by Mona Simpson
“The more I think of it,” Dr. Kemp said, “I’m sure the wife’s name is Uta. I think the fatal flaw is the gambling, you know, it’d be like alcoholism or any number of others. He can’t seem to resist it. It’s one of the reasons I thought he had probably gravitated back to a gambling area. She might have even owned a hotel or a restaurant somewhere in Nevada. I seem to remember something about that.”
“Do you remember the restaurant’s name?”
“I think he even worked there one summer. Or maybe that’s how they met. But the name, what was that? It might have been something like Donner Pass. Donner Lodge. We’re not giving you much, but I suppose it’s more than you had.”
“Ut-terly charming,” Dr. Geesie said again.
“I grew up with my mom. Which may have been lucky actually.”
“Well, you’d have had a number of crises,” Dr. Kemp said. “I don’t know if they even have a Gamblers’ Anonymous thing or not. But he also, I think, had delusions of grandeur. He always wanted to be more important than he was. The gambling thing was like buying lottery tickets. You think you’re going to be rich tomorrow.”
Dr. Geesie clicked again.
“I mean, I buy them, mind you,” Dr. Kemp said. You knew that Dr. Geesie never had.
“But it sounds like he had money anyway from his wife. So what did he need more for?” He should have known how little we had. What we did. How we managed.
I watched Dr. Kemp unwrap and eat another chocolate. “You want one?” he said and then threw it across the room. It was blue foil. That set Dr. Geesie shoving himself up from the armrests and carrying the bowl of turtles around the room.
“I should have asked you already,” he mumbled. “My wife usually—she’s at birthday club.”
“I’d like to know what’s happened to John,” Dr. Kemp said. “You know, he can sell himself and what he believes in. I don’t know whether Uta has stuck with him. She loved him very much. And you know, put up with a lot.”
“I hope she’s still even alive to find,” I said. “I remember her being pretty old.”
“She might be in her sixties, I don’t know,” Dr. Kemp said.
“He’d be fifty-five now. I know ’cause that’s how old my mom is and they’re the same age.” This seemed an increasingly fragile bit of romance.
“ ’Course I’m seventy,” Dr. Kemp said.
“I’m seventy-six!” Dr. Geesie said, like, so there!
God, I’d probably offended these guys, saying she was old enough to be dead. I tried to cover it. I said, “I bet she’d be about ninety now.”
“No, she was younger than I was,” Dr. Kemp said. “Well, she might be my age, I don’t know. She had some wrinkles, I guess.”
“Was she a nice person?”
“Yas.”
“Was she smart and everything?”
“Why sure. And, as I say, she put up with a lot.”
There was a racket at the front door, then a delicate stamping. “Well, hello.” Dr. Geesie’s wife took off plastic shoe covers and hung up her scarf. “I won’t bother you,” she said, tiptoeing through the room.
Dr. Geesie looked to Dr. Kemp. “Do you think she should check the Western Division of International Studies?”
“He doesn’t seem like the joiner type,” I said. It was like umbrellas and sunglasses. The medical insurance I might have been wrong on. The college probably gave him that.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Kemp said, “we can’t tell you more.”
“All these people from years ago, why would you remember?” I shrugged.
“You remember some, like Ted Bundy was a student of mine,” he said.
“Oh, neat.” I was winging it. I didn’t know who Ted Bundy was. But the name sounded like some New England blazered politician. I talked too much. I talked too much all the time then. I just filled in the spaces.
“He was a very good student,” Dr. Kemp said.
Mrs. Geesie came in and snapped the TV. “I’m just putting on the picture with no sound,” she said. “Gregory, call me when you see my show.”
“She has her show she watches every day,” Dr. Geesie said. It seemed pretty soon time to go.
“Your mother may not remember me,” Dr. Kemp said.
“She doesn’t like the idea of me finding my father. So I probably won’t tell her right away.”
“Well I can understand why you’d like to find him. One likes to have some kind of contact. It doesn’t have to be close. The way he treated you you probably wouldn’t want to be close. But you’d still like to know. If you ever do find him, I’d like to hear.”
