by Mona Simpson
I washed standing on one leg, the other foot on my knee, swishing the towel around lightly. Other women disciplined their eyes to look away from us, cut a hole in the air and avoided falling into it again.
They saw me as a Theresa Griling. It’s a long story, this girl I knew at home. I was beginning to understand how someone could become a long story.
My mother didn’t notice the other women, but she saw that I was embarrassed. All of a sudden she saw that. And it must have seemed like a defeat. She’d driven all that way and now we were here and I was ashamed of her.
She sighed one of her sighs. “Comemeer,” she said. She brushed blush on my cheeks. “Listen. Nobody cares, do you hear? They don’t give a hoot. They can think we wanted to wash up before we eat. They can see we’ve been traveling. They don’t want you to stay dirty.”
I must have looked pale standing there, because she pushed some lipstick over my lips. They were chapped and I wouldn’t stand still, so she smeared a little and licked her finger to clean the edge of my mouth. I ran over to the sink and spit. I tasted her saliva, it was different from mine.
I felt something then, as I stood watching my spit twirl down the drain. I wanted to get away from her. There was nowhere I could go. I was twelve. She’d have me six more years.
My mother examined us in the mirror and sighed. She held my chin up and looked at us both. She’d been right. We did look much better. She gathered our things back into the suitcase and snapped the buckle shut. “See, all done,” she said. “Doesn’t it feel good to be clean?”
We found eight car washes in Westwood that afternoon but they were all the drive-through kind. My mother wasn’t going to trust them with our Lincoln. She would now, but we were new then.
“You wouldn’t do it by hand?” She was standing on the blacktop talking to a boy who looked as if she were asking for the world. “I mean, I’ll pay you. Ex-tra. I just don’t want those hard detergents on it. They’ll hurt the finish.” She ran her hand on the car top. It was still smooth and new. This was a long time ago.
“You can wash it yourself, lady,” the boy said, walking off. He walked with his head tilted slightly back, as if he owned the sky.
My mother sat down again in the car. “You know, I guess we could,” she said. “I guess we could do it ourselves.” She started to unpack the backseat.
“Heather, go.” She gave me a five-dollar bill. “Give him this and say we want rags for the windows and stuff to clean the seats. Oh, and ask if they have a little vacuum cleaner, too. Go on.”
She already had our one suitcase out and the trunk open. My mounted child’s ice skates were on the pavement next to a tire.
The boy stood hosing off the wheels of a Jeep. “Hurry up,” my mother yelled, but I kept sluffing. I didn’t care about the car being clean. If it was mine, I’d have just left it dirty. She would say I never learned to take care of a thing.
I stood with the five-dollar bill stuck in my hand, looking down at the cement ramps by the gas pumps.
“Could we please buy rags and cleaning stuff and also possibly rent a vacuum cleaner?”
The kid laughed. “What kind of cleaning stuff?”
I shrugged. “For the outside and for the seats.”
“Gonna do it yourself, huh?”
“She wants to.”
He put the hose down, not turning it off, so a stream of water dribbled down the blacktop. He stuffed a bucket with rags and plastic bottles. “You have to pull up here for the vacuum. You just pull on up when you ready.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t know how much to charge you for this stuff. Five dollars probably be too much. You not going to use that much fluid.”
“She might. You better take it.”
He laughed. “She might, huh? She always like that?”
My top lip pulled down over my teeth. “Oh, no, she’s usually not that bad. We just moved here. Just today.”
“Oh, I see. Well, makes sense. Anxious to get the car cleaned, huh?”
“Yeah.”
But we kept looking at each other, his chin tucked down against his neck and his eyes dropping open, until my mother called.
“Heather, hurry it up. It’s already four o’clock.”
“That your name, Heather?” He picked up his hose again.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
Torches flared on both sides of the road that led to the Bel Air Hotel. The path wound in and out of woods. My mother drove real slow. She parked underneath the awning. I moved to get out but she stopped me and told me to wait. She rested her hands on the steering wheel the way she used to for years on top of my shoulders. The valet came and opened the doors, her door first and then mine. She wasn’t shy to relinquish the car now. There was nothing embarrassing in it. It was clean. The leather smelled of Windex.
