by Mona Simpson
She used to eat in bed, but that had had to stop. Though she’d been careful about crumbs, some ants had come anyway. Her mother had never had ants. In fact, the idea of them had inspired her particular snobbery. “Once you get them, they’ll never leave,” she’d been fond of warning, believing that their house, built in 1911, had never had a single one.
But Beth Penk, the housekeeper, was older now. Bea still paid her the same salary, but asked that Beth come only Saturdays, when she could be home. The two women sat at the kitchen table and drank a pot of coffee together before the day began.
Bea didn’t believe that ants never left. Selling houses, she’d arranged for enough extermination tents, but she was unlikely to go to such measures here. Now. It was an old house. She imagined the ants marching in neat straight lines.
Every so often, Bea wanted to One-Hour Maxwellize her house. She, too, wanted that clean, chemical, mint quality. But maybe, she thought, houses were ruined for her. She knew too much about the stagecraft of improvement. Perhaps selling anything eventually spoils it for you.
She’d read once that many prostitutes couldn’t enjoy sex. In the same article, it said that most of them refused to kiss their clients, keeping that one small favor for their real boyfriends.
Bea thought to herself that she should have saved back one room to enjoy.
The bedroom. But no, in the houses she listed, she’d done up every part.
One night, she called Father Matthew. Late, for no reason she knew. With no question, no plan, she found herself blabbering, trying to improvise. Then, she blurted, “Could you just come over?”
And he said, “Okay, yes. I’ll be there.”
She got out of bed then, after she hung up, agitated, and started to try to clean her room. Which was where she lived. Which was a mess.
She whirled through piles at a tearing speed. First the bed, then stashing magazines in the closet. Finally it was all done.
And he was still not there.
All of a sudden she remembered his driving. She could see the twin slow headlights moving through the darkened streets; she could draw his car on a map, stopping at every light, waiting at four corner crossings even when there was no other car. For miles.
He’s a priest, she told herself, and always will be.
She could imagine the two of them in her neatened bedroom. She could. There would be something mandatory about the act, a certain amount of shame. Heads down, stepping out of trousers. Like children in a locker room, made to change for PE. He would be pale, too, both of them white-legged. They would slow together, not knowing how to move. She thought of Bill Alberts’s kick, the way he’d grab her arms and twirl her around, whistling a show tune. Her mother had always said Father Matthew was handsome, but of course she was thinking of him in black and white, in his priest’s clothes.
She sighed, heaving herself to the kitchen to measure the ingredients for hot drinks.
She’d have to think fast, concoct some reason for this ridiculous visit.
At her mother’s table, pouring the Ovaltine from the warming pot, she dribbled some on his sweater. She dabbed at it with a paper napkin, which shredded on the black. Where was a clean dish towel? When her mother was alive, these things just stayed where they should be. The background of the house receded, perfectly, to let you think about nothing but conversation.
Still swabbing at his shoulder, she said, “All these years, have you ever thought of us as . . . ”
“Yes. I have,” he said, looking down at his lap.
His neck remained in that sloped angle as they drank from their warm cups. Not ten minutes later, he stood up and left.
The way rain makes a path, branching on a windowpane, something started inside Bea, that small a trickle.
The next month, Shelley called up on the telephone. She needed help with him. She was driving to Florida; she’d be gone for four days or maybe five. Going to a funeral.
XVIII
Nance was the one who phoned to tell Shelley that George was gone. She called at Shelley’s parents’ house.
So Shelley heard it from her mother, who told her in a measured-out, cautious voice, afraid to learn any more.
“She just thought you should know,” she said. “I told her you can’t make it to the funeral, working and all.”
“When is the funeral?” Shelley asked.
“Well, it’s down there, day after tomorrow. But I told her you’ve got a job. She doesn’t expect you to go all the way to Florida. He never did pay you for all your hours.”
Shelley supposed Nance understood some of what had happened.
“I’ll go,” she said. “I can make it if I drive all night.”
The funeral took place in a small cemetery adjoining a golf course. He had already been cremated before Shelley arrived.
“I just don miss him,” Nance said out in the bright air, sounding as if that were a thing to wonder about. She kept shaking her head, amazed.
He had been hard with her; Shelley didn’t doubt it.
At the end, Nance had had to do everything for him, even when he went to the bathroom, Petey told her.
Petey—now a middle-aged man with a beard, wearing a Hawaiian shirt—said that dressing George took an hour and then, when it was done, he’d kick his legs and pummel his arms, shouting, “No, no, not this. Take it off.” Nothing was ever right.
Shelley nodded. “I used to say to him, ‘Who made you God?’ ”
“Yah,” Petey said. “You knew him all right. Built that pool.” He shook his head. “She went through a lot with him.”
“But she never stood up to him, though,” Shelley said. “There’s probably ten tape measures with my skin on ’em around your old place, but see, I’d throw it back at him. There’s the difference.”
“He tore the phone out,” Petey said.
“I s’pose” was all she finally answered. She shook her head. “To build up a place like that.”
She remembered his telling her she could go there anytime. He couldn’t imagine dying. Not then. And that wasn’t so long ago. Fifteen, sixteen years.
