by Mona Simpson
I started to object, and we talked for a while sitting in the car outside Hector’s aunt’s house. Ben Orion wanted us to put the psychopath behind us. “The mystery’s solved,” he said. “Case closed. Now it’s just life. Next time I see you, we won’t even talk about Eli Lee. And, and, you’ll have each read a book on a new subject. You’ve gotta develop hobbies.” Hobbies! That word seemed to belong to another era.
But we agreed. When the taxi he’d called arrived, he stepped out. “You sure you don’t want to get a ride and return the cat?”
We shook our heads.
“You’re going to try to deliver that thing, aren’t you?” he said.
I didn’t answer one way or the other. I shrugged. I didn’t want to lie.
“I don’t like this,” he said. “I don’t like this at all.”
By the time we got off the bus in Pasadena, the sky was deep blue with one visible star and a bright crescent moon. When we found the street again, the house looked like it had before. No Christmas lights. Only a sad wreath on the door, the kind you bought at Ralphs, with a fake paper-velvet ribbon.
We lifted the crate with Tomcat balancing inside and hauled it to the edge of their lawn. We’d planned to put Tomcat on the porch, but now that seemed risky. Maybe they’d hear the thing meowing in its crate. I slipped in a treat from my pocket. When we turned around and started walking, Tomcat made a sound like nothing I’d ever heard from a cat. Then we ran.
I felt relieved that Eli’s house had no lights. He must have promised lights to his own kid if he’d promised me lights. I was glad he’d been bad to that kid, too.
“Hey, what happened with the puppy?” Hector asked, on the long ride home.
“She came back with more pictures on her phone. But we’re not getting a dog. She just likes thinking that we’re the kind of family that could. We can’t afford a breeder dog anyway.”
“Want to make a mutant when we get home?”
We dug out the bag of half-ruined animals, cut and sewed in a desultory way, like we had for days and days in middle school, but we’d lost the heart for it. The next time Zeke came over, they went home in the grocery bag to his house, and we never mentioned them again. For all I know, they’re still there. His mother is an artist and doesn’t go on rampages to throw things away. She keeps household odds and ends, believing they’ll come to some eventual, higher use.
Hector didn’t go away that year for break. His dad was stuck grading finals. And his aunt was losing it. “Christmas is the worst time of year if your boyfriend’s married,” Hector said. “She should break up with him. But he woos her back every January.” Hector sussed out the Bundt cakes in our kitchen. I was sick of them already. “We should give one to Ben,” he said. We rode our bikes, with a red-wrapped cake in the front wire basket. But Ben wasn’t home. He hadn’t called us either. We left the cake in his mailbox.
62 • My Sin
I told Boop Two she could stay up late. It’s vacation! But she wanted to go to sleep. And then the house went quiet. I puttered, wishing my mom would get home so we could watch an episode of The Wire. It turned eleven, then twelve, and I began to search on her computer.
In the drafts folder I found an unsent e-mail to Sare.
I can’t even kill myself because the kids
That stunned me. No period. Because the kids what? Or did she mean because of us. I’d once heard Eli wail like an animal. I thought it was him, anyway. I googled suicide. There was a hotline number, but that was for if you were about to jump off a bridge, not if you were scared about your mom. One in the morning, and she still wasn’t home. I paced. I called her cell phone. Her mailbox was full. She hadn’t said where she was going tonight, only that I was babysitting. I thought of calling Marge, but now it was really late. I tried to make myself pray, but I didn’t know how; we’d been raised without religion. Fucking mixed marriage. What was I supposed to do? I started counting. Prime numbers and then number chains. I thought of calling the police, but I’d have to say her name, and I didn’t know if they kept records. I didn’t want it to affect her job. I dialed my dad and got his machine. I kept counting. I worked myself into a weird state. I counted and rocked; maybe this was praying. I never told anyone, even Hector.*
Finally, I heard tires bite up the drive.
