The Lost Father

by Mona Simpson

  I WAS VAIN ABOUT MY HANDS. I liked my hands. I knew I was not a woman who could just wear anything and not worry about it. My grandmother wore men’s flannel shirts and an old plaid cap, she still looked herself, maybe more so, like a jewel set plainly.

  I was always working at things. Stevie said once to me, “I love you because you try so hard.”

  But my hands—my hands I didn’t have to do anything to. They were fine. I didn’t wear rings or bracelets and when I saw them, the way your body surprises you in mirrored lobbies or small oblique car windows, they pleased me.

  SOME OF THOSE MINNESOTA towns were rich. The road wound around a lake and wide old-fashioned mansions stood looking at themselves in the water, a history of all power and peace. It was too late to be rich myself. Even if I was, it wouldn’t have been soon enough to save my mother’s life for anything. I imagined her sitting in the place with tiered lawns, like Beverly Hills High School was, but quiet, a thousand times quieter. Her in a green long robe, a sad expression on her face, sorry, but glad to see me, infinitely kind. She would have a hairbrush on her lap.

  “Comeer,” she’d have said, “I want to brush out your hair.”

  I let myself wonder again what we would have been. This was weak: I’d lapsed into the soft reverie a hundred times. By now, my wishes like that were all for the past.

  JUST OVER the Minnesota-North Dakota border, I pulled to the side of the road for a Dairy Queen. It was a small old stand, its roof shaped to resemble the curved tip of an ice cream cone. Red picnic tables, their paint peeling, ranged outside on the blacktop. Mostly, I supposed, for the summer. Still, the sun pressed midafternoon bright now and there was just a thin drape of snow on the plowed fields. I bought a butterscotch sundae and sat outside at one of the wooden tables. The air was cold but clean, with a sharp hook in it. The sundae tasted good. Even in a chain like Dairy Queen, quality varied a lot. It depended on who owned it, how clean they kept the machines, what grade ingredients they bought, how much they cared. You never knew which stands were good unless you lived there. There was a great one in Egg Harbor, Wisconsin.

  This was a real one. You could taste the clean high-alcohol vanilla, the butterscotch, the nuts were fresh. I sat, studying the little yellow plastic cup while I ate. Then a giggle near me took my attention, the way a bird’s call can sometimes interrupt even pure concentration.

  The girl had a particularly long neck and a flat chest. Her shoulders sloped down. She had old-fashioned curly dirty-blond hair and a few pimples, regular bad-food pimples, on her forehead. On the East Coast or in California these would have been saladed and cleansered away, but here they just stayed, part of youth, like the late season flies on these picnic tables we shooed with our wrists but didn’t even mind that much. Under the table, her socked ankle stretched long and thin beneath the end of her jeans. Then his hand reached her foot, peeled the shoe off, and placed it on his lap. He was big cheeked—an Indian—with solid arms. He had dark eyes and eyebrows that slanted up. His features fell even and simple. From across and under the table, they kept moving, touching in different ways. His butt left the bench a second and he leaned over to kiss her.

  “Don,” she said in a low, tomboyish call, because her wooden ice cream spoon had been knocked on the splintery table. Then he was back down and their hands toyed together. Now his foot roughed her thigh.

  Oh. They were ten years younger, maybe more. In back of the small flimsy building a tractor started up with the hecking putt of its motor, we heard it jolt over the half-frozen fields. I finished my sundae still watching them, my spoon scraping out all the corners of the tiny yellow cup. Now they had long finished too but they still dallied there, toying together, the sky the palest blue, clouds high and calligraphic above us.

  I got back in the car and there was nothing else on the highway. I just drove awhile. I was jealous, of their fun.

  Just two kids raffing and fooling on a picnic table.

  A dirt road led off the dull highway and I followed it, stopping the car at the edge of the woods. Snow had started again. I just waited awhile there. Close lines of snow fell around the car on all sides. Past the birches and pine, I watched a silent valley, trees and a mud-rutted road. It wasn’t the world. I found the world beautiful, especially then. Snow fell in even stitches on the blue-green fir, the young white birches. I was just not right.

