by Mona Simpson
But when Jane asked if they’d return, she replied, “That cow town? What do you want to go there for?”
Mary di Natali had grown up on an old road in the part of town where overland settlers had built small brick houses like what they’d left, matchboxes on big yards with ancient trees, and lived for generations without the suspense of weather. People kept chicken coops or tied goats to trees. Mary never knew her father, but she had read his forty-three letters, which in small penmanship complained of a ship’s damp cold and relished an imagined future, when he would again be a baker of bread and live his life in front of fire.
Mary’s mother supported herself with her husband’s small bakery. In later years she became famous as far away as Fresno for her wedding cakes that gave a mysterious happiness, caused by a secret ingredient only Mary knew was wildflowers, broken into the batter.
Although she’d never been there, Jane felt she would recognize the dead-end road near the train tracks, where prim brides of all ages stood in line. As a girl, her mother played in white ruffled dresses, with a bow in her hair. These came from the dimestore or Browns’ catalogue, the same as other children’s, but Jane’s grandmother favored the less durable styles.
Mary had never fit in. But in the places Jane had already lived, she’d fallen in with the pack. In the camp, she was a leader, calling out games and rules. Her clothes, like the others’, were muddy colors from being collectively washed. When Jane heard her mother’s stories, she wanted that white dress with the white bow.
“Can’t you write to her and ask if I can have it?”
Mary sighed. “Someday we’ll go back. I don’t want you wearing dresses anyway.” This was an idea she’d heard once from a man and kept because her own childhood dresses had no pockets and she couldn’t collect things except in her skirt, and then her underpants showed.
“By the time we go back, they won’t fit anymore.”
“I’m sure she saved a few. Like the communion dress. That she’ll have.”
Jane’s grandmother had delivered eighteen intricate cakes with small beans in their pale-bellied centers so Mary could have her first communion with a silk dress and her own wedding veil, cut down. Wax orange blossoms held the lace on her head.
“You look just like a little bride,” Phil the milkman had whispered.
It was windy that day and Mary felt so light from fasting, having eaten only paper-thin wafers, that when the old nun led them up a hill by a rope that had hoops for their hands, she believed it was to keep them tethered, to prevent them, in their white dresses, from billowing away.
“Why don’t I get to have a first communion?” Jane asked.
“Because the Pope’s a liar,” her mother said.
Jane’s grandmother silently conducted two hundred and eighty-four weddings in Auburn. She baked the brides’ cakes, wired mortified bees and pressed butterflies into attendants’ bouquets and took the festal photographs. She’d thought about her own daughter’s wedding since the day Mary was born and every year, on her birthday, presented her with a silver knife, fork or spoon to contribute to an eventual nuptial set. When Mary announced that she was moving out to live with Owens, her mother immediately disowned her. She had never liked Owens—not then or later, when he appeared on the covers of magazines—because he didn’t know decent manners.
By then, Mary had become slovenly and lank-haired, a disgrace to her mother, who tried to maintain the standards of a Frenchwoman in Auburn, wearing a permanent bun so no one could have the slightest apprehension of finding a strand of hair in his cake.
“She says she’s from France,” Mary heard them say, behind her mother’s back, “but we all know she’s a Belgian.”
She was Belgian and the dumpman’s daughter.
Owens and Mary lived together one summer. In September, he went to Harvard. Mary sent him a twelve-inch nasturtium chiffon cake in the mail and received no letter of thanks.
By Christmas, when Owens returned, he renounced all food but rice and beans and the smallest increment of green vegetables. He rented a cheap house near Auburn’s only highway, splitting it with Mary and his friend Frank.
In the house that shook with the rumble of trucks, this was a period of giggling love, repeated chases that ended with her caught on the soft bed, and pancakes for dinner at midnight. But at her job at the dimestore cash register, Mary sometimes cried because she and Owens hadn’t known each other as children. Owens had roamed the family junkyard with his father, looking for car parts. Once, they tore a fender off a wreck for a Caddy his father was working on, and that day, Owens told Mary, he saw a little girl in a white dress and a white bow, walking in a path through the debris.
