by Mona Simpson
“How did your piece go in New York?” Lola asked.
“Not too well. They didn’t like it.”
“No? What do they know. Maybe other cities will like it.”
She brought me lunch to my workroom on a tray.
The house stayed quiet. On slopes of the day, I’d feel a collapse and think, Maybe I can’t do this anymore. But music was all I could ever do. I looked down the stairs, at the still living room, the empty chairs. I lay on the floor, listening to Wagner. Lola came in with a cool towel.
I still had so many streets to cross with William to deliver him to the other side.
Now I dreaded what I’d liked before, the drop-off. Lola picked him up from school that first week, and I met them in the park after to take Will for a walk. Before supper, I went out with shears and cut flowers for our table, arranging twigs and flowers that would last only a day. I’d studied Lucy. Maybe this was what I could do now.
“Flowers?” Lola said. “What for?”
She ate with us. I let her give the bath while I flipped through the glossy pages of cookbooks, glimpsing an alternate life. All the women here had turned themselves into grown-ups who could sit and chat and tend children. Could I? They believed a child should be attended by a mother most of the day. Paul didn’t believe that.
I didn’t know if I did. I hadn’t grown up that way. But look at me!
The high A-flat stayed.
On the weekend, we walked out again. The dense morning fog burned off; it was hazy and I still couldn’t see.
Then I had to dress and go teach. The first day, my ears were ringing, but then it was done and over, the first day.
I winced a moment, thinking; maybe the mothers were right and it was arrogant to spend years making a gift no one had asked for. Still, I heard an implication of melody in some plane noise outside and put down the notes.
Lola knocked on my door with lunch. “I make egg, you want?”
When she returned later to take the tray, she sat at the piano.
“You teach me,” she said.
I taught her the major scales. I took out the book I’d once bought for Will. She was more interested than he’d been. I wrote out the notes. Key signatures. Put her fingers over a few chords. Showed her the two places where there is no black key between.
When I went downstairs to start dinner, I complained for the hundreth time about the black kitchen.
“In our place, we know how to fix that,” Lola said. “Not so hard. All we do is paint and put new tiles. I know how grouting, the problem is we have to get a guy to take these off.”
Two days later, at breakfast, she said, “I talked to the old guy at the place of Ruth. He can take this off and bring it away. If you buy new tiles, I will teach you how.”
“Really?” I’d lived in rented places my whole life. Even if we’d wanted to change things, they weren’t ours. But this landlord lived far away. “Okay,” I said.
Danny came one day with an old guy and they hacked off the tiles. “Demo,” they called it and I paid them two hundred dollars. The kitchen was a dusty wreck, but before they left they put up a new surface, called a green board, and swept everything clean.
When he came home, Paul put a hand to his forehead. “Did we have to do this now?”
The next day, Lola and I started. She stirred a pot of something called mastic and we buttered it on the back of the tiles. She crouched on top of the counter and set on the tiles, with rubber spacers between them. I got good at the grouting with a small trowel and a sea sponge.
“See. You teach me music, I teach you this,” she said.
“I owe you a bunch of lessons.” I sat in the kitchen for a long time once we finished, in the clean watery light. Before she left to pick up Will, I brought the cello down and showed her dominant tonic, five one, five one, explained triads, and began to sketch out the sonata form.
The next week, I took Will to school. Now, with the pilot in preproduction, Paul left the house by seven. I saw Helen the first day. She didn’t mention my being back or having been gone. In fact, she never made any reference to my symphony again.
“Thanks for the flowers,” I said, standing by the cubbies.
“Sure.” She held her tummy at the bottom. I thought of the dress I’d bought once, size 2, hanging in the back of Will’s closet. For my girl. I couldn’t afford another child now, though. Then there was the flimsy dress Paul had bought me, not on sale. Maybe what I could afford didn’t matter anymore.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
She looked at me strangely. “Paul didn’t tell you? I had a miscarriage.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Apparently it’s very common.” She shrugged. “We’ll just do it again.”
