by Mona Simpson
On a windy day in late August, after they’d all left, I lay my bike on our porch, yelled hello, and no one answered. “Yoo-hoo!” I opened the Mims’s door. She sat at her desk, on the phone.
“I’m talking to Eli,” she said.
My heart shocked, going heavier and small. Then: He knew she wasn’t dead. Had he called to tell on me?
Her arm, on the desk, seemed calm and permanent, with an intelligent hand, veined, not young. But her face looked back to full color. I suppose I should’ve known it was Eli. Once, in the middle of the night, I’d thought we were hearing his real voice for the first time; I wondered if he was using that voice now. Open on the desk was the letter folded in three that she’d received two days ago. The Field Foundation is pleased to … The prize. She, Marge, and two young biologists would outfit a lab on South Campus. Seeing that, I remembered how I’d been worried about our finances for a long time, and now I wasn’t anymore. I noticed a small card near the letter.
Congratulations,
Yours, always, always.
Eli
Guy has a way with words, Ben Orion had said. So Eli was up to his old tricks. Three little words. Who knew what they would do to her? Never really ever was more like it. He must have read about the prize and figured out that she was alive.
She shooed me out of the room. I couldn’t listen by the door. One night on our porch my mom and Ben Orion had made me promise no more eavesdropping.
When she finally slid into the kitchen and started slicing zucchini, I shuffled in like someone about to be hanged. “What did he say?” I asked.
“Oh. Well, he said that what he has with Jean is an arrangement to raise his kid.”
“An arrangement, not a marriage?”
“I said, ‘Eli, what were you thinking? What if you’d been at the movies with your wife and run into us?’ He said that never would have happened. He said they don’t go out. He kept saying, it isn’t like that.”
“They never go to movies?”
“I asked him if they ate together, and he said, ‘Not really.’ ”
“Meaning: she fills my bowl every night.”
“He said, ‘You’re my most important relationship, and I still did this.’ He said he’s been having convulsions. He didn’t want me to see him like that.” I pictured Eli shaking on a cement floor. Maybe that was his “surgery.” No wonder it left no scar! I’d begun to use analogies to understand the logic of his substitutions, to try to excavate some fucking particle of truth in the rubble of lies.
“You know how his brother is addicted to that terrible drug—”
“Dalmane,” I interrupted.
“Well, Eli’s taking Dalmane now. He says it’s the only thing that works. He wanted me to go to his doctor with him. He said I’d have a lot of questions.”
He hadn’t busted me, it sounded like. A feather of elation passed through me: Maybe it hadn’t really happened. But I’d called him. I had. I knew I didn’t imagine it.
“Will you please set the table? He says he lives in the basement, and Timmy sleeps there with him sometimes. He offered to take a picture and e-mail it.” She filled the pasta pot.
In those days, I still mixed up the knife and the spoon. “Can I see?”
“Oh, I told him not to bother. I don’t doubt that he has a basement.” She shook her head. “Why didn’t he just tell me? He said he still feels romantic about me.”
Romance! What was it, even? I sure wasn’t going to bank on it. It seemed worthless, like those thin Christmas-tree balls that shatter so easily. I thought of the presents she’d given him—even if he kept them as his little shrine, he still went barefoot to his kitchen where his wife stood ironing his shirts. Romance had done my mother no good; it probably didn’t help that ironing wife much either. Still, that day in my bedroom, in the real light, I’d turned my head away from Maude. I’d wanted something more.
“I asked him if Jean knew about me. He said she didn’t know the scope of ‘the deception.’ ”
“ ‘The deception.’ As if it were an accomplishment. An algorithm. A concerto.” I suppose it was what he had. His great deception. He hadn’t told her about my lie, though. That seemed pretty obvious. I supposed I owed him one.
I hated that.
“He gave us the sofa.” She shrugged. “Good sofa.”
“Your personal shopper.” I asked if I could go along to Eli’s doctor. “I mean, I have a lot of questions.”
