by Mona Simpson
I stood in the rain under the umbrella at his grave, where his stone lurched, monumental and plain in this landscape. It was a large stone, ragged at the edges, a stone that could have been a plank upended, a bridge over a creek. Mamie’s was only a marker in the ground, overgrown with moss and grass.
A man and a woman.
Later I found out, he wasn’t even buried there. His body had been dug up and moved to Arizona by the later wife.
Driving back on that small road, I stopped on a bridge that had a little silver machine full of corn to feed ducks in the creek underneath. The ducks’ feathers were ruffled from rain. A dime bought a handful and I threw the kernels, puckering the water’s surface. The ducks darted and rushed, pecking their beaks underwater. I used the pay phone across the bridge. I felt like calling my old boyfriends and asking, Why didn’t you fall in love with me? I called Paul first and got his machine. I asked him to write me a letter and explain. What a message to leave on a machine.
I kept on doing that on the road. I stopped at phone booths and little motels and called old boyfriends and asked, Why? Why did you stop? What’s wrong with me?
That was my litany all across America. “This sounds crazy but I want to know.”
I began to sense Madison. Dry cattails, some half frozen in the water, stood, stiffly guarding lakes. I wanted to stop and eat while it still seemed far enough away to be easy. I pulled up to a trucks top place and before I went in, I took the box out and locked it in the trunk. I picked a soft booth by the window and ordered eggs. Outside the window I could see the quiet snow.
“Have you called the medical school and told them you’ll be late?” Timothy said, on the phone.
“No, not yet.”
“You should do that.”
“I’ll just lie and say my mom’s sick.” I’d been using that excuse for years and it was always true.
“You don’t have to give away that much. Tell them there’s a personal matter keeping you in the Midwest.”
THERE WERE certain things I knew my father wasn’t. My father was not a pilot, for instance, or an elementary school teacher. It was like sunglasses, umbrellas and health insurance. Now I had all three.
WHEN MY MOTHER had gone away and left me with my grandmother, she called almost every week. She worried about my virginity. She saw it as some silk purse, all I had, about to be stolen.
“You’ve got to be careful with her now, Mom,” she screamed to my grandmother on the phone.
“It’s still here. It’s not a sow’s ear yet!” I yelled.
“Shht,” my grandmother whispered. She too considered virginity no laughing matter.
My grandmother, though, studied dresses. She took an interest in my hairstyles. It took me a long time to understand. My mother, wherever she was, had ambitions for me. My grandmother recognized the years I was in from her own: this was courtship.
I got a hold of The Joy of Sex. The problem was I couldn’t check it out of the library. I couldn’t face Marion Werth and her polished pointed fingernails at the counter. And besides, there was nowhere I could hide it at home. So I read it every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon and tried to remember things. There were long sections about tricks from Asian prostitutes. I read the chapter about sleeping with a virgin. It was assumed the man was older and not. I remembered just what it said. I was ready.
But the boys weren’t. They were all Catholics. That may have had something to do with it.
Even Stevie. Stevie climbed into my window at night. When his brick house sucked into the dark and returned to the landscape, he jumped out his low window and walked across the road, his head down and hands in his pockets.
My grandmother went to bed earlier and earlier. We both pretended I didn’t notice. In our house, we’d both be in our pajamas right after supper, at seven-thirty, before the light left. I was the one who pulled closed the thick living room drapes. We both pretended that I’d stay up only a little longer to study. I watched my grandmother climb up the stairs with real keenness. She was getting too old to take care of me. She tried to hide her unsteadiness but I saw the lurch of her wrist on the banister.
She always reminded me to lock the doors. She felt bad that she was turning in first and that I would be up by myself. Every night, she meant to stay up later, but she was just too tired. Her body felt the mandatory order of dreams, already impinging. “Be sure and check the door” was the last thing she’d say.
She had already tried both doors twice. I changed from my pajamas back into my school clothes again. I hated being barefoot at eight o’clock. Bare feet on the carpet made me feel like a moist little kid. I couldn’t have friends over, it would’ve been too weird and I couldn’t really talk on the phone either, we just had one and it was in a corner of the kitchen, right under her bed. So I studied out of boredom and ate. I’d eat a cold pork chop left from dinner. I’d finish off the peach pie. I was always hungry those years.
And it was hours before Stevie would come. His family was young. From the curtain I could see his father stretch in the small living room like a sulky lion. I’d be done with all my homework and whatever I was reading and more by the time Stevie shoved my window open. Sometimes I’d be asleep on top of my bedspread, not from exhaustion but the sheer boredom of waiting.
We’d mess around for a while and whenever I tried to bring us to it, he stopped, gasping. “No! I’m not gonna do that to you! You don’t really want that! You’d be sorry. Just think you do now but you really don’t. I’m not going to do that.”
Stevie lasted years. Now I thought I really could have loved him if I wasn’t always gone on other people. Still, there were his feet. Once, he came to visit me in California when I lived there with my mother. I was always bugged about his clothes and, I didn’t know, his teeth. Underneath he was hard and straight and right. I knew that. But whatever we’d felt as children in the old barn, that was gone, completely gone.