I dived into bed, turned the light off, and pulled up the blankets, still counting to myself when I heard hangers in her closet. She walked down the hall and opened the Boops’ door. Then mine. I closed my eyes, pretending sleep. I still had clothes on, even socks and shoes, under the covers. She walked to my head and pulled the comforter up to my chin. I tried not to move. I felt her breath on my face. Then she rose, but she didn’t leave; she collapsed in the chair at my desk. We stayed in the dark, Gal scrabbling on wood chips in the terrarium where she’d lived her whole life. My mom stood and opened a window. She cried evenly then, not loud. After a while she stopped. Then I was asleep.
But the next day I woke up hurting in my shoes. When my mom left with Boop Two to deliver presents for a poor family the school had assigned, I dialed Eli on his home number we weren’t supposed to have.
He answered the first ring. He probably had caller ID and saw our number.
“It’s Miles Adler,” I said. “My mother killed herself.”
For a moment there was silence.
Then his voice caught on a sob—I recognized the animal cry from that night long ago. I hung up and stared at the phone, afraid something would happen. Certain he’d call right back. Horrified at what I’d started. But he didn’t call. Not then. I couldn’t believe myself. I’d been afraid for a long time. My mother was harmed. She was worse. Less. I assumed the change was permanent.
All day long, everything held still, our life again. The trees outside looked dense, pulled into themselves. The air felt like air after a storm, new clear.
A reprieve. My sisters clomped back in, and I liked them. We moved slowly. I brought the Mims a coffee and played a game of Trouble with the Boops on the floor. The doorbell rang: I froze. But it was Marge. Marge! I hugged her. She looked surprised but game and grateful. That afternoon, even with the Mims not up to speed, I felt patient. I trusted her to return to us. I didn’t mind, right then, my life away from the eddying bright hormones that flashed at school. Away from the whorl of chaos, in our small house, we could mend and grow.
I didn’t want to think about what I’d done. But it had accomplished something: we would live far away from him. If I’d learned that the Lees had moved to another continent, Australia, for example, I could have almost wished him well.
Every year, the Mims volunteered us at a food bank. We stood in line freezing outside the big airport hangar, jumping to warm ourselves, but I was glad to be there. If Eli showed up at our house we’d be gone. I’d been sure to turn off the lights when we left. We ran into the cavernous, high-ceilinged warehouse, and it was still as cold as outside, but there was room to move. We joined up with Charlie’s family at their long table. Rock music from our parents’ era boomed in, the Stones pounding, as the Boops counted out carrots. The Grateful Dead. “Box of Rain.” The Mims and Sare measured scoops of dry corn into ziplocks. Maude’s mom gave me a box knife to slash open sacks of potatoes. So many times with community service, it seemed that the community served was actually doing us the favor. But there was work here for real: every family would receive a crate with four dozen potatoes, twenty apples, bags of grain, vegetables, and a turkey. Maude’s mom ran the show, standing next to the open back of the hangar where the trucks parked, with a whistle around her neck. She bent down to hear people above the noise. She had red hair, too, but the red was mixed with other colors and her curls were loose. Her hair was long, longer than Maude’s. I didn’t think I’d ever seen that before. A mother with longer hair than her daughter. Charlie and I did more than we had last year. Maude’s brother let us unload a truck bed of turnips by ourselves.
Finally, at midnight, our shift ended, but the music was still
going. I wasn’t tired, and I never wanted to go home. My mom and Sare stood shouting, their breath visible. None of us had really eaten. We ended up standing at the Slice, biting pizza on napkins, them talking about how next year, they’d plan. “A thick barley soup,” Sare said.
“How about not,” I mumbled, and Charlie laughed.
I bolted out of the car and ran up to our porch in case Eli had left a note or slid a letter under our door. But no. Nothing. No phone calls that night either; I half slept. I got up a few times to check outside; no cars moved on our street. This was evil: an absence—just wind, the place where guilt would pool. I turned over and tried to think of something else. I didn’t want Eli to come. I was afraid of him because of what I’d done.
After my bad prank I waited days, and nothing happened. Eli never knocked at our door. I didn’t see another letter. I checked CID on our phone. It was as if my lie lived suspended in a nether zone. What if the Mims had died? I wondered. He thought she had, and he didn’t do anything.
