by Mona Simpson
The orthodontist said hello to us, but mostly he stood with his ex-wife and his children. They all went out someplace to eat after. We were invited to a party and my mother decided we might as well go. Maybe he’d come later and anyway, what else were we going to do? We didn’t say it but we were both thinking at least we didn’t have to pay to go somewhere to eat. We weren’t even hungry, but everyone else was going someplace planned so we felt like we wanted something.
A good deal of our gratitude fell that day on the family who had the party at their house. My mother kept showing me nice little ways the wife made her home attractive. Odd stone urns in the bathroom held fragile flowers that wouldn’t live more than the day. My mother kept knuckling my back and whispering, Say thank you. I didn’t want to. It was a party. It was no big deal. At home, we had our own backyard and if you had a party you didn’t expect to be thanked for every little thing. I knew all the kids but my mother didn’t know their parents and not many of them talked to her. She said mostly they stuck together, the couples. And some of them seemed to be friends from before.
I no longer even remember any of their names.
By the end of the party my mother blamed money. It was money all the other women her age had.
“Did you see how they all had the pearls?” We were walking out to our car. We’d stayed till the end but then people were going with their families out to dinner.
I hadn’t even noticed. I didn’t notice what mothers wore, and always, my mother was the prettiest one. Other people told me that and I always said what they said to her. “Did they really say that, Annie-honey, really?” But she was alone in her glory. She shook her hair and looked at her profile lining up the car mirror.
Later that day it was the shoes. She decided the orthodontist had left her because she was wearing a yellow-and-white dress with black shoes. “I knew I shouldn’t have. Damnit. But no. You had to have your dress and I didn’t have the money to buy myself one pair of decent shoes for spring. He probably looked at my feet and said, no, I don’t want a poor little chitty like that who can’t even buy herself one elegant thing. Why should he? He can have any of those. Any one of them. I saw how they were looking at him.”
“Most of them are married,” I volunteered.
My mother turned her ankle in and out, surveying. Yes. She was deeply disappointed in the shoes.
I HAD ANOTHER PARTY that night but it was only for kids.
“Go on and go,” she said. “Go ahead. I want to get home and out of these shoes.”
And when I came in later with my key, I thought my mother was dead.
It was a strange haze light that came into that small apartment from the street lamp. There was only the one room.
She was just on the bed then and still, even when I shook her.
“Mom, come on, wake up,” I said when I roughed her shoulder.
Then I just stopped and sat down on the chair and waited. I would die then too. I still had on the fragile party dress. I had played outside. There had been a pool. I distantly remembered the soft music of splashes. They seemed nothing now, foam on the top of the sea. A frill of breeze in the palms high above the people’s pool.
I did not believe I could survive her. I still do not know.
I took the dress off first and set it on the back of a chair. It seemed thin now, almost transparent, a sunny white. It moved a little on its own. It was still perfect. I had been careful not to eat anything so there wouldn’t be a stain.
A dress was always the end of the world for us, distillation of beauty.
I sat in that chair for a time I will never be able to determine or measure. Then, later, far later, she turned in her sleep. That was all. She turned to the other side.
I’ll ship you off to your father and he can have you.
Go find your father and see how you like that.
I will. These were all things we had said before.
That’s fine. You go ahead. Just go and see how you like that.
That next morning was our worst. The gunpowder violence was gone, my night of terror, rolling on the hard floor, but it had lasted. Usually our mornings were a sea wind, blue and yellow. That evil metal taste from the night vanished. But that morning it was still there.
It was day and we were almost standing tall.
“If you need to go, go then,” I said biting my lip and tasting the faint salt of blood. “Or send me back to Gramma.” As soon as I said that a flag rose. I saw something. I saw that I would respect her if she left me. Walking away was the right thing for her to do, the strong thing in her life. For her she should have left but not for me.
We stayed together like that. For five more years. Our biggest triumph would have been one for us strong enough to go off and try for a life on her own.
She never did really. Even now.
And I grew up able to love people without much relation to me. I could love the nuance of their lives and the drama of their other attachments. With my mother, I was never first. I am unusual in that I can love people for themselves.
That dress is one of the few things from my childhood we still have. It hangs in her closet, covered in plastic from the best dry cleaner in Los Angeles. Waiting.
“WHY DON’T YOU get Carol to send that box and we’ll look through together at Christmas?” My mother’s voice on the answering machine.
I STILL KEPT PLANNING for the island. Jordan brought more brochures. I wanted coconuts and little monkeys. One of the pictures had hand-sized monkeys scampering on the counter of a tiny wooden store, near fishnets and ships in a bottle. Through my childhood in Wisconsin we all wanted monkeys. Little squirrel monkeys for pets. We wanted different things each year but a monkey was the one that lasted. Every year we all asked for a monkey for Christmas. Emily Briggs was the only person who ever got one. But she turned out to be allergic so they put it in the new teen section of Briggs’s called The Id. The next winter, it died, in its cage, of pneumonia.
I pictured brown water and palms above us like ceiling fans. We calculated money. My voice sank when Jordan called one day and said he’d bought us both panama hats at a store named Worth and Worth. He’d invested money. That seemed too far.
