Authors: Mona Simpson
“What you did, Mary, is not the point. None of this is the point.”
“Well, what do you think the point is?”
“Jane’s gotta work harder, that’s all. I’ll talk to her,” he said, as if that finished it.
“Well, she’s waiting. She’s making muffins to bring you.”
It was Tuesday. He’d forgotten all about it. “I’m gonna have to do another night.”
“I told you a week ago, Owens. I can’t tonight.”
“Okay. I’ll get her, then we’ll go to the office. I’ll set her up at a desk.”
“But she has to be in bed by ten. She’s a kid, Owens.”
All these years outside the school system, Jane had been perfect, a rare something. Here, in school, she went unrecognized. The teacher hadn’t said anything, as other people did always, about how Jane was special. Mary was used to uncertainty about herself. But for Jane to be unexceptional, even to this one big-hipped teacher, tilted the whole world.
Jane strapped on her seat belt without being asked, balancing the cardboard box of still-warm muffins on her knees. She was glad they were going to his office: she’d made too many for just the two of them. The muffins released a faint sweetness into the car.
“Now, do you think your muffins’ll be enough for dinner?”
“Muffins are enough for me,” she said.
In a way she never was with her mother, Jane felt confidence in his driving, even when he sped. They made up the road, gliding through dark, in no place, really, but together.
He’d told her about the parking spot and his argument with Rooney, and now was talking about gears and transmissions. He liked
to explain machines and chemical reactions and weather, what made fog, how precipitation began. She tried to be alert because he’d often stop and quiz her, make her tell it back in her own words. She didn’t yet understand this was a quality he reserved only for her and that made up a great portion of what he understood to be paternity.
Jane enjoyed these rides, the sound of road air humming up from the floor, night all around them, and she always regretted the minute they touched ground. He waited too, and they both stared ahead at the dark buildings—ordinary office buildings, rented, like others along this highway. Someday, he told her, they’d build. Genesis should have its own buildings, with land around. He envisioned it as a college campus.
He’d had architects out from New York trudging these hills, jackets slung over their shoulders, getting mud on their wingtip shoes. The problem they couldn’t divine was where to put it. Owens loved this highway and, remained loyal to it; he’d lived and worked off it for years, he wasn’t going to move to El Camino, even though a fleet of historians reported that it was the original El Camino Real that ran through California all the way to Mexico. He figured it had changed a lot since then.
They parked in the slot that now said
G. J. Rooney
. Jane took small fast steps to keep up, across the wide lot. Owens sighed. “Olivia could be more a part of my life here. I told her at the beginning, we could set up a little office for her and by now everybody’d know her.”
Walking her child’s mincing double steps, Jane tried to be what Olivia wouldn’t. Tonight she’d baked thirty-six muffins, with oat flour, bran, molasses and bananas. She’d tried to copy a muffin from a place Owens liked, called Mae’s, but her efforts were doomed because she listened so carefully to her father that she was limited herself to ingredients he approved of. And Owens, like many people, enjoyed some foods in total ignorance of their composition.
Jane liked going to her father’s office. She didn’t mind hanging around, waiting. She would have liked a little desk set up there for her.
She couldn’t start her homework yet. She’d been banished to the microscope room to study, but every time she opened the book it went
dull on her, like a pill without water, so she searched the desk drawers and found bags of trail mix, and in the file cabinet a smelly pair of high-tops. An electric guitar leaned in the corner. She would do just one more thing and then her homework. She took out her postcard from Noah.
Today I heard a boy whine, “What do I need a penny for?
”
“
They say when you find a penny it’s good luck.” This wasn’t his mom but some baby-sitter. She looked young and bored
.
“
But I don’t need luck.
”
“
It’s nice to have, just you keep it, someday you may need it, everybody does.
”
“
I don’t like this penny, it’s not shiny.
”
“
Give it to me, then,” the baby-sitter finally said
.
He said no
.
Remember, Jane: never give away your luck
.
