered the piece from the floor and dashed over to Melrose to have the girl repair it with a fine silk that kept the alive and the dead together. With polish over it, you could never tell the difference. My mother’s manicurist herself drove a Mercedes. She kept it parked outside her shop, and whenever anyone else parallel-parked, she ran out, hands on hips, watching.
THE WOMAN TOOK my two hands flat on the palms of hers and said, “Oh, you very bad. No good. You bite. You must to quit. I do what I can do but this no good.”
I needed some self-improvement. I knew it. This was just another thing.
My grandmother had had a little zippered red case she kept in the medicine cabinet that contained her manicuring tools. All the silver implements and files and clippers had their own slots and built-in straps. There was a compartment for cotton balls. She took the whole business out and gave herself a manicure every week at the kitchen table. She gave me one too when I was a very little girl. “That’s about as good as it’s going to get,” she said at the end. My nails were always bitten.
MY GRANDMOTHER stood between me and the orphanage. For my mother, she became less a person than a place she could bus me off to when I got to be too much for her. And a place to call for money, to be wired into the Western Union office.
In Racine at least we always knew where the orphanage was. We drove by the dark red building and peered over the long, hilled lawn. It was on Hennigan Drive on the east side, just across the road from the coal yards and the river. You drove past Heritage Park and the prison and the abbey; its small lights winked out like lights on a boat at sea. They were too far back from the road. You could never see anything inside. Even when we drove up the long drive, all you could tell was shadows, a suggestion of motion.
In Los Angeles, who knew where orphans went, or runaways. It seemed abstract and more violating. Worse. Like you’d fall away into a black number.
My grandmother was mysterious and kind. Her husband died when she was only in her fifties and she’d never remarried. That didn’t seem strange to me until I was grown up myself and by then she was dead. There were so many things I never asked her. She lived alone, had few friends, worked diligently and carefully raising her children, and then again raising me. I like to imagine secret pockets of grandeur in her life. I tried to think of her happiness without me. As in her death, there were so many places I couldn’t follow. It was a certain kind of love, with no trace elements of passion. A clean love. I wanted her to take pleasures without me. I wanted her even to forget me. It was a love that had nothing to do with possession or jealousy, a love only half in this world. My own mother sometimes called me now from far away and espoused ideas like this on my answering machine. “You’re sounding better on the tape,” she said the last time, although I hadn’t changed my message. “I want you to find joy in whatever you’re doing, to become your own self and at peace with that. Whether or not I’m in your life, I want that independence for you.” But her words gave me no solace. I hardly believed her. She seemed to learn the words from cheap poetry, the kind of thing printed in greeting cards. Sentiments blew through her from the television and she voiced them and then they left. Her own feelings were unhinged and terrible, tufts of wind, and they too inhabited my mother and then left, just as completely, sweeping her empty and clean as new paper. My mother was ill. I accepted that, in some final way, long ago.
Time with my grandmother was cooler. I always felt a little shy when I came back to Racine, right before I saw her. Nothing was the same as my mother. I’d never lived so much with anybody. Everyone else was another person.
“The house stayed so clean without you. I had nothing to do,” my grandmother said, every time. When I came back, it was hard at first to think of things to say, we had to get used to each other again. We sat at the kitchen table with the night quiet and the highway outside and my own thoughts running their course and my grandmother’s hands and eyes busy at work shucking hickory nuts.
And my grandmother sewed. She washed and ironed endlessly, though it seemed effortless, the running of the house, and hours always hung long to fill, more than enough time and too few imperatives. Our clothes stayed clean and pressed, my tights with a hole mended, socks darned, elbows patched neat and tastefully—an orange rectangle on a blue shirt. The patch would be sewn with yellow yarn.
Ribbons and ironed bows clasped the ends of my braids. The kitchen curtains stayed fresh and white and billowy, the heavy floor-length gray drapes in the living room went twice a year to the cleaners downtown. All this felt managed, regular.
“How do you do it?” I called once from college, standing in a scrambled mess on the floor—papers, books, shirts, socks, rubbers, pens, a borrowed stethoscope on my bare chest, a box of graham crackers open.
“Shucks,” she said. “It stays clean. I don’t do much. I played cards all morning.”
Upstairs there were five bureaus and twenty-one drawers built into the wall. They were packed with ironed, folded, bleached white cotton sheets and pillow slips, each embroidered by her hand in a standard form of lace. Tablecloths and napkins waited there too, maybe a hundred doilies and handkerchiefs. Many she’d embroidered or edged but all with a pattern I could find named somewhere in a book.
My grandmother left nothing fanciful, no mistakes and nothing extra, nothing she’d made up in bold color just for the afternoon’s flare of it.
It was maddening in a way, to love someone so plain.
My grandmother, in living and in dying, left no clues.
THAT WAS A REFRAIN from my childhood with her. “Sit still awhile, why don’t you?” I always did, when she asked me, but I didn’t need to rest so much. It was then that I wished I were back with my mother who was young.
