by Mona Simpson
I TOOK MY SHOES OFF outside the Briggses’ back door and carried them up the stairs. I kissed Stevie good night. “Tomorrow I have to deal with the box,” I whispered.
I WAS THE FIRST ONE UP. Then Emily stumbled in too, her nightgown frilled from washing, her triangular-shaped long legs seeming uninflected. Emily, what was it about her beauty—it seemed her soul hadn’t inhabited her body yet. She was a body waiting, flexing, living in itself. Her body seemed general somehow, new. I used to think that meant she was a virgin. She really had been a virgin with an unconscious awkward spring in her legs. When she was excited she would stand in one place and jump up and down. But she was still that way now. I thought some man would fall ravishingly in love with her for that, exactly that. It would madden him that he could look and look and never find her. That wasn’t Tad, though. He didn’t seem to find her mysterious at all.
She sat down on the living room carpet, pitched on her hands. “It’s so early,” she said.
She did headstands, awkward attempts that spurted her bare ankles and feet up into the air. She’d always been a little bit an acrobat.
She did a back roll, tucking her head under. Her face flushed when she came up, her foot bumping on the washstand where they put their keys and mail. From what I understood, that washstand came from Merl’s grandmother and she’d had to argue bitterly with her family to attain it. It was the only thing Mrs. Briggs had from her family.
“You know when Mai linn was away in North Dakota, once I got this letter. We’d been getting all her mail, your aunt brought it over—anyway, she got this letter from Interlochen which is this music camp my grandfather’s on the board of that’s a school too, and they said she could come and audition for a scholarship and it was like a form she had to fill out and when I put it down it dropped behind that thing, and I could never get it. I tried a bunch of times with a knife or a fork or something. I kept thinking tomorrow I’ll get that out and send it to her. But I always felt bad because Mai linn might have had some kind of scholarship but she didn’t even know.”
“You never told her?”
“No, I felt so bad.”
“You should, Emily.”
“Not now,” she said. And then she shot up, she had the longest ankles and they seemed to contain great springs of power, like a kangaroo’s. “Want some coffee?” I heard her banging around in the kitchen.
I stayed on the living room floor, where the furniture loomed rounder and more oddly proportioned from my vantage, and vast spangles of light spurted and broke on the white walls. I did not believe in accidents. I based my life on that, it was the only way I knew how to bear it. I’d always told myself that tiny misunderstandings did not matter. There were always more chances.
In books, I hated things like that. The one letter that could have made a difference. I thought if I opened that as possible, I couldn’t have lived with the regret.
But maybe it was true anyway. Mai linn could have gone to that school.
Emily called me into the kitchen. The room amazed with light. She hurried around the stove, opening the door, turning the gas off under a kettle. Her bones hit the floor hard and erratic. Maybe it wasn’t accident in the world I feared, but malice. But Emily could not be evil. I knew Emily. She was an unlived girl here alone in a white kitchen, elbows and heels, the stove door banging. Still, Mai linn had already had so much taken from her. My mother had hated me sharply, not always, but sometimes with real point and glitter. The moments she came after me rang with terror. I lived with the shards of them. I tried to believe something else was true, but they were there in me, crystallized forever like shrapnel. Emily took a new pan of muffins out of the oven. “No sugar. I used your little bananas.”
We sat at the white enamel table, rimmed with a red line, that was where Dorothy worked and sometimes sat at a forty-five-degree angle, looking slant out the window, eating her soup for lunch.
Emily took out her mother’s Spode cups and slammed them on the tabletop, without saucers, as if they were any college mugs. Aw, I thought, that was what this marriage was for. So Merl and Pat Briggs could have a daughter and raise her to be this careless.
The snow sun glazed in off the walls, rebounding. Emily poured from the pot, then took the carton from the refrigerator, milk blooming slowly in the coffee.
For no reason right then I thought of my grandmother’s hall closet, by the one bathroom. My grandmother’s hall closet was a symphony of smells, eucalyptus, medicinal, with all manner of suppositories and foot remedy. Still, it was so clean. I don’t know how you keep the house so clean, people would say. She shrugged. Uch, it doesn’t get dirty.