  This was my only way of praying.

  I tried to tell myself and remember: I had had my happiness too. My forty-two thousand eight hundred and sixty-four minutes of it. Some afternoons I’d felt all lined up right so the rest of life was in me and a part of me and I’d look at my hand and believe I was the same material, hair, skin, the cartilage of knees, gelatin of eyes, as the sky and the ground, the leaves stuttering with molecular press and collision, all of us built out of the color and substance, the paint pots of the periodic table, each a different weight, texture, feel, but still the same, endlessly breaking down and remixing. I believed that, sometimes.

  The times like now when I drove to the end of a dirt road and sat holding the steering wheel, no one could see me and no one would ever have to know. I could bear it. I didn’t mind that much. After, I would be in the world again, caught under the big net of light and thunder and snow with everybody else. I started backing out, blowing my nose. Driving towards Montana, the road climbing, I began to think maybe this was the wrong way to be. Twenty-eight and fixed on one thing. Still, I kept going. When you’ve wanted to find a person long enough and you are closer than you’ve ever been, you can’t stop even if your faith changes. I would be better to finish, I knew that.

  I began to count the things in the car, every time I stopped somewhere and got out. At gas stations where I filled up the Olds and used their bathroom and walked to the pay phone booth standing on the corner of the lot, I counted seven. The box. My purse. My earrings on each ear. The suitcase. Raincoat. My atlas. The umbrella I’d taken from Frank Lloyd Wright. And when I came back, from the phone booth or diner or gas station bathroom, I’d count again. I didn’t mind anything, the whole trip, wasting time, if I wasn’t losing any more of what I had. Every time that machine clacked over my credit card, I was losing.

  I drove with the window open, a sharp cold dry snow taste in the air. The pale luffing winter sky going on as far as I could see, I started thinking what I’d do if I were a bride.

  I knew all that Emily was accruing.

  If I were a bride preparing myself for something sacred, I decided I’d start a long time in advance and give everything up. That would take a long time. I knew how I wanted to die and I guessed, as I thought about it, this would be the same. I would try to make up something to the people I’d disappointed, to the ones I hurt or left. I would give away my things, one by one, taking care to match them with the person. I would tell my secrets, one to each friend, until the compartment was empty. It would be a sort of confession. Years before she died, my grandmother starting giving away her things. “Just take it,” she’d say, “I don’t use it.” But she never told her secrets.

  Then I would make my days simple, eating little, drinking only water, keeping order among what I had, my few clothes clean and folded. I would own less and less. I would go to sleep every night early. I would give away more and more, write one letter each night before bed. Then I would begin to be ready. I would slip into the sheets, clean, with my hair brushed out. My bed would be solid and my sheets stiff. My stomach would be thin as a wafer. And I would wait like that a long time.

  But sex in my life had never happened that way. That was a picture in a locket, an ancestor. I unlocked the door, shaking it, into the messy apartment, hoping the toilet’s flushed, wishing I’d kicked things into closets, and I turn the light out while we undress because I’m wearing the bad underwear, ones pink from the wash. It’s late, we smell the sharp grasping urgency of drinkers, the sheets feel gritty but warm, his skin is there, we begin and even unholy it is eternal, outside of time.

  I P
ASSED TOWNS named Wing, Mott, Pillsbury, Fordville, Hamlet, Oberon, Warsaw, and Berlin. Every midwestern state has a Hague. I drove through Mechanicville, Kellogg, Witoka, Money Creek, Pilot, Lark, Carson, and Killdeer. I almost turned and followed the signs to Yucatan, North Dakota.

  The only place I could ever picture was my grandmother’s old house. I sat once with my grandmother and Paddy Winkler in the living room, each of us braced with TV tables. “Can I you get anything, Paddy?” my grandmother said, looking over to the television. We had it turned up, loud for him.

  “Well, these waltzes don’t do much for me, Lil. But those taps, them I like. I heard that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on the TV the other night too.”