That seemed weird. Didn’t miscarriages usually make people sad? I called Paul. When he said, I’m in the parking lot, got to go now, it felt like a cut.
Wednesday, I stood at the park, opening the stroller. For the first time, Will didn’t want to come. So I followed him around equipment, the only mother there, the other adults immigrant nannies and guys playing pickup basketball. Lola crossed her arms. If the mother is here, then why cannot I take an off?
“I will be the one,” she said, grabbing the stroller. “You can work.”
But I didn’t feel like working. I’d lost my way. At the top of the high twisty slide, I sat with my legs spread, Will between. Far below, my cell phone rang. This was March of 1995, when most of the moms had cell phones but none of the nannies did yet.
“Lucy,” I shouted down. “Can you get that!” Lola would have hated doing it. She would have felt like a maid.
“Claire! It is Paul!” Lucy yelled. The romantic. She carried her front high, like a pigeon. She threw the phone underhand, and twenty feet up, I caught it, collapsing with that tiny victory, winded against the metal. “Hey! How’re you?”
“Little stressed … Mary Catalanato, the one at the studio, production side …”
Though I waited for them, Paul’s actual calls disappointed me. What did I expect, in the middle of the day? Willie climbed over my legs and whooshed down.
“… on Friday. So you should probably make an appointment for your hair. And does he need a cut?” There: the coin dropped in its slot; he’d called to tell me to get Will’s hair cut for the pilot shoot. There was a beep—his other line. “I won’t be late. Eight, eight-thirty.”
Ten, I thought. The phone sat, a bar on my leg. I leaned back against the metal wall of the room at the top of the slide. Somewhere, designers had decided to puncture red metal, so sky showed through, blue polka dots. Park designers! I wished I knew different people.
I’d wanted to tell him where I was.
Will climbed up to my room. He knocked.
“Hi.”
He stood in the middle of the floor. “Hi,” he said, looking down. “What are you doing?”
I picked up the cello, played a little of the phrase I was toying with. He pulled the collar of his shirt and started biting it. Many of his collars now were gnawed. I swooped him up and sat him at the piano, set his fingers to a C scale. “Should I teach you a song?”
“Not now,” he said. “Later.” Then he bumped down the stairs, face-first, the way he loved to that scared me. I didn’t stop him. I wanted him to have thrilling pleasures. And so far, he hadn’t hurt himself.
“He told you to get your hair done?” Lil sounded riled.
“It’s not like it sounds.”
“Really? Because it doesn’t sound so good.” Lil usually assumed a fond tone about Paul, as if he and her husband were good guys who just couldn’t help not being, well, us. “I mean, he should find you beautiful all the time, shouldn’t he?”
“That might be more realistic in your case than mine.”
Her pause was the twinge between truth and kindness. We were awkward approaching this difference in our lots. “You’re plenty beautiful.”
“Speaking of beautiful, we have to ha
ve dinner with Jeff and Helen.”
I was still hurt that they hadn’t said anything about my concert.
That night, I thought of my conversation with Lil. All my life I’d made random stabs at beautification, usually alone. They’d been costly and they hadn’t worked. “What do you do besides haircuts?” I asked Helen. “For female maintenance.” She’d once told me about their sex life, but this felt more private. “I mainly do the dentist and the occasional haircut,” I went on. “But I can tell there’s more to it.”
I watched her deciding whether or not to trust me.
“I do more than that,” she said. “I’ll take you, if you want.”
“I’ve always been afraid of beauty shops. Meanwhile, Paul wears the same thing every day.” I elbowed him.
“They all do.” She shrugged. “But who’d want to?”
I would. There it was: my missing feather.
“Well, tell me when, and I’ll book us.” Then she got stiff again. A silence.
“She’s upset,” Jeff said. “She thinks you guys don’t like the school.”
“You know how many people begged us to help them get in? And you act like you’d rather be somewhere else.”
“But we do like the school,” Paul said. “We’re just worried the school doesn’t like us! Or him. Apparently, he’s not big on circle time.”