At the desk a man shuffled through his book. “We’ve put you in the tower, which is a lovely room, but there’s only one bed. A double. I’m afraid it’s all we have left.”
My mother let a frown pass over her face, for appearances. We’d slept in doubles all the way across America. She didn’t like to sleep alone. I did. She was frowning for me to see, too.
“That will be all right.” She shrugged.
Following the valet to our room, we let ourselves relax. I bumped against the wall and she let me bump because I was clean. The stucco seemed to absorb amber evening light.
We walked through an outdoor courtyard. There was a small café; white tablecloths, white chairs, the distant slap and shuffle of late swimmers. People at the tables were drinking, lingering in daytime clothes.
We climbed stone steps to the tower. My mother tipped the valet and then closed the door behind us. I crossed my arms over my chest. She looked at me and asked, “What’s the matter with you now? Don’t tell me even this doesn’t satisfy you.”
She stood looking around the room. And it was a beautiful hotel.
But I was thinking about us on our hands and knees, our butts sticking out the car door, scrubbing the melon juice stains off the leather. The afternoon canceled out now. My mother was not that way. She could hold contrasts in her mind at once. She must have found me horribly plain.
“It’s nice,” I said.
A green and white polished cotton canopy shaded the four-poster bed. My mother kicked her shoes off and collapsed. I sat on the window seat, my leg swinging over the side. My jacket hung on the back of a chair where I’d left it. She hooked it with her bare foot and brought it to her face. Then she tried it on, adjusting the collar, turning it up.
I looked at her—she was standing on the bed, barefoot, her toenails polished a light shade of pink, glancing in the mirror. “Take my jacket off,” I said, cranking the window open. It wasn’t warm but my arm was pumping as if I needed air.
“It fits me. You don’t know what a cute little shape I have, for a mother. Pretty darn good for my age.”
“Can we afford this place?” I wasn’t looking at her anymore. My face was out the window, gulping the night. I watched the waiters move, beautifully, around the glows of candles on the little tables. One man cupped his hand over a woman’s to light a cigarette. My mother’s fingers spidered on my back.
“I’ll worry about that, okay? I’m the adult and you’re the child. And don’t you forget that.”
“Don’t I wish I could.”
“Well, you can. So start right now.” She laughed, half a laugh, almost a laugh.
“I’m hungry.”
“Should we call room service?”
“No, I want to go out.”
I hardly ever said things like that. I was afraid I would be blamed for wanting too much, but that night it seemed I had to go outside. I didn’t like being just with my mother all the time. You were alone but she was there. My mother must have felt that too, but I think it was one of the things she liked about having a daughter. You never were all alone.
“I don’t know, I’d just as soon have so
mething here, now that we’re parked and all. To tell the truth, I’m sick of this driving. You don’t know, you haven’t been doing it, but it tires you. You can’t believe how my shoulders feel. They ache, Heather-honey, they really ache. Twenty-one, twenty-two, let’s see, we left the fifth, do you realize, we’ve been on the road sixteen days. No, the fifth to the, today’s—”
“We can go here. You don’t have to drive. There’s a restaurant down there.”
Her head turned. She looked a little startled; she always did when she was interrupted from one of her long songs. “Oh, okay. Fine. That’s fine. It’s just this driving, seventeen days, day in, day out, eight hours a day behind that wheel and boy, you feel it, you feel it right—”
I stood up and walked to the door, my jacket hooked on one finger. “Let’s go.”
“Well, would you just wait a second, please, and let me wash my face? And I want to put on a little bit of makeup.”
I sat on the steps and listened to her vigorous washing. She slapped her face, her feet thumping on the bathroom floor.
“It’s going to be a few minutes,” she said.
And it was. The sky went from deep blue to purple to black in the time it took my mother to get ready. I sat on the steps watching other people come to the café, sit down and drink, clinking their glasses together. I saw a man reach across a table and rummage underneath a woman’s hair, as if there were something to find.
