by Mona Simpson
Now, these were the dresses of childhood dolls and Hollywood movies. Their husbands would have frowned—they wanted their wives in neutrals. These were candy colors, the long gloves of ocean-liner pomp, royalty and Europe. And here they were ascending. The ceilings vaulted up towards the light of clouds.
Everyone seemed dressed in what would have seemed to us costumes. I saw that in New York sometimes. Yale girls in gem-colored dresses spilling out of unmarked doors, standing on the lit porch of the Plaza, tilting a little from their toe to heel, waiting, the wind dallying in their sleeves, their dresses without them in the dark windows of all of those little stores on Madison Avenue, deserted at midnight. Teatime at certain hotels you saw them, in hats and gloves, where all the doormen wore livery and braids. When I remembered my grandmother’s Europe, I blamed less. If you love a person once, it changes everything.
Strings of the orchestra sawed as the meal thinned to desserts which came, first elaborately, in spun sugar baskets nesting ice cream, then in smaller and smaller tarts and petits fours. With the champagne still pouring, Hans took each of them for a perfect swooning dance around the floor.
First Rene, then Jen, my grandmother tucked in the middle, beautiful, but never knowing that and not calling attention. The man is supposed to lead: The man is supposed to lead, people had been telling me all my life. “A-hem,” I’d been told again and again, gliding across the floor with the boy who was my partner. I supposed learning with my grandmother, I became the man.
They danced and danced. It felt good and in the dizzy swirl of lift, my grandmother thought she saw her own face reflected like a shine of cloud in the polished high boots of many men, men in military regalia, stars on the ceiling, ta da deedum, dada da da.
Later that night, he came to each of their rooms, in the same order. Rene, then Jen, my grandmother neither first nor last, nor assuming, then Gish.
He bent over my grandmother’s bed and lifted her soft hand and kissed it. He asked if he could have some little thing to remember her by. She gave him the pearls. She didn’t know what else to do. And on the plane home, each of the girls confessed that they left things—a string of pearls, a fox stole, a watch and a garnet ring—in Europe, at that last hotel. None of them seemed too upset.
AT MY DOOR, a brown paper bag, many times wrinkled, waited on the ground. In it was a little box, cotton-battened, glass-fronted, with two butterflies inside. “To your collection,” neat printing on a piece of lined paper said. The man upstairs. I took it in, I’d left the door unlocked again, and I knew just where I had a nail. Stevie Howard had visited once and done two days of home repair. When he left, he bought me a toolbox with things like nails.
I put the butterflies up on the wall next to the cement print. One thing I did have of my grandmother was a rough cement square, boxed in a cedar frame I built crookedly when I was ten. It hung on my wall, over the desk.
When I was ten, I read books we called how-to, about animal tracks and electronics. I wanted to build a ham radio. I loved the idea of contact with the greater nighttime world far away, the voices of truck drivers. Nights I tinkered at the kitchen table making a battery from a book and lead and zinc I’d bought from the hobby shop. That you could make a thing like that way out where we were in the country—that seemed amazing. These were my own inquiries that my grandmother supported but didn’t follow me on.
But I also liked the animal-following solitary crafts of the snowbound forgotten country where I lived. Those days they’d graduated me to the second floor of the library, which was the young adult division. Sometimes I strayed to the full-adult sections, like natural history. There was a hanging constellation of the Milky Way galaxy there, planets made from painted Styrofoam balls. I wanted any of the sciences then. They seemed new. And I lived among everything old. That was my school life, downtown.
I was still younger at home. I made animal tracks with cement. I woke up early one January Saturday morning and the sun beat hard on the snow so a little deep dirt and mud showed, the trees shuddering, and the cedar needles glittered, shrugging offloads of snow and the new and the old seemed the same again. I trooped out before eight o’clock in her clothes and mine, sealing, warm, loose. I tracked the fields where the drifts still came deep and took imprints of rabbit and deer prints. I got a rabbit, a deer, a squirrel and what might have been a fox. It kept me all morning. When I came back in, she had her back to me by the stove. I had the idea then in the kitchen. I didn’t ask her, I told her. “Gramma, I’m going to take your handprint.”