Mary tried to show him bits of nature, because it was hard to talk after he came back from college. One night, she pulled him to the top of a hill, where, among the ancient, broken oaks, they watched the sunset spill for miles over the valley they’d always known. His eyebrows lifted: he was glad to see. She reached for his hand, but even then he didn’t acknowledge it. The sunset was the sunset, with or without her.
She wanted to get him off alone, somewhere simple and small. Her dreams at that time were always dreams of closure. And he did sometimes say, “Well, maybe if this thing doesn’t work, I’ll just go and live on an apple farm. In the mountains somewhere.”
Owens wanted to establish a business where everyone was young. He had already proven himself unable to work with bosses. He and Frank both had the nightshift now, at the company that employed half the valley. The nightshift was where they put misfits and Mexicans.
Mary got pregnant accidentally, and from the day she told him, he made it clear that her condition held no enchantment.
He was every day up and out of the house by noon. At that time, Owens and Frank were inventing the business that would later make them famous and put their drowsy valley town on the map of the world.
The last day of her life in Auburn, Mary did the unthinkable and burst in on him at work. She had never been to the place where he and Frank planned their empire, because it was the basement of Owens’ parents’ house. She’d expected test tubes, Bunsen burners, petri dishes, chemicals, wires, smoke and possibly a conveyor belt, but instead she found Frank whistling “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” while Owens stirred his beans and rice on a hot plate. The only evidence of scientific activity was an open ruled notebook with penciled equations. The rest of the basement seemed to be a woodshop.
“Owens,” she said, “we’ve got to decide what to do.”
He lifted his hands to a loose position of prayer while Frank climbed the stairs.
“You can stay, Frank,” Owens called, but the whistling became fainter and then they heard the door bang.
“I can’t have a baby now, Mare.” With one cupped hand, he touched her hair. He couldn’t give her anything in words, and this wouldn’t count. His voice built the last wall, but for a moment, Mary closed her eyes and basked. Her neck weakened and the weight of her head fell to his hand. It had been a very long time since he was kind to her. But it occurred to her that she would have to choose, between him and his child.
“I’ve just started something,” he whispered. “It’s brand-new. I’ve got to give it time.”
“I’m starting something too.”
“I didn’t ask you to get pregnant.”
“But now it’s happened and we have to deal.”
Their fight escalated until he threw the beans at her. He noticed, as she walked away with the mess on her shirt, that her breasts had become large. The only vanity he’d ever suspected in her was the tendency to wear tee shirts backwards. Some girls in high school said she did it to show off her figure, but he knew now that was a lie. Mary was guileless.
Mary had been pregnant at nineteen with the bewilderment she still carried like a halo of bees. She had gone with her predicament and asked strangers for advice, as if carrying the small globe of her life and offering it to them. This made a mission of a youth
that had previously lacked direction. Mary kept asking until she found someone to tell her yes.
She had her tea leaves read by an old woman near the railroad tracks, who told her that life is a long time and good-for-nothing young men are always abundant, plenty to pick from, like weed flowers. The milkman’s daughters, who went to church every Sunday, their heads covered by thin veils of spiderwebs, whispered the ingredients of remedies to flush out the mistake.
Only one person said yes: a Taoist priest who lived on a high ridge of the coastal range, eclipsed half the day and all the night in fog. He had not mastered English and he only said, “Child is miracle,” but that was enough to start Mary on the journey that led her to seek refuge on a communal apple farm in southeastern Oregon, where everyone was responsible for cleaning up and every meal included apples.
Forever after, Jane’s mother blamed the Taoists, because the priest never sent even the smallest check to help.
