by Mona Simpson
We decided not to call my mother until we were farther north, in Michigan. It seemed safer in another state. Walking to the cash register, we passed two men in outdoor clothes with a radio going on their table. “Storm’s still up,” one said to the other.
My grandmother was a shy person, but she made an effort.
“You’re not going to the lake, are you?”
“Yes, ma’am. Up to Superior. Gonna get the washups.”
“Why, us too. You must be the real rock hounds.”
We followed their truck. We drove and drove, through towns with Indian names, down main streets one block long. We passed a road sign advertising the butter factory that used to rent our old barn; it showed a picture of a Michigan summer: blueberry patches, a bear, high clouds over a lake and dark green pines—the paper peeling off the sign, flapping in the wind. We were halfway to Canada.
We each sat on one of the twin beds, taking turns talking to my mother.
She shrieked so loud my grandmother held the receiver out a foot away. At that distance, my mother’s voice sounded hilarious, like a tiny recorded puppet’s voice.
“Lake Superior. My God, Ted, they’re at Lake Superior, those two. Well, when are you coming home?”
My grandmother kept the phone away from her.
“Put her on,” my mother said, “put on my little wee-bear-cub. I miss my Little Bit.”
The corners of my grandmother’s mouth lowered. I took the phone. My grandmother and I were both laughing then, and I tried to stifle the sound.
“Pooh-bear, are you there? Are you all right?”
“Yes, Mother, I’m fine.”
“Do you have enough to eat, Bear-cub? And what are you wearing? Do you have warm clothes?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Well, you be careful out there on the beach. Don’t you dare go at night when it’s dark. And be careful of the other rock hounds and watch out for those undertows, because, believe me, Twussy, they can be atrocious, they just pull you right out, I’m telling you—”
“We’ll be fine, Mom, we’re not swimming, we’re just walking on the beach. And we’re going down to dinner now, so I have to go.”
“Okay, well, have a good time and take care, you two. And hurry home because I miss my little Twussy Thing, Pooh-bear-cub. I’m lonesome just thinking of you way up there.”
“Is it still raining where you are?” my grandmother asked.
“Storming. I’m in bed already.” My mother giggled.
Downstairs to the dining room, my grandmother and I could hardly walk.
“Well, how do you feel, you little, you little Pooh-bear-cub, you,” my grandmother said. “Oh ye gods.”
“My little Twussy Bear, I’m soo lonesome, sigh.” We kept bumping into each other, and then against the walls.
“We shouldn’t talk like this,” my grandmother said, trying to pull her face straight. “But oh, the things she says. Twussy bear. Now what is a twussy bear?”
Ten at night and the storm was still going. We sat in the dining room in a corner, next to a window. Finally, we were quiet. That was what always happened when we talked about my mother. First, we couldn’t stop laughing, we were hysterical with talk. Then it burned out and we each sat quiet, alone.
“Gramma, was she always like this?”
My grandmother turned and looked out the window. Her profile was sharp and even, like faces of men on backs of coins. Outside, waves opened and lit the shore. Rain splattered on the glass.
“Oh, there was always something not quite right about her. Something a little off. She wasn’t quite all there.”
“Even when she was a little girl?”
“I’ve thought that to myself a thousand times, and I just don’t know anymore.” A waitress brought a basket of bread to our table. We knew it was warm. Neither of us touched it. “I think even when she was real small, there was always something missing.”
I looked around the room. There were rock hounds at most of the other tables. Canvas bags and flashlights lay next to their feet.
We ordered big meals: fried steaks with pats of butter melting on top and peach pie, warm, under cream, on a soft, dissolving crust. “Nutmeg,” my grandmother said, tasting it. “Good.” Afterwards, we both drank coffee. The times I’d tasted my mother and Ted’s black instant espresso, I spit it out. But we drank cup after cup with cream and sugar and it was delicious, sustaining us, as we waited for the storm to clear. The waitress kept circling the room with the silver pot.
