by Mona Simpson
My kids, I took each one to be baptized, but mostly I worry their diplomas. Mai-ling, she is a more true Catholic. I try to pray, but many times, I cannot. I know what God would say—Why now, Lola?
The priest walks behind the altar. When he returns, he hands Mai-ling a paper. He is tall, sharp featured, with neat hair. China breaks free and runs. I am the catcher.
Mai-ling continues her slow crab walk.
“I cannot read,” she says, handing up the paper. “I stop at grade three.”
I read out, “Father, mother, date of birth, parish. It is a form.”
I remember once, China and her brother on the lap of Mai-ling in a big chair with a cardboard book. Mai-ling tried to wriggle up, but China kept pointing at the pages. With her ABC book, one word on a page for each letter, the kids were trying to teach Mai-ling. Yaya, see, that is Cat. C-A-T.
There is thunder again, so we look at the high windows. The colors blur, like the church windows the kids made once with the iron of Mai-ling; two pieces of wax paper and crayon shavings, melted to beauty.
I take up the collection for Lettie, to send her home. Some are just not strong enough for here. Each babysitter gives something; most give a ten or a twenty. My pupil and Cheska together, they count out one hundred dollars. I do too.
Helen picks us up at the church. We squeeze in the back, kids on our laps.
The mothers here drive in the front alone.
When we arrive at my weekend house, the phone is ringing, and Helen slides on her socks. She motions that the call, it is for Lucy.
“Who?” Lucy mouths.
Helen covers the receiver. “Him.”
Lucy crosses her arms, shakes the head. I have daughters; I recognize this shake. But I have never said no that way to an employer.
“She’s busy right now. Yes, I’ll give her the message.”
“Tony, he is in the doghouse?”
“That is not Tony.”
“So, who?”
Lucy looks down.
“The dentist,” Helen says. “He’s been calling. Frequently.”
The second commandment of Lola: Do not involve your employer in your personal life. “A dentist!” is all I can think to say. “But a dentist is very good.”
“I will just see with Tony.”
Tony! I have known stubborn loves like this before. They do not end like the ones she has been watching in the movies. Then there is a honk outside. My protégée hooks her purse strap over her shoulder.
“Tony will drive you to your weekend place?”
“We will just go to Chinatown.”
“You are not working tonight?”
“No more.” So my pupil quit her Saturday job without asking me. Living in this house she is becoming confident. All because a painter we do not know the name. She probably wants that Tony will walk in and see her the way she can be here, not sit in the car and honk. She runs out, her bag bumping her side, and opens her own door. Everyone wants my pupil now. A dentist. My weekend employer. Everyone but Tony.
I am cleaning the kitchen when she comes back Sunday, carrying a can of chips. She takes from the waistband of her leggings a paper, folded to triangles, like a flag. “From The Book of Ruth, I found. The mom of Tony.”
I never lived without a plan for going home. Every year I got one-week vacation. I told the Daniels eleven months in advance. But then, as the time approached a sadness overtook me. Those were the days when I was most here. So much money for that one ticket. Just for me. I was not strong enough. Max pulled on my clothes. If I did not know what to do, Max did. I did not expect much from my husband anymore, but I listened to my kids on the telephone. One cry from them and I would have gone because they were mine. But they let Max have me.
They needed shoes. They wanted games; they had to have tuition. My money could give them things I could not. And the problem of not following your whims for so long is you no longer know what it is you want. I felt an embarrassment, every time I postponed my trip, but also relief. Max became quiet and very good. We took a long walk in the twilight. He stayed in his stroller and I pushed him past the band pavilion in Griffith Park.
I was frightened to see my children again.
It was easier to just go day to day.
Lita, Bel Air, 1975
My pupil looks to me; she has no mother. I will have to find her a good Filipino husband. But I am still needed for Williamo. She can play with her Tony for a while.
“Lola, I am gaining weights. In our province, a potato chip this kind, it is expensive. Here it is so cheap! But Tony, he wants for my stomach to be flat!”
Helen calls down. “Luce, you there?”
“Yes, Helen.”
I will go to my place. Three is a crowd.
“Do we have milk?” Helen drinks white hot chocolate before her bed.
“There is,” Lucy says. The holy words of America: There is.
So I walk home from the affair I did not take, and Claire puts into my hands a stain. “Chai,” she says. Here, the clothes are older, like my own. Williamo climbs up my knees; Paul gives me coupons for SavOn, telling me I will also need to purchase Tums. He takes pills now to sleep.
I help Claire to prepare the dinner. Here, they eat late.
“My weekend employers,” I say, “they have returned from the White House. He made a commercial for the Democrats. The president said thank you and shook the hand, but then he met Helen and he is staring at her feet! He cannot get over her shoes! Jeff told me.”
“Which shoes?”
“She show to me. They are very tall, many straps. Gold.”
“So that’s how they make it even.” My employer laughs. “Good for them.”
I look at Claire. She could not wear those shoes. Still, there is that melody, a tremble in the air. I am back.
Claire
A DAY IN DRAG
The kiss changed nothing.
