by Mona Simpson
Still, after a while, those phone calls sputtered out. We hurried off the phone with promises to keep in touch and never did.
For the first moment, we rushed to the other to feel again and check what we had always known: we only lived near each other for a while in our lives, not because of us. That was all. There was never really anything there.
SOMETIMES when I was a child I saw a picture of a man on a billboard, or a man far away, someone I didn’t know who looked a certain way.
ONCE, I SAT IN A FIELD, winding string for my kite around my hand and Chummy from across the street knelt to help me. Chummy’s hands were big and dark from work. A man would be kind for a moment, bending down like a genuflection. Never for a long time. He would notice me, fix my kite and then forget. It was like that with orphans or half-orphans. People felt bad but they were busy. And you weren’t theirs. They had their own worries. And there were kids worse off even on our own road.
For help anyway, your want had to show. After a while I tried to make that invisible. This was what made me seem hard. People said that. “You’re a tough one such a one,” they said, which meant they didn’t have time. They decided I would take too much work. I was already too far gone.
You had to inspire people to save you. And they blamed you a little if you didn’t.
And we weren’t any better than the rest. After all my grandmother’s admonishments about bathrooms in parks, we let Mai linn be sent to Hebron, the first girl Ben loved. Because her saxophone was too loud.
But that wasn’t it anyway, kindness. No. Paddy Winkler was kind but old. His face seemed loose, eyes random, fluttery, uneven—he was not it.
I wanted power from a man, a different kind of power. People around me sure enough seemed capable. They could do things—but one at a time, piece by piece, manually. I wanted someone who could slip a hand into my chest without ripping skin, touch the center and bend that metal, transforming me. The nuns told my mother tests proved I was smart but not trying. Maybe I was bored? people asked. I shook my head no and meant it. And then I got in trouble.
The car skated over snow and farmyards split to both sides of the highway. A sign promised Madison in eighty-five miles. I began to consider where I’d sleep. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
In Racine, I wasn’t the only one boy-crazy. All the popular girls were. And for the others it just came a year later. I had Emily over to my grandmother’s house and we found hidden corners to have our private urgent conversations. We also played chess. Pat Briggs taught us to play. Emily never really took to it but he brought home a fancy ebony board and carved pieces from a buying trip to New York. “I know who Andy likes,” Emily said. My breath hardened into something that felt like a wrapped candy just under my rib cage. Andy was the one then, for me, carrying the light.
“Who?”
“Emily,” she pointed with a long finger to her own chest. She was probably right.
“And I know who else he likes,” she said.
“Who?”
She pointed to me, with that same unpolished but filed nail.
The others all acted boy-crazy too but it meant more to me. For them it gave an afternoon’s fun, for me it was hard serious. I thought of them all the time.
I was popular. Just be nice to everybody, my grandmother told me that when I started school—probably everybody’s mother told them that then but by fifth grade they’d forgot. My being popular pleased my mother. Popularity was her goal in life, one she worked at too hard and too little. She won people fast and high, and then she’d do something bizarre and lose all she’d gained. Only the most loyal stayed loyal to her.
With my grandmother, it was all fine as long as it was girls. That she understood. But when boys started calling on the telephone, her mouth went lined. “What does he want with you?” she said.
I shrugged. I had the shrug that worked.
I WAS AN ADVANCED READER. Tests said so. I used this ability to read about sex in the small dusty section labeled PSYCHOLOGY in the public library. Two architects in 1928 modeled our public library on the Parthenon, only smaller. “I like it better than the one over there,” my grandmother said, after her first European tour. “Here they keep the pillars so nice and clean.” I collected rocks at that time, and she’d brought me a little chip from the real Parthenon, labeled ROCK FROM THE PARTHENON in her neat script.
Seldom used, except for Wednesday morning women’s good-marriage-work reading group and Marion Werth’s Family Tree Club, it really did smell dusty. I worked my way through psychology sitting on the floor, leaning against the old wall. I found little pamphlets on adolescence. I knew that word from my mother. Whenever she didn’t like what I was doing, she’d sigh and say, “I can see you’re going through adolescence.” They were full of warning stories. One was called “Just a Friend.” It was about two girls, you knew them, I mean you could have named them in any class—the Wanda and the Denise. Denise was friends with everyone. She didn’t ever like boys specially, for being boys, everybody was just a friend. Wanda, on the other hand, Party Wanda, was always the first one to turn out the lights in someone’s basement. Everything went along just like that for a little while, the book said, because the regular high school boys didn’t know any more than Wanda did. But then, one night, Wanda got together with an older boy. It was dark, in a car, Party Wanda tried to stop him but by then it was too late. She got pregnant. Now who do you think has a greater chance for a healthy adult loving relationship with a man? the book asked at the end. Wanda or Denise?
It seemed dangerous but that kind of thrilled me. I didn’t know what it was then, but I wanted to be taken like that, darkened out, overwhelmed.
I tried to talk my grandmother into letting me clean out the Polynesian room in the basement so I could throw a party there.
I was the one who always wanted to play Spin the Bottle and Truth-or-Dare.
