by Mona Simpson
And I’m not mad!
I know.
It’s not that, it’s just one of those things I kind of need to know.
I think really, I will write it down but in a, you know, in a brief summary, it had nothing to do with my love for you, Mayan. You know what it is—I was totally irresponsible, you know, I was a spoiled little—
Why is that? Because you were from a rich family?
I was selfish. I was brought up without a sense of—that, you know, you, in this life, you really have to really fend for yourself and you have to care and you have to do these things. So I was torn between feeling, here I am, I have a daughter that I really loved but at the same time I’m saying, gee I want to enjoy life for myself, I want to be selfish.
What was the selfish part? What was fun for you at that age? That was probably about my age now.
Oh, a lot of things. I mean, you know, I did a lot of traveling, I did this, I did that.
Girls? Gambling?
Sure, combination of both. But I’ll write it down. I’ll put some of my feelings down on paper in some detail for you. I understand. I will. The old question is when you get to a certain age, you say I wish I could turn the clock back. But you can’t you know. Anyhow. Your mom was a spoiled brat too. We both were. Though we came from different cultures, different backgrounds. They weren’t so rich. But she was spoiled. We both were selfish. We had some bad habits, some artificial goals and artificial values.
What did you want in life then?
Huh?
What did you want from your lives?
Oh, lots of things I guess but, I don’t know. I think the objectives are unrealistic, lots of dreams, you know. Your mom wanted to get a Ph.D. and she wanted to conquer the world with her education and this and that. And I wanted to get my Ph.D. and do other things, you know.
(I’d discovered one reason I’d have never in a hundred years guessed I wanted my father: to quiz him about her, what she was like when she was young. He was already far less mysterious. Her glitter and distance remained a solid crown.)
I always thought she wanted high society and fancy parties and dresses more.
I don’t know. I think she probably wanted both.
But she was really serious about her education at one point?
Sure. Oh sure.
Because she’s not like that so much now.
High society now probably.
No, she’s sort of like semi-spiritual.
Well, spirituality will help.
In her thirties, she wanted beautiful dresses.
Maybe that’s why you take the opposite extreme, huh? My feeling was, maybe you’re rebelling against that.
Actually I’ve been buying clothes lately, too.
I WAS. Even though I was supposed to be learning architecture and proving myself all at once. I won one of those competitions I’d sent off sketches for when I flunked out of school. A tiny commission. Still, it was six months’ rent. But I wanted other things too now. Things to the right and the left. Some days all I wanted to do was buy dresses.
I WANTED PEARLS. I wanted something from my father.
I don’t know which came first.
I was different now, greedy to catch up all at once. All the things to the right or the left of the straight road, the silly things I never picked up, the glittery things I’d had no time for.
I’d started dreaming of dresses. A perfect black pleated aerodynamically impossible party dress.
And pink luminous pearls, with green and blue echos.
IN THE YEAR since we met he’d sent me two presents. The first was for my birthday and he called several times before it arrived; he was nervous about its value. It was a thick gold-chain necklace. I’d noticed that all my Eygptian cousins wore gold chains around their necks. I studied it under the kitchen light. It was marked 18K in tiny letters. By Christmas it was a bracelet, interlocking links, some shiny, some frosted gold. This was gold plate.
I didn’t get the bracelet until late. I went to Racine for Christmas. When I got home I waited two weeks and then wrote a note. He called irate, because I hadn’t acknowledged receipt of his gift.
“Did you get my note?” I asked him.
“No. I never got a thing from you,” he said.
Timothy said it probably made him feel better, that he had something to be mad about.
But we seemed to get over that. And in one of our regular conversations I determined to ask for pearls. But once he was on the phone it wasn’t easy. He was mild but the way he talked didn’t open many nets for questions.
“Not too bad, not too bad,” he said. “Put a beautiful tree in yesterday. What kind, oh, it’s just a tree, I don’t know.”
“Like a pine or deciduous? Does it have leaves?”
“Yah, sure it has leaves.”
He asked how things were with my boyfriend. This was a guy I’d had three dates with. His voice had a nervous quality when he asked that, as if my condition were fragile. He made me feel like I was old, twenty-nine, and not that pretty. So if this guy left, that was it.
But I tried to be jaunty. “Well, he’s kind of short but other than that he’s cute.”
“Sometimes you have to make some adjustment, some compromise. You’d like to wait for everything but then everything might not come along, Mayan. I guess the most important thing really, is if there’s something that clicks inside then you know there’s something that’s going on. But if you’re feeling cold like a fish then you can’t force yourself to like him.”
“But with Uta you didn’t have it really.”
“No, not really.”
“And you had it with my mom and lookit how that worked out.”
“Sure, sure that’s true.”
“What would happen if you ever met my mom again? Do you think you guys would fight?”
“I honestly don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t see any reason to do that. I don’t know. I don’t have that answer either, you know. Crazy life, huh. All kinds of tough questions. Tough questions, yah.”
“You probably aren’t friends with many people from that time in your life and she isn’t either. So those are years that maybe no one else remembers but you two—like your college years.”
