by Mona Simpson
“What are we going to do with all the Inca Kola?” Hector asked.
“Starting next week, I’ll cut it to half price. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know. We may have to actually start drinking it.”
Hector loved the spicy pig chips. But then, he’d eaten bugs when he was little.*
* * *
* I always did have the more refined palate. That became clear later, with the older version of Coke and bath salts.
24 • Einstein Was a Great Romantic
We were standing in front of Cottonwoods waiting for carpool when Eli showed up on foot. No one walked to carpool. He said hi to my friends—he knew the Rabid Rabbits’ names, even Simon’s, and he’d only met him once, and they nodded, not the least surprised to be remembered—and asked me if I wanted to take a walk. I said sure, and we headed to a supermarket parking lot, where he put his hand on top of a rusted Volvo. The car wasn’t as neat as I expected from what my dad had since dubbed the Closet Caper. A dirty toy slanted on the backseat. “My friend Mark lets me borrow his mother-in-law’s car,” he said. “She doesn’t use it. I pay for the long-term parking.” He drove south to a tract of land with a miles-long duck pond and a dusty road. There were old half-neglected parks like this all over LA. We started to roam.
“Your mom told me about the math teacher,” he said. “She sounds frustrating.”
The Mims never thought I had the right to be frustrated. No matter how horrible a teacher, my parents wanted me to make myself the little favorite. “It kinda is. I mean, before this year, I actually liked math.”
“Well, what, wh-what did you like about it?”
Again, his question surprised me. Everything my parents said about math directly pertained to my abysmal grade and my manual lifting of it. “It was always kind of easy.”
When Eli listened, his hands dug into his pockets, and his head turned down. He had a funny-shaped head and a long neck, darkly tan with a bump. “When I was your age, I was just getting to understand that I couldn’t do math. I loved it, I could see it, but I wasn’t going to be good enough to do it. My math test scores were so low compared to my verbal, they thought I’d cheated. I made myself learn. I’d go over every page six times. The next year my scores jumped two hundred points. Then the people from the College Board wanted to study me because I was such an anomaly.” He must have been able to tell I didn’t know the word because he said, “Anomaly means ‘oddball.’ ”
I couldn’t imagine my dad ever calling himself an oddball. And he wasn’t one. “Do you mind being short?” I asked all of a sudden, thinking of my father. Height never strayed far from my father’s consciousness. Eli was short, too.
“You know, I never really knew I was short, I didn’t know until—” Then he stammered. I was aware of some problem. Like dust on a CD.
“Until what?” I said, to help.
“Well, when I was getting married, my in-laws complained. That’s how I first heard I was short.”
“Nazis,” I said—the kind of joke that made my mom tense up.
But Eli laughed. “They actually are German.”
“Did they like you?”
He paused. “Not really. The night before the wedding, I sat with Jean on their dock—they have kind of a compound, on a lake—and I apologized for taking her away from all that. She didn’t deny it. I always thought that was good. Honest.” He spoke about his ex-wife kindly. That troubled me in some way I didn’t understand. I wasn’t being fair. When my parents talked about each other in those same tones, it seemed natural and right. We walked for a long time. I thought of how he listened on the phone at night for hours to my mom and how, when she called my dad, he rushed her off. My dad didn’t do that to me as much.
“I always tell your mother that math, math makes what I do ornamental. Whereas an equation”—his arms were going—“an equation is permanent.”
She’d written on the blackboard: EINSTEIN WAS A GREAT ROMANTIC. Eli was, too, if he could go on this way about math.
I felt his hand on my back. “You know, I’m deeply in love with your mother.”
“Oh,” I mumbled, wondering, Should I have said Thank you?
“It’s, it’s the most important thing that’s ever happened to me. Even more than my mother dying.”
“Oh, good,” I replied automatically, then thought, Duh! Like I wanted her to beat his mother’s dying! It wasn’t until later that I remembered he had a kid. The Mims would say having us was the most important thing that ever happened to her.