The Briggses planned a boy-girl dance for Emily. That my grandmother understood. It was odd the things she liked and didn’t like. Something appealed to her about the notion of a dance. She taught me even more steps and we practiced on the living room floor. I already knew but I never told her it wasn’t going to be that kind of dancing. She became excited and concerned about sewing me a proper dress.
“Do you think it’ll be long, floor-length?” She met me mouth-tight just inside the screen door when I came home from school one day. She’d driven downtown to Noble Fabric and Upholstery. She had swatches.
“I don’t think so, Gramma. Not until I’m older.”
I led Hughey Cartwright outside the Briggses’ garage, by the Venus de Milo, saying I was too hot. He didn’t get the idea so I put his hands around my neck and then he started breathing fast in little huffs and he kissed me. His lips were wet like worms.
I THOUGHT EVERYBODY else knew the thing I was looking for—they all had it and I just couldn’t apprehend.
It was the secret no one told. The first time I thought I recognized a trail wasn’t with anybody I expected. Not from school. It was with Stevie. He was just a boy from around home I’d known always. It was May and he worked after school and weekends picking strawberries for Grigg. It started in the old barn where we were just playing one day like we did a lot, after the truck brought him back from the fields. With a flashlight, we looked for kittens and mice babies in the hay. I lay on my belly, it was just my old clothes and my pants came too far up my leg. I would have never been seen in them at school. But my grandmother made me change out of my good things right when I came home. She didn’t have enough to do all day. As soon as I took a thing off she’d start cleaning it and by suppertime, it’d be hanging back in my closet, ironed already. She didn’t give me enough time to get dirty.
So I was crawling low with my hands and I felt something and then I knew it was him, his mouth on my ankle. I started to shout, Stevie, don’—but then it felt good, a shot blooming. He crawled up on my jeans so his legs were over my legs, his front over my back.
“I’ll show you something,” he said. He lifted hair up off my neck. It was probably white under there. I felt a bite and then this prickly soft-rush. It felt under skin. He pulled up my shirt and did it on my stomach while I watched. He did something with his mouth, then lifted his face down so one eyelash brushed against my skin.
“Butterfly kiss,” he said.
“Oh neat.”
I moved other parts near him and I felt his knees on the back of my legs, his fingers pushing on my gummy skin like under wrists and the fine fluttery butterfly kisses. We moved in the hay and I started doing it too; it was like being under a gown, silk or something with threads or tentacles that moved all over you. He did it on my chest, my back, my neck all over, the backs of my legs, my face.
We were so remote, far from school or what we thought counted, it was just Stevie and me in the barn, nothing important. Except it was hard to stop.
Finally, we heard his mom on the porch calling him in for supper the way she did when she’d been calling for a while or when the dog was gone far away and he knelt, pulled his shirt back on and his sock up where I’d been on his ankle. He looked at me with those same eyelashes. “See you tomorrow?”
“Yeah, sure, probably. We’re not doing anything. Like we ever do.”
In his house, they always ate at five o’clock. His mom liked to have the dishes done and see a show that came on at six-thirty Central Standard time.
BUT THE NEXT DAY I walked home through Prebble Park and I had to stop and go to the bathroom. It was a bathroom with a lot of stalls and I left the door open a little, that was automatic by now, I’d been in there a hundred times in my life and I did my duty and then I stepped out of my stall and there was a guy there, an older guy.
He looked scary. His eyebrows met in the middle and he stared serious at me, without smiling, and said, “Take off your underpants.”
I started doing what he said and when they were down, halfway at my knees and I had to start the awkward stepping out of them, I remembered I was supposed to say no and here I was doing what he said. He wore scuffed-up pointy black boots. They seemed enormous.
Now I had the panties off and in my hands and I looked up like for what to do next.
His lips were the color of the crayon named Magenta. “Give them to me.”
But I didn’t want to give him my underpants. “No,” I said, but my voice was so small it was like a whimper or a mew.
“What,” he said and then I didn’t answer.
One hand clamped down on my shoulder and with the other he grabbed the panties and I pulled with him, I didn’t want him to get my underpants and he let go my shoulder to grab them and I heard the zup of them ripping and then I just ran with my school uniform on and no underwear, up the hill under the water tower and out the park down Mason Lane, and then I finally tripped on a chestnut on the sidewalk and scraped my knee.
He wasn’t anywhere. He hadn’t followed. It was different to run without underwear and now it felt funny to be sitting down on my wool jumper and sucking the drops of blood from my knee with no parities on. In a way it felt good anyway, like running must feel if you’re bald.
When I came to Grigg’s fields, I saw Stevie bending and picking, legs far apart, in a line with other children. Every time he dropped a strawberry in the basket, he looked over his shoulder to find me and then he did. But I ran home into my house and up to my bedroom. I had to put on new underpants. I didn’t want him to know. I was already used to secrets.
I opened my drawer, it creaked a little, it always did, and there they were, my pile of clean cotton underwear in soft Easter egg colors, pale blue, pale green, pale pink, bright white; My grandmother ironed my underwear. She ironed the shirts and panties flat and then once she folded them, she ironed the creases too. I put one on again and then I changed to my play clothes and went downstairs like the day was starting over again, this time normal, right.
