by Mona Simpson
We drove past the shopping center, the used car lot and my public school, out on the highway, to where it wasn’t developed yet. And then when we were at the place we’d gone for the benefit dinner, the place for girls, my mother let me out on the ditch by the side of the road and turned around and drove away. I stood waiting for her to come back. I was sure she would come, but I was trembling anyway. I couldn’t control my teeth, my hands. I didn’t have anything with me, money, anything. I took off my mitten. Inside was one soft worn dollar bill, pale from washing.
I was just wearing my jacket and jeans. I sat on a post. I didn’t see my mother’s car coming back. I watched the other cars in the distance, each one was a sink of hope, I squinted my eyes so I thought it was ours and let myself feel the sweetness of belief wash over me, but then it would come close and be green or red or yellow or blue, and all the time, inside, I really knew.
I thought of going somewhere. I looked behind me at the woods. The snow was melting on the ground. The tree trunks seemed to all rise, black, from the same level plane. It was hard to look at them. It was late afternoon, their black bark looked lush, holding gold on their thin sides. They glinted like fish in the air and soon it would be dark.
Then down the road, on my side, coming towards me, two girls were walking on the gravel, their hands in their jacket pockets. Their heads were down. I couldn’t see any more from where I was. Their feet kicked up clouds of dust. I thought they were coming for me. They were girls who lived here in the woods, in those cabins, and my mother had told them I was bad and they were coming. At the exact same time and with a feeling like a finger pressing down, leaving an impression on my heart, I knew that they were coming for me and I knew that I was imagining it, that they weren’t, they didn’t know me.
I bolted. I saw a flash of metallic blue, but then I was on the other side of the highway, up the embankment, in the woods, before the blue car passed. I stopped for a moment, still. All my life I’d imagined one death—slow motion, a clear day, pale blue sky, white clouds and a dull gray highway, a yellow stripe, the long bounce off a rounded blue fender, then the soft fall, dead, then nothing. All in sunlight. I’d never told anyone and I wondered if every person carried their own death with them, like something private and quiet, inside a small box.
I started to walk in the woods, still looking down for a white car on the highway. I knew where I would come out, on the other side. I didn’t think past that. At the road, I could hitch. The sky was white and blue now. The trees had lost their gold.
When I came out I was on another highway. Trucks and cars passed by. I’d never hitchhiked before. As bad as my mother thought I was, I hadn’t really done much. I was still too scared.
A truck zoomed by and the wind almost knocked me over. I stepped up and stuck out my thumb. I looked ahead of me. Three women, mothers, drove past without picking me up, and I looked down at myself and thought how I must look. My jeans were splattered with mud. Then a truck came and stopped. Feet above me, the cabin door sprang open. The man said he was going as far as the bridge. The seats were leather and cracked, I could feel the tape on the backs of my thighs. The whole cabin smelled of oil. It was a long, easy ride. We passed Dan Sklar’s office and I saw a white car like my mother’s outside on the street, and Saint Phillip’s empty playground. The sky was colored with feathery pink clouds when I got out.
“Say, where’re you going?” he said, when I stepped down.
For the first time I thought he might be dangerous. He wore a pale brown uniform with darker brown piping and a clover with his name, BUD, over his left breast pocket.
I jumped down the three steps and pushed the door shut. My ankle twisted and I landed in a puddle. I started running and didn’t look behind me. Suddenly, lights flooded the place between me and a brick wall. It was the truck moving and I turned around, stuck.
His head was in the rolled-down window.
“Girl, where are you going? I don’t like to let you off like this. It’s getting dark.”
I looked at my shoes. They’d gone from white to brown with streaks of mud and coal, in just one day.
“I’m going to my grandmother’s house.”
“She live around here?” His head moved back and forth.
We were downtown, by the quarry. There were old stores here, small stores with gray worn wooden doors and bars across the screens, the only color labels from the orange companies. Ruby Beauty, Sacramento, Indian River.
Two huge piles across the water, the bright soft yellow of sulfur and the smaller mounds of coal; he was staring.