I felt sorry for Eli all over again. It didn’t occur to me then to feel sorry for his kid. I couldn’t even remember its name.
25 • Angeldog
When we returned home, a dog stood sniffing in our yard. Eli coaxed it with the voice some people try on children. “This is a stray,” he told me. “See, no collar. And he’s dirty. He’s probably been homeless a few weeks already.” He cooed, “Are you hungry?”
“Should I get him milk?” I asked. Cats liked milk.
“Do you have any canned pumpkin?”
“I don’t think so.” Canned pumpkin! It wasn’t Thanksgiving, and the Halloween jack-o’-lanterns had already caved in and been hauled out back to compost. Eli carried the dog into the house, where the Boops fell onto it. Boop One went at him with a pink brush. “Can we give him a bath?” she asked. “He stinks a little.”
Eli found our rice and some kind of broth in a box, and he was unlatching cabinets, looking for a pot. “He probably hasn’t eaten for a few days. So we want to give him food that won’t upset his stomach.”
Both my sisters knelt over the dog. “Can we keep him?” Boop Two asked.
“First, we should put up signs and try to find his owners, if he has any.”
“I feel like he’s supposed to be our dog,” Boop One said. “He came to our yard. He found us. Maybe he’s an angel. For our family.”
By the time my mother walked in and noticed every cabinet door hanging open, rice fanned on the floor, and Eli stirring a pot on the stove, Boop One’s eyes had swelled almost shut. My mother screamed, then looked at me, accusing. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed: her eyes were horizontal slits, and what showed was red, not white. On her arms, bumps pushed up from below the skin like marbles, growing. “Oh my God,” my mom said. “We can’t keep that dog here.”
“She was brushing him,” I said.
Eli squatted, murmuring to the dog. He poured the rice gruel into a bowl and blew to cool it. The Mims steered my sister into the bathroom.
“Should we be driving her to the hospital?” I called.
All the while, Eli baby-talked the dog.
I went to the Boops’ bathroom, where all three females stood in steam.
“Can you breathe, sweetheart?” my mom asked, hysterically calm.
“A ball is swelling in my throat.”
“Wait in the kitchen, Miles,” my mom said.
I scuffed back to where Eli seemed to be overpitying the dog.
“Honey,” he called. “Do you have Benadryl? Should I go buy some?”
“I’ve got Claritin, if it’s not expired,” she said.
He opened drawers until he found the medicine, then held the little bottle up. “It’s okay,” he said. He didn’t seem that worried. Did he think my sister was faking it? I couldn’t see how you could fake bumps coming up beneath your skin.
“I’m going to make a call,” he said.
My mom, who’d just come into the kitchen, looked up at him.
“A woman I know in Malibu,” he said, “she once helped me rescue a bird.”
The Mims looked away. She’d thought he was calling someone about her daughter. She took ice out of the freezer and said, “Miles, grab the thermometer.”
“I’m going to drive him to the shelter,” Eli yelled.
“Miles can go with you,” she hollered back. I didn’t appreciate being volunteered. I brought in the thermometer. “Can she breathe?” I asked.
“The bumps
are going down,” my mom said, shower water still running behind her.
Eli carried the dog. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. I’m not going to leave him there if it’s not the right place.” I followed him to the car. I thought I had to. “I really don’t know what time I’ll be able to get you back.”
“I can take a bus,” I said, but I didn’t know where the pound was. And I had to read two chapters of a book for World Civ. In the car, you could really smell the dog.
Why did I have to go?
We drove through clouds of fog and finally parked in front of a low, flat building. He lifted the dog out of the back. I just followed along. After whispering to the dog, Eli talked to a man behind the desk. I still wanted a puppy but not tonight, not with my sister all allergic. I needed our house to go back to the way it was before. With the flip of a latch, the man opened a swinging door, and we followed him through a maze of cages. Dogs howled, pushing against their wire doors. I saw one of the kind my sisters wanted: a white fluff ball. The man shoved our dog into a cage, poured food, and filled another bowl with water from a hose. Our dog curled himself up in a back corner.
