Authors: Mona Simpson
“Carol, I don’t care what’s wrong with your sister, I want a turkey on my Thanksgiving, all right? And if we can’t eat now, you can get your purse and we’ll go.” Jimmy stood up, stuffing a slice of meat from the platter into his mouth with a hand, his napkin still tucked in his collar. Blood dripped on my mother’s tablecloth.
Hal got up, making a noise with his chair, and walked down the hall towards my mother.
“Should I fix you each a plate?” My grandmother looked back and forth between Benny and me. The food was resting in the center of the table. Parsley and lemon slices garnished the potatoes. It was a beautiful platter, neat like a field.
Benny told her no.
“We’re old enough to wait,” I said.
Jimmy shook his head, looking at me. “Your mother.”
It seemed we waited a long time, still there, and then I heard Ted’s voice, shaped and kind, like a curve around my mother. “Before it gets cold,” he was saying. They came back, Ted and Hal on either side of my mother. Standing, her face lit with the candlelight where she’d been crying, my mother seemed beautiful and strange and I felt sorry I hadn’t run back to her with Ted. She wasn’t looking at me now.
“Shall we eat before it’s cold?” she said. “Hal, why don’t you start the vegetables and I’ll serve.”
We ate quietly, careful.
“It’s wonderful, Adele. This whole meal has been wonderful,” Hal said.
“Yes, it’s very, very good.”
“Thank you,” my mother said, primly.
Jimmy leaned back in his chair. “Well, Adele, for the very best meat available in the world at eight ninety-nine a pound, I’ll tell you something. It’s not bad.”
My mother’s face hung in the air a second while we waited. Then it grew to a slow smile. She couldn’t help but laugh. She looked over at Carol. “I don’t see how you put up with him.”
“Well, you know, Adele, sometimes I don’t either. Sometimes I just don’t know either.”
They never went to bed that night. I heard them. They moved from room to room on the new furniture, the way people turn over and change positions while they dream. I think they were amazed. They had been married three years but they had never had any furniture.
The next morning my mother came in and sat on the edge of my bed. She looked at the room behind her.
“I think he’s running around,” she said. She was nodding her head in assent with herself.
“Who is?”
“Shhh. I’m sure of it.”
“You’re nuts.” I turned around to go back to sleep.
Her hand pried my shoulder up. “I don’t care if he is, I hope he is. If we caught him with another woman, boy, that would really be it. That would really help.”
“What?”
“In court. Then we’d get everything and we could move.” She shook her head. “It’s no more than I deserve, Gramma paid for the house, it should be mine. She’s
my
mother.”
“What are you talking about?”
She looked down at her foot. A slipper dangled off the bottom, she was bouncing it on her toes. “Today, at noon, Horst is going to call and ask him out with some girls. We’ll just see what he says. I’ll bet he goes.”
“Who’s Horse?”
“You know, Horst, downtown. The tailor. He’s the one who took up your raincoat.”
The morning was slow and pretend. We all stayed around the house, doing nothing in the kitchen. My mother offered to cook Ted an egg. He refused, but he stood next to her and let her pour him more coffee. She made me cinnamon toast. That was the kind of thing she never did. She hated white sugar. We all ate the leftover château straight from the refrigerator. One of us would open the door and leave it hang while we stood chewing.
Then, at noon, the phone rang.
“It’s for you, Ted.” My mother handed him the receiver and walked to the stove. My mother rubbed the same spot on the counter, over and over, with her dish towel. I sat where I was, blowing the sugar on my plate, then writing my name with a finger.
“No,” Ted said, into the phone. “I’m not interested in that.”
Then he was off. He took his coffee cup from where it was on the counter and went back to the screen door hinge he’d been trying to fix. I walked into the living room. All the candles had melted down, the wax flat on the plates like fried eggs.
“So, what was that all about?” my mother asked.
“It was Horst.”
“What did he want?”
“Nothing. He wanted to go out somewhere.”
“Oh, well, are you going?”
Ted put the screwdriver down. “Adele, you heard what I told him.”
“Oh, well, I was just wondering. I mean I was right here, are you sure your answer wouldn’t have been different if I wasn’t around just then?”
I went back to look in their bedroom. The bed was tight and untouched. They never had gone to sleep.
A nun’s flashlight carved out a cave in the darkness and we followed. The old orphanage had closed. Now, they’d built an annex on the west side of the Fox River, small wooden cabins where older girls, girls who’d been in trouble, lived by themselves, four
of them with one nun. My mother and Lolly and I walked through the woods to a benefit dinner in one of the cabins.
My mother nudged me. At the small round table there were candles, that was most of what we could see. The windows were dark and it was dark outside.
All around us girls hovered in white high-necked blouses, their long hair pulled back in plain liver-colored rubber bands, lipstick a little over their lips and dabs of nail polish on their nylons. They seemed tall and awkward, they didn’t know what to do with their hands. They’d made our meal and they hovered, waiting to take our plates away and wash them. But I knew sometime, once, they were bad. When one leaned down to pour coffee, my mother touched her sleeve and asked a question. She looked up, distracted, and then explained. As a project, they’d made the centerpieces. Ours was an old 45 record melted down, that’s how they got the edges to frill. They put the candle in the hole.
