by Mona Simpson
“Aw, come on, it’s our first house together.”
“But we don’t need to buy things. That’s not what matters. I don’t care about chairs,” she said, in an impassioned voice, not because she felt this so strongly but because her renunciation was a familiar step in their dialogue of forgiveness. She didn’t know if she cared about chairs or Christmas tree balls. She didn’t think so. But recently she’d come to understand that she wanted some of the normal things too.
“He tells the same story over and over again.” More than anyone, Mary had an unquestioned faith in his brilliance, so his lapses left her incredulous.
“Have you heard about the five guys begging him to run?” Olivia was at the bungalow because she and Owens had made up again and she regretted some confidences she’d exchanged during the days she’d been angry.
“Yes! He told us two or three times—”
Jane skidded into the kitchen from behind the door. She couldn’t help it. “Oh, I know. Like I told him, you should really go and taste the rice and beans yourself, just a surprise visit, and then you could find out why people are complaining. And the next day he said he would, like it was his idea.”
Olivia smiled. “I like it that he forgets. I don’t have to have new things to tell him every night.”
Jane was sent back to her room. Both women felt uneasy talking in front of her about her father. But once she was gone, they didn’t know where to begin again. Interruptions were not easy between them. Although their talks sometimes reached a pitch of confessional intensity, they were still not, in the usual sense, friends. Their relationship lacked ease and laziness. Mary’s full kitchen was wide and windowed, and she moved through the dim room with an air of propriety, making her tea with dried lemon peel and cinnamon. She had a certain standing as the mother of his child. The apartment Olivia rented was smaller than this one room. But she knew what no one else did. “He’s going to fire Susan and Stephen,” she blurted, even though she’d vowed not to confide in Mary.
Mary’s eyes fell open so wide that her long forehead seemed stretched. She was calculating whether this would make things worse for her and Jane. When something threatening occurred to Mary, she became very still. Owens interpreted this as stupidity. She slowly poured hot water into a glass pot warming over a candle. Unable to come to any conclusion, she stalled and asked, “Why? Isn’t he happy with them?”
“No. And I don’t think they’re so great either.” However wary she now felt, Olivia couldn’t resist a conversation about Susan and Stephen. They had humiliated her, and it was a matter of some importance that they go. “They could do a lot more. They take care of him, but they don’t pay attention to anyone else. Like when Jane comes over, they could give her clean towels. Just little things to make people feel at home.”
Mary herself had never felt at home in Owens’ house, but she hadn’t considered that a possibility. “No, you’re right. They’re a little cold.”
“I don’t think they’re such great cooks either.”
“No. No, they could be much better.” Mary laughed. “I even think we do better here. He should maybe get an older woman, who could really make a home. We could even use her. That way, if she made a nice meal every night, it’d get eaten, now that the new house is so close.” She giggled, a first foot in, planning. “I’d even bring our laundry.”
Olivia controlled her voice. “I don’t think he’s planning on having servants.”
“He needs somebody, though. Susan and Stephen do a lot, and like you said, it still never feels like a home. Between all he wants done and then what Jane needs too, the way he is, he has to have help.”
Olivia’s eyes closed. It was always the same. She was an adjunct. “But, Mary, if he did hire someone—and I’m not saying he will—I’d supervise the person. I’d be mistress of the house.” There. She’d said it.
It took Mary a moment to absorb that she was out again. Then her tone became the one she used with Owens. “I just thought if Jane needed something.”
“Well, that would be fine. I’m just saying …”
But Mary’s forehead stretched again, that same uncomprehending look. Maybe he’s right after all, Olivia decided. Maybe she is dumb.
Owens didn’t hide his chagrin when he discovered that the beans in the Alameda County School District had been fatted with lard. He was sitting on a small plastic cafeteria chair, holding a forkful in front of him. “What’s in this?” he asked.
The principal rubbed his hands together. “It’s beans and rice.”
“No it’s not. There’s something else in here. Some grease. See this yellow stuff?”
Jane, who was along, was thinking whatever it was made it taste good. She was eating fast, because she knew she’d have to stop when the ingredient was announced.
“Could you find out what this is? I’d really like to know.”
Lunch capped off a bad morning. Owens had been visiting a school funded by his open-classroom initiative.
Desks and pupils faced every which way—forty, fifty or perhaps more in one classroom. It was difficult to count because many of the students were in constant motion. Who knew? Certainly not the teacher, who looked cowed and meek, slump-necked, handing out pencils with an infinite slowness and asking the students to share. Then it became clear that there weren’t enough pencils to go around.
Owens had three pens on him. “Here,” he said, donating them.
Children erupted from their seats to a stinging hive around him until two boys hit their heads together with a loud thwock and three children emerged victorious. Then, almost immediately, the rupture closed, the pens were owned and forgotten, and the class roared on in its manifold disorder.
This teacher seemed lacking in any aggressive virtues. She had no visible pep, limited imagination and even, it occurred to Owens, insufficient wind power. But what she did possess was infinite patience, which was either what they needed more than anything or the worst possible obstacle to their progress.
“I’d get those desks back in rows,” Owens volunteered to the principal.
