by Mona Simpson
“Not for long,” Owens said. “I mean, wouldn’t you rather be in a new culture as it’s rising rather than the ruins? New York’s over, Noah. Look at how many western presidents we’ve had. The center of the country’s here now.”
“Not for science,” Noah said.
“Science follows money. Like everything else.”
“Then how come the people at MIT and Harvard win all the Nobel Prizes?”
“Don’t forget, Linus Pauling went to Oregon State.”
Noah laughed. There was a tensile strength to their friendship, which allowed for and even insisted on a good deal of criticism. Neither was quite right for the other in his original form. He gulped down the rest of his coffee. Having convinced Owens that Jane was his daughter, he understood Owens would forget he had anything to do with it. Today he’d gladly let him pay.
I’m no wanderer, Noah thought as they parted on the bumpy sidewalk.
The east door to his old high school was open, and Noah rolled down the clean corridor. The janitor, Jim Clarke, was a friend of his father’s. His sister had loved geography, he remembered, passing a classroom lined with maps. She’d always wanted to leave. “Michelangelo hands,” she’d said, holding his hands when she finally left. She had stubby fingers. I do have good hands, Noah told himself, checking them on the gritty wheels. My sister is a jar of secrets.
“Noah, my man.” His old chemistry teacher, Mr. Riddle, touched his shoulder. “What can I do for you?”
High school seniors buzzed at lab stations, noticing his arrival. Noah told Mr. Riddle about the fellowship while he took Erlenmeyer flasks out of a cabinet for the students.
“Go,” Mr. Riddle said. “The line’ll be there, whether you’re in it or not.”
In the bleak schoolyard, Noah sat still. Very little moved. Alta was a stationary place, unlike the city of foghorns and regret only twenty miles north. He hadn’t said anything about Jane, her being a reason to stay. She wasn’t his.
From the beginning, Owens could talk to Jane. He was always himself, but Jane felt awkward around him and even the simplest thing seemed hard to say. “I have to excuse myself,” she finally said one afternoon, in his factory, when he’d been telling her how machines resembled the inside of the human body. He didn’t seem to hear.
“I need to pee, Owens,” she said, more loudly.
“Oh, wait. I’ll alert the media,” he said, and that became a refrain between them, his expression of boredom with the endless, additive, sonorous details of childhood.
That afternoon, he took her to buy new sneakers, and she had to call her mother from a pay phone. “Well, they have ones like mine, but instead of three bumps—you know where I mean—they have two bumps.”
Her mother apparently did know what she meant, and they continued a spirited discussion. Owens drifted off to gaze at globes in a store window, concluding that it was a good thing he’d been born male, because he could never in a million years be a mother.
It didn’t occur to Jane to thank him for the sneakers. She was a vivid child, full of life, but lacking in what her tutors called refinements. Her manners struck them as indelicately blunt. She was missing those graces a patient mother instills slowly, stitch by stitch. And Owens never bothered with manners, which he considered to be the frills of civilization and a waste of time. He didn’t notice if she wiped her nose with the back of her hand or expect to be thanked for sneakers.
In the car, Jane talked incessantly about their next-door neighbor, while Owens listened with a small fraction of his attention until a phrase lifted out at him.
“… because we’re poor,” he heard his daughter say.
“You’re not poor,” he said.
“Yes we are. My mom and I are.”
“You and your mom live on the same amount of money as most college professors. I’m sure the woman next door—what’s her name, Julie?—has no more money.”
“She’s a lawyer!” Jane said, as if that proved it.
“At most she makes the same. You might even have more.”
Jane didn’t know how. Every day, Julie went out in suits; they just wore tee shirts and jeans.
“I have this coupon for a free meal,” he said. “It’ll probably pay for more than you and me and your mom. Do you think your neighbor might want to come along?”
Jane raced ahead of him to the bungalow, yelling, “Can we go to dinner with Owens?”
“Sure,” Mary called from the back, where she often sat with the doors open.
“And can Julie come too?”
Mary thumped into the living room and saw Owens standing there, surveying. The house seemed darker and smaller, as if the room no longer had angular corners, but round ones, like the inside of a ball. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, why not?”
