by Mona Simpson
She sought not to alter anything, not to express, only to leave the world just as she found it, as if she had never been here. I kept looking for anything she might have left behind. I wanted that. But she’d taken herself out of the things she used long before she left us. The last few years she was alive, she kept giving away her things. She wanted to give everything away.
When my father left, he took things with him. From him, I wanted my own back. When I tried to imagine him, I thought of caves.
THE WOMAN LEFT ME, my nails suffered to evenness. I felt creased lines in the place where nail, which was really bone, met skin. She returned wheeling a cart of colored polishes.
“So now, what you want?”
Pictures of done hands superimposed on Asian temples hung all over on the walls. All of a sudden I felt shy. I did know what I wanted but I felt afraid to ask. I’d seen it in magazines.
“I’d like it clear but with the white underneath?”
“French. You want Fench manicure. The white under nail. But no can’t have that. No nail. You let grow first, then I do. Now pick color.”
MY GRANDMOTHER’S COLORS were winter in the place she lived. Her hair was white but the clean shock of real white, no yellow or blue in it. Her skin tinted softer, a pink beige, her teeth the patina of yellowed ivory.
I thought of her pearls, no long, flapper pearls, but pearls around her neck like two hands clasped, that kind of pearls. Of course they were never real. Nobody we knew had real, except the Briggses. My grandmother could have been a flapper. She was the right age during the twenties. But those city ways would have dismayed and even frightened her. Self-attending, that kind of flair, even just an open shout for joy, went all against her nature. That quality of suppression turned my own mother against her and sent us to Los Angeles chasing beautiful clothes and sun tans, every form of immediate pleasure in this world.
My grandmother never changed friends, all her life. She stuck with her regular foursome. Gish was Jen’s sister; her real name was Francesca but she’d never been called that since she turned nine and tried to mimic a movie star. Because of that, she had always been known as wild. The girls were deeply, habitually loyal, even to a common name.
I knew these were good qualities. But after a whole night of their trilled conversations, more repetitive than the most conventional fugue, I felt so alone.
Marion Werth had given me a book about Madame Curie. She died of her work, eventually, leukemia. She was an early widow, like my grandmother, and like my grandmother she never remarried. But she was a woman of science.
At the time of their lives when Marie Curie was traveling the world for science with her daughter—who also died of her work, leukemia, again from radium—my grandmother and the girls toured Europe, sightseeing and playing cards.
I was a teenager by then and I lived with my mother in apartment after apartment, all furnished or empty, in California.
Why did the girls go to Europe? They missed dancing. Their husbands had died early. All their lives, before and through the wars, the fun they knew best was dancing. But there was nowhere in Wisconsin that they could dance. Maybe a niece’s or a nephew’s wedding if one of the young men was courteous enough to ask them. And even then they’d only get the one dance. Jen had seven children and so one of the grandsons always seemed to be having a wedding. But the girls didn’t like the music they played by then anyway.
“I can’t pick up a beat,” my grandmother said, whispering one two three, one two three.
My grandmother resorted to me, when I was there, on the carpeted living room floor. First she’d try to find a song with the right beat on the radio, but failing that, she’d hum, ta da deedum, ta da deedum, de de dah, teaching me the two-step and waltz. We practiced that way, there on the floor, and I did all the time, on the lawn, on the frozen-over driveway, I waltzed to the mailbox, polkaed to the school bus.
But in the European hotels where each of the girls had her own room, they danced. They came home with pictures of their guides. The guides were young men who took them climbing in the Alps, made sure they saw museums and choir boys in the city, and sat and joked with them in the good Swiss coffee houses.
In the old, grand hotel, the guide would take turns and dance with them each, gliding the women over the floor, their mouths held careful, their feet knowing the steps for years.
My grandmother packed good dresses to dance in, both times she went. And the first time she took her jewelry, her watch and pearls.
