by Mona Simpson
Wouldn’t you just know, Granny was the one who took care of it. She got up at five every morning and hauled out that big pail of water and oats. She was the one who brushed that pony. Even after they took the leg off, she hobbled out there on crutches. She was a tough one, such a one.
I’m still sorry I let them take that leg, I think that’s why she died. She just didn’t want to live anymore when she couldn’t move around. They said her heart was like a girl’s, she could have lived lots longer. But she’d had the tumor in the leg. That they had to get rid of. Those last months were hard, with her in bed, I got up all hours of the night, changing the bedpan, she was so ashamed, she wouldn’t let anyone but me in there. And then she was losing her hair, too. She was a proud, proud woman. It was hard for her.
She died on your seventh birthday, in the morning, before any of you were awake. I wasn’t sorry. She’d lived a long, long life, she was ninety-one when she died and she didn’t really want any more. I was up with her all night. We didn’t talk much. We weren’t ever close and she wasn’t one to pretend. But I’d taken good care of her all that time and she knew it. She never had bedsores, she always had her things around her, I fixed her just what she wanted to eat. She had to admit I’d been good to her. And I was glad to have done it. Then when she died, at five thirteen in the morning, she looked happy, she got this big smile and her hands just opened at her sides. Carol was there then, too, she saw it. And then I knew, that was the end of something.
Adele and I talked and we decided to go ahead with your party. Why not, it didn’t make any difference to you kids and she had everything already planned. She had a cake from the bakery in the icebox. And because Granny was so old, we weren’t sad. She would be happier where she was.
So I sat on the phone to the funeral parlor and with the priest. And then again, too, we had detectives looking for Milton. They’d been looking this time for weeks already. And I saw outside the kitchen window, Hal taking you kids for rides on Silver Dollar. He went round and round the garage, so slow. I suppose your mom paid him something, that was probably the only time he made his money on that horse. Not long after Granny died, we had to give the horse away. Some people on a farm took him, where they had little kids. They came in a truck and got him.
You were wearing white that day. A white eyelet blouse and shorts and white anklets and white tennies. I remember from the picture: you had a big white bow in your hair. Your mom planned a nice party for you. Some of Chummy and June’s came, Hansens, and that Stevie Felchner, whose parents rented the little orange cottage in back by the barn, and those Griling kids. You can see in the picture, after all these years, you can still see how the other little children look clean and had decent clothes and shoes and those Grilings didn’t. There were the two girls your age, Theresa and Mary, and the one they didn’t have too much longer, that retarded girl, Annette, who went away to school for them up in Okonowa. I remember they each brought you presents. Everyone’s was nice, something the mothers bought and wrapped, except the Grilings’. They each brought something they’d just bought, in the bag from the store. I suppose the dad or whoever gave them their money, gave each one fifteen cents or a quarter and they each went in and picked out what she wanted. I don’t remember what Theresa or Mary brought anymore, jacks or something, you know, a regular present. But this Netty brought you such a cellophane bag of chocolate candies. I suppose that’s what she would have liked for herself. She couldn’t play with toys much. But it was a warm day and they were all outside and I suppose she was carrying it around, holding it in her hands, and by the time you opened your presents, hers was all melted, just one gooey bag of chocolate and the kids laughed.
Your mom had all kinds of things planned: games, pin the tail on the donkey, she’d bought firecrackers that came out like red, white and blue parachutes you kids could chase across the yard. So while you were all busy with that, she came in and found me. She had a supper planned for the kids after, she’d ordered that cake from the bakery a week ahead. She had sparklers and those black firework snakes for you kids to light after you ate.
She came and told me about Netty’s chocolates; we both felt so bad.
“Pyuk,” she said, holding the bag up and dropping it, with a thud, in the wastebasket. “Mom, you don’t think you could just whip up something chocolate for a cake, so we could take it out and say it was made from Netty’s candies? You wouldn’t have the time?”