“Ugh, why do you want a thing like that? You’ll just throw it out.”
“No I won’t.”
“Oh, it’ll end up in the basement.”
“Gramma, I need it.”
“Well, all right if you say so but hurry up about it then or your breakfast’ll get cold.”
I made her grease her hand with Crisco and then Vaseline. She didn’t like this. You made a plaster cast first and then reversed it. She took her ring off and, palm smeared with Vaseline, she had to press down in the plaster.
“Ugh, such a mess,” she said. “Well, what we wouldn’t do for science, huh? That’s my contribution to the world of learning.” Later that night, she gave herself another manicure, to get off all the little bits of plaster.
Now I was glad I had that. It was her right hand. Right hand and your left, what you are and what you were supposed to be.
I stood up and set my own hand into her imprint, matching. My fingers were thinner and a little longer. But it almost fit.
It was the end of the day again. I was spending the last of my grandmother’s money to find my father. She would not have wanted this. “Ugh, shucks, throw your money away why don’t you,” she would have said. “We worked hard for our money and here you’re going to get rid of it chasing him and what does he care for you?”
She would have rather talked about my boyfriends. “So now you have Paul and Stevie,” she said once when I was in college, “what are you going to do? Which one do you like better?”
I asked her about her husband, how she knew.
“Knew what?” she said. “I knew him from just around where I lived. He raked the leaves for my dad.”
“But you must have fallen in love with him.”
“Yah yah and I fell in love with him, oh yah sure, that too I suppose.”
She wanted me to buy hair ribbons, dresses, rings, manicures, to take my friends to a show, to go out, have some fun while you’re young …
I would not be doing this if she were alive.
That was the truth.
And it was too late to stop.
7
I REALLY HAD NOWHERE to go for Christmas and that was fine with me.
There was no place I could go that was home. My mother’s apartment she had just how she wanted it. There was no room for me. And to go to Racine, I had to stay with someone else or be in a hotel. Nobody I was related to owned anything anymore. Not in Wisconsin or anyplace.
When my grandmother died and we sold the house, none of us owned any part of the continent. We all just rented.
I’d dropped out for a while from my life. I was getting out of touch. I knew worlds; everybody does. I had Briggses in the Midwest, Stevie Howard and Helen and Jane in California, this friend, that friend. And I didn’t want any of them now.
I was sick and tired of being the honorary aunt. The single adult following along at Christmas and New Year’s, helping where I could, pleased, grateful—I’d had it. Always wondering, if I was sitting by the fire with a book, shouldn’t I be chopping something? That came of having it never be your house. I guess my mother had probably felt that all her life.
I was ready for an island, sex in the water with dark-speaking teenage boys.
Or maybe I’d stay here and study. I’d study until the day and then volunteer at a soup kitchen. There was a lot to do in hospitals on holidays. People need more.
I CALLED THE GUY, Jordan, and asked him if he wante
d to go to some island. I hadn’t returned his calls for a while. I’d been bad about that.
He was a little surprised to hear from me but kind of pleased. I thought he was playing with the phone cord, I don’t know why. “Well, maybe,” he said, “that’s a definite possibility.”
I never wanted to do the ordinary things until I was twenty-five and since then they sounded great. A thin lap of water, the rustle of dry yellow palm. The loll. I wanted to look as standard as possible, a body like an instrument, in a bronze bathing suit, laid out right.
He had a light laugh like froth, soon dissolving.
Then, the next night, we were sitting at a square table with a starched white tablecloth. We had travel brochures spread out—he’d brought them, the Caribbean, Mexico, the Amazon.
We studied them all and decided the Amazon. Maybe Peru.
“You keep disappearing,” he said later.
