by Mona Simpson
Paul never asked himself that. He thought he was a great dad. He did twice as much as his own father had. And he still got the day, whole as an uncut sail.
At the dinnertime call, I told Paul what happened. I could hear the alarm in his voice. “Who picked them up?” he asked. “Moms or babysitters?”
“Moms.”
“Well, next time, make it shorter.”
I sighed. “You’re better at this, but you’re hardly ever here.”
“Like a drop of rare perfume.” There was a pause. “Claire, it was a joke.”
I knew. Everything was a joke.
In September, two days after school started, I got a midnight call from the police, telling me they had my mother at St. John’s. They’d found her outside and she didn’t know where she was. “Is she normally okay?” the man asked.
“More or less,” I said. “Why? What was she doing?”
“Well, you’ll see.”
I ran outside to Lola’s room and banged on the door before I remembered. Her room had been empty forty days. Only the bare cot and a globe. I stood a moment and spun the orb. When we’d been planning our wedding, in that hopeful swath of time, I’d said I wanted to live in Europe for a year when we were raising our children. He’d agreed, though reluctantly, even then. Who was that young woman? Even my dream seemed average to me now. Probably most of the mothers here had told their young husbands-to-be similar wishes. They’d probably known long before I did that few of those acquiescences counted. They understood—a great open secret—the bargain: together they would make a family. The women would raise children; the men would go out into the world and provide money. Why did that contract do so little for me?
I called Paul, left a message, and then had to wait. What was I supposed to do? I had no way to reach him. I called Tom and the phone rang and rang. Tom still had no machine.
I found a bar of dark chocolate in the refrigerator and tore off the layers of paper and foil. She’d had two breakdowns, but she’d always gotten better. I tiptoed in to peek at Will, fast asleep, one arm flung over his head. I bent down to hear his breathing.
I was really absolutely stuck here until Paul called.
Had he ever, in the years since Will was born, been marooned? I thought of lifting Will into his car seat. Maybe if I was steady enough, he’d stay asleep. But they’d never let me bring him into the hospital. And I didn’t want him there, in the psych ward. I stood, gnawing chocolate—when Paul called.
“I have to go! She doesn’t have anybody else.” This is the wild of life, I thought, walking with the phone, to my jacket on a peg by the door.
“Who can we call?”
“What do you mean? Paul, you have to come home. I have to go!”
“Claire, ten people are sitting here waiting for me. No thank you,” he said to someone else. “What about that older lady next door?”
“It’s after midnight!”
“Still, it’s an emergency. I’d do it, for a neighbor. What about Tom?”
“No one answers. The guy still doesn’t have a machine.”
“Well, calm down. She’s in a hospital. Nothing’s going to happen. Hold on a minute.” He punched the phone off before I could say anything. “Okay, I’m sending Molly over. She’s on her way.” He exhaled.
I waited on the stoop, the door open. When Molly pulled her car in, I had my keys out and ran down. I glided through stop signs, over dips and bumps. Then, when I stepped out of the elevator to the third floor, time slowed.
She sat in a gown, shaking her head. Her hair was flat and down, a way I’d never seen it. Tom stood, a hand on her shoulder, urging her to drink from a straw. Everything about the scene seemed normal.
“What happened?”
“My heart was racing.”
“She just got a little overexcited, that was all,” Tom said. “I wonder if something we had at Twin Dragons didn’t set her off.”
“The beans weren’t the same,” she said with bitter fury. “I told you so.”
“They asked us never to come back,” Tom mumbled.
I went out to find a doctor. Tom looked husbandly, fussing with the pillows, the planes of her face hard.
“She was hitting him,” the doctor said. “She didn’t recognize her friend. We had to restrain her.”
Once, I’d seen a nurse’s arms make a cage around her.
“Is she taking medication?”
“Just vitamins.”
“She needs it. I’ve prescribed two milligrams of Haldol.”
“What does that do?”
“It should calm her down. Does she see a psychiatrist?”
