by Mona Simpson
After summer school, once, I was in my room, in play clothes, leaning over to tie the laces on my sneakers. Ted knocked on the door. He was home early, he wasn’t usually home at that time.
He sat on my bed next to me. For a while, he didn’t say anything. It made me think that in all this time, he and I hadn’t been alone much. Just the two of us, we didn’t know what to say.
He held his hands in his lap and looked at them. “Your mother is leaving me,” he said. “I suppose you already know that.”
The tiles of the floor, painted white, spun when you looked at them too hard. It was cool in this room. My room touched the farthest back in the yard.
“Ann, do you know what a homosexual is?” He looked at me hard, waiting, like the teachers wait, a whole side of their heads still, after they ask a question in school. “Well, a homosexual is a man who likes men better than women. Your mother is saying that I’m a homosexual and when you’re older and she tells you that, I want you to know it wasn’t true.”
“Okay.”
“That wasn’t the reason.”
I couldn’t look at him. “What is the reason?” I mumbled.
“What?”
“If that’s not the reason, so what is the reason then?”
I sat next to him looking down at the floor.
“I don’t know, Ann. You’ll have to ask your mother. Someday you’ll just have to ask your mother. Maybe she’ll tell you.”
We kept sitting there, on my bed, staring at the wall. Then he picked up my hand.
“I’m sorry to see you go, Ann. Because in the years we’ve lived together, I’ve grown to love you. I’ve come to think of you as my own daughter.”
I smiled to myself and tried to keep it from showing. My chest felt warm, as if he’d given me something important to keep. I didn’t want to move, I was sitting in a small square of sunlight.
“I’m going to miss you,” he said.
I looked down at the floor between my sneakers. Ted was an orphan. My mother had told me he didn’t know who his real parents were, but every Christmas he sent a nutted fruitcake, carefully wrapped, to his foster parents in upstate New York. He sent it early so it would be sure to get there on time.
The sky in the windows, that had been plain and blue when I’d started to put my shoes on, was bright and almost dark now. I didn’t want to go outside anymore. Then we both heard my mother’s car bolt up the drive, the slam of her door. Ted dropped my hand back in my lap.
Lolly and my mother sat in the basement, laughing. They’d made a pitcher of Bloody Marys and it stood on top of the washing machine. They were sorting my mother’s old suitcases of things into boxes. All we could take with us was what would fit in the car. Stuff my mother owned but didn’t know where to put lay on a carpet in the basement. I sat on the top step where they couldn’t see me.
“He’s left and gone back and left and gone back. And he knows if he did, she could ruin him.”
“You mean she’d get half of everything.”
“Half, more than half, the house, everything that he’s worked so hard for and built up himself from scratch. I don’t blame him for wanting to hold on to it.”
At night, I walked back down to the basement where they’d been. I pulled a string to turn on the light. It was just one bulb. I rummaged through the cardboard boxes. In the pile marked Take were my baby skates and an old suitcase monogrammed with my father’s initials. The handle was broken and a dog collar buckled through the two metal loops. Inside was a jumble of my first-grade printing exercises, whole pages filled with small and capital E’s, a white photo album with a yellow pressed bud rose in it, a list of classmates who might like me, a faded Band-Aid—colored hospital identification band from when my mother was in Saint Peter and Paul’s for me, photos of me naked with a beach ball in little cardboard frames—I quickly flipped them shut, then I found a yellowed onionskin paper report on me.
Ann is an average child. Her teeth have white marks, possibly from a fever in infancy, making her inappropriate for close-up facial photography. Her hair and olive skin are rich and promising, and her long bones might bode well, but her expressions are sometimes blank and unpredictable. In play skits, with other children, she was sometimes shy and melancholy, looking off somewhere into the distance. Other times, she became aggressive and out of control.
The report was a tissue carbon, on letterhead stationery, green on yellowed white. Ann Hatfield August. Age 2½. The Glory Jones Agency on Park Avenue in Chicago. I held it in my hands and read it over and over again, as if there might be more about me. I didn’t remember any of it. I didn’t know I’d ever been in Chicago.