My mother nudged me and whispered. “You could do that.”
After school, downstairs, I lay in the cool basement. There was a bed with an old bedspread and a television. I lay on my stomach and watched the reruns in the cool dark. I heard my mother coming down the stairs. She had a load of laundry in her arms. The pipes banged, as she set the machine going. Then she came towards me.
“What are you doing down here? Why do you always come down here when you could watch the big TV upstairs? Are you ashamed of something?” She was talking a certain way. I kept looking at the TV, not moving, though a commercial came on.
“And why do you bounce up and down like that with your hips, people don’t do that, it’s vulgar.”
I still didn’t answer. I was barely breathing.
“Did someone fuck you?” She said the word long, with air in it. I wasn’t allowed to say it. “They did, didn’t they? I can tell. Tell me, Ann, who did, tell me, who fucked you. Because they really ruined you.”
I saw her then like an animal, her teeth huge in her face, her body stiff and small. Her feet clicked on the cement basement
floor and she moved back and forth with her hands on her hips, her head bent forward, stalking. She wouldn’t come any closer. It was as if I had a smell. I made myself stay the same.
“No,” I said.
“Come on, tell.” Her eyebrows lifted and fell once and she kept her smile. She was excited. “Tell me who did it to you, who fucked you.”
I still didn’t look at her. “Oooooh,” she came towards me with her arm. “Stop twitching like that.”
I got up and walked past her to the stairs. She grabbed my arm and I shoved her away. “Leave me alone,” I said. She made marks on my skin. “What’s wrong with you.”
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” she yelled at my back. “I go upstairs in my own house. I’m clean. I don’t twitch. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”
I locked myself in the bathroom. In a few minutes, she knocked and scraped on the door.
“Ann, come out here a second.
“Ann, I have something to tell you. There’s something we have to talk about.
“Open this door. Otherwise, otherwise, I’m going to open it, I’ll get the key.”
Circles. My head was against the cool tiles of the bathtub. The door had a gold metal doorknob. There was no keyhole, there couldn’t be a key. She said she was going to get a key. But there was no keyhole, there couldn’t be a key. But she said there was a key.
I pressed myself into the corner, like something molded there. I tried not to hear, not to think. And then, after, there was always a lightness, a feeling of air inside, like you are an impostor, eating only the appearance of things, living in holograms of light. There in the corner, almost gone, I had one feeling above my stomach, like a flutter. No one but me could ever know about this time, not if I wanted love.
Later, Ted came home and everything was normal again. My mother acted nice to me, she made sautéed mushrooms for over our steaks. She seemed to have forgotten. I watched her, but it
seemed rinsed away, all gone. We were friends again, I was her daughter, she liked me. And I was relieved, happy in some recovered way. She picked up my hand and squeezed it. And all evening, there was that lightness. I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t interested, I wasn’t tired.
I didn’t want anything. I’d lost my attraction for gravity and I couldn’t get it back by myself. I knew it would always be there again in the morning, after sleep. But for that night, I didn’t care. I didn’t want a thing.
We drove past the shopping center, the used car lot and my public school, out on the highway, to where it wasn’t developed yet. And then when we were at the place we’d gone for the benefit dinner, the place for girls, my mother let me out on the ditch by the side of the road and turned around and drove away. I stood waiting for her to come back. I was sure she would come, but I was trembling anyway. I couldn’t control my teeth, my hands. I didn’t have anything with me, money, anything. I took off my mitten. Inside was one soft worn dollar bill, pale from washing.
I was just wearing my jacket and jeans. I sat on a post. I didn’t see my mother’s car coming back. I watched the other cars in the distance, each one was a sink of hope, I squinted my eyes so I thought it was ours and let myself feel the sweetness of belief wash over me, but then it would come close and be green or red or yellow or blue, and all the time, inside, I really knew.
I thought of going somewhere. I looked behind me at the woods. The snow was melting on the ground. The tree trunks seemed to all rise, black, from the same level plane. It was hard to look at them. It was late afternoon, their black bark looked lush, holding gold on their thin sides. They glinted like fish in the air and soon it would be dark.
Then down the road, on my side, coming towards me, two girls were walking on the gravel, their hands in their jacket pockets. Their heads were down. I couldn’t see any more from where I was. Their feet kicked up clouds of dust. I thought they were coming for me. They were girls who lived here in the woods, in those cabins, and my mother had told them I was bad and they
were coming. At the exact same time and with a feeling like a finger pressing down, leaving an impression on my heart, I knew that they were coming for me and I knew that I was imagining it, that they weren’t, they didn’t know me.
I bolted. I saw a flash of metallic blue, but then I was on the other side of the highway, up the embankment, in the woods, before the blue car passed. I stopped for a moment, still. All my life I’d imagined one death—slow motion, a clear day, pale blue sky, white clouds and a dull gray highway, a yellow stripe, the long bounce off a rounded blue fender, then the soft fall, dead, then nothing. All in sunlight. I’d never told anyone and I wondered if every person carried their own death with them, like something private and quiet, inside a small box.
I started to walk in the woods, still looking down for a white car on the highway. I knