by Mona Simpson
“They said it was Wayne State. That’s what they said.”
“Professor of what?”
“Well, of ice skating, I suppose.”
AT THE OUIJA BOARD, Eli went first. He closed his eyes for a too-long time while all our fingers were cramping on the heart. It’s like fingers poised over a piano, not the most comfortable position. He got a grin as the heart skated over the board. “A love-of-my-life question,” he said. The thing landed on YES but then it moved, clunking off the board at the bottom. He shrugged. “Guess nothing lasts forever.”
“Not of yours,” Emily said.
I told Emily I liked her dress and asked her if it was from Briggs’s. She thanked me and said no, it was couture.
Then I felt like a dummy. “What’s that?”
“It’s the top line a designer makes, so there’s only a few. They only make a couple and they sell out right away.” She was saying all that as simply as she could. For a second, I hated her.
“Oh.” I didn’t know these things. And I should have. There was so much.
We stopped talking because the heart was looping raucously around the board, we all bent over swaying with it. We must have looked like something religious. I thought of a glass of water.
“What’d you ask now, Eli?” Danny said.
It was sort of thrilling to be pulled like this, the thing really did seem to own a life. “I asked about Mai linn,” he said. And that stilled it. It answered these letters: WATAD.
“I’m next,” Emily said, and then Pat Briggs came and asked her to come say good-bye to someone. Danny was talking to Eli so I turned to Otto Kapp.
“What aren’t you afraid of?” I asked. As soon as I said that, I heard how it sounded. Emily gave me a look from under her hair. I’d just been trying to make conversation. This is why I was such a hit at parties. Poise was not a word people would have used to describe me.
“I’m not afraid of death because I have already seen it. I went to the Black Forest in 1969. One year after my wife died.” His mouth puckered and he said, “Fef.” He had many lines on his face but his skin was dark enough and his bones clear enough that it looked good. “I saw my wife there for a moment, she just came like on an errand to tell me something. And she said, ‘It’s all right Otto, don’t worry.’ Her voice—it was her voice, I was married to her thirty-two years—came down from the trees. And so I don’t worry anymore.”
He looked away and after a while I turned to Danny. “So what do you think of Tad?”
He smiled. “Tad is a tad Tad,” he said, smiling.
Then Emily returned and we did her question. The heart was sluggish. All our fingers waited, light, but the plastic stayed where it was.
“Come on, Emily, out with it,” Danny said.
“No can do,” she said.
It had to be about Mai linn, I decided. Or Tad. Or even me. Then the thing began to move in infinitesimal circles, it cranked and looped its way slowly and stalled on YES.
“Oh good,” Emily said, with a certain kind of smile I recognized on her and then I understood that the question wasn’t people at all but was about the jacket she’d been calling all over the continent for. Yes, she would get her coat.
Then it was my turn. I asked about the box. Would I find the box this week? By that time in my life I knew better than to ask a question without deadlines. The heart felt dizzy and warm but random. It spelled W then MAYBE then IS then T.
“We still haven’t done Danny-my-man,” Eli said.
“Or Otto,” I said.
“Not me,” Otto said, “I have no question.”
I had another question. I asked if I would have a long life. The thing moved off the top of the board, over the round face of the moon. All those years of “Does he love me?” and now my question was “Would I live long enough?” I was old enough to know that you can outlive love and that, eventually, you will want to.
Danny closed his eyes a second then opened them. “Okay, I’ve got mine.” The thing went in fits and starts, jagged, and only stopping on the beige blank places of the board where nothing was printed. Finally it ended, clear on NO.
That was it. We all took our hands off. Merl came and squatted down, asking Emily and me to help Dorothy with something in the kitchen, and the two of us staggered up.
We found her bent over four trays of meringue mounds, lighting them with a cigarette lighter. They flamed blue. The girl dressed as an elf carried the first, Emily the second, I was third and Dorothy last.
“What is this?” I whispered over my shoulder.
“Hmph,” Dorothy snorted. “Baked Alaska.”