  She liked to watch dancing on TV. She followed the variety shows for the tap dancing. “Oooh, can he dance that little one. Listen to him go. That I like to see.”

  Can he ever dance—this was high conversation in Racine. My grandmother copied phrases she’d heard and repeated them. She applied herself diligently to learning the forms so she could put as little of herself into the world as possible.

  “Can he ever!” Paddy replied.

  It was easy to feel like a genius in Racine.

  Just then a squadron of teenage girls tapped onto the stage of Ed Sullivan.

  “Oh, lookit there, can you hear, Paddy? It’s those little dark girls and can they ever dance. Even the real tiny ones. Lookit her go.”

  Outside on the porch my mother was sitting with her friend Lolly, both hugging their knees and looking out at the sky. They were talking about beauty and the habits of men.

  Bud Edison said once, “I always really admire a white guy who can dance.”

  “Stevie can,” I said, almost like an accusation. Bud Edison knew about Stevie the way we both knew about each other’s loves before.

  “I know what it is,” I said and I did know just then, all of a sudden. “It’s failure.” Things like dance were compensation. It was the same thing with jazz. Stevie went on for years, during vacations, and then we started up in Madison. Once when we were still teenagers, Paddy Winkler called the police and reported him as a burglar. He lay under my bed while they prowled out around the edges of the house with their flashlights. The next night he came back.

  After mass, my grandmother’s car bobbed outside like a moored boat, always there, running, never late. I was the last one out. I always looked up once more as if he might be on the ceiling.

  “Man, you haven’t even seen me dance yet,” Stevie said, curling a hip shove in the bathroom, before the shower. With him it was hard to describe. I knew his small vanities, the way you do. “He’s a fixer-upper,” I told my college friends, apologizing. He lived on people’s couches. He’d just come back from the air force. He wasn’t going to be enrolled until the next semester and he was much older than all the freshmen. But that wasn’t really it. There was once we took a walk in a woods he knew. It was near dark and when we were inside the trees, a thunderstorm started and sheets of rain pounded with violence, echoing, and we had no clothes for it, nothing, we hugged our chests freezing, and he laughed softly, something mean to himself on the top of the voice, neck sloping down forward like a yoked animal, neither of us knew any way out and he was not surprised.

  In the warm indoor pool of Cap Chief Motel at midnight in North Dakota, my arms and legs swam in the profound trust of being unseen.

  I WAS STOPPED BY A SIGN, just a little green square on a weathered post by the side of the road saying, HEBRON, INCORPORATED, POPULATION 1,109. So it was here, it existed, this name I’d always known. I slowed the car and coasted in. My head turned back and forth, eyes greedy for the look of the place. It was ordinary, a flat blond brick elementary school with pipe-metal monkeybars in the playground. Oldish long cars stalled on the main street. Decent well-kept houses stood in a neat grid of tree-lined streets. It looked like a greatly distilled Racine.

  I tried to imagine what it was for Mai linn arriving here, shipped through the agencies, papers all filled out. She might have pushed her cheek against the bus window, turned away from other passengers, she might have been crying. But, springing down, in her tennis shoes, she could have thought, this isn’t so bad. Better than the orphanage in Racine where the cemetery ends, near the coal heaps and sulphur piles for the paper mill.

  The downtown here was two tree-lined blocks. Standing with her duffel on the pavement, she might have even had a moment thinking, I lucked out.

  When she’d moved into my aunt’s house, she told me, she remembered the first time she woke up there alone. She was sick and everyone else had gone to church. She walked through the rooms and opened all the doors. She fisted the piano keys, just for noise in the empty house. She sat naked on the upholstered living room furniture eating a plum, letting the juice spill on her belly.

  The Hebron family might have been standing in the parking lot where the bus halted, hands on their hips, waiting for her. They would have had her picture ahead of time, maybe the kids made a poster, WELCOME MAI LINN TO HEBRON.

