by Mona Simpson
At least I was old enough now so people didn’t ask right away, What does your father do? Children demand that of other children. When I met my college boyfriend’s family, his little brother badgered me, “Come on, what does your dad do? He’s a lawyer, right? Come on, tell us. I know it’s either law or medicine.”
It was neither law nor medicine, wherever he was. That much I did know.
“Gigolo,” I said.
A thousand times people had said to me in my life, You don’t know your father?
No, I’d answer. Or, well, some but not much.
And I lied. Once I told a man on a bus that I had six brothers and sisters and that my father was a baker and I played the violin. A lot of times I tried to tell the truth but making it sound more normal than it was. Well, we lived in different cities. I lived with my mom. He was a divorced dad. I didn’t really know him that well.
Now, Atassi sounded to me like a shoe, I could draw it, a fancy slipper, tilting up at the toes. At the time, when it was my name, it seemed like a pair of thick squarish black eyeglasses that I always wore.
Ann Stevenson was like a name. But the name of someone else. I saw her in a boxy suit, bought this season or last, cautiously. I imagined Ann Stevenson as some young woman at a convention with a name tag on her upper left suit-jacket pocket. The suit was melon-colored or pale green. Dull blue. Maybe I had become a little this conventioneer.
I’d hated the name Mayan and liked it and gone around and around. Most of the time I didn’t think of it. There are aspects of yourself you grow into with time, your nose, your face, your legs. You know them, finally, only as your own, the way you could never, except for a few flashing moments, love or hate your own body.
So many Americans were like me—changed. Look at the phone book. Anything foreign got ironed. Thousands of women sealed away their names for a husband’s. And to their children, the old name was no big deal. They didn’t think of it as her real name any more than they thought of their mother’s childhood as her real life.
It happened to practically every woman in the world. I don’t know what my problem was. It was common. All of this was. It didn’t make me special. Still, I hadn’t married Ted. I didn’t love him.
I did love my father, though. However unrequited the feeling was.
I DROVE BACK TO THE HOTEL, drew the blinds and flopped on the made bed, belly down, chin to fabric so I smelled the old cotton and bleach, harshly clean. He wasn’t anywhere when I was in high school, he was just here. Living a life. Breezing out in good suits to meet the high weather and his ambition. Dinners at so-and-so’s to insure such and such a position. A gift for thus and such. Not thinking of me or my mother. Not ruining his life over us at all. Not even hampering it. He was just a man, nothing higher. And I was a fool. My grandmother had been right.
I had liked the old men, their fastidious distinctions, the way none of this moral business mattered to them anymore. They almost liked my father for his scandal, the way they once had for his clothes. A little color. Greed, ambition, all the vanities seemed milder to them now, themes like melodies with ends already known. But they were no relation. Neither of those men could have been my father.
After a little while on the bed, things began to be different. He’d never left his life to look for me.
I wanted to go home. I remembered coming out of a movie on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon and walking with Timothy to Tacita de Oro for cafe con leche and fried plantains. I craved rice and beans.
I called Mai linn. “Get this,” I said. “Everybody I talk to here calls everybody else Doctor. They take the Ph.D. very seriously in the state of Montana. Even after my dad dumped these old ladies in a Cairo jail, he’s still Dr. Atassi.”
Mai linn told me, “One day last spring I was just walking, it must have been May or June, and there was this little ceremony going on in front of the bell tower. They were giving doctorates to four or five people. One was a woman, the rest were guys. And I just stood behind a tree and watched. And when they lifted the tassels around the woman’s shoulders, that’s what they do, I started crying. I couldn’t believe it.” Mai linn was two years away from her Ph.D.
It was still day. I had to get to work. I didn’t feel like it much anymore. But I thought I better try and find Uta’s maiden name. Maybe I’d call J.D. Nash and ask about the marriage records in Nevada. I’d go to the library here tonight and read through the local newspapers, then tomorrow, first thing in the morning, I’d hit all the administration buildings.