“I just don’t, Owens. So if you want to eat with us, that’s fine. But if you want a date, then maybe you should go over and ask her yourself.”
“It was just an idea,” he said, shrugging. “Forget it.”
When Mary and Jane met him in the restaurant, Olivia was there too, and a man who was her cousin. Jane had heard about Olivia before. She’d expected her to come down slowly on a winding staircase, in a long red dress with a slit on the side. But she just sat there in the booth wearing jeans. It was like once in Portland when she saw a movie star on the street—blinking, a little pale, with small bites or a rash on her skin.
Jane had often imagined the time she’d finally meet Olivia. But instead Owens just brought her along, and Jane had the feeling that from now on she’d always be there. And that first night, Jane felt they weren’t even properly introduced, with their real titles. She had no way of knowing this was how Owens presented everyone in his life. Of course, what she really wanted to understand was how he felt about her, if he’d told Olivia she was his daughter and her uncertainty was not unfounded. Much as Olivia was there, a girlfriend, though probably not the great love, as if he were still deciding, Jane was only a girl, sort of his daughter but not completely. He seemed to be still deciding that too.
Jane knew Owens’ mother hadn’t held him until he was eight months old. She thought maybe for him love came from being along together, as son or daughter, rather than really being it for sure in the first place, the way she and her mom were. But that made her nervous, and she bit her thumbnail. If that was the way he was, why couldn’t she see him every day, then?
Owens showed them all the coupon, which Theo had given him. It had come in the mail addressed to “Resident” and was good for forty dollars any Wednesday before nine, but Theo’s wife didn’t like foreign food.
Things took a turn for the better. He turned his attention on Jane, with everyone looking. On his lap for the first time, Jane assumed the position of a small queen, legs dangling. He said, “Maybe Jane’ll be our country’s first woman president. Let’s say she decides to go to college, then after that maybe she goes to law school like her neighbor—what’s her name—Julie? But say she doesn’t want to practice for a while, she wants to live in the real world. So she decides to work at Genesis for a few years. After a little while, she might even take over and run it for a decade or so. Then, when she’s forty, forty-five, she runs for president.”
Owens looked full and satisfied that night, enclosed by two parenthetical women, with his daughter on his lap. That morning, he’d met with five bald men in suits, who’d offered to plan his campaign for him should he choose to run for governor in three years. He had not said yes, but he had not said no.
“And because of her Persian heritage,” he went on, “she’ll have certain sensitivities to that region.”
“I’ll help homeless people,” Jane said.
“Yes. Maybe she’ll figure out some tax incentives to help the poor. I think it’d be really great if you did that, Jane.”
Olivia’s voice assumed the slow, deliberate tone often used with children. “Jane, is that what you’d like to
do when you grow up? What do you think you’d like to be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe dancer or president.”
Huck, Olivia’s cousin, exploded in a loud, jagged laugh. He was bulky, square-shaped and, up until then, mostly quiet. He was an eighth-grade teacher, and Jane wanted to ask to be in his class. She’d never had a man teacher.
Mary caught Olivia’s eye, then looked down. Both women felt jealous of Jane in a prickling way. They envied her the only thing she knew she had on her fickle throne: a future. Owens was now expounding on educational policy, as Huck passed the rice.
“You work in Alta Saint John’s?” Mary asked. When Olivia nodded, she squinted. “And you’re a nurse?”
“No. Just a CNA.”
“Oh,” Mary said, not knowing what that was. “My mom died there. ”
The dinner continued, sparked with small conversations that easily went out, only Owens and Jane feeling somehow free to talk. When they finished, Owens paid the bill with his coupon, leaving a twenty for a tip.
“I look in the mirror and see what I look like,” Jane said, skipping on the sidewalk in her new sneakers, “but I don’t know what that is, if it’s pretty or not.”
“Know what I’ll get you for your birthday?” Owens said, his hand clamping her neck.
She hadn’t thought he even knew when her birthday was. She began to imagine the presents, five months away, larger and larger ones.
