by Mona Simpson
Then I had a hard time fitting the key into the lock, I wobbled on my heels. I thought, my father could be at his upstairs window wondering who the crazy woman was ministering to her car door. At least, I had the consolation, he’d never in a million stars guess me.
I saw the door. A screen door and then a wood door. I didn’t see a nameplate or anything but I pushed the doorbell and I heard it work inside and then a little dog was barking madly, I don’t know how I knew it was a little dog, bellow size I guess, hurling itself against the door.
“Oh, only the dog’s home,” I thought, letting myself down, and then the door opened. There was the wire mesh netting of the screen door, the dog, turning flat against it, head to tail, a terrier, longhaired, messy, a man in a maroon bathrobe, barefoot, pajamaed, I only recognized at the shoulders was my father.
“What do you want?” he said, his eyebrows sharp in a V.
He looked at me a full moment and I knew him, the curled lip, the chin tilting the whole face like a bowl. His eyes ran back and forth over me and got nothing. He didn’t smile. He seemed foreign then. His face was thinner now, a smooth vertical. He’d lost hair down the center and grown beautiful.
“I’m looking for John Atassi,” I said. “And that’s you, isn’t it?”
I wondered for a moment if I would have to prove who I was and I thought of the shoes he once promised me he would get me in Beirut when he left and I smiled because of course I couldn’t put on the slipper and lift my leg up to show because it wouldn’t fit, I had grown, time had come in and changed the ending and I was not the same anymore. My mother still had a basket with a half-knit sweater for the tiny child I was.
He said “Yes,” and the face was nude like an old sad clown’s, full of mime, and I told him, because he did not know, “I am your daughter,” and then everything turned different, he was jumping and yelling, he pulled me in waltzing, crying over my hand. I knew he would never remember the shoes from Beirut, he’d forgotten years ago, maybe even while he was saying the words of the promise, like the disappearing ink of fireflies on a Wisconsin night sky.
I was in and he was only a man.
12
“YOU KNOW, HONEY, you should of called,” he said after the tears were over, wiped delicately from his face with his own hand, holding a colored tissue Uta delivered to him. “We almost went away for the weekend. We were going to drive up to the mountains.”
Uta tched. “Yes, we were planning on it.”
“Isn’t it lucky, Uta, we didn’t go. Yah, it’s really fortunate. We could have just been gone.”
The day I met my father was the way Stevie described his own wedding, long and hot and rich with food. Stevie was always asking everyone else what his wedding was like, as if he wasn’t there. I was in a daze. All around me was light and heat and noise and lots of champagne.
And there is no one I can ever ask.
His house was ordinary, nothing. Walking through the little entry hall, I immediately revised everything. He had standard furniture. It could have been rented but it wasn’t new enough.
Uta was still there, in nylons and slippers, carrying a Kleenex box over to him. She offered me one too, but only after.
Uta: nobody thinks their parents could do better than each other. Few people ever have such positive proof. Four-foot-eleven, brittle, she had odd points of hair where sideburns would be, a style Liza Minnelli adopted briefly in the late ’60s.
We settled ourselves down in the furniture and Uta brought a pot of coffee.
His eyes were red from crying but we’d stopped.
“Your father is a great man,” Uta said to me.
Oh really, why? I felt like saying, what has he done? From what I hear he’s not been so dandy to you.
“He’s just a wonderful, wonderful man. I’ve seen him go through so many things. I really admire him.”
I kept stealing shy looks at him and he was just there. I couldn’t tell if he looked like me or not. His skin was whiter than I’d thought. Ramadan had been better looking.
Like any strangers, we talked about geography. Modesto, Stockton, Yosemite, the immediate area. I said I liked Berkeley. I said that I was there last summer, visiting Stevie, my childhood friend.
“Well, how come you waited till now then?” my father said. “Why did you take so long?”
“How come I waited till now?” I hit his shoulder a way I thought was playful. This was how I’d seen people do it. “You’re hard to find. I’m not that hard to find. Maybe I am. I don’t know.”
“Your mom’s still listed in Los Angeles?” he asked idly. The answer to that was yes. She was.
“You wanted to play the cello, didn’t you?” Uta asked out of the blue.
“I played drums for a while, when I was a kid.”
“No, I think it was the cello,” she said. “Well, did you ever do it?” She said that as if it were some accusation. “Where was she born?” she asked him instead of me.
“She was born in Bay City, Wisconsin.”
“But wasn’t Adele pregnant in Egypt?”
“Yah, we lived in Luxor. I was working for a Saudi petroleum company. We had a brand-new place but she just didn’t like it. She didn’t like the food. Didn’t like the style of life. She just was unhappy. But you were born here, in Bay City. July 2, ’58, see yah. Yah.” He had a foreigner’s voice. Then he lapsed, looking out into the small patio. “Midafternoon.”
“You find out all kinds of things now maybe, huh?” Uta volunteered. “Did you ever know your birthday?”
“Sure she knows her birthday.”
“Birthtime, I mean.”
“No, I don’t think so. I have a birth certificate but I don’t think it has a time on it,” I said. “And your birthday is May 21, 1931, right?” His birthday was the same day as Yasir Arafat’s, even though Arafat’s was in 1929. In my wilder moments I’d let myself think they were the same person.
