Casebook: A novel

by Mona Simpson

  “It used to be just awful,” he said. “It grew out like a mushroom. A stylist in DC developed this cut.” His head was shaved on the sides. He wore a white button-down shirt, khakis, Converse low-tops, and no socks, even though it was winter cold. He had ears I kind of wanted to pull.

  Walking to the restaurant, he put his hand on my mom’s back. That seemed wrong. She’s ours not yours, I thought.

  Then, in the restaurant, my mom ordered a glass of wine, and he ordered a Coke. When my mom and dad ordered wine, they both did.

  He turned to me. “So who do you think …” He motioned with his hands; he seemed to have trouble getting the question out. He stammered, “What, what bands do you listen to?”

  “Green Day,” I said. “Coldplay.” I hadn’t meant to rhyme. I blamed his stammer. I hated speech impediments. Twice a week, Boop Two got driven to speech therapy, and I had to go along and sit for an hour in a room full of dirty toys.

  Eli signaled the waiter. “Could we please have red pepper flakes?”

  My mom liked hot pepper on pizza. But before, she’d always asked for it herself. An old couple stopped at our booth then, and my mom introduced us. “We’ve noticed them,” she said, after they left. We’ve?

  “Why don’t I know them?” I asked, thinking, If he does.

  “See the way she’s looking at him, folding her hands?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So?”

  “They seem eager to talk to each other. As if they’re expecting … fun.”

  “They have a nice …” Eli flailed, his hand flapping. “A nice …” He never finished that sentence. He seemed to have trouble with sentences.

  Watching old people: I didn’t like that. And I hoped she didn’t get all we-ish with Eli. Ask for your own pepper flakes, I felt like saying.

  At home, he wanted to see photo albums. Maybe my dad wasn’t the culprit, I thought, maybe the Mims had left him for the dork guy. It didn’t seem like it, though. My dad was better-looking. For that matter, so was Holland. A couple times, I skidded in socks down the hall and lingered behind the door to hear the Mims and Eli. She kept laughing. He said, “I love them already. They’re your children.”

  I stayed slumped against the wood, my leg falling asleep.

  He whispered, “Did I kiss you all right?” He sounded scared, like I would be, and I’d never kissed anybody yet.

  So the culprit must have been my dad. If this was the first time Eli had kissed her.

  The next morning, I found a picture on the table of my mom when she was a kid pulling on bike handlebars that had streamers. I didn’t think of Eli again until weeks later, when a package arrived for me in the mail: two volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories.*

  * * *

  * What was that about?

  11 • Another Failed Christmas

  A guy in cleats dangled from a safety belt strapped around our neighbor’s fishtail palm. He was winding a string of multicolored bulbs around the trunk, to make it look like a candy cane.

  My mom shouted up, “Hey, could you put lights on our roof?”

  Women in Uggs and down vests followed leashed dogs while we waited in the car to be driven to school. The mountains felt close; we could see their brown ridges. Winter in Santa Monica.

  The Mims bargained. “Single mom,” she shouted up. “Math teacher.” Sometimes she said professor, sometimes teacher. Teacher when she wanted a discount.

  He agreed to staple on lights and set them on a timer for a hundred bucks. “Might be a lot for one socket,” he said. “It shorts, you have to push the little button and reboot.”

  I used to love Christmas. My dad, in his glasses, carrying a tree over his shoulder, saying, I like having a shiksa wife. The Boops only got that for a few years. And Christmas didn’t happen anymore. Last year my dad came over and gave my mom a bracelet I never saw her wear.

  “It’s snowing in the San Gabriels,” Hector told me. They were leaving three days before vacation on one of their epic drives to Glacier National Park, on the Canadian side. “Nineteen sixty-two was the last time it really snowed in Los Angeles.”

  The weather I think of as winter in LA has to do with stillness. Monterey pines don’t move; the sway of palms is so slight as to seem imaginary. Everything sparkles. You could see snow in the distance down Pico, if you squinted.

