by Mona Simpson
“I guess I was always a tomboy. I never liked the girl stuff. I always thought it was less. And it seemed like a waste of time. I never felt I had the time. Emily Briggs would sit around spending all Saturday hovering over her toes. She’d polish them three layers of pink and then she’d take that off and start over and do four layers of peach and then take that off and finally end up with pearl. And that would be her day.
“ ‘You can be both!’ my mother would tell me. But what was she? She wasn’t both. Neither was anybody else I saw around. She was always trying to deny the limits of time and space.”
Timothy told me it was time to stop and I felt startled. I stood up, brushed off the front of my dress and moved back into the kitchen room. I felt strange, a little embarrassed, something ended. I brushed my hands against each other a way my grandmother did after she wiped down the table.
“I wish it was over and I’d already found him and now I was just living my life.”
“What is the feeling that you can’t wait?”
“I’ve been waiting all my life. Too long.”
The displaced gorgeous fish moved now in a kind of jagged stunted fury for spending their youth in this unobserved dim country, and then exhausted, they hung in place fanning their delicate, extravagantly colored fins, like tissued jewel.
I didn’t pay Timothy. Emily’s analyst thought payment was important for the patient’s recovery, so just to be safe I usually brought Timothy a little food. But that day I had nothing.
I STILL HAD THREE places to go before home. I went to a flower store that smelled like rain, dirt and moss. They had lilies of the valley, tiny roses, old lady flowers I hadn’t seen for years. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find dandelions. Flower deliveries were a thing like written invitations, something I didn’t grow up around. They didn’t really have all that in Racine. Few children were even taught to write thank-you notes. They seemed to me like something from an old book. My mother always meant to send me to charm school. Marion Werth headed that program downtown at the YWCA once a week. We never managed to get organized enough for that, but we carried a battered book from move to move, called White Gloves and Party Manners. I read it again and again, just for solace, at night in my bed, listening to the trains moan by outside in the cold dark. It was all about whose name you say first when you are introducing someone royal. Which fork to use for shrimp and what to do if you are a guest and you break a vase. When we lived in California in empty apartments, with just our boxes, I used to lie sometimes on the carpet, late afternoons, for hours I just sat in the lightless dusk reading, waiting for the sound of my mother’s tires outside.
In the flower store, I picked two champagne roses which were a color like what pink is dipped in tea. My mother once showed me how to make the new ivory beads Merl Briggs brought from her travels in the Orient seem dimmer, old with value. We gently dipped the strand, string and all, in tea. These roses had very long stems and the blooms felt disproportionately heavy. Their color concentrated and waned like color in a cheek or a lip.
Tonight I wished I were home in my bed, eating take-out Chinese food from the carton. Still, the dark shook glamorous wings with new lights. The white tissue for the flowers rustled like party slips. I stopped a taxi, slid in and we swam in the just lit public world. I pulled out my better shoes from the backpack, traded them for bad, tried to put on lipstick by touch, brushed my hair. I should learn to carry a mirror, I thought. Another thing to get. How many times had I brushed my hair in the back of a taxi or walking up from the subway, sucked in breath as I went to the door of a party that could, maybe would, just might … but then never did change my life. At a stoplight, I asked the driver, “Could I come up front and use your mirror?” So we rode together, he somehow dodging cars without the rearview, which I used to draw on my eye makeup. I looked like an owl. I never did learn how to do makeup right.
I always thought I’d want to go to parties like this, but now I wasn’t in the mood. Still, Emily was engaged. I had to go for a while even if Tad wouldn’t look at me. I felt the fragile light bundle of flowers in my arms. Good.
I knew what a father was from what Emily had. I had a little of Doc Briggs too. He liked me. I knew I reminded him of himself. He’d married late and everyone always said he’d been kind of weird before that. I’d ask them what they meant, and they’d all shrug or shake their heads, like my grandmother, and say, “I don’t know, just funny.” He had lived all that time, even being a doctor, with his mother. After six or seven years, he decided he didn’t like medicine and he opened a gift shop. A year later, he was running his father’s store, Briggs’s.