In every person’s face, there is one place that seems to express them most accurately. With my grandmother, you always looked at her mouth. Her teeth seemed to balance at the very tips of each other, just touching, her lips held and nervous while she listened to a question.
“Oh, no, we’re just amateurs, shucks no,” she said, frowning, to a table of women at our left. In groups, she was the shyest one at first, always, but eventually they looked to her to start them laughing. The ladies at the table promised to wake us up if the storm broke.
“That’s room nineteen?” one of the women shouted, as we stood up to leave.
“Us, why no,” my grandmother teased, “but Elma, you go and knock on nineteen in the middle of the night and just see what the gentleman says. And tell us what you find there.” The women were still laughing as we walked away.
We went to feed Handy two pieces of steak we’d wrapped in a paper napkin and to let him outside by the car to make. But he whimpered in the rain, so my grandmother spread newspapers from the trunk over the backseat floor. When we left, we felt sorry for him staring out the car window. With his paws up, he looked tiny and pitiful, wet; his head, with the hair packed down, seemed no bigger than my fist, the size that’s supposed to match a human heart. We took him under my poncho and carried him to our bathroom, where he beat his tail against the door. “Ugh, you are a wet thing, you,” my grandmother said, lifting him onto her jacket.
The wind was still blowing when we finally went to bed. At the very northern edge of land, where it was dark and late and storming, sleep seemed the easiest state to exist in. I went to sleep there fully trusting the world not to harm me. I don’t know if I ever felt that safe, before or again. My hands lay softly on the bed that night, my ear to the pillow as if that was where the comforting sound of rain came from. We were far away. I liked going to sleep knowing it was cold and no one was outside and we were so far away from anywhere else where the sky might be clear and other people might be living other lives.
When we woke up the next morning the storm had broken and the air was sweet. There was only a light rain. We dressed quickly and took our equipment from the car. I carried Handy in my poncho. It was still dark, but the sky was lightening a little over the lake. In the distance, we saw spots of other flashlights. Waves shellacked the sand and brought new rocks and driftwood. The lacy foam receded and we tracked down, looking for agates, banded with gray and blue, the colors of the air here. They were everywhere in the sand, caught in the masses of seaweed. We walked slowly, our eyes careful on the ground. Every few minutes one of us would stop, bend down and pick up a stone. We found agates and arrowheads and just granite smoothed by water. We each came over to see when we found one, held it in our hands under the flashlight. My grandmother walked to wash hers in the water first. I licked mine to see and then put it in my cheek, sucking, until I found a new one.
It was as if the stones renewed us. We could have walked and walked, bending down forever on that beach. There were miles to study. Handy ran along near us, going ahead, then looking back, his barks soft and lost in the louder noise of waves. I hadn’t seen an ocean yet, but this lake seemed enough. We couldn’t see the other side, but we knew over the pencil gray line of the horizon was Canada. Canada—just the sound of the name. It seemed it could end all our problems.
A man at a filling station kept looking at my grandmother. It bothered me. He leaned on the front of the car and he took a long time to wash the windshield. My g
randmother blushed a little when he stared. She picked up the Kleenex box on the car seat between us and set it down again.
“Gramma, why is he looking at you funny?”
She shrugged. “Well, shucks if I know.”
Then I remembered something. There was a picture of my grandmother when she was young, wearing a white lace dress, her braids ending in two pencil points at her waist. She was holding a black dog with a huge ribbon around its neck. My mother and my aunt Carol said she was beautiful. They said they felt in awe of her. I’d never seen it. To me, she just looked like a grandmother.
“That guy likes you, Gramma.”
“That old fellow. Shucks no, he’s too old for me.”
But when the man filled the tank, he kept looking in through the window, the nozzle in his hand. My grandmother gripped the steering wheel and she looked down at the spokes, her mouth working, smiling in spite of trying to frown.