And with him, I still felt like I’d walked home from school one day and come into the wrong house. It might be a quiet house, a good house, they might sit around a clean round table, but it was still the wrong house.
In bed he didn’t giggle. He was silent. And then he had a deep full laugh like a bell and it rang into the air as if just released, unfolding, rejoicing to be free.
BUT STEVIE HOWARD was going home for Christmas, back to Racine. I had a picture of Stevie still, when he was twelve, barefoot, sitting on a stone fence playing the banjo. No boy was as beautiful as Stevie was when he was twelve. But he didn’t look like that anymore.
He called me and I could hear he was outside. The hot tub. I could hear the water loshing and above the spread of eucalyptus in the wind.
“I wasn’t going to go home for Christmas,” I told him. “I was thinking of flying to Egypt.”
“To Egypt?” His voice sharpened. The loshing stopped. I guess he stood still in the water. He lowered his voice and went slow like he did when he thought I was crazy. “For Christmas? It’s not a really great time to go there now. In terms of safety. You should look through that box first and see what they found.”
“That Uncle’s supposed to get back, I think, middle of January. Maybe he’ll hear something over there.”
“He says he has no idea where he is?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Yeah. I told you before. Why would he lie?”
“I don’t know, Mayan. People lie. And I think it’s about time to start thinking about giving up altogether.”
“Cutting my losses.”
“Before this takes over your life. Quit while you still have plenty else. Nothing’s worth this much. Think of what could justify all this time and, I do
n’t know, absorption, at the end of it. What’s he going to do? What’s he going to be? Really.”
I TOLD THE DETECTIVE about the box. I couldn’t help it. I was so excited. A box, when I thought of it, held a kind of perfection.
I DIDN’T GET TO ANY ISLAND.
Jordan when I told him didn’t say anything. He closed his mouth like he was taking back a breath. His head tilted down a little forward. He was usually such a confident guy. He had a beautiful back of the neck, I saw then. He had a regular man’s haircut, short in back with the hair cut to a V. And his neck was long and thin, a cup between tendons. I was truly sorry. But all I could do was shake my head.
I always had the Oldsmobile key on my keychain. I owned it. My cousin Hal used it in Racine. He left it in the airport parking lot when he went to Florida so I could just get off the plane and walk out and find it. I didn’t want to see anybody waiting for me by the luggage rack and there was no one.
The weather hung low and gray and snow fell small, closely spaced, in thread lines. It was snow in the air and wet on the tar parking lot and it was still afternoon. It smelled different here. I just stood by the car and looked around.
I started driving. I considered checking into a hotel. But the money. I didn’t feel up to the Briggses yet. And that’s where I had to go. It was Christmas Eve. Emily was already there. She had flown out five days before. It was still new to be going up the hill, to the Briggses’ house. Where my grandmother had lived was in the other direction from the airport. I drove out on Allouez and all of a sudden I was at the cemetery.
The cemetery was fairly vast, you noticed only after you’d passed through the gate and driven in. It covered a wide strip of land alongside Mason Street and then continued down the hill to the river, so that where I was you could see out to the dark smokestacks across the water. The paper mills now sent plumes of smoke into the gray sky and they held like clouds. A timid, tender break of white and silver caught between the smokestack chimneys. The mounds of coal and sulfur down the river were lightly dusted with snow.
I didn’t know if it was the first or the second road to the right. But the car drove itself, I followed under the thick trees and then I got a funny, itching sensation on my throat when I recognized the names.
Christiansen. When I saw that stone with the two urns on either side, lilies engraved, I stopped and I got out. Christiansen was always the one behind. With my finger, I scraped off hardened bird shit from the marble. A few plots away, a man in black sat crouched over on a low stone writing something. He wore mean black boots, high up for a man on his leg, a thick black coat, no hat. Bits of snow caught momentarily in his yellowish hair. He bent over, gripping the pen hard.
I walked back to the car and opened my suitcase. I wanted to change. I still had on the dress I’d worn on the plane. I slipped the good shoes off now, already snow-stained, and rubbed sneakers on over my heels. Behind the car seat, I took off the dress, put on a sweatshirt and yanked up jeans. Then just as I was zipping I heard footsteps.
“I know you,” a voice dropped close.
A head popped over the open car door and it was Danny Felchner, Amber’s boy. He’d lived on the end of Guns Road. Jim the Carpenter was his father and he’d been a momma’s boy, always inside. When we were children, I saw him once, in his house, in an apricot-colored dress on backwards. He was four or five years older than me. I hadn’t seen him for more than a decade. His family had moved away.
“Hi, Danny.” I read over the stones. I didn’t see any Felchners. “Do you know somebody around this part?”
He shrugged. “I come to get names.”
He showed me the book he was writing in. It had a black-and-white-marbled cover. In it he had a vertical row of names. We were there. My grandmother and my grandfather, my cousin. That felt strange, on my neck.
“What for?” But then a long yellow car stopped a few yards away. A woman slammed the door and walked out. She made her way to a stone and stood there. She had something in her gloved hands. It looked like a washed-out jar.
