by Mona Simpson
For the first time I could remember, I was ready to go to school. All of a sudden, I was starving. I pulled up my knee socks and went to the sink. Ted had remembered to defrost. There was a two-pound package of ground sirloin in the sink, the blood running in jagged lines down the white porcelain.
While I was spreading the meat, my mother walked in, wearing black tights with a hole in one toe and a tartan plaid skirt, looking at her side, tying the matching sash. Ted walked out behind her, all dressed, saying Good morning, Ann, and nodding as he buttoned up his coat. He didn’t eat breakfast with us anymore. He drove to the Lorelei and ordered eggs.
We stood at the window over the sink, watched him stamp to the garage and come out with the shovel.
“Look at the size of those icicles,” she whispered. “It’s like a wonderland. I’d like to chop off a few and keep them in the freezer.” We both watched Ted shovel the driveway. He waved when he trudged up and leaned the shovel against the garage. We could see him through the windshield, unfolding his sunglasses and putting them on. He backed the Cadillac out slowly and as panels of snow fell off, it looked like something huge, coming up from underwater.
“It really is a beaut.”
I was eating my steak tartare standing up. “So I guess you’re not mad about the car anymore.” It was still early, but I wanted to be at school before the bell rang for once.
“Oh, Ann, I was all wrong about that. We were wrong about him, we really were. You know what he was going to do—he was going to drive it home and say, Here, Adele, Happy Anniversary.”
I sat against the wall, to pull on my boots.
“Really, Ann, we should be ashamed of ourselves. He really only meant the best. We spoiled his surprise.”
I heard my mother in the living room click the radio on. Then she came galloping into the hall, saying, “Snow day, put your books away, school’s out, snow day! Go out for me once and just hit those icicles with the shovel. We can take them out in summer, on a tray, with fruit around, wouldn’t that be a centerpiece?”
“You’re so tan, Ron,” my mother was saying. Ron Hanson was Ted’s friend from Holiday on Ice. His hair was bleached blond, with tinges of green, he laughed from his waist, placing one arm over his stomach as he bent down, and he had effeminate hands with long, spoon-shaped fingers. My mother talked about him endlessly with Lolly. But Ted was a reserved man with few friends. The three years we lived in the house on Carriage Court, we saw Ron every winter Holiday on Ice came through Bay City. This time, they were in from California and so Ron was staying in our back ironing room.
Now he was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, with my mother and Ted, drinking. I could hear their ice cubes shifting in their glasses.
“It’s those pills, I’m telling you, Adele, you should get them, you really should. You and I have the same skin, that same, pay-yull skin.”
I was in the bathroom, standing on the rim of the tub with my arms up gripping the shower curtain rod for balance, so I could look at my body in the mirror. It didn’t look to me like me. There were smudges of fat where I didn’t feel fat. Water in the tub was gulping out after my bath. I kept looking, trying to look a different way.
“What’s the name of those pills?” my mother said. I stopped and stepped down onto the rug. Didn’t she know pills that changed your skin, things like that, were dangerous?
“I just call them pigment pills, that’s what they really are. But it’s a prescription. I’ll write it down for you. I found a man who’ll give them to me, but they’re not inexpensive. They’re rather dear, in fact.” He laughed. I imagined his hand on his red shirt, his thin fingers spreading.
My mother knocked on the bathroom door. I picked up a brush and ran it through my tangles to be doing something.
“Open up.” She rattled the doorknob. “It’s locked. Honey, I’ve told you, don’t lock this door. It’s dangerous. If something happened to you in the tub, we couldn’t get in.”
“What’s going to happen to me in the tub?”
She was standing, looking at me in the mirror. She smiled and patted my naked butt. She cupped her hand and ran it down my thigh.
“Don’t.”
She looked down at me. “Why don’t you run out there and say good night a second. Go on.”
I looked at her as if she were totally crazy. “No.”
“Go on. Why not? Don’t you think they’ve ever seen a naked little girl before?”
“I’m ten years old, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Well, you’re still a little girl to us. At our age.”
“In case you don’t know, it’s not very nice to walk around naked. People don’t do that, Mom.”
“Oh, come on, a little girl with a cute little bod like yours, it’s just cute, that’s all.” It made me wince, hearing her say Lolly’s word. She ran one finger under my arm to my elbow and smiled, secretively. Then she suffered up again. “Go ahead. Come on, Ann, do it for me.”
“Why.”
She sighed, impatient at having to explain herself. “Because I’d just like them to see what a cute little shape you have. Come on, won’t you please, Ann? Just run out. Just for a second.”
“Forget it,” I said. I had my pajamas there, folded on the toilet seat top. I put them on, buttoning up all the buttons.
My mother sighed. “Boy, I can see you’re almost into the terrible teens. Can’t ask you to do anything anymore.”
I put on my robe and tied the belt, tight. “I will, however, go in and say good night.”
My mother followed me into the kitchen, still looking down at me with pride. Her gaze was like a leash as we walked. Ron and Ted leaned on the counter. We still didn’t have any furniture in the house.
