Authors: Mona Simpson
Right after the war, a developer called Handelman made this neighborhood
and named it for himself, Handelman Hills. He put up cheap houses for families first starting out. Sometimes Owens drove through the small streets just for the smell. Smoke from burning leaves curled through the air, grass released the aroma of tart earth as the sprinklers sissed evenly back and forth, back and forth. They were beautiful, simple houses.
Before Handelman, the hillsides were covered with bare weeds and scattered oaks and alders. Long ago there had been a Spanish world, shepherds in slow migrations. Even before that, Indians lived on roots from this ground. The streets now alternated between Spanish names and those of Handelman’s relatives back in Ohio. Nothing remained of the Indians except stray arrowheads boys of Owens’ generation dug out of the dirt. No one remembered much past the last conquest.
When he turned up into the driveway, a sprinkler beaded the lawn next door, the fan of water turning itself inside out.
“Yoo-hoo,” he called, slanting in.
She sat at the kitchen table and he joined her, hoisting three huge bags. His dad was out back. The kitchen looked the same as ever, clean-countered, but now it carried a slight lace of rot and the firmer smell of medicine.
“I’ve got something for you,” he said, eyes serious. “I brought some cherries. I think what you need to do is purge your system. You need to just eat cherries, and nothing else, for three or four days. I think that’s what’s going to cure you.”
“You got so many. Put them in the fridge so they’ll keep,” she said. “And take some home. We’ll never eat all those.”
He poured some into a blue bowl on the table between them and got out a smaller plate for pits. He stuffed the other bags in all the empty places of the refrigerator. He stood eating handfuls, as she took them one at a time.
“Shouldn’t we wash them first?” she said, frowning as if she’d done something wrong.
“Forget about it,” he said with his mouth full. “They’re organic.”
“Don’t help with the dirt,” his dad said, clumping in.
“How’re you feeling?” Owens asked.
“Good today. Today I’m good,” she said. “Last night I slept.”
His eyebrows were so you couldn’t say no to him. She ate the cherry meat delicately, around in a strip the way children eat apples, because they are told.
“How are you? How is the business?” She always called it “the business.”
“Everything at Genesis is pretty great.” This was not altogether true. Outside, light faltered over the close-cut yard.
His dad came in again, this time carrying carrots, dirt still attached, in a sheet of newspaper. “We read in the paper about the stock split.” He nodded once. Approval.
“Yeah, so you know what that means. You guys are rich! You should take a trip or buy yourself a new car.”
They heard the electric clock move. He understood too late that was the wrong thing to say.
His dad said, “We don’t want to go anywhere.”
“But we enjoyed the trips we did take. Especially the one to London. With you and Olivia.” His mother picked up the pendant around her neck and let it drop back. “How is she?”
He sighed. “How is Olivia? That’s an excellent question. I’m not sure I know the answer to that, Mom.”
“Well, you see her, don’t you?” His dad stood cleaning the carrots at the sink. In his huge hands, the small white roots looked delicate, like nerves.
“If you don’t know,” she said, “I don’t know who does.”
“She calls here,” his dad said. “Comes up to see her.”
“And the past few times, she brought a friend along and the friend gave me a massage! That was real, real nice.”
“Karen. Yeah, I knew that.”
“Say, tell me, did you pay her something? Because we tried and she wouldn’t take a dime.”
“Oh, yeah, don’t worry about that.”
“Did you pay her or not?”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll pay her. But that’s not the point. She’s a friend of Olivia’s and mine, and she wants to come. She liked you a lot, Mom.”
“Oh, and I like her too. Very much.”
“You know, with Olivia, sometimes I get the feeling that when I’m
old, I may look back and think, I really blew it, because she could have been the love of my life. But we’ll have just missed. Because we can’t really get along.”
Nora leaned in. “What do you fight over?”
“It’s not that.”
She pulled back again, neck retracted.
“I’ll remember this really beautiful girl I was with for a while in my twenties.”
“You going to marry her?” his dad’s gruff voice came. “You’re thirty-one.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if she’d marry me. Sometimes I worry about what’ll happen to her if we don’t stay together. I feel like in five years, I could be driving out to Napa to visit her in the hospital.”
