Anywhere But Here

by Mona Simpson

  I remember once you had a part in the school play. You were going to be Mary. I guess it must have been the Christmas pageant. I don’t know anymore, but it was something they had in the auditorium and they invited all the parents and the grandmas. The mothers were supposed to make the costumes. So your mom was going to send you in your summer sandals and this long muslin robe, just a beige thing, like a bedspread or a curtain really, that your dad left in a closet. It was from where he came from. She didn’t make a veil or anything. That was going to be it.

  “For Mary?” I said to your mom. “For a boy, maybe, one of the shepherds, but not for Mary.”

  She always had an answer for you. “Well,” she said, “that’s what they wear over there, in Jerusalem. That’s where it happened, you know.”

  You couldn’t say a thing to that, because she’d been there and I hadn’t. That much at least was true. But this was Saint Phillip’s in Bay City, Wisconsin, and I had been here plenty. I don’t care what they wear over there in Egypt, I knew they didn’t wear that here when they were Mary in the Christmas play. So I bought some nice thick velvet, a remnant, it was a beautiful color with your hair, a deep, rich blue, and I sewed you a gown. She didn’t mind, she just shrugged and let me do it. And we made you a white veil and a thing around your neck out of a starched sheet. You looked real nice. Your mom went and clapped and all, but here you were Mary and she seemed distracted. After, she came up and pulled on your collar. “You look like a little pilgrim,” she said.

  But she was funny because the next year you were an angel and she made a tremendous costume for that. I remember because she did it in Gram’s garage and she got that gold glittery paint all over everything. On the lawn mower and the wheelbarrows. Gram said she never had been able to get it off the floor. The cement is still gold under the car.

  “And how many people get to drive in on a yellow brick road,” your mom used to say. She got it from that Lolly. I didn’t think it was so funny. I saw Gram’s point.

  One of those Griling girls was an angel with you, and your mom made a costume for her, too. Your mom took sheets and old white gloves and your tennies. Each of you had to give a pair of your old tennies. Then she bought big pieces of tagboard and she cut out wings. She untwisted coat hangers and made you each haloes that stuck way up over your heads.

  She laid it all out on the garage floor once when Gram was at church and she spray-painted it all with gold. You can still see the angel shape from the cement that’s not gold on the floor.

  Well, it did look good, just great. You two were the best angels Saint Phillip’s had ever seen. I think they even gave you some extra lines to say—I suppose they couldn’t have such well-dressed angels just stand there doing nothing. You read real well, nice and clear, even then in the second or third grade.

  And after the pageant, the Griling girl came running up to us, crying. I think it was Theresa. They’d gotten Bub Griling to come, the older sister brought him, she was the only one that had any sway, they said she looked like the mother.

  Theresa was so proud, here she was in a play and with a nice costume like that and he came, drunk. He went up to the stage practically in the middle of the whole thing and shouted, “Now what did you do to your shoes?”

  They had to lead him out, the sisters. I remember the oldest, the pretty one, with that wavy blond hair, she was wearing red shoes. He was yelling, oh you can imagine how Theresa felt on her big day, her family all leaving by the side door because her sisters had to take her father home. And I’ll tell you, Ann, he stank.

  So Theresa stood by us afterwards, when all the kids went with their own families. And she was heaving and crying because he’d said she’d have to go barefoot the next summer because he wasn’t going to buy new ones just because she’d gone and ruined her shoes. Or she could wear them gold, he’d said. He was drunk.

  So she tugged at your mom, asking, Will it come out? Could she get it off somehow? Oh, those kids were pushy, but I guess they had to be. He never took care of them and their noses were always running, they looked dirty. You know, you tried to be nice to them, but you finally think, Gee, he doesn’t do a thing for them and they’re his kids, heck, why should I?

  Well, it was the last day of your school before vacation and the assembly was over early and they just let you go. So your mom and I took you and Theresa and Ben down to Shaefer’s and bought you all new sneakers for the spring. We told Mr. Shaefer to give them to you each big so your feet could grow a little. It was snowing outside downtown and they put the streetlamps on early, it was a dark, wet day, and we were the only ones in the store. You three walked around the carpet in your new, white tennis shoes. You’d think it was the most exciting thing you’d ever had. You walked so delicately, as if you were stepping on the moon. That was what was nice about little kids. It didn’t take much to please you then. Keds sneakers and oh, then you were all set.