It was dark in the room and murmuring ohs for the flaming desserts mixed with a thinning applause from outside, here and there I saw a flame reflected in a bell set on a table or on the mantelpiece, one still in a boy’s hand.
I looked back at Dorothy. “Don’t you mean miniature Baked Alaska, more like Baked Delaware?” and then as I turned I was falling, I saw Emily in front of me and her hair and the long gown and flames were sliding, I managed to right the tray on the ground but there was a lot of commotion, I started to apologize and almost cry but a crowd had gathered not by me but to my left a little and then I saw them swatting at Emily’s hair. A bad metal taste rose. From somewhere else, the real lights flicked on. Then it was simple. I’d tripped on Emily’s gown. Dorothy and I cleaned up, took the tray to the kitchen, and by the time we returned Emily looked fine, people stood awkwardly eating their desserts in the light. I heard footsteps in the foyer. I’d ruined the party. Ended the mood. People were beginning to get their coats.
Emily yawned. She lifted the piece of her hair that had burned up to her face. “Smell,” she said.
Just then we began to hear the music, a flute, from the stone garden in back. Merl Briggs clapped her hands over her head. “Circle, everybody,” she yelled. “Join up in the circle.”
The awkward line of held hands drew us all outside and there, on the stone terrace, was a small stand of women playing wind instruments and three folk dancers who joined in among us and led the widening circle in a simple vine step. Everyone joined: the choir boys, the habited nuns, Tad, the hip religious, what was left of the costumed revelers. And then it struck me as I watched one of the nuns in habit, face down, following a dancer’s feet on the stone ground, her soft chin and cheeks falling out of the stiff white ramikin—it wasn’t that the nuns couldn’t dance. They just didn’t know how to waltz.
8
I HEARD THE VACUUM going somewhere in the house. Merl probably.
All the guests were gone. The paper sounds of their last good nights, called from outside, had fallen and settled long ago. It was late. Emily’s door was open and she was snoring in a curl on her bed, the dress a tangled mess on the floor, Tom Harris enrapt inside it, his tail beating a steady knocking rhythm. I’d come upstairs to change. I had a thing about dressing up. As soon as the party was over, I put on my jeans and big socks and a loose shirt. I couldn’t lounge around in a tuxedo, even one Pat was going to throw out the next day. I went downstairs and found Dorothy sitting, hat and scarf and coat and gloves on, at the edge of the piano bench, waiting for Pat Briggs to drive her home. We heard his footsteps overhead.
The vacuum kept going in a far distant corner of the house.
“I’ll take you, Dorothy,” I said.
“He’s comin’.” She nodded.
“But when?”
“Isn’t that the truth.”
“Why don’t you just let me.” I stood up to look for paper. “We can write a note.”
“He’s the boss,” she said, still on the bench, her gloved hands folded. She made no moves, her body or her face.
“Yeah.” Tomorrow and the next day he would be and all the days. My finger tinkled on the keys. I couldn’t help it.
It was a German piano, supposedly the best in the world, and they’d had it here in this house for more than twenty years. No one touched it. I tried a little, from the scales El
i Timber had taught me years ago. It sounded horrible, but it was fun, anyway, trying to put the notes together from memory like a puzzle.
Once I’d slept over, in childhood, and I was the first one up. I walked down the stairs and saw Dorothy testing the keys, she could really play, but when she noticed me, she stood up and pretended to be cleaning it. She didn’t even have a rag with her so she went at it with the hem of her dress. It amazed me then that I could scare someone. I was never a boss.
A clock chimed dumbly on the wall. Two a.m.
“Be right down,” Pat shouted down the stairs.
I heard him step on the scale. The Briggs house had a scale in every bathroom. Those they used. I’d already gained four pounds. I knew it even without the scale. I know myself at a hundred fourteen. Racine bakery.