My mother was humming, standing with her back to me.
When she stepped outside, I sniffed loudly to let her know I didn’t like perfume. I was wearing my regular afternoon clothes, and she’d put on a long dress, with a slit up the back. She was the adult, I was the child. She wore pearls and heels, her hair was teased two inches out from her face.
I rolled up the sleeves of my shirt. I have the kind of arms you roll sleeves up on. My mother is softer, plush.
“Well,” she said, making noises around her, the pearls, the cotton swishing, “are we ready?” She was talking in an octave higher than her normal voice, a voice to be overheard.
“What do you think?” I shoved my hands in my pockets and started down the stairs. She clattered behind me.
“Wait, wait, would you? Go a little slower, please. You don’t know what it’s like up here. I mean on these heels.” She put her hands on my shoulders. “My balance isn’t what it should be. It’s fine, in the morning, I’m fine. But by this time of day, you’re just going to have to slow down. Please.”
“Why do you wear them, then?”
“Honey, you know. They look nice.” She caught up to me and grabbed my arm, falling a little. “At my age, they expect you to have a little height. And who knows, maybe I’ll meet someone tonight, you never know. And I’d hate to meet the right man when I had on the wrong shoe.”
But my mother seemed to gain balance when we waited at the café entrance. I was glad to be with her then. I was glad to have her in those shoes. I stood close by her, when I was shy.
“Two for dinner?”
“Please,” she said, her chin high, following him. She knew how to do these things.
We got a small table at the edge of the courtyard with its own glowing candle, like the rest. We didn’t look at each other at first, we looked at the people around us. I didn’t see any free men for her.
My mother opened the menu. “Wow,” she whispered, “a wee bit pricey.”
“Room service would be just the same.”
“Not necessarily. But that’s okay. We’re here now, so fine. Well, I know what I’m having. I’m having a glass of wine and a cup of soup.” Even that was going to be expensive.
“I’m hungry,” I said. I was mad. I wasn’t going to have any soup or salad. If we could afford to stay here then we could afford to eat, and I was going to eat.
The waiter came and my mother ordered her glass of wine and cup of soup. “Is that all, ma’am?”
“I think so. We had a late lunch.”
I ordered a steak and began answering the waiter’s long string of questions. Baked potato. Oil and vinegar. Beans instead of rice.
My mother kicked my shin, hard, under the table.
“Didn’t you want a hamburger? I don’t know if you saw, but they have them.”
“No, I’d rather have a steak.”
“Oh, okay, fine. Whatever you want. It’s just that you said you wanted a hamburger. You said it this afternoon.”
Then the waiter left us alone. My mother leaned over the table and whispered. “Didn’t you see me winking at you, you dummy? Didn’t you feel me kick? I can’t afford this. What do you think you’re doing? Jesus. You saw what I ordered, didn’t you? Don’t you think I’m hungry? Am I supposed to starve myself so you can have a steak?”
“Why didn’t you order yourself a steak?”
“Boy,” she said, “I can’t believe how dumb you are sometimes. We can’t afford this.”
“So why are we here? Why aren’t we somewhere we can afford? I asked you upstairs and you said I shouldn’t worry, that you were the adult and I was the child.”
“Well, children order hamburgers when they go out to expensive restaurants. That’s all they’re allowed to order.”
“Then, why didn’t you change it? Go ahead. Tell the waiter I can’t have my steak.”
“I don’t believe you. You shouldn’t have ordered it! You felt my foot under the table, you just wanted your steak. Well, fine, you can have it now and you’d better enjoy it, because believe me, it’s the last steak you’ll get for a while.”
She sank back into her chair, her arms lapsing on the armrests. Our waiter arrived with her wine.
“Everything all right?”
A smile came reflexively to her face. “Lovely, just lovely.”
She’d had it with me. She pretended that she simply wasn’t hungry. As if not wanting things was elegant, but wanting them and not being able to get them was not.
She leaned over the table again.