“Honey, I’m not going. I can’t see Eli.”
“Ever?”
“Probably not. We may have seen him for the last time already.”
“But we didn’t know it was the last time.”
It wasn’t my last time, though, as it turned out.
The door slammed. My sisters ran through the house and gathered near the Mims. She nudged them to the sink to wash hands. We stopped our conversation. It seemed strange to be talking to her like this in the kitchen. No more need for eavesdropping. I had the sense of time passing.
I rode my bike to Ben Orion’s. “You want to take a walk?” was all I could think of to say. “I know I didn’t call or anything.”
He slipped on clogs by the door. “So what’s up?”
I told him that Eli had called my mom, that he’d told her This is the most important relationship in my life! “I’m sure he tells his wife she’s the most important relationship.” I wanted relief. And it helped to think we’d mattered. But if we really were important to him, he wouldn’t have done what he did. “So why does he keep feeding her this dope?”
Ben Orion sucked up a breath. “Because she knows too much.”
I felt socked. I hadn’t thought of that. I’d assumed he was going to say because he does care about all of you in the way he can or something like that.
“You mean, so she’ll shut up?”
“So she’ll shut up.” He sighed. “The Dalmane was a nice touch. You’ve almost got to admire it.”
72 • I Touch a Breast
School started again, but not for me. With everyone gone to college a quiet boredom fell. I kept working at the Aero. I changed the marquee every night, spreading the letters out on the pavement, then hooking them up one by one on the grid, using a long pole. I returned cans of film to distributors. After the screening I counted bills, sealed the ticket stubs in a ziplock Baggie, marked the numbers on a ledger, and took the cash in a cloth case to deposit in a bank chute. I pedaled fast those minutes I carried all the money in the front wire basket of my bike.
By day, I took driving lessons. My dad made me, so I could drive myself to SAT prep. My grades were the problem; my SAT scores were fine, but now that I’d joined the ranks of the unmentionables, he thought they had to be not just good but fucking incredible. I didn’t expect one week to be different from another anymore. I had a permanent life. I can see distances, I texted to Hector, like someone living on a great plain. In October, Hershel hired me to work afternoons at Neverland. Sometimes people I knew called, but I didn’t want to go to their high school parties. I started mucking around writing a movie script, but it sogged in the middle. I couldn’t even imagine an ending. Ben Orion had been right. I needed hobbies.
He came to the Aero Sunday nights, sometimes with the Mims. Once, he brought Ez, who’d been almost his stepson for a while. I bit the inside of my mouth when I saw them, thinking, Fucking Eli. Don’t you want to just go to the movies with me? he’d said once to my mom. After all the sex and declarations and pain, maybe it all came down to Don’t you want to just go to the movies with me? And we could never go to the movies with him now. “I thought he loved me,” the Mims had said to the ancient doctor. But I’d thought he loved me. The night Ben Orion brought Ezra, I kept my distance. But the next Sunday I sat with him after the concessions line emptied and watched In a Lonely Place. We’d also seen Chinatown together. He wanted me to know the great vanished LA neighborhoods of his youth that now existed only on film. He waited while I closed up, and we walked down the street
for hamburgers. He still wouldn’t let me pay. Sitting across from each other in the dim bar, we were watching another show, waiting for Eli’s demise, the way in movies we hoped ahead for the heroes to best the villains.
This plot was moving much slower.
The Mims still took detours not to pass our old house.
I called Sare once in her MSW soon-to-be-therapist capacity and asked if she thought my mother was still sad. “Well.” She laughed. “Your not going to college hasn’t helped.”
I was working on that, I told her. My dad was working on it even harder.
I passed my driving test and arranged my work hours so I could pick up my sisters and take them to their activities. My dad and I split the price of Malc’s old car. I added a morning job at Krispy Kreme I went to right after I dropped them off. Once I’d been driving for a while, I drove one Saturday all the way to Esmeralda’s house. She fixed me an enormous lunch. Her son’s baseball team had won the league championship. In November, they were going to play in Japan. She showed me pictures of all her kids, asked about my mother and sisters. She gave me a bag of pig chips to take home. I thought of sending them to Hector but I ended up eating them myself.