It was so strange to be doing this thing that nobody else wanted or valued, that nobody had asked for. The world didn’t need it, it wasn’t useful or even beautiful, but just this huge, year-wasting project in my life I hadn’t even picked. My father’s leavingjust happened to me. It fell like a stone in the center of my childhood. We could either build everything around it or attempt to move it away or try to believe it didn’t matter. I thought of Emory’s toothpick structures, made up whole out of something as frail as a wish. That was more beautiful, surely.
This was built on shame, someone else’s carelessness that we had shrined into our lives’ cathedral. He’d tossed a cigarette butt down somewhere on the road and I’d taken that up and built a church around it.
I had to get out of that Holiday Inn room. I shoved up. I’d go to campus. This was the end.
It was my peculiarity to know things before they happened, not clairvoyance in any practical way, the kind of gift that involves policemen and German shepherds. My previsions were unreliable, some of the events did occur, some never materialized. That didn’t matter. I had a nature given to anticipation and what I anticipated most were ends.
I felt things ending a long time before they did.
The night I knew I would get into medical school, I was at a party at Emily’s house. Watching the moon and the rain in the lanterns, I went by myself out on Merl’s stone terrace and felt the sorrow of being the one who would leave.
I knew when Providence for me was over, before my grandmother had a third stroke. It had to do with snow and not wanting to go to sleep.
New York was ending that way now, but with more regret because I had never really settled and lived there.
And I knew when it ended with my father. It was that afternoon, on the way back to Firth Adams College. I saw a sheer face of rock and a faint rainbow, already lopsided, mostly dissolved. I got out of the car and stood hands on hips and looked for a long time. The colors drained and then it was gone, just a play of old light on the cliffs and canyons like an expression that had left a face empty.
What was coming next?
It would not be what I’d wanted.
It would be something less, something I wouldn’t recognize because I had not made him and he had not made me. Maybe we could learn to know each other slowly and something would build. But it would be something else, beside the point.
All my prayers, my years of prayers now were lost, spent, and I would have rather gathered them like coins in a hat than meet this man.
If I still wanted to believe, that would change too. It might not be possible.
It seemed, perhaps, through my own doing, I had made a grave mistake. Maybe it was better before, better to always believe, to live with an attitude of expectancy, a cocked still head, plumed like a bird.
That way you are always almost fully alive.
HE HAD JUST BEEN HERE, a man, chasing his own ends.
I stood with my hands on my hips absolutely alone. I started shouting to hear an answer and a long time later a pale echo circled back, but it was not my voice anymore, it had the hollowness of something big and expressionless, rock-dumb and empty, something from the huge identityless source and it was coming back, sound and motion, logarithm of language, my name, my old name over that mile of mountain.
Eventually it began to precipitate slightly, a fine close thread of sleet, not rain or snow, and there was a portion of rainbow just alighting there between the rock and the valley.
I stood awhile holding my elbows.
Love a person, that is the answer to the world. Forget grandeur and sacrifice and ideal prayer. Just love a person.
And all that kept my work alive was the chance I might be wrong and still not find him.
I BOUGHT COFFEE at a cart and walked slowly in a diagonal, so as not to spill.
Sometimes I thought my mother’s saying I was an overachiever had made me one. I was a person who couldn’t quit. In a way, I was grateful.
It was after midnight in a library and there were six years of daily newspapers in two stacks on the floor: the read and the unread. I’d spent the day in a campus phone booth, the atlas open to Nevada on my thigh, calling county clerk’s offices. J.D. Nash had checked the Bureau of Vital Statistics. Nevada had computerized in 1975 and only one Atassi showed up in the system. This was a Sahar Atassi marrying a Diane Thayer three years ago, when Sahar Atassi was twenty-seven. We scribbled with the birthdates and figured that the girl was then nineteen and born in Mountainview, California. For a moment, I thought he could be my brother, but then J.D. Nash told me that Sahar Atassi listed his father’s name as Tarik.
