The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  If there was money it would be bad money. I believed that, I didn’t know quite why. I could almost get a casino: imagine my high heels on the hard polished stone floor and him taking me through Atassi’s Palace, gold-plate endless fountains and tiled pools of water and slot machines jingling and, above, rapturous Persian shapes, an atrium with blue and green tropical birds, but still it was all his and I was the boss’s daughter.

  Maybe he was a terrorist. Yasser Arafat was at least compelling. I thought of the man telling me that in India parents had more important things to do than raise their children. Maybe an idea could be that. Not money.

  “He doesn’t sound reliable enough to be a terrorist,” Timothy had said. “Or committed enough.”

  Why you are unwanted: that is the endless, secret question, asked over again and again.

  I wanted to have been given up for something that was beautiful, even once.

  I SAW ANOTHER guy in a phone booth, his knee up pushing against the glass. Eagerness, it looked like.

  That did it. I veered into a lingerie store. I’d never been inside one. They’d always given me the creeps. But this one looked sort of athletic. There’s athletic and there’s intimate. It’s a distinction. You get to be an age, I guess, when you want good underwear. I used to never think about it. Then the last time I’d visited my friend Stevie Howard in Berkeley I was really shocked because on his comforter was a pair of black lace underwear. I asked. I couldn’t believe his wife didn’t wear regular underwear. Helen was a botanist. He was a tree pathologist. They were both, most of the day, in dirt.

  We were sitting at Stevie’s little kitchen table drinking herb tea and he was looking all over away from me. The stove pipe. The corner. Baskets above the refrigerator where they kept the napkins and bananas.

  “What do you mean regular?” he’d said then.

  “You know.”

  “Well, I guess she doesn’t.”

  I’d always thought he would marry someone like me. “What do you mean, you mean bikini or you mean not cotton?”

  “I don’t know, I guess sort of both.”

  “I can’t believe this. You mean like fancy lacy stuff?”

  “Well, it’s very tasteful.”

  “Silk?”

  “I don’t know but I guess so, kind of silky.”

  “Lace?”

  “I suppose some lace.”

  “What color?”

  At that point he stopped me. He’d lost interest. I wanted to see. We actually had an arm fight over her dresser drawer. She was gone to work at the lab.

  I was twenty-eight. I’d never had anything but plain cotton underwear. I had poor people’s underwear. Some of it not even mine. My own closet and dresser were filled with clothes I didn’t buy. When I was young, Mrs. Briggs used to send over her old clothes, maid-laundered, after she’d cleaned out her closets. But she kept things so long, they were years out of style and hardly ever worn by the time I got them. My mother did that now. She hated throwing things out so she sent them to me, but even her old clothes were never gifts. She was letting me use them, she would say. Any time she could decide she wanted one piece back and she’d call me, demanding I send it overnight mail. Once I was wearing her eight-year-old flowered skirt that she’d said came from Paris and I was ducking through a metal fence in college and I tore it. I freaked out, shuddering and crying, Stevie Howard stood with me as I begged and tormented a Chinese tailor at the dry cleaners because it was my mother’s and expensive and it was from years ago and I could never find one like it and she would kill me, kill me when she saw. “I don’t know why you wear that thing,” Stevie had said, “you have a lot of your own clothes that’re nicer.”

  Most of mine were old and grayed and some of the elastic frilled from so many times washing. Years ago, when Stevie and I had lived together in Madison, he used to do our laundry in one big scramble and when I ran out of mine, I’d just wear his. Mai linn quit wearing underwear altogether. She just wore jeans. “Except with skirts,” she said. “I don’t like the feel. Actually it’s a really sexy feeling to wear a dress without any.”

  Emily had a boyfriend once in college who used to buy her stuff like that. She never wore it. You wouldn’t guess from knowing him that he’d have ever been the type either. It was supposed to be knitted silk or something. Then one day she came home and he was in their futon with the covers pulled up to his chin. He had on all of the stuff he’d given her, layer over layer.