“Yeah,” I said.
He waited a minute as if he were deciding whether to believe me. His face stayed in the window. He had short white hair and wide bones. I thought I saw him wince. He was thinking he was acting selfish, he shouldn’t leave me, but he wanted to get where he was going.
The small red lights of the truck flashed on and he turned.
I’d lived in Bay City all my life, but I’d never seen this corner. I fingered the dollar in my mitten. I went into the grocery store and the door tinkled above me. It was dark inside except for the wide, white iceboxes along the one wall.
I stood by the cash register, choosing. I bought a package of Milk Duds, a piece of beef jerky and a bottle of chocolate milk with a straw. I opened up my folded dollar and I gave it to the man. He waited while I stood there, before he slid off the wooden stool, butt by butt, to stand.
Then I climbed the cement steps to the bridge. This was somewhere my mother could be driving and see me. She’d brake the car, get out—the world would stop in light. There was no one else on the sidewalk. My footsteps were soft in the dark, I could hear them. Cars flowed in one stream, their small red lights like sequins. For a second, they looked to me like dark separate muscles of one long thing, then they were cars again. I took my mitten off so I could feel the steel metal sting of the banister. There was a three-foot wire mesh fence and I could see through to water. Smoke came from the tailpipes, it was cold enough to hold in the sky. The noise was steady. I looked down. There was splintering ice on the rushing, dirty brown water. It looked like root beer when you took the lid off in the summer.
On the other side factories lined the river as far as you could see. The sky was still a luminous blue. Small windows in the factories showed yellow. And on the ground, trucks, dumpsters, plows and cranes stood still, parked on the coal lots, their orange shapes scattered, left cranked up in open positions, empty-handed. Dirt fell in a fountain from one of the cranes like a huge timer.
Then I looked down again. The sidewalk I was walking on now, halfway across the water, was steel mesh, too, I could see down through it, and then it was as if something uncorked in me, the air rushing inside my ears. I looked at my dirty sock and my dirty shoe from the puddle and the sound of water below was like the reflection and echo of something, and I stopped. I closed my eyes.
Cracks on sidewalks, red lines of ants, uneven places, grass growing up around concrete, the worst thing is you are alone. You always know. When you can’t even sink, you can’t stop, you can’t let yourself. The dream of stopping, the desire, is like a pill. There is no one to hold your dead weight, so you always come back to yourself and you have to move again, your right foot and your left, the same.
I bit my lip until I tasted blood and gripped one hand over the other. One step and one step and one step. The underneath roar and the creak of steel were loud like sound in one closed room running in lines over itself. I bit the Milk Duds like pellets. I felt my tooth; there was a chip. That made me incredibly sad. I kept the piece in my hand. It seemed singularly important that I have it and not lose it to the water. Finally, I was light, a feather on the other side, ground again. I walked by the dark coal plant, I kept walking. I could smell the coal, it smelled like winter. An old neighborhood, these were bad streets, every block the flashing lights of a tavern. A brilliant Schlitz sign, water falling, white and blue, tripping over itself, behind it, I saw that
the sky had gone dark. Then I was on the highway, on the shoulder, in fields, unused earth.
The earth creaked, I stepped on a branch, above me the sky shifted like a wooden door. It started to rain and the drips were themselves and echoes all around me. Along the road, there were stakes with shiny reflector disks to keep the cars from running off. I walked in the marshy ditch, passed the bowling alley, taverns, long fields between lights. There was an old red brick hotel where they put chairs out in the summer, in front of each door. Once the son was my grandmother’s paper boy.
In the gravel car lot of the Starlight, a pickup backed out and a guy rolled his window down and whistled and I started running through the field. By the tracks, there were woods, birch and pine. It was very dark now. I knew where I was. But there were noises all around me. I kept biting the hard Milk Duds. I promised I wouldn’t look back; I felt touches on my shoulder blades; there was air, different from other air. Some air was curved and shaped like an arm, with viscous weight when it touched you. It touched behind your knees, your neck, the soft part of your cheek that bruises. I was walking over a mulch of disintegrating leaves. There were warm spots and long cooler corridors, as in a house, but I was walking fast, tripping. The points in the sky were stars.
