by Mona Simpson
He pulled me over to the edge of the square where there was a tiled drinking fountain and a man stood with a camera draped in black cloth and a camel tied to a palm. He seemed to be asking, did I want to have my picture taken with the camel? I thought of my father’s old women and smiled. I wanted nothing like that from this trip.
We walked around the stands of the bazaar and I slowly became interested in things again. I wondered if all religions, all identity with a place or an origin or a culture that began late, began hokey. I wondered if Navaho doctors bought their children little tepees and tomtoms, but I felt a kind patience towards all that now because it was a start, I knew I would come back here again a different way, for longer. From a dusty market table, we picked out an everyday Turkish coffeepot, a little one. I wanted to open the jar of what it was my father had liked. When the woman had given it to me, I thought I’d save it for my father and give it to him as a present the first time I saw him, if I ever found him and we met again. But in this late afternoon light, sweet with dust and honey, I didn’t want to wait. I’d waited and saved enough for him. The lid stuck. I gave it to Ramadan, he held it against his belly, straining, and again I thought, he’s young, and then it was open. It was a rich distilled paste that tasted of almonds and honey. We ate it with our fingers, just walking through the market, past fabric bolts, animals, eating and licking our hands. We finished the whole jar. I turned my back for a moment and he bought me a dress and a small prayer rug. I was staring at a casino called the Las Vegas that had a wooden painted cutout of a bride and groom propped outside, the heads open circles for you to stand behind and have your picture taken. BE THE BRIDE, it said.
In the airport I bought a snowball paperweight with sand instead of snow, a scene with camels and tents in the desert. He paid for this. He’d paid for the coffeepot. He’d paid for dinner. He’d paid for the dress and rug and he’d try to pay for photographs of the two of us I didn’t want. Then it was time to go. We passed a bar called the Ramadan Room, which was playing an orchestrated version of “Home of the Brave.” At the gate where I had to go in and he had to stay, I tried to give him my money. I had two hundred and ten dollars cash, I wanted to give him all of it. He would take none. It got so I pushed the crinkled bills in his pockets. His mouth got hard, his chin made a clean line, he took it all, balled it, jamming it down in my pack. So I was the one after all who was paid.
At the metal bar going into the security gate, we drank a long kiss good-bye. His appellated, articulate hands moved around my face as if fashioning an imaginary veil there.
“Good-bye,” I said. I knew in a way I could never explain but understood absolutely I would never see this soul again.
He said words I didn’t understand but I made out Allah. Everything in his language had to do with God.
11
I STOOD IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR, in the middle of the day, and tried on the dress. It was white, a kind of cotton that comes from more than one third-world country and looks like it has already been washed. It fell in vague ruffles at my knees and on my shoulders. I felt foolish. It didn’t look like me in it. My legs seemed wrong, under the dress, like two stiff, thin trees. I picked up my hair, fingered it. Too long. And the ends were split.
I came of age at a time when a dress was an almost quaint thing. I’d spent my childhood in dresses and school uniform jumpers, but then it was jeans every day. I’d never stopped wearing jeans. My grandmother sent me money for a dress every spring I was in college and I spent it, but never on a dress.
It was the middle of the day and I collapsed on the bed. A while later I pushed myself up with an arm and began to try. There was so much to do. It was hard to know where to start. So I called for a haircut appointment with Shawn, who had always made me look like a busy person you saw walking loosely on the street.
“Just one minute please,” the girl said.
Someone else came on the line. “Shawn Timmelund is dead,” she said.
“He’s dead?”
“He died two weeks ago.” All those cancellations. The time they’d said his elbow hurt. “Would you like an appointment with his assistant, Terry?”
I put down the phone.
ALL WEEKEND, I waited for something to happen. I thought I better not call people too much. I felt like having them hear my breath, but then I had nothing to say. I called Stevie and made him ask me questions but it seemed too much work to answer. I just mumbled yeses, mostly nos. I couldn’t tell him much about Egypt. “Now you give up, Mayan,” he said. “You’ve got to.”