By then, I had almost three thousand dollars in my account.
I took my sister to Beverly Hills, where her piano teacher lived with who knew how many family members crammed into a house that looked like it hadn’t been remodeled since 1957. You went through a gate to the dead-looking backyard. Two sliding glass doors opened into a studio where a poster on the wall read:
WE ARE WHAT WE HABITUALLY DO.
Eli habitually lied. He’d made promises to two families that canceled each other out. A con artist of love. The teacher conducted lessons at an upright piano in a silk dress, high heels, and the clear-colored nylon stockings that marked her as either irremediably old-fashioned or foreign to LA. On the other side of the room, there was usually a girl wearing headphones silently practicing on an electric keyboard, and three or four other kids sprawled on the floor, filling pages of theory worksheets. There was always at least one waiting student. The teacher, a Persian woman my mother’s age, ran her lessons over, and by late afternoon, she was often an hour behind. It was a place of intent concentration, not really an atmosphere I loved, though today Ella was the pupil at the upright Yamaha. We’d heard her as we rounded the corner. Music gusting. Boop Two, who wanted to quit piano, moved differently under her sound. It was Beethoven. Even I knew that. I felt something trampling branches in my chest. I hadn’t seen Ella for a long time.
Her hair looked normal again. Straight. Light brown. The time I’d seen her retching in a silver dress, it had been Kool-Aid-dyed, red at the ends. The teacher stood and gave my sister stapled-together pages of key signatures to identify.
I sat in the armchair where the moms and dads waited. With all her troubles (vomiting, the older boy’s hand spidering her belly) Ella could still make this—a shape that dissolved as soon as it touched air—and I felt that rampage through me, destroying all the principles I’d used to talk myself out of her. The hundreds of ways I’d noticed Maude—Maude organizing my papers, Maude looking up at me—she couldn’t make this.
Finally it was over, and Ella turned around—just herself again, a girl.
The teacher beckoned the next in line. Ella hoisted her backpack and stepped outside. Hey, she mouthed through glass. I thought she said that. She stood like a feather. Small shoulders. No hips. A hand clipped in her back pocket. My sister lay on the floor, marking notation. I went to the yard and followed Ella.
Behind the shed, she turned to face me, leaning on a rusted wheelbarrow filled with ancient water and decaying leaves. It smelled like dirt and worms. “This is where I come. It’s the only place without a bunch of little kids.”
“Need a ride somewhere?” I asked.
“No. I’m getting picked up after my brother’s jujitsu.”
“I remember your little brother. George.”
She took out a cigarette and lit it. She offered me one. I refused, though the smoke in the air smelled good. Stirring. But all these years, it had been pretty clear, she didn’t like me that way. Could people change their minds? The insult had felt permanent.
“I heard you raised a lot of money for animal rights.”
“Well, yeah, kind of, the summer before last. With Hector.”
“That’s cool. We’re never here over the summer. I miss everything.”
“I mostly stayed in my room.” I didn’t know what else to say. “I work at the Aero now.”
“I heard that, too.” She knew about me, as if she’d collected random facts the way I kept any detail about her. Could I have been wrong? Could she have liked me, even before? My hopes swung wildly, a bird trapped in a room. She’d always had an odd smile; it started as a frown and then went up more on the left.
“You want to kiss me?” she asked.
“Should I?”
She set her hands on my shoulders—she was as tall as I was—and her lips touched mine, exactly. It was something I’d imagined so many times, and now it was real, a color, transposed over another color to make a third. The smell of half-decayed leaves came from the wheelbarrow. Then she pulled off her T-shirt! She hung the rose-cotton top on a bush, then reached back to unhinge a light green bra. I glimpsed her small biscuit-colored breasts, like my sisters’.