Owens was still persuading Olivia to move into the new house with him, but he found the challenge enlivening. The romance of pursuit and his own talent for recruitment contributed to a vague restlessness when they saw each other every night. When Olivia described her argument with Mary, he had to smile: two women quarreling over who would use the maid, like children fighting for the rule of an imagined kingdom. Who would be queen? The easiest solution, he thought, was not to hire anybody. He considered himself a Solomonic mediator, but that drove Olivia crazy, his regarding her as only one party of a dispute, with no special connection to him.
“Ah, the women in my life,” he said, with lifted eyebrows and a merriness in his voice. “I’m going to tell Susan and Stephen this week.”
This soothed her, but not completely. She couldn’t say why, even to herself.
“I mean, I’m not mad,” she said. “I think of Mary as a fragile flower. I like her.”
Olivia learned certain words from reading. She didn’t look them up in the dictionary, although she underlined in books, intending to go back later. But eventually she apprehended the meaning, if she found a word enough times. And sometimes with the new word came an idea, a tint of life. She’d discovered that it didn’t work to try and please him; it made things worse. The more insouciant I am, she thought, the happier he is.
This was a lesson almost any mother of a certain generation would have taught her daughter, from the playpen on. But Olivia had had an unusual mother, who believed her daughter’s beauty was so extraordinary that she took a small, mean pleasure in depriving her of some of the common tools.
“You think this is nice?” Owens asked.
“Oh, I think it’s beautiful,” the clerk declared.
He turned the ring, studying it, and then shook his head. “Because I don’t think it’s very nice at all. I want something simple. But because I’m probably going to get married on
ly once in my life, the stone should be … special.” He was speaking very slowly, as if he considered it a distinct possibility that the woman was an imbecile.
“Did you ask her and she said yes?” Jane whispered. They’d driven all the way to the city, but he hadn’t told her anything.
“No, and that’s why you can’t say anything. I’m thinking about it.”
“And you’re getting the ring first?”
“If we find something really great.”
But they didn’t. The woman led them to a private room in the back of the store, where a man showed them several stones Owens considered too large, too yellow, or not the right shape. Owens wrote down his number, and the man promised to search.
When they emerged, the streetlamps were coming on and people on the sidewalks seemed to be hurrying. Jane would have liked to stop. A restorative cup of hot chocolate, Peter Bigelow had said the time he bought Julie the dress—the kind of thing he would probably do only once in his life, her mother said—and that was what made the day beautiful. He’d bought them both gifts that afternoon, but the day was a gift too. They wandered through the streets, in and out of stores, with a sense that something momentous had already happened. They stopped and looked up at the sky. Peter’s eyes seemed gelatine and far-holding. It was the first time Jane had seen a strong man frightened. She had hoped someday she would marry a man like Peter.
But she also admired her father’s stern profile, his long fingers, as he examined the fine rings. She wanted to marry someone a little like Owens too.
Driving, he seemed preoccupied again. Jane wished they’d found a ring and bought it: maybe that would have made the difference.
“Want to see the house?” Owens asked Noah Kaskie, who was waiting on Mayberry Drive when they returned, half an hour late.
“Sure. I want the full tour.”
Once inside, Owens moved on his hands and knees to show his friend the method of hand-planing the floor planks. “In Japan, they have this incredibly smooth wood that feels really good when you walk barefoot. And it’s all just hand-planed wood with no finish.”
“Not even wax or polyurethane?”
“Nothing. So we can have a shoeless house.”
Noah reached down a hand to feel. He was self-conscious about his wheels. It had been over a week since he’d hosed them off. He’d have to clean them with a rag whenever he came here.
Of course, finding Japanese hand planers wasn’t easy, but that was precisely the kind of challenge Owens excelled in. He contacted sixty-two men—in Japan, the United States and Canada—before he located the right one. He’d done it all from his telephone.
Noah looked around the empty rooms, impressed but not particularly envious, even though it was so far beyond his present and even eventual means that he didn’t like to think about it. To him it wasn’t beautiful. If he were buying a big house, he’d pick something more classic. Brick or stone around a courtyard; one story, of course. He’d want a dining room and a pantry and broom closets, plus lots of little bedrooms for children.
Noah’s mother had often gone to garden shows, to see the insides of rich women’s houses. She and her friends had not returned home defeated; they came back like divers with one tip minted from the deep. They too would use paper narcissi as centerpieces!
They were standing by the fireplace when Noah saw the tracks his wheels had left on this soft wood.
“I think Olivia and I should either break up or get married,” Owens said all of a sudden, staring at his friend with a peculiar intensity. The fireplace waited, impeccably clean. “You know what I did this afternoon? I went shopping for a ring. A ring can definitely be had. But do you know how you’d propose?”
“There’s no one to propose to.”
“But how do you think you’ll do it, when the time comes?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’d wait for a moment when we both were happy. When you can’t stop laughing. I’d ask then.”
Owens carried Noah upstairs to see the bedrooms. “I was thinking of taking her to this little restaurant where I know the cook, and I’d ask her to make us a soufflé—like a fresh raspberry soufflé—and have her bake the ring into that. What do you think?”