“It’s Chummy with that Public Service hat.” My grandmother walked to the window and pulled back the curtain every time we heard a car. Public Service was the name of the gas and electric company in Bay City. The men wore yellow hardhats. She meant it wasn’t my mother.
Then she pointed with her fingernail where I should erase. My homework spread over the kitchen table. She stood behind me, checking the arithmetic of my problems, her glasses low on her nose.
The back of my hand was in my mouth, something I’d done all my life. It drove my mother crazy. When I was young, I bit my nails and she pretended to give me a manicure, rubbing my baby fingers with quinine. It worked, but the gesture simply adjusted itself. Now I moved my lips over the back of my hand. This made my mother more upset. “I should have let her stick with the nails, who cares if she ruined them and had ridges all her life like Juney Miller, it’d be better than this,” she told Lolly once. “Ann, take that mouth off of your hand. You’re going to get thick awful lips like a Negro. If you do that where other people can see you, they’re going to think something’s really wrong with you. And I don’t think you even know when you’re doing it anymore.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t. You think you do, but I’ve seen you doing it when you thought you weren’t.”
My grandmother watched and didn’t say anything. I did another page of problems and she looked over it, checking my additions and multiplications in the old math.
“We have fun,” she said. “I know you like it by me.”
Then we heard my mother’s car in the driveway. My grandmother touched my hair, just then. That was the kind of thing she almost never did.
“I know you haven’t got it the easiest with your ma. I know how she can be. I know it.”
I looked down at my sheet of problems. I said, “Sometimes,” and then my voice stopped.
“I know, I know it, but shhh now.”
The screen door banged and my mother rushed in, with Handy beating around her ankles.
“Well, hello, hello.” My grandmother collected my school papers together. We sat around the kitchen table. My mother rested her chin on her hands. She fiddled with her bracelet. She seemed tired again.
“So, tell me, what did you two do?”
We told her little bits. We drove up to Lake Superior, we had supper and went to bed. When we woke up, the storm was over. My grandmother took out our rocks from the canvas bag and spread them on the counter. She wrote labels and taped them on rocks while we talked. She’d finish them before I had to go. When we walked out to the porch, a rusty streak of red held in the sky. It was one of those dusks that was cool but not cold, the sky so brilliant it made the houses and barns, everything built, look small.
We stood on the porch, in no hurry to leave, while my grandmother took the leash down to walk Handy. As soon as she lifted it off the peg, Handy jumped up on her, yelping.
“Ya, you be quiet, you,” she said with a false sternness.
The highway was barely visible but we heard the constant running noise of travel. My mother was wearing a straight cotton dress with a cardigan and I had on dungarees. It seemed to me then, as we stood there, for a long time on the verge of leaving, that we shouldn’t have really had to go. Something had gone wrong.
My mother and I should have both been girls who stayed out on the porch a little longer than the rest, girls who strained to hear the long-distance trucks on the highway and who listened to them, not the nearer crickets. We would have been girls who had names in their heads: Ann Arbor, Chicago, Cheyenne, San Francisco, Portland, Honolulu, Los Angeles; girls who looked at the sky and wanted to go away. We would have been the kind of girls who thought we, more than other people, saw the sadness of things, the poignance of lush darkness around stars, but who finally sighed and, calling the dog with a mixture of reluctance and relief, shut the door and went in home.
My grandmother looked at me as my mother slid into the car. “Go on, get in now,” she said.
But she wanted me and I wanted her and she couldn’t have me because I was my mother’s. She was too old to take care of me. She would die before I was grown.
As we backed out of the driveway she bent down to Handy. My mother turned on our lights.
