by Mona Simpson
Emily could always do anything and it was just because it was never my house. So I did invite him. He wanted to go and change first and come up later. I dropped him off at his car, an old car like mine. I wondered if it had been Amber’s.
The Briggses lived on the Hill, a little out of town. Just driving there, I tried to subdue my excitement over the snow, lines and lines, curves overlapping, like stilled waves on the far distant ridges of old Italian paintings, the fields in their blue cartilage of snow, going on and on far enough to see stands of trees and beyond them, nothing; the dusk settling. Black stark twigs, the dried earth poking out at ditches, the lowness and closeness. I knew it wasn’t so much. Everybody feels that way about the place they grew up.
AN EVENT YOU DREAD enough is always a relief when you arrive. Parties. Briggses’ were always so much bigger on the way.
I parked about twenty feet down the hill and sat in the dark quiet car. The house was already lit. The made-to-look-old gas lanterns lining the drive from here really did seem tonight like torch flames. They had a gate, swung open now. The house, set halfway up old Baird’s Hill, was pink brick in the shape of the White House. It was higher in the middle and that part had white pillars. There were two fancy neighborhoods in Racine, the old one along the Fox River and this. Pat Briggs’s father and his grandfather both owned huge old houses in town on Mason Street. His Swiss grandfather had built an all-stone house there and he’d built his own church, of the same stone. Otto Kapp. He’d started Kapp’s, a German restaurant and bakery on Main Street. Otto’s wife was dead now for a long time, but he was still alive and so was his sister Clara, who’d never weighed more than about eighty pounds and who had seemed attached by wires to the cash register in the middle of the candy and cookie counter where you went in and out of Kapp’s. People said that’s why they got so rich, because either Otto or Clara was always at that register. “They never let anyone else get near it.” I’d heard that all my youth. If someone got rich in Racine you could bet it was from some character defect.
Otto had been some kind of actor and singer when he was young and he spent his money building the church so he could start a boys’ bell choir.
His only daughter had married Seamus Briggs and Seamus Briggs had started Briggs’s. According to everyone alive to remember, that was some wedding in Otto’s church. They still had the dress in a vault at Briggs’s. It was supposed to have cost a thousand dollars then in the Depression. When Pat married Merl, he’d wanted to start a new neighborhood and they bought up Baird’s Hill. They’d brought architects from Spring Green and from Chicago—in medical school in the East, Pat had followed the fashions—but the architects had begun excavating and planning something with local wood and clay and stones they just found in fields outside town and cement, all things which seemed to Merl dirty. She had wanted something fancy. The only person Merl really got along with during that period of construction was Scully, the stonemason for the cemetery. He and she were finally left together planning the house after everyone else went away. She’d wanted something grand. She’d always imagined columns and huge velvet stage curtains, that sort of thing. And she’d gotten it. There were bay windows with windowseats and a lot of statues. In the backyard, down the hill a ways, were the carved-out foundations the old architects had made, before they left in their muddy boots and yellow slickers. “Dirty men,” Merl said whenever they were mentioned in the newspaper. We used to play there as children, we used it as an amphitheater.
Years later, Frank Lloyd Wright came to the public library and gave a speech. The Better Homes and Gardens Society had brought him up and they’d driven him around and asked him to pick the best house in town, from the architecture point of view. Marion Werth had introduced him at the podium. That was her first month at the library. He said in his speech that he could not select a winner because after a day tour he had not seen one example of architecture in Racine. All we had, he’d said, was building. He’d criticized the whole town as they sat below in their best clothes from Briggs’s, and they all clapped politely when he was done talking.
I took a hard breath. I had to go in. I went around to the trunk and got out my backpack. I always felt sloppy and like a student when I walked into Briggses’. Sometimes I was fine about that. I thought it was good for them to just see how normal people lived when they were doing something serious. Tonight, though, I felt pretty shabby.
I expected Dorothy to be somewhere near the door. They had a maid and that was just natural to them. I can’t quite explain the way that seemed to me. I was disappointed. It wasn’t all neat and ordered, it didn’t have that air of in-control comfort maids brought in the movies. It was just one other thing that couldn’t touch the real mess of life.