  But now, I was in this store fingering panties and bras and one-piece things. All of a sudden these skimpy soft things didn’t scare me anymore. When I first saw them, they seemed almost dirty. But the fragile fabrics felt good against your skin. I was embarrassed, though, about the salesgirls. They didn’t hover. They looked distracted, following the traffic outside. It was a job, I supposed. I’d worked in stores. This time of day especially was slow.

  I didn’t think about my body much. But when I did I knew I didn’t have a body like other people. It didn’t have what it was supposed to. Clothes didn’t go right on me. My mother talked about it like a deformed thing. A year ago, I was home and she shook her head and said, “We look better in pants. I do too, so don’t feel bad. That’s why I’m telling you, it’s not morality, if you’re one of these big models or starlets with the long long legs, sure, go ahead and sleep with him the first night. But with legs like ours, they’re better off seeing you dressed up in great pants until they’re really in love. Then, when they’re hooked, you can take it off and it’s no big deal.”

  It was true: I only wore pants. The one dress I had went down below my knees. Still, people wanted to use my body, just as it was. My mother and grandmother made me feel that. I had to be careful. Maybe even my stepfather. Men would always try and have you. When I was growing up, we all heard the story about them using Netty Griling, men who worked for the place where she was. Netty was a retarded girl who’d lived down the road from my grandmother. They took her away to a place they had for them a long time before we left, when she was nine or ten.

  I often thought of the men with Netty Griling, in a field maybe, the weeds over the height of her face, and what they did. She would look down with her mouth open a little as if she were watching something far away. And who knew what would register on her and stay inside, there would be something, a cramp or a slight twitch. Nothing she could ever know or say.

  Even though I thought all these things I knew I was better off too. I wasn’t fat and I wasn’t ugly. I’d had boyfriends all along who told me that, told me I was better-looking than my mother. So I believed and I didn’t believe. I guess I was that way with many things. But that day in the store, I was just beginning to try to build myself up a little. I thought I’d just buy one thing and then leave. I felt guilty even before. Here I was buying something nobody would see.

  And that was only the beginning.

  I didn’t know what I wanted. Some were sort of like light fancy shorts, some the regular shape I’d worn all my life, made out of different fabrics with lace insets, and some skimpier, bikini-ish and even some high-waisted like my grandmother wore over her girdle, but bedecked. There were many colors and degrees of lace. I eliminated red. Did I want white or black or some kind of mute rosy silk or blue? I didn’t think too much lace. I supposed like with any kind of clothes, some shapes were best for different bodies.

  I picked out a few. I liked an ivory-colored one-piece thing but it cost a hundred dollars and that just was definitely way too much so I let the price tag drop back on the silk. And what about bras? I didn’t own a bra. I hadn’t had one for years. I picked a few simple ones. Matching? Matching.

  Then I braved a salesgirl. “Excuse me, can I try these on please?”

  “We can let you try on the bras, but it’s illegal to try on underwear.”

  “Oh, okay.” I thought she could probably see right through to the shabby stuff I lived my life in. I owned two weeks’ worth before I had to do laundry again and this was near t
he end.

  I tried the bras. That wasn’t too bad because I kind of liked my breasts. They weren’t big or anything, but nothing was wrong with them. All the bras looked pretty good. The underwear would be a different story. Hips were what I’d wanted to get rid of when I fasted. And they shrunk but the proportion never changed. By now I understood that it was me.

  I went back to the counter to buy one bra. I had the underwear in my hand.

  “How do you know which fits?” I asked.

  I seemed to be the only customer buying. Another woman dallied in the corner where the fragile night things hung.

  “I guess it’s okay if you try ’em on over your panties.”

  I was glad I asked. “You’re a small,” she said. She gave me petites and smalls, but they felt like strings on me, nothing. So I went out and got mediums and larges. Better. I liked baggy underwear.