At Racine parties, when I was a child, we’d end up sitting at right angles to each other and having a real talk. He asked me what I thought about kids getting allowances, whether they should get paid for chores or just be given money every week. We were always, by the end, talking about death. He was the only person my whole childhood who asked if I thought my father was alive. “I know he is,” I said. It wasn’t that often I saw him but I liked our talks. He knew who I was. He’d taught me, when I was ten, to play chess. We played chess and we talked about things from school and eventually, death. Those were the years my grandmother’s aunts were dying. There were seven sisters in all, counting her mother, and they all died within five years. My cousin Ben and I were taken to every funeral. Doc Briggs’s brother was an undertaker so he and I discussed the comparative merits of each laying out, each embalmment. Two of the great-grand-aunts I saw for the first time at their funerals.
But here was the thing. I’d be myself, in my jeans and hands in jacket pockets, and we’d be talking, looking not at each other at all but far off in the field say, back of their house, and then Emily would prance in and she was completely something else, and she would come over and climb on him or lean her hands just on the back of his shoulders and we would be talking about something still and true and she would come and frill and natter about dresses and parties and buying things and what she didn’t have that someone else had and could she, Dad, could she please? And they were connected, with something that was as visceral and repellent to me as the slime of snails, its oozing glitter. That was them. He loved her like that.
No one ever loved me that way. No one at all. Not my stepfather. Not the men I made my fathers. They cared for me in a stiller way, standing up and looking in the distance. They acknowledged more who I was, like a vertical pole, something they might have respected, but nothing that melted them down. I never knew if my real father would have either. I didn’t think so. I didn’t remember him being that way.
And Emily and I were such different children. We played dress-up and I would usually be the man. She was always being a princess. Or a fairy. Something that had a cape or evanescent wings. And she leapt and jumped, she was always wearing pink and silk net tutus.
Now, Emily tended to get what she wanted from the world. Except my cousin Ben. She probably would have gotten him too eventually. But he died first, when he was too young to see what she could’ve given him, and that—his death—was the most solemn bead in her. I could feel where that was in her, always. But she worked now to the top of her abilities, while Mai linn stood blowing them away, her advantages, talents, like a puff of dandelion wish in the vague indiscriminate wind. A girl with a father and a girl without.
I was jealous of Emily, sure. But one thing that kept me from being too jealous, or confident either, was that I was never sure of what seemed true. I believed, in a way, that Emily was smart but not that smart and that she was beautiful, and that I was smart enough but only borderline good-looking. But I was never sure. Sometimes I thought Emily only seemed that way to me because I wanted her to and then, in certain glances from certain mirrors, I maybe thought I could have been beautiful too.
At the museum entrance, a man asked if I’d like to check my bag. I said no. I never checked my bag. I needed my things too much. Once I was with Bud Edison at the beach in January and he wanted to
walk on the sand in the snow. I made him wait while I went back to the car so I could change out of my boots to old sneakers. I lived that winter with the cushion of my one coat padding my chair in restaurants, I knew the fall of it over my knees at the movies. My hands grew used to touching the things I owned. Checking. I had this one pair of earrings I wore always. I bought them when I finished college. Graduating college was no big deal, my mother wasn’t around, and I missed her getting me a present. My grandmother did. She sent me a check to buy myself something. I used to always save her checks, never to buy anything, and she’d always scold me to go out and spend.
“Take the two of yourselves to a nice dinner or go to a show. Get out and have a ball.”
“I don’t even know if he’s the one, Gramma,” I’d said. Everything always seemed to me so dire.
“Well, go ahead and have a nice time anyway. Buy yourself a new dress.”