The tall front door hung open a little, supporting an elaborate wreath, excrescent with dried flowers and miniature fruit. Inside, Emily waved at me. She was on the phone, stretching the cord the length of the circular marble foyer. “Tad,” she mouthed. She always looked different at home, a way she didn’t anywhere else. It was as if other places when she was sitting or standing, she was folded into too little space. Tonight, her feet pawed the pink stone floor and stretched. Her toenails were polished under the nylon.
She finished with Tad and then immediately began dialing again. “I’m trying to get this jacket before it’s all sold out everywhere,” she told me, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder. She showed me a page ripped out of a magazine. She’d always been a cutter-outer. Collage maker. The jacket was black with gold chains and spangles. I guessed it was nice.
“Aren’t they closed?”
“Pacific time,” she said. “Dad gave me a list of buyers.” The Briggses shopped the way other people worked. Grimly. As if it made a difference. Gish had told me that when Mr. and Mrs. Briggs first married, he’d wanted her to throw out all she had, come to Briggs’s and let him give her everything new, from the top lines. In Briggs’s the top lines were all on the top floor. It went down that way to the bargain basement. But Merl hadn’t liked much and when she did take to a sweater or a coat or pair of gloves, she insisted on buying duplicates. Closets filled with unused triplicates of four years ago’s sweater. Mr. Briggs, a retailer, tried endlessly to explain to his wife about fashion, that it didn’t last. But he never could teach her frivolity. For her it was all effort and no joy. She worried about waste. She could never see clothes as dispensable, understand that there would always be new and more.
Pat’s wisdom worked on Emily, though. She really was his daughter. When she’d first moved to New York, I found her cross-legged on the floor of her empty apartment, having spent two hours calling Neiman Marcuses across America because she’d seen a dress in a magazine that seemed to her the dress Isabelle Archer had worn the day she landed in England. When the dress finally arrived, it didn’t looked right on her. “Not enough butt,” she’d decided, patting herself. A month after that, I got it. But she got sick of seeing her old things on me, so now she gives them to her cleaning woman.
“Hello. Size eight, but I could even take a six or a ten,” she was saying, her voice loud on the phone.
“Can you do that?” I whispered.
She covered the mouthpiece. “Sure. Dressmaker.”
“Oh,” I nodded. I should know these things. Why didn’t I?
She minced around the foyer, almost dancing, phone between cheek and breastbone, wearing just a pale peach slip and nylons. Her hair lifted way out crinkly the way it got when she braided it wet into a hundred tiny braids. The bottom almost reached her waist. She lifted some and pushed it back lightly. She was someone whose hair had always been brushed by another person. She treated it like a major personality.
“Got to get dressed,” she breathed. “What are you gonna be?”
I’d let the backpack slide down off my shoulder.
“Huh?”
“What’re you going to be tonight?”
Then I remembered. Of course. Merl had written me. I was supposed t
o bring a costume. This was a dress-up party.
“Um, surprise,” I said.
“Yes, would you please check?” she was saying louder on the phone. “I’ll wait.”
“Emily, what are you going to be?”
“Angel,” she said, then looked back down to the phone, where apparently some voice in California had returned to help her get the one more thing she momentarily wanted absolutely. “Yes, could I please speak to the manager.”
THE WHOLE HOUSE had been done once by a decorator in 1963 and it was still that way. The dining room was cabana style with wide black and white stripes and the living room was a kind of fancy I couldn’t identify. The windows all had floor-length drapes coming out from behind valances with scalloped edges. What was I going to be, I wondered, walking through the house. A fire shifted and broke in the fireplace and candles in silver and glass containers burned. No one was in the room. On tables at the ends of couches slipcovered with pictures of dogs hunting in cattail marshes were cut-glass bowls of miniature apples. Coming to this house, all I’d thought of was the box. I’d drawn it in margins of patient charts, then erasing again. It looked like this: a plain brown cardboard box, corrugated, the kind one uses moving. Just that there was, somewhere, a box with attempts like mine.