“Sure. That’s probably true.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Healthwise? I went to see the doctor day before yesterday and he says I have to give them a five-six day journal of my eating habits.” He always had a certain delicacy talking about his own condition. He seemed to visit doctors a lot. “When you were talking about that other subject, there was somebody standing here so I couldn’t discuss it freely with you. It’s an interesting question, though. I don’t know. It tingles something inside you know.”
“I bet.”
“Well it does.”
“Dad, do you have any things from your family, like jewelry or anything, because all these girls in America have pearls from their families, like pearls their fathers gave their mothers or their grandfathers gave their mothers or something.”
“I don’t know, I’ll check. There’s a few suitcases I have. I haven’t even opened them. But I’ll check. I’m going to work on it. And if we don’t find something, we’ll fake it. I’m going to fake it.”
MOST OF OUR CONVERSATIONS now ended up with me talking about my mom. What was she like then. I wanted him to give her something: money, her life back.
I wanted him to have to send her a monthly check. I hadn’t found a way yet, to ask.
MAI LINN AND EMILY were intrigued by the pearls. It was us again, sitting in a triangle, but this time in a New York restaurant with our elbows on the table.
“But of course you’ll ask for more,” Mai linn said.
“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m going to try and pick them out here and somehow suggest to him what I want.” I looked at Emily.
“We’ll go to Chanel this afternoon.” Emily had been giving me the full range of choices. The large South Sea pearls were in t
he ten thousands, that I knew was further than I could push him. Anyway, I wanted him to give the big money to my mom. But Emily said for the price of good small pearls you could get Chanel, which weren’t real, but I should see because they were beautiful anyway.
I looked at Mai linn kind of guiltily. I hadn’t really wanted her to know I was following Emily through all these stores.
“I’ve priced them anyway,” I said.
“How much are they?” Mai linn asked.
“Well, they start at about five hundred.”
“But you don’t want those. They’re too small,” Emily said. “They look like a child’s pearls.”
“The ones I want are a thousand. I think he’ll do that.”
“He should,” Mai linn said. “But then what?”
Emily said, “You mean she’ll ask for more and more?”
“The fight will come,” Mai linn said.
I nodded. “And maybe I want that.”
“So you’re kind of upping the ante. Testing his limit. But whatever it is, I don’t think you’ll be satisfied. Pearls aren’t going to make up for it.”
“But I still want pearls. I think I’d just like to have some.”
My friends’ fathers gave them to their wives. Or my friends got them at graduation. One mother I knew bought her daughter pearls on an installment plan, paying on time every month. I never wanted such things in Wisconsin. I had them. In abundance. My grandmother’s house was full of mysteries, you opened a drawer and it was there, the big colored chalk, pearls, a little dish of hand-cut nails. None of it was real, but it didn’t matter. It was real enough for us.
But I didn’t just want pearls. I wanted them to be hard for him to afford.
And if we don’t find something, we’ll fake it. I’ll fake it.
EVENTUALLY, we pushed up from the café table and went outside. Mai linn said, “So Emily, whatever happened to Boom-boom-boom?”
Emily shrugged. “He doesn’t talk to me anymore. He sent a bonded messenger to pick up his ring.”
“And what about your little lawyer?” she asked me.
“He’s around. We’re friends.”
“He’s a nice guy. I don’t know why you didn’t go for him.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know either. You never really know.
These are the beauty years for me, I was thinking. The best was probably over, or else it was right now. I’d written my mother and asked her if I could have one of her old suits.
She’d called me up on the telephone, furious. “You’re just take, take, take,” she said. “That’s all I have to wear, do you think I ever get anything new! I wear things five years, ten years old to work every day.” She was still yelling when I set down the phone.
There was nothing else I was waiting for and I was behind. I made Emily take me shopping and give me lessons.
And she was a happy tour guide. That day she led us to a small store with large communal dressing rooms. We took blouses and jeans and slacks and jackets and dresses and skirts into the room and all started trying them on.
I never wore skirts. I couldn’t because of my legs.
Emily said, “Both of you I think would look really good in this. Let me go see if there’s another one.”
We each slipped on the matching skirts. They were a black fabric, short, well over our knees. Mai linn looked right, the way a person is supposed to. My knees looked loose, like a fried egg on top of bone.
“No,” I said. I unzipped it and I was stepping out, it was around my ankles.
“Put it on again.” Emily pulled it up, zipped, ran her hands over my hips and down the outside of my legs, smoothing the fabric.
“My legs, I can’t. They’re too short.”
Mai linn pushed her calf up next to mine. “They’re exactly the same,” she said, and in the mirror, they were.
We left with our shopping bags. I was spending all the money I had in the bank. But after my grandmother’s money, other money was easy to spend. Then we went to the library so I could show them old typefaces I found. I was looking at typefaces for the inscription on my fountain.
I STARTED TO WORRY that he’d get my pearls at Macy’s. The other jewelry he’d sent me had come from there. I wanted nice ones, good quality.
I was going to see him around my birthday. I wanted to pick out the pearls myself.
I don’t know which came first.