I had never quite been like this, how I was now, before. Or maybe I had, sometimes, and forgot because I wanted to. I was in bed. Depressed, round and round like a unthreaded screw in a socket. I couldn’t read. My head hurt and I felt like, let somebody else do it.
And this seemed true. Of me. All the other times, when I’d been high and gay, marauding arm-in-arm with my friends down the streets, now that felt like I’d been trying, pretending. Making myself an imposter.
This seemed a completely flat, unemotional, almost sensible decision. It was too much work to live. I didn’t want to. I have to try so hard, I reasoned, too hard. I was sick of being an overachiever. And my house was a mess full of little scraps of paper. Phone numbers and addresses, lists I couldn’t throw out because I’d drawn on them. I had skyscrapers and swimming pools and fountains. Towers. Since I’d been to Egypt everything I drew had a place for water.
Somebody else would be born. They would have a life like mine, but a little more. One part of them, one shred, would survive less damaged. Preserved. And they could do it. Let them do it. They could build the towers, trace the viruses, find the cure. It didn’t matter who did it. Only that it be done. It didn’t have to have my name on it. I didn’t even have my real name anyway.
The world could wait for them. It would have to. It was too hard for me. Not that I was doing much good, anyway.
The world couldn’t wait, but it would. The world had been waiting for a long, long time. Those who have to wait have been waiting always, and they will wait some more.
Sometimes I sensed what I could have been otherwise, like a broken horse’s dream of flying. I couldn’t follow that, it was too long a thought. That was why I had always wanted a daughter. I kept feeling I could stand myself if I had a daughter who was better than me. Before, when I’d been dry and the doctors had told me they didn’t know if I would have periods again or not, on the street, in line for movies, everywhere, I looked at girls, not boys, and thought, if I didn’t shrink myself inside she could be my daughter someday and perfect. For what was still in me to have a chance again. It was hard to see what was erect in my spirit be laid down, while other people, heartier, but less of that, survived. And now that I finally could have children, I wouldn’t, I was giving up. I hadn’t eaten anything for almost a week. It seemed too much work to get up and buy food.
When they told me I was out for a year, Timothy said to me then, “You can’t use everybody else’s standards. A year off might be fine. When you look at what you’ve made out of what you’ve come from, you’ve done a lot.” I felt then the way someone must feel when they’re told for the first time, officially, they are retarded and they understand what they’d privately feared always can be seen from the outside.
My father had known me before he left. Perhaps he measured my qualities. Perhaps he stood over my small childhood bed and looked at my face; I was not the beauty he had wished.
But what were the allures—taste? Taste of wine, of the inside of mouths, the tart taste of sores, the feel of money, its usedness, Italian fabrics, reptile skins, leather, the casing feeling of vastly expensive clothes?
The lightness and forgetting of travel.
The thrill of adultery. Of gambling. Of throwing it all away—forever.
Of destroying the weak who know no better than to stare at your portrait like a faraway president and memorize your lost name.
I heard a rush of water from upstairs a
nd thought, oh good, the old man was running a bath. The sound was powerful, voluminous, the force of water pushed through pipes. I liked the idea of the old man stepping into the bath, luxuriating. I could imagine him rubbing his small hands together, taking his little pleasure with a nervous relish.
My apartment seemed better and it was later in the day from the water. Falling Water. Waterfalls. I’d always wanted to go to see the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pennsylvania and now I had time. Now I had nothing but time.
I dialed Bud Edison’s number. Nobody answered. It was Saturday night.
I remembered Emory telling me, with the bad nickel taste in your mouth, the only thing to do like that is cry and sleep and wait. Tough it out.
I kept ricocheting back and forth between the numbers. 1971 to 1975 I went to high school. He was just in Montana. In 1973 I was fifteen, sitting by the garbage cans in the alley while my mother raged inside. He flew to Cairo. The Cairo Caper.