I probably wasn’t enough of a child. I supposed at one time the house had gone dirty when my mother was growing up, loudly, with violence, the way she would. I supposed those were my grandmother’s real years of parenting. Maybe she missed that. I was something else.
Now Emily banged around the kitchen with new cooking gear. There were copper bowls and trump pans and flutes. And it made me think of my grandmother’s bad tin pie pans, their berry stain marks, how she’d make a pie in a square casserole dish, anything. Once you knew how you didn’t bother with upgrading the equipment. Summer was berries and crust, cherries, grassy herbs. Winter was nuts ground in buttery cookie batter. It had nothing to do with the pans.
STEVIE AND HELEN and I ate. I got like that there. There was nothing else to do. You began to start looking for something to take home with you. Every day I asked about the box.
We drove to one place for breakfast cinnamon rolls. Baked goods in Racine seemed extraordinary. World class. Then, a little more than an hour later, we drove to the diner downtown for chili and pie. At night we met at Kroll’s, the deco hamburger place all our parents had gone as teenagers for burgers and malteds. I’d been there four days and nothing had happened about the box. And I’d gained six pounds.
The diner itself was a monument. It was downtown, across Mason from Boss’s, the inner-illuminated green glass cube surrounded by taller old brick buildings. The tan brick Odd Fellows Home, the charcoal brick Elks, and the YMCA, bricks the color of dried blood, towered over Boss’s with their tiny shaded windows. Inside the diner, silver-pedestaled black scuffed leather stools stood on worn linoleum. The china was white with a rim of black and the glasses were very thick. All painting of downtowns seemed allusions, references to this. Men. We sat at the counter and I looked out at Boss’s Tobacco and Magazine Shop, where the Briggses had first seen my cousin and me in our sailor suits and wanted us. The Briggses then had been different, tall, befurred, movie stars to my mother.
The chili was perfect.
All this was new to Helen and she had the goodness to like it. We drove, full, to the Wildlife Sanctuary, where I used to work. Ducks and geese sat ovally, tucked into themselves on the blue ice. In small wire cages, raccoons rattled. When Jane stuck her finger in, the one winged bald eagle jumped and rustled on his tree. Across the way, the Bay Beach Amusement Park Ferris wheel and train tracks looked toy and forgotten in the snow. We bought bags of corn kernels for ten cents to feed the birds. That was the price it had always been. Everything was the same as when I’d worked there. We tossed the stuff, throwing it everywhere, disturbing the fowl but not feeding them. We kept on and on until we saw, on the drained glass, the frozen pond, the mud, scattered corn. The ducks and geese were full too. They roosted where they were like eggs, indifferent. A sunset began, glorious pollution colors over the still winter bay, the paper-mill waterworks in the distance intricate and deep blue.
FOUR DAYS PASSED. Six. Then it was day seven. I’d gained nine pounds and no box. I snooped around the house. There was so much. My box could have been anywhere. I had a mission here and small talk was keeping me from it. Small talk and food. And damn Christmas.
Pat Briggs brought home a Swedish Ring Cake in a tall pink box, tied with string. Emily, Tad and I lay on the den floor, watching The Wizard of Oz. Emily and I broke off a ring at a time and let the
flaky almond layers melt in our mouths. It is a strange thing to keep eating when you are already very full. My stomach protruded like a taut convex drum. The den was still fairly normal, Merl’s filling kept to bureaus lining the walls. Pat shouted for her to come sit with us and watch the movie. We heard her tunneling, working, somewhere in the house.
I asked Pat about the box. We were all facing the screen. Dorothy had just met the Tin Man. Pat was leaning back in the brown-and-yellow-striped recliner. Tom Harris sprawled in a leather bean bag close to the screen. Tad was reading the New York Times. He and Emily had driven out first thing in the morning to find the paper, but they had to wait for Boss’s to open at ten to ten.
“Oh, all right. We’ll search it out tomorrow, how’s that.”
“Fine,” I said. “Great.” As soon as I said that I winced for being so grateful. My mother was that way. She felt so frightened and weak. Peeled. She taught me to try—at all times—to keep on everybody’s good side, even more than that, on their list of favorites. We believed we needed people for protection.