“I’ll take down all the mirrors in the house!”
But Jane and her mother didn’t own any, and they couldn’t take down the ones attached to doors in the rented bungalow.
“Yes!” Mary said, catching up from behind. “She shouldn’t even be thinking about these things. It would be so good for her to go to India or Mexico for her birthday.”
“Yeah,” he said wistfully. “You’re not turning out to be much of a hippie, Jane.”
Olivia pulled her stomach muscles in against her spine as she walked along behind Jane. Although they didn’t know it, tonight was her doing. “Let’s really try,” she’d said to him more than once. “Let’s set one day a week Jane can come to dinner and really stick with it.”
Unlike most of the women Owens knew during the years of Mary’s exile, Olivia had heard of Jane. She’d always wanted to meet the woman and the child she said was his daughter.
“She looks exactly like him,” Olivia said to Huck, in the parking lot. But he only half agreed. “Mary’s very pretty too,” he mentioned.
She made one more effort. “Does anybody feel like ice cream at Café Pantheon?”
“I do!” Jane’s voice belled out.
Owens’ renown in Alta was such that most people in the café smiled when he picked Jane up so she could see the ices. Mary lifted her arm to grab Jane’s foot. For her, too, he provided a certain position. She was, after all, the mother. Jane looked down and wondered, What does she want? Also, glancing around the café with its polished wood surfaces and marble round tables ringed with people, she wanted to be able to wear a dress.
Olivia seemed somehow less at this public moment, waiting behind with her cousin. Only the girlfriend. She sometimes imagined people looking at her, picturing the act.
When they all stood with their cones, Owens’ hand slid into her back pocket, and she reciprocated. Olivia vowed to talk to Jane often, the way she brought Owens’ mother flowers twice a week since she’d been sick. Owens approved of Olivia’s efforts, but he didn’t help much. Of the Tuesday night dinners with Jane she set up that first year, he only made it to three.
Nevertheless, that night he thought of them all as family. He threw his arms around whichever two fell on either side, crushing them against him, looking down from face to face, exhaling: “Ah, the women in my life.” On a walk with Noah the next day, he’d announced, “If Olivia got pregnant and we weren’t ready to get married, I’d go ahead and have the child. I’d get them a little place to live. It’s a more European way.”
In the bungalow later, Jane declared that when she was president, she would make every kid go to school and let every girl pick out a dress.
“Jane, you don’t like politics,” Mary said. “You don’t even read the newspaper.”
“So? Neither do you.”
“But I’m not saying I’ll be president.”
“Well …” Jane paused a minute. “Just because I don’t read the newspaper, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t help people.”
“Jane, people who do things like that are interested in elections and bills passing.”
From then on, Jane demanded a subscription to the newspaper, and for a month, she and her mother spent all day Sunday making their way through the sections.
One calm Friday in April, Mary walked the long mazelike path back to the old bakery, letting the soft wooden screen door bang. In the kitchen she found Rosie, the milkman’s stout daughter, dripping liquid frosting crosses on a tray of Sunday buns.
Rosie moved slowly to the drawer under the telephone, where Mary’s mother had kept scratch paper and finger-sized pencils.
Mary had flown home to the funeral and stayed up all night, sorting her mother’s things into piles. But her mother’s possessions were so familiar that at dawn she left them all, taking the bus back after only one day.
Rosie led her down the narrow staircase to the basement, where one cardboard box remained. “Rest we gave away,” she explained. Near the top of the box was the wooden case of her silver. Made in France, it said. Opening the lid, Mary saw all the cutlery stacked evenly in the slotted felt like keys, blackened from lack of care. Then she carefully closed the small latch, marveling that it was intact, despite her neglect, suddenly and silently grateful to her mother.
“You’re lucky that’s still there. Them across the street wanted to sell it. She took all your ma’s doorknobs.” Rosie nodded. “My dad had to wrestle it out of her mitts. Your ma told him, ‘Someday she’ll come back and want it.’ ”
Mary understood then that her mother had been not too strict but too lenient and had given her too much when she was young, imposing the lifelong burden of regret. Following the wide, white swathed buttocks of Rosie—whom she’d known all her life—she climbed back up into the flour-infused air. Mary had let the bakery go too. She could have worked here every day, in the warm yellow room that smelled of yeast and sugar.