Dorothy gathered up her things. We both moved to wait by the car. The sky outside swung low and stars swirled close so my balance wavered, my stomach warm and funny. My feet trudged into the firm crusted snow and I felt the first rush of icy water soak through my shoes to touch skin. For some reason that first flush of wet always for an instant felt warm and then you woke up in it. Around us, the sky loomed and hazed, the stars glittered down to bushes, pine trees shed bulks of water whispering, the world turned live and spawning, warm and shocking cold at the same time.
We stood out there on the white gravel driveway. I looked back at the solid house. “Don’t you sometimes wish you lived here too?”
Her shoulders lurched up further and she adjusted the hat on her head. “I live in my own house. With my mamma. Like you lived a lot of time with your granmama.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if I would have loved anyone I grew up with.”
“Your granmama gave you a lot.”
“I know she did, Dorothy.” I would never deny that. I didn’t want to talk ungratefully about her.
Mr. Briggs stepped out of the house in clean, warm clothes, carrying cash in his left hand. Dorothy stood still and he went around and opened her door for her. She got in holding her purse on her lap with both hands and the car went slowly down the hill. And I followed, just walking. I heard snow melting all around, invisible as huge dry owls in the trees and tunneling insects and rodents underground working at their instinctive system of hydrology. I got as far as the highway I would have to cross or hitch at, it was still far to our road, but the highway spread wide and dirty and fenced and semis thundered by cracking wind as if it were wet sheets and leaving no sympathy for straight lines, no wrapping of me in their headlights and the dawn began somewhere else too I could feel it I knew the sky and the moisture of air so well here. I almost started back, but then I ran across. That was a long band of time like a tunnel or a scream.
And then I was in the soft ditchy ground, sinking, over the sewer pipe for the two little rental houses that had been in back with the butter barn. They looked dark and empty now like old jack-o’-lanterns. I walked the small gravel road that in summer would be cricket loud and bright, alive with wind this time of night. It was still and cold, as if the sky itself were cracked frozen. The bare trees and their branches, thinning to a notched delicacy, were very high and taut and everywhere there was the luminous blue sky over the tiny structures, dark with sleep.
At the end there was Stevie Howard’s little brick house, small and low as a matchbox in the distance, completely outscaled by the land here and the trees and, like a mercy, that old soft yellow light was on in the kitchen and that was when I wondered if I’d died and so it had all come back.
But the cinching red wet pain at my ankles was real.
June and Chummy Howard were dark half silhouettes like schoolroom statues in the kitchen window. There was a pot of coffee on the table and three cups. Stevie’s head was there too and his wife, Helen, and his daughter, Jane.
Everything was so much the same it seemed time only happened to me. But once I walked up the one cement step into the kitchen, differences were fluent in the light. Chummy and June sat, their arms propping their faces, not even older but old. And Stevie Howard was here married, his wife’s fingernails hard and long and crimson like beads on the old gray-flecked linoleum table. Stevie and Helen and Jane had just come from the airport. Their plane had been seven hours late.
Helen was making good conversation, asking us questions, including me. Stevie got up and went back down the low hall to his little bedroom to put Jane to sleep. He came back in a T-shirt, with his suit pants and socks.
IN A WAY I didn’t marry Stevie because of his feet. They were white and dry yellow, blue-veined.
I couldn’t love him because I knew him so well. And I was still looking for something new and outside. I looked at the dark window, where the trees and clouds were only indistinct moving shapes, alive.
One thing about people on earth: you know their sounds and body pains. The irritation of their wombs, their feet’s thud, the plink of their parings, the pain of bunions. Especially in houses the size of this. I could have drawn you my grandmother’s feet. She was a majestic-faced woman, easily beautiful, but she did not have good feet. Her feet were the feet of a woman over sixty who had worked all her life in the country and who had not thought too much of herself. Her metatarsus protruded so that the insides of her foot formed a point, the kind of excrescence women of another place and culture would have saved from pain by cutting holes out of cloth slippers. Her toes too bore shapes made by time and the constrictions of hard shoes, and were festooned with bunions and corns. Looked at plainly and together, her feet were strong the way a pair of workman’s hands are at the end of his life.