I wasn’t that direct about it. It had been a year, a little more. We’d talked on the phone but I hadn’t seen my father, since that first time. I was going to be in California anyway so we planned a trip in the wine country, for two days.
It wasn’t until then that I remembered all the things I’d saved for him. Well, I’d taken that little add-a-pearl chain to show him, the two pearls like tiny baby teeth. But there were pictures of my childhood. All my altars and shrines. I threw them out, but then I took my favorite, made of butterfly wings and my baby teeth, back from the garbage. I wanted to keep it for myself. I’d saved the roses he’d bought me from the grocery store a year ago and they were dead and dry now. He’d given me pictures of himself.
Of my mother and me in our life?
He never asked.
I called him to say, don’t get anything for me for my birthday, I wanted us to go shopping together.
STEVIE HOWARD DROVE ME at seven in the morning to the place I was going to meet my father.
“Why is it,” he said on the way, “that women, basically law-abiding women, want to steal men’s clothes?”
I thought of Mai linn. When Mai linn first left Racine and moved to North Dakota, she used to sleep with Ben’s shirt. I had sweaters and too-long-footed socks from old boyfriends. Eventually, I threw the stuff away. It made you feel safe for a while but they didn’t really fit. Later, when you had to go out into the world on your own again, they didn’t work at all.
“Remember how I used to wish I had a shirt or an old sweater of my father’s?”
“You could get one now, huh?”
“I don’t want one now. Now I want pearls.”
WE MET MY FATHER at a café in Berkeley. We all had coffee and then I threw my backpack in the trunk of my father’s Cadillac. Before we left, my father invited Stevie to join us the next night in San Francisco for dinner. Driving at fifty miles an hour towards the Napa Valley, he asked me if I’d ever been there before. I lied and said no but I had gone there once with my mother.
My father was wearing new green and gray suede hiking boots. He had a map with instructions to a place we could hike. “I am prepared,” he said, showing me the canteens of water. “People all told me that hiking would be an enjoyable way to spend some hours.”
Fine with me. I’d hiked for years in college and I knew Napa was pretty flat. I didn’t need anything but the stuff I was wearing.
He had a tape of Arabic music he slipped in the car’s stereo. It sounded like the kind of thing you heard in Greek restaurants.
“This is Om Kulthum. She’s the Frank Sinatra of the Arab World.”
“Where is she from?”
“Cairo.”
“What’s her name again?”
“Om Kulthum. That means, technically, Mother of Kulthum. See when you have a son you take the name of your oldest son. So my father’s real name was Azziz but he went by the name of Abu Mohammed. But you’d never say, Abu Mayan, in the Arab world. Call it sexist, call it what you want.”
Then I remembered something I’d learned from Ramadan. The word “tarboosh.” It meant a tall hat, a fez. And my father when I was little used to play a game where he lay on the floor and pushed me up in the air on the bottoms of his feet. I always thought he was saying Kaboosh, just a sound, but maybe I was high up like a hat. I asked him.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I don’t remember. Could have been.”
“I HAVE BEEN THINKING about your wedding,” he said. His bottom lip curled open in concentration. I suppose to him I was pretty old.
I tried to
divert him by asking about Egyptian weddings.
“Oh, well, I don’t know what they’re like now, honey, I suppose they’re just about like here now.”
“But when you were growing up?”
“Oh, well, when I was growing up, the traditional Arabic wedding was in the home of the bride. And first of all it was only women.”
“No men? What about the groom?”
“He comes later. But it starts out all women. See, the women of the family have been cooking for days and days preparing the food and the cakes and the sweets and so on and they throw an enormous feast. And the bride sits in her dress on her little throne and they eat. They dance a little. If they’re rich, they may even hire a eunuch to dance in the middle. And this is all non-alcoholic, remember.”
In his house in Alexandria, there were wedding pictures of a girl on a fancy throne.
“And then, after a little while, the bride will go into the house and she will change clothes into her next outfit and she’ll keep doing that all night. To get married in Egypt, the girl has to have nine or ten dresses and not only the dress but the whole thing. You know the shoes and stockings and accessories. And if it’s a wealthy family like mine, they would go—”
“Paris.”
“Well I suppose now they’d go to Paris but then we would all go and shop in Beirut. Beirut, Lebanon.”
I remembered the pictures of the girl in the different dresses.
“So they’d have music and the meal. She’d go and change, and then she’d stay on her throne. And the women eat and drink, just soft drinks, and dance. Then the groom will come a little before midnight and he takes her to the bedroom. They leave them alone for a while. And then after an hour, I don’t know, two hours, the mother of the bride will go in and she’ll come back out and bring—this sounds barbaric but it is that way—she brings out the bloody hankie and they all dance around it. And then the marriage is consummated. If there’s no blood there’s trouble. My brother-in-law Tarik was kind of a timid guy and he was in there with Amina until ten in the morning.”
“Do people ever fake it?”
“Oh, you mean like kill a chicken and use that. I have heard of it, but I’ve never known it to happen, personally. The mothers there watch their daughters pretty carefully. It’s part of the mother’s pride, that her daughter is perfect and untouched.”