Danny and I both watched. The woman faced the river and we saw her back and the live factories beyond. A barge moved slowly down the water. She stood so she was shaded by one large chestnut and a fir, the stone before her was rounded black granite. Her coat was car length, her boots and pants modest. She had the coin-sized curls all the women there wore. They went to the beauty shop once they’d turned twenty-nine or when they’d had a child, whichever came first, and gave their hair over to permanence.
Then another car came from far away, turning in the road by the river. That car was brown and inched on slowly. It looked like it would stop a long ways from us, on the lower part of the slope. But it was impossible that time of day not to watch. The snow swirled and ticked, fizzy around us, but there was no real movement. The barge hardly advanced on the gray-brown river. Finally the new car slowed and bobbed, lights flashing in front of the yellow sedan. The woman ran over, her boots ankle high just shirring the snow. The driver of the new car stood out and went around to open her door. She looked behind her shoulder, then tucked into the dark car. The yellow car sat, less yellow in time dimmed with snow.
“You know who that is?” Danny Felchner said.
“No.”
“Pud Hollander, from the bank. I don’t know the woman. Probably somebody from the west side.”
“What are you doing here anyway, Danny? You’re living around here? Writing down names in the cemetery?”
“I’ll put you in,” he said, tilting the left half of his face up towards me with a crooked smile, “but you’re not Atassi are you, anymore, or August? You’re what, Stevens, right?”
“Stevenson.”
“Here.” He passed me the book and the pen. But I just didn’t feel like it. I didn’t want to.
“I don’t like to write my name,” I said, handing him back his book and his pen.
“I’ve been living here for five years now. You heard of the Black Shutter?” I said I hadn’t. “Well, it’s my store. I own it.”
“What kind of store?”
“Anti-Qs,” he said. “Junk.”
I wanted to ask him what he was doing in the cemetery writing down names but I could tell he would be mysterious. And I didn’t want to be all day. “Can I give you a lift anywhere, Danny?”
He smiled in an odd way. He frightened me a little, but then I’d look again and he’d only be Danny Felchner, whom I’d always known. “You can give me a ride,” he said.
I looked around, I kind of expected him to have a car there. An old battered truck or something. I remembered his dad’s carpenter truck, a round-nosed thing, with yellow and green paint chipping off like a toy left outside. His father built my mother and me a kitchen table once. She was never satisfied with it. It always wobbled and we were forever sticking things underneath. Jim the Carpenter claimed it was our floor.
I tossed him the keys. “Warm it up a sec, okay?” I didn’t have gloves on, so I brushed off the markers on the ground, first my cousin, then her, just with the side of my hand. I could read them, their full names. I heard the car idling behind me. I stood there a minute, just trying to feel right to her. It was hard with someone watching. Then I turned away and got in the car.
“So where shall I take you?”
He shrugged. “Where you going?” He’d opened his coat and he’d crossed his arms, like a pretzel in a black sweater. His big boots crept up on the carpeted walls of my grandmother’s car.
I didn’t exactly know. At the cemetery gate I turned left, towards town. I had no place to be really either. I didn’t want to go to the Briggses’ yet. It was still early. I flicked my hands up off the steering wheel. “Downtown?”
He smiled, head forward, purring. “What, you want to look at the Christmas windows at Briggs’s?”
“No, not Briggs’s,” I said.
“We could go to the church bazaar in your old school basement.”
“Saint Agnes?”
�
�Mmhm.”
“Oh, let’s do that.” My fingers lifted straight back. “Where?”
“Follow the two steeples and then left.”
Everything here was easy to see. The steeples exceeded everything but the smokestacks in the sky. Danny’s pale fingers fluttered around my grandmother’s car radio. It had hardly ever been used. We should have sold the car, but I just never did. My aunt advertised it once in the paper for me but the best offer we got was four hundred and fifty. That just didn’t seem worth it.
“There’s no music,” Danny said.
And then I realized how still it was here. Everything seemed muffled and colored. The beginning of sunset streaked now between the steel bridges and the smokestacks and paper-mill workings across the Fox River. The clouds bottomed with strokes of pink and a lit orange that wouldn’t last.
“Your radio’s broken.”
“Oh, that. Is it?” There were things about growing up without brothers and sisters. And my grandmother was old. She kept a radio in the kitchen, but she mostly listened to the weather or the talk news or WBAY, looking for a waltz. And with my mother she never let me play rock ‘n’ roll in the car. I couldn’t have told you what it was to begin to hear music.
“It’s my grandmother’s car.”
He nodded. “Your grandmother was a nice lady.”
I coasted to an easy parking place and we walked down into the church basement. Women at a card table handed us white Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate with miniature marshmallows on top. We passed booths of felt sunbursts, painted yardsticks, complete with sewn yardstick jackets, mod woven potholders, family tree kits, child-made multicolored candles, embroidered calendars of the liturgical year, women in bright smocks selling all of it, along with powdered sugar twists, dark ginger cookies and endless crinkly home-baked pies.