“She won’t.”
“She should.”
I wandered through the halls past the maternity ward and thought of the night Will was born. A great night in my life. He lay on my chest, on a gurney, then, at last, on a bed inside a citadel of pillows. We’d lucked out; a slow week, they gave us a single room for no extra.
At the beginning, I still believed in our luck. I thought my wishes would come true, some of them.
I just have to go home, Paul said then.
He left and Will and I began. So many times Will cried that night, little fists shaking, and I didn’t know why. I stumbled in my paper gown to the bright nurses’ cube.
I called Paul in the middle of that long curved night. Sorry for waking you. The rind of hardness that grew later was for that I’m sorry that I said. But by then, I’d begun to collect stones.
I returned to my mother’s room and sat, siding with Tom in a long repetitive argument about whether she had to eat.
“Last week I brought her half a turkey breast,” Tom said, “and every day I’d check her refrigerator. She hadn’t touched it! I had to throw it out. I think she lives on bananas.
“Why don’t you try,” he said, handing me the spoon.
I took a little of the pudding in the small plastic dish.
“You like sweets,” I said.
She bit down. I had to tug the spoon out. Then the pudding came out, too, down her chin.
“That’s what she does. She spits it out,” he said.
In another hour, I walked to the glass wall where the field of babies slept. A young doctor came in and knelt before a clear plastic basinet. He took his mask down, lifted a baby’s hand to his lips. I formed crushes everywhere now. But when he stood and pushed his glasses up, I saw that he was younger, probably a decade or more.
Back in the room, Tom was on his knees, trying to work my mother’s left sock back on.
“She wants to take off her socks and shoes,” he said. “It’s the medicine they gave her. It’s making her crazy.”
Her feet had dark veins, the toenails yellow. Dark patches were visible under her eyes, her hair too long this way and lank, and I gleaned for the first time how much work it must have taken her to be beautiful still.
I ran to the bathroom for water and gagged.
When I came back, they were looking into each other’s faces. While he stared at her, she made a new smile, then another. Now, here, finally. So, he had been right after all. They had something.
At last my mother fell asleep and Tom sat solidly in the chair, arms crossed, eyes closed. I rushed outside before anyone woke. A slap of wind hit my face. It felt like cheating. She was my responsibility, and there was no good end. I ran fast to my car in the gelling light. On our small main street, people in sweats and slippers followed the taut leads of dogs.
I remembered the room of babies, the doctor kneeling. I want another child, I thought. We had no marriage. But that morning, I didn’t see what the two things had to do with each other.
Paul and I drove up to the house at the same time. Almost four. He would have lived like this. We could both make a snack, softly complain about our jobs. Peek in at our sleeping boy, wonder together about his day. Share a word the nanny had told one of us.
We had to shake Molly to wake her up.
When we were alone, I said, “I feel b
ad Will doesn’t have a sibling.”
“He’s a pretty confirmed only child. Remember what he dictated on the card to Simon when his sister was born?”
Happy Survival.
• • •
“Well, when would you have this second child?” Lil asked in a tone not entirely kind. She had her three.
“Pretty soon, I guess I’d have to.”
She didn’t say anything. She must have thought we couldn’t manage as it was.
The Emmys fell on the second week of September, and Paul had arranged for Ofelia to come over. Will hated her. He’d liked her fine before, but since Lola left he hated everyone but me.
For wives, the Emmys meant a chance to don a ball gown, though this ball was in Pasadena, in the afternoon. But I felt foolish in my long dress, giving last-minute instructions to Ofelia at the kitchen table. “He can watch The Wrong Trousers. Twice.”
“Thrice,” he said.
Paul stepped out in his new tuxedo, his handsomeness a form of rebuke. I could hear Will crying even after the driver shut the heavy door. Fog blew past. I wanted to run back and get a sweater, but it wasn’t worth another goodbye. Paul got a call from the executive producer, who wasn’t coming. “He figures we never win.” But on the off chance they did, Paul had to write a speech, so he hunched over, scribbling.
