by Mona Simpson
I smiled in the dark apartment—the foreign student’s question. “Mmhm, I’m in medical school. What do you do here?”
“Civil engineering. I plan bridges.”
“Oh, that’s great. How old are you?”
“I’m thirty. But you know, um, this month is bad because we have a deadline.” A thirty-year-old Egyptian woman building bridges! Good for her, was my first thought.
“Good for her,” I said, after hanging up.
I marked down Call Aleya three weeks later in my calendar. Call Aleya.
AFTER CLASSES ONE FRIDAY, I went out drinking with some other students, new friends maybe. They went to a dark narrow place where a middle-aged woman was the bartender. She had long black hair she kept in a ponytail. We were the only people there. Regular living-room furniture crowded the room and in the back corner, on a gray large chair, sat an old old woman, watching television. She had long hair too, just growing down plain, a yellowish gray. There was a huge separation between the women that age who did their hair and the women who didn’t. No matter what they talked about together, that would be more. I thought I’d be the type who didn’t do it. In the Midwest, you could almost tell a woman’s age by her hair. There was the hair of childhood, the long plain hair of the best years for a girl, the twenties’ bangs and wings and upcurls, then the above-shoulder still-with-bangs cut of the thirties, beginning to be set in rollers, sprayed, the forties’ style, definitely done. The stages here in the East looked more expensive but just as set. But some women everywhere stepped out of the procession.
Everyone was drinking drinks. I’d asked for coffee and the woman behind the bar, moving loosely, made me instant in a glass. I listened to everyone, spoke when I could. But it was hard. And when they were getting up for their second drinks, I left. I was supposed to be living this life. I tried but I was still never in it. As the time ticked thick and slow while they were drinking and spaces hung between what anybody said, I always knew I should have been doing something else. I wanted to go home and call my old friends far away. I noticed the sign outside as I walked away: THE BLUE ROSE. I passed a sedan jacked up on cement blocks in an empty car lot. That looked like so much unused land in the West.
THEN CAME the frustration days. Three weeks passed and I left more messages on Aleya’s machine and she didn’t answer them. I thought the detective was going on nothing, theories of some alumni bureaucrat who last saw him in 1959. Still, I started to wonder if maybe they were right. Maybe he was in Egypt. I thought of a toss of stars like dice on a pure black sky. What did I know of Egypt?
Well, okay, I decided, so maybe I’d just go. That had always been the wild card. After such an extravagance, something would have to change. Egypt would probably cost the rest of my money. I called the Egyptian Consulate and the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. I said I was looking for someone, anyone named Atassi. All I did was annoy them. But I asked them to send me a visa application. The piece of paper arrived a few weeks later in the mail. It was thin, blue-lined, made with an old-fashioned mimeograph machine, like the exercise sheets passed out years ago in grammar school. It looked crude compared to anything official and American.
I’d never asked anyone really how much it cost to go there, even though I’d heard the word all my childhood. Some things seemed possible in this life and some didn’t. I was always drawn to those that hovered at the border. In childhood the moon was not possible. It was a thing of far beauty, a cool light on our everyday hands. Now, NASA kept a waiting list of civilians who wanted to go. Tad Alto, Emily’s fiancé, he’d signed up. The going was such a different enterprise than gazing at the moon, your chin propped on a shovel handle. And so many things had felt impossible anyway in childhood, maybe to me more than to other kids. A lot of the big optimistic opportunities didn’t reach the country in Wisconsin. And the systems priding America, we didn’t believe they would work for us. I never felt surprised when a letter came back marked ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN RETURN TO SENDER, if a package never showed, if a telephone did not ring. I felt confirmed in what we already knew was the truth. Things didn’t work. He couldn’t get through to us. Our prayers fell down space and time, shreds like sound from the man upstairs and his TV, so you could make out noise and shuffle and static, a word now and then, but never a sentence that meant anything.
I couldn’t even draw the shape of Egypt. Wisconsin was like a hand.
I went to a small travel agency near school. I’d heard about this guy; he was a dharma bum, ex-hippie, who would cheat on airline tickets, sticker them so you got the lowest available price no matter what. So much of what determined what was life and what dream was still only money.