He was alive. He was not dead. Now I fully believed he existed.
I stayed in bed for two days. I didn’t eat. It got worse. My mother called me and asked about her wedding dress. Was I wearing it? Because if I wasn’t she would really like it back. It was hers after all, she said.
Her wedding dress? I would have loved to have her wedding dress.
“I never had it,” I said.
“Yes you did, I gave it to you in college, I shouldn’t have, I knew I shouldn’t have.”
“I wouldn’t have thrown away your wedding dress!”
“Well yes you might have, it didn’t look like a wedding dress. I had it shortened. I shouldn’t have maybe. But it was like just a cocktail dress. Raw silk. It was two colors. A sort of pale silvery blue and off-whiteish.”
Maybe I had lost it. I unplugged the phone. I didn’t want to hear.
I knew whatever it was it wouldn’t be enough because I wasn’t. I believed the truth: I didn’t have enough good in me. Not enough had been put in. And now, like my mother had said, I would always have to try so hard. Too hard.
I thought of different places I had wanted to see. Falling Water. Racine once more. Glacier National Park. The Grand Canyon. But I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t go forward. I couldn’t go back.
I stopped being afraid to die. The world was beautiful, so much I could not go outside. I knew the colors, spring, would hurt my eyes.
I wanted to leave it all be. I felt inside my grandmother’s way finally, the wish to vanish, letting the animals go free.
I didn’t want anyone to notice. On the old couch, I stayed home and pulled the covers up. The coward way. It was raining against the one window. This was glamorous rain. It gave a soft halo to the streetlight. Even only that made me nostalgic. Two kids nudged on the sidewalk below, both wearing black tight clothes and masks and I thought, good for them, let them, they can have it.
I was making lists; I scribbled in pencil on a bill envelope the names of all my friends.
Stevie
Mai linn
Timothy
Mom
Emily
Emory
Jordan
I laughed a bubble of a sound. Once, Edison would have been first. Now he wasn’t even on it.
I had so much to do. I stood up to write more, but my wrist was incredibly light and I was already far away, everyone I knew in a pasture with long faces and ruffled edges, receding from me one by one.
That blurry shelling fade was the softness. But just then, in that state, the blanket held up to my neck, I thought of the way back. It was one word, slate blue, the shape of a key.
Food. I had to get out and buy food. Live while you’re young, my grandmother said with her eyes already closed. I was still young, I remembered. Maybe it had something to do with finally believing he was alive. Maybe I thought we couldn’t both be. Staying awake was too hard. I hadn’t eaten but I wasn’t hungry. I knew I should go out and buy some food anyway but I was too tired. I slipped just a little once and then again. I counted my friends to myself. I kept counting them naming their names. But then I dropped Emory. I let them go one by one, like beads, unknotting, slipping from a string.
THE NEXT THING was sitting hard in a plastic hospital chair, egg bottomed, my hair a curtain over my face, a hand forcing me to drink a cup of something that dribbled down my chin. My lip fell loose and hanging.
The old man, my upstairs neighbor, stood there stomping his cane. He rapped loud on the floor, twice for emphasis.
“Drink it,” he said. A firm nurse in white stockings held the cup to my mouth. “It’s just high protein,” she said. “You’re a little weak. You fainted. You haven’t been eating enough lately.” This is where I was when it all sifted back into me.
“I telephone, but who?” the old man said, thumping my cane again on the linoleum. The linoleum was old and cracked and brown with age. The floor was consoling under these lights.
No one, I said. I didn’t want to explain. He stamped his cane twice on the ground. Hard like he had no patience. Then I told him Timothy’s and Emily’s numbers. I wanted Mai linn but I was afraid to tell him a number that was long distance. It seemed to go on a long time that night, the bright lights like bullets of sun pressing down on my head so my hair felt limp and bad, the protein drink which tasted like chalk. Everyone handled me like a thing they didn’t like. They were only professionally kind. The nurse held my chin and the back of my neck, hard, with rubber-gloved hands. “Come on, you have to finish before you can go home.” I didn’t blame her. I’d made myself this.