I winced. I hated being accused. “I don’t know,” I said, “you’re too normal.”
He nodded. He seemed to accept that right away as if it were some kind of answer.
Normal. That was another thing I was and wasn’t. I’d always tried to isolate him, the absence, and make it the only thing. The rest of my life was normal. I’d stood on wooden outside steps watching the highway. But I stepped off that porch, too, onto damp cool evening lawns with a lit birthday cake in my hands, fireflies daunting the night. I ran home on the gravel road, a report card in my fist, kicking up dust, and pulled up my socks inside the slow kitchen as my grandmother lifted a tray of cookies out of the oven.
But none of that was only that.
Not one room was untouched. I was not the same.
I FINALLY TOLD my mother I was looking for him. I don’t know why I did that. I just did. She never wanted me to, I understood that.
And she started again. “Well why? Why do you want to find him?”
“Just to know.”
“Know what?”
“You knew your father. I just want to know who he is.”
“I can tell you who he is. He’s a goddamn bum and a crook, that’s who he is. Who took from me and took what would have been yours, too. Don’t you think you could have had the dresses and the—”
I stopped her. “I didn’t ask you.”
She hung up on me. We’d done that for years, but every time I sort of sat there. I bit my lip. I always felt stunned, as if a bee stung me. There’s the pain but also pure surprise.
She called back a couple hours later, in the middle of the night. “Have you ever talked to Pat Briggs about this?” she said. Not even, This is your mother. She expected me to know all that, and of course I did.
“No. Why?”
“ ’Cause he may have some information.” She said that like she knew something she wasn’t telling me. But half the time she sounded like that. Sometimes she did know more and a lot of times she just implied.
“Why would Pat Briggs have information about him?”
“Oh, there’s a lot of things you don’t know. And Gramma looked for him once.”
“When?” When was that? Why didn’t I know? This was outrageous. I wasn’t sure yet that it was true but I believed her.
“I guess she knew you always wanted to find him.”
“And what happened?” This had all gone on, in my family, without me.
“I think they found some pretty bad things and then they stopped. I think she felt it would be best to just drop it. But there was a box in the basement, if I remember, with all the files in it and I think Carol said when she went to Florida she drove it over to the Briggses’.”
The box. It began to turn and glitter for me, like a geometric drawing or a cut jewel. It existed, hard and permanent, home, like a pearl.
My mother was going on. Her voice lowered and she laughed a little as if she were telling something that she did wrong but that was really kind of adorable. “I remember once I called her and I was going to send you back there and she wanted to find him, I think she thought in case she died or something. You should know where he was.
“I guess I really did want to send you back. That once. It was right around your eighth-grade graduation. Remember you had that beautiful dress that I couldn’t afford that you had to have.”
“No.” I didn’t remember it that way.
“Oh come on, you remember the dress Paulette made.”
“I remember the dress.”
“Well. I still have the bills.” She laughed again.
I did remember the dress. I remembered her threats. I remembered the rest all different.
My mother always meant to leave. In Wisconsin she meant to but she didn’t have the courage to do it alone. So she took me along. She needed someone to talk to and blame it on. Someone she could believe she was doing it all for. Once we were in California, where she’d wanted, it still wouldn’t open for her and so what she wanted then was to be there alone. She thought men didn’t want a woman with a child they’d have to support. She wanted to send me away. Back to Gramma. Or just leave me. Something. She thought maybe alone they would want her.
And she should have left. We both knew. I believed it too.
I thought of running away, a lot of times during all those years in California. I’d stand outside our apartment door and look at the block with its strange buildings and that blank sky. But I was too scared to do it, that was the thing. When she wanted me there, when she came back around her cycle and wanted me to stay with her forever, she told me I could not live without her. Nobody else would want me. The way I was. The ugly way I slept. The way I breathed.
It was bad around the time of my eighth-grade graduation, because she was going out with the orthodontist and he was dropping her.