“Not big on circle time,” I repeated.
“Go in and talk to them,” Helen said. “They’ll help you.” Then she steered the conversation to her new concern: Was an immigrant nanny right for Bing at this age? “I mean, she’s great with flowers and ironing T-shirts but—”
Paul and I looked at each other. Lola wouldn’t touch an iron.
“Lucy’s young, I guess,” I said.
“Oh, it’s Lola too. Bing tells her, Lola, make me a grill cheese. And she jumps.”
“Willie does that.” I sighed.
“I’ve seen Will hit Lola,” Helen said.
I bit my lip. “Hope she did something about it.”
Helen shook her head. “Bing is definitely outgrowing Lola.”
Outgrowing Lola! “But she loves them.”
“I think a college girl,” Helen said, shaking her head as if she were far down a road of thought we couldn’t hope to follow. “We’ll see.”
As soon as I began to feel settled, the terms changed. I was starting to understand why these women considered motherhood a full-time job.
When we got in the car, Paul said, “A UCLA girl isn’t going to do the dishes.”
“But I don’t like it that he hit her! I’m sure she didn’t do anything.”
“We’ll have to talk to him.” Paul wanted to think about his pilot in a straight line, so the rest of us should stay in place—wife, child, nanny—until he had time to consider us all. If I pushed my work to the center the way Paul did, Will would grow up on the peripheries. I didn’t work in a straight line, anyway. I had to sink into parts of myself I didn’t know. That took the opposite of force.
And we needed Lola. Not only for Will but for us. Paul was never going to do the things she did that I didn’t want to do by myself. She’d taken pruning shears to the Christmas tree, hacking off branches to make it shapely, before Will and I hung the delicate, shiny ornaments.
“I thought they still wanted Lola,” I said. “Meanwhile, Helen’s been dreaming about a Tri Delt.”
“Sounds like they’re canning Lucy, anyway.”
Lucy made those flowers. And ironed, apparently. “Maybe we should hire her.”
“Lola’s better for Will,” Paul said, reaching a hand over to rub my shoulder absentmindedly, impatient to get home. Probably every husband talked his wife into believing her nanny was best, the way we talked ourselves into believing that about our husbands.
Paul had been on development this year, which was what we’d been waiting for—it was supposed to be the time he’d be home. Once, he’d walked up the lawn while it was still light out with the manner of a man carrying a party in his arms. When he came through the door, Lola jumped up from the table with her plate and scooted out to her room. For months, he worked on the pilot in coffee shops, and then another long plan unfurled. When the pilot went, and the show got on the air, if it received good ratings—then we could live. I still believed that, sort of.
On Sunday, Paul took us to see the set. We fumbled fifteen minutes before finding light switches in the cavernous soundstage. Then Will climbed behind the three-walled house. This’ll be part of his life, I thought, Hide-and-Seek on an empty soundstage.
Later, I stood by the fence at the ocean, with Will in his stroller, watching the sealed waves open. Long after we lived together, would he remember that his mother took him to see beauty?
Would it be different for him later, because he had Lola too?
Helen sighed as we walked into the loud square room, bored with beauty. Stylists gesticulated with blow-dryers at reflections of sphinx-faced women who gazed severely at themselves. A grandmother endured an intricate highlighting job next to a teenager sitting stiff in her chair. A dread filled me seeing them, so hopeful and so willing.
“Your color’s a little washed out,” the man said, lifting a piece of my hair to show me in the mirror. “You want to do some henna?”
“Sure.” I worried what it would cost, but it seemed impolite to ask.
“Lean over, I’ll layer it.” He rummaged through my hair.
“Better, huh?”
My head looked strange, but I nodded.
Then Helen and I lay on parallel tables while a woman smoothed hot wax on our legs with a Popsicle stick. When she pulled the wax off, it hurt, it really hurt. She leaned to inspect the area between Helen’s eyebrows. She took a tweezers to a few hairs, frowning. “Bikini today?”