The way the rich lived in movies when we were children was like New York City. It almost equaled the moon. But things went strange on us. If that first day the detective had said nine thousand dollars, I wouldn’t have felt surprised. I probably would have given him all my money. Detectives, for me, came from movies anyway and could have been like the rich and the moon. I only knew Egypt from my father and the movies. When my grandmother was away and my mother wanted to go out, she’d drop me and my cousin Ben off at the Coliseum Cinema in our pajamas. She’d come late, late at night to pick us up and we’d be half asleep on the velvet benches in the lobby while the girl behind the candy counter vacuumed the star-flecked carpet and my grandmother’s friend, Gish, tallied the ticket stubs from the red and silver wooden box, painted with stars.
Egypt could cost anything.
The travel agent worked out of his apartment. He was a large-featured man over forty with a goofy laugh that lurched towards the personal. “That’ll be seventeen hundred sixty dollars, round trip, with two weeks advance purchase, open as far as return. That’s the best I can do.”
That was way too much money to make sense in my budget, budget who was I kidding, what budget? Too much money but it was not … impossible. I still had six thousand dollars left. I could do it. Or I could charge it and pay it off month by month.
I asked the travel agent if any courier services went to Egypt. Mai linn always signed up to be a courier and once they bumped her onto the Concorde.
“To Egypt, no, I don’t think any legal ones.” He loosened a crescendo of giggles. “For under a thousand I can get you to Thailand. Bangkok. That’s a great trip. I was just there.”
“Is there a way to get a ticket refunded once you buy it?”
“You gotta have a doctor’s note. I guess that’s no problem for you.”
Money. Once in California, with Stevie Howard, we ate a tart made of golden raspberries, in a restaurant. He didn’t particularly like it. “Fancy,” he said, in his way. Stevie was a gardener, but to eat, he preferred plain things. But I remembered for a long time and the next winter I tried to find a bush of them to buy for my grandmother. She loved things like albino squirrels or berries of a different color. Those were the wonders of the world for her. I troubled over her presents. She didn’t want enough. I finally called Marion Werth at the Racine Public Library long distance. She wrote a letter for me to the Brown County Horticultural Society, which tracked down the golden raspberry to a nursery in Nebraska. When I called, the woman on the telephone said the bushes were two-ninety-eight for three. That was more than I’d expected. I’d expected a golden raspberry bush to cost a hundred dollars, but I’d thought I could just buy one. My grandmother wouldn’t need the harvest, she’d want to stand and marvel, the watery berry heavy-coned in her hand, still attached to the bush, soft against her soft palm. I told the Nebraska woman about being a student on financial aid and could I order just one bush for my grandmother. The woman sounded perplexed. “Do you understand I’m saying two dollars and ninety-eight cents?”
I bought twenty-four. They were still growing along the east side of the garage, next to the rhubarb patch. But other people lived there now.
“Whadaya say? Should I book it?”
I rested my hand lightly on the travel agent’s desk, which was covered with layers
and layers of paper, a real mess, but still, his room looked provisional somehow, scarcely inhabited. I was superstitious with money. I wanted to keep it tightly, a dark seed in me, but I also wanted to spend it all, like blowing a feathered dandelion, as if then, lightened, something would have to happen. My mother was that same way. She’d spend all our money on dresses and jackets as if she were threatening life and time. Now what, she seemed to dare the sky. I know what she wanted: a man with numberless money, to take us into his mansion. But what always happened was, we cried long distance on the telephone and wheedled just a little more money out of my grandmother.
“Not yet,” I told the travel agent. “I need to think.”
“I’m going to Nepal in three weeks. Now, that’s a trip. Why don’t you come along?”
I WAS DIFFERENT AT WORK. I tried to look at everything small. When I held a person’s wrist I tried to see only her skin, the tiny hexagonals, and hear the vein ticking, watch just the patch of linoleum on that floor where her feet planted, tentative in large slippers. I did what I was supposed to do and marked the charts. Every old woman was to me my grandmother and so I was careful to be kind.
I watched Emory pack his boxes. Emory had found a job.