“Well, hello,” my grandmother said.
She had dough rolled for pie crust. I felt I had a million hours. I could loll around here in the kitchen and Stevie would still be waiting for me, bouncing a ball outside.
I never told Stevie or anyone. That was how alone I was. We all were.
It was Danny Felchner that day in the bathroom. I’d recognized something at the cemetery when he whispered in my ear, his voice went a certain way.
IN THE BARN, time dissolved. I didn’t want it to stop and then once we did, it was over. There was never enough. Pleasure for me has always been that way. Like candy. Not lasting. It always seemed incidental to love.
My grandmother walked into the kitchen later where I sat scribbling my homework. I’d started a letter to my mother. My mother was away in California and Tuesday was my night to write to my mother. Sometimes in my bed I’d written letters to my father, but we had no address to send them.
“Mayan, say, when I took your clothes to wash, I couldn’t find your underpants. I thought maybe they fell under the bed but I can’t get down there, I started but ugh my knees are bad today. Would you just scoot up a minute when you’re done and reach?” My grandmother’s mouth went a certain four-pointed way. She hated to admit any infirmity.
My pencil stopped on the paper. She wanted doors bolted and windows barred, she always clicked the button that locked us into our car. I was always trying to prove we didn’t have to be so careful.
“I lost them.”
She frowned. “Well, how did that happen?”
I shrugged. My shrug didn’t work that time. “In the park.” Lying was hard then. I had to build, stick by stick.
“In the park,” she repeated. She wasn’t going to let me off. She adjusted her glasses on her eyes. She peered a way she never did. She was after something.
“They ripped. I climbed over a fence, I know I shouldn’t have in my school clothes, I’m supposed to go around, but I just did and they ripped.”
“So what did you do with them then?”
“I threw them out.”
“Where? You didn’t take them off right there, I hope, where everyone could see.”
“I went into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet.”
“Well, next time you leave them on and come home. I could have easily mended such a rip like that. But you shouldn’t be climbing fences, Mayan, you never know when a splinter just gets into your skin or those metal pieces stick up and they get rusty, you don’t know all what’s there, you could get infection. Tetanus. And Mayan, you know you should never flush a thing like that. Think of the poor plumber.” Paddy Winkler had been a plumber and the life of their conversation was a mutual commiserating dismay and inexhaustible amazement at the objects people put into toilet pipes. He found them all and took them out—in their various states of decay. Because of Paddy Winkler, the house was full of Kleenex boxes. He contended that, due to harsh chemicals used in the production process, toilet paper should never touch the face.
“And he should know” was always her last word about that. Two of Paddy’s grandchildren worked at the paper mill.
Later, she came back to talk to me. “Mayan, has your ma told you at all about menstruation?”
She hadn’t but I already knew from books in the library. “Yes, Gramma.”
“And you know all about that.”
“Yes, Gramma.”
“Well, good then.”
There were certain things my grandmother wouldn’t talk about. What she really meant was, you could just lose your virginity on such a fence and then what would your mother say? I could feel her resolving to watch out even more.
That night was the first time I noticed doing something I still do. I talked while I was warming into my bed, pulling the blankets around me, readying for sleep. I said, “Safety.”
DRIVING ON THE EMPTY ROAD, I felt like calling Stevie and asking what went wrong. So I stopped at a gas station lot and dialed his number in Berkeley, but the phone just rang.
A little red sign in the shape of an arrow s
aid Spring Green and I turned left. It was the middle of the afternoon. I hadn’t planned this. But I’d always wanted to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s school. I thought his grave was there too. No one I knew had ever been to it, living in Wisconsin all those years. Pat Briggs had seen all the Chicago work and he’d heard Wright speak, but none of us had been here. This made the day feel more like a small vacation. I could take an hour for something that had nothing to do with my father. It was a curving farm road, low round hills on both sides. Farms, when they became visible, were set far away, napkined by neat, vast fields.
The farms looked rich and lush and large-siloed. I passed through a remote town, with its own main street, a restaurant and a clothing store that seemed to carry goods from a generation ago. Small hand-painted signs announced the Taliesen School. Because of the weather, a mixture of sleet and rain, fog billowed up from the ground and hung in creases of the hills and the building seemed to float like a kind of castle.
I took a tour, paying ten dollars to a woman with sensible shoes. With four others, I walked through the buildings. The main hexagonal room, with a grand fireplace, unused today when a fire would have warmed us, showed the erosion of years one would expect from wood and clay and stone. Water seeped in splits of the wood, the windows didn’t hold tight. “Money,” our guide whispered, and she shook her head every time we passed something cracked. “Dirty men,” I remembered Merl saying.
Outside, I stood under an eave waiting for the rain to break so I could run across the gravel to my car. There was a bucket of workmanlike umbrellas, mud-spattered yellow canvas. I stole one. It could have looked like I was borrowing it to walk across to my car, then to drive it back; a person could’ve even believed I meant to use it then forgot, but it was not anything like that. When I took it I knew. I wanted to.