  You wanted to wear them outside, but we didn’t let you—they would have been ruined in that slush. Mr. Shaefer wrapped them up nice, you each got your own shoe box to carry. Your mom insisted she pay for all the tennies and she stood up at the counter, giving him her check.

  Theresa wanted to keep her gold shoes. I don’t know what she ever did with them, threw them out probably, when she got home. They shed those gold sparkles all over wherever you stepped.

  Later on, Mr. Shaefer called, her check bounced and I had to pay it. I never told Jimmy, he would have been mad. He called there at Mom’s house first and it was just lucky no one was home and then he called me. So I drove down and gave him the cash that same afternoon. He was real nice about it, quiet. He gave me back the check and I folded it in my purse. I never did tell Adele. I talked to Mr. Shaefer a little while by the counter. He had people in the store that day, trying shoes on their kids. It was right after Christmas, I remember.

  I only had a few times I was close with Adele, the way you and Benny were fifteen years. Once, really, that I remember, and that was when we were already grown. I sure remember fighting with her. That’s most of what comes to mind.

  But once my parents sent us both off to Mackinac Island for a holiday, just the two of us, alone. I think Milton wired the money and said to buy something for the girls. He always thought of us like that, as real little girls, even when we were grown. And we had just a wonderful time there. Your mom was already in college, she was going back for her sophomore year and I already had Hal. We took him with us, in a stroller. And he was good. He was an easy baby. Benny always tried to climb out of things, he hardly ever slept. But you could take Hal anywhere. So I never really felt hampered.

  We went up on a Friday and you go from the train to a ferry and then over there on the island they don’t have any cars. Just horses and buggies. Apparently, the people did own cars, it wasn’t that backwards, they just figured out it was a better tourist spot with the buggies. So they passed a town ordinance banning the cars. Can you imagine! What they won’t do to make the money. I think maybe they could have cars in the winter, when the tourists went home, but in summer, when we were there, you didn’t see a one.

  All the roads were that nice old-fashioned brick. We stayed in the Grand Hotel—there was the one big hotel in the center of everything, with pillars and long white steps going up to it. Oh, Ann, I think they were marble. And the horses and buggies would line up in front. It was real swishy. We came on a Friday night and we got all dressed up in our room, and I mean dressed up, we wore long white gloves that buttoned and gowns when we walked down those stairs. Oh, such stuff we had. Those gloves are probably still in the basement, but where would you ever wear gloves?

  We did all kinds of things that week. We walked around, we shopped. Lake Michigan was too cold to swim already, it was Labor Day, the end of the season, just before the summer stuff really closed up. But we’d go and walk along the beach.

  I remember one morning I woke up real early. It was the Wednesday, I think, we were taking the ferry home the next evening.r />
  Well, Adele always slept in, you didn’t want to talk to her until noon, but I was used to getting up early from having a baby. They don’t let you sleep. So I dressed real quiet and I dressed him and we took a walk. I left a note for Adele at the desk, to meet me for lunch. There was sort of a special bakery we liked and this was going to be their last day open. Most of the summer people had already left.

  It must have been eight or nine in the morning. I pushed Hal in the stroller and we came to this painter by the side of the road, painting the woods. I recognized her because she worked at night in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, drawing portraits in oil pastels. I knew because Adele had had herself drawn in her long gown and gloves. Hal and I had been standing, waiting for her. I’d shookled him, rocking, saying, “See, oh, look, see she’s drawing a picture of your Auntie Adele.”

  The artist was dressed differently now, she just had on pants and a shirt, and a cap, I suppose for the sun. I recognized her but I wouldn’t have said anything because I didn’t want to be a bother, but she said hello and put down her brush. She had her whole easel and palette set up there. It was really something to see, the spot she was looking at and then the way she’d painted it with her colors. Those silvery birches. It was really something. She had a thermos of coffee and we passed the metal cup between us. I rocked the stroller a little with my foot, to keep Hal quiet.