Owens visited them once, in the mountain camp that finished the first decade of Jane’s life. He came at night, while she was asleep, and Jane remembered the visit afterwards as in a silver dream. She’d heard the racket of a car and felt the milky heat of headlights, but then she rolled over and fell into an embracing sleep like a spot of kinder water in a lake or the first sensation of warmth when she wet the bed.
He and Mary hauled Jane up, opening her from a curled position. He spread her across his outstretched legs, measuring. Mary tilted down to the floor with a candle. Mary had always believed her daughter was a rare beauty, and she had a mother’s pride.
Owens put his fingers on Jane’s knee, through a hole in her green stretch pants. For a long time, those pants had been her favorite thing; they had once been yellow.
“She has your forehead,” Mary said, pulling back her daughter’s bangs, to show.
They did that all night, isolating a part of her anatomy and saying it was one of theirs or the other’s. And they both looked at her with wonder, because she was a physical marvel—the only thing they had in common now and could agree on.
They played a game on the floor, drawing a grid with their fingers in the dust.
“I’m five ahead of you and eight ahead of Mom,” Jane said, grabbing her feet and rocking her small body. Jane competed avidly, sucking her hair for inspiration, shrieking when she won. The score finally finished with him first, Jane second, her mother far behind. And that seemed to settle them all.
The next morning, the floor was swept and there was no trace of him, except the stack of new, unbent money on the kitchen table. It was late but the air still felt early, thin and cool with a lace of frost, as if they had confessed and all was forgiven, for a little while. Jane couldn’t remember what he looked like.
Mary believed she’d finally found the cure for love: she’d become more Owens than he was. Passing wishes he’d mentioned were her life. She really had lived on an apple farm.
There was another man now, Mack Soto, who had two boys of his own and a fat short wife who had once been petite. He gave Mary white-bordered photographs of his sons, and from then on, Mary made sure to have Jane’s picture taken in a machine booth every season, and she sent these to Owens, with Jane’s age penciled on the border.
Mack drove to the wintercamp one night a week, while his wife had her book club. His coming made a party. They lit candles and drank long ribbons of brandy, which tangled in Jane’s stomach, her arms and legs loosely knotted, like a doll she’d once seen, held together with rubber bands.
In the deep middle of one night, they sent her outside to walk. She put on her jacket, jammed her hands in the pockets.
“It’s safe out there, isn’t it?” she heard her mother say, behind the door.
Mack’s voice slowed, stony and arrested, in a permanent state of nostalgia. “I used to walk with my grandfather here when I was a boy.” He told them what he’d already told his sons, but his sons never listened fully because while he talked their mother rolled her eyes.
There was noise that was branches swaying, pine.
“We’re lucky he has no girl,” Mary had said. “He always wanted a girl. She did too, I suppose.” The fat short wife who had once been petite took to bed when her second son was born. She got up again two months later wanting no more children and refused to let him touch her, except to rub her head.
Jane and Mary were always like this, knowing intricate stories about other people while the other people knew nothing about them, not even that they were alive. Jane wondered if her father understood how they ran out of money and worried what they would eat. The time he came in the middle of the night and they played checkers on the dusty floor, she asked for his phone number. He shrugged and said, “You already have it.” She made him write it again, with his finger on the floor, but it was only the number of a phone at an office and other people answered; they sometimes left five messages and still didn’t hear.
Jane walked the long road, her shoes so soft the bottoms of her feet felt pine needles. Stars touched the tops of her hands like bites, and trees on both sides drew up tall, tilting. She pulled the caps off acorns with her fingernail and chewed the bitter green meal.
She was drunk too. Her mother didn’t like to leave her out and Jane craved the taste of liquor, like harsh dissolved candy. She fingered uncurled pine cones in her jacket pocket to steady herself under the close stinging stars.
Beneath trees taller than any cathedral, Mack had walked with his grandfather quietly.
She ended up shivering and vomited, heaved out like an animal, then, cold, curled up by the side of the dirt road. Her mother came later, scratching the ground with a flashlight, her slippers whispering and the red wool plaid robe itchy when she gathered Jane in her arms.