Ron was holding up a hinged metal fish whose sides shimmered like dark mother-of-pearl. He said he found it in Baja. I asked Ron if, when he went back to California, he would buy us one of the fish if we gave him money now. I’d noticed that most people would give me the thing when I said that. They’d just give it to me. Adults relinquished shiny, pretty things to children. They were embarrassed to be caught liking them too much. I could see Ron looking into the segmented fish, deciding. He wanted to keep the fish—he wanted it that much. It hurt him, the thought of giving it up. I decided then that this made him different from other people. He loved his toy the way a child would.
“I’ll get you one if I ever go there again,” he said.
“Ron, are you married,” I blurted.
“Now, Anny, what do you think?” he said. His eyelashes dipped down, teasing. “Of course I’m not married. I’m waiting for you to grow up.”
I ran to my bedroom, screaming.
That night my mother came to my bed and just sat down. It woke me, I could feel her looking at me. I bent my knees under the cover and sat up. She pulled the blanket down off my shoulder, down one side. She pulled one knee out and looked up and down my leg. “You are a long-limbed beauty,” she whispered. “You’re my jewel. I have to take you somewhere they can see it.”
A clear night, my mother and I piling into the car to drive to dinner.
“What about the TV commercial?” I said.
It took her a minute to look at me. She was distracted. Then she sighed. Ted was back in the house, getting something. She leaned from the front seat, her face working, eyebrows, mouth.
“So be nice to him. Play up to him a little. I bet if you’re real cute and quiet, he’ll do it for you. Don’t kid yourself.”
“Why can’t I ask?”
“I wouldn’t. Just be real cute and make him want to help you. You’ve got to learn to make men want to do you favors.”
When he came into the car, I asked. “Ted, what ever happened with, you were going to ask a man you know if I could be on a commercial for TV.”
He looked over at my mother sharply. She stared straight ahead, hands on her lap.
“Oh, Honey, I did ask him and he said that none of them were made locally, they get the
m from Chicago and then they dub in the Bay City names. They don’t make them here.”
“So I can’t do it.”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“He could, he could get you on if they made them here, but they don’t make them here,” my mother said, scolding.
“Oh.”
A year before we moved to California, I asked my mother for a bikini. Theresa Griling couldn’t get one because her older sister who planned their money said her suit from last year was still good. My mother took me shopping downtown, but Shreve’s didn’t have real bikinis. All the two-piece suits came up too high and most of them had white pleated skirts. When we’d tried on bathing suits, we both stared at me in the store mirrors. In a bathing suit I looked older. “Oh,” she said once and put her hand on my waist. I shirked away then. I couldn’t have said why, but it felt weird, that touch. It moved as if her hand were burrowing in. After that, I said I didn’t want to try on any more.
Then one day I rolled my bike into the kitchen and Lolly was standing there holding a bikini.
“Malibu-wear,” my mother said, putting her hands in the bottom, spreading it open between her fingers. “This is the real bikini, all right. Try it on. I put it on me and it was a little small, so it should be just right for you.”
I changed in the bathroom with the door closed and walked out, suddenly cold.
“Very shall-we-say-svelte.” Lolly and my mother looked at each other, talking over my head.
“What do you think?”
“Love it,” said Lolly.
“Comemeer.” My mother kneeled down on the black and white linoleum floor and pulled the bottom up as if she were shaking me into it. She pinched the shoulder straps and looked at Lolly. “Just a nip or two on each side.
“Okay, my little Bipper,” she said, tapping my butt as punctuation. I was dismissed. “Very cute. Adorable, in fact. Why not, you know. If you’ve got a cute little body, why not show it?”
Lolly slapped her own butt hard and the cotton made a soggy sound. “This bod needs some work. A good two weeks of diet and exercise before I’m ready for show and tell.”
I rode my bike to the public swimming pool with Theresa and Benny. They both still lived on Lime Kiln Road. Every morning that summer, Ted drove me across town before he went to work, turned in the bumpy dead-end road and left me off. I always walked slowly up the yard to my grandmother’s house. I liked the minutes alone there. The trees, bushes with shiny leaves—I remembered everything.
I thought I had been happy when we’d lived in the white house, out in the country. But I was dumber then, there were things I didn’t know, even about downtown Bay City, where my mother took me to a boutique called The Id. I didn’t know if I could be as happy here now, as happy as I had been once. I kicked the gravel stones up the driveway.
Benny lived over the long yard in the next house. Like everything on Lime Kiln Road, I had known him all my life. His mother and father were always Carol and Jimmy. Benny was pale, with thick white-blond hair and scrapes and scars on his skin.
I remembered sitting with Benny on my grandmother’s eaves trough, saying our first words. My mother had taught me to say yellow, but Benny said lello. Lello was Benny’s color and Benny had to be right. Our parents thought of us as exact opposites and marveled that we played together so well. For years we were together, me trailing behind, always a year younger. I behaved better at school; I was quiet, meticulous, but Benny knew things, the things kids were supposed to know. He was a genius at running and accidents. He could run fast and hard as if his lungs were pure and inexhaustible.