“Brazilian.” Helen continued to read Newsweek.
“No, thank you,” I said. That seemed what starlets would do or women who hadn’t gone to college. “Does it hurt?”
“A little, because you’re not used to it. It’s nice, though, if you put on pretty underwear.” Pretty underwear! The woman pulled a curtain closed around Helen.
“Thanks, Marsha,” Helen said, a few minutes later. “Feels clean.”
“Maybe I’ll try.”
What a job: she took my knees, rocked them, put wax in spots that would normally be indecent. I felt like a baby being diapered, until the zip of pain.
“You get used to it,” she said.
The waxer put on a pair of magnifying glasses like those I’d seen worn by Jack the jeweler. I lay on a crinkly sheet of white butcher paper while she examined, snipping, with a professional air. At the baby shower for Sky Tucci, two women at my table talked about when she’d sent Buck Price her panties, by messenger. That had shocked me too. “There. That’s better,” the woman said.
“He’ll like it,” Helen said, through the curtain. It took me a moment to remember who she meant. I’d slid off the globe of the familiar. I looked at myself. I didn’t know if I looked better or only different. Did other people lose time like this? All afternoon I’d worried about the bill, and at the cash register, eyebrows restricted, hair blown to twice its normal size, legs waxed, toenails dark red, the total came to two hundred forty dollars, not counting tips. Helen wouldn’t think of the money again after she’d signed the paper. She maintained herself like an asset that needed protection.
I was still thinking about the tiny triangular face like a fox. I felt nude in my underwear. The air glittered when we stepped outside. A breeze cut through my skirt.
I had a melody all of a sudden. For clarinets.
My grandmother had gone to the beauty shop Friday mornings. A woman tended her white curls, rolling each one, drying her under a steel helmet. Conversation about the hairdresser’s truant daughter gave these ministrations a serious air, which ended with my grandmother counting out the tip in cash. This was the only ritual related to her appearance that my grandmother paid for. She did her own nails every week. Sh
e set up the whole business on the kitchen table using glass condiment dishes the filling station gave away that, later in the day, would be filled with mustard and pickle relish.
“You change your hair!” Lucy said, when I dropped off Helen. “It is too short!”
Home, I bounded upstairs to dress while Lola fluffed Will. She left in Danny’s green Mercedes; she’d asked for five tickets to bring a group of nannies. I drove Will, suspendered in his car seat, to the Lot. We walked under huge painted signs—THE SIMPSONS. STAR WARS—to soundstage 6, where Paul stood in his billowing white shirt. The guard gave us wristbands, like the ones Will and I had worn in the hospital. Inside, lights caught us in the noise of a thousand people. They sat in bleachers on our right. Why hadn’t I known they’d all be here?
On the left, PAs milled, looking miniature in the sets, open on one side, like the rooms of an enormous dollhouse.
We had gifts for Paul. Willie had painted a mug at Color Me Mine, and I’d bought a silver fountain pen he’d probably return. Will handed him the decorated bag.
“Oh, thanks, can you keep it for me?” People circled him, waiting for us to get out of the way. He tapped a clipboard with a Bic.
“I’m going to assign Molly to you for tonight. You guys’ll sit with the writers.”
Molly installed us on director’s chairs in front of eight TV screens. She fitted earphones on our heads. I felt privileged. Jeff and Paul wore them but the writers behind us didn’t get any. I turned around. “Thank you for coming. It means so much to Paul.” First Lady manners, my mother called them. She and Tom were somewhere in the audience too.
Jeff stood watching Molly walk off. “Helen wouldn’t put up with that.”
“We like Molly,” I said, glancing at Will.
“Sorry.”
“Mommy.” Willie slid down his chair. “I know where Craft Catering is.” Last week, Paul had given Molly his keys to drive Will to the set and then home again.
Bags of chips, cookies, and candy lay open on the counter, a child’s treasure, all the things I kept him from. I let him fill a plate while I poured coffee, already bitter.