His dad made a noise with his mouth. “Olivia’s not crazy.”
“She kinda is, Dad. You don’t know her that well. She’s got a lot of problems.”
“No crazier’n you are.”
“I remember hearing the mom did that,” Nora said quietly. “And the dad, isn’t he sick too?”
“Yeah, her dad’s got cancer. But he smokes.” Owens shrugged. “She does too.”
“So she hasn’t had it easy.”
“No. But I wish she’d do more to help herself. Like quit smoking.”
“Such a pretty girl. And a nice girl too.”
When he was a boy, Nora thought, they’d looked so much alike that people in stores often remarked on the resemblance. She’d been pleased, extra pleased, but why? It didn’t amount to much at all. He always knew—they’d told him right away when he was old enough to understand—so what did it matter what people said who didn’t know them?
“Cherries are the best fruit,” Owens said. He rolled the stones around in his mouth, then spit them out into a brown bag he took from under the sink. Nora ate one by one, cleaning the pit thoroughly, then taking it out with her red-tinged fingers and setting it on the plate. They’d always had cherries here, every year, from the first of their marriage.
“Say, if you do want to marry her, I’ll give you my ring.” Nora took the slender ring off her finger and offered it to her son.
“Naw,” he said, looking elsewhere, out the window over the sink into the yard.
“You put that back on your finger, Nora,” his father ordered. “You keep your ring. She’s always giving away too much.”
“I don’t know what’ll happen. I suspect we won’t be married. But that we’ll never really forget each other.”
“Why do you think you don’t get along?”
Arthur Owens had to leave the room. He couldn’t stand the way she got with him.
Owens took another handful of cherries. “I wonder if some people are the same and see to a very deep true part of each other. But maybe those people can’t have a kind of everyday life where you eat breakfast and go to movies and raise a family and have it be kind of nice.” His head came up, as it often did with a new idea. “Did you have a great love in your life?”
“Well, your dad is for me.”
“But there wasn’t ever anybody else, before Dad?”
“Nobody special. Now they seem like—oh, I don’t know—maybe people in a book I read. I can’t even remember the names. Your father and I, we had our whole lives.” She gripped the arms of her chair to steady herself.
“What do you think I should do with Olivia?”
Owens’ gaze was straight on her; it felt like a mercy of sun. She wanted that to last. It was all at once what she’d wanted, and it was almost too much. What should he do? She truly did not know. And she was tired. She felt grateful, all of a sudden, for her Arthur. There had been thousands and thousands of days, plain little notes he’d left, his five o’clock phone calls, the way he turned at night and made one noise that let her sleeping body know he wanted sideways now with her arm around his belly and her foot between his calves. There was that and head on chest.
But her boy was nothing like that. “Try to get along better,” was all she could think. “Because love is really your day-to-day life. With your family.”
If she’d said, “Marry her,” Owens fully believed he would. He was a young man who rarely granted anyone power over him. But he also knew his mother well enough to understand that she would go to the edge but not over the cliff, not for this. She liked Olivia but was never truly comfortable with her. Like most mothers, she wished for a young woman more like herself.
“Say, have you talked to Colleen at all?”
“Pony? No. Why?”
“Call her once, Tom. She’s your sister, and she hasn’t always got it so easy either. Maybe she can help you talk out some of these things.”
“Mom, I don’t know how to say this, but Pony and I don’t really get along.”
“Well, try a little. You always played so nice when you were children. You have to work at things sometimes. You don’t get along with Olivia, you don’t get along with Pony. Maybe you have to put a little more in.”
“We just don’t have much in common.”
“Maybe you can help
her
, then. Just until she’s back on her feet.”
At first the cherries tasted only like themselves. Now, after an hour of eating, they acquired a brown tinge, a maturity, like tea. They had not really played so nice, though Nora had tried for years to make them do that. She remembered Colleen sitting hunched at the edge of the lawn, patiently looking for a four-leaf clover. She picked a regular one and twirled the frail stem around and around as if it might have more. Then he walked beside her, reached down and picked a four-leaf from right next to her knee.