  I bought five pairs and a matching bra. One black, two white, one pale blue and one a beigey pink. All larges. I hoped they were sexy enough this way, loose. I didn’t know. How did people learn these things?

  I gave the girl my credit card. One more thing. Now that I’d blown half my savings it seemed even easier to spend. My life was definitely moving like some momentous train gathering speed, dark trees pressing and then falling away at the oval windows. A woman in a cap carrying the bags she lived out of drifted by the luminous glass front wall of the store. This was one time in my life I felt completely severed from everyone. My family seemed to have forgotten about me. My grandmother used to send me packages of new socks and underwear, nothing like this, just from the Kmart. And my first fall here, Stevie and Helen had sent me a coat. He was rich then, with his first degree job, or he felt rich. That wouldn’t last, either. But we didn’t know that then.

  Learning femininity, I felt like I was guessing piece by piece. Women just with each other became different, I supposed. Like a solitary herd. I never really grew up girl enough.

  With my mother, somebody had to put gas in the car. I became strong and silent, stealthy, like her dream of a son.

  A woman rushed in from outside wearing a raincoat. Her face was urgent, checked. She stood next to me at the counter and extracted a long beige thing from her bag. She showed the girl where a thin rolled strap was broken and a panel of lace ripped. “A successful honeymoon,” she said. Then she slid on glasses and bent over closer. “Can it be fixed, you think?”

  Spending all this money made me think of Jack’s chair. I had seen one like his drawing in a store. I’d tried to save for it so many times and now I was doing what I said I’d never do, I was spending all my money from my grandmother, and I wouldn’t even have the chair when it was done. I might have nothing. I walked towards the showroom, my eighty dollars transformed into a light tiny bag holding fragile delicacy. I passed men slumped against the walls, asking for money mostly just with their eyes.

  I understood: I would never own a house. I would never have the chair. Even if someday I had my inheritance money back again, and that would never happen, I could not spend so much on a chair anymore. That made me want to see Jack’s drawing again. I wished I hadn’t sent it away. And I wanted something too. I wanted a box.

  I passed an open empty garage, its dark tunnels stained on the walls.

  The showroom door was open and I walked to the back. I went through a swinging gate I wasn’t supposed to pass. A young man was there, lugging something out of a huge crate. I liked watching him work, his back an artistic thing, and then the thunder of the emergence, the chair over his head like a man bringing forth what he’d wanted out of stone. He set the chair down in what little there was of room. Sawdust scattered on the backroom floor. He hadn’t even seen I was there but then he did. He stood heaving, blood slowing in his veins. He had on a tight green T-shirt. We both looked down at the chair awhile. It was perfect. It caught the light in its leather folds like a hand would or a jewel, as unalike as those things are.

  “May I have the box?”

  “Sure.” He lifted the cardboard box out of the crate and tipped it upside down. White nugget-shaped Styrofoam fillers showered out, but I touched him.

  “No, I need that. It’s to move something fragile.” The skin of his arm had been warm.

  “Take it,” he said.

  It wasn’t heavy carrying it, just awkward, like dancing with an inanimate thing. I knocked on Emory’s door. There was no answer. I left it in the hall with a note to the janitor—DO NOT TAKE—and one to Emory, “For safe passage of factory to Brooklyn.”

  WHEN I CAME home from school, I put them away in a drawer, the new underwear and bras wrapped flat in white tissue from the store. I was just studying tonight. No one would see me. These, too, I was saving for the other life, with the golden shoes.

  I never understood about fashion. Why you can’t put a thing away for years until later when you’ve finally assembled all the pieces one by one. But a real piece of fashion is perishable, subject to time, like life itself.

  Emily could buy something and she’d wear it home that day.

  MY GRANDMOTHER owned her own house in Wisconsin. The other places we lived were always rented. My mother left Racine and sometimes took me with her, but my grandmother’s house was the only place we always returned to. There was one clock in the house. When we came inside, we all took our watches off and when we needed the time, we walked into the kitchen where it was.