“Why sure,” I said, “but won’t Annie expect the storebought? She knows you went to pick it up.” The cake from the bakery was real fancy, I bet she paid quite a bit for it. She’d brought one of your crayon pictures of a swimming pool and they’d copied that, with the frosting.
She said she’d take you aside and explain. You always were good like that, she could talk to you and tell you the truth. She knew you wouldn’t cry or fuss or throw a tantrum like a lot of children would. You were mature, more than Benny was. Carol couldn’t talk to Benny like that. Your mom talked to you almost like a grown-up.
“We can have the other with Benny and Hal tomorrow,” she said.
And I was glad to do it. When someone dies, it’s like you’ve been hit hard in the stomach; you lose your breath for a moment and everything stops. Then when it all comes back, you have an empty house. I’d made the phone calls first thing in the morning. Now there was nothing left to do. The house seemed so big and quiet. And do you know what I did? I fetched that bag of chocolate from the wastebasket, it was sealed with such a cardboard strip on top, it was perfectly good, just melted, and I used that as the start of your cake. And believe me, I’m telling the truth, did that cake ever turn out good.
I took my time. I had all afternoon. I baked three layers and then while they were cooling on the mangle, I made a filling with nuts and a separate maple frosting. Your mom had the idea to put seven sparklers in like candles, and we lit them just before she carried it out.
We’d set up two card tables in the backyard, and your mom had covered them with paper tablecloths. Red, white and blue. Everything had to match. It was just dusk then and Carol and Hal were there too, and your mom and Lolly and we all sat down and had that cake on paper plates. Your birthday is in June and the mosquitoes mustn’t have been too bad then yet, because we stayed out late and watched while you kids drew with your sparklers on the air. You and Benny played tick-tack-toe, but whichever one won, it always faded before you could draw the line through. Ben was teaching Netty to write her name. She wrote the same letters over and over. She had the letters right, but she was too slow. I went and made a pot of coffee to bring out and we ladies kept drinking the coffee and eating the cake. Then, one by one, at eight or nine o’clock, the mothers would step out on the porches and call their kids home, and family by family, they’d go. First Hansens, then Stevie Felchner, then finally June came over to get hers. Pretty soon all the mothers had called their kids in, except the Grilings, and they looked embarrassed because they had no mother. That little Mary got the older ones by the sleeves and they said they better go home, too, their father would be missing them. And by the time we folded the card tables up and went in, all that cake was done for.
I’ve thought about that many times. That was good of your mother to think of, on that day when she had so much to do. That Netty went away, I don’t know, a year or two later. I remember when they came and took her in the car. I watched by the window. It was two women with short hair, they looked like church women, and just an ordinary car.
ANN
5
SOUTH OF WILSHIRE
When we moved to California, we didn’t know anybody. For the first three weeks, we stayed at the Bel Air Hotel, but that was too expensive, so we moved to another, smaller hotel on Lasky Drive. Lasky was one of the quiet, mildly commercial streets south of Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It seemed to be a clean hotel, inhabited mostly by older single people who rented by the month. Our room in the Lasky House had a double bed with a faded, flowered bedspread
, gray carpeting and old wooden venetian blinds.
We went to the same place for dinner every night, the Hamburger Hamlet in Westwood, and we tried to sit in the same booth. We ordered the same food every night, too. There was enough else new in our lives.
“Well, it is beautiful.” My mother sighed as we drove away from the Lasky House and Beverly Hills and the car coasted down a hill on wide, bright Wilshire Boulevard into the sun. Tall, glorious apartment buildings stood on both sides of the street, their stripes of window catching light from the late, red, falling sun. We saw young boys in huge white leather tennis shoes on skateboards. Two rabbis walked on the sidewalk with a three-year-old girl in a pink dress. A couple in sweatsuits jogged.
We didn’t know how they could do it; live, eat, look like that. For us, it seemed so hard.
My mother was going to be a special education teacher in the Los Angeles Public School District and her classes started a day before mine. We got up early when it was still dark. She took a long time dressing arid left an hour to drive. As she went out to the elevator, she told me to stay inside our hotel room. I asked if I could just walk around the block.