She knew I liked her; she had to. Everybody knew.
I thought this might be happening because she’d heard something about Maude. Maybe she didn’t want to lose me as her permanent admirer. But I didn’t want her to kiss me for that. “If you’re interested now because you heard I was with Maude,” I said, “we’re, we’re just friends.” I wanted to let her off the hook.
Great salesman, I could hear Hector say.
“Anyway, she’s gone,” I said.
Ella shrugged her shoulders, the small bones going up and down. She stood looking at me. I looked at her, too, our mouths smeared from kissing. I put my hands on her breasts the way I’d first touch an animal, and they were like that, warm, as if they could each act back.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “I’ll still like you anyway.”
She pulled me to her again, and this time we fell down. Okay, now I get it, I thought. The drug of this. The power. So this was what all the fuss was about. For years, I’d gone to sleep every night in Ella’s arms. Now I was there. It was different. More. Once you’d felt this, you’d never want to go back.
Then the gate creaked. The au pair with her brother George. She reached back quickly, fixed her bra, and pulled her shirt on again. “How’s college?” I asked.
“I didn’t like it there, so I moved back home. I’m only taking five units.”
Maybe that was why. We were the ones left. The remainders.
The circle of wrought iron clanked. I moved to stand in the place where she’d been. I wiped my hand on my face and it came back red. My nose was bleeding.
I wasn’t gay, I supposed.
“Do you like Ella?” Boop Two asked in the car.
“I love Ella,” I said, telling the truth a way that seemed just talk. “We’re friends.”
I fully expected to wake up from this shimmery aftercalm and find all the sparkles fallen through my fingers.
“I meant as more than friends.”
“She doesn’t think of me that way.” I knew it wasn’t the same for Ella. But what was it for her? I kept picturing her breasts, the reddish-brown part around the nipple slightly bigger on the right. Still, I didn’t know if I’d talk to her again. We didn’t have school together anymore. And I remembered that time I’d texted her and she’d never texted me back.
“You should tell your father you’re heterosexual,” the Mims said that night. Boop Two must have ratted something. “Because if you don’t, I will.” Our father was coming over for dinner. “You’re using this to yank his chain,” she said.
“I’m using it to get his attention.”
Hector and I had stopped talking about our parents’ marriages a long time ago. We never really figured them out, and Hector had stopped caring. I thought I understood our divorce. My dad had wanted to give the Mims a safe, easy life. But that life had felt too soft to her. After the Boops were born he’d wanted her to quit. “You care about math, not teaching,” he’d said. “You hate faculty meetings.” A lawyer by training, my father litigated, never discussed. At that point, she’d taught four days a week, as an assistant professor. She earned seventy-one thousand dollars a year. By my father’s accounting, that sum was not worth her exhaustion or complaints, most of all not worth her nagging him to help more.
She’d grown up poor but necessary. She couldn’t find a way to be that with him. He really didn’t need any of us. She’d worked in a Detroit hospital when she was young, as a Candy Striper; she’d described the feeling of smooth time, the paddlewheel of days, where despite the construction-paper cutout decorations, Christmas was never Christmas, Sunday was not Sunday, and the rounds remained the same.
But she was the guilty party. She’d loved Eli and hoped to marry him.
My dad had still never settled on anyone else.
But he finally had his hit show. More people have seen Happy Never After than any single one of Shakespeare’s plays. He still handed my mom garbage from his car window, but often she asked him in for dinner, and when he walked up the lawn Hound went wild. Dad hadn’t wanted Hound, but the dog loved him. And Dad had more pictures of himself with Hound than any of us did, and Hound lived in our rented house. Rented or not, our house felt permanent now. We knew our landlord, Einar Nelson, a ninety-year-old Swedish widower who lived up the street. When Marge and the Mims baked, they made one extra and had the Boops walk it to him. At Christmas, he got a Lorelei vase, too.