  She said this was what she considered her real work, this outside-painting. She painted the water on the beach, too. I thought that would be hard, don’t you think? Because it’s always moving. It never keeps still. And she said yes, it was hard, she said she had to look a long time at it. She did the drawings in the hotel to make her living. She wasn’t married or anything and she lived here on the island all year long. She said she painted outside every day she could, when the weather was nice, the summer and fall. Then in winter, she stayed in a garage and made bigger pictures from the ones she’d done all summer. She said every year she felt so glad when it was spring. In summer, sometimes after her work in the hotel, she painted at night, too, by the moonlight. She said she took the ferry over to Traverse City and painted tents at the county fair.

  “Tents are so beautiful,” she said. I never forgot that. Because they are pretty, but it’s just not something you’d think of.

  She was short, but you could see she wasn’t real young. She must have been about my age and she had a real soft way about her. I remember thinking that she might never marry. And here I was with my baby, you know, and I thought, What a wonderful life. She seemed so independent.

  She asked if I’d like her to keep Hal there awhile so I could walk around by myself or take her bike and ride a little. And I said, Okay, sure, why not. I had another sip of her coffee. We finished off the cup and I went and rode on her old black bike. Now when I think of it, that was selfish of me, using up her free time and taking her bike and her coffee, but then with a baby I felt so glad when somebody offered a favor. And I expected other people to ask me things, too. That’s the way it was with young mothers.

  And it was so nice riding. I was the only one on that road, a nice, wide, blacktopped road with a bright yellow line like chalk down the center, and sumac on both sides. I had on a short-sleeved white blouse and a skirt I’d ironed with a little travel iron that morning in the hotel and I felt the air rush up under my arms, so I must have been going pretty fast. I just pedaled, it felt so good, I don’t know how long it had been since I’d ridden a bike. Then pretty soon I came to a big lawn for a school—a new, one-story building with all the windows on the same level. I stopped at the curb to tie my shoe. I was the only one anywhere around. It was a still, bright day. And across the street the sumac and the aspen trees and pines looked to me just like they did in her painting.

  Then I stared down at my shoe, on the curb. Where the cement ended, there was ordinary dirt. A fringe of such tough grass started an inch or two in. I rubbed that dirt with my foot. And it was all dotted with such scraps, rubbish. Little bits of paper. Just junk. I don’t know what it came from, wrappers, beer tops, junk like you saw everywhere. It made me feel awful, like there was no place special, there would always be this dirt. And what I’d seen before, the pretty thin trees and like in her painting, that seemed a small part where all over there was loads and loads of this dumb dirt. Isn’t that for the birds, thinking like that on a holiday? I had to make myself lift my eyes up to those trees again.

  That afternoon we met Adele at the bakery we liked and we stayed a long time after lunch. It was their last day. Kids came over from the mainland to work the summer and they were all going home, back to school, I suppose, their regular lives.

  Adele had made up a little paper chart and we were figuring out her schedule of courses. She switched back and forth every which way and we went over and over it. It seemed like a game to me. Economics on Wednesday mornings, English from four to six. And people would walk by and look at Hal and I’d take him up out of the stroller. It was the end of the summer and we had suntans. Adele and I were both young.

  We sat there for so long we got hungry again. It was outside, in a little area closed off with a wrought-iron railing. We sipped ice water with flowers frozen in the cubes. Those glasses, I don’t know what it was, they were thick maybe, they just felt good in your hand. We ordered coffee and blueberry tarts.

  The coffee tasted strong and they brought real cream. And those blueberry tarts were delicious. I remember taking mine out of the little wax paper ruffle and slipping it on the plate. They printed the wax paper with gold and they made the tarts with mounds of blueberries under a currant glaze and custard—then a thick layer of chocolate just above the crust. I wish I had the recipe for those. Adele could probably tell you, just from tasting, what was in it, what spices. But she would never remember anymore.