Once, he couldn’t live without her. Now he could, apparently. Did. I remembered an old humiliation. I’d sat, knee against bare knee, with Charlie, and he said Zeke was his best friend. My head weighed on the stem of my neck. I was your best friend and you changed your mind but didn’t tell me. I didn’t protest that someone could stop loving me. The only complaint I thought I had a right to was that he didn’t tell me when. What to make of a diminished thing. A line from a fifteen-dollar poem I couldn’t remember the name of. Since then, Charlie and I had been good, but we’d never been really close again. Maybe he didn’t want that. And anyway, I was fine with Hector. But the Mims didn’t have her Hector.
What I’d done felt imaginary; the fallout was so silent. Still, I’d really called him. If the Mims found out, she’d be disappointed. I understood uncaught criminals who walked through the world trembling. I was glad no one knew. That was probably the way Eli felt every day.
For a while, in the shade of his crime, I’d felt we were simple and good, trying to walk in ordinary sun. Now I’d blighted myself.
I was ashamed to have loved someone who didn’t care about us. For I had loved him. Even aside from her. I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. I hoped I wouldn’t. I held my mind, as if I couldn’t trust it, and pointed it—this way, not there. I wanted to avoid the things I didn’t want to think about: clusters of wind, unformed and horrible, like a dead near-birth, a tooth grown inside hair.
Holidays didn’t happen in 2007. My dad bailed on Hanukkah, and the Mims gave us only okay presents for Christmas. “I don’t want to sound greedy,” Boop One said, “but is that all there is?”
I remembered the year when, after we’d opened presents, she’d shown me the tree house. I liked thinking of the Rabbits’ Pad now. Even if we still lived there, I probably wouldn’t go in it anymore.
My mom disappeared for a few minutes. I thought maybe she’d gone to a hiding place to get more loot. An Xbox 360 with Guitar Hero. But where would she have it set up? I heard a car door, and then she came in carrying a dog tucked inside her sweater. “He’s deallergic,” she said, looking at our surprised dad.
The girls shrieked.
“Don’t think I’m going into this with you fifty-fifty,” my dad whispered on the porch. “Don’t think I’m going into this with you at all! I think it’s a mistake.”
“Merry Christmas to you, too,” I said loudly. But when he left and she came back inside, I said, “I can’t believe you gave us a living thing.” The Boops were shaking its paws. An hour later, they’d gone into the boxes the Mims kept of our baby clothes. (Theirs were intact; the monster had only a boy.) They stuffed the puppy into a dress.
Hound was no mistake.
He jumped all over Hector when he arrived. “It likes males,” I said. “The bad news is it shows affection by peeing on you.” We were crate training him, but he didn’t seem to be getting the message. My dad thought he wasn’t all that bright.
Hector sketched a sign.
PET OUT OF CONTROL?
UNTRAINABLE ANIMAL?
WE’LL FIND YOUR INCORRIGIBLE A GOOD HOME.
“Remember when he was whining about his hand? That the dog bit his hand?” Hector said. “We’ll make him an honest man.”
“Would take a lot more to make that guy an honest man.”
“If a dog bit off his dick, maybe,” Hector said. “When I tell a lie, it comes true. Like when I said I was sick to stay home, by the middle of the day I had a fever.”
I shivered. My lie. I thought it would stay in me, a needle in a wet organ. What happened to Eli? For years he’d called every day; he’d come bounding up our steps, and now nothing. “Remember when he called Charlie’s mom that time?”
“Or when he flew out after the quote ‘brain operation’? Quote ‘flew out.’ ”
That was the thing, though, about uncaught lies: I still believed he’d had that operation, sort of. But didn’t he miss us? He’d loved us. I’d thought I knew that. It felt like a real thing in my body. Either that was wrong, or love could dissolve. Maybe he got tired of us. They’d talked about my grades for hours. And Boop Two’s reading. The one time I’d heard the wife’s voice, it was dancy, lilting, like a dog keening for affection.
“I’m an idiot,” I said. “Who borrows dogs?”
