by Mona Simpson
We went to the kitchen and set the box on the enamel table. He took a bread knife and cut through the metal-threaded tape. Then we bent over, Pat serious in his intent, glasses heavy on his face, like a drawn thing. His fingers went through the files one by one. The box, lidless, resembled an organized drawer of a file cabinet. Endless papers. He would lift out a piece of paper, read it and put it back. I just stood there. There wasn’t much for me to do.
We went through my mother’s divorce papers, I stared at my mother’s signature on it, the tissue copy of my grandmother’s will, marked Copy. For one breath moment in my life my mother was another story. I saw not one manila file with my father’s name.
“Look at this,” he said, handing me a paper. It was my birth certificate with an ink print of the whorls on the soles of my baby feet stamped in a marked square. He handed me a paper. I read it, we stacked it on the desk, in its manila file. I had decent hands. We had long digits. All of my family.
This took hours.
I heard the doorbell, activity, it all passed and we kept on.
We talked a little bit. We were back on our old subject of funerals. He was telling me about the new crematorium. “Four stories high,” he said. “And they have little lockers, like a gym.”
Then Emily slid in modeling the jacket she’d cut out from the magazine, the store tags still on the ends of the sleeves.
“It just came,” she said, “Fed Ex. What do you think?”
He smiled a way that meant things that didn’t have words.
“It makes me want to take a walk. You guys want to come?”
He bent his head down, demurring, and she tranced out, but he stretched up again for one last casting look which stopped everything for me and turned it all to salt.
Okay, let’s get this over with, I was thinking. We went through every paper in the box and it was not there.
“Hmph,” Pat said, tapping one thick envelope in his hands. He kept it from me a little longer than the rest. It was bills my father had run up in 1961, right before he left. All the Briggs invoices were marked “paid.” They were kept together, inside the envelope with a rubber band. The items included two men’s suits (size 44), six shirts, two dress shirts, mints from the delicacy section on the sixth floor, a hat, leather valise, talcum powder, thirty-seven dollars’ worth of “sundries” in a category marked “men’s toilet,” a small radio, a dictionary, a driving scarf and pipe tobacco.
My grandmother had paid them all.
THERE WAS NOTHING to do then but eat. I didn’t care anymore. I stopped weighing myself. Emily sluffed around in big socks and jeans mixing up one last batch of eggnog from scratch, whipping cream in a new copper bowl, beating egg whites until they winged like snow, passing the mugs out, grating nutmeg with a new grinder, special for this.
Later, we walked out on the main hill road and on one side of us were the crushed shapes of children’s snow angels, their heads, the scraped wings and the mash of them getting up again after. I wasn’t ready to go home tomorrow. Pat Briggs had told me a lawyer in Bay City had helped with the search, maybe he knew something. I had to see him. And Gish was in the hospital.
The box being wrong, which dead end would I call the last? At the end, I began to understand, there would always be a live chance that the address, the identity, the location of my father was a false lead, a bad tip, a dumb hope. I could fly somewhere, get maps and drive a rented car to an address and get out and still never meet him. Another city, another town, another shrine that was just a neighborhood where the dark green ordinary leaves had held my hope and were then forgotten.
Every time there was a setback, he grew.
I didn’t even know the questions anymore. I had a memory of questions, but the answers now seemed apparent in their absence, unknowable. They were the kind of questions that bring a look of rue to the lips, a lift to the shoulders, a horizontal swing to the face.
“Where were you when we were here?
“Where were you when we suffered, the large and the small?
“Where were you when I had my life?”
And the answer is no answer and one I knew. When I was a child, when I started school, when I lost my key and stood locked out of the house, when I fell and cried, when I first saw the night, when I fell in love, when I was alone, the one we looked for and prayed to, and whispered over our hurt and bleeding skin to, and expected to hear us, wherever he was—was gone.
THAT NIGHT, Mai linn was playing saxophone in Detroit. Her roommate from music school was from Detroit, and she’d gotten them the gig. Emily and I flew up to hear her. Tad insisted. His treat. “No, it’s no problem, I’ll get the tickets, we’ll have a car waiting for you, you can fly back the same night, boom boom boom.” He punched the air. He didn’t want to come to Detroit. He liked music with words.
Mai linn picked us up at the airport. She had a luxurious car, which was strange for her. She’d always had a VW bug she worked on herself. But this was an old white Falcon, with simple, stylish fixtures on the doors. Inside, everything was red and silver. It was a car a woman our age could have inherited from a careful grandmother, but this was not the case. Her roommate had bought it from an ad in the paper. A man in a UAW windbreaker had had the car propped on cinder blocks in his garage. She said the first few months, they’d kept the car perfect, like a museum. She’d polished the outside every week with kerosene. The man who’d sold it told her to do that. But by now, the leather was torn and worn cotton clothes tangled on the seats. “It feels more homey, anyway,” she said and it did. The heat worked strong and right away. The car felt deeply comfortable. It was a consolation. I was big on consolation that night.
Mai linn had asked me what ever happened with that first detective.
“I should’ve paid him more. I don’t think I gave him enough incentive. I’m too cheap.”