I came to a clearing. A weaker light showed through. The trees were high and feathered; they sighed and dripped, scraped and wheezed, shifted their weight. Finally, I stepped out. There was a long field, water coming out of a cement pipe that we crawled through in summer. Past that was the railroad track.
My cheek brushed against a cattail and I saw my foot sink into a puddle. When I pulled it up out of the swamp, I heard water. The weeds moved under the dark surface like swollen hair. I pulled the cattail hard with my hand and the silver seeds blew off onto the tall grass like scattered wishes. I sat on a rock and took off my shoe, pulled down my sock. Sitting still the noises were louder. There was one sound, loud and continuous. Air has a voice like water, but I didn’t know if it was the wind or a faraway train or trucks on the highway. I didn’t know if there’d ever been such a thing as silence. The wind rippled on my arms. It was always there, the sound, like inside a shell, but you had to move and then stop to hear it.
I walked with one shoe. I got over the pipe with my knees. The mud of the other side felt silky, good, on my bare foot. Then I was at the tracks. The moon was a long way down, centered between the two ties. I balanced on the rails. The smooth metal was good on my foot. It would take me to the end of Lime Kiln Road.
I kept going and going with my eyes closed, my own sounds, a scuff and a meech, two steps, endless, echoing in my ears, indistinguishable now from the outside, the way the lines of the sky and land finally merge at night and then go on and on, ringing forever.
There was a train. I was in the ditch, holding on, shaking, deaf and blind. After, a long time after, I was cold and wet. My heart was still beating, loud, like underwater.
Then I was at my grandmother’s door. The house was dark and quiet, cool, wrapped in wind. I heard branches ticking against the high windows like fingernails. I decided to sleep in the Oldsmobile. I didn’t want to wake her up. There was something perfect about her sleep.
The dark in the garage was a different, grayer dark, there was no light inside the blackness. There was a deep scent of rainwater and earth from the geranium planters, filled with soil and roots. Each summer, she took them to the cemetery, planted. I found the handle of the Oldsmobile door and lifted it. I went around to the other side, but the doors were locked. I could see the shapes of the lawn mower, the old hand plow, Benny’s dirt bike, all the tools hanging on the wall. Then there was real noise, outside, metal, and the wind taking the garbage can lid down the drive. Something was in the garbage. I pressed myself against the old wood wall and waited. There was a long screeing sound. Raccoons. I stepped outside. Their handlike paws moved intricately below them, as they looked up at me. Their fingers worked without them, over the garbage as if it were jewelry, precious, expensive things.
I stood on the hard grass of the yard and started calling.
“Gramma. Gramma. Gramma.”
I kept going and going. Now was too late to stop. I heard my voice coming from all over, the wood of the roof, the high tenting trees, a wind from the railroad tracks, crickets in the fields, all the sounds started anywhere but in me.
A light at the top of the staircase flicked on. My grandmother stood at the small window and opened it.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me.”
“Who are you?”
But the light pulled off and she was coming down the stairs. Then the kitchen was chalky yellow, the same room I’d seen by itself in dreams, and the dog barked inside the door.
My grandmother opened the screen an inch. “Is it?”
“Gramma.”
“Oh, good gracious, come in.”
Then it was over like any dream, I was cleaned, I was warm, I was safe. I was wearing loose silk pajamas my great-great-aunt Ellie gave to Carol for Carol’s honeymoon at Niagara Falls in 1946, the elastic big on my waist. I pulled the covers up in the small cold bed while my grandmother sat downstairs in the kitchen corner, calling Ted on the telephone, telling him she had me here.
“Your mom’s not home,” she said, kneeling in front of her bed, shoving the pan underneath with the regular sureness of a cook. “Lan-knows where she is. Ted says she’s out somewhere looking for you.”