“How long do we have?” Eli asked.
“We’re just under capacity now. Not bad. At least three weeks.”
“We’ll check in every day,” Eli said.
I stayed quiet riding back. He parked in front of the house and turned the engine off. I didn’t know whether or not he was coming in.
“When he said three weeks, that’s for what?” I asked.
“That’s how long they can keep him before they’ll put him to sleep. A thousand dogs get euthanized every month in Los Angeles.”
I had a flash of the fluffy dog with a pig’s paws. But that real dog we’d just seen would most likely die. Sitting in the car, I thought of the things I’d read about lab animals and eating meat. We ate meat. Except when Eli was here.
Eli came in that night after all. My mom had pasta waiting, covered with a striped towel. Boop One was breathing again, the bumps down. For the first time in hours, Eli smiled, watching my mother move around the kitchen. Then she stood behind his chair, her hand on his neck. “You’re not using that sunblock I gave you. You’re burned.”
“I was using it. I ran out.”
He left that night carrying a tube of sunblock in the front pocket of his white shirt. “Now, listen,” he said to me. “Here’s the number for the shelter. You should call every day.” He gave me the slip of paper. I liked it that he trusted me with this.
After a week, it seemed I was the only one who remembered. Boop One, who’d thought it was an angeldog before it’d made her allergic, didn’t ask at all. I thought of his face and the dirty tufts of fur. Then, on a Thursday, Boop Two asked, “Did they find the owners yet?” She stood there while I called. They told us he was eating, but no one had come for him. After that, Boop Two called every day; I heard her in their room on the princess phone. One night, she asked my mom for a ride to the pound. We went, the three of us, and when we came to the dog’s cage, he pressed up against the wire, rattling it, and making a noise from inside. “He remembers us,” my sister said.
It was two weeks now. I thought of Eli’s question. Boop Two asked the woman, who had hairy legs, if they took volunteers.
“You have school,” my mom said. “And speech therapy. And piano.”
“And weekends,” said Boop Two.
26 • A Letter Under My Father’s Door
In the car one day I asked my mom what ever happened with Eli’s brother.
“Well, he’s at home,” she said. “He was in the hospital eight weeks, but unfortunately they were only able to reduce the Dalmane a small increment.”
“So what happens now? He’ll keep taking it forever?”
She didn’t answer. We were at a stop sign, and her short nails drummed against the steering wheel. I’d recently noticed that a lot of other moms’ fingernails were different. The girls in my class were beginning to do that, too. I preferred my mom’s hands.
“Will he look for a new job?” I asked.
“I found a placement agency for people with disabilities. I’ve got to remind Eli. I keep thinking we should hire a student to at least get Hugo out for a walk every day.”
That we again. I didn’t think we could afford to be hiring brother-walkers, even student brother-walkers. There were lots of things we couldn’t afford anymore.
She sighed. “I need to keep on Eli about that.”
Later that night, I thought about what it meant that Eli’s brother had been in the hospital all summer to be weaned from a drug they hadn’t been able to get him off of.
I googled Dalmane. It seemed to be a drug for anxiety. So when they made the dosage lower, what—he got convulsions or foamed at the mouth? I finished the sentence three different ways and hit a wall. What she meant but wasn’t saying was that when they didn’t give him the amount he needed, he went suicidal. There’d been nothing like this in my family before that you had to steer around thinking about. I felt it settle in my chest. A tightness. A tender spot. A nest. It made us different. I felt older.
Hector was still obsessed with Eli’s head. He thought it should have a scar.
“Maybe his hair covers it,” I said, though only the top part of his head had hair.
“Does he ever say anything about the operation?” Hector asked.
“Not to me. Maybe he did to her. It’s been a while.”