On the first trip, their guide was Hans. He accompanied them through Greece, Rome, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, finally parting from them in Vienna, putting them on the train to Paris. He was their favorite guide, then and always. They had taken that first trip when the last of the husbands died. That had been Jen’s Alfred. Gish planned a month off from her job at the Coliseum Theater. She worked as hostess there, which meant she took the tickets in a long formal dress every evening. She’d had the idea to go abroad and they all agreed, the trip did them a lot of good. When they went back for the second time, they tried to arrange, through the travel agent, to tour with Hans again. Naturally, this posed difficulties to the agent, who told them flat out that finding and retaining a guide from five years earlier would be near impossible. Guides tended to be young. They took time off from their studies or went into businesses. It was hard and aimless work, abounding in flattery and remembrances, but leading nowhere. “You wouldn’t want to be a guide when you’re fifty,” the agent said.
This was a new thought for the girls. They worried. They each privately wrote Hans long letters about his future prospects, and my grandmother considered the merits of sending along a check. They didn’t tell each other. However, they assured the travel agent, there would be no problem locating Hans. They each possessed his full address and that of his mother in Bremen. They’d received Christmas cards from him just this last year. That had been the day. The girls on the phone like teenagers. Gish’s was held up in the mail over the weekend, desperate thirty-six hours of wondering, had she done something wrong? She went to church Saturday morning before the matinee for an extra confession.
I think they really returned to Europe just to see Hans again. Word came through their travel agent at last, six weeks before their departure. Hans would not be their guide. Hans had married and had a child and there was some rumor of illness in the family. Hans wasn’t working as a tour guide anymore.
They went anyway, secretly, conspiratorially, planning to make a visit to Hans themselves while there. They didn’t reveal their plans but took off on the departing day full of exhilarated gigglings, carrying suitcases heavy with dresses and dancing shoes and suits and the machinery of undergarments, boxes of Kleenex, first-aid equipment, cough drops and Handi Wipes.
Hans—in the picture I still have of him—didn’t look like a Hans. He looked like a George or a Scott. He was clean-cut, soft-haired, with a long nose, but his smile was slack and seemed to bespeak a love of pleasure. His lower lip drooped on the left.
I found out later about their pilgrimage to him. Apparently, Europe had less to see this time and they came home with colds and indigestion, complaining of the prices and telephones and toilet plumbing. They knew when they settled home that they would not go back for a very long time. My grandmother understood that she would never return. Never. She felt perfectly comfortable with notions of mortality of that kind.
I was not. I felt I’d missed too much already and I was missing things every day. Things I should have been learning, experiences. I didn’t know how to keep up with my homework or make money or forget about my mother blowing up at me or how to stop being in trouble all the time. I didn’t even know how to stop biting my nails.
I wanted to be whole, what I would have been. And I knew that wasn’t going to be now. I couldn’t live with the idea that what was supposed to be a gorgeous part of life was already over.
APPARENTLY, it was the last week in Europe when my grandmother and the girls
found Hans. This new guide—the Swiss, they called him—couldn’t understand why they so wished to see Bremen. “It is”—he shrugged—“what you call, university town. College only.” But that last week, they broke away. They were already tired, Rene and Jen were sick, Gish had lost her best shirt in a Hamburg dry cleaner.
They hadn’t danced as much on this trip. In fact, I had a feeling they hadn’t danced at all. Who knows what they thought they’d find when they traced the streets to Hans’s address and turned up at his door. Maybe they had lingering hopes, like the aftertaste and dissolve of a lunch sugar mint, for dancing there. They didn’t know. Perhaps he’d come into money and lived in an old mansion with twenty-foot ceilings and velvet curtains and marble floors and an entryway and a balcony and …
But they were sensible women who lived ordinary lives back in Wisconsin. I suspect they already knew. They turned the corner to a house that was gray and run-down. The yard was small and mean, poor shoots of grass grew like a few hairs on the side of a bald man’s head. Mostly, it was worn down to smooth, packed dirt. Things from inside spilled to the three bare stairs, a child’s truck, a rubber ball, a bone, an old platform shoe.