He shrugged. “I don’t have a birthday. Isn’t that funny. But you know in those days, Mayan, in Egypt, they didn’t have a doctor come and deliver a baby. They had a kind of traveling midwife, an itinerant. And I was the youngest of four children and one day I asked my mother when I was born and she couldn’t remember. Can you imagine that? She just didn’t know. They didn’t keep track of those things the same way they do here. And so next time the woman came around, we asked her and she didn’t remember either so when I came to school here, to Columbia University, I just made it up.”
SO THE ONE FACT I had from Jim Wynne didn’t even turn out to be true.
I ASKED HIM ABOUT MY BIRTH. I told him that my mother had always said I was in an incubator. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “It was a normal birth. ‘Huna London,’ I said, ‘Sheesh, Huna London.’ ” Then he just broke out and cried. “You know there’s not a day that went by when I didn’t think of you. And now when I’m getting older I thought what would happen if I died. You wouldn’t even know. I wouldn’t know how to find you.”
I cried a lot too and let him hold my hand in his. My hand was always wet from his tears. I noticed, though, that his hands weren’t mine either. They were small hands, boxy. I recognized my mother more and more in my own body.
I didn’t think it exactly then, but I wasn’t so hard to find. And why wasn’t he going to find me until he was dying? But he spoke well, in a way that didn’t suggest questions.
Uta was up and down a lot, getting him things. He took no more notice of her than you would a small, tail-beating, somewhat fragile and always beckoning dog. In fact they had such a dog. I’d made them put the dog upstairs because I was allergic. Every once in a while the dog would scratch and whimper and Uta would say, “Aw, he’s lonely for his daddy. He loves his daddy so much.”
“I SEEM TO REMEMBER something about your father promising me a sheep.”
“That right?”
“Could that have been?”
“Well, you never met him, Mayan. When we were over there, you weren’t born ye
t.”
“And then you, we, lived for a little bit in Michigan.” For years I’d had a red toy truck from East Lansing.
“Was Adele with you the whole time in Michigan?” Uta asked him.
“Yes, we broke up in Michigan,” he said. “I had made the mistake of inviting some Egyptian immigrants who lived in the Ann Arbor area to my house for dinner. And you know these people had never been to Egypt. So we’re talking, they knew Adele and I had been there and they wanted to get some first-hand information. Our impressions.
“What I’m going to say is not very nice about your mother but she was young and we were unhappy. But she, she knocked things down, she told them the most miserable things, how dirty the people were, how dusty, how pessimistic. And these people, you know, they didn’t want to hear that.”
“They wanted to go there,” Uta said, trying to follow along.
“Sure, they want to go there! It’s their whole life, their homeland, I mean they want to hear some nice things about it.”
I smiled. They were probably second generation like me, or third. Egypt was never my whole life.
“Well, didn’t you speak in Arabic, sweetheart, and tell them what it is really like?” That was Uta.
“They didn’t speak Arabic. They were immigrants, you know. So after that I remember I took my suitcase and got the car and that’s the last I saw of Adele, I mean, we saw each other again but that was really it. And the next day I resigned, took a train to Chicago and got on a plane and went back home. I was going to go and I wasn’t going to come back to this country ever.”
Well that’s a good father, I was thinking.
“WOULD YOU LIKE a glass of champagne to celebrate our reunion,” he said. It was not much after noon, but this was less a question than a statement and he returned with a wash towel and the opened bottle and poured a glass for each of us.
His stories were never an explanation really. Uta made a few attempts. When she came in and joined us again with napkins for the champagne, she said how hard my mother had made it for him.
“Oh, she was terrible, she made him feel so bad, Mayan. I remember she’d call him and tell him he could see you and then she’d call back and call it all off. Many times I know she hurt his feelings bad.”
“She’s crazy,” I said. She was.
“He wanted to see you but …” She just bent her neck down and shook her head.
“Is she still crazy? She always was,” he said, his head rising. He had a flat smile, buoyant. “She was a great girl, beautiful, very intelligent, everything, but always a little crazy. But you shouldn’t talk bad about her, Mayan, because she is the one who really raised you.”
What did he mean, really. She is the only one who raised me at all.
He just patted my hand, sometimes looking at the low ceiling. “The daughter I never had.”
And whose fault is that, I want to say now, remembering. Whose fault was that?
At the time, though, it was a romance. The day was like a river trip on slow brown water, the banks always changing, water the same. I didn’t have to do anything. Everything made sense before he said it and I’d forgiven him already. I kept looking at him and he was beautiful. Everything was easy that day. Love was perfect. Roses, champagne, our hands fit. The day went on. It was long and unfolding. We talked and stopped talking and everything he said was right.
I was quiet, still. I didn’t have to do anything.
HE SIGHED and looked at his hand. He picked up his champagne glass and held it up in front of him a level moment, then took a sip. His face closed on the taste, severe a moment.
“This is very good champagne,” he said. “Drink some, darling.”
“Mmm, very very good,” Uta churned her slippered legs, which didn’t reach the ground.