“If you were so hungry, why didn’t you order more at lunch? You love hamburgers.
You usually always order a hamburger.”
“I do not love hamburgers.”
“Yes you do.” She sighed. “Why can’t it ever just be nice? Why can’t we ever just have a nice, relaxing time?”
“In other words why can’t I just want a hamburger, why can’t I want what you want me to want. Why don’t I always just happen to want the cheapest thing on the menu.”
“That’s what I do, why can’t you?” she said. “Don’t you think I’m hungry after all that driving?”
“You can have some of mine.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t want any. It’s yours. You ordered it, now you eat it.” She looked around the café. “There’s nothing for me here. I wanted to just stay in and have something quick from room service. Not get all dressed up. I just wanted to relax for once.”
Our food came and I stopped looking at her. I started cutting my steak. It was thick and glistening with fat. I put all four rounds of butter in the baked potato. Steam rose up in spirals. Then I shook on salt, spooned in sour cream. It looked delicious. She took a sip of her soup.
“So how is it?”
I said fine, still looking at my plate.
“How’s the salad? You haven’t touched the salad.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, still eating.
“Try the vegetables, you need those vitamins.” She put down her spoon. “Would you like a taste of my soup? It’s delicious, really, these little bits of carrot. They’re grated very finely. I wonder what they use. It tickles your throat when it goes down, like lots of little sparks.”
She was even smiling.
“No thank you,” I said.
She did the talking while I ate. “You know, you’re really right. This is a lovely place. Lovely. The pool over there, can you hear it? That little glup, glup, glup? And this air. I love these warm, dry nights. I wonder how cold it gets in winter. I know we won’t need rea
lly heavy coats, coats like we had at home, but do you think we’ll even need any? Light coats? Sort of raincoat-ish? I’d love to have a trench.”
Then I set my silverware down. I guess I was finally full. Now I looked around, too, and up at the starless sky. “The air is nice,” I said.
“Are you finished with that?”
“What? Oh, the steak?”
“I thought if you were I’d try a bite.”
I shoved the whole plate over to her side. I passed her the salad and the dish of vegetables.
“Oh, no, I just want a little bite.”
“Try the vegetables. They’re very good.” I knew if she finished my dinner, that would be the last I’d hear about the bill.
She sighed and settled in her chair. “Oh, it is. Very, very good.” She leaned over and whispered to me. “You know, for what you get, these prices really aren’t so bad. This is enough for the two of us, really. You know?”
Later the waiter came for our plates. All that was left was parsley. “I’ll take that,” my mother said and grabbed the sprig from his tray. He must have thought we were starving. But my mother really always had liked parsley.
“Will that be all? Or can I get you some dessert and coffee?”
My mother winked. “No coffee, please. But I think we’d like to see a menu for dessert. And would you like a glass of milk, Young Lady?”
I looked up at the waiter. “I’d like coffee, please. With cream and sugar.”
He left, to bring the dessert tray. My mother looked at me suspiciously and smiled. “Ann, now tell me, when did you learn to drink coffee? Were you just bluffing or did you learn? Look me in the eye and tell me true.”
We shared the cup when it came. She took a sip, then I took a sip.
“With you,” I said. “I learned from you.”
I could see her looking at me, wondering. But she let it go and she let the bill go, too. Now, I’m glad she did. You grow up and you leave them. She only had me six more years.
3
THE HOUSE ON CARRIAGE COURT
We were leaving the house on Carriage Court and Ted the ice skating pro. We’d met Ted when we took skating lessons, first to firm my mother’s thighs, then just for fun. All day the air conditioners in the arena hummed like the inside of a refrigerator. On the door of my locker hung a picture of Peggy Fleming; on my mother’s, Sonja Henie. Framed photographs of Ted during his days with Holiday on Ice hung in the main office, next to the list of hourly prices. In them, he didn’t look like himself. He was young. He had short, bristly hair and a glamorous smile. His limbs stretched out, starlike, pointing to the four corners of the photographs. The lighting seemed yellow and false. In one of the pictures, it was snowing.