It was a watery day, windy, not raining yet but it would, and I was walking to Three Corners. I waited on the old cracked sidewalk, outside the wire fence of Saint John’s School. Mary Griling was going to meet me at ten o’clock. I didn’t know how she’d get out of her classroom, recess wasn’t until 11:15. I guess she said she needed to go to the lavatory. Anyone would have believed Mary.
Chalky yellow light came from all the windows in the old red brick school. Dry leaves blew up against the fence by my feet. I felt in my pockets. Mary’s passion this year was for marbles. The popular girls in her class were girls whose fathers worked in the ball bearing factory up the Fox River in Pulaco, girls who brought huge, shiny ball bearings to shoot with. They called them steelies. I had a steelie and a package of colored cat’s-eyes.
I stood there and cars went by and then finally I saw her, coming out in her indoor clothes, a jumper, a white blouse, knee socks and clean, polished saddle shoes. Her collar was neat and crisp, folded down like two envelopes. She had her badge pinned to her jumper over her left breastbone; it was a silver metal eagle on a white satin ribbon. Mary was awarded it in assembly for being the best female pupil in her class. She ironed the satin ribbon at night and put the pin back, fresh, every morning.
The sharp leaves touched our legs through our socks as they blew against the fence while we talked. I gave her the marbles and steelie and she put them in her pocket, keeping her hand there, holding them. We scuffed our shoes on the pavement.
“I guess you better get back,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Remember those pictures I took a long time ago in our new house?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll get rid of them, burn them someplace.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “I don’t care.”
“Just go ahead and find Benny if you want anything,” I said. “Don’t be afraid of him.”
“I won’t. I like Benny.”
I never said anything to the rest of them, to the boys. She stood there and I put both hands on the shallow indentations of her shoulders. We kissed softly, both of us, the way I’d seen my cousin Hal kiss my mother once, looking at her mouth, so carefully, as if he were afraid he could miss.
“This way, we won’t have the house, but we’ll have a car to let people know who we are a little,” my mother was saying. She’d managed to get the Lincoln Continental after all. “Maybe out there where everyone’s in apartments, it goes a little more by the car. Because we won’t have a house or anything, but maybe this will help. They can see we came out of something.”
When we slid into the new car, it smelled like lemon wax. The leather moved below us, soft and rich. We both wriggled, shrugging, to adjust ourselves. It felt like our bodies would make permanent impressions, the leather seemed that moist. My mother opened her purse and took out a bag with two long leather gloves in it. She held each of her hands up, taking a long time pulling them on.
Then it was an Indian summer day and everything was already done. We stood in front of our house on Carriage Court, alone, light, carrying nothing, already packed. Ted had left for the rink very early. The house was empty and clean, the windows washed. Everything inside had been accounted for. The grass was cut. There was a stake with an orange SKLAR REALTY—FOR
SALE sign stuck in the front lawn.
“Comemeer,” my mother said, “I want to show you something.” We were standing on the front sidewalk, by the new car, which glistened in the sun. I didn’t want anyone, any of the neighbors, to step out of their house and see us. Across the street, the garage door was rolled up and one of the boys stood over a work table. A radio came on. I just didn’t want him to ask anything we would have to answer.
My mother lifted the lid off a garbage can and grabbed the back of my neck. Her other fist held a fan of pictures over the can like a hand of cards. She dunked my head gently.
“I was packing your closet and I found these.”
In the pictures, Mary looked simple, very young. She was much older now. The boys looked frightened and excited, eyebrows pushed together, dark uneven lips. The boys seemed guilty, caught. My mother peered down, looking at me looking at them. Her voice was very gentle, as if she were afraid.
“Don’t ever do that again, Honey. Seriously. It’s against the law. Because they could really sue you and put you in jail if the parents ever found out.”
The garbage cans were clean, hosed off, and ferns bright with new tight fronds curled against them.
“What for?”