Noah asked her to write him back, and Jane meant to do that and her homework, but she didn’t have nice writing paper or an envelope or a stamp. There were so many things she always meant to do.
At midnight, her father had finally come to tell her it was time to go home. She still hadn’t done her homework, but now it was too late to try. She sat on a couch, her knees hooked over the old arm, while he went over just one more thing. Her muffins lay ravaged on the table. Jane craved another one, the banana melt with oats, but he was talking, and to get it she’d have to walk across the room, and everyone would see.
Owens was his best now, half sitting, talking to guys who trusted him. “We don’t really have much time. We have a deadline, and people are going to be making judgments about us. But what they don’t understand is that that’s not at all what it’s about. What I saw Rich doing down there in his corner or the tests Henry’s going to do just before the sun comes up tomorrow, this is what we’re here for. So in another way that’s not exactly logical, we have a lot of time—all the time we need to go into each one of these problems to the bottom. The worst thing we could possibly do now is pull back. We can’t afford interruptions. Because as you all know, it’s not hard when time is smooth. When there are no days and nights or Tuesdays and Fridays and there’s
only the clock of the work. I’ve been on two projects like this, and I can tell you we’re going to do more now, in these eight days, than we’ve done in the past year. We weren’t far enough
in
before.”
Jane pulled her knees closer, her tongue touching skin through the jeans hole. She tried to apply what he was saying. But there was no work yet she did. When her mind wandered, it entered lush scenes of reunion with all the people she’d known in her life, watching her receive an award….
“We got to stay healthy,” he said. “That’s crucial now.”
Rich stood hunched. He was tall and embarrassed of his height. “Shit,” he said. “My family’s coming in two days.”
Jane looked around the room at the guys so familiar to her father. He’d given her a book about the Manhattan Project and said it was a lot like here. But in the book, the men wore shirts and ties, suit pants, hard shoes. Like Owens, they had faces like fine dogs. But these guys were wilder. Henry’s hair frizzed out five inches, and everybody except Rich wore running shoes. Rich was the one good thing from his semester at Harvard, Owens had said—his professor, who’d come for a year to help him out (as Owens put it) and to secure his children’s inheritance (as Rich explained it to Jane). Owens said he thought all the guys were nice-looking. He could probably hardly see them anymore, the way he had at first or the way strangers might. It occurred to Jane that this transformation could happen to women too, if he knew them this well. But he never would.
In the beginning, he had hired the people he knew. They smoked dope together and hiked the Grand Canyon. But now he interviewed at graduate schools all over the country. He lectured at these schools and drew audiences of more than a thousand. They offered him large fees for appearances, fees he always donated to their scholarship funds. Young guys like Henry, he said, were as different from Owens at that age as they could be. But he no longer worried, as he once had, that he’d be unable to love his own children because they would be so different from himself. Jane was just glad he’d changed his mind.
“You’re right,” Rich mumbled. “I gotta know you’re right. I just don’t know what to do with my folks.”
“Well, these are tough choices. And I’d have to say, your folks, much as you love them, might just have to wait till after D day. We’ve got to find that one step further in purification so whatever protease is eating it up, can’t anymore. I mean, this is the way I look at it. There are people I’d love to see for dinner and go to their house and meet their kid—no, I really would. There’s introductions I’d give, keynote addresses, I’d go to birthday parties, baptisms, the works, I’d meet every one of these women people promise to introduce me to. These people are fine, there’s nothing wrong with them, I like them, I’d learn from them, I’d do ten lectures and I’d have dinner with your parents, Rich—if I weren’t going to die.” He swiveled in his chair. “Come to think of it, even as it is, I’d still love to meet your parents. But after we’re done with this. Same goes for meeting women. So keep those names.”
The guys started making jokes now, about vitamins and what to eat for energy.
“Pills,” Henry said. “Many, many pills.”
“Oh, and one last thing before I leave, guys.”
Rich was pacing, head curled down, feeding himself raisins from his hand.
“I’ve got good news for the night owls. I know you all like juice and you like it fresh as possible. And the same is true for Mae’s muffins. And so I’ve arranged with both companies to deliver starting this morning at five, every day between now and D Day.”