“I will. I’ll call you.”
“John and I were good friends, I think he treated me shabbily but, you know, I still have some feelings about him. I don’t have any bitterness.”
“No. You don’t sound like it.” I stood up to go. On the TV were cut shots of bells in a cool place, a high tower. I wanted to hear them. All of a sudden, I wanted to hear music. Then a jewelry box opened somewhere else in the house and its vain cranked music sounded like an ice-cream truck.
“Well, he’s either down on his luck or all of a sudden he made it big. I don’t feel that he would be sort of in between.”
“What’d you say your first name was?” Dr. Geesie asked me.
“Mayan.”
“Mayan,” Dr. Kemp said. “Why sure, I think I did hear him mention your name.”
“Well, I don’t know what else to tell you,” Dr. Geesie said, “but there you’ve got some of the bad and some of the good. He was a charming fellow.” He shoved himself up again and stood holding the bowl of M&Ms.
“I knew that a daughter existed, why sure,” Dr. Kemp said. “Existed. That makes you sound like a statistic.”
I was writing out my phone number on slips of paper. I asked them to call me collect if they ever heard anything. I kept stealing glances at the TV. It was still the high cold heavy metal bells.
“Oh, well,” Dr. Kemp said. “I’m always broke.”
“So definitely call collect then.” Sometimes you crave music in a way that seems physical. This was in my chest.
“I have drug bills of two hundred dollars a month. And none of them are fun drugs.”
“Do you have something wrong?”
“Oh, I have angina and diabetes. I’ve got the ball of wax.”
At the screen door, I asked. “Oh, Dr. Geesie. What’s your middle name?” George, I had decided.
Just then, the woman bent down in front of the TV, her heels rising out of her shoes. Bells spilled loudly and filled the room like a higher ceiling, a clean height.
“Graybner,” He said. “Gregory Graybner Geesie. All my brothers and my father have the same initials. G.G.G.”
I WAS THINKING of changing my name. It was just a little thing. I should have done it once when I changed schools. It would have been easy. I changed schools so many times. I didn’t like to write my name. Mayan Amneh Stevenson. It was a kind of alias and not legal. But it was printed on my driver’s license, all lines of credit. All my school records said this. My social security number was wrong, faked anyway, so I could work in Dean’s Ice Cream Diner when I was thirteen. My mother shrugged at the time. “You’ll just get your money a year earlier when you’re old. You can be sixty-four. That’ll be nice.” Sometimes I took comfort in the big mess of this country. In not being found.
I was Mayan, a word you could finger like two beads on a chain. I had a chain with just two pearls. One of the times I’d seen my father when I was a child, we went to a restaurant that served oysters. You were guaranteed to get a pearl. We ate the whole plate of them and we didn’t find a pearl, so they went to the back and got us two more oysters and this time they each had a pearl. We thought they had a special pail of them in back that they knew had pearls.
“But how could they know?” my mother said.
“X-rays,” I said, a smart aleck.
They put them on an add-a-pearl-necklace right then, but I’d
never gotten any more. Whenever we ate with my father, we ate better. We had whole meals of fancy food and dessert. We ate it all and never worried about our weight because we knew this would be just once and not always. It wouldn’t last, it would go away and remind us that chances are only once, taste ephemeral, and life in this world, all its sweetness and rain, is nothing to count on continuing because it will, but only without us. Time is short, attachment expensive, but it was worth it for us to eat every time. It never tasted enough. We had such appetite. The thing I still love best about us, my mother and me, is that we wanted so.
I just started using the name Ann. It seemed pretty much the same thing. Amneh had always been my middle name, one I’d had to spell for a stair of teachers calling roll in elementary school. Somebody told me once that Amneh meant “wish” in Arabic. And that was all the truth in my name. I was almost a Jane, my mother said. But my father thought that was too American. Too short. “A Jane will grow up to have bangs,” he apparently said. He allowed no name that could end up nicked, with a y or an ie. That eliminated Jennifer, Catherine and Rebecca. His family name we had lost, although it loosened a small waterfall of sounds: Atassi.