I rubbed my bare arms. “Can we stop for coffee?” I had staff paper in my purse, but I couldn’t think. I should have brought along a book.
He looked at his watch. “We better not.”
Pasadena looked bronzed, from sun on the old concrete steps of the auditorium, glittering. When we stepped out, it was stingingly hot, even now, at four-thirty—and only forty miles away from Santa Monica, where I’d been holding my elbows. I saw the Indian woman who’d once told me never to leave without saying goodbye, her long hair pinned, her sari fluttering in a breeze I didn’t feel. I imagined her daughters at home, playing fairly. Two by two, we filed in. This was the lesser ceremony, where they also gave out awards for lighting and makeup and that wasn’t televised. Last year, Helen had gone to the Oscars. Her dress, her hair, the jewelry, had made a drama among her chorus, as importantly thrilling as her husband’s nomination for best short. I had on a new dress tonight, the one we’d bought just after New York, but it didn’t make my torso shiver the way I imagined a new dress could. We sat next to one of the nerdier guys Paul worked with, who had a beautiful date—a Chinese woman with slim calves. Paul told me they said in the Room that an Asian girlfriend was the last stop on the train before coming out. One step away from gay.
After an hour, I whispered in Paul’s ear. “Can I go get a coffee?”
“Sure, take the car. Here’s the driver’s number.” He extracted a card from his pocket. “Be back by eight-thirty, so if we win, you can see me.” He sighed. “I could use a coffee too.”
“Want a to-go?”
“No. Wish I could.” This was Paul; he understood I’d be happier elsewhere, and he let me go.
I found our car at the curb and asked the driver to take me to a restaurant in old Pasadena that Helen and Jeff had mentioned once. My heel caught between cobblestones; I had to bend over to yank it free. In the restaurant, people looked at me, alone in my formal. But I spread out staff paper on a table. The ambient music—the Gypsy Kings—made me crazy. Okay. May as well look crazy. I got out my noise-canceling headphones. The waiter brought a cup of harsh espresso. The bitter sips felt bracing; what I needed. I worked and ordered another. And a water. I cherished this recovered time, looking out the window at the still street. A mother hurried along a young girl, in the late afternoon light.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waiter asked.
“One more,” I said, scanning the square room. At the bar in back, I saw Jeff and Alice, the doctor I’d met once at a party, his long pale arm on top of hers. Their heads were close, the way they’d been at that party, in intent conversation. I sat watching, ghoulishly fascinated. He took a piece of her hair from in front of her face and slowly hooked it behind her ear. Then he covered her face with his. I left a twenty on the table and stepped outside, into the wavery heat. I had an answer now to my long yearning—the wrong one. He’d picked her. Not me. I had what I’d always had for consolation. I knocked on the pages in my bag. Beethoven was five foot four and had short thick fingers. He enlisted friends to help him look for a wife. But despite his dancing lessons and horseback riding and self-education, he never found luck in love. He kept getting deafer and he kept writing. When he was composing, his affliction hampered him least.
When I arrived back at the auditorium, the sun spread on the rim of the mountains, and guys with headphones unfurled a red carpet over the ramp where people would walk from the theater to the dining room. I slipped back in.
“Did I miss much?”
“Not a thing.”
Forty-five minutes later, they announced half-hour comedy, and the show Paul had worked for won. Paul jumped up, bounding down the aisle. He looked small in his tuxedo holding the trophy. “I’d thank my parents but”—he paused and the audience rustled with tame, happy-hour laughter—“they also made me short.”
When he returned, I tugged his sleeve.
“It can’t hurt with the show airing next month.” He gave me his program and notes. “We have to go in back for photographs. You go and find our table, ’kay?”
I wished, all of a sudden, I’d brought the camera. I should have taken pictures. Paul with his Emmy. I felt glad for him, from far away.
When we returned home, Will bolted up from the couch, where he’d been watching television.
“He no go to bed,” said Ofelia.