“Just because.” She shook her head. “They just could. Take my word for it. And believe me, they would. So don’t ever do that again, Honey, because you could get in big, big trouble. Really.”
She ripped the photographs into pieces. They’d yellowed, they looked old and simple. Mary, in them, was nothing, just so young.
“We’ll forget about it,” she said, quietly, letting them fall into the garbage can. Then, she bent down and retrieved the torn bits. “Actually, let’s not leave them here. You never know who looks around. We’ll throw them out somewhere else, on the road.” She unclasped her purse and dropped the shiny scraps of paper inside.
Then we walked down to the car, stopping on the lawn. My mother frowned. “You know you were right when we moved in. It is an ugly house. It really isn’t anything much. Just a little shoe box with no windows.”
I turned around and looked. It didn’t look to me like a shoe box anymore.
The leather smelled new and old at the same time as we sank down into the car’s front seat. My mother seemed nervous, driving. She hadn’t told the family about the Lincoln Continental and now they’d all see it. They’d have to. When we turned onto the gravel of Lime Kiln Road from the highway, the sky was blue, the clouds white and thin, the telephone poles pitch-black. High leaves on the trees glittered, sharp, dark green. The sky was a deeper blue than most pale summer skies and the wind moved like bright transparent banners around the branches. My grandmother’s house looked trim and neat as we drove up the driveway, the dark front bushes shiny. Birds sat on the tin tops of the mink sheds on the lawn, the cornfield was yellow and dry. Behind the old barn that once housed the butter factory, the highway looked dull, pure gray. And when we drove up and parked, my grandmother and Carol came out of the house. They seemed drawn to the car. Carol and Jimmy each touched it, running their hands over the sides.
My grandmother didn’t say anything. She smiled with her teeth together and she was squinting, the way she did in the sun.
“What’s that, a Lincoln Continental?” Jimmy said to my mother.
“Mark III,” my mother said.
She had packed neatly, and with an eye for color. Through the windows the inside looked spare and orderly. The trunk was full and the backseat had only our best suitcase, and on the tan leather, there was a printed red box and each of our summer sweaters. That was all we were taking with us to California for the whole rest of our lives.
Hal was gone already, at boot camp in Texas. The night before he’d left for the air force, I’d sat on his lap, pretending to shoot beebee guns in the air. I had looked outside over the dry lawns. All our lives we’d collected skeets from the fields. It was supposed to be good when you found a whole one.
Inside, the kitchen was buzzing with sun. It was after eleven in the morning. Jimmy Measey had already driven to breakfast at Bob’s Big Boy on the highway, then to the water softener store and back again. Carol stood pouring coffee for everyone while my grandmother served squares of rhubarb pie, just made this morning, still warm. Jimmy sat on a high stool drumming his hands on the table.
That summer, because we were leaving, I’d stayed afternoons and watched, trying to learn how to bake. The crust must be made in the morning; the parts not set, but the flour, lard and water mixed on the kitchen table, rolled out thin on the cutting boards. Nothing was measured, nothing kept. My grandmother washed and picked over the fruit, chopped the rhubarb, peaches, tossed in handfuls of berries and beat up eggs and sugar and fresh nutmeg in a blue bowl. Maybe vanilla, if we remembered. We poured the liquid into pie crusts, lining the square tin pans, and it smelled as clean as milk. We dallied over the crusts, ruffling the edges with two wet fingers for a long time. When they were in the oven, there was a fine dust of white flour in the air. I’d watched and studied, taking notes.
“Would you like milk?” Carol set the glass down, hard, in front of me on the table. Then she walked to the counter and wiped her hands on her apron. She seemed to be trying not to get in anyone’s way, she stood studying her knuckles.
Carol would have my grandmother to herself now. My mother eyed Carol suspiciously, a little bitter, as she slowly ate her square of rhubarb pie, examining each piece on her fork before she put it in her mouth, as if it were a complicated wonder.
