Casebook

by Mona Simpson

  She nodded, somber, absorbing the information as if it were important. “So then what happened?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I mean, what ever happens? And what was love, if not Ella Fitzgerald and Rainbow Rooms? These were our family myths. Was there more to it? Sex, I remembered, with a drop in my stomach. But I couldn’t say that to the Boops. “Well, you know. They got married and came out here. He wanted a different kind of law, and there was the long-shot job for her at UCLA, and then they both got lucky.” Before, she’d worked in the New Jersey woods, where an ancient emeritus mathematician had walked across a field to lift her hand, saying, “I heard about the Ring.” Our dad liked being the man who’d given her the Ring. I liked him being that, too, though after the emeritus mathematician, she’d only worn it sometimes. I wondered where that ring was now. One of my sisters should probably eventually get it.

  “Were they really in love?” Boop One asked. “Because if they were, they would never stop being.”

  “Well, yeah. They were. But you know them.” I couldn’t really handle this. Guys, I felt like saying to my folks, this is your job. The truth was, I couldn’t see the two of them together anymore. They once upon a time fit a way they didn’t now. “He’s kind of like, going out late at night in Hollywood. And she wanted pictures on the stairway wall. A piano in the living room.” The family romance, Eli had called it. You and your family romance.

  “But we have pictures on the wall and a piano,” Boop Two wailed.

  We did. It was true. I’d flubbed up, explaining. “I mean, they were in love, but—” We were in the Boops’ room, on the floor, and I picked up two Rubik’s cubes. I held them together so they touched only on the blade of an edge and explained, “They connected on a corner.” That didn’t go over either. Boop Two was right; we did have pictures and a piano. They never went out late in Hollywood. Why hadn’t they? That was a bad thing to remember, too. Probably they hadn’t because of us.

  “I don’t believe they were ever really in love,” Boop One said.

  “Did one of them like somebody else better?” Boop Two asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, I love Eli, but … compared to Dad? And Holland, I don’t know. She seems like a rebound.” They both seemed consolation prizes.

  “Why did they have kids then?” Boop One shrieked. “What’s the point of love if it’s going to end! There is no point!”

  By then, both Boops were crying. Their faces caved in like apples rotting before my eyes.

  “Hey, but wait. They’re close. They’re friends. You know that. They still love each other.”

  “But not romantic,” Boop One spit out.

  I had no answers. Last night, when he’d dropped me off, our dad opened the car window and said to the Mims, “Hey, Esmeralda tells me I need new pillowcases. I guess sheets, too. I don’t know where to get them.”

  “Should I send you a link?” she said, leaning on the car top.

  “Could you just order them for me, and I’ll pay you back?”

  “But, Cary, I don’t know what color you want. And there’re different fabrics.”

  “I’ll like whatever you pick. You know more about these things.”

  “Romance can be overrated,” I finally said, as if I knew. That set them off more.

  Females. They flopped on their beds to cry it out. I wondered: What was so-called romance? It seemed a lot like friendship, but with a fleck of sparkle. What was that sparkle? Hope, maybe. But hope for what? A better life. Some future.

  After their department meeting, my mom and Marge blared in, wearing their serious clothes. Marge settled herself at our kitchen table. I was hoping she would leave so I could get my mom to talk to her daughters.

  “So you know who came to see me?” Marge said, nodding hello. “This woman from the executive committee. She’s supposed to be the number one scholar in the world on the medieval Bible. And she lost her husband, too. You know what she said? She says if you put on the form that you’re open to men under five foot five, there’s this whole wonderful population of grateful short men. So I did it.”

  “Did what?” I said.

  “I sent in the check to Match.com. I heard if you gave them your credit card, you never get rid of them.”

  “Where do you hear these things?” the Mims said.

  “From the students.”

  I lingered. “Can I ask you something?” I said. “What did you do to your hair?”

  They both started laughing. Marge’s hair was definitely different. It seemed more … out, a new shape, maybe even another color.