Jeff called Paul. Helen called me. If I didn’t do something, she said, William wouldn’t get in. They took those private parenting lessons. How had I missed the school tours? Some essential mailing list had dropped my name. When I’d gone to the mothers’ group, they talked about Costco and trainers and complained about their nannies. I thought I could skip it. But I had and now we’d missed deadlines.
I called Paul. “Did you know about any of this?”
“Nope,” he said.
So I paid three hundred dollars to attend a class, taught by the woman who ran the school, and here I was, on a tiny chair, Friday at noon. I couldn’t send Lola to this. We needed Lola so I could attend. All the mothers in the room must have had nannies. We, the prospective parents (there was one man), wore name tags. Mine said CLAIRE, MOM OF WILLIAM, 2.7. Our instructress kept referring to our work (what I still lived for, cried over) as “background”—for example, “Her background is in dance.”
“I was a lawyer, but now I’m writing poetry,” Helen said, when it was her turn.
“Composer,” I said next.
“Poetry, music,” the instructress repeated.
The ideal mother: great legs and a background in ophthalmology (MELISSA, MOM OF SIMON, 3). No wonder parties in our twenties felt giddy: a secretary interested in journalism could, in the span of a few years, tip over to a background in journalism. Background was just preparation for these small chairs.
With my instrument in its case, pitched against a fence, after my lesson we were months behind paying Julie for, I used to watch the successful girls leaping on the green field, twirling batons. They made beautiful shapes, blurry cartwheels against the sky. But for what?
These women were the well-rounded girls grown up, motherhood making the end of good-at-everything.
I had only an ear. No wonder I couldn’t do it.
Each mother told a problem. Melissa talked about moving the baby in with her daughter. “I’d finally gotten the room just right. I’d been working with a decorator”—syntax to make Paul snicker: working with a decorator—“and now th
ere’s this crib …” But I liked Melissa. I could picture her daughter’s room, beautiful and still.
The one father present shoved back his chair. “Meeting,” he mumbled.
The instructress released him with a benedictive smile.
Paul would never be here. In fairness, he couldn’t have cared less that I was. “You don’t have to do that,” he’d said, at breakfast. “My mother didn’t go to any class. Just forget it.” By now, noon, I was sure he had.
But this seemed to be the way that Santa Monica children got into school.
The next woman, dressed up and poorer looking, said, “I should probably be at my job too. We’ve been through a divorce. I had to go back working. And since then my three-year-old only wants to eat ice cream. Should I let her, just for now?”
The whole room turned, one notch. I could hear the thinking—No to the ice cream, God no to the divorce, and especially that hairspray and the add-on nails.
The instructress made a point about choosing your battles and spelled out the name of a healthy ice cream. That child should have gotten our kids’ slots, but I doubted she would. The instructress sounded kind but overburdened, a teacher. And Helen and Jeff weren’t the only applicants taking private parenting lessons.
Helen described Bing’s sensitivity to noise.
I wasn’t so earnest, but neither did I want Will preschool-less. I thought about what to say. Will had thrown a stick at Bing, but I didn’t want to give the impression that he was a bully. Paul could have made these women laugh. I asked about going out of town for a concert. That seemed innocuous enough.
“I wouldn’t go away at his age,” the instructress said. “I just wouldn’t do it.”
I felt clobbered. Would she have said that to Jeff? Here, the female Jeffs were actresses. She would understand that a movie star had to leave. While the woman after me began to explain how her kids made too much noise in restaurants, I slipped outside to call Paul. “I’m a little wobbly,” I said.
“How’s your work going?”
“I’m at this school thing.” I held still. “I worry about Will. He threw a stick at Bing.”
“Oh, Claire, I’ve got to take that. It’s NBC.”
I stood for a moment listening to the dial tone. I knew what it was to rub your hands together, busy with your life’s work. I’d been that way once, and I, too, had had someone tugging me back: my mom, sometimes in hospitals, always wanting. I could use a little romance, I thought, still holding the phone. That’s what women got, to make them forget. How could you know that and still want it?
I wandered back in. The school looked sweet; I wouldn’t have guessed three-year-olds needed letters of recommendation. Kids lay on the floor drawing, the way I had.
“They’re making their autobiographies,” the teacher said. “Using inventive spelling.”
In 1960s-Catholic-school America, we didn’t invent spelling or write autobiographies. The nuns tried to teach us the story of the world. We made time lines. I included the Pyramids, the invention of mathematics (by the Arab peoples), the Boston Tea Party (cups flying over a choppy Atlantic), D-day, V-J Day, and the election of Richard Nixon. (I’d worn a NIXON’S THE ONE dress, made of plastic campaign banners, stapled together at the shoulders by my mother’s friend Julie.)
We hadn’t considered that our lives might contain important events.
Being born, baptized.
First communion in a little bride dress. The nuns had passed out mimeographed forms for the communion package, and I longed for the three-inch missal edged with real gold. But in my class, no one could afford that one.
Prom.
Graduation.
Going to college.
Falling in love, getting married.