But she never taught me to wear clothes, to use things the way she had. But this one time I did go out to the best jewelry store in Madison, LaVakes, and I bought earrings.
I touched them, left ear, right. Still there. One thing I should have been was more careless.
THE CEILING of the ancient wing was as high as any church I’d been in. I guess I was early. Emily wasn’t there yet. I sat on a stone ruin to get myself together. I rummaged in my bag for paste pins. Emily had called yesterday needing to borrow a pin. Pins, like linens, were things I was rich in from my grandmother’s drawers. I’d thrown a handful into my backpack. They were dreamy things. Bits of glass, cherries, nursery rhyme flowers. One was a picture made of shimmery butterfly wings. The backs were stained a dry hard clear color from the safety pin being glued on more than once.
Heels made a certain sound in this huge room. Emily had told me about the museum. They had an endowment, from the Reader’s Digest heiress, to replace the huge extravagant flowers every other day. The blossoms were everywhere, the best of the season. In spring they had had cherry blossoms. Now there were branches of bittersweet. Huge tulips—things impossible in nature, but this wasn’t nature, this was New York. I watched the kid caterers nail atmosphere together piece by piece. Dressed in twenty-two-year-olds’ clothes—black things from thrift stores and running shoes, Chinese slippers—they curved over every table lighting candles, the girls’ long hair falling, just as the buildings out the window lit from within, so they loomed closer, silver and gold. I’d always wondered, in my grandmother’s house and in all those empty rented places with my mother, if people felt different when they had a dining room. At my grandmother’s, we ate in the kitchen with the sound of the highway running outside.
Emily told me after the second day all those thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers were heaped like rot in big metal garbage bins in the back.
That would never happen in Wisconsin. A thing like that would just never happen.
“I’d go take ’em,” I said.
When we talked to each other, our Midwest accents fell back into our voices like the heels of boots.
“I tried one day right at the beginning, there were these enormous branches of forsythia—it was perfectly fresh and I was carrying them home. I’d worked late. And I ran into a curator I knew from upstairs. They talked to me the next day.”
“I’d just do it anyway.”
“No you wouldn’t. People would think you were funny.”
“I don care.”
“Yah you do.”
I sighed, waiting for her. Where was she? I lay down on the alabaster slab, the little run of fountains gurgling below me. It was interesting that they used the ruins this way. For a party. In an hour the room would be full of flimsy silly dresses, food and evanescent life. You could see the people in the close corner stepping in, down, taking drinks from a waiter’s tray. All presided by the stone ruins which were outside once, subject to the sun and wind. I slipped behind a temple arch. I wanted to be hidden just then. My family had never given parties. It wasn’t just that we had had so little but that we hadn’t used what we had. We’d lived in places and left them, afraid of ruining the walls, the floor. We’d never hosted meals, friends, the disorganized mess of life. And this temple had. There were just stone walls now and cut places for windows but you could still feel how it must have been used. By people no more serious, no less petty and jingling than tonight’s. I watched a woman walk in a diagonal across the room: she was wearing a blouse with shells tied to the bottom hem; their noise carried up and then hung a certain distance above our heads, like a canopy. I thought of a book I’d read about Katsura, rich and empty with the lives it had housed. The moon-watching parties on the lake, the tea ceremonies. Sometimes I’ve thought that everyone wants parties, even scholars. So many of us read history because we are afraid to inhabit our own youth.
I was still standing behind a wall, looking through the thick window. I was dressed up too. This was public time. Passions ran and had always run deep under all the walls and monuments, under the silver and gold of New York City, unaltered even by the moon. I thought of my father still free somewhere in the dark northwest, altitudinous, windy black pines. Passions were by nature secret, and tonight I felt closer to that hidden life. I had my own mission, too.
Then I saw Emily and I stepped down and around. I followed her to the ladies’ room, where a window opened, screenless, to the near lit buzzing city towers. I fished the pins out of my backpack, held them all in one palm, their candy innocence.
