by Mona Simpson
“Nightmare to them, sure.”
“—blow to the college. Apparently they were just starting an International Relations School and that was—”
“I was thinking of driving out there tomorrow. I thought I could do more there, maybe find people who knew him.”
He looked at me a way I’d seen before on faces. “You’re going to drive from Madison to Montana?”
“Just ’cause it’s been years since you asked them, who knows, maybe another student saw him someplace. Or some old friend. Or mistress. I mean, he might have even called them for a reference. I worked for the Wildlife Sanctuary in Racine once and there was a person who wasn’t very good at all and left under bad circumstances. But still, three months later, somebody ended up calling us because the person had put our names down as references.”
“When they leave under bad circumstances they still call.”
“But I mean sometimes people are incredible, so who knows.” I must have sounded pretty bad. I remembered all of a sudden, he just met me today.
But he kept looking at me from the side with a kind of awe.
I SLEPT PERFECTLY sealed in the guest couch Paula Nash made up for me. The beagle’s tail beating low on the door woke me in the morning. After breakfast, I followed J.D. Nash’s car to the Wisconsin Bureau of Vital Statistics, where we were the first ones there, standing at the Xerox machine, looking out at the lake, frozen blue. We both had mugs of coffee with the Wisconsin State Seal printed, and the badger, the state mascot, drawn.
“Well, what I was going to suggest last night was looking through indices in the most likely states,” Jay Nash said. “Now, I would guess that California would be one likely state.”
“It sounds like it, doesn’t it, California and Nevada.”
“What other states would you suggest?”
“Idaho and Montana, I guess. Maybe Washington. Oregon.”
“I don’t think we’d find him in the Midwest,” he said, “he’d land on one coast or the other.” It was odd hearing him say that. Mr. Wisconsin. He had on a Wisconsin tie clip. “I can contact my counterpart in each of those states. Each system differs, of course. The completeness of the indices varies from state to state. Some states have them in very poor condition and other states have them computerized so it’s all over the map. If—what I think we should do—see if you think this makes sense—should we check the death indexes first?”
Something dropped a long way, then landed. “Sure.”
“Because, I would suggest death and marriage. The only way a birth would show up is if he had a remarriage and had more children.”
“Well, that’s always possible.”
“We could check them but in California, that’s a big state, with immigrants from everywhere. That name probably exists in California.”
“I bet it doesn’t. I’ve done a lot of looking and it’s never turned up. It’s a really rare one.”
“Except in Egypt.” He giggled at his own joke, a hiccupy laugh. I liked him. “Okay, well, what I’ll do then is start with California, although—they’ve had a recent change and I don’t know the new person in California, Bill Shields worked there for years, it would have been easy with him, he probably would have done it as a favor, otherwise there could be a charge for looking into the files.”
“I’m happy to pay for any of that.”
The old copying machine huffed and churned, clanking like a homemade robot.
“Let me see what happens. I will find out the charges and I’ll get in touch with you.”
“But let’s go ahead with it and I’ll definitely be happy to pay, that’s no problem. And let’s do both death and marriage. I think the marriage isn’t totally unlikely. The children does sound remote. But you never know.”
“Let’s now do the first two and if that fails then we can consider the third.” The copied file was complete. He gave it to me. “Why don’t we say we’ll talk in three days, what is that, Wednesday.”
He walked me down to the car and asked me if I knew the way out to the highway. I told him I did.
“Yes, you were in Madison too, weren’t you? I always wondered why you didn’t look me up.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want him to know that my grandmother had never told me he existed.
BEFORE LEAVING MADISON, I called my mother. I didn’t know why. This was where she went to school too. She was the first one in all her family to make it to college. That was something. Sometimes I remembered a part of her life like that. I don’t think I ever gave her enough credit. She’d met my father here. I missed my mother. I did.
“Oh, do me one favor,” she cried on the phone, with a real fist of energy, like her old self. “Go to the student union and get a piece of black bottom pie.”
My mother had always harped on that when I was here for a year and I never went. The famous black bottom pie.
“Mother, you were here in 1955. That’s more than thirty years ago. They’re not still going to have it.”
“Yes they will!” Just that made me so sad. I slumped against the phone booth.
And then I did end up driving the Oldsmobile to the student union and it wasn’t even a restaurant anymore, I know she pictured a wood-paneled restaurant. It was a cafeteria now, full of college kids from anywhere and a number of wide-faced farm kids, but I took a tray and went through the line and at the dessert spot I said, “Hi, this is crazy but my mother came to school here in 1955 and she told me I should come and get the black bottom pie and I’m sure you don’t have it anymore, but I thought I’d check anyway and just—”
And then the pimpled boy handed me a white plate with a maroon border and a white and yellow piece of pie on it, a thin rim of chocolate, poppyseeds in the cream.
“Uh-huh. Black bottom pie. We still got it.”