  After school let out, my dad took us to see his family in New York. My father’s family—I don’t know how to describe it even now—but you bent through a small door and entered a world where all of a sudden you were better. We became straight-A children, even though our school didn’t give grades. We moved inside a snow globe. A waitress told our father we were the politest kids she’d ever served. Those things happened with our dad. I’ve spent half my life wondering how many of them were true.

  We returned home Christmas Eve and tore into the FedEx boxes my aunt Mab had sent from Montecito, and Boop One swallowed a Frito of packing Styrofoam. At least she said she did. No one saw. First she said she did, grinning with her pointy teeth; then when my mom went apoplectic, she denied it, crying and choking out that she’d been just kidding, all the way to the emergency room. We had to wait on plastic chairs while the movie we’d planned to see was starting its music and titles. “Merry Christmas!” I said, looking at a wall clock decked with foil tinsel above the nurses’ station.

  The Mims called my dad and got his machine.

  “Why don’t you try Eli?” I said.

  “He’s back East. He has a brother who—” She stalled.

  “A brother who what?”

  “Well, he told me about his brother years ago. It was the first real conversation we ever had.”

  “Well, what about the brother?”

  “He’s ill.”

  “With what?”

  “I don’t know if it has a name. Anxiety, I guess. The worst thing is, he doesn’t have friends.”

  “Not any?”

  “Last year, there seemed to be a woman he talked to at work. We hoped that might turn into something. But now he’s lost his job, and he’s tired all the time. He lives in New Jersey in the apartment where their mother died.”

  “That’s sad. That their mother’s dead,” I said. “But, at least, no mother-in-law!”

  Just then, a nurse pushed through swinging doors. The X-ray hadn’t found any Styrofoam. Boop One had been telling the truth that she was lying.

  “It was a joke,” she mumbled.

  “Don’t ever lie like that again!” I said.

  “You’re not the boss of me!”

  We rode past the Aero Theatre, dark already, where people had laughed, eaten popcorn, and gathered on the sidewalk after to talk some more. Another failed Christmas. We passed decorated houses on our street; one roof had six lit reindeer.

  “Next year, can we get colored lights?” Boop Two asked.

  “Colored lights,” my mom repeated, not saying yes or no. A trick Sare probably learned at MSW school.

  But even our white lights had shorted out. My mom stomped up to the plug she couldn’t see in the dark. Under a crescent moon a coyote trotted down the middle of our street. The Boops had never seen a coyote before, but even they could tell right away that it wasn’t a dog. Its long tail draped the pavement and its gait carried something wild. The Mims had told us about four-legged-animal locomotion and hidden symmetries. She’d said a dog is math incarnate: when it walks, its footfalls are evenly spaced in time, and when it trots, diagonal pairs of legs, right front and left back, hit the ground together. This was connected to the fact that when you see birds on a telephone line, they end up evenly spaced. I’d forgotten why.

  We followed the coyote half a mile down the road.

  12 • In a Drawer

  The next morning, we lunged onto our gifts, and then, after the savagery, there was that fizzy holiday feeling of Now what? The Boops had received an Easy-Bake oven and sat bickering about which recipe to make. Cake or bread. Bread or cake.

  “There’s one more for
you. Outside,” my mom said to me. I stepped onto the porch with bare feet. It was cold, the sky pale, almost colorless. Still so early. A hawk coasted. We both stood watching. Then she put a hand on each of my ears and turned my head. “You like it?”

  It took a long time for me to see: a tree house built into our live oak like one of those pictures you find inside another picture. I ran over the wet grass, my ankles prickling, and then climbed the rope ladder. From inside, I could see the neighbors’ yards and beyond. I knew I was going to like it up here.

  When my father walked in hours later, he was carrying a pyramid of store-wrapped presents and a waxy crumpled to-go cup with the straw still in. My mom had put out the good plates, but my sisters and I cut slices of the warm coffee cake and just ate them off our hands.

  He gave my mom earrings. She put them on, and they looked pretty.