“Honey, I’ve got a lot on my mind. Just do what I say this once.”
So I made the bed and stayed in the room, watching TV, pretending I was an actress on each of the shows. I kept calling the desk to ask the time. I wanted to go out but I didn’t. Here I was too scared to disobey.
And when my mother finally came back, something was wrong. She knocked things over, moving quickly. It seemed everything had changed. I didn’t even know if we’d get dinner. She exhaled, snapped on the overhead light, kicked her shoes off and began undressing, hanging her good clothes neatly in the closet.
She looked at me for the first time that afternoon. “You won’t believe what I’ve been through today, you just won’t believe it,” she said. Then she went back to undressing.
Except for the overhead light, it was dark in the room because the blinds were down. We never raised the blinds. We didn’t want anyone on the street to be able to see us.
“I can’t teach there, Honey. They sent me to Watts. That car going in the parking lot with barbed wire all around. They have electric fences. I’m telling you, Ann, we’re lucky I’m alive.”
Her voice sounded small. I’d never heard her so scared. It made me feel light in my stomach. I lifted up an edge of the blind. It was reddish outside, dark only in the centers of bushes.
“They have a big wire fence around the school, it’s like a prison. They give you a card you put in to open the gate. And Annie, those kids were like this, taller than I am.” She was standing in just her bra and underpants. She whispered, “And all black. I can’t go back there, Ann.”
“Don’t other people go, too? I mean, what about the other teachers? It couldn’t be that bad.”
“With this car? Wait’ll you see. They scratched it. Somebody scratched it with a piece of broken glass. He must have taken something and gone all the way down the side. One day there and the car’s ruined. You’ll see.” She sat on the bed and turned off the overhead light, even though it was only five o’clock and reddish outside. We could still hear the day from the sidewalk below, other people’s day.
“Won’t they send you somewhere else, somewhere safer?”
“I doubt it. They’re probably all booked. School’s started. They’ve got their staffs lined up. See, that’s how they get you. That’s what this school system does. They get the poor person from out of town and stick them there in the ghetto, where no one else will go. And I suppose they can get away with it. People come all the way out here, and then what are they going to do? And if it’s a man and he has a family to support? But I’m too old for that, Honey. I’m sorry, Honey, but that I just can’t do for you.”
I remembered how we were the day we found out. We whirled around in our stocking feet, our hands together in the middle, screaming “Weeeeeeeee!” We’d been alone in the house on Carriage Court, skidding on the black and white checked kitchen floor, no one heard us. When we stopped, she had looked shy. “You don’t know, Annie, but there aren’t many women my age who have an MA,” she’d said.
She probably remembered that too, and it made everything worse. We felt like dupes now, for having been proud. And she probably went back to thinking what she usually thought about herself, that she wasn’t quite right in the world.
“We’ll have to go home if I can’t get another job. I can’t work in that school, Honey. I’d get hurt. I wouldn’t get out alive.”
“Are you just not going to go tomorrow?” Tomorrow was my first day of school. I didn’t even know if we were having dinner. I started to hang my clothes up, too, neat in the closet. I always get neat when I’m scared.
“I’m calling first thing in the morning, believe you me. We’ll set the alarm. But the other teachers said, sure, they wanted to leave, too. Everyone wants to get out of there. I’ll tell them I just can’t teach there and see what they do. And otherwise, I guess I’ll look for another job.”
I didn’t say anything for a while.
“I don’t even know where to look here. I mean the LA School System is it, they’re all over. I don’t know, but I need to make money. We have to live.”
It was still only afternoon, but I pulled on the T-shirt I slept in and crawled under the covers. My mother sighed and sat down next to me. We had the one double bed and I always stayed on my side, near the edge. She shook my foot through the blanket.
“Come on. Get up, Honey. Let’s go get a bite to eat.”
I had to know. “Do we have enough money?” I asked. “If you’re not going to have a job?”
“Well,” my mother tried to laugh. “We have enough for one dinner, silly. Don’t worry so much. Come on. It’ll work out. I don’t know how, but it will.”