For graduation, all the girls in my school had to have white dresses. You had to put them on twice, once for the graduation and once a month before, when they took the class picture. At first all that was okay. Because my mom found me a cute dress at Saks with a shirred waist that was cheap too, only forty-two dollars. But then when she came to pick me up from the pictures she saw that two other girls in my class had my same dress.
“Oh, will you look at that. Damn,” my mother said. “Hmph.”
Some of the girls who had been going to this school forever, they knew in advance about the white dress. There were girls who bought their white dresses in New York and in Paris the summer before.
I pouted a little about that but not really. I just liked to complain. There was so much I didn’t have. But I didn’t really care that other girls had my same dress. One of them was kind of popular. Actually it made me feel better.
But my mother got it in her mind that we had to have a better dress. We’d show them. A dress no one else would have. Now I wonder if it had anything to do with the orthodontist. She knew we would see him at the graduation. He had a daughter in my grade. And the ex-wife would be there, too. So I suppose she wanted us both to look good.
My mother found a French seamstress named Paulette and they became friends. Paulette was married but to a man who was a disappointment. He was bald and slope-bellied and he lay around in his socks watching sports games on TV. We hired Paulette to make a dress for me and we started driving to where she lived in West Hollywood several nights a week for fittings.
They worked and worked, Paulette and my mother, designing and sewing and redoing and shifting. They studied the magazines, the French and American Vogues. My mother would come in with sketches of the dress on her manila school folders. All my life, she’d drawn clothes and I’d drawn buildings. We were both doodlers, so no paper we had in the house was ever clean.
It was a thick rare cream-colored silk. The dress went to my ankles. There was one band for a neck and a ruffle and one band too at the bottom. The sleeves were full, with a row of covered buttons. But the real glory was the belt, it was made out of eighteen different-colored satin ribbons. They got tied in three separate bows and hung down long in the front, like a maypole.
&n
bsp; It was costing us a fortune, this dress.
My mother’s temper was short and I could always ignite it, just by being the way I was.
We were driving home on Sunset Boulevard from Paulette’s one night and I did it just by looking the way I did. I mean my face. I had some expression.
“That does it,” she said, swerving the car. “You’re going back to Wisconsin. You can live with Gramma. I can’t take you anymore. But I’ll give you a last big bang with that dress, boy, that’s some dress they can all see you in, so you’ll go out with a bang.”
The dress was our apotheosis. It was perfect. I only wore it that once.
That day, seeing her daughter in the dress and new white shoes, on the velvet-thick lawn of El Rodeo School under a shimmering high light Los Angeles sky, a day clear enough you could feel the sharp top edges of the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance, if I’d risen up into the sky in that dress, the ribbons fluttering like the ends of a balloon touching the rough middle stalks of the palms, my mother would have felt a dissolving happy ending to her motherhood, she would have rubbed the stinging edges in her eyes, held her elbows in her hands a way she knew she looked good and that would have been her life’s satisfaction. As it was there was me again on other days in worse clothes, bumping into her, getting in her way.
I think she really imagined it might work with the orthodontist—him seeing how good we looked at graduation and then I’d be gone and they could start over again and be young. She herself had a new yellow-and-white two-piece long suit she wore to the ceremony.
I had the best dress in the three-hundred-and-forty-person class and I was probably the poorest girl. “We showed them,” my mother whispered. “Boy, I’ll tell you.” A tear gelled in her eye, she was so proud of herself. And it was hard for her, this life. No one will ever know.
That was on the lawn, her heels sinking in the grass. That was when she still had hopes. He was standing over with his son, by the empty basketball court. The orthodontist was muscular and tan, not a tall man.
My grandmother had not even been invited. “She’d never come,” my mother said, bitter, but with a young breeze of snobbery, too. “She never goes anywhere. She could come and visit. I’m her daughter, you know. But no. She just stays in her house, in her own little yard. She’s really a loner. When you’re grown up I won’t be that way. I’ll come visit and see you with your children, wherever you are.”