Stevenson was my stepfather’s name. It wasn’t even really his either. Ted had been adopted, back in upstate New York where he was from.
And Ted meant to adopt me as his child. I probably spoiled that. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to or not. I wanted both at the same time, without my father ever knowing. It was up to me, my mother said, no one could help me, it was my decision, but I knew she wanted me to say yes to Ted. I tried to stall for time and it never happened anyway. My mother and Ted had their own problems and maybe they forgot. But before they honeymooned in upstate New York, my mother dressed in a suit and a square black hat with two feathers, col ted up the cement stairs of the school board building and changed my name on the manila records. That was all she had to do. And when I was returned to my grandmother I was Ann Stevenson. Nothing legal had been done but it was official. And I was too young, it seemed, for any of the procedures to matter much. I guess most everybody in charge thought a mother could call her child whatever she pleased.
It had been more than twenty years since any of us saw Ted. That was longer ago than the last time I saw my father in California, although there was nothing comparable about the two men, and though I suppose I could have seen Ted, any time. Ted Stevenson was not a hard man to find.
The world of professional figure skating is not large. After us, Ted had moved to Milwaukee, remarried a younger woman and with her, he had five children, all boys. He lived, I believed, in Nebraska now, teaching figure skating, as he always had. I suspected he looked about the same too; he was a nice-looking man, thin-faced, not the sort to age. He once told me how he had toured with the Ice Capades through Cuba, before the revolution. Their crew went to small-town arenas and laid out the ice. In one remote province, he was the first man to introduce pictures. The people had seen cameras before, but Americans had come, taken, and never sent the prints. Or perhaps it was the mail down there, Ted said, maybe some sent them and they never arrived. Ted brought a Polaroid. He held the snapshot in his palm, looking from the shiny paper to the old man, tears coming from his face loosely as the picture developed. He was seeing a miracle, Ted told me.
“A science invention,” I’d said. “Not a miracle.”
“To them it was,” Ted said.
“Not to me.”
“Nothing is to you, Maya.” He always called me Maya, like the Indians.
“That’s right,” I said. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus either, in case you have any plans for a costume.”
There was a father/daughter breakfast at my school once and I brought the slip home to my mother. She made arrangements with Ted. And then the day came and he was there looking serious and dutiful in a new white shirt and an ascot. None of the other fathers would be wearing ascots. Most of them worked at the paper mills or at the canning factory. I put on my regular shorts and got on my bike, ready to take off. My mother ran out to where I was, holding her bathrobe together, but you could see her slender naked body curved inside. “Go on in and change. Hurry,” she said, “he took the day off from the rink and dressed up for this.” His voice came from the door like a pulpit, “Let her be, Adele, it’s up to her. Whatever she wants.”
“I want to ride my bike,” I said, my hands still on the handlebars. And I rode away.
A few years ago, I tracked Ted down. It took under an hour. I was working for the Wildlife Sanctuary and I was sitting alone at the little indoor desk that sold postcards and animal pins and ten-cent bags of dry corn to feed the ducks and geese. It was late afternoon. I liked it because you had to wear old clothes. I sat up on a stool. There was corn all over the ground. Once in a while I made long-distance calls from there. They never seemed to check. Certain things have always seemed socialistic. Books. Men’s shirts. The phone.
Ted’s wife answered. She was nice. She said how lucky it was that I’d called when he was home. But then when he got on the phone, we couldn’t find much to say. He seemed slightly unhappy to hear from me. “Yeah, your mother,” he said with a bad laugh. He had a rind of bitterness. I must have given him my address because his wife followed up our conversation with a photo Christmas card—the five boys in gray and green suede climbing shorts and green suspenders—and that was the end of that. On the bottom of the card, the wife had scribbled, “Ted is going to write you a letter.” He never did.