“Janiting,” he said, “for a school at night. The school at night.” He started howling. One thing Emory could mimic exactly was animal calls.
“When are you going?”
“Tomorrow.” He nodded his head, mouth closed, up and down and up again, three times, like someone taking medicine they didn’t like the taste of.
We sealed the boxes with packing tape, loaded them on a cart with wheels. “Tell me about the apartment,” I said. “You haven’t said anything about it.”
“I think I might get a dog.”
I joined him on the floor now, balling newspaper. “What does it look like?”
“There’s one window with a windowsill really wide that I’m going to paint yellow. The floor slants. When you walk up the outside stairs, it turns and there’s crack vials all over. Inside the ceiling slopes and it’s light in front and dark in back.”
I nodded. Being a doctor would always be this way. You released people to an unsafe world, partly well, with some of themselves intact.
“You’ll paint and make it a home. And get a strong lock, too, Emory.” I should talk.
“Maybe a Dalmatian. And not a puppy. I’m going to get me a dog. I remember I used to have these days, man, I’d just lie on my stomach, face mashed down on my bed, the sheet would look yellow, it would be tinged, even if it was white, tinged and I’d shake and sweat and I’d drool and the drool would make a circle and the circle had a smell like a bad coin.”
He just stopped and so I asked, “And then what happened?”
“I would stay like that for a long time. Whole afternoons, evening, I don’t think it was more than a day. And then I’d get up. I’d be tired, real tired. It was like I’d been on this circus ride all day long. Screamed my insides out. I got a new body and I’d walk around and touch things that were mine. Just my comb, chair, cereal bowl. They felt new. They didn’t have me in ’em anymore. That used to happen a lot but it doesn’t happen as much now. First thing I’m gonna get me a dog. In a week it’ll be me and the dog.”
“Do you know, when it gets like that, if there’s anything you can do to make it less?”
“I learned about that, yeah. I figured out if I got myself up and went and saw somebody, even live people in a movie, it’d go away and I’d be better, I could chase it that way, but I don’t know. I think it’s better for me to stay in those hours and it’s like on a ride, being spun all around so you hurl against walls and you shake so hard that when it’s done with you’re really through. When I get up, the world is straight. Like hundred years ago. I leaned up from my bed once and saw this black sky with silver clouds out the window, collected around the moon. And it stays small for a while like a kid’s room, everything smooth and tiny under your hands. I think it’s better for my work if I stay. Better for me. Plus I’ll have the dog. Either a Dalmatian or a Lab. No terriers. I hate terriers. Never going to have a terrier again.”
I was propped against the wall, a ball of newspaper in my hands. “Does it scare you, that those spells may come back?”
“Oh, it’ll come back all right. They’ll probably come back my whole life. Like a full moon. Rahr,” he growled. “Sometimes they’re worse. When I was younger and stupid, almost every time I used to think, how can I go on after that and live, these hours I’m falling through, how could I ever tell another person. I thought I didn’t want them knowing I’ve been made so low, been done that to. It’s like being fucked, I guess.”
I leaned towards him, I didn’t think about it or consider, this was fast, if I’d waited I would have known it was a bad idea, I guess I pure meant it and so it went exactly right, my hand took his and we gripped like a tight shake or arm wrestle and our faces found each other and we kissed and then drew back our eyes in a straight line.
“It’s always that high wire, for each of us, one day to the next,” I said.
“Yeah. There’s good things too. Like, I was never a dumb fuck. Back in the days when my father and I had our fights, man, that was violence, I mean you could taste the metal in the air and you felt it in your mouth and then it went yellow. And I always believed it was pretty probable I would die. And then, after there was this green thin air. Peace. Could eat it.”
“Yes.” If I were God, I’d have given the fourteen-year-old Emory some days of swagger and frivolity. But that is all just nothing. Wishing. I suppose most everybody, even the dumb and the mean, would not leave this world, with its beauties, as it is. Perhaps my grandmother would. Maybe that was what it was to believe.
“What about this?” We’d boxed almost everything, but the factory stood unwrapped, just as it was. “We don’t have a box big enough.” The dried glue in the joints had turned a darker color, like sheer caramel.