  In this flatness in winter, the sun fell a certain thin yellow on the sidewalk. These are not the things you say in letters, how you felt yourself alone stepping in your new Ladies-Auxiliary-of-Racine-bought white sneakers down the rubber-treaded bus steps onto the yellow blessed sidewalks under maples and elms, shoving your hands in your pockets, goofing a grin on your face, your new family watching, wanting them to like you but fighting the want at the same time because you feel dumb and bitter and far away. But you go with them down the main street and then you all pile in the station wagon, you in the front seat, the mother clambering big and awkward into the back for the first and last time ever, and then you see the house, a box-shaped brick house, pretty with a pointed roof and a big screened-in porch. You sit at the table that night and she serves coconut cake with lemon filling, a new one she cuts open in your honor. Mai linn wrote letters but you don’t write those things. Most slow every minute things you don’t ever say.

  Then I saw the low rectangular ice cream store, Rudy’s, and the parking lot in back where the Greyhound buses stopped. One yellow school bus was parked in its long slot. I stopped and went in. I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and asked to use the telephone book. The kids behind the counter were teenagers, this was their after-school job and their movements had a slow play luster. Klicka, Kenneth, was listed in the book, 3939 Grove Street. I wanted to at least drive by the house. I could do that, anyway. And these kids could tell me where the junior high was. Bell Junior, I remembered it was called, from Alexander Graham Bell. I wanted to do more, though. I wanted to knock at the door and ask to talk to the father alone and say something to him, land him blame. But I couldn’t do that without calling Mai linn.

  I got so eager then I took the sandwich outside with me and held it in one hand in the phone booth on the corner. From in there, I could hear the slow drift of cars on the wide main street.

  After two tries, I found her. The secretary of the music department went to get her from a practice room. “Guess where I am today?”

  “Yesterday was Minnesota. You in Montana yet?”

  “No. I’m in Hebron.”

  “You are?”

  “Yup. I wish I had a camera. Maybe I’ll go buy one.”

  “I could tell you where. The Camera Corner. Right next to the Jandrain’s Music. There’s one camera store and one music store. But you better be careful. We’re never going to be able to pay your credit card bill. You know the total?”

  “Unh-uh. But I’m only going to do this once. I don’t care if I have to pay it off forever. I’m going to start at the bottom and get my life totally organized after. This is it.”

  I told her what I’d done in the last day and a half and I heard a small steady noise.

  “I think you’re running about thirteen hundred.” She had a mathematical memory. It was all that was left of her genius for high school science.

  “Listen, Mai linn, I called because I’m here and I kind of felt like
going to their door and knocking.”

  She didn’t say anything a minute. I could imagine her twirling the cord around her wrist. “What for?”

  “Just to tell him it really happened. That he didn’t get away with it. That you survived and are doing fine. Doing great.”

  “I don’t want them to know where I am though.”

  “Listen, I probably shouldn’t do it. It’s just a whim. I’m sitting here at the ice cream parlor, outside, I mean, I’m eating a grilled cheese sandwich.”

  “Rudy’s? You’re outside Rudy’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On the corner of Main and Sullivan?”

  “I guess.”

  “Hey, let me think about this.”

  “You don’t have to. It’s probably a dumb idea.”

  “Let me call you back in a few minutes. Give me your number.”

  I gave her the pay-phone number and then I sat in the booth finishing my food, the wash of slow life all around. One old woman with a scarf tied under her chin passed and looked at me sharply. A car slowed across the street and parked. A man got out and walked briskly into a store.

  Then the phone rang. “I’m going to fly out and meet you. It’ll take me pretty long probably, but just go to Dickinson and check into the Airport Ramada and I’ll find you when I get there.”

  “What? No, I’m sorry I started this, but don’t. You’ll end up in the same shape I’m in. You have to stay and practice.”

  “But I want to. I’ll only be a day. I’d like him to know that he thought he was doing something absolutely in darkness and he thought he was completely unwatched and I was just a kid, a yellow kid and I had no power and no recourse. He did the greedy thing to do that’s always been done, he had more and he knew he could take what he wanted and not get punished. I know what he did. It’s in me. I’ll tell him I’m thinking of writing a letter to the superintendent of schools.”

  “Are you really thinking of that?”