9
I DROVE IN A CLEAN morning spell and made good time. The signs rose clear and green, I felt grateful as they ticked by, reminding me I was still on the right road. The day opened light and spanning, low horizontal as if I could see everything, like objects on a table. Silos, barns, the occasional round trees. I touched the hard shelf of the dashboard with my right hand. The pale sun warmed a little and I was glad this car felt solid. My grandmother’s cars always worked. She bought only Oldsmobiles, a new one every five years before they ever gave any trouble. This, her last, had under eight thousand miles.
Wisconsin ended. And the long Minnesota road widened in daylight. I stopped in Saint Cloud for gas and stood up, stretched on the square tar lot.
Down the block the stationary windows of small midwestern stores shined pearllike, waiting for the hour to open. A row of head dryers flipped back like broken bird necks at the front of the Chatterbox Beauty Shop, and a uniform store displayed the different colored plaid jumpers for Catholic school children. The door of the diner was already open. The man filling my gas had a stern Swedish face and blond cropped hair. No one here was going anywhere. Nothing was strange about their day. They could hold it before them, curved in their hand like a small crystal globe.
I DIDN’T LOSE MY VIRGINITY with who I should have right. Hardly anybody I knew did. And that morning in Saint Cloud it seemed to blame for everything and so nothing would be even and balanced until that was set right, like a coffee cup, fallen on its side.
I drove down the slow main street. People crowding the door of the diner looked middle-aged, wearing plaid jackets, hands hooked around the steaming white mugs.
It was hard to think about that even alone in a car in a place in Minnesota I’d never been before and probably never would be again. Hard to admit. My mother-cherished virginity, she was so sure I’d give away wrong. And I did, like an always present cheap childhood glittery bauble that cannot be found and values only after.
Nobody I knew lost their virginity with the one they should have right. And all of our grandmothers did it proper, in the slow and grand procession.
My mother had had one love before my father a
nd I blamed her for him, kind of. She was always going wistful and saying she should have married him, no matter what her father said. His name was David Kale. “ ’Course then,” she’d say, sighing, ready to wind up and do something material in the world, like get in the car and see about dinner, “then I wouldn’t have you.”
Whenever she said that she usually followed with how glad she was to have me and nothing in the world would have been worth not having me and all kinds of life-and-death proclamations; still I never missed the level truth in her voice. She didn’t know.
Emily still had her square of cotton panty, where she bled. She carried it in her purse during college even though she didn’t speak to the guy. Frank, I think his name was. It was just on ski weekend once. Mai linn just said, it doesn’t matter. Bodies don’t. What is first anyway? A number.
In science, there’s a certain kind of confidence you either did or did not have. They called it hands. Whether you had good hands. In jazz, Mai linn said you wanted your horn to have legs. Poets were supposed to have an ear—a pitch-perfect ear. That part of you—the authority—didn’t mean you had no doubts. It depended on whether there was a bottom. I had no bottom. Some part of me was ruined for love. I thought confidence with love came from knowing you were wanted on the earth. Could you be wanted by something other than your parents?
Talking about love, I never sounded right, like other people.
But I’d tried.
All the things I told no one, I said them in bed. That was love for me. Telling them the truth about my father. And I did it with every man I slept with. Night became my time for secrets, a cave we’d dig together that could go on and on, as long as we could last, all the way to China, where everything was foreign even street signs and eventually words meant nothing and all we had was touch and murmuring sound.
I think I scared some of them shitless. I had two kinds of boyfriends. Jerks and the ones who helped me. The ones I thought I was really in love with and the ones who were really in love with me. I used to think that way: really in love. You either were or you weren’t. I sat in ice cream shops or teahouses with my friends sucking a long time on straws discussing it.
When I was with Stevie I had a whole run of other crushes, one after the other. And when I was with Bud Edison, whom I loved but who never paid enough attention to me, I had other guys who helped me, day to day in my life. They gave me back rubs, they spent hours with me moving my grandmother’s furniture around the tiny apartment like a puzzle. Everyone knew I wanted to find my father. That was something of mine always.
“Maybe the man doesn’t want to be found,” Paul said, when I called him from Saint Cloud. He was sitting at his Justice Department office with a mug of coffee. “You ought to leave the guy alone. He obviously wants nothing to do with you. The guy’s got a right to live his life the way he wants to.”
“He has a right to leave his children?” I said.
“You’re over eighteen,” he said.
He had always looked at me like I was a little less because I had a father like that and he blamed me for dwelling on it. He was the kind of man who believed in playing up your strengths.
It was an embarrassing thing to admit: my father left me. You knew the guy was going to see you a different way. It was something that happened to you. And a lot of the guys, I thought, would tend towards girls who were new—nothing had happened to them yet. I was someone left already. I wondered if that made me easier to leave again. A wrapped gift left behind on the conveyor belt. I’d begun to notice in the last year how many girls in the medical school wore pearls.
Even with the men who touched their daughters there was that: they were wanted. Mai linn yearned for the crystalline sugar garden of an unwatched childhood, a father with a clean lap, newspaper held, simple, interested in the daily meals. In a way, Mai linn and I had the opposite problem.
I lived out my childhood unwatched.
It was worse for Mai linn, though, telling guys in college. They’re different, she said, but after none of them look at you the same.