Then, it stopped. For a girl in 1965, that was The End.
Mo-om, I asked once, what comes after? She was driving our VW, with the window on my side that didn’t go all the way up, so my right shoulder wetted.
Well, having children. Maybe buying a house, fixing it up. But my mother never owned a home. When she talked to me about life, she reverted to some ideal.
Even now, I wasn’t sure what I could tell a daughter. I should have been raising Will to be different. But I felt a little of what the rich must feel: I didn’t want to give away his advantages. When I picked up his clothes from the floor, I chanted iambic: Your wife is going to hate me. But by then I will be very very old.
I had a grandmother whose life was a stationary field. I thought I constituted her holidays. My grandmother truly did not care what marks I got on my report card. Once she was gone, I wondered, where could I ever go to rest?
Women crowded around the instructress like leaping dogs. Helen had the mom uniform: those thin pants that ended above your ankles and new athletic shoes. Most of them wore the earrings Helen wanted, with large screwbacks. The bigger the diamond, I’d noticed, the more tortuous the apparatus. The women asked passionate questions about toilet training, sleep, and separation. I cared about these things too, but I had to go. The mother of the ice-cream eater also hurried out.
A picture of a woman hung in the library of the preschool. With a cap of uniformly curly hair, the results of what we then called a permanent, she sat in an upholstered chair, her left hand lost in the fur of a collie, WIFE, MOTHER, LIBRARIAN engraved on the plaque.
Once the kids were born … women still said. (MOM OF SIMON, 3, BACKGROUND OPHTHALMOLOGIST.)
I’d once asked my grandmother when had been her happiest time. When the kids were small. Whole lives packed into five words.
Another plaque I’d stopped at was in the Natural History Museum, below huge, reconstructed dinosaur bones: PERSONALITIES IN PALEONTOLOGY: HILDEGARD HOWARD. A Los Angeles woman, she’d studied bird fossils, carried a notebook, a pencil, and calipers, and measured bird bones every day of her life, wearing a hat, a good dress, and pearls. “I have a hard time recognizing real birds,” she said. She’d married another bird-bone paleontologist, a man seven years younger. They worked in the same museum for decades, but never had children.
Helen knocked on my Jeep window. “Want to go see them?”
The floor of our rental house made a dim shallow sea, strewn with toys. Lola sat, a queen amid the debris. There must have been nine nannies with again as many kids. William stood, a truck hanging from his hand. I felt my luck. I never once would have rather had a different child.
Foreign babysitters nodded too politely over their plates. Lola had spread a messy feast. I didn’t envy anyone her nanny either. I knew Lola was the one.
“Where you go now?” she asked. “You will not work?”
“She wants to take a hike,” I whispered.
“For what you do that?”
I shrugged. “Make friends, I guess.”
Lola shrugged then.
I swooped up my boy. The room may have been a wreck, poor Paul working till midnight for a showrunner who still didn’t get his jokes, but I thought it gave our boy something to have the party in our house.
“What do you say when I say Joop joop?”
He giggled in his way we should have recorded, because it would be gone forever soon. “Joop joop!” he said, full of mischief.
“Joop joop!” I said. “No, I say Joop joop. What do you say?”
When he was just learning to talk, I used to tell him if we were ever lost from each other, I’d call out Joop joop and he would answer me Joop joom. This was the private nonsense that knitted happiness.
William stood shaking his head, refusing to say it. “Joom,” I whispered in his ear.
I locked the children back into the dimness, safe in the room of toys.
Then Helen and I stalled outside. Through the wood-and-stucco walls, we heard him sobbing. Helen shrugged. She left Bing all the time. For every errand, every Pilates class, she had to go. Will and I took it harder; usually I trudged upstairs only once a day.
But wasn’t it better to touch love, even if that opened longing?
Halfway out on the lawn I heard:
To be or not to be; that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Yes, then what?” Lola prompted.
“Joop joom,” he said, for me not to hear.
Every time I left, I measured: For what? But today was mostly shot already. At three o’clock, when people at jobs had been working six hours, I followed Helen up a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains, her biscuit-colored calves moving like even scissors.
She lacked the bright patches of anger that brought my friends into relief. She was oddly blank.
“Marriage is hard,” she said. What she told me then was pretty much what I’d expected, but it was the first time I’d known this kind of love up close. My friends had more or less the marriage I had. Someone kind. We’d married late and chosen with our eyes open. I was a realist; you didn’t see guys like Jeff with women like me. I felt curious about their marriage, though. I wanted to prove once and for all that my wiring was faulty; I wanted to put my crush to rest. At night, it darted in the pool before sleep.
“I decided to marry him before we even met.” She’d built it all out of his name. I thought of those extravagant miniature towers that grew in a water glass. Magic Rocks. The first summer, she’d walked inside a net. “Dates finally felt like dates were supposed to,” the way she’d imagined them, sitting on the floor with her doll. Her attention honed with the focus of a miner’s lamp: a thousand small efforts, meals cooked, punch lines remembered, she went on a diet—all for one judge. A hard one.