We each sighed and went to sleep. Later, we heard noise. Doorbells rang from two places through the house. Someone was at the front door. It was not the kind of house where you went to the front door. Even the hoboes in summer knew to use the back. I stood up to the window and the sky was lit with a huge moving stripe of light.
“Shhh, just stay down where you are. I’m going to go to the hall window to see. If anyone comes, you just run in the attic.”
She walked slowly and pulled on the light by the window.
“That’s your mom down there. Ye gods, who knows what all she’s got with her. You just sleep. I’m going to tell her she can just come back in the morning.”
I walked to the high window. My mother was standing where I had been on the lawn, her hands on her hips, staring up at the house. She looked small. She was wearing her suede jacket and her sunglasses were still on the top of her head. Dan Sklar stood behind her, his shoulders curling down. The light was coming from the top of a squad car. Two policemen crowded on the porch. Then I heard my mother shouting through the walls.
“Just let me have her, you don’t know what I’ve been through tonight! She scared me near to death. I almost had a heart attack, I can still barely breathe.”
“You can have her in the morning then. She’s here fine, now. Just leave her sleep.”
“Mom, she’s mine, she’s not yours. Give her to me.” My mother was beating her jacket pocket with a fist.
My grandmother closed the door, I heard the bolt locking. The policemen shifted their feet, their fingers in their belt loops. Then they all left and it was quiet again.
The inside of the tin bread box, the polished silver metal, was bright with sun, brighter in the creases. The outside was pink and smooth, painted. I stood for a long time, looking into the metal, the sparks of light in the tin, playing.
The screen door rang and my mother stood there to pick me up. My mother acted nice to me then. It was just us in the car, she and me, and it was early. She drove fast on the highway, the sun was bright, but still cool.
We sat on the same side of the booth in the restaurant on top of Shreve’s. Our knees touched under the fabric of our skirts. I was wearing funny clothes, a skirt of Aunt Carol’s, my mother’s college sweater from the upstairs closet.
The waiter stood for a long time, pouring champagne into our orange juice, and we leaned forward, watching the glasses.
“So. I think it’s time we really think about going.” My mother smiled at me. Our seat was by the window, over the Fox River. The bridge w
as splitting in half, the huge metal sides lifting in the air, for a boat to go through underneath. From where we were it was all silent choreography, light blues and darker blues, steel.
“What?”
“We’ve been talking about it a long time, I think we should really go.”
“Could Ted get a job out there?”
My mother put her cup down in her saucer too hard. A pool of dark water filled the plate to its rim. “He’s not coming with us.” She shook her head. “You and I are really elegant. We can pass. He couldn’t fit in there. Not in a million years.”
The champagne and orange juice bubbled in quaint, tall glasses. Two tiny paper umbrellas rested on the ice cubes. When we raised the glasses and toasted, the backs of our fingers touched.
My mother called the Los Angeles School System. She stood with a yellow note pad next to her, talking on the phone in the kitchen. I was home, too. My mother had called us both in sick. While she held the receiver, saying, “Mmhmm, mmhmm, yes, mmhmm,” her hand thumped against her side.
Then, when she hung up, she started hopping around the kitchen, clapping.
“Yippee! We’re going to make it, Ann-honey. You just see. We are. I know it.”
“What did they say?”
“Well,” she started, kneeling down next to me and gathering her breath, picking up my hand. “It looks like I’m going to get a job. He said to me, Well, for someone with your credentials and experience, there should be a spot, for sure, somewhere in the system. I just have to send all my things in. You know, my papers. God, I’m going to have to work on that. But, let me tell you, Ann, he was impressed. You don’t know, but your mom’s pretty special. Really, Ann, you don’t know, but not many women my age have an MA.”
She looked down at her hands. She was shy about it. I felt, I don’t know, kind of proud.
She stood up. “Say, remember that boy from TV who was here once for the Cerebral Palsy telethon? Let’s just give his agent a call and see about getting you on a series. Let’s see, it was Ellen Arcade in Riverside, I think.” My mother had a long, perfect memory.