“You are,” Emily mumbled.
“What are you going to do when you find him?” Mai linn said. Emily was falling asleep in the backseat. Her eyes closed and her breath whined high and even.
The question made me blush. I really didn’t know. “Meet him, I guess.”
“Do you know, like, what you would say to him?”
“No,” I said. I didn’t. I looked down at my hands.
Then we were quiet for a while.
I watched Mai linn drive. I was glad to be going to hear her play. I remembered how odd and convoluted Mai linn seemed the first time I saw her. Another nun, not our own, had come into the classroom and said we would be getting a new student from a faraway place who was an orphan and she might look different than we did but we should take pity on her and be good Christians. And then they brought her in, already fitted out in one of our uniforms, but way too long. No one hemmed it. I suppose they figured it would last that way. She was short and so she sat across from me in the front row. She was so near all day I saw her strangely. The way her ears came out seemed different and stiff like gills and her upper lip seemed an odd distance and angle. There was something unnatural in her smoothness, coils of her glasses seemed attached and almost alive.
With friends, sometimes you can know them for five or ten years and all of a sudden see their beauty. And once you see it you know it has always been there.
I used to believe there were beautiful and ugly faces. Now I don’t, really. There is young and old, there is clean, there is integrity.
But Mai linn still doesn’t know her own face. It’s a trick, what her stepfather did. He molested her and all the while he made her be ugly.
She still says now, she doesn’t know what was worse. “Him or the powdered milk. And that she kept a lock on the refrigerator. With her kids, too, but you know she let them in if nobody was looking.”
We were driving on a wide good Michigan highway, with quiet dark hills close on one side of us, to the city where hardly anybody white lived anymore. There were Arabs and blacks and Black Muslims. W.D. Fard came from Arabia to Detroit as a traveling salesman and esta
blished the Black Muslim Church.
The car had a long windshield, we could see stars. They pressed on the dark glass sharply, and I knew they would fade by the time we drove into the city. I leaned against the glass, wondering what I looked like. I wasn’t sure. I’d spent enough time staring at mirrors in my life. Sometimes it seemed I was okay. Other times, not. I suppose both were true. I was one of those people in the middle, like most of us, not beautiful but not worth pity either. Two men had said they were in love with me. But neither had lasted.
I leaned over the seat divider and looked down at Emily, whose eyes had closed. I’d never been like her. Sometimes I thought I could have been better looking if … if what? I hadn’t fasted so much as a child? I thought I grew funny because of it. If I’d washed my face in a more disciplined way. If I didn’t have Egyptian hair?
The Briggses had taken Emily to a dermatologist when she was a child, just because she had white and fragile skin. Talk about end of the empire. From when she was eight years old on, Merl Briggs washed her face twice a day with special soaps and creams and they changed her pillowcase and gave her new towels every night. I remember her standing under her mother’s diligent hands—she could never go outside without sunblock. She had gone to all kinds of doctors for everything. Once when they felt like her arches were falling they took her to a podiatrist and had arch braces made for inside all her shoes. And it had all worked.
In a line of a hundred women, Emily was likely to be picked as most beautiful by a hundred men. It was a fact of her life and had been for a long time now. It had been there, hard in her like a pit or a jewel, since she was a teenager. She had been recognized by the world, by everyone except my cousin Ben. He’d just shrugged. “She’s okay,” he said when I bugged him. Now, she was grown. She neither doubted nor exactly valued her beauty. But she needed it. She had had problems with men, too.
We were entering Detroit now, an elaborate labyrinth of old dark streets, cracked lights. I was thinking of the ways we measure a life: a person was healthy or ill, rich or poor, beautiful or plain, ugly, educated or not, the member of a majority group or suspected. But we didn’t consider the age you were when your parents died. Or the years you lived. Time, too, could be a source of poverty or fortune. Most of us were loved, somehow. I measured things to myself, weighing luck, deciding each time that lives were equal, even despite everything. As a child I once wrote down, “Every life holds exactly forty-two thousand eight hundred and sixty-four minutes of happiness, no more, no less,” on the inside cardboard cover of a spiral notebook. My mother had framed that penciled thing where she was. The notion pleased us. So we wouldn’t miss out, after all.
My grandmother too had owned an aspect of beauty. Men stopped and stared after her, all her life.
Then Emily woke up and started talking about Tad. She always spoke of him like a difficult boss. “Tad’s going crazy because we haven’t screwed all week.”
“Why haven’t you?” Mai linn said.
“My periodical.”
“So?”
“I don’t know, he doesn’t like to have sex when I have my period. A lot of people are like that. I think he’s faint around blood. He told me once his mother wanted him to be a doctor, but he just couldn’t. Physically. I mean, I’m not thrilled about it either. He’s so clean, I’m always a little nervous in his apartment when I have my period. That I’ll bleed on his sheets or something. Once I left a Tampax in his toilet and I didn’t flush ’cause it was late at night and I didn’t want to wake him, and I was trying not to sleep too soundly so I could get up and flush before he did and then I just remember hearing him in my sleep, get up and flush and then pee. But he never said anything about it. That was nice. He’s a really superneat and clean person. He even brushes his teeth a lot. But I guess everyone’s either too much one way or the other. And this is lucky. He picks up after me.”