I FINISHED my childhood without a father. I remember the consternation: I used to stand outside, my arms crossed, tennis shoes scraping the porch lip just for the feel of it, counting cars from the highway. It was still light out and my grandmother was asleep, already done for the day. This was the year before my mother and I left. I could see cars in the distance but from our porch I couldn’t tell what make they were or if there was one person inside or two. I’d follow them to see if they’d turn at our off-ramp. They almost never did. I still believed my father would come back. But would he make it in time.
If you asked me if I thought he was alive, I would have said, yes, and I’d have meant it. Sometimes I wondered, would I ever just see him again in my life without my doing anything. If someone else, something, would arrange it. Now, I figured, if I found him, I would never know.
It is possible to believe and not to believe in someone’s existence, equally, at the same time.
BUT FAR AWAY as my mother and I went, we both still kept Ted’s name. In California, we tried to be that family for a while, proper, behind its screen door. It was like a raincoat. Stevenson. Sounding everything we were not: rich, old, respectable, standard, British. Not even legally mine.
In California, my mother bought things to make us seem like once we’d had more. Somewhere else, back in Wisconsin, where the new people here couldn’t check. I’d come home from school once in the afternoon, during the rainy season, and a whole set of china was in the cupboards: plates, salad plates, cups, saucers, everything. The fragile china was shining, painted with blue and green peacocks, in the dull kitchen, on that dark afternoon.
My mother lifted one down to show me but we didn’t eat on them. My mother focused her homemaking on kitchens. She didn’t really know how to cook, but she could make a kitchen look beautiful. We had the plates and clear light-blue glasses and a yellow gingham tablecloth and curtains and by the sink, we had brushes made of rush twigs twined together, a deep yellow soap in the perfect shape of a moon.
Once a friend of mine came over after school, a true rich girl from the far north side. Calla lived in a mansion. This was a rainy day too. I never knew what would happen when I had a friend come over, but my mother was there that day and she was almost normal. She hovered near the kitchen, which seemed to me what she was supposed to do, to be a mother. In a while she came to my room and knocked and asked us if we wanted hot chocolate or tea and cookies. I loved her then. I don’t know where she found the cookies. We hadn’t had any cook
ies before. Then we sat in the kitchen with our tea and cookies, served, in honor of my friend, on the peacock china. Calla picked up the saucer and turned it over, and looked around the room in a distracted, enchanted way. That was one of those moments when I felt quiet because my mother was right. That was what she had intended.
Now, it seems to me wastefully funny: all the stunts and extravagant effort, the telephone wheedling after money, all to fool a dreamy thirteen-year-old girl on a rainy afternoon.
MY MOTHER SHRUGGED ONCE. “It’s a great name,” she said. “With Atassi, no one ever said it right. You always had to spell.”
That was true. I was Mayan Atassi for seven years and I remembered saying “A-T-A-S-S-I” as if that were the name. I was Atassi with the nuns. On their simple elementary school rolls, that was my name. We had a white curved Volkswagen bug then, too, with plaid seat covers and the window on the passenger side wouldn’t go all the way up. Both these circumstances, the oddness of our name and the cold wet from the window, formed snags I minded, but they were also ours and I would have never dreamed of changing them. I thought that was our car, we would have it forever. Once we ate creamed shrimp on toast in a restaurant downtown and when we came onto the street again, other cars had parked too close for us to get out. Our bug’s name was Ginny. My mother pounded the front fender and said damnit and tears watered her face, but then she shrugged and sighed “Hokay,” and pushed my neck with her hands, walking, until we stopped at the cab stand in front of Boss’s Tobacco and Magazine Shop.
Later, I’d thought of changing my name back but there was the trouble of everyone else. I had been Stevenson for too long. A lot of my friends said they thought Stevenson was a better name. I felt the other but I wasn’t sure. Plus about something like this, nobody else really cares. The world is busy.
But that was why I never liked parties. The first question was always, What is your name? Then, And where are you from? Both of those, for me had more than one answer. The truth was spiked and jagged and took too long for social conversation.