“And then, and then, I couldn’t do anything to Mayan, you see,” my father said.
“That’s what you told me, sweetheart.” That whole day, Uta really only talked to him.
“I couldn’t hold her, I couldn’t pick her up.”
“That she wouldn’t let you.”
“No. I couldn’t do anything.”
“She wouldn’t let him kiss her. Kiss you.”
“That’s not good,” I said, but all I could think was how Uta was. What a rah rah.
“I couldn’t do anything, you see. If the baby cried and I went to pick it up, that was all wrong. She wouldn’t let me change you. She wouldn’t let me touch you. You would cry and I’d go to pick you up and she’d say, Let her cry. She should cry. She read all these books, see. And I thought, if I can’t touch my own baby, then fuck it. Anything I would do was the wrong thing to do. So we got in fights over it. From the beginning. From the day you were born. That’s the way it was. Everything had to be her way and she had a whole philosophy about child-rearing and so on and I was a dummy.”
“And believe me she wasn’t so good.”
“She was pretty good. Because after all she raised you. She did it. Not me. She and your grandmother. From the little bits and pieces I gather, your grandmother really raised you.”
“Is that your mother?” Uta shrilled.
“No no, that’s her grandmother.”
Now Uta addressed me. “His mother’s sister lived in Cairo and we visited her. And his mother was there too. That’s how I met her.”
My mother had always told me my father left because I cried. She’d always said it was because I cried and he said, let her cry, he wanted to go out and go dancing. But she wouldn’t let me cry. I would never know what was true.
THE DAY WAS BORING in the way most important, unrepeatable days are. Funerals, weddings and the ceremonies surrounding birth when no one is sure what to do. None of us was at our normal work.
After a while he stood up. “I suppose I better get dressed so you can see your father looking a little better than just a couch potato.” He still had his foreigner’s accent.
And they went upstairs to dress. I relished the time alone. I stood up and explored. It was a small kitchen, a small living and dining room. They had the latest video equipment. Everything else seemed about five years old. There were no pictures or anything personal that I found. There were no books. Upstairs I heard Uta cooing at the dog. Its tail beat hard through the floor.
There was a wedding that day at The Lighthouse, which was why, it turned out, it was closed, and there was much discussion of how long he would have to go in. He decided he’d work for a few hours and then after we would have dinner. It took a long time for him to get us a reservation. That seemed much on his mind—getting us the very best place. “It’s Saturday night,” he kept saying, as if we were defeated already, as if I should have given him a week’s notice to get reservations.
“His restaurant is the best in town,” Uta offered, looking at him. “They get married there even.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“And the receptions. Wedding receptions and so forth,” she said.
The restaurant he really wanted was booked. He was a single-activity man. When he was talking on the phone he was talking on the phone, not like my mother, or me for that matter, who were always dancing, mimicking, pacing, tapping, fidgeting, carrying on primarily with each other, the one present there with us in the room.
He asked if he could speak to the owner. But the owner wasn’t there. Then he made a bid to whomever he was talking, saying he was John Atassi from The Lighthouse and his daughter was here and it was a special night and could they possibly get us in. “No,” he repeated the other man’s word. “All right. I understand.”
I remembered my mother slipping the waiter two rolled-up twenty-dollar bills so we could get in to see Barbra Streisand at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas. My mother and I—we would never take no so easily.
He looked at Uta and shrugged. “If they’re booked they’re booked,” he said. He said it again later when we were walking up the gravel, my heels sinking, to the restaurant he’d chosen second, as he was explaining t
he hierarchy of restaurants in Modesto. “But,” he shrugged, “when they’re booked they’re booked.”
“WERE YOU IN CHICAGO for a while?” Uta asked me.
“No.”
“Somebody told us sometime or other that you were in Chicago and in some kind of television work or radio work …” That seemed to be all. Somebody told them that and that was it.
“No I’ve been in New York doing graduate work, well medical school.”
“That right?” he said.
“Following in your dad’s footsteps, huh?” Uta said.
“My mother went to graduate school too.”
“Do you go full-time to graduate school? Daytime?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You can’t really do medical school at night. They don’t have it.”
“That right?” he said. “You didn’t want to go on and get a Ph.D.?”
“No,” I said. “The only other thing I really was interested in is architecture. And you don’t need a doctorate for that either.”
“New York,” Uta said. “Well there’s always something to do there, that’s for sure.”
“It’s the most cosmopolitan city in the world, really,” he said.
It was determined that the dog needed to go out. Uta went up to get it on its leash. He rose and stretched, offering me the last glass of champagne. I refused and he poured it for himself. “What time is it now?” he said, walking to the clock. “Two o’clock.”
When Uta descended with the dog she asked how I got there. “Did you come on 580?”
“Yes, I came on 580, it was very easy.”
“You could have flown into here.”
“I don’t think there’s a direct flight,” I said.
“Well honey, your dream came true,” she said, lingering at the door.
“I’ll show you something,” I said to him. I took the chain out of my pocket. I’d brought it along but I hadn’t decided until just this minute that I would tell them. “You gave me an add-a-pearl necklace when I was very little. So right before when I left on the plane I found it to bring along.”