I’d always been so certain I was the only one in the world looking for him.
I passed the den and saw Pat Briggs at the far end crouched by the fireplace, moving logs. He was wearing a football player’s outfit he was too thin for.
I found Dorothy in the kitchen, with about twenty colored tin trays of food. She snorted. “Here, try.” She handed me a tiny Italian tomato half with something white on it and a snipping of basil, pressing it between her blunt fingers as if it was hard to keep a hold of something so tiny. Merl had always loved miniatures. When Emily was a child, Merl collected dollhouse furniture, and now the house was full of bonsai and miniature fruit.
Dorothy stood by the sink with a stream of water running. She spread a net of tiny grapes open between her fingers, delicately, as if she were opening a part of the body.
I hugged her and closed my eyes against her back. She smelled faintly of sugar.
“I better clean up and get my stuff upstairs.” I took two bunches of island bananas, each no bigger than fingers, from my backpack. “I brought these for Merl.” I wasn’t big on presents but I’d hoped she hadn’t discovered these yet. I’d never seen them in the Midwest. One bunch was red, one yellow.
“Oh, that she will like.”
The room I was staying in was shoe box-shaped with one high window, which I closed. I opened my pack on the bed and took out the dress. It was wrinkled. I set the shower running and hung it up to steam. Then I lay down on the bed.
I was staring at the pinwheeling patch of uneven paint on the ceiling thinking that I’d been a tomboy and now it was getting late. I hadn’t learned the other yet. My time with my mother was remote and wasted, we had loved things, and people, but it was only ours. Like Emily’s life, you could tell about it. Here in the house, there were framed pictures all over the walls. They slanted on crooked nails in the hallways, they hung everywhere, on little draped tables they were propped in silver frames. At what age she did what. Guys who fell in love with her would want to see them. I could imagine Tad in a wool vest, picking up the picture of her bald in a lace dress on a horse. He would look at her lips and perfect head, wondering what it meant, her blank, clear expression. It meant nothing, I mouthed to no one, absolutely nothing. She had always had costume parties and she was always something like a princess or a fairy or a mermaid. When she was eight they’d had a dress-up party in Briggs’s. They’d closed up, let the little girls rampage and then had them photographed in the store windows like mannequins. I’d been there. I was a pirate, with scarves tied on my pantlegs. There’s one great picture of Mai linn and Emily and me in the window, the year Emily was bald, our limbs posed jerkily as if we were really made of materials.
But my years with my mother weren’t like that. The two of us standing like bowling pins different places on a blacktop gas station lot, hands on hips, looking at the sky. My T-shirt sleeves rolled up on my arms, my nails bitten, my arms strong and a man’s hands. I learned how to self-serve and fill it up. My mother didn’t want to gas up her clothes. “I hate the smell,” she’d said. “Pyew. I can’t stand it. It makes me dizzy.” She lifted her groomed hands to her nose and sniffed.
I was never so faint.
THE DOORBELL CHIMED and I heard footsteps. I thought of the box again. I had to say something right away tonight, I decided. I pushed my shoes off. The bed felt good, the little chenille bumps. I didn’t want to go down yet. The sky was pretty with gray clouds from the small window up here, divided by a near black bare branch, ticking against the glass.
I came here my first Christmas in the East and that was my first time away from Bud Edison. I discovered then that you really fall in love with people during the time they’re not there. You do it all by yourself.
We’d strategized at the supper table. Emily and I decided the coolest thing was to send him a postcard with nothing on the back but just my name. I sent him one with a picture of the paper-mill works. He’d hated it but not really. It made an impression for so long I felt guilty it wasn’t really my idea.
It wasn’t the same with Jordan. But I remembered little things I liked. One time in bed when I was on my back and he verged up like a sail.
I opened the bathroom door to check on the dress. Steam ghosted in, filming the window. Then Pat Briggs was at my door in a new costume. He was wearing some kind of muslin gown and sandals.