He whispered up into my ear, “I waited for you.”
“You be needing me más?”
“That’s all for tonight,” Paul said. “Thank you, Ofelia.”
I wanted to tell Paul what I’d seen in the restaurant, but he’d quiz me: Could they have been talking about something else? Maybe Helen lost another baby? I’d have to describe the way they touched. And I couldn’t. Not to Paul. I’d told him I wanted to separate. But I still couldn’t talk about this. Sometimes, we sat together, sad and embarrassed, and watched people on a screen fall onto each other with hunger.
Jeff and the doctor had looked pensive. Old lovers.
So he did pick someone else.
After that night, I couldn’t sleep and I had a hard time concentrating. I found a psychologist named Dr. Lark. She looked the way I’d always wanted to—skinny with dark curls—the age of my mother.
“It sounds like you’d like to hire Lola back,” she said, near the end of the hour.
“I didn’t want to fire her. But Paul did.”
“I’d put my bets on you,” she said.
Relief tumbled over me. When I unlocked the door, I asked to talk to Vanji in the kitchen. I paid her three weeks’ salary and told her now that Will was in school, we wouldn’t need her regular hours. I gave her the rest of the day off.
Will started telling me an interminable story about a flag. The phone rang; I picked up the receiver; it was a single mom named Judith who’d just hired Lola and wanted a reference.
“I’m jealous,” I told her, and I was. All the while she spoke, I wondered if I could still talk Lola into coming back. But the woman said her baby had problems. There’d been too little oxygen at the birth.
I took Will to the next playclub myself. Helen still reigned, legs crossed on Beth Martin’s butterfly chair, no sign of being wronged. Kids played outside with nannies, skidding in to grab chips. “That’s enough, Bing!” Helen barked, her voice bottomed with satisfied authority. Her smugness had shifted: from having the marriage to envy to being the expert mother.
“Sibling rivalry,” the Indian woman said. “In India, we don’t have sibling rivalry. When Kasha is mean to her sister, I punish her for not being nice, not for sibling rivalry.”
Siblings. Soon, Will would be the only only child. Three seemed to be the c
ommon number here.
Helen was having an avid conversation with a young mom I didn’t know, who held a typical fat, charmless baby.
I wasn’t really listening but I picked out the words “still Lola on weekends.” A string inside me yanked. They still had Lola on weekends! But they hadn’t wanted her! I almost cried. Nothing was fair. So Lola still went there Saturday and Sunday.
“How is Lola?” I asked Helen.
I’d called Lola twice but she hadn’t called me back. Now I’d have to get my news from Helen. I felt an urge to tell Helen I’d seen her husband kiss the doctor whose Chinese adopted children were here, too, with their nanny.
Helen shook her head. “I think there’s something wrong with that baby she’s taking care of. She doesn’t lift her head yet.” Helen raised her eyebrows. “Single mom. No dad. Lola said nobody comes around.”
“I think it’s somebody really high up and married,” Beth Martin said. Then she turned to me. “How’s the show coming?”
Show? For a moment, that stumped me. They were all looking. “Oh, good, I think.” I hadn’t been to the set since the pilot shoot. Paul didn’t seem to mind. Beth had once introduced me, Claire’s a baker.
“He got an Emmy for his old show,” Helen said.
Just then a nanny from outside came and whispered something to Sue. “Claire, Will’s having a problem,” Sue said in front of everyone.
Here it came. Out on the concrete, Willie sat cross-legged, frowning down with a particular expression I knew, shaking his head. “I don’t want to be his friend.”
Simon stood there, fists balled.
“Melissa?” Sue called back into the room.
I knelt facing Willie, but I couldn’t get him to look at me. “Willie, you don’t want to hurt Simon’s feelings.”
“I don’t care,” he mumbled. “I don’t like him.”
Please don’t say that. Simon ran up against his mom’s calves. “He said he didn’t like me!” Melissa picked him up. Her hair, which had once fallen out, was a beautiful dark brown.