* * *
* You were too spooked to tell me you prayed! You could have told me that. I did bath salts. I did LSD. I had a conversation with Jesus on ’shrooms.
63 • Our Idea of Art
He adored her.
She was eh about him.
He was a card-carrying member of PETA.
A rotary-phone receiver.
A handshake with an old man.
A turkey baster.
It didn’t feel like falling in love.
More like a stalled train at last finally moving.
Or: Steep stairs leading down to an unfinished basement.
PSYCHOPATH (kneeling): I’ll always call you on your birthday.
HER: (bubble) Well, duh …
“He had a thing with birthdays,” Hector said. “It would have been perfect for him if she died. He would have brought flowers to her grave.”
That made me shiver. Hector said his own lies came true.
Eli had told her that her work lacked vibrant romantic hope.
“How can geometry have hope?” Hector said.
“I can kind of see it.”
HER: Were you ever going to tell me?
PSYCHOPATH: I was going to tell when you turned fifty. Because by then you really would be too old.
Hector drew them in a bed, covers up to their clavicles, with a fantasy bubble: her at fifty, hair up, in a regal dress, him kneeling, giving her a jewelry box with the typed fortune: I’ll always love you.
“I gained four pounds over the damn holiday,” Marge said.
“We’ll resume training,” Philip answered.
“Well, we got through Christmas,” the Mims replied.
64 • A Message in a Bubble
“Down, boy, down. You’re not a pound dog at all, are you?” Marge said. She looked at the Mims. “You know this dog is proof that you’re over Eli.”
She wasn’t, though. This was late January, day 125. Marge came over nights to work on grant proposals. Their first collaboration was going well; they had two more ideas they were applying to fund. The Mims couldn’t stand to work alone now, she said. She told me that back in the days of Euler and Gauss nobody distinguished between pure math and its uses. Euler worked on the arrangement of ship masts and also on elliptical integrals. We know Gauss for number theory, she said—Speak for yourself, I mumbled—but he also computed the orbit of the first known asteroid, conducted geographical surveys, and invented the telegraph.
The Mims looked thinner than she’d ever been.
I was, too. I knew because I needed belts for the first time.
“I’m the one who shouldn’t be eating,” Marge said, opening the refrigerator and
taking out a wrapped wedge of cheese. On the table was a bowl of Asian persimmons. She sliced one paper-thin.
The Mims said people asked her what diet she’d been on. She and Marge laughed.
“Might as well take advantage of it. Drive into Beverly Hills. Buy a new dress.” Marge said she’d read that the more subjective the discipline, the better dressed the faculty and the more illicit sex they had. Mathematicians, by that theory, had few affairs.
I doubted that the Mims would drive into Beverly Hills to go shopping. Whenever I went to her room at night, she was working numbers with a pencil. I noticed her hands; they looked like mine.
One evening Marge came over after dinner and said, “I’ve got something.” I listened from the hall, against the heater. “He’s not at the NSF anymore. Look. I e-mailed to tell him we wouldn’t need him at UCLA spring quarter, and this bounced back.”
They bent over a piece of paper.
“When somebody leaves under good terms, that isn’t what they say. He must’ve been fired,” Marge said. “But I wonder when. He couldn’t have been living out here and working for them. I’m going to ask around.” I wanted to see the paper but Marge put it back into her bag.
Then I hurried to my room and e-mailed Eli. Just a blank e-mail. A form came back.
The person you have e-mailed can be reached by personal e-mail at the following e-mail address: [email protected]. If you would like to contact someone internally at the National Science Foundation, please reach out to: [email protected].
Philip started running with my mom every morning in the dark. They picked up Marge for the last mile. Now, when the Mims woke us, her face was glossed with sweat. Weekends, they nabbed us out of bed for dawn hikes, with headlamps. After, the Mims dragged us to dog obedience school in the parking lot of a church. We stood like drunks wavering from exhaustion, holding Hound on the leash. She carried around a puppy-training book written by a monk. It seemed as if he’d never learn to go to the bathroom outside, but then, on day 148, he did. He still chewed things. We put our shoes up on our desks. Not one of us, except the Mims, used a desk for anything else.