  I had to be told how old I was when my father left. Nobody remembered exactly. It seemed he left more than once. But they thought three. The last time he left I was three.

  For many years I didn’t remember. I thought he left in our sleep. But then the day of my grandmother’s funeral, it came back to me. Because he left on a day when we had relatives in the house for a family party. And the only family parties we had tended to be funerals. My cousin Ben and I were taken to eleven funerals before we were ten years old. We became experts in the conversation. Who looked nice and who didn’t look anything like herself. She would have been glad, somebody usually said and sighed. We came to like the activity of after, the bratwurst. It usually meant a calm outside afternoon and then a barbecue. We drank out of the dead woman’s cups. It was always a woman. The men all seemed to have died before we were born. We were introduced early and death didn’t seem so bad.

  Most of them were for my grandmother’s aunts, who lived in Bay City and Sheboygan. But this party was at our house and I can’t think who could have died. But the day he left we were not alone. Ben and I moved at the fringes of the family house, filled with people. We were not easy to see, among cousins, alighting and then running, folding between the bushes and the house. My father called me, from the intimacy of hiding, where I smelled the dirt and felt the raw, reddish new branches of bushes on my bare legs, and I ran out to him over the long yard. Ben skidded up after me. My father stood by the open door of his car, just at the point the driveway met the real road.

  He was a tall man with good posture and I had often been told to stand like him.

  “Can you manage by yourself?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Ben’s leg swung from the knee because we were talking without him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have to leave, Mayan, but I’ll come back.” Then he bent and pulled up each of my socks as far as they would go on my shins. He tied one of my shoes—I remembered the strict upward pull of the bow-knot thrilling like all rectitude. He straightened my collar, lay his palm over my neck, as if that were where the heartbeat felt. He touched the serrated edges of my two new front teeth, growing in.

  “Don’t forget I am your father. Nobody else can ever be that.” Those were his last words to me. Then he walked around to his car door, rolled each of the front windows down an equal inch so he could taste the swelled summer farm air, and began to drive.

  There is Wisconsin light and Wisconsin color. It is like Dutch but poor; a kind of pale, live blue sky, with clouds and the color black, superimposed; th
e humming telephone wires, crows.

  “I won’t, I won’t,” I yelled to his windows a second too late, running by the car as long as I could keep up. Ben touched the tail fin just before he fell gasping in the soft ditch, his legs mildly scraped by the sharp, high grass. Heaving, we watched there like posts, even though our cousins’ high voices ribboned the air, calling.

  My father that day was thirty years old, a young man, but to me he was already eternal. He must have known, already then, about my mother: what was curled in her, one tight paisley that would grow as it escaped, like fire. But he left me to her anyway for our lives. Perhaps he trusted the house, its sturdy trees like old women’s legs, the honor of decent relatives. All of those proud structures changed as I grew up inside them. And I did not understand for a long long time what was wrong with my mother.

  I ALWAYS SAVED a place for my father. That is what waiting is. I still kept something, one scratched light, the secret. If I’d let that fall, like a held candy dirtied on the ground, I would have made a different life. I sometimes wish I had grown up to be more ruthless. Mai linn, for that quality, sometimes awes me.

  The first instance was my fifth birthday. We all thought he would come home for that. Ben and I stood scrubbed, pink and red, wearing our best clothes as the other children arrived. We set his place for him at the table, with his glass for ice water and his cup and saucer for coffee. His coffee had to be scalding hot. Playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, blindfolded, when some hands clutched and turned me from the waist, each time I thought the stranger was him.

  We waited and waited, stalling an hour and an hour to cut the cake. Finally, high afternoon passed, the youngest guests cried with the exasperation of exhaustion and other children’s mothers arrived to take them home. Then when they were all gone, we ate the cake greedily, with our hands. Our grandmother, who cared deeply about nutrition, said nothing.