Of course, they knew then. And the good religious women that they were, they felt no flashing urge to walk on—the way I would have—find an intersection, hail an anonymous taxi.
I wish they had. I wish they’d turned and gone, run helter-skelter, fast as they could in their pumps with their little purses hanging off their hands, asked the taxi for the best hotel in Bremen, gone there and sat in a wood-paneled room, listening to a string quartet, taking tea.
What they found was not so much worse than what they knew at home, in the bad parts of Racine, in their own parish, during some patchy years of their own children’s lives. With my mother, my grandmother had known even worse.
Apparently, Hans’s living room had been small and held the shrill reek of diapers somewhere nearby. He was there and the wife too, him hapless, holding the baby in just its rubber pants. It was the white and brown of winter then, the same time of year they’d come before when it was the red and white, the ermine and red velvet of a king’s coat and outside the planted rows of pale, match-colored bare trees … The wife had heavy, messy hair and didn’t shave under her arms.
“I did notice that,” Jen said later.
“I did too,” my grandmother confirmed.
Hans seemed downcast to them and older. A few attempts at beard wisped on his cheeks.
“Unsuccessful,” Gish said. “Like a fool.”
He was studying at the university now, he told them, engineering. This made him look sad.
“Oh, but that’s good,” Jen said.
“Good for you.”
“You regularly read that there’s lots of work for engineers.”
“And always the building, more building, they’re building, building, out by me even, too, way over there.”
“Where I am too. Ugh, the noise.” That was Gish.
“But it must be lucrative.”
“Oh, yes, gracious, I should think so.”
Downcast. The wife seemed cold at first. “Well, I suppose so, four women coming to their door in the middle of the day, what is she supposed to think!” But then she thawed a little. By the end she was running back and forth from the small kitchen to the living room, delivering coffee and little ham salad sandwiches.
They got to almost like her.
“Oh, but did it smell down in there. I didn’t want to eat with that either, but here she brings it out and it’s just us there and so I nibbled at one.”
“ ’Course I suppose she’s got her studies too, they’re both in school. It can’t be easy,” my grandmother said.
Before they left he apparently put a tape into a tiny player and danced a turn around the small living room with each of the women. My grandmother didn’t like it. I don’t suppose the others did either. She said the room was so small and cluttered they bumped into furniture and the baby cried. Nobody probably much wanted to be dancing.
As they left the ladies fumbled awkwardly with their purse clasps. They gave him a little something for the child. They walked all the way back to their hotel and found themselves depressed. Instead of staying on as they’d planned, they took the train to Frankfurt that same night, spent a lackluster day there shopping and then came home.
So that was that for Europe. The girls had had enough of it. If you asked my grandmother, she’d say, “I’d just as soon stay home.”
BUT THAT FIRST TIME—we can only imagine its opulence. There must have been palatial hotels kept up for the business of visiting old women and foreign bankers. Places with plush ballrooms where old women could dance under chandelier light with handsome strangers. I imagined my grandmother’s face open in a surprised smile. After a day of sightseeing, even in gondolas, on a mountain, Hans had herded them back to their rooms in plenty of time to dress for dinner.
Gish had asked him, “Is it casual more or just a nice dress or sort of formal?”
He knew what they wanted. “Formal,” he said, lips severe. “Do you have anything long? Floor length?”
They assured him. “Oh, yah yah, sure.”
“Do it your best, ladies,” he said, “tonight’s the night.”
And they’d scurried up to the private rooms and begun bathing and powdering and putting on their makeup. They called each other in to zip up the long back zippers and to fasten the clasps on the good watches and bracelets because they couldn’t see them so well anymore. Out came the cuticle oils and dabs of perfume. The mink stoles, all first bought from my grandfather’s pelts, musty from not being worn these twenty years and lingering in stale closets. My grandmother hadn’t worn hers since her husband had been alive to lift it off her shoulders.