I WAS APPROACHING the outskirts of Madison and I had to begin to think of things that were real. I had an address more than ten years old, who even knew if that was still good. People moved. In 1974 I lived on South Elm Drive with my mother. Nobody could have found me from that address anymore. And after that, I went to college and moved almost every year. I stopped at a gas station and called Madison information and asked the operator for the address too and sure enough, it was the same. Some people’s lives were that way.
I asked the boy at the pumps for directions and he gave them to me, he knew the street, it was all coming out almost too easy. It was four-thirty, quarter to five, a home time of day.
I found myself hurrying back to the car, as if I had a real destination where people were waiting for me, setting a table.
HIGH SCHOOL had been the world. We had everything. I was only alive during my day there with the other kids. In California, I had no other life that I believed in.
I was okay in school but not that good. And it didn’t mean much. I lived not for the classes but for the breaks between them, the ten minutes we had to get from one room to the next, and of course, for lunch, which was the height of the day. I always felt a pang when the one o’clock bell rang. Then there was nothing else until tomorrow.
The nuns in Wisconsin hadn’t understood me and then the lay teachers in Beverly Hills didn’t either. But only Sister Mary Bede who tried to teach us Latin in Racine had the nerve to say anything. She tried to warn me right before I moved away. The really popular kids, the nuns let go because they didn’t make the grades. But I did sometimes. Sister Mary Bede read the grade on my paper and looked at me and shook her head.
“I’m afraid you’re falling in with the wrong people,” she told me.
“I don’t think that will happen, Sister,” I said.
“I pray for you every night,” she said, reluctantly handing me back my test with the perfect score. “And for your poor grandmother. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, it would be a shame to throw that away,” she said.
�
��I won’t throw that away, Sister.” We both had our hands on the test paper. It lay on air between us. I grabbed it away too fast then, tugging it out from her dry fingers. I wanted to leave. Behind me I heard her sigh and the slow rusp of her sweeping, the broom across the linoleum classroom floor.
I had something new that day. One pant leg rolled up. I started that in Racine, when I got my district test back. The tests there were so easy. They didn’t expect us to go to college. And they wanted to pass us, laying a hand on the tops of our heads, without having made us feel bad about ourselves. When I came to school that day with one pant leg rolled up, everyone stared. But since I was moving to California, they thought maybe I knew something. By two weeks later, the whole school, including older kids, rolled up one pant leg.
Just a few people took Latin in Beverly Hills High and the room was in the worst building, near the typing class. The teacher was a regular old woman who was fond of breaking out of grammar and telling us how each of her daughters had found her husband. For each one, it had been hard.
One thing I think would have been different if I’d been normal: school wouldn’t have meant so much. The rest of my life I barely lived. All I cared about in my nights with my mother was that nobody from school would see us.
BACK AT HOME ONCE, at my grandmother’s kitchen table, Paddy Winkler reached out and felt my face. “Tell me what she looks like now, Lil.”
My grandmother had her back to us; she was fixing something at the stove. Paddy Winkler waited, hands politely folded on the table. He relished my grandmother’s food. He had never had anybody to cook for him. In his little kitchen, he only heated beans and franks from a can. He couldn’t see to cook. His fingers were dark with grease that didn’t come off, the same way Chummy’s were. My grandmother lifted up pieces of Czech coffeecake, rich and aromatic. Her hands were just manicured, in round ovals, a pale clear pink.
I sat at the end of the table, my feet playing on the metal bars under the chair.
“Here you go, Paddy, let me get you your coffee. Mayan, put out napkins, would you.”
I gave Paddy his, you had to put a thing right into his hand. I’d been doing that all my life but now I was more conscious of touching. It felt kind of good. His fingers were rough as if you could feel all the lines that make a handprint raised up on his skin.
“I’ve been listening to movies on that TV Dickie and Stevie got me.”
“What do you see?”
“Last night I got on that Casablanca again. Practically can remember it from the last time.”
“Oh, you stay up late, Paddy, I can’t stay up so late anymore. She does. This one does. But she studies. She’s a very good student, she gets A’s.” She frowned like there was almost something wrong with that.
He reached out and felt my face again. “You didn’t tell me yet what she looks like now.”
“Ugh, be glad you can’t see her, with all the makeup. She’s a pretty girl underneath it, but out in California they all put on this charcoal, black around their eyes like raccoons. That I don’t like.”
It was strange the things she did and didn’t like. She didn’t like the makeup or the platform shoes I wore, but she liked anything I did to my hair. Little braids I made or dandelion chains, hippie things, reminded her of her own youth. “I think it’s nice with the flowers, real real pretty,” she’d say.
“You know, Mayan, the most beautiful women in the world don’t wear makeup. Ingrid Bergman never wore makeup,” Paddy said.
I gave my grandmother a look, like, what am I supposed to say to this guy, he’s blind.
“Your grandmother don’t wear makeup.”
I skidded my chair back. “Well, I’m not the most beautiful woman in the world, okay, and I think I look better in makeup.” I’d only started then, when I’d moved to California.
“Come back and sit down, why don’t you, eat your coffeecake,” my grandmother called. “To tell the truth, we don’t care what you look like.”
