Authors: Mona Simpson
Olivia laughed.
“What?” His face opened, perplexed; he truly did not get the joke.
“Never mind.”
He told them about vintages then, and the vintage of the year Jane was born was no good or at least not anything special. Nineteen sixty, on the other hand, Olivia’s year, was awesome.
Then it was morning, and Jane ran downstairs, squeezed oranges and put on oatmeal. But Owens said he was fasting.
He was driving up to Berkeley himself, in his low-to-the-ground car. She was scheduled to take the bus with everyone else. When Olivia had offered to drive, he said he wanted them on the bus. Olivia hadn’t even slept there. “I can’t afford to have a fight,” he said. “And given our odds, the chances of that happening are pretty good.” The bus would leave the Exodus parking lot at nine sharp. The cooks were going to drive her there.
“I’m ready,” she said. “I could come with you.”
“I think I need to be alone this morning.”
She just wanted to be with him in the car, pushing that lever to make the seat tilt back. She would’ve been quiet and left him alone. She always had.
The sky this morning was a pale blue, steady as far as you could see, with bulky white clouds. The columns of neat trimmed palms and shaggy sycamores already cast pure navy shadows. He stood outside the house like a traveler, holding his suit bag and his shoes.
“Good luck today,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, looking out at the distant mountains. At moments that seemed important, he believed there was something to be learned from nature. He stood there trying to be humble. A plain moth fluttered near his hair.
“Come up on stage after and find me.”
In his dressing room, Kathleen poured fresh pomegranate juice. She was tall and ready-handed, and in the last two weeks Owens had found it very hard to keep from comparing her to Olivia.
Though she was twenty-six, a college graduate and married, Kathleen seemed to him unspeakably innocent. He was pretty sure she’d
slept only with the one guy. From the wedding picture on her desk, he guessed there was fondness but no great passion. Her husband had a mustache and the beginnings of a belly, a salesman kind of guy.
She took his bag and hung the garments up, smoothing the good fabrics with the flat of her hands a little longer than for the clothes, then set the shoes on the closet floor.
Where was Olivia, he wondered. She could be here this morning with juice.
The bus hadn’t left at nine sharp. The driver had a list, and quite a few people were not there yet. So the bus waited in the empty parking lot. Exodus was closed for the day, because everyone was going to be in the audience. They’d hired temps to answer phones. Down the road, at Genesis, spangles of light twisted off the tops of cars. For everyone else, it was a plain Wednesday.
Jane stood on the blacktop, one shoe scratching an itch. It was strange to be out of school at this hour. This was the first day she’d missed since she started. In the mountains, she’d been absent all the time for no reason at all, but down here she wanted her attendance record to be perfect. Still, Owens had told her this was important, and his father and his sister were already on the bus, facing forward.
Just then, Owens’ father unfolded out of the door. He seemed like a sheriff, very tall, his mouth crossed with lines. He had on an open-collar shirt, like the boys at school wore. All the men up in the mountains had dressed like him, but Jane wasn’t used to that anymore.
“What do you think about Olivia?” he said.
“Maybe she decided to drive.”
“Told me we were leaving at nine and she’d be here. But it’s nine-thirty! I don’t know what to do and neither does the bus driver. Man’s got a job. I don’t blame him.”
“I could call, I guess.” A pay phone wavered at the end of the lot. The diagonal walk in early heat seemed like wading in clothes through water. Jane understood she could save Olivia, but she didn’t want to. If she did, no one would remember, but if she didn’t, would they count it and blame her? Jane’s fingers punched the numbers. Maybe Olivia was already driving, but Jane knew she wasn’t. Jane could leave her in the warm silence and change the day and ever after.
“ ‘Lo.” Olivia’s voice curved, hollow with sleep.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Oh, my God. Thank God you called, Jane. Just go on without me. I have to take a shower. I’ll drive up.”
“Did you get a new dress?” Jane had heard Owens say she’d better buy one.
“New enough. What are you wearing, Jane?”
“My uniform.”