“I found one,” he said, running to her, the mother, carrying it like a flag. And Colleen ran up too, clutching the bottom of her skirt. She had loved the little girl because she clung like that. And Colleen always got less from everyone else. I had her by me, day and night, when she was a baby, Nora thought, even in the hospital. She needed me. He never did like that. A few times, always in private, she never even told Art, she took him to the bedroom, closed the shade and tried to let him suck. She didn’t have milk, of course. And he wouldn’t suck. He cried and looked away. Later, Colleen sucked for almost a year.
“Be good to your sister. Do it for me.” For Pony, Nora could go all the way and ask.
They sat a moment, hearing nothing but the dull sound of the refrigerator. They were still eating, but by now the fruit was rote in their mouths.
“I think you should really eat just these cherries, nothing else until they’re gone. Just cherries and water. And when you eat them all, call me and I’ll bring some more. You might start feeling a lot better in a few days.” He talked with the indifferent authority of a doctor.
“So what do you think you’ll do about Olivia?”
He shook his head. “I want her to be proud of me.”
“I’m proud of you,” Nora said. Her tooth hit a liquid and sweet cherry.
“I know.”
“Promise me you’ll look out for Colleen. Just try a little.” She took his arm. “Won’t you give that to me?”
“Mom, we’re really different. We’ve never been close.”
Arthur stepped into the room. “Just leave him be, Nora. What’s his promise worth anyway if he don’t want to give it?”
Owens was talking on the phone, feet up, when Eliot Hanson walked in. Owens did not consider the entry of another person a reason to truncate what he was doing.
A large book of black-and-white photographs devoted to North America’s national parks lay on one of the tabletops. While they waited, most of Owens’ employees pretended to occupy themselves with this book. But Eliot carried a novel with him at all times and easily sank into a chair, returning to it.
A half hour later, Owens hung up. Even then he didn’t immediately turn to his guest. This behavior didn’t upset Eliot Hanson in the least. Nine-tenths of insult is surprise, and he billed in quarter-hour increments. He’d worked for Owens a long time and he was well paid.
“Hi, Eliot,” Owens said at last, while typing on his keyboard. “What can I do for you?”
Eliot stood up and closed the door. “I came to talk about your real mother.”
“Biologic—” Owens started, then bit his lip. “Yes. Did you find anything?”
“Do you have a little while? I’ve got quite a bit of information. There’s also a story about how I met the doctor who delivered you. He was retired and living with his wife in Santa Rosa. And I called—”
“Listen, Eliot, since I asked you to do this for me, my mom’s gotten sick. And here at work, you know, things are tough. So I just don’t have a lot of energy to give this right now.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your mom,” Eliot said. From what he’d heard, Owens often did this: assigned a project and then, when people came in to report, acted as if they were nagging him. But Eliot had become involved with this particular project. “Well, what do you say—shall we drop it for now?”
Owens knew little about his biological mother. But one of her wishes had become abiding policy in his childhood: she had insisted that Arthur send him to college. She had demanded this, merciless, regardless of means. And Arthur capitulated, promising away vacations and household margin, nights out at supper clubs with his friends. All the years of Owens’ childhood, Arthur and Nora kept up a college fund for him and, in fairness, also for Pony. Christmas gifts from relatives and understanding friends came in the form of cash contributions. And when the time came, he went for a semester and dropped out with great relish. He wasn’t going to let a woman he never knew determine his life.
“No, no, I don’t think you should drop it. I’ll tell you what: I’d like you to just keep it for me. Sometime I’ll want to know all this stuff, but I don’t want to hear about it right now.”
What was he like before?
For Olivia, during the years which were and always would be the time of her great love, that was the constant question. Was he always the same?
The only people who’d known him before were his family. His father had opinions; his father could say, but he wouldn’t. “Stubborn,” was all he offered. “Still is.”
Pony wasn’t close enough to know much, but she said he studied magic. “I can make you go away,” he’d warned her. Apparently, for a month Owens went around measuring things between his thumb and first finger. “You’re as big as this; I can measure you. You fit into
my eye, so you’re not very big.” He claimed to have made a horse disappear.