In us each, there was a quality of being oddly marooned together. We looked at each other with depths of patience. We knew we were both working to make the best of it. But she was old. And I held still, containing all my vim and greed to yell and run and kick and boss. I did that at school. I became the rule maker who ran the long field, head down-pointed, marking the boundary line, shouting instructions.
At home I sealed up, mindful.
It was a different kind of bond. I observed children with their parents. Their touch held noise and color—they could kick each other and then fall together, bodies tangling. They were lovers, their bond physical, meant and necessary, with gold flashes of hate, the underside of ardor. They never doubted that they belonged together.
We did not have that. Or we did a little. But it seemed a fainter trace, her in me. We often mentioned when we found something in common. Our hands were the same, we discovered, the way our third nails grew faintly ridged. My mother and I, we never bothered with any of that. Sometimes other people would say the two of us looked alike or didn’t, we shrugged and couldn’t care. She was my mother. That was absolute. We didn’t need to seem it.
I was a passenger, hand quiet on the seat beside me, in the car my grandmother steadily drove, taking me where I needed to go, picking up, the car idling, waiting, while I made my last glorious loud run on the play field. Every Tuesday in winter, after school, she drove me downtown to the big public library. I bounded down the steps, onto the dirty, slushy, crusted downtown snow and into th
e familiar-smelling heated car.
Now when I tried to remember the smell of the car, I thought only—it was women. It was a woman’s car. It smelt of women. I own that car now.
What did women smell like? Like clear transparent things, see-through plastic umbrellas, like rain itself, which though it falls in its numerous choral broken lines, also implies a rising, a coherent belly rising like yeast. They smell like watery pink, like plain new floor, like camphor.
Korean music came from speakers on the ceiling and my manicurist sang along, her head swaying. She poked my cuticles back with a little wooden stick. She executed the job much more harshly than my grandmother had. My grandmother held you always so careful.
“Cut or push back?” the woman asked.
“Always push the cuticle back,” my grandmother had said. It was one of those things you did by family, like toothpaste.
“Push back,” I said.
She started but then shook her head. “You need cut,” she said. Then she began going at me with a clipper. She skidded on my third finger and the blood came a pure ruby drop against my hand, drained white from soaking.
MY GRANDMOTHER had three friends and they made a regular foursome. They called each other “the girls” and had been doing so since they were. The other girls were Rene and Gish and Jen.
They played cards together once a month. This was a formal affair. The card table and folding chairs were extracted from the still, cool, male-smelling front closet, a cloth was borrowed from the cabinets upstairs, and though it had been pressed before its placement in the drawer, now it was ironed again. And there was time. Eclair puffs were baked, cooled, cream was whipped, the tin of strawberries thawed the night before in the sink was poured into a bowl and still there was time. We waited. We sat in the living room pulling back the heavy gray floor-length drapes to watch for cars to come. We never started eating or drinking anything ourselves. We didn’t sneak, the way my mother would.
Exactly on time then they arrived. In Racine, Wisconsin, there was no fashionably late. Except my mother. I’m sure she thought she started that. These were close varieties of white women, all in their sixties and seventies, all widowed except Gish, who had never married. Jen was the small one, Rene the emoter. Gish, the oldest and the only working woman, complained of her health.
I sat in a chair, content, my hands on the armrests. I liked watching. It was the big activity in the house. My grandmother’s head rose a little higher, her face more colored and filled. I taught myself bridge just watching. I began to see the cards on the table and make answers.
One night in October, when they were dividing up their pennies, finished, I hauled out my new Ouija board and made them all play. I’d bought it with allowance. My grandmother, when I lived there, gave me chore money. I loved games of prescience—wishes you made and didn’t tell, the envelope of silence around the question I’d imagined over the whispery Ouija, moved it seemed by breath.
“Ugh, I don’t believe in such stuff,” my grandmother complained, but she played anyway that night for hours. She didn’t seem to mind. She said the same thing about church. She’d go anyway, putting on a good knit dress with a belt and taking out the matching hat and handbag.
That night, the girls asked question after question about Hans, the guide they’d had in Europe. Twice, the girls had gone together on a European tour. They’d come back with dolls from every country for me. The dolls were all dressed as if for royal balls. I’d only seen Hans’s picture. He wasn’t my type. He had long fingers, a soft whiskery face. But the girls always went for a different sort than I did. They liked young men with exquisite manners and all the sex drained out of them. Even then, at eleven, that wasn’t what I wanted.
“Is our dear Hans happy over there?” Jen started.
“And is his little girl well?”
“And the wife, don’t forget the wife, even if we don’t personally like her style of clothing.”
“Or of the hygiene either.”
“Well, she’s got a lot to do too, I suppose, but that house. And the diapers everywhere! Right by with the food!”