Jane’s mom had a new dress, but not for today. They’d bought it together to cheer her up. It had cost ninety-four dollars. She was meeting Jane there. She had an appointment with her orthodontist this morning, and if she canceled she’d have to wait another six weeks. She was in a hurry to get her teeth straight and on with her life.
The bus still arrived forty-five minutes early, the way Owens liked his plans to work. And when Olivia raced in through the backstage entrance—her deep smile bordering on apology—he threw his arm around her all the same. He whispered that there were seats saved for family in the first three rows.
Everyone wanted Jane, and there was a fuss over whom she sat next to. Olivia scootched her hand open and closed and then talked with her chin down, her voice slurring all motherly. And then her grandfather strode over and whispered, “She wants to sit down front, we got a place.”
One place, Mary noted; he has his nerve. “I think I’ll keep her here by me,” she said. When she was pregnant, he’d told people she was the town pump. And now he wanted her daughter for the front row.
Jane was the only child here. People nudged to point her out. Now she wanted to hold her mother’s hand because of what she’d done.
She’d done it fast, and it had come to her like an inspiration. Olivia had waved and asked if she wanted to see Owens. And she’d said yes and not turned back to her mother, who felt looked at without her.
There was a door and a man in a uniform. For a second, Jane thought of her mother, the two of them standing holding hands before a closed door. But with Olivia, she went right through to the other side. People she’d seen at his office walked around holding clipboards.
In his dressing room, her father had seemed calm. He was wearing suit pants and a white shirt, no tie or jacket. He hugged Jane without looking at her, then wandered out to the hallway. Jane realized her mother was right about Owens, his faults and his talents: both were true, just outsized. He was like Mount Rushmore, so big.
But he was too big. Jane wanted to be felt, like putting a pin in a huge balloon.
The room was quiet, except for the noise of Kathleen peeing. Jane’s eyes hit the shoes with their cedar shoe trees. She picked them up and hid them behind some boxes in the closet. Then she went out into the hall, near her father. It seemed maybe nothing had really happened. His hand drifted idly to her hair.
Kathleen waited at the door of the dressing room, as if she were not allowed out. Her face was all on him, alive. If his head made the slightest turn towards her, everything opened. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose and on her arms. Jane imagined her in a clean kitchen, holding a bowl of cupcake frosting and stirring.
Owens had told Jane that on a business trip to Washington, D.C., they stayed up until four in the morning, talking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
“Talking about what?” she’d asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he’d said. “About God and what we owe America.” Then he admitted they’d made out, and it was some of the most exciting kissing he’d done in years.
“But she’s married!”
“I know. That’s why I’d rather you didn’t tell anybody. I don’t think she’s too happy in her marriage, though.”
“Who do you love more—Kathleen or Olivia?” He didn’t seem pressed to decide.
Then it was time for the speech, and nothing happened. Jane believed and didn’t believe it was because of his shoes.
Waves of tiny noises rippled through the crowd. Jane knew she wasn’t supposed to talk to the men crouching with cameras. Even the balconies were full. “Why do you think they’re late?” she whispered.
“He’s always late,” Mary said. “He’s always been.”
“You can tell this is important just from the place.” The ceilings went so high. The seats were wood and rich, soft velvet.
“They probably just rented it,” Mary said. “But colleges are beautiful. Maybe he’ll have this for you when you get married.”
Jane knew he wouldn’t. For a wedding he’d want someplace small. Or that cold, bare, rainy mission he liked.
As the minutes passed, Jane got worse and worse. It was becoming irrecoverable, like in a dream, and now there was nothing she could do but clutch the armrests on her chair and wait. They would leave soon, all these people, and he would have missed his best chance because of her.
Then, just like that, her father came out in a spotlight, his same hulking walk, and everyone stood clapping. She felt the warm relief on her chest: you couldn’t harm him if you tried.
But there were some other black shoes on his feet.
“Hello. My name is Tom Owens, and I didn’t go to any school to be governor.”
The crowd was suddenly loud, and Jane and Mary popped up cheering, as if they’d been suppressed under lids all this time.