Sounds of gratitude were emitted in the room.
“And even better,” Rich said, “tonight we have Jane’s muffins.”
Jane put her head down in the bask-wash of happiness. Her mom understood the secret of muffins: it was the baking powder. People let their baking powder go old. They bought new baking powder every time, even though it maddened Mary to throw out the red cans nine-tenths full.
“Well, I’ve had Jane’s muffins,” Owens said, stilling his head as if he were considering an important judgment. “And they’ve got a lot of love in them, but overall, I think Mae’s are better.”
Rich exploded. “Don’t you see, Owens? Having love in them
makes
them better.”
“It’s okay,” Jane said. Rich looked at her, shaking his head, as if he was thinking she was a year, maybe more, away from enlightenment. She shrugged. “My identity’s not in my muffins.”
“Well, guys, I’ve got to get Jane home to bed,” Owens said. “See you in the morning.”
Jane had been thinking of a way to take some muffins home, at least two for breakfast. But now that he’d said Mae’s were better, she felt ashamed to care. She wanted one for herself, but she couldn’t get it without him seeing.
On the way downstairs, he said, “Listen, I want to talk to you. This is your first month of school, and as you know, I had some doubts. And a lot of what I was worried about is coming true.”
The teacher conference, he meant. She started sinking. She knew she hadn’t done her homework, but she thought it was possible the teacher would say she was excellent anyway and give her a star.
“I want you to stop socializing and think of yourself as a nun on a retreat. No telephone. I think you should try to work a whole lot. Not just homework. I’d do that first, get it out of the way, and when that’s done, then go a lot deeper into the subjects by yourself.”
“But a lot of times it isn’t that interesting. And I don’t know why I can’t talk to my friends.”
“Sometimes we need to make our days very simple. Like now, I see the guys at work, I see Olivia, and I see you.”
“And my mom.”
“And your mother, but mostly just when I pick you up. There’re people I really like, and if I think about it, I miss them. But sometimes things require more than you can give if you’re leading this full-fledged social life. Now, when you’re older you can decide whether you want to devote your life to a vocation or be some little social butterfly. But right now I’m your parent, and it’s my job to teach you. And I’d like you to gain some experience of solitude.”
“Did my mom seem okay this afternoon?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Why?” He laughed. “As okay as she ever does.”
She sighed. “I’ll try.” When he put it that way, how could she say no? Plus he wasn’t around enough to really tell. She could probably still talk to Madeleine and Johanna.
She knew that for him, there was never a month or a day or a year when the answer came back,
Yes, you did the greatest thing
, because at exactly the moment it was done, his eyes opened and he saw how much else in the world was going on at the same time. Now he still worked the extra hour—against weather, movies, picnics, browsing, being bored on the phone and dangling so it went on longer, against life, really—to prove to himself he could do it again.
“I’ve got more work to do when we get home. That Berkeley speech is in seven weeks.”
He was sensitive about his education, she could tell. Maybe he wished he’d stayed in college longer. He did a lot of speeches at big industry conventions, when he was introducing new products; and at universities, he talked about Genesis.
But she knew the Berkeley speech was different. He told her Henry James had spoken in the same lecture series and the guy who found the shape of DNA. She had a feeling this was not for Genesis. This was for him.
“There’s those people we went to see that time, over across the bay,” she said, pointing to an old picture in the foyer.
“Aw, Shep and Lamb. They look really young, don’t they? And there’s Frank.” He sounded fond, as if he wished he could see them all. But Jane suspected he could, if he just called them. Maybe not Frank.
Jane remembered that evening at Minna’s house, months before, and she thought about why movie stars married movie stars and why, most often, the rich marry the rich. When she and her mother delivered the tuition check to her school, the administrator had talked, as people often did, about whom Owens would marry. “My sources say it won’t be the one he’s with now,” she said. Later in the conversation, she’d said it might be easier for Owens if he found someone who already had money.