  38 • A Move Without Reason

  I heard no more about guest bathrooms or coat closets, and I hadn’t seen Sare tour-guiding strangers through our house, so it began to feel like we could stay. Tennis started for real. We had practice every day after school; Sare stood with her arms crossed, watching Charlie. Cottonwoods didn’t have its own courts; we practiced at a park strewn with crack vials where homeless men picked through the Dumpsters. Not the fastest player or the most agile, I could usually psyche out the other guy, tap the ball over the net when he expected a slam. But I was on probation for throwing down my racket.

  Then, one April Friday, the Mims picked me up from a match I’d won against a Harvard-Westlake guy twice my size and said she’d sold our house. My heart dropped three inches; I felt it clearing a trench. Without the place where a bunch of guys slept over, what did I have?

  To staunch the Boops’ hysteria, my mom told them we’d get a puppy.

  “You’re overpromising,” I mumbled.

  “I don’t even want a dog!” Boop One shrieked. “I’m allergic, remember!”

  Even in her depression Boop Two couldn’t say that. But she stretched her arms out and kissed the outside of our house and got a splinter in her lip. This time, we drew a young doctor in the emergency room. Boop Two dug her nails into her twin’s arm as the doctor pulled out the splinter. He gave it to her in a jar to keep.

  I wanted to blame someone. Both my parents seemed guilty. Or Eli. To make the move easier, my dad took us to Houston, and we shopped with cousins in the biggest mall I’d ever seen. While we were there, my mom packed up our house by herself. Or with him, I supposed. I wanted to talk to my dad, but I couldn’t get him alone until finally, in the airport, he allowed my sisters to go to the newsstand to buy candy.

  “Miles, it’s not my decision.” He shook his head.

  “She can’t afford it, Dad. And she probably doesn’t feel great about that. Do you think she wants to move?” I was winging it; I didn’t know for sure the reason was money. But the Mims loved our house. Of all of us, she probably loved it the most.

  “Miles, when people get divorced, everyone has less income. We’re supporting two households now. Everyone has to make choices.”

  “Well, what choices is she making? I mean, I don’t see her out buying fur coats!”

  He just shook his head. And Eli! He’d once offered to lend us millions. Where was his checkbook now? I remembered that box he was supposed to have sent for Christmas. I sure never saw it.

  We went straight from the airport to the new place. My dad parked the car, and none of us moved to get out. I counted nineteen boxes on the wraparound porch. Finally, my dad led the way up to the door. My teeth chattered. All the boxes on the porch turned out to be empty. My sisters’ room and mine waited—beds made with our sheets and their animals, my bookshelves alphabetized with the Pez collection, coin jars, marbles, and Legos. She seemed to have tried to make everything the same. Two of my Legos had come apart. Even arranged as much like our old rooms as spatial geometry allowed, these rooms looked off. It was our same stuff, body-snatched. I heard my dad oohing and aahing in the Boops’ closet. I opened the door to a cabinet they must have built into my corner: mutants in a Vons bag, next to a six-pack of Mexican Coke.

  The kitchen had our pans and utensils, but when I checked the refrigerator, there was only a new carton of milk. I sat on a s
ealed box. The doorbell rang; Eli walked in, holding bags of takeout. My mom looked up, a way she wasn’t usually with him, hair in a clip, her cheek smudged. He was the one to blame, I thought. But this wasn’t Pasadena. It must have been money.

  “We’re going to the beach,” she said. “We’ll have a picnic.”

  My dad scooted out, head ducked, smaller with Eli there.

  The smell of food spread from Eli’s bags. He slung a blanket over his shoulder, and he had a football tucked under one arm. It must have been his. We weren’t a football family, or a beach family either, for that matter, even though we lived in Santa Monica. People were trudging back over the sand to the tunnels that ran under the highway, returning to their cars as we walked toward the water, none of us in a good mood. The sun was already setting. We were way late for the beach. My mom would make us take showers. The thought of that new bathroom made me queasy. What about our house? Would we never go there again? Eli looked like a beach bum, his legs dark in frayed khaki shorts. He must have gone to beaches in Washington, if they even had them. Or else how did he get tan?

  He spun the football at Boop One.