Then Emily was there. She clipped into the Emergency Room, wearing an orange skirt. She had a hard purse the shape of something we’d learned in geometry.
She put her hands on her hips, looked around. “So what happened?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just didn’t eat much.”
The old man stamped his cane. “I come in with this for her collection.” He held up a framed huge blue butterfly behind glass. The label read PAPILIO RUMANZOVIA. “I send away in catalog, rare butterfly, from China, and your door you left open. I find her there almost dead. She don’t up.”
“I’m fine,” I said, “I was just tired. Jet lag. I just got back from a long trip. I was in Egypt.”
“Where?” Emily said.
“Oh never mind.”
“Egypt. Pfa,” the old man said. “She look dead.”
“Well let’s get out of here,” Emily said. “We’ll start with breakfast.”
I had to give the hospital my social security number and the name of my insurance, which I still had from school. Emily had her car and we offered the old man a ride home, but he just said “Pfa” again and walked off with his cane. We drove to my apartment for me to shower and change and then we were going to go eat. My apartment was open now, she could just see it. It was hardly my things anymore. I stripped and went into the shower and by the time I came out she’d sorted everything into three piles, the way you would anyone’s, a stranger’s. “Cleaners,” she said. “We can stop on the way.”
We went out and had French toast. And then she started to talk about money. She unclasped the maple-leaf clasp of her purse and started taking out bills. They lay curled on the table like dried leaves, each with a different tilt and crease and twist.
Sometimes I thought about money, how you know the feel of paper, you can separate it from the scraps of tickets and bank receipts in a purse flap or pocket with your hand, without even looking. And each country’s money was different, on different paper. It was one of those deep habitual things we never think of knowing. That’s probably the most patriotic thing about me. Knowing dollars by touch.
I knew I had to take Emily’s money. I had to borrow from someone and start to straighten the piles out. But first I had to ask her about Bud Edison.
I asked the worst. “So are you … in love?”
The money lay there on the table, I was counting, it was over four hundred dollars.
She looked sideways, her p
rofile majestic. Her head slanted down. “He’s in London. Again.” She shrugged. “It’s in three weeks.”
“I meant Edison.”
“What? That was nothing. He just came to the shower. You know he is a jerk. He brought a negligee to the shower. It was embarrassing.” She stopped for a second. “Is that why you didn’t come? Because you didn’t want to see him?”
“No. I was in Egypt.”
“Oh.”
I looked down at my food as if it were a duty. I took the money. I didn’t deserve it. At least I had medical insurance still from school. That seemed as stolen now as the sunglasses from Boss’s and Frank Lloyd Wright’s umbrella. I didn’t deserve anything right then. But I had those three things now and I was glad I had them. Most things in this world were undeserved. You had to believe that.
IT WAS A GOOD RUNNING DAY, blowy, melting, a vivid sky. It was spring now and I wanted to see the blossoms. I ran every day. The sky over the river was darkening though and I felt a little scared. But I wanted to see the pink-and-white trees because it was supposed to rain in the night and anyway I knew all things could be different tomorrow, so I ran. I saw the blue-gray clouds and the trees, mat light of the blossoms in the wind and I came home feeling, well at least I had that. I liked the increments of seasons, when I didn’t miss a day. That made me feel I was living my life.
Really the attempt to find God was a selfish thing. Beauty was something you couldn’t pass on or give away.
That evening I went up to the old man’s apartment with a box of chocolates. He took it, looked down at the offering in his hands and did not invite me for tea.
“Thank you.” I said.
“You a foolish girl.” He shook his head as if to shoo me away. He started closing the door.
We stood there, the door open three inches.
“How did I look?” I asked. I’d wanted to know that. I still didn’t think he had needed to take me to the hospital.
“You look ugly,” he said, then shut the door.
So it was true.