“Tell me which one,” she said.
I picked and she stood carefully still while I pinned it on her collar. She looked at herself in the mirror a moment. She really did turn out beautiful. Once in a while, I thought, she wanted me to be her sister. She had better pins than I did, ones with real jewels, and she knew enough to tell the difference. The door was open. Outside, people moved tenderly, holding thick glasses with drinks. Far away I saw a guy I always flirted with at Emily’s parties by talking about my ineptness. He always laughed and seemed to like it. I gave her the roses. We had been so different growing up but now we were both just young women living alone. We both lived primarily on muffins. They were good and comforting and they didn’t get you fat. We talked on the phone while we baked. We didn’t use sugar or even honey. We sweetened with just banana.
“Have you seen Tad?” she said as we stood near the wall, before really entering the crowd.
“No, not yet, was he looking for me?”
She turned to me blank.
Tad never made it to the party, but when he arrived home from London, after midnight, he had a strand of pink pearls with a butterfly Romanov clasp.
I TOUCHED MY EARRINGS, both still there, and lay my head back on the seat while the cabdriver took up my panic, plotting through the streets recklessly and fast. I was late. Really late. I kept waiting for Tad to get there before I left. Finally we approached the quiet school gates. My date, the gastroenterologist, stood outside, hair blowing in the wet wind, arms crossed. I didn’t know about him. He was divorced.
“Don’t run,” he shouted as I slanted over the brick sidewalk.
“I’m sorry.” Having rushed and skidded like that, it was a funny thing then stopping, straightening my scarf, to wade into the slow, well-lighted plan of a reception hall. It had seemed to matter so much getting here before too late and now it was nothing at all. “Will they be sitting down?”
“No, I don’t think so, and if they are, then it will be a dramatic entrance.”
They were sitting down. A salad and a cup of soup were waiting at my place. I tried to land gracefully in the chair held out for me. From here on, it would be soft and slow now. All I had to do was eat. It would be easy here to be kind.
The night peeled away evenly. There was nothing more I had to do.
I sipped. I leaned in to hear my table partner’s story, folding my hands under my chin a way I’d watched my mother once hold her arms long ago. I was the youngest person at the table. It was easy to get the men to look at me. I hardl
y had to do anything at all. I was glad for the feel of silk velvet and its folds in candlelight. For a moment, while my date was talking, I thought what my family would have been like if we’d had money. This was a weak thing to do. But I did it anyway, alone, just seconds at a time. I imagined my mother in a kind institution, a place with three-tiered lawns rippling down. And every day she rested. She was saving up for me. For the energy I would take. Then, once in a while, maybe twice a year, we would have our night, beginning early, with the sky darkening but still a blue. If you looked at us, we would seem normal, but a little softer. We’d go to a restaurant, a quiet place with candles, and we’d enjoy the food, her especially, we’d be clean and dressed nice, we’d ask each other questions, she would touch my face like a mother …
My mother, one thing about her, sometimes she appreciated a thing so much, a petal of the world, like a meal or a pair of shoes.
A man across the table was asking me where I came from. “Wisconsin? I lived a lot of places, but mainly a small city in Wisconsin. Racine.” Sometimes when people asked I just said California. It depended. I was the only nonwife at the table. All I had to do was answer simply and smile. The older women had to work harder. I didn’t feel bad about that at all. It just felt like something I had. In me. Particularly.
The women must have watched with a curl of rue in their laughs. They recognized my vulnerability more than I did.
After, we stood outside the school gates, a wife and a different husband holding bowls of flowers that had been the centerpieces to take home. Standing, talking, touching each other’s wrists and coat shoulders, we moved frugally, all university people, enchanted by the winter flowers. The first cab came, a couple folded in, and I jumped in too, they were going in my direction. From inside I saw my date stand there hands in his coat pockets, his thin hair in the front moving in the wind and then in a few minutes I was home.