“Well, you did it with him,” Petey said. “I wasn’t gonna.”
Now Nance was going around with an old guy who was from Green Bay, too. They had worked together at Kendalls—in the notions department—before she was married, forty years ago. And they both loved Florida.
“So you don’t miss Green Bay at all?” Shelley said.
“With this weather,” Nance said, “I could never go back. You know, I got pains in my hands. The tops. Like an oval disk. Right here.”
Shelley had heard about this. When you were a nurse, people told you their ailments. She picked up Nance’s hands. They were small and plump, with fancy pink nails and age spots. She began to rub them. “But the sun makes it better?”
“Yah, the heat helps. Up there, I was getting so I just stood by the grate. Here it melts away.”
“Then you should stay,” Shelley said.
XIX
Bea cleaned the house, just in case. Her mother’s home had been a landmark on the garden tour when Hazel was alive. But that was coming undone. . . .
When she told Bill Alberts she’d be staying with him or that he could move in with her, he moaned. “I’ll let you escort me home from the club,” he said.
The first night, he let her drive him and walk him to his door. That was it. The second night, no more. The third night, which for all she knew would be the last, Bea worked herself up to say something.
Her key was still in the ignition, the two of them just sitting there.
“When we were younger . . . ,” she began.
“When you were young,” he corrected. “I was never young.”
“Our friendship, I thought our friendship could’ve gone a different way.” She was looking straight ahead, out the windshield at his house. “But now—”
“It’s too late for me,” he said, a hand on her shoulder.
For a minute they s
at there, cold in the car.
“Well, okay,” she finally said, “let’s go, then.” She got out her door and closed it and let him get out on his own.
She blamed him. He’d once liked her, maybe even loved her, but not enough, not enough to wait. What? Seventeen years. “So whatever you felt then,” she said, turning half back at him, “not anymore. Kaput.”
“I’ve always believed in you. I still do that.”
Then he fell, climbing the shallow steps made of river stones.
“Oh,” she said, getting down to help him. She’d let this happen, out of spite, and he was old, older than her father was when he died. A sharp mineral smell slammed up at her from the ground.
Her hands were under his arms, trying to haul him up, and he wasn’t budging. Then, all of a sudden, he laughed.
“What are we doing?” he said.
Oh no, she thought. She didn’t want it to stop. So she didn’t say anything. Most often in her life, she’d harmed things with too much talking. Cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck—she knew what they said about her. She imagined nothing would change if she just kept her clap shut.
He was the same man as always, still himself, his eyes intent. But his face seemed softer somehow, around the mouth. His hands were large and flat, like a mime’s implying walls as he grazed the outside points of her.
“At our age,” he finally said, a continuation but also an answer to his own question.
XX
Bill had been asked to look into the Belgian monastery property. “They want to sell off their orchards,” he said, handing Bea the papers the next morning. “They have a second mortgage. It’s your religion. Better you than me.”
“I’m not Catholic,” Bea snapped. Given how he was looking at her, Bea understood she’d not only been a gossip but also the subject of it. People probably believed she’d been the priest’s mistress. But did he think so?
“Well, Christian, I meant,” he said, hands up flat. “Falling on hard times and selling off their orchards. Very Chekhov.”
The monastery’s prime hillside estate ran all the way down to the river, bordered on one side by Heritage Hill, the town’s historical society, and on the other by the old orphanage. Next to that was the penitentiary with its four walls and corner watch towers, where, not so long ago, at night, you could see the silhouettes of guards holding rifles. First they called it a penitentiary, then the reformatory. Now it was supposed to be the Wisconsin Correctional Facility.
Bea drove over to see the abbot. It was no surprise that the order was broke. Novitiates, she knew from Father Matthew, were scarce. From a community of over a hundred, in the last decade the population of the Norbertine Abbey had dwindled to fewer than forty. And most of them were old. When Bea’s mother was growing up, it was not uncommon for one son from large Catholic families to enter the monastery. “But then,” she’d said, “I suppose they had enough to spare.” Even when Bea was in high school, she knew one girl whose older brother, a handsome boy, was becoming a priest. He’d had a girlfriend, a beautiful girl named Marie, but he told her that after graduation he was going into the abbey. That was when all her trouble started. Later on, he dropped out anyway. But by then she was working at the bank; she’d cut off her shining hair.
Bea had a plan. Heritage Hill—of which she was a long-standing board member and a docent, donning the costume of an 1850s matron, replete with butter churn and apron, every year for the Christmas festival—would buy the orchards and the fields, and the brothers could continue to tend their vines and trees, to make their honey and candles forever, to use the land as if it were theirs. It just wouldn’t be, technically, anymore.
She met Father Matthew in the monastery’s plain kitchen, probably renovated sometime in the 1950s and never updated. Supermarket bread waited in its bag on the counter, next to generic brands of peanut butter and jelly.