“I know,” he said. “I was thinking the same thing.” They listed their home as San Jose. Then J.D. Nash told me that everything before 1975 in Nevada was still just paper records, files, and every county clerk’s office kept their own. I volunteered to call the eleven counties. Seven took the rest of the afternoon and turned up nothing. Then I called San Jose information, idly, for Sahar Atassi. Nothing. I called Mountainview for those Thayers. I thought maybe I’d get her parents. Mountainview sounded rich to me, a certain way. I imagined high old trees, live oak, eucalyptus and pine, so the light came in plank-dense shafts and the air flecked green and gold. It was the kind of place you imagined going up hills and turning a corner and then seeing horses, huge and bright in the sun. I imagined the Thayers as riders, with yellow ruffled curtains in their ranch kitchen, formal dinners outside on their terrace. I saw Diane a tall cool blonde, sharp-featured, with big hands. A rider, a giver of summer lunches. No Thayers were listed in Mountainview. I could have ranged farther in the Bay Area, but that seemed a pretty remote tangent and I had to stop somewhere. That was the hardest part. Finding the place to stop.
I still had four more Nevada counties to go. I’d switched phone booths, to the one on the first floor, that had a view. My choices had narrowed to this. The counties got scratched off my list, mounting charges on my phone bill back home. Wouldn’t they have gotten married where they lived? Dr. Kemp said Uta—or Sonia—was from Reno. But Reno was in Carson City, Clark County, and that county clerk said no.
Every county clerk I talked to was a woman and I told each one of them the truth. The tedium of their office jobs fell slowly like dust in their voices. I could see the old wooden files, the VENETIAN blinds, the loud big fan, the boredom. My story brought a little silver; their files could change a life. Each one of them said no in a different way.
I thought I’d get lucky with the last county, Esmeralda, in Goldfield, Nevada. But that woman shuffled back to the phone slow and soft-voiced too. I heard the mix of paper on a desktop. “No, hon, I’m sorry, we’ve got nothing in that name. I went all the way back to ’55.”
Nights weren’t so bad. It was two o’clock. The library hummed, quiet. Most everyone must have been home asleep. I stopped and started again. Stopped.
I was just staring at my hand.
DEAN DANIELS—Frank his name turned out to be—wouldn’t talk. When he heard whose daughter I was, he told his secretary through the intercom that he had no information on the subject.
Then I went to the college president. His office was in an old, ivy-covered brick house. He sat behind an enormous desk in a high-ceilinged room, toying with a pencil. He wore a bow tie and suspenders. The suspenders encouraged me.
“I’m a daughter of Moham—John Atassi who taught for you, I understand, a long time ago.”
“John Atassi,” he said.
“Anyway, I’m looking for him and I haven’t seen him since I was a very young girl and my mother and I are looking for him just, well, basically to meet my father …” I don’t know why I blurted out my mother. It felt better to be two of us.
The pencil seemed purely balanced between his open palms. The sharpened tip hit the center of one, the pink eraser the center of the other.
“We haven’t seen him for years. I was put in touch with Dr. G.G. Geesie, who told us about the fiasco you had with him. But I was really wondering if there was anything you could help me with, by way of finding him. If you knew any friends, Dr. Geesie said that he was a ladies’ man, which he was I think in the old days, unfortunately with my mother, but I was just wondering if there might be some woman you’d know of in town I could call who might have some notion where he may be.” I really talked too much.
He took the pencil and laid it on his blotter, parallel. “I … would … have … no … idea … whatsoever.” He spit those words out hard like watermelon seeds.
NIGHT IN THE HOTEL WAS BAD. I left the library at two-thirty. I hadn’t eaten. I began to see the numbers on my bills swarm off white pages like bees at my face and nothing different. I didn’t need to eat tomorrow anyway, I was fat enough. If I ate one meal a day that would be better for everything, I decided. But sleep came hard, in bits. A strange light sided through the Holiday Inn drapes. My room was on the first floor and sometimes I heard pickup doors slamming in the parking lot and the walls trembled and I hugged my knees up under the covers.
Then the phone jolted my heart.