Hector wanted to check her e-mail. I didn’t say he could, but he opened her computer and the program popped right up, no password or anything. She didn’t erase messages, apparently. He easily scrolled back to June.
From: [email protected]
Subject: in way of apology, not exoneration
Date: June 17, 2004 12:26:59 PM PDT
To: [email protected]
something the neurologist showed me on encephalitis
The classic presentation is encephalopathy with diffuse or focal neurologic symptoms, including the following:
Behavioral and personality changes, decreased level of consciousness.
“I’m not sure what that proves,” I said.
“Listen to your mom,” he said, and read out. “I’m feeling so happy and myself in this. You’ve given me a life. July eighth.”
That went through my body like a shock. “Stop,” I said. “I mean, she likes him, maybe she loves him, I like him, too, but it’s not like she didn’t have a life.”
I pushed the lid of her laptop down.
“Wait. I found you a nice one.”
There’s nothing so deeply consoling as sitting in my children’s music lessons.
But she meant my sister. I’d quit piano years ago. “Enough already!”
I yelled that, startling us both.
Espionage had a life of its own. Secrets opened to me when I wasn’t even looking. My dad took us to dinner at a place that served Mexican Coke in glass bottles, the same ones I had in my closet! “It’s the old formula,” the waitress told me. “Made with cane sugar.” My dad asked if they came in diet. When the bill was set down, I asked to see: six dollars each! I’d been right to hold off; I had to convince people that Mexican Coke had added value. That night I stayed up late researching, with a bowl of cereal at my dad’s steel counter. In an early hour of the morning, while I read about MexiCoke, a letter shot under the front door, and through the glass, I saw the back of a short trench coat dashing across the lawn. It wasn’t Holland, I didn’t think. A letter under the door after midnight! I held it up to the computer glow. The envelope just said Cary in turquoise ink. No Hart. I put it back on the concrete floor for him to find. He’d jam it in his desk drawer or mix it in with the pile of bills and scripts on the counter. I’d have to read it after it was open. But the next night, we were back at my mom’s house, and so I couldn’t check.
While my dad was probably ignoring the letter, we sat at the table, on the other side of Santa Monica. Boop Two, who’d always lived on chicken tenders, a
nnounced that she was going to stop eating animals, including birds. “I decided not to eat anything that has a face,” she said.
“What about Thanksgiving?” I said.
“I’ll just have pie.”
A few weeks later a woman phoned for her. I was finding a pen to take a message when the woman said, “It’s Dorie from the shelter. Could you tell her Hunter’s been adopted?”
I started hopping on one foot. I should have asked more, but I was embarrassed at how happy I felt with this stranger on the phone. Later, Boop Two called her back. She sat down after, her hands underneath her butt. “He got a good home, a family with five kids. One is developmentally disabled. So Angeldog is somebody else’s. I thought if nobody adopted him, we’d get him.”
All of a sudden, I was mad at Boop One, who’d made such a fuss that first day and then forgotten, and even at the Mims. We agreed not to tell them until they asked. They didn’t ask.
Dogless, our lives went on. Angelless too.
I looked everywhere at my dad’s for the envelope with the turquoise writing. It gave me something to do at his house. But I never found it. He must have thrown it out.
27 • Are You Still in the Same House?
Up until then, my dad had come to all our holidays, but this year he was going to Hawaii. My mom tried to talk him into leaving the day after Thanksgiving, but she could never get him to do what he didn’t want to. I was beginning to see that we were better at talking him into things than she was.
Then, the Tuesday morning before vacation, when we were racing around his house, Holland appeared at the sliding glass doors wearing cutoffs and combat boots, carrying a small orange suitcase, and holding the New York Times in its blue bag. Her legs were tan, with little yolks for knees. I opened the door. She handed me the paper. My dad and the Boops pressed up around me. My dad gave her a look; I was more fluent in his looks than in Latin. This one meant accusation.