I felt something like a metal bar in my chest as I stood up, going from my heart to my neck.
But outside the Lasky House, there was a breeze. The air was bright and cool. I looked at the other people walking on the sidewalk. They seemed amazing to me. Then, I saw the scratch on our Lincoln. We both looked away from it.
“Should we try somewhere new, closer, or would you rather just go to the old place?”
“Hamburger Hamlet,” I said.
We ordered sunflower sandwiches, the same thing we ate every night. They were cheese, tomato, and sprouts on wheat bread with little porcelain dishes of sunflower seeds on the side. They had always enchanted us. We knew from the menu that the mayonnaise was safflower. But tonight the sandwiches weren’t wonderful. They were food. When we’d finished the sandwiches, we ate every sunflower seed from the small white porcelain bowls.
We drove past the long strips of park in Beverly Hills, lawns that separated the commercial district from the lush, residential streets above. Papery late summer poppies bloomed, red and tall, moving in the little breeze.
“One of these nights I’m going to come with a scissors when it’s dark and cut a bunch of those.” My mother laughed a little, mimicking the mischievous vigor she’d always had, effortlessly, in Bay City. It was a weak try. We were both far too afraid to do anything like that here. And if we did steal the flowers we would have no vase to put them in, nothing but the paper-wrapped water glass in our hotel bathroom.
The next day was my first day of school and I had to go anyway, even knowing we might not stay. My mother was driving to the Los Angeles School District office to try and talk to someone. We both wore our best clothes. My best dress from Wisconsin was navy blue wool, with a red belt, a little hot for this weather, but my mother said to wear it anyway. “They always remember what you wore your first day.” While she dabbed makeup on in the bathroom, I pulled up my first pair of navy blue nylons. At home in Bay City, we girls all bought our own nylons at K-Mart down the new highway. We hid them in our school lockers, changing out of our knee socks from home every morning. When my mother finished her own hair, she braided mine and tied on a red ribbon.
“Are those kids going to school like that?” My mother peered over the steering wheel to get a better look. We were early, parked across the street. “They look like they’re going to the beach.”
They wore long, wide-bottom jeans, ragged at the ends from dragging on the ground, leather sandals and T-shirts. The girls’ hair fell down over their faces onto their arms and backs, thinning to points at the ends like vines, as if it had never been trimmed.
“I have to change,” I said. “I want to go back to the hotel.”
My mother shook her head slowly. “We don’t have time, Honey. I have to get going and, anyway, you’d be late. You don’t want to be late your first day. And I wouldn’t send you to school looking like that, I wouldn’t.”
“I’ll walk back.”
“There’ll be the nicer kids and those girls will be wearing dresses. Believe me, Annie, I know. Go on, you look real cute. Really, or I wouldn’t tell you.”
I got out, carrying my clean new notebooks. It was nothing like schools in Wisconsin. It was old. The plain stucco walls were painted pink. All the roofs were red tile. There was a square steeple, as if it had once been a church.
Everything seemed strange: the small, old desks, the pale but bright blue walls. I thought it might always seem odd to me; I might leave before it ever grew normal. From where I sat in the class, I could see a palm tree, its huge leaves fluttering a little near the window.
Two girls in my class wore dresses, but I could already tell that they weren’t the ones I wanted to know. I liked the thin girls with long panels of hair like curtains on both sides of their faces. They smiled and laughed, knowing things. But I wasn’t even sure if I’d come back here tomorrow. I thought of my mother somewhere asking the LA School District for a different school. I imagined her in the district office like a court, pleading her case. She was asking for our two lives. The person who decided was a man. He sat and listened behind a large, wooden teacher’s desk; he played with a pencil between two fingers. She was standing in high heels, pacing, occasionally running her hand through her hair, pushing it back. She moved precariously, in those heels. He deliberated, listening. The sleeves of his judge’s robe dragged on the desk. She talked on and on, a whine in her voice. At moments, she broke into a cry, while he sat calmly looking down at his clean hands.