  I wondered, then, if she’d gotten anything from Eli. I hadn’t. You’d think from a guy who said he loved her children, the gift boxes would tower. No presents had arrived, though. I led my dad to see my new place and he climbed up with me. “Not too shabby,” he said, hands in his pockets as we stood looking out over the world. My dad was here just for a visit; he could leave anytime he wanted, any minute. We had what we’d had before, but less of it. And we never knew when it would end. Our family couldn’t reassemble; even I understood that whatever held people was fragile and, once broken, couldn’t be put together again. But we weren’t yet something else.

  A week later, rummaging in my mom’s drawer, I found a card with two names and long phone numbers, the handwriting tiny, like little spiders. These London tailors make bespoke men’s suits for women’s bodies. I want to take you and have them make one for yours. I compared it with the note in my Holmes book. It matched.

  She hadn’t said anything about London. I didn’t want her leaving the country. Where would we go? For a few weeks I made a point of checking that drawer for plane tickets. I never found anything until one day, a torn corner of graph paper.

  I guess I’m not good at love, it said in her handwriting.

  This is not bad luck was scrawled in those tiny black spider letters.

  O-kay, I thought. Maybe Eli was for her alone, without us. London.

  When I thought things like that, I just stopped. I could still stop my thinking then. But not for much longer.

  13 • From the Roof

  A day in January, when carpool dropped me home, I found Eli crouching in the front yard wearing a catcher’s mitt. Boop Two was practicing that complicated round-the-world fast pitch they do in softball. My mom stepped out to watch. Eli had driven them to my sister’s piano competition three hours east and back. My dad could never do that. He was always working.

  IT’S NOT THAT I’M SO SMART, IT’S JUST THAT I STAY WITH PROBLEMS LONGER—A.E. was chalked on the ancient standing blackboard my mom and Sare, looking wind-tossed and pleased with their loot, had once hauled into the kitchen from a flea market.

  At the table, we told Eli the story of the not-swallowed Styrofoam Frito, the emergency room, and the horrible Christmas lights that kept shorting out.

  “I can put up lights for you next year,” he said, reaching for my mother’s wrist. I wanted to slap that hand.

  “Maybe you can help him, Miles,” she said.

  “Sure.” And with that a future was pledged: us on the roof with big staplers, bales of wired lights looped on our arms. The Mims and my sisters could watch from below as we lay on our bellies stringing lights on the edge. That was the first feeling I had for Eli. We could be men who did that shit. I liked the idea of putting up lights ourselves.

  After dinner he left. I didn’t wonder, as I should have, if I’d been old enough to care about other people when they turned the corner beyond visibility, if he flew back to DC or just stayed in some cheap hotel here, but the next night he turned up again to take my mom out. Hector was over, Simon and Charlie were coming, and we had our best babysitter, our cleaning woman, Esmeralda, who didn’t speak English and let us eat what we wanted. My mom emerged from her bedroom looking different.

  “What’s that stuff on your face?” I asked.

  Eli stood the same as always—the white shirt again and no socks. He looked my mom up and down and said, “Wow!” I’d read wow in the bubbles of comics, but I’d never heard anybody actually say it. I did a spit take. His lips opened, a bottom and top tooth just barely touching, as if he wanted to eat her. I’d never seen my dad like that.

  They left, and I read “A Scandal in Bohemia” out loud while Hector sketched on my floor.*1 Hector could draw any Simpsons character exactly. Bart and Marge heads cluttered his homework.

  After Simon and Charlie arrived, we took over the upstairs and had a marathon night of Fawlty Towers while folding paper airplanes. I forgot about the whole bottom of the house until the girls pranced up shrieking. They’d messed around in my mom’s closet and had bras on outside their clothes and underwear as hats. Makeup smeared on their faces. I’d once used a bra for Mickey Mouse ears; maybe they remembered that. But the stuff they’d found was shiny. Black ribbons with what seemed to be miniature mousetraps hung down over Boop Two’s face. I didn’t want to think about my mom wearing those.

  “Put that back!” I yelled.

  You knew your mom’s underwear, everyone did, from before. I never went near that dresser now. She had only one desk drawer where I still rummaged. I’d picked through all her things when I was smaller, but that just stopped, the way once she’d come into my bath with me and now not, and it hadn’t seemed like the end of anything until my sisters dressed in her underwear made me remember what had changed. My mom and Eli were having sex probably. That was a lower, threatening world.