“I believe there are two kinds of human endeavor in this world that have produced great results. One is collective effort, and that’s the way of working I know best. And the other is the individual achievement of poets and artists.”
Jane knew the secret. Her father was going to work around to him at the end. She’d been there when he’d first read about him in the newspaper. Today he was going to say, “One morning I was reading the newspaper with my daughter, and I read a story about a man in a country which has been engaged in a tragic civil war. And this man lived in the oldest city in his country. And at a time when most everybody who possibly could was getting out, this man made no plans to move from his apartment. But every day, around dusk, he walked into one of the main squares of his city and sang for an hour until it was dark, with artillery shells exploding all around him. And he’s here today to sing for us.”
But when it happened, he’d changed his speech and didn’t mention having a daughter at all. And for the first time ever that she knew, he was making a bad speech. All her life, Jane had learned to count on few things from her father, but one of them was charisma; she’d never considered that he could fail to mesmerize. It was an absolute she’d had to live with, and now that it was slipping, she felt frightened of so much.
He was reading from notes, as if he didn’t want to let himself be himself.
There was a quality in people that lived beneath the surface and only sometimes sparkled up, which she could not match with a word. “Terror” was only approximate. But Jane was keen to those glints and shards—which showed themselves not so much in the face as in movement—because she believed she could help. “You shouldn’t worry about that
at all
, Mom,” she’d whisper, slipping a hand into hers. She had divined this in everyone except Owens. And now, as she watched him speak, it occurred to her that because he didn’t feel it, she felt it for him.
Years before, he’d started out quick and smart with journalists. He said he’d seen his words twisted into helixes he didn’t recognize. So maybe he was trying to rein himself in. This speech, he’d told her, was a personal honor—not just a platform to evangelize for Exodus or run for political office. He’d already given four gubernatorial speeches, and the men who wanted him to run had scheduled a fund-raiser at the Bohemian Club’s Russian River retreat. But he intended to use this podium for none of that. He had aims he could hardly put into the right words, he’d told her.
But he was going on too long; even Jane could tell that. He was talking about education, pointing to an elaborate chart he drew on a blackboard. In secret, she had been going to the Alta public library and studying him. Articles she’d read had accused him of rhetoric, hyperbole, an absence of facts; on the front of a newspaper’s Sunday magazine, someone had called him the ultimate salesman. But Jane knew he wasn’t that. So today he was giving facts and differentials and equations. He kept his own levity about the stupefying idiocy of the system from rising up into words.
Or maybe it wasn’t the journalists. Maybe it was here. Jane knew
the places her parents lied. And the one they had in common was college. They both said college didn’t matter, but even when they said the word, they sounded wistful. Maybe he thought this was the one thing better than he was.
Then somebody in the audience went out the back, letting the door slam. The noise rang through the auditorium as Owens continued on about his plan to issue vouchers to every parent of a school-age child. Then, before the echo of the noise finally ended, someone dropped his keys. Jane watched with alarm as heads turned, searching for the sound. People fidgeted in their seats. Then coins dropped somewhere else further back. By now it must have been on purpose. People were dropping money: not all at once, but one at a time, the silvery sound falling from different parts of the audience; as soon as one dimmed and there was only memory ringing in the air, another began. Owens riffled through his pages. She knew he saw the patches of movement, but he had many pages more to go. This had never happened to him before. What he did then was almost preordained. His father, who looked like a sheriff, sat in the front row, perfectly right-angled. Owens read every line on every page.
In the end there was booming applause, but of a nature that seemed too exuberant for even Owens to find flattering. The next day, he would ask Kathleen to cancel all his speaking engagements for the rest of his life. He’d decided it was time to stay home.
Now cameras popped white lights as Jane ran to the lip of the stage and shimmied up. Everyone came: Olivia, Mary, his father and sister, people he knew but she didn’t. Kathleen stood near the curtain, still offstage. Owens picked Jane up. She whispered, “I wish I was wearing a dress.”
“I’ll get you one,” he promised. “You’re old enough now.”