Two guests sat with him at the table. There was a Dutch priest who had just completed an eight-month walking trek through Italy; he spoke no English, Father Matthew explained. And also the girl he’d told her about before—a runaway he was trying to help, named Dawn. He’d found her a second or third foster home, but little as she had, she didn’t like the responsibility of family life. The foster families had assigned her chores, expecting her to pitch in and help baby-sit.
Bea noticed the girl’s bare foot up on her chair, the dull and scratched skin, her dingy hair.
On the windowsill were two tomatoes and an avocado, not yet ripe, in a long triangle of sun. All these years, she’d never pictured the inside of where he lived.
Father Matthew led Bea to the abbot, who met her in the room where she’d sat planning her mother’s eulogy.
The abbot jumped up and shook her hand with such vigor that it seemed to Bea unseemly, a man of God kowtowing to a realtor.
She laid out the plan with all its paperwork. She was proud of her solution, if she did say so herself. It had taken hours of round-robin phone calls to the Heritage Hill board members, who were not all so eager to pay top dollar to the monks. Bea had convinced them with the sobering fact that if they didn’t buy, there were no zoning restrictions to prevent the abbey from selling to a developer, who could put up condominiums, which would certainly impinge on their nineteenth-century view.
The abbot, however, didn’t seem to glean the miracle of board approval. “But then we wouldn’t own the property?” he said for the second time.
“No, you wouldn’t own it. You’re selling it. That’s why they’re paying you all this money. But you’d have a perpetual lease, for one dollar a year, so your bees, your apricots, and everything will be hunky-dory.”
“But we won’t own it,” he said again.
You people aren’t supposed to believe in owning anyway, she wanted to scream. You sure don’t for your nuns! A year or so earlier, there’d been a flurry in the local news when a landlord sold the building that housed seven or eight elderly nuns. The retired women—Bea’s neighbor, the TV anchor, had reported—were impoverished and had nowhere to go. Several were writing to relatives in different states, whom they hadn’t seen for years. “Retired?” Bea had said to her. “Well, not from nunship,” she’d answered, “but teaching. They used to all be teachers.”
“It’s just hard to sign a paper saying that we won’t own our land.”
Hard, but he did.
Bea stopped by the kitchen to say good-bye to Father Matthew.
“Do you ever miss, like, going out with somebody?” Dawn was asking.
The girl’s blond hair held a tinge of green.
“People ask me if I need physical contact,” Father Matthew said. “And I do. I need hugs.”
The way the slim girl kept peering, Bea was quite certain his answer had not satisfied her.
“What about more than hugging?” Dawn suggested, blowing on her tea, holding the mug up near her face with two hands. Both feet were on the chair, her knees pulled up to her chest.
“Oh, if I get my hugs, I’m all right,” he said.
XXI
After the funeral, Shelley ate with them all at Big Boy and then got back up in the Jeep and drove the forty-one hours home, stopping for food and coffee at rest stops.
She pulled into Green Bay at ten o’clock, and the air was soft, wet, dark. She parked in the lot at the Riverclub and went right up. At ten o’clock, he was usually still there.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “I thought I was out a truck and a girl.”
Shelley still flicked her foot. The habit drove her mother nuts. At Christmas, she’d said, “People won’t hire you if they see you doing it. They’ll think you’re crazy.” (She used to say, “Kids won’t want to play with you.”)
“I already got a job.”
“And what do you think is going to happen when he dies?”
For some reason, Shelley found herself repeating this conversation to Bill Alberts at the Riverclub, right after she loped in. It kept coming to her as she steered the long way back.
“ ’Bout me?”
“About what you’ll do when I die.”
“What, you think I’m crazy, too? Anyway, you planning on croaking sometime soon?”
“I’m seventy,” was all he said. Then he sighed. “You know, I’d be glad to pay for a psychiatrist. Dr. Klicka, over on Baird, probably the best we have here. Best and only.”
“So you do think I’m nuts.”
“I went to Dr. Klicka myself for more than a decade. We still play chess. You’ve seen her. You know her as Katie.”
“You did? What for?” The idea of a rich person needing a head doctor was altogether new to Shelley. Even her mother would know better, from the magazines.
“I’m afraid you’ll be too alone. I’ve noticed you don’t like to go over to your family very often.”
“I don’t love my parents,” she said. “I loved my grandmother.”
A few minutes later, Bea Maxwell dashed in, dressed up, holding her keys out. There was something about her that Shelley couldn’t put her finger on. But it was him with her, too. They were laughing together like her parents had, long ago.
Both standing, they danced a few steps, Bill almost tipping her over, Bea was so much taller.
That night in the kitchen, giving him his medications, Shelley tried to start something. She stood behind him, rubbing his shoulders a way she’d done before, but then her head went straight forward like a turtle’s, her face near to his face.
“Nothing doing,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed.”
But Shelley was not ashamed, not then. Lots of people, she’d noticed, had one problem or another with sex. Or maybe most people had the same problem.
But in that one thing, Shelley was lucky. She didn’t wear out on a person like her sister Kim did and get exasperated all the time. And she was not afraid of them leaving, either. She didn’t clutch at people or drive them crazy, as she’d seen the less pretty of her brothers’ girlfriends try. She knew that George had needed her, and that Bill Alberts did now.