“Are you coming out to see the neighbors?” Rosie asked. There was a strangeness to her adult voice, of virginal curiosity.
“I will sometime,” Mary said. She couldn’t bear to think what else was thrown away because she’d been in a hurry. Maybe nothing is worse than knowing you have hurt your own self.
Mary bought a morning roll and Rosie took her money, the cash register ringing its cheer. A young man came in and asked for two buns with nutmeg flowers on top. He was wearing a shirt that could have been a pajama top, the collar ripped from washings.
“You look like you need a cup of coffee,” he said to Mary.
They sat down on the steps outside. As he lightly drummed the cement, she told him what she’d told no one else, how she’d left at nineteen and never come back in time to see her mother. Then the funeral, when she abandoned the house full of childhood.
“What did you go back to?”
“I have a daughter,” Mary said.
“There you go,” he said, fisting her hand inside his.
As they talked, Mary remembered the times she’d wanted to give Jane away. Once, Jane stared at her straight up from the dusty plank floor of the apple farm. It was before dawn, and Mary’s body—ninety percent fluid, she’d once read—felt hopelessly watered down from being up every hour to feed. She was contemplating adoption. She sat at the small desk in the room, examining a pamphlet she’d picked up from the local church, then carefully wrote the address on a plain envelope. But her daughter kept staring at her, as if she knew something about Mary no one else did. They made a silent pact that morning, and Jane never again woke up in the night.
“S
ee, she knew. She slept because she knew I couldn’t take it.”
But she had kept her daughter. She had. A hundred times, maybe a thousand, it had been so hard—the ghost of a butterfly flickered in her back, a permanent weakness felt even now—but she had gone through it and she still had her. That was the one thing she did.
“Your mom’d understand,” the man said. “That’s what she did, right?” Mary had received a card and a check from her mother, the only present attending the birth.
His name was Eli and he played drums in a start-up band that practiced every night. For money, he ran a gardening team.
“I knew your mom. I used to trade her birds. I’d give her a pair of quail and she gave me a tab at the bakery. This new one, Miss Hips, wiped me out. I still go because I like your mom’s nutmeg rolls.”
That night, he came to visit after his band practice. He brought a triangle, which still hung on their front porch years later. When Jane stood in front of him, asking her mother a question, he rubbed her shoulders and said, “Hey, man, what’s going down?”
Jane couldn’t tell about Eli. He was nice, but she didn’t think he was what Mary wanted. He was like a boy, more of a friend. He’d tickle and make her mother laugh, sort of at him, sort of with him.
The truck finally gave out, and after they left seven messages, Owens took them to buy a new car. Mary chose the make and model. With Owens, she was discovering, you had a moment of chance, and if you said what you wanted, sometimes he said yes. She could glean no particular logic to his decisions. So she asked for more than felt really right, and it gave her a high strange giggle when he assented. She felt he was letting her in too, not just Jane. But maybe not. She got the model she wanted but not the color. Only one was there on the lot, and Owens didn’t want to wait; it was maroon and she’d been hoping for blue.
Driving home the first new car they’d ever owned, Mary and Jane still felt joyless. Jane didn’t know if it was her father’s way of giving—he’d looked grim, writing the check—or her mother’s tendency to suspicion, but they drove straight home and parked and Mary never trusted that car. Almost always she smelled a faint trace of oil, and they drove with the windows open, even in the morning. Now, two months later, it wouldn’t start. And Mary had to get to the city to give blood. Rosie had walked all the way to the bungalow the night before, delivering an envelope addressed in light pencil to Mary di Natali, Auburn. “Here’s the letter I said came to the bakery.” It was from Bixter, who needed an operation on her one eye. She sent the name and address of the hospital where the blood could be forwarded. “It’s a funny thing. I’d been thinking of you two for a couple weeks, and then I remembered we have the same blood.” Mary and Bixter each prided themselves on being RH negative.