My mother was born on an old kitchen table, now in the basement, cluttered with tools. Her high school dresses hung packed together over her red ukelele in the upstairs closet, the closet with one high window that showed sky and clouds and telephone wires. Her father’s mink sheds stood rusting in the field out back. My mother blamed the house on Lime Kiln Road for things gone wrong in her life. She had hated being so far in the country, she remembered walking miles in the snow to Saint Phillip’s Academy, the sound of her boots the only sound for an hour in the hollow, blue air. She had felt embarrassed, bringing boyfriends from college to a dead-end road, when the car had to pass by Griling’s house, junk and old auto parts in the front yard, and children whose matted hair made their eyes look huge and hereditarily dumb.
“Well, who could I meet? Out here? Gram talks about Ellie’s June this, Ellie’s June that, well, I remember when June was in high school, Ellie bought the smallest little house in DePeer and June grew up with all the doctor’s kids and lawyer’s kids. They could have moved, too, but no, Gram and Dad stayed there. And look at June now. Look who she married. And she didn’t even go to college.”
“She married an undertaker. And now she’s got twelve kids.”
“Listen, it’s the undertakers who make all the money these days. More than the doctors even. They don’t have to pay the malpractice insurance.”
“So would you want twelve kids?”
“I think I would.” She said that quietly, shy. “I always wanted a big family. I think I would have liked to be a homebody.”
That shut me up.
“So did you really have fun, tell me true, I won’t tell her. Did you really have fun or was it just all right?” She bumped over a curb. “Whoops.”
Then the car was coasting, and she let me turn the radio on. “It was all right,” I said.
She was intent, looking at me. There was something about when she looked at me, it made me blush, I couldn’t help it. It always seemed like I was lying, no matter what I said. The blood poured to my cheeks. “What did you have to eat? Did you have a steak up there or just those Polish pasties?”
“We had pasties.”
She made a face. “Well, I broiled a château,” she said, moving the wheel with one hand, easy. “We’ll see that you have a good steak tonight.”
A week later, my mother ran to my room. She’d told my grandmother what I’d said and they’d fought on the telephone, my grandmother cried. “Ann, tell me true now, did you lie to me, because she said you had New York steaks, the best they had on the menu up there, and she paid twenty dollars for it.” She looked at me, shaking her head. “Don’t do that, Ann, don’t play us against each other. She’s my mother, too,” she said.
The winter I was six years old, my mother was gone. She went to California, without me.
My grandmother and I talked to her on the telephone in the kitchen, asking her when she’d come home. She told us she was recovering. I pictured her in a white hospital like a kitchen, with violets in a water cup. “Not yet,” I told the nuns at school when they asked if she was home. They asked at the end of the day when we stood in line, waiting for the bell to ring. They touched the top of my head and their palms felt cool and dry. Every day my grandmother’s Oldsmobile would be banked right in front of the school, waiting. She leaned over and opened the door and inside it was warm, the motor running.
One day, a friend from my school came over and we ran through the fields chasing monarchs with butterfly nets and my mother called and said she was coming home. “Just when you had your friend and played nice,” my grandmother said, putting down the phone. The jars of butterflies sat all over the counter tops and on the kitchen table, holes punched in their tin lids. Their wings seemed to beat as we breathed.
The day was there then and I was scared. I didn’t want her to come. I waited outside, I was wearing all white—white shorts, white T-shirt, white anklets and white sneakers—and when I saw the car coming down the road, I hid behind the garage in a lilac bush. I didn’t want her to see me.
But then—then the car door slammed and before she had to come look for me, I ran out and she was there and I was at her legs and she was young and beautiful and so much fun and my mother again.
“My baby’s all white, oh, you smell, you smell like perfume.”
The white VW gleamed in the sun and she carried me, hers again, my legs sticking out from her back. I felt sorry for my grandmother that day, moving around the kitchen in a blue print dress, there was flour all through the yellow light, she was baking, rolling out dough. She cut around our fingers, making cookies the size of our hands, all day she looked down at her work on the table, because I was not hers to watch anymore.
For a long time, I didn’t like Ted. He seemed to get in our way. Before Ted, my mother and I were waiting, preparing. We were going to go to California.