And Carol looked at her sister, who still had her figure, a young face. (Why was it—she seemed to be puzzling—that Adele’s face stayed clear long past the age when Carol’s and all Carol’s friends’, women who used masks and facials and creams, accepted lines?) Who knew what Adele could get for herself, what we could do in California? We already had the new car and Carol must have wondered where we got the money for that. (Later, she would hear from the former owner, the dentist’s wife, who belonged to clubs, about the matter of delinquent payments.)
But my mother’s optimism must have seemed stamped on her clothes and even on mine, like labels. Carol glanced down shyly at herself, leaning against the counter, and she slouched, looking frumpier. She rubbed at her mouth with a napkin, as if she had eaten something sweet and oily and there were crumbs on her face that would stay no matter how hard and how many times she washed. Her thighs rubbed against each other as she walked and she seemed to wish we would leave. She moved as if she hardly ever thought about her body from the waist down. She paid no attention to her legs. Except when she saw my mother.
But it would only be a little while now. Carol closed her eyes and when she opened them she looked out the window. She could wait, she knew, she must have said it to herself without words, she was a waiter, she always had been, always would. The oblong silver water tank gleamed like the Goodyear blimp on the grass, in the untimely sun. Carol would have remembered Benny and me in our baby sun-suits climbing on the rough silver, scratching our chubby legs. It was all so new to us then. “It’s funny what kids like,” Carol said, “the most ordinary things, like water.” Water tanks, things after a while my mother and I forgot and didn’t even see anymore. Carol shook her head. It was too bad for Benny that I would be gone. All summer, Carol had found Graham crackers hidden in stacks in Benny’s room, when she’d gone in to dust. She hadn’t said anything. She’d left them.
Carol must have known she would always change the towels, screens in summer, storm windows in fall, the plain things, putting both hands on Benny’s shoulders; only when she thought of that, she probably pictured his squirmy body below her fingers and a small boy escaping under the kitchen table. Now, to touch Benny’s shoulders, Carol had to reach. And he would still grow more.
My grandmother wasn’t young either, and when she was old and when she could no longer take care of herself, Carol would be right there, right next door, here. Carol would come every morning for coffee and ask her what she wanted to d
o that day, in the same careless, flat inflection our grandmother had used with her and she had used talking to her own children.
Carol would keep her mother clean, she would keep the sheets fresh and smelling of rainwater. Every day she’d come and push the windows open. She would take the time to wash the doilies on the windowsills underneath the African violets and iron them, just to put them back again where they’d been. Never in a million years would my mother do that. No matter what she said.
When the sky clouded and turned gunmetal gray with the blue, Carol would walk by herself over the back lawn in a hurry to the clothesline between the two pines. She would put the wooden pins in her pockets and her mouth and fill her arms with sheets.
These were chores my mother and I had done, had dreamed about doing always, but now we wouldn’t anymore. We wanted other things.
When my grandmother was old, I would be away at college, my mother could be anywhere and Carol would be there, here, home. We already knew it that day. It worked out like numbers in arithmetic. Carol was already wide in the hips, she and my grandmother went to the same girl at the Harper Method Beauty Shop every Friday, a standing appointment, for the same all-around-the-head permanent curls. Carol’s face had become rounder, with kindness, as she’d grown into middle age. Her voice had the bland, even quality of an unselfish nun. It was only around my mother she had an edge.
And my mother, tasting the coffee go bitter and dry in her mouth, having eaten her two pieces of pie, felt full and still sure there was not enough. She stared at the half pie left in the tin pan. Carol was always born first. Her mother already had a daughter when she was born.
It was almost noon and there was a breeze lifting the thin summer curtains off the sills. My mother set her cup in its saucer and it trembled, chiming a little as she looked around the kitchen. Simple views. A corner. The refrigerator. Broom closets, the clean white stove. The mangle. With her chin in her hands, she closed her eyes a second, perhaps believing that if Carol were not next door (the dark darker, the edges of her eyelids tight), her husband, the Arab, my father, gone nowhere, a new hard star in the night sky, it would have been only herself, she would be staying home with her mother. She would be the one. The night sky chipped with light would be bordered with windowsills like a framed doily.