“I don’t know how he can concentrate on his schooling with all that going on.”
“I don’t know either. That’s why you keep a house nice and orderly. So he can do what he’s supposed to do.”
“I always thought so.”
“Of course you did. And you kept a real nice house, Jen.”
“Just beautiful. I still remember your orange cakes.”
“That I can’t do anymore. My eyes aren’t what they were.”
“Well no, that’s a lot of work. Too much work. For just us alone.”
“But you did it for Alfred.”
“And he appreciated it.”
“I hope he did.”
“Why sure he did.”
“I know he did.”
“He’d’ve been a fool if he didn’t.” That was Gish. Gish had always thought Alfred was a fool and rarely resisted an opportunity to suggest it. Gish was sly and large and caused trouble.
“Why, I’ll tell you, he sure ate a lot of them for somebody who didn’t!”
“But do you think that wife with the hair all over sprouting from her, do you think she’s grating orange rinds for his cake? Why, she can’t even wash the diapers.”
“Lord knows what else would fall into her cake. That house was not clean.”
“I know it.” My grandmother pursed her lips.
By the time all this narrowed to a question, it was: “Well tell us, why don’t you, if you know all the answers, you Ouija you, is she still letting that grow under her arms?”
The plastic heart lurched and skidded. The answer told a sudden yes. They giggled, climbing the steps of an octave—thrilled.
My questions I kept private. The Ouija skated as answers fluidly uncurled themselves in a script written with rapid jags between the numbers and letters. The answers never seemed to quite fit my questions, but I couldn’t complain because I didn’t want to tell them what I’d asked.
To “Will I see my father again?” it said ytab784.
“Will I be rich?” spun the heart waltzing to NO, then YES, then 59.
“Will I ever live with my father?” clearly, evenly spelled out the word DOG.
And “Is my father alive?” made the Ouija heart skitter off the board quickly, exiting straight through GOODBYE.
“No fair, you’re pushing,” my grandmother called in excitement years ago, as the heart flew, warm all over the board.
“No, I’m not, I’m not. Look,” I shouted, and she half-believed, her cheeks flushed and mouth tense, as we felt the mysterious drag us in its trail. She looked up from the board and out the dark window. The lights were on inside so we could see nothing of the sky.
I didn’t remember what all I asked anymore.
Will I be happy?
Does he remember me?
Even after, I never told. She didn’t press. I was preparing for sleep when my grandmother clapped my board into its box, saying, “Well, that was fun, wasn’t it. We all had a good laugh from it.”
But the next time, the girls wouldn’t touch the Ouija. They were afraid of it. They relented, though, and agreed to a game of Monopoly after bridge. I always won at board games. I cleaned them out that night. They all saved. They felt afraid to buy. Meanwhile I spent my money every chance I got and at the end, emptied them out from hotel rents. They counted their toy bills carefully.
“Well at least we can pay, I’m glad of that,” my grandmother said, counting out nine hundred and fifty dollars when she landed on my hotel on St. James Place.
I was always trying to lure them into playing for money. Sometimes they would and I’d collect little piles of pennies and dimes. She worried that I might become a gambler like my dad. At home alone, my grandmother wouldn’t use cash but she’d gamble hankies. She lost those too. I kept them in a gold cigar box from Boss’s.
WE HAD TWO BOOKS: one old Bible and the American
Heritage Dictionary from 1957. Stacks of yellow National Geographics and Reader’s Digests filled the rest of the one bookshelf in the den. I never saw my grandmother read. But she looked at the pictures in the National Geographics and she used the heavy Bible to dry fall leaves.
After my grandmother died, I owned her furniture and her clothes. Other relatives and I inherited her money. But none of that seemed personal. I wondered a long time what she left that was her. People were supposed to tell stories. Secrets. She didn’t do that. People sometimes made a thing that showed themselves. Like my mother’s needlepoint, a gorgeous thing, all her winding chemical rages refined to the points of a picture, frenetic in bright colors. Goldfish dashed maniacally at the center. But my mother couldn’t finish things. She still had a little sweater she’d started knitting me when I was four, it was half finished in a basket, red, one-sleeved.
My grandmother fixed and mended, darned. Her handiwork was fine, but her efforts all attempted the standard. Her homemade things copied the storebought done on machines. Her stitches got that small. That was her goal, so you couldn’t see the difference. You really couldn’t tell her hand.
I don’t have her signature. I have only copies, legal things, deeds, the Xerox of her will.
On letters she just signed Gram, not her name. But when I could have asked for it I was busy chasing other, more elusive things.
Most people tried to make something different, something only them, some proof like a document forever saying, I felt these wide bright things, I used my time on the earth. Most people wanted to leave a scratch of themselves behind here. She just left, giving all her things away before.
But for all the batter of my mother’s madness, the shrill air of the Briggses’ money, what colored my temperament was just the shadow of my grandmother’s hand over me, not even touching, only shading me.