Just then Merl appeared in her work clothes. Dirt marked her cheeks and one streak of hair escaped the rubber band. She wore a grayed white shirt and old pants, patched at the knee, pointed sneakers with a fur of dust. She was carrying file cards and a rag.
Pat looked at her and sank back into the recliner, compressing.
“Merl, get in the shower and put on that new silk robe I brought home for you and come and watch the movie with your daughter and her friends.”
“I can’t,” she said, holding her rag and cards stiffly in a panic of being caught. “I have to work.”
“Merl, it’s a classic, for God’s sake. Everybody in the world but you’s seen The Wizard of Oz.”
Her bottom teeth showed and her eyes darted. “I’ve got so much to do,” she said and disappeared backwards.
Pat slid to the floor and Emily moved to the recliner above him. She had on jodhpurs that ended halfway up her calf and regular white socks. Then, she cast her right leg over her father’s shoulder. He grabbed the white ankle and slowly peeled the cotton off. He looked at her toes, touching each one separately. “This little piggy,” he said, in a voice I’d never heard from him. He looked at the bottom of her clean foot with such amazement.
He found every little part of her so perfect.
THERE WERE ONLY two days left before Emily, Tad and I went home. I couldn’t think of anything else. I didn’t even step on the scale. I was sick with food.
There are things worth more than money, all money, valueless things. The box. I thought of it with its secrets. To sit on the floor in my old clothes and have its contents spread out between my legs, would be almost more than meeting my father.
I began to understand obsession. There was this box. I drew it on every piece of paper I had a pencil near. I believed I could recognize it if I saw it. Even when I was talking about different things, it was always right there.
The guy Jordan called from New York and I could barely even talk to him. It was too long to explain. Somewhere in this house there was my box. There was no assuaging me for it. Even love—I needed the box more. But life at the Briggses’ went on, food- and phone-call-filled as usual.
I began to understand about power. If you are powerless, then what is essential, central for you, is always peripheral, minor for someone else. You curtsy like my mother and ask your favor and then scurry into a bowing retreat. I knew how a poor person would feel observing Congress. And if you were powerful, you could delegate your most whimsical concerns to become the mission of another person’s whole life. I had no doubt that if the box were for Emily, the Briggses could have had it found.
I dreamed about the box. The box had wings.
Finally, the second-to-last day I asked Emily. She was doing awkward back rolls and somersaults on the carpet in front of Tom Harris and Tad. They’d just come back from the Retrospective Exhibit of Family Trees, posted in the library in honor of Marion Werth’s long service. Tad had expressed an interest in Emily’s genes. I said, “Can I please ask you something?”
“Sure, what?” she said, stumbling up, rubbing her hands on the front of her thighs. “What?”
“You know that box I told you about that’s somewhere here someplace. I’m really nervous because I need it and we’re leaving. And I’ve had this detective for all this time now and we’re at kind of a brick wall and whatever’s been done before I really need to know about it. I need the box.”
“Well, I’m sure they’d send it to you if they find it.”
“No-oh,” I kind of yelped. “It’s here for sure and I’ve got to get it now. I can’t just go back.”
She looked at me with the keen still eye she had when she thought I was going crazy. “Dad?” she called through the house. “Dad!” She ran up the steps and I heard her nearing the distant sound of sifting that was Merl. When she bounded down again she said he was at the store and she was holding keys. “Well, let’s go then.”
“We don’t have to. I mean, I can wait.”
She just looked at me with that level eye again. We drove downtown. Emily had a special parking spot in the garage, one right next to the door of Briggs’s. I sat in a chair outside his inner office while she talked to him. And then Pat came out and we took a walk through the store.
Pat had a way of acknowledging that this was serious by listening with his head down, almost parallel to the ground. His hands were clasped behind his back.
I’d explained again about the box and how badly I wanted—no, needed—it, and then he asked me, how is medical school going and cocked his head as if my answer were the one answer to my life.
I shrugged. “Okay. Not great, maybe. I’ve been a little preoccupied with this.” I hated saying that. I knew the Briggses, people like that, expected me to do well. It was how they knew I was different from my mother.