  Behind us, waves roared. The heads of surfers bobbed far out in the ocean. At the pier, the Ferris wheel, still closed for the season, stood frozen. My mom and I sat on the blanket, eating from the white cartons. If you ever want to corrupt me, use Chinese food. Nasturtium shoots were apparently a favorite of Eli’s. The indistinct food was warm, spicy, and really oily, the kind of thing the Mims rarely let us have, but she ate it now. That eased me. I liked to see her eat. Sare had said that Dale had a very slow heart. He calms me, she’d said, as if it were an excuse. My mom cared what we ate, she cared what we watched, she cared she cared she cared. It was a burden how much she cared. Now her hair blew. The salty food tasted wooden from the chopsticks and hours spread unbound. Without her worrying, I felt a pang. I had a Latin quiz tomorrow. We were at the beach. I could have loved this, I thought, if only we still had our house.

  Then Eli threw the football at me; I caught it in my gut and staggered up. Eli’s shirttails flapped. This was what men did, I thought, and forgot everything. It felt good to run. He put my fingers over the lacings, to teach me how to send long spiraling passes. I caught the ball to my chest and fell back, wiped sweat off my forehead with a sleeve. He tackled my mom to the ground, and they stayed there a moment, him on top of her. I saw the crescent of her face under her hair, his arms a cage, and my stomach lurched. She looked not herself. She looked under. He had something to do with all this. Hector thought my mom wanted Eli to write a sex diary. What would he even remember? Positions? The idea of my mother in positions made me heave.

  I held my belly, felt it undulate. Once, I couldn’t remember when, Eli had said, I’ll pay half when I move in. If you ever let me. At that time, it had sounded like they’d bought something he’d pay half of. Now I thought maybe it was the whole house he’d been talking about. Maybe he would have paid for half if she’d let him move in. I wanted to go back, let in Eli and even his kid if we could get back our house.

  Why didn’t she ask me first? I hated her for a moment.

  But then where was I?

  Down by the surf two dogs bounded into waves, rascaling each other. The sunset was a too-bright yolk. “Watch,” my mom said the minute it spread to a line, then sunk. It was going to be a new, worse life; I was sure of it.

  Had she tried hard enough to keep our house? I’d always defended her. She does her best, I’d lectured my sisters, she tries hard to make our lives right. But this new house—this wasn’t for us. I’d never before thought anything she did was for someone else. That gave me a dark feeling in my head, as if there were a hole and air getting in where air shouldn’t be. I guessed this was what people called a headache. My first. When I think of my life as a boy, it ended there that night, while the Mims stared out at the Pacific with its barreling waves, the world indifferent to our losses.

  My sisters played on the lacy edge. Then they ran to us, wet, smearing me. Eli and my mom wrapped towels around them, and we started the long trek back. I lagged behind, hauling the bag of stuff, and looked back at the mirrory water. Even after sundown, it wasn’t dark. The sky had turned a deep clear blue, impermanently beautiful.

  Eli was telling the story of his dog. In Texas, he’d rescued or stolen a dog, depending on how you saw it. The dog had looked scared. He’d been abused. They’d found him tied up in a small West Texas town. “I picked him up, he was trying to bite. I got him in the car and drove away. That was how I got my dog.”

  “You and Jean,” the Mims corrected.

  “She would have just walked by.” You could tell he thought that was treachery.

  “You stole a dog?” I said, remembering Rebel, Hector’s lost pet.

  “I suppose I did.”

  I shot a look at my mom. This didn’t bother her? He stole a pet.

  Before the sand ended in a parking lot, there was an old playground, the metal equipment now faded and peeling, the colors worn to plain steel on the monkey bars in places where hands held on. In its corner stood a concrete-floored shower. Eli turned the knob and leaned under the spurt of water so his hair flattened on his forehead like Herman Munster’s. With the ancient cracked soap bar from the public dish, he soaped his whole head: hair, face, ears, eyes. The Boops screamed when he soaped his eyes. He did it again, getting his shirt wet. I lagged back; Steve Martin the guy wasn’t. I missed Hector all of a sudden. I couldn’t whine to him about this, though; he’d already moved twice to not-as-good places.