Mai linn and I didn’t say anything for a minute.
“Oh, see that car there, that’s Tad favorite car of all times.”
“The red one?” I said.
“Mmhm, the red one.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that you spend so much more time and energy on his life, than he gives yours?” It was a mean thing I said, but a true one.
Emily’s answer surprised me. “No. Because everybody’s different.” She didn’t seem to have a flicker of embarrassment.
That made me laugh and crack the window. I looked back at her. Her hair was blowing over her eyebrows. I’d grown up so ashamed. I collected scraps of information about my father as if the discovery of this life were my great project. My grandmother had always scolded my curiosity. She waged a war against magic.
“And what does he care for you? Do you think he’s wondering and thinking where you are and what you’re doing right now? He could find you if he just picked up the telephone. And there you sit.”
I could disobey my grandmother and not feel one needle of anger. She was only concerned for me. But she got me too late to coax me out of it with logic. I needed my father. He was a question planted in me, too young. Approaching him was a life’s mission. And like all real missions it became daily and very slow.
“Do you have anything of your father’s?” Emily all of a sudden asked. That was like her to remember the material.
Mai linn turned from the steering wheel. “Yeah, that’d be good, huh? Some shirts of his or something?”
“I didn’t mean a shirt. I meant work he did or something. Or a watch or old jewelry from his family.”
What’s wrong with a shirt? I was thinking. But I just said no.
It had started to snow. Small dizzy particles trembled in every direction, up and in curved sideways trajectories, they seemed to mill more than fall.
“Want some music?” Mai linn knew these streets, we could have never found the place alone. She turned on the staticky radio and found a woman’s voice like polished walnut, and for a moment I was just grateful to be there, circling the streets of this old city, part of the decrepitude and endurance and escape that fused to make jazz. The woman sang brokenly about rose petals on a staircase and in the snow I understood that a kind of lasting beauty could only come from accident or failure, that that was one of the axioms like gravity and the taste of the cigarette smoke in precipitation and then Mai linn slowed the car to a stop and we stepped out in the brick block of buildings with her torn envelope of address to find where she would play.
Mai linn was playing in a spotlight then, past the small rectangular desk that was the ticket booth, after two narrow flights of stairs. Inside, the light was right, deep yellow-orange, and on stage, she looked neat and studious in baggy charcoal pants, round boy’s sneakers, a suit jacket, tie and suspenders, pigeon-toed, knee-bent, her hair clipped behind, glasses on, blowing like all anger and discovery. We sat in an old padded booth and ordered brown drinks. Even closing my eyes I saw the dizzy snow.
OUR LAST NIGHT, at Stevie’s old house, Jane woke up and came out into the kitchen. Helen was in the bathroom. We’d all been sitting at the table, talking about looking for my father. I was telling everyone I loved, as if I were leaving on a long trip.
“You got a detective?” Jane shrieked. She had a loud amazed shrill voice. Already, she was so different from her mother. She was an enthusiast. “Is he really a detective? Wait a minute, Mo-om!”
The toilet flushed, they scuffled, Helen saying, wait, let me finish, Jane, and then they came back holding hands, double silence of concentration playing over their foreheads.
“You don’t even know if he’s dead or alive or if he has a red couch or a blue couch?” Jane said.
“No. I mean I’m not sure. I think he’s alive.”
“Atassi,” Stevie told Jane. “That was her name.”
“You could call yourself Mayan Atassi Stevenson,” Helen said.
“See if you like the guy first,” Jane said.
“Yeah. I don’t know what he’ll be like. I’m not expecting a swell guy necess
arily. He’s probably not a swell guy.”
“But he might be, though, Mayan. There must be something of you in him, right? He might be anything.”
“A swell guy, Mom? A swell guy if he left his daughter?”
“We don’t know everything,” Helen said.
“I have to meet him,” the child said, “I just have to meet him.”
“So what about you?” I tickled her and made her shriek louder in a star of points. “How’s the third-grade boy scene? How’s Trip?”
“We broke up. It was meaningless to go steady with Trip, what did it mean, we sat together on the bus and that’s nothing!”
“Okay, so Trip’s history, who’s in.”
“Well.”
“Come on, out with it, is this a new commitment to second-grade spelling or what?”
“Well, he’s a third-grader. Trevor. But I don’t think he likes me. All the guys in third grade like me except one. And that’s the one I like.”
It was so common. Maybe it had nothing to do with him being gone.
I SAID GOOD-BYE at the windy airport. The Briggses stood together in new coats. Helen and Stevie and Jane were leaving too. “We’re so glad you kids are all successful, doing so well in your lives,” Mrs. Briggs called. I watched Emily, in her jacket, bounding up the tarmac. Tad ran after her with an armload of newspapers. I was supposed to be leaving too, but I decided to stay a little longer.
Even having the family I did, I was a snob. For all the Briggses’ parties and decency, I couldn’t help but prefer my own. I couldn’t quite take any other family seriously.