In schoolrooms, he knocked things over. He was accident prone. Once, jumping off the garage roof trying to fly with two paper kites tied onto his arms, he cut himself over the eye. Mothers on Lime Kiln Road loved Benny. You could see him with a white bandage on his forehead, sitting on a front porch, reading or tossing a ball to some rapt younger kid. For a long time he tried to teach Netty Griling how to read.
He knew the names of things. Bugs, trees, things on the radio, parts of machines. He seemed born knowing how to drive. Later, he danced easily, he could throw a perfect stone, a football, he understood rock ’n’ roll.
These things mattered, they counted, we both knew. I admired him, he would always be older.
Theresa and I rode behind Benny. Every mile or so he would lazily turn back and circle around to us. It was a clear warm day with soft nimbus clouds drifting in the sky. I had the new bikini rolled up in my towel. At the pool, we paid a quarter for a wire basket and changed in wooden cubicles where the half-size doors were old and chipped and the concrete floor was gritty. You pinned the safety pin, with the number on it, somewhere unnoticeable, like the side of your suit. In the cubicle, all of a sudden I was surprised how small the bikini was. I stayed there awhile tracing a name cut into the pink faded door.
Theresa gasped. “You got a new suit, a bikini.” She poked her elbow into my side. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrugged, all of a sudden not wanting to be noticed.
We lay in the sun for a while and it was the way it always was. We had to rub the white cream from a silver foil tube on Benny’s shoulders and Benny’s nose: Benny burned. I went dark. With the new bikini, you could see my tan line. I snapped the elastic of the bottom. My grandmother, my aunt Carol, my mother—all of them looked at me in summer as if I were amazing. They all freckled in our family, freckled and burned. I was dark from my father.
Benny ran to the line at the diving board, and Theresa and I moved back to the metal fence and put our hands behind us. Then we jumped in, cannonballs, our arms hugging our knees.
Something amazing happened then, to the spot I jumped in, the spot of blue in the pool. I was underwater, coming up, and there was a swarm of boys around me, touching, pushing, patting my breasts with their flat hands. Legs and arms were on all sides of me. I felt as if I couldn’t get out; they were touching me up and down. I splashed, pushing my shoulders up for air, for breath, and the world changed and stood still, when I came above the water, splashing, trying to move towards the cement side. Something had my leg and was pinching the muscle of my calf. I saw the stillness of the sky, the pale green high water tank with BAY CITY written on its belly in black letters. I was alone.
I pulled on the metal steps trying to climb and their hands were on my legs. One was pulling my bikini bottom.
I screamed up, “Help me, these guys!” to the lifeguard on a white chair.
I didn’t have time to think, I just pulled with my arms. Above me, the lifeguard moved one dark leg over the other. The bottoms of his feet were yellow. He picked up a white whistle off his chest and finally blew it. By then I was out, stepping, making my first footprint on the concrete lip.
“Okay, guys, knock it off,” he said.
In the green water, the star-shaped cluster split and disappeared. Their skin looked white and strange, fishlike under the surface. I stood on the concrete, my arms across my chest, looking up at the lifeguard. I was back to myself. This was Ashwaubenon Pool in Prebble Park; I’d been here before, all summer, days and days. I kept standing there, waiting for the lifeguard to talk to me. He was motioning at the deep end, where a boy’s arms were beating the air, as he tried to get to the side.
I looked at the shadows in the green water. For a second, for a split second, I had opened my eyes and with the pressure of resistance underwater, for a second, the thought had come, they like me, and it was warm and the water was soft and enclosing and I was someone else, being directed, floating.
Theresa hauled one leg up out of the pool; she padded, dripping, and stood next to me. The lifeguard finally looked down and shrugged. “You know, you’re asking for it in that suit. If you don’t want it, don’t ask for it.” He grinned. His legs were swinging beneath his chair. It was the first time I’d thought of the bikini; that was what had been different.
We lay down on our towels again, by the fence, and closed our eyes. You co
uld feel yourself drying, just under the wind. I listened to the pumps below the concrete, the steady machines.
Benny stood dripping on us. “What happened?”
I kept my eyes closed and pretended to be asleep. Theresa sat up on her towel and told him.
“I know you’re awake.” Benny kicked me with a wet foot. His feet were so white. He was frowning. “Those guys are creeps.”
“Saint Agnes creeps,” Theresa said. None of us ever went to Saint Agnes. It was the rich Catholic school.
Theresa and I turned on our stomachs and opened a magazine and Benny went to buy us all Dreamsicles. Theresa took her sister’s magazines; they were swollen and frilled from having been wet and dried so many times. Underwater, those guys were faceless, swirling around like sharks. They still poked up, sometimes, laughing. But I was safe, things were the same, while I stayed on the concrete. It would only change in the water. When Benny came back, the Dreamsicles were already melting inside their paper wrappers.
“Here.” He threw his balled-up T-shirt into my lap.
Theresa carried my pin and hers and waited at the counter to get our baskets. She came in the stall with me when I changed. The ordinary dry shorts and top felt good. Then we were standing outside, against the metal bars by our bikes, waiting for Benny. Theresa touched the inside of my elbow. “You better not wear that suit again here.”
“He owns the very largest real estate company in Bay City.” My mother smiled to herself. “And it’s growing. Boy, are they growing.”