  I held the football on my lap in the backseat. We’d ended our game without a winner. Like in Cottonwoods Elementary, where we’d never been allowed to keep score. A thousand games and nothing mattered. Then, all of a sudden, this year counted. Grades that would go on our permanent records. Divorce. Moving. Everything was ending.

  I felt like secret scores had been kept all along, and I’d lost and never known.

  My mother drove the long way around, not to pass our old house.

  Our first night in the new place, Eli slept on the futon couch.

  Late at night, I heard the Mims say, “But she’s allergic.”

  She sure was. We’d all seen Boop One’s body go reptile with bumps the size of golf balls, gunk streaming out of her nose. No one would want her kid to be like that.

  “She can get shots,” he said. “They do work.” Was that all he could offer us?

  I kept my hands at my sides that night in the strange room. The walls came so close, it felt like a ship’s cabin. From my bed, I could reach out and touch almost everything. A chalky light fell onto my comforter; morning, and I hadn’t slept at all.

  I heard the noises of beginnings: water in pipes, the kettle whistling. Then my mom laughing, again and again, as if she couldn’t stop. Happiness! I bolted up. Hers, not mine. I pulled on sweats and went out. Eli was flat on his back on the floor, her head on his chest. He seemed to be tickling her.

  She choked out, “Oh. Oh.”

  It seemed so easy for them to laugh. She didn’t used to be happy when we weren’t. They didn’t startle when they saw me. They looked up, sweet-faced. I thought they owed me guilt. What happened to his million dollars?

  “Hungry?” my mom asked.

  “Not yet.” I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Just then, it came to me, why he wanted my sister to get shots. He planned to move in his dog! The dog he’d stolen! Would that kid roommate with me because it was male? I still hadn’t ever seen it. I’d met Haskell, Holland’s kid. A little nightmare. Way worse than the Boops. And from what my mom said, this kid didn’t even sleep through the night.

  Eli finally stood to go, and my mom said “Wait” and ran to the bathroom. She returned with her electric toothbrush. She tucked it into the pocket of his shirt. But that was expensive! She’d gotten me one already, because I had braces, but the Boops didn’t have one. She spent too much money on him! That watch. Also, she’d given him sunbl
ock before. Little useful things. Not that the toothbrush was so little.

  39 • Will You Melt?

  But nothing terrible came true. Eli didn’t move in with his insomniac kid and hive-inducing dog. He said good-bye that day and flew back to Washington with our toothbrush, leaving us to ourselves in the new house. That was a relief. The next weekend, we took a hike with Hector’s family, and my mom broke off a branch of sycamore on the trail and hung it on the wall with small nails when we got home.

  Marge, who lived around the corner, came over carrying a bowl of batter. The smell of baking found me in my room.

  “I can only have one,” she was saying in the kitchen, spreading a muffin with whipped butter and spun honey, both new delicacies to us. “I’m on a cleanse.”

  “What’s a cleanse?”

  “It’s what they used to call a diet.”

  My mom shot her a look. We didn’t talk about dieting in our family. After their mutual terror of pedophiles, my parents’ second-worst fear was anorexia.

  Eli returned every week to teach a class Marge had arranged for him. He and my mom washed walls and painted, the days we slept at our dad’s. With a sander, they stripped the windowsills down to wood.

  When I walked in after tennis one day, a stranger was kneeling in the fireplace. He was an electrician, he explained; my mom had talked the landlord into letting her install a gas pipe so we could turn on fire with a key. “Oh,” I said. He showed me how it worked. That was when I learned that we were renting. Another yank.

  We could lose this house, too.

  But we made fires every night that spring. Saturdays, she assigned us chores. Because the house was smaller, she told us, Esmeralda would come only once a month now.

  Sundays, we hiked with the Audreys. The Mims found a papery wasps’ nest and set it on our mantel.

  The first time Sare visited, she walked backward. “This sure came together fast! Think of how we agonized in the old place. Here, it’s all turning out right.” She went from station to station, where my mom had hung things on nails in the wall. A fire broke over itself. There was nothing on the mantel but that branch with the nest.