If I had penciled my grandmother’s two feet, I would not have rendered them staunch pedestals, though they were that too, but never bare, when she stood sturdily working in the kitchen, they were modestly encapped with solid’shoes and even stockings. I couldn’t believe one foot of hers ever, even as a girl, demurely scratched an itch, the toes on the ankle or arch of the other. No, my grandmother was too embarrassed of herself. She was never coy. I think of them roughly parallel, resting on the floor, tilted to each other at the tips slightly, like hands veering but not daring yet to pray. They rested that way when she sat in a chair at night watching her variety show on the old TV.
My mother too, a glorious and vain woman, who hated herself first and then the world, felt tormented by her feet, which were misshapen, different, and, it seems, in several directions. She too had bad feet. Her toes, she blamed to no avail, again and again, crimped up in a curve permanently from wearing shoes too small that her parents made her walk too many miles in. A driven woman, she spent years of pedicures trying to shallow the rises of bumps and bunions and to candy up the effect anyway, with colored polishes on the nails.
It was not only women. To understand class in America, all you had to do was make everyone in the room take off his shoes. All of us sit for hours with a baby picking up his foot and marveling, taking pictures knowing, it’ll never be this perfect again.
Everyone was a child once with unbent feet. My grandmother always told me about coming to a small rented place I lived with my mother and dad and finding me in winter with no shoes. My mother had defended herself. “Momo says babies don’t need shoes!” My grandmother winced telling the story, how she took me into town to Briggs’s and bought five pairs of socks and shoes. “Over there I bet they don’t get any shoes.”
Once when I was young, just before my father went away, he had traced my foot to buy me a pair of shoes from Beirut. I wanted pink slippers or golden. Or mint green. It was plain lined paper, a pencil drawing. He labeled it my daughter’s foot, folded it and put it in his pocket. But the shoes never came.
For a long time, Stevie wouldn’t let anyone see his feet. He and Helen made love twice a day for the first year, but always in his socks. He told her his feet were damaged. “High school football,” he said, “my brother’s shoes.” But Jane had seen his feet. “They’re ug-ly,” she said in her shrieky voice. “One thing about kids,” Ste
vie told me. “They tell the truth. If something’s ugly to them, they’ll say it. They don’t know there’s anything wrong.”
Emily Briggs had the kind of straight long slender foot you could lay on a pure china plate. She took a strange pride in her feet. Even in one potato, two potato, the game children played with their feet in a circle, one child chanting and counting with a hand, seeing on whose foot the rhyme came out, I remembered her once saying, as if it were the most incredible thing, “Some people are ashamed of their feet.”
“I’ll take you home,” Stevie said. “We’ve got to go to sleep.”
Chummy and June were apologizing that there was no place for me to stay, they had grown children in every small room. In summer they used a tent outside for the young ones. “And that they like,” Chummy said, “oh sure.”
Helen said she was tired. She’d stay with Jane. His wife was like a picture of a wife, her face an oval emblem. Sitting in a chair.
Outside, the wind came up around us like stiff scarves. But I wanted to walk over and look at my grandmother’s house. We walked a little ways up the driveway, under the trees. Shades in all the upstairs windows were pulled down.
“I wonder who lives there now.”
“My dad’s talked to them. The man is a manager at Shopko and I think his wife works there too, in the pet section. They were from somewhere else. I don’t think they have children.”
The house looked still and asleep. We kept walking, trying to be quiet. I opened the garage door. Different shapes loomed than we had had. When I pressed up against the kitchen windows, standing on the flimsy tin drainpipe, I saw they had changed it all, everything. There was plaid wallpaper and a sofa where there used to be the one table we ate on for every meal.
Even the dark trees in the yard looked older and vast. “Do trees live forever?” I asked Stevie. “Or do they die? I mean, if nobody cuts them, would they keep growing?”
“For thousands and thousands of years. They don’t die of old age. But something will eventually get them.”