“Just come home,” Jordan said. That loosened me to cry. “We can keep looking from here.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
That started a new storm of it.
“How did you know I’m here?”
“I met up with your friend Emily. We were both going to your apartment, which I told you, you left unlocked. She was there to check your shoe size. She needs you to try on some dress. She called your friend in Philadelphia, too, to see where you were. Tell me, come on, just swallow and then tell me why you can’t come home.”
I stuffed knuckled sheet into my mouth. “Because it’s not home.”
“Aw.” He laughed at that, his nervous high laugh. “That’s a good reason. Well, we’ll make it a home.” I could see him shopping in a bright new furniture store, full of plastic receptacles and lamps.
“No, it’s not that. I want to go to the personnel office tomorrow and ask about his records. And go visit his department. Those old guys said everybody there now is new but I’m right here, it’s crazy not to check. Even if I could find an old address.”
“So do that tomorrow and then get on a plane tomorrow night.”
“I’ve got the car, Jordan.”
“What?” This was the first real blade in his voice, as if I’d tricked him, showed some stranger in me he’d never seen. I’d heard this turn in other people’s voices, but this was the first time in him.
“I’ve got the Olds, my grandmother’s Oldsmobile. She left it to me when she died.”
“Leave it there, we’ll get it later.” He said that without much conviction.
“I can’t. Don’t worry, it’s not that bad. I’ll just drive it back to Wisconsin and then fly home. Listen, I’m better than I sound.” I could hear, he thought I’d gone really bad. He wouldn’t even tell me anything about himself.
That afternoon, I’d run out from the library, needing something. I thought something to eat. I bumped into a boy who was bending down to lock a bike and he looked up mad and then when he saw me his face changed. “Sorry,” he said.
But really, I was still fine then, no worse.
TWO BIG MAPS hung on a bulletin board outside the personnel office. On one, colored pins marked the places Firth Adams students came from; on the other, the pins showed where they went. Someone now worked in Xian, China. A hometown pin was stuck in Racine. I wondered who could be here from home. I wo
uld’ve loved to have an old friend here now. I felt like a person at the end of life. But then I remembered, any student from Racine would be ten years younger.
I walked into the door stenciled PERSONNEL on a vertical ribbed glass panel.
“Yes, can I help you?” a young woman said.
“I’m here on a kind of delicate and bizarre personal matter.” I leaned over the counter to whisper this.
The young woman took a step back. “Yes?”
“I’m looking for John Atassi, who was employed by you many many years ago, in ’73, and left, I understand, in bad circumstances. But I’m actually his daughter and I haven’t seen him since I was a young girl.” I lifted my hand to my face and breathed against it, smelled. It was normal, just slightly warmed air. It didn’t taste. Still she seemed as if my breath occupied physical space.
“ ’73. Mkay, then I don’t know. He wouldn’t be on this computer file. We only go back to 1980.”
“Do you have any hard files before that?”
“We do keep records, but we don’t update addresses once they leave and so …”
“Could you check them anyway. Whatever you had would be useful.”
“Now, how exactly do you spell his name?”
I spelled it for her slowly.
“Okay. And the first name again was?”
“Was John.”
“Did you want to wait while I see what we have in the basement or can I call you?”
“Oh, I’ll wait.”
“It’s not … it may take a few minutes.”
I sat in a chair, watching office life. She looked at me like I couldn’t be helped. I sank further back into the chair. The room was still and full of small movement at the same time, like a pond. Young men and women with clipboards arrived and they were led to an inner office. They seemed lightly dressed, crisp. Every time the older woman came back out, she looked at me.
I smiled, arms on the armrests. I hadn’t slept last night. Waiting was fine.
“Okay, I’m back,” my girl finally said. “I checked with Rosabeth Larson, who is the personnel director. And she said that we cannot give out addresses or any identification codes of former employees. What we do do is if somebody wants to send us a letter that’s already stamped, we will put the address on it and send it to that person. We can try that but the last thing that we have here is actually a letter that came to us from California in ’76, so I don’t even know if that would be current.”