“What’s going on in here?”
“I’m unwrinkling a dress.” I peeled off my sweatshirt in the bathroom and pulled the dress on. It felt clammy, especially where it touched the back of my neck.
“Ever heard of hired help?”
“I thought you were going to say an iron.”
“I have your Christmas present from your mother. She sent it here, care of the store.”
“Oh.” I sat on the bed and held my hands together. I began to see him more as the steam thinned.
“How is she?” He looked at me from an angle, keen.
I shrugged. “The same.”
“I don’t expect any of us really change.” He wrung his hands. “But that’s a hard life out there. Hard place.”
I opened the high window and we heard a rise of laughter. People were walking down the drive. We heard the gravel move, women wobbling on high heels, grabbing their escorts’ elbows, saying whew. My mother would have loved these parties. All my life, I’d been invited and she hadn’t. In California, too. We’d sat on the bed of the small hotel when we first moved there and she’d said, “See, it’s easier for you to get in with the kids ’cause you’re young and you have school.” I’d nodded. It was true. It was easier for me.
“What are you supposed to be?” I said.
“Jesus.” He shrugged. “Merl made it up. I just have to put on something she got for around my neck. She couldn’t decide between that and Bart Starr.”
“You want me to lipstick on some stigmata?”
“Here, open it,” he said, shoving the box closer to me. “She sent us something too. Some peanut brittle. Was pretty good. We managed to finish it.”
The ribbon was a satin tartan plaid. I didn’t really like doing this in front of him, opening my mother’s present. It was a private thing. And I knew to him whatever it would be was small. Christmas was a big production for her. The paper was a ribbed pale brown. A piece of mistletoe was tied in with the bow. She’d always taken a real pride in wrappings.
I held the contents, a jar of something, up to the light. “Jam,” I said. I opened the little card. “This is currant jam I made myself,” it read. “I’m still making you the bigger present, but it’s not finished yet. I did another inch of sky today on it!”
I kept the bow intact and smoothed the paper out, refolding it.
&nbs
p; PAT BRIGGS LOOKED at my dress. “You want to hit my closet, kid?”
That was almost a joke. So many times my mother had brought me to a party without a costume and the Briggses had let me rifle through Pat’s stuff. So I always ended up a man.
Pat Briggs had three closets, three stages of new. I found a tuxedo and began opening his drawers looking for socks. I stuffed toilet paper in the tips of Pat Briggs’s shoes. I went into the bathroom, slicked back my hair.
“Very convincing,” Pat said when I walked out.
He opened the top drawer of his desk and took out a stapler. “Give me your arms.”
“Won’t it ruin it?”
“Don’t worry. It’s on the way to Goodwill.”
He stapled my cuffs together, put on his rosary and he stood in front of the mirror a moment and rubbed his palm over his head, where it would have been hair. That was something he did. He did it fast in a flickering way like he hoped people wouldn’t see it. He had that and his tick.
EVERY PARTY at the Briggses’ really centered around Tom Harris, the dog. When guests arrived, they would be led, either by Emily or Merl, one or two at a time, to pay homage. Pat wasn’t any better. He would shrug his shoulders and nod at the procession over to Tom Harris, but he watched too closely to really mind it. Tonight Tom Harris was stationed in a new red plaid-lined basket in front of the fireplace. Merl Briggs had added straw to make it look like a manger. On either side of him were new statues of dog angels. Tom Harris himself was dressed in a handknit red sweater. He was an old dog now, fourteen (in human years), and his eyes were yellowed and immobile. On one side his fur was scratched down to just pinkish skin. I watched Emily haul Homer Hollander, from the bank, and his wife, Eileen, over and make them kneel down as she rolled her face against the dog’s side. You could tell who was courting the Briggses’ favor. Everyone else got up and away from there as quickly as possible. The dog smelled.
The most ingratiating, and some old indulgent friends of the family, brought little gifts for Tom Harris. A limp raw bone, barbelled, lay with a big green ribbon near his head. Tom Harris seemed disinterested, a being half in the next world.