  My sisters, in their stupid ugly costumes, had no idea.

  Hector stroked my nose with his finger, from the top, where glasses would go, to the tip. “I’ve been told this calms a lobster,”*2 he said.

  We waded out onto the roof and flew our paper airplanes down under moonlight. Hector told a story about his aunt. She’d started to bake a cake and the recipe called for vanilla extract, so she borrowed a tiny bottle from her neighbor. Then, after she didn’t answer her phone for three days, the police found her passed out in her car, on the shoulder of the Pacific Coast Highway. They took away her license. She’d have to walk now to AA meetings. The architecture firm had arranged a driver to take her to and from work.

  “Wait, vanilla extract has alcohol in it?”

  He said all extracts did and told us his mom was moving from Topanga into his aunt’s house in the Palisades, to help her.

  But then, when Hector went to the bathroom, Charlie whispered, “Aren’t his parents getting divorced?”

  I don’t know, I mouthed.

  Simon blurted, “My mom said they were.”

  When the bathroom door opened, we shut up. Hector stepped back out onto the roof. “What were you guys whispering?”

  We said, “Nothing.”

  He said, “Come on,” and finally we said. So we were the ones who told him his parents were breaking up.

  “I thought it might have been something like that.” He shrugged. “Don’t know why they didn’t just say it.”

  That night, Hector invented mutants. We snuck downstairs and stole stuffed animals from the Boops and found the sewing kit. Simon had gone to Waldorf School until third grade, and he knew how to sew. We amputated limbs, jabbing our hands with the needles, trying to attach them to other sockets. We scissored off heads. We worked for hours and only completed the kitten with a pig’s head and lobster claws. The Boops were out cold. After midnight, as we sprawled half asleep, Airplane! flickering over my friends’ faces, I heard tires. I knew the sound of our tires. I stepped onto the roof.

  “Your holiday weight,” he was saying.

  She made a moo-ey sound.

  “Oh, come on. I love your tummy. Your tush and your tummy are the only overtly sexual parts of you.”

  I went inside. I did
n’t want to hear more. I felt unsafe, all of a sudden, as if wolves were biting at our walls. For a long time, I turned on one side, then the other, bumping into Hector; I couldn’t sleep. In the morning, though, it was just our house, sun on the kitchen cupboards, my mom whisking eggs, Hector and Charlie already at the table drinking OJ. The Boops played jacks on the floor. Eli must have left in the night.

  “The girls said they heard a stampede on the roof. And this morning, I found the front lawn covered with paper airplanes.” She got out the camera and was taking photos when Sare drove up.

  “Better get the picture before the sprinklers go on, ’cause that’s going to be one mess.” I could always charm my mother. But nothing about me was magic to Sare.

  * * *

  *1 This is where I got the idea to change a name or two. I’m thinking maybe I should make every single character in the book a redhead.

  *2 You did give me most of our good lines. I suppose you had to so as not to appear arrogant. As arrogant as we in fact were.

  14 • The Year of the Mutants

  Dante, Max, and Miles G. wanted to get into mutants, too. From then on for a year we had blowout Friday nights with five or six guys sleeping over. We named ourselves the Jocular Rabid Rabbits and sewed mutants in the tree house, which we called the Jocular Rabid Rabbits’ Pad. Simon taught us all to sew. To this day, I’m the only one in the family who can mend with an even stitch or reattach a popped button. That was the most social time of our childhoods, Hector’s and mine.

  One night, Boop Two screamed, seeing her former toy headless, ragged-necked, with fluff coming out. After that, the Mims informed us that we had to buy our own animals to mutilate, with allowance money.

  “How many millions do you need to borrow?” Eli asked on the phone. “I have money, too, Reen. I’m not going to let that get in the way.” How could he have millions? I wondered, with a shiver. My parents talked about other people’s money. Hector’s aunt paid his tuition. Charlie’s grandfather paid. My mom and dad felt like they were the only parents at the school who were actually writing checks out of their own salaries. But none of the families we knew had millions.