  The paper doilies from under the pastry blew onto the brick patio in a little breeze, they were white with gold fluting. They had gray marble tabletops, with dark green iron chairs.

  Hal stood up in his stroller blowing soap bubbles. These were really the last few summer days. At the curb under a tent of green leaves, I watched an old man put his hand under his wife’s elbow and ask if she wanted an ice cream. They crossed the street in a diagonal, slow, to the cart on the other side. Michigan chills early. They get the Canadian winds.

  That chocolate in the blueberry tarts was such a surprise. Oh, they were good. I’ve meant to try and make them like that a hundred times, but it would be a lot of work. I even bought those little tart pans, I have them here somewhere. I think they put in something special, nuts, I’m sure, and maybe a little lemon in that crust.

  People walked past us and some at other tables stood up and left. We just stayed. Behind Adele, a girl who worked there sat with her legs crossed. Their uniforms were red and white, like candy stripers’. She had her hair pulled back off her face in a plain rubber band and she took a long time smoking a cigarette.

  Adele would every once in a while bend down and try and teach Hal something. She’d wave her fingers in front of his face to make his eyes move and say This Little Piggy on his toes.

  “He’s very bright, Carol,” she said. “He’ll be a bright, bright boy. You’ll see. I’ll bet he’s reading at two or three.”

  That meant a lot to me from her, but I tried not to show it. Even being sisters, we were shy sometimes.

  “So, you think he’ll be all right?” I laughed a little. “Smart like you?”

  “Smarter.” She sighed. “The boys always are. The lucky dogs.”

  “So you don’t think I did too much the wrong thing marrying Jimmy and staying home.”

  She nodded her head real slowly. Hal stood up in his buggy. We’d bought him that bottle of soap bubbles with the wand. I held his hands, trying to get him to sit down.

  “No, I don’t think you did the wrong thing, Carol. I think you’ll have a good, happy life.”

  I never forgot that. My chin swelled, I could feel the blood coming there and m
y lip was doing something funny—I’d had no idea before I cared so much what she thought. I glanced over to see if she was noticing, but she looked away. I suppose she was worried about herself.

  “And I think you will, Adele. You’ve done so much already, at your young age. You’ll get your degree, maybe even go to graduate school. I think you’re going to have an exciting, exciting life. You’ll go places. I know you will.”

  She smiled at me, but one of her distant smiles. I suppose she thought there was a lot I didn’t know. And there was. Plenty I couldn’t understand. She hasn’t had the easiest time. I suppose even then she must have worried. You could see. A girl that pretty and nervous, beautiful, really, looking all over, scattered, putting on lipstick there at the table.

  “Should we go?” she said.

  “No, let’s stay.” For once I acted like the leader. You’d think I always would have been, but even eleven years older, I never was with her. The waiter strolled by and all of a sudden I felt in a festive mood.

  “We’d each like another tart,” I said. “Two more. And two more cups of your good coffee.” That brought us both back to normal. We laughed and laughed. Adele lowered her voice the way she does when she’s joking around, trying to be stern, saying, “Carol, you really shouldn’t have,” but we both wanted more. She slapped her behind. “Why not?” It was our last day of vacation. We were going home tomorrow and then Adele would leave for college. We had plenty of money, extra. We felt like rich girls. And we didn’t worry about weight or health or any of that yet either. We were young. And we were both pretty enough the way we were, we knew that. I was married already. That was the least of our worries.

  He brought the coffee first in nice china, with pink morning glories painted on the cups. We poured the cream in, it was that old-fashioned heavy cream, almost brownish, and it just swirled and swirled. We watched it a long time, longer than ever needs be. But then we had the time.

  For a while everything seemed to be going good with us. Hal really did seem okay, except in school. We had the trailer at Pine Mountain and we went up every weekend skiing. For once, Hal and Jimmy agreed on a sport and Hal could do it. Ted and your mom drove up, too, and stayed in the lodge, we’d always end up there together. You got to be a good little skier, you had your white bunnyfur jacket, remember your mom bought you that? She took a lot of flack for it, believe me. Gram, everybody, thought she would spoil you.