“You want it? Take it. I was going to burn it.”
“Oh no, you’ve got to bring it with you.”
“Never find a box big enough and even in a box it’d probably break.”
This confounded me. “Don’t burn it, whatever you do, don’t burn it.”
“Well, you want it?”
“I’d love to have it, but you should keep it.”
He said he’d leave it for me. That made me uneasy, but I couldn’t think of anything. I wanted the factory but it seemed wrong. He shouldn’t give it away. “Don’t forget a lock,” I said.
“Hey,” he called out into the hall, “don’t you forget Vanessa what’s-her-name. He’s probably not a swell guy.” He fell to mumbling. “But I’ll have to walk the dog. Every day I’ll walk the dog.”
“King. I’ll remember. Not a swell guy.” I had to turn. In my chest, a high trapeze swing of happiness.
5
I NEVER WANTED to be a girl.
I wanted to be president or something. Mai linn and Emily and I were three little girls squatting in the dirt hitting rocks on the ground. Promising each other. Never to be mothers. I was the leader. I wasn’t going to be stopped from anything because I was a girl, I decided, and my playmates echoed me, the dust settling on our flimsy cotton dresses. This was our vow to ourselves when we were nine, that strange afternoon time of childhood when Mai linn and I sat cross-legged on Emily’s pavement in her long-decaying garden, hitting rocks on the hard surface for no purpose, promising hard. We had to repeat the words, because we already knew our lives would be littered with temptation. Look at our mothers.
My mother worried about my appearance. She didn’t think I made the most of myself. She knew I didn’t pay enough attention. She claimed concern about my personal habits. I wasn’t showing the usual signs. “Boy I don’t know who’s gonna want to sleep with you, all over the bed. Like this, this is what you look like.” She made an ugly position with her arms and then her face like that. She was standing above me when I woke up one morning. “
Do you have to sprawl over the bed?”
“That’s the way I sleep,” I said.
“Well, boy I’d change that if I were you. And fast.”
My mother was young and full of vim. She didn’t worry really at all about my grades. She would have been happier with another daughter altogether. If my mother thought about it now, she would not want a daughter like me. She would have wanted a young woman more like her own self: enthusiastic, spirited, pretty, full of life for the game.
She would not have wanted to make a child like me, even as she was doing so.
Emily’s mother was different but also unhappy. She had the things my mother wanted, but she couldn’t use them right. Emily’s mother had no better life than we did. My mother always sighed when she picked me up. “What I could do with that house. And with her clothes.”
“You could’ve married ’im,” I said.
She sighed again. “I know. And don’t think I don’t think about it.”
Mai linn had no mother.
We worried about Emily, losing her. Emily was beginning to have the kind of looks impossible to miss. She had ankles that dipped before long thin feet, and majestic features, the nose and overfull lips of a Greek statue. Plus she had blond, good hair. Only she was a little chubby.
We kept Emily on our side a little while longer due to a critical mistake she made in the shower one evening in August of our fourth-grade year. She mistook the depilatory bottle for shampoo and was bald the rest of elementary school. That and nothing else safeguarded her virginity. Emily had no will. She had been the kind of child her doctor father could pull up on his lap and arrange her flat-boned legs, putting them on one side of his knee or another. She mostly went along with what we said. But baldness became a mark of identity for Emily. First we all went shopping for a wig for her. Then, her family and I and Mai linn were supposed to be the only ones who knew. The wig shop was serious; it was a large warehouse with wigs and toupees on only one back aisle, the rest of the merchandise was prosthetics, wheelchairs and crutches. There were racks of nurses’ uniforms in the front. We touched the hairs and said, this one seems pretty natural. I understood that day, you really are alone in life. Because just watching Mai linn try on the blond wig and feel the side of it and look around the store at the strange old ladies who worked there, I knew she was feeling what I was: this is Emily and not me. But somehow the word got around and my cousin Ben pulled the wig off Emily’s head in American history and she cried and ran out of the classroom and everyone had seen and so the whole school knew. I think that was what started the long music of Emily’s fall into love with Ben.