She wore pearls, which now held a patina of worth, from being touched.
They pushed on elbow-length gloves. These were dresses and accessories they wouldn’t have dared buy now or anytime in the last fifteen years but which they’d kept, carefully tended in their closets, on the chance that they might need them, once more.
And here they were, wrapping themselves in those taffetas and silks and satins, marveling that they still fit and at how good these soft and shiny fabrics felt against their skin, remembering, with a shiver, what bareness meant to an arm and then fur, lush and hot, on the outside shoulders.
They descended the stairs, heads high as they’d tried to keep them fifty years ago. This was the generation of girls whose mothers made them parade around the house, balancing Polish and German and Czech Bibles and heavy bilingual dictionaries on their heads. Their mothers had grown up in Europe. They had learned how to clasp and unclasp the small pearl buttons on gloves, they had learned how to waltz.
But the girls grew up in Wisconsin, where there was no need for ballroom manners and few opportunities for grand entrance until now, when, over sixty, they descended more glamorous than they had ever been, one by one, down the stairs.
I picture them as butterflies. Rene first, a painted lady in her thistle-colored plaid; Jen in orange and black with ruffles, a monarch; my grandmother, a Question Mark, the largest angel wing, in a straight dress of pure melon; and Gish, a swallowtail in an all-black sheath. My grandmother was tucked in the middle, second to last.
They ate at a round table, the five of them, tasting the herrings and foreign cheese, drinking champagne. Hans was adept at keeping the champagne moving from the silver ice bucket into their glasses. He wore a tuxedo, fashionable that year. He relished these touches. He, like they, had a predilection for the fancy.
There is a certain kind of man who understands older women. Hans loved the fruff of it all, the ruffles settling, fastidious care. This sort of man serves as the ideal host amongst finery. He immediately recognizes talent in a first-rate waiter. Usually, he is a man who is not paying.
It was funny to think that my father was a little bit like Hans.
MY GRANDMOTHER SIPPED her champagne a
nd began to feel herself rise. Her body seemed to swell with lightness from the lower sides of her back through her shoulder blades, as if wings were pushing through her skin, beginning to extend.
At home, she made her own farm of liquor in the basement cellar, which was still cluttered with her husband’s tools and saws and wood slabs and, on the other side, his Polynesian bar. Occasionally, in the winter, she crept down with a flashlight and liberated a bottle. Cherry bounce. She’d have a little glassful and then she’d climb down again, holding the banister, and put the bottle back.
She drank and her mouth opened to show more teeth in a wordless smile. The others were talking, a steady, above-water melody of how good everything was, how tasty that, did you get some of this, yes, I had a bite.
Drinking … all this was new and not new. My grandmother sat there still and rising, her cheeks full and embarrassed in the pleasure of someone giving her something.
She had dined out, years ago, with Art. Then it was always four, them with another couple. Rene and George. Jen and Alfred. Just now it occurred to my grandmother how Gish must have felt then, during those couple years. “Aw, shucks, I’ve got to work at the Coliseum anyway,” Gish had said at the time and no one had pushed her because no one knew quite what to do with an extra woman. At a holiday yes, of course, sure, but not an ordinary Saturday night out. In the flush of inclusion, after so many years alone, in her delicate, hesitant appreciation, my grandmother remembered Gish and only then understood the randomness of fortune. Years before I was born, Alfred had asked Gish first and she had said no.
Everything had been built lower then. The glasses were not these tall flutes, but low wide cups, with not clear pink bubbles rising, but a heavy amber liquid. The table was low, as was the ceiling, the area they sat in was banked by a waist-high wall of polished mahogany. She had dressed up then too, but differently. Then she’d worn woolen suits, straight skirts and matching jackets, only a collar of fur, coordinated bags and heels. They’d had to be sophisticated women then.