We never wanted to be married too young, none of us, Emily, Mai linn or me. I always thought, twenty-seven. Now I was almost twenty-nine. Everything was late.
I was driving on an empty road. It was Sunday. Back in New York, weekend nights lit the sky with parties. This morning, people would be tangled asleep in couples, just beginning to blink awake. What did they do then? I thought they went out for brunch in the middle of the day, sank back into looseness from Bloody Marys and wandered the afternoon away in impending aimless sadness, the anticipation of separation and Monday morning.
But I was in the middle of the country sealed in a car and this was taking time. I was spending my youth trying to find him, and why? After, I’d still be alone.
I could find him and then I’d go back to my apartment broke and be behind in school and no better.
But I’d tried to forget about him and just live. I’d tried to do all the things I would have done if I were not waiting for anything at all. Sometimes when people asked, I said my father was dead.
Most of the years since I’d left my mother, I was looking for my father, but not like this. He was something I thought of, with fingers drumming the table top, eyes on the far horizon out the window. But I thought I could do that without disrupting the parade of my normal, sequential life. I talked about it in bed at night with men and in the daytime I did the regular things. I thought I could get by like that. I could find what I wanted, it felt like then, deep in the middle of the night, at that one first moment of entry, that was always new.
But that didn’t last. That can’t. Then in the late afternoons, I would wonder again where he was. I’d gather my backpack over my shoulder again and walk towards the evening of books.
I might have been losing my mind in that car or I might have been learning the things I needed to know for my life, I couldn’t tell which, but hurtling in the straight line of that still landscape I feared as I always feared given wisdoms, could I keep them and hold them, or would they just streak the dark with their penmanship and fade before the word was through, like fireflies on a Wisconsin dusk, flickering, never captured, writing the story of the world but not on anything so stable as paper or stone but in time so that it was legible only through the decipherment of memory, which was always changing.
LONG FLAT PLAINS spanned out around me. The silos began, leaving blue, sharp-bladed shadows. They felt dangerous and important and I sped up each time, passing, until I couldn’t see one anymore in my mirrors.
In college, I went for pilot types, strong and quiet, with sharp features so, my head on their chests, I heard heartbeats like underwater through leather jackets, and then owlish frail boys, who seemed they should be always lifting bell jars to examine specimens. Stevie Howard really was a pilot. He was in the air force three years before college. He slung his arm around me when we walked anywhere, those days, and his arm had weight.
Paul’s eyebrows pressed together over me in bed. “You know what my father said once?” A terrible look passed on his face. “He said shiksas are for practice.”
College was the first time I lived like everybody else. I ate the same food, lived in the same dorm, I had pretty much the same as all the others.
But I found too much beauty in mystery. This is not a way to happiness. The invisible always seemed more true to me than the people I’d always known.
Those years, after I slept with someone I always said, I love you. And once I’d said it once, I kept saying it, again and again, times when I really meant other things.
Like, Where were you? Why don’t you call?
I sometimes stood before a mirror and bit my lip, thinking, if.
Enough people had loved me, for a while, or tried to. But I didn’t want them. I made excuses. They seemed too small. I needed something else.
I’d tried and tried, for ten years now, at love. I’d tried the ones I thought I loved so much I didn’t even know and I’d tried the
ones who were there, who, every time I saw them again, I winced. I’d had enough boyfriends to know it was something in me. And now I’d stopped.
I remembered my father calling me once to the car. The house stood a long way from the road. This was still my grandmother’s yard. He told me he would always be my father. No matter what. No one else could be that.
And nobody else ever was.
MY GRANDMOTHER LIVED like a regular respectable woman of Racine, but she never liked to get out of her everyday clothes. She hated the fancy in life. She made fun of it all, oh, yah, sure sure, I got all such stuff, I’ve got the purse and the belt, matching, oh yah sure, I can go with the best of them, sure. A religious woman, she felt odd in church, with the lace veil resting on her head, the gloves, the belt and purse. She had the unfussiness of a woman who had been beautiful all her life. And I supposed she liked that—you could see that in her cheeks sometimes. But she also felt ashamed of being noticed. She was so shy, a man whistling at her outside the hardware store made her feel wrong, like a stranger’s touch would, as if they took something off of her.
IN MENOMONIE, when I’d stopped for coffee, I passed an old woman standing in front of a restaurant studying the menu on a wooden placard. It was a vaguely health-food place, pretty cheap. She held a square white patent leather purse in both hands in front of her. I knew she was pricing things, trying to decide if she should go in. She was an unassuming woman, curled in a little, wearing a cloth coat. When she noticed me looking at her, she startled a little, like a bird. I turned away. She wavered a long time. I watched from a little ways off. Now, my grandmother would have never been like that. She always stood straighter, the light of beauty fell around her, like a ring of petals, and she had enough money for a meal all her life, without worrying. When I remembered that, it was a consolation. The woman I was watching was more like me.
It took years to understand that I was not the same as my grandmother or my mother, that we were each marked at birth, as with a fingerprint on our soul and our faces, and that our lives, close as they were once in that white house, would move in solitary ways.