“S’all Greek to me,” Paddy said and then spun in his wild laugh.
IN RACINE, we had had our own movie stars and they wore makeup too. They were girls three years older named Carrie, Corinna and Kim. Carrie eventually overtook the others because she got together with Enrico and they were one of those couples everybody watched. It was funny to think how we saw them separate for a year and watched them start to notice each other, like lines coming from two corners destined to intersect. Then they were the total couple.
Every girl in the school would have traded whatever boy she was going with for Enrico and every guy would have done the same for Carrie. You knew that. It was just something you lived with. And anyway, it wasn’t about to happen.
She didn’t let him take her for granted, even after. We all knew just when it happened, what day. It was their prom. Racine had all kinds of fancy dances even for young kids. It started with Cotillion. At the ninth-grade prom, Marion Werth and Eli Timber were still there as chaperones, her in a long colored dress and gloves that went up to her elbow.
We all watched Carrie and Enrico and the ninth-graders come to school different and hazy that day, the older kids. They took over the whole building with their happiness and their childhoods ending. Even nuns relented, studies flew out the windows into the air, I closed my eyes a minute and opened them and saw a swarm of numbers just over the sill like a moving haze of bees, we had every day left for learning, every hour every day all the next years and this was their only one prom.
Carrie stood calm and ripe, ready, nice to everyone in a way that didn’t matter, seemed superfluous and thereby more kind. She inclined her head towards the nuns and that June day, even Sister Mary Bede felt charmed. The nuns with their other kind of faces looked with fondness at her too that day. They were letting her go ahead and go, and she and they both seemed to accept finally that it wasn’t themselves, they each belonged to a system, a world system bigger and beyond their own powers to resist. In the end, the nuns didn’t put much faith in willpower. For all their talk of phone books under laps and precautions, they themselves lived as women, with timid, curling nervousness, waiting to succumb.
Carrie had always been pretty; it wasn’t only that. She owned something else that day. The color of her lips changed. It was a real red now, even in the daytime dullness without makeup. She’d put on weight and it went to all the right places the way it never would on any of us ever again. Her breasts turned up at the nipples like the stems of pears.
I was studying the way her brow went and how her ankles dipped and her thighs squared at the top. Everyone did that.
All the guys, the lay teachers and the priests too, and even Eli Timber, they all looked at her and you could see they were idly wishing they could do it, instead of Enrico. They noticed him with a new sharpness, almost like respect.
This was a warm Friday. The Monday after Enrico stood high, one of those guys: tall, thin-faced, incredibly long-necked, not serious. His red hair fell floppy in long tight curls, and his high beak-nosed face always roved open, ready for new interest.
You could imagine it: his high white butt, nose tipped up, eyes straight to her a plumb line, mouth pursed into something serious and small but only once. Enrico understood a hundred men and boys had looked at him and wished they could do what he was doing now. Naturally unsusceptible to solemnity or even the bands of concentration, still, numbers had not failed to impress him. And then too, she was his first girl, perfectly pretty. With her knees bent, her calves lay open on the bed, in the smooth curve of cut calla lilies.
Monday in school he was the same as ever but more, more with the guys, their laughter even easier and more free. She wore a gauzy dress and high sandals anyone else would have been sent home for, her hair pinned up on top of her head. You could see the whole shape of those legs through the dress. Stevie moved staring at her in the guidance office. She stood like a vase.
“Are you wearing a slip?” he asked.
“Yes, I am wearing a slip, Steve
n, and panties and a bra, too,” she said.
I saw a priest and a teacher look right at her crotch, like a target, then away.
She still had her confidence, we saw that.
The last day of school, before I moved to California, I heard her in the bathroom, talking to Kim through the stalls.
“So he calls Thursday night and says, ‘Hey, Cay, how ’bout Saturday?’ I said, ‘I’m very sorry, Rico, but I made other plans.’ ‘You did who-at?’ he says. And I said, ‘You didn’t call and I made other plans.’ ”
I knew, even hearing her over the high bell sound of peeing, that she meant it. She wasn’t going to change her other plans to see Enrico the way any of the rest of us would.
See, they had you after, because you didn’t want to be a slut. After the once, they’d turned you into a girl sleeping with her boyfriend. That wasn’t so bad. Some mothers would have died from heart attacks on cement floors, finding out, but for us, that wasn’t so bad. It depended a lot on how you both looked, really.
But how could you leave him? What would you be then? A girl who’d slept with two of them? That was different.
Carrie was willing to hurl the risk.
Good for her, I thought, good for her.
“I always liked Enrico,” I’d said to Eli Timber at the Briggses’ Christmas party, “but I don’t know if I respect him.” By now Enrico already worked at the paper mill. For a while he’d been a salesman at Briggs’s.
“I respect him,” Eli Timber had said, “for being the first guy to get Carrie Hudson.”
Carrie told me once, “You know how before you sleep with a guy, nothing works, you’re always bumping into each other’s foreheads, his arm’s uncomfortable, you can never walk with your hands on each other, it’s too awkward? Well, after you sleep together, everything fits.”