“Look,” she said, turning Jane to the millions of small stars, which seemed to fleck the sky with chalk. “Do you believe in God?”
“Yes,” Jane said cautiously, as if she’d guessed the right answer but didn’t know why.
Mack’s feet hung blunt off the edge of the bed, pointed stiff, like a butcher animal’s. She had touched the hoof of a hanging cow once—it was dry like that.
The next morning, the liquor woke them hard and early. Mack was gone and there was no money on the table, only white cinching rings where glasses ate the wood near drops of candle wax.
Jane could tell from the rhythm of Mary’s heels on the floor, her steps wound tighter than what usually meant mother. Her orbit went smaller and smaller, cranked erratic wishes, steps of a carousel, the bed exhaling a final puff of hate.
She lay down for a long time without anything, looking into the repeating wood of the walls, her circle shrunk to the size of a pineknot. She said her hands felt fizzy, hard to move. “I give up, you win,” she said, not to Jane.
All day, they never left the cabin’s one room. But the outside lured Jane. Bright-colored insects ticked against the screens, high pines slowly waved.
“Can we get something to eat? I’m hungry.”
“Mom, do you want me to bring you a glass of water?”
“When are you going to get up?”
There was never any answer, only the breathing, the snagging torn breath that seemed to fill not only the space of the small cabin, but time itself, with hooks and debris.
Jane watched the green day tempting, effervescent, behind the screen. But she couldn’t live without her mother. On the sheet, Mary’s saliva formed a coin. Jane touched it—it smelled metallic—and fell in.
It seemed hours they lay there, turning on the sour sheets. The busy optimism of the world passed. They heard the habits of civilization roll by, the important weight of semis, rushing the highway, delivering food and milk to apartment dwellers on patios in distant cities, and the whistles and confetti shouts of children outside.
Mary and Jane had always been different anyway. They never read the newspaper or heard radio—they couldn’t keep the daily habits when they tried, and often were slow and late.
As the noises
outside leapt and grew, Jane discovered the suspended pleasure of resignation.
Her mother woke, rubbing her own head. “I can’t anymore,” she said, smiling down haplessly, the way the man had said to her, on his hands and knees when their affair was young, “I can’t help it,” and the same way he had said, the night before, “She knows everything and she’s forgiven me.”
“Do you want me to go outside?” Jane asked.
The mother nodded, her eyes wise now as miles of travel.
The Driving Child
Bixter owned an old black pail she used for everything. While Mary took the Greyhound bus to her mother’s funeral, Bixter and Jane scoured the woods with it for wildflowers to make a pie.
“Won’t it be bitter?” Bixter asked.
“We sugar them,” Jane explained.
They washed the frail petals in rainwater, let them dry on a screen in the breeze. Then they mixed them with eggs, milk and a dust of nutmeg, and poured it all into the crust. This was the first time Jane had ever been away from her mother.
When the smell from the tiny oven rose, Bixter said, enigmatically, “A crust must be made in the morning.”
“Why. Why can’t it be made in the afternoon?”
Bixter frowned. “Because of the air.”
Jane would remember that all her life. While somewhere in cities children were chanting the names of all the presidents in order, the collected odd convictions of solitaries became Jane’s education.
Two days later, they heard Mack’s car outside. Mary burst in the door just as the sky cracked and rain started. Mack had cried, she told Jane. “He was so big and he cried.”
“If it wasn’t for the kids,” he’d said.
Sunday, Mary stayed in bed and a pink cup of coffee floated before her. They hadn’t eaten anything for days now, since the tart pie of flowers. Jane stood in the cool air like a statue, holding the cup. Clouds outside meant evening. Mary sat up on the bed and sipped, then began to move. The world was soft, as it always was when she first rose late in the day. Perhaps here hid the lush secrets of indolence, but that was knowledge she couldn’t use. She collected the candles, saving the wax in an old milk carton.