He shook his head, wincing. We were on the escalator now down from the fifth floor to the fourth. “I always thought you’d be an architect. I thought we’d be hiring you to build a new Briggs’s.”
We’d always shared that when we saw each other, Doc Briggs and me. We’d talked about buildings. I’d shown him my drawings of towers and minarets.
“Ask Emily,” I said. “She’s the one in art history.” Emily would have never done that.
“No, I know Emily. Emily’s not a studier. Not that way.”
I looked at him sideways but he was grinning in reverie, he was watching a memory of her moving through air and space.
“I always wanted to be an architect,” I said.
He looked straight at me, the tic playing over his face. He seemed almost naked like that. “I remember John F. Kennedy Primary. I thought you were going to knock ’em all dead.” That was a contest they’d had to design an elementary school in town and give it a name. Everyone had laughed at me but then my drawing had won and it was up on display in Briggs’s. The school never got built, though, the budget was cut.
“Architecture is half an art, half a science,” he said.
“Medicine too, I guess,” I said.
“No, medicine is really just a blunter form of merchandising. What you’re selling is time.” He slid his hands into his pockets. “Let’s get off here, I told Emily we’d stop by and see a ring she was looking at in Estate Jewelry. And I’ll see to it, Mayan, that if that box is there we’ll get it to you before you go.”
“Thank you,” I said. We walked through a forest of mannequins being moved. “Must be hard to be a dad, huh?”
He moved his shoulders a certain way, as if burrowing in. “Nothing like it. Before they’re born, you want them to be like you. You want them to be sort of your type, the way you’d want a girl to be your type and if she was you might fall in love with her. Because you’re scared. You want to love them but you don’t know if you can. But it’s stronger than that. You love them right away just the way they are. Whatever they are, that is your type, more than yourself is your type.
And you’ll see, your child will change who you can love in the world.”
Emily was seated at a velvet-covered stool in front of a long glass case. A velvet black tray was out in front of her. She turned on the stool full of charm and asking, a tight string of triple pearls around her neck. “I saw this movie called The Stranger,” she said. “And the girl had this dress that went up to here and pearls like this. I thought I’d get a video and give it to a dressmaker and …”
He was over her then, his hands on her neck.
I walked over to the window, behind a display of fur. It was okay. He’d heard me out and promised he’d find the box himself. Outside, snow had melted in patches and grass stood muddy and colorless. In the distance, down this hill and past another, you could see the red clay roofs and square steeples of the Belgian monastery and its vineyards. Everything looked different here than it did at my grandmother’s house. There it was flat land as far as you could see, eventually the railroad yard and then the highway.
LATER, we were sitting on the living room carpet playing Monopoly. Tad acquired Marvin Gardens. “Boom, boom boom,” he said, fists churning, “that’s all three. A monopoly.”
“The box?” I said.
Pat Briggs made a face that was like his wince, frozen. “Now? I’ve almost finished you gals off. Let me just nail Tad.”
“I don’t want to keep bugging people,” I said.
I stopped trying. I let him win. Emily and I were out. It was him and Tad. Then just Tad.
“Okay.” He sighed and got up. He’d get away with as much as he could, but finally, he’d do the fair thing. Emily tried to be like that, too. He went to a small drawer in the kitchen and got out a flashlight, he knew just where it was and I remembered, oh yeah, this really is his house. He pulled the string down from the ceiling in the hallway by the small bedrooms and climbed the steps to the attic.
I stood down below. “You sure it’s in there? I saw a lot of boxes in the garage.”
That was a stupid thing to say. Boxes were the main unit of filling in this house. There must have been a thousand in the basement, the garage was a solid cube. Merl Briggs sealed them squarely and labeled them in a neat, right-slanted script on all six sides. Pat’s footsteps creaked the ceiling and a few minutes later he came down with the box labeled ADELE STEVENSON’S LEGAL PAPERS, as if he knew in the elaborate packing and storage and stuffing and mechanics of this house, with its deliveries and emissions, its trucks coming and going, its repairs, its scrubbings and supply drops, where the one box was buried in the attic with our name on it.