“Memorable,” Kaskie said. “A little messy.”
“I know. I thought of that.” Owens proceeded to outline his various plans; each one involved the ring being hidden in a beverage or a portion of food.
Cracker Jack prize, Noah thought. Not a question for her to answer, but a treat. Noah had never considered purchasing a ring. Now he wondered if he should’ve bought some jewelry for the girl in college. Women liked those things. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the scuff marks downstairs. Would Owens have to get the workman back to fix it? Noah wanted to write a check then and there. But how much would it cost? Would they have to fly the hand planer from Japan or Canada? “So Olivia’s definitely moving in, then?”
“I think so. We had a little fight about it,” Owens added, forgetting he’d already told Kaskie. “You know, I wish Olivia would do something with her life. Like, say we had a couple kids and she wasn’t that happy with the schools. And so she started her own school, and then, after it’d been going a little while, she decided to go out into the business community and raise money so poor kids could go too. I think that’d be really great.”
He doesn’t love her enough, Noah thought, wishing she were there. He could tell her about the wheel tracks.
A small futon with twisted sheets lay in a corner. “I slept here last night,” Owens said. “It was great. In the morning, some kids were sort of yelling on their way to school.”
The bathroom was strange. Owens had spent days combing the world for Japanese hand planers, but he could live with chartreuse tile? He’d already set his toothbrush on the lip of the sink. Kaskie recognized that they had the same razor. “Oh, you’ve got that too,” he said, seizing on this commonality after an hour-long discussion about home renovation to which he had nothing to contribute.
“It’s great. I threw out my electric. Where’d you hear about it?”
“Remember my friend who was sequencing the enzyme? Rachel?”
“A woman. Really?” Owens raised his eyebrows.
“I guess she uses it for … you know. Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure she shaves. Her legs maybe.” Noah tried to remember Rachel’s legs. She usually wore pants.
“Is Rachel the woman … ?” Owens got a faraway, indulgent smile. “She doesn’t shave?”
“Not underarms, I guess. I don’t know,” Kaskie blundered. He hoped he wasn’t compromising his friend.
“I would’ve guessed she was a shaver. She struck me as being very East Coast.”
“She’s about five minutes away,” Noah said, “from a Nobel Prize.”
Every minute he didn’t bring up the black lines was a moment gone. Noah remembered his grandmother reading to his sister and him when they were young, a book about manners. If you break something in a house where you’re the guest, go immediately and tell the hostess. And Noah understood that if he didn’t say anything and they left the house, they both would know and it would be a problem between them. But he didn’t want to tell.
Stalling, Noah picked up the small instrument. “Feels good in the hand.” With old razors, he’d habitually nicked himself.
“Yeah, their stock shot way up.” Owens sighed. “And it should; it’s a good product.” This was true word of mouth—an idea Owens had never thought about while his first product was selling wildly and had learned to monitor only this second time around.
If worst came to worst, he could pay for the ads himself. But that wouldn’t look good if it got out. Maybe Rooney was right. Maybe you couldn’t buy word of mouth. Yet he didn’t doubt the worth of Exodus, and these oppositions disturbed him. He rubbed his eyebrows. “But you like the place?” he asked.
After a thorough tour, Noah felt satisfied that Owens didn’t own a house he could love. For that he was both
grateful and relieved, and more ebullient praising it than he could’ve been if he’d found it truly beautiful. “It’s making me think I should move,” he said finally. “Owens, look. I made marks on your new floor, and I’m sorry. What can I do?”
“Oh, I don’t care about that, Noah.”
“Yes you do. You paid a lot of money to get it right. Let me fix it.”
Owens shrugged. “You get it as beautiful as you can, and then you live in it. This counts as living in it. I’ll mop up later. Let’s take a walk.”
Ribbons of jasmine seemed to float among the woodsmoke. They kept walking, each believing that whatever was wrong with their lives, it was never this place. They might be random specks of matter, but in this they were fortunate—they were born to a place that would never grow old, that voyage could not daunt or diminish.
“Do you think everyone feels this way about where they grew up?” Noah asked.
“Yeah, a little,” Owens said. “But this is different. It really is better here.”
The place had its own grandeur, the dark mountains like a proud woman with her shoulders thrown back. It was more than their love for it.
As they entered town, Kaskie felt in his pocket and fingered the worn bills. This time, he could treat. “Should we stop for a coffee?”
Owens patted his stomach. “I’m getting a little fat. Let’s look in there instead.”
Kaskie reluctantly crossed the street and entered the bike store. Owens bought a new kind of roller skate and Kaskie allowed himself to be talked into a set of wide off-road wheels. Just when Kaskie had a twenty in his pocket, Owens had done it again. Kaskie had to borrow cash.
Jane was sitting on the curb when they returned, eating her own scab. “I forgot my key to my mom’s,” she announced, “and it’s locked.” While they were walking, she’d picked out the room she wanted in the new house: the one next to Owens’. She’d tried it, lying down on the bare floor.
“I’ll drive you there and we’ll find a way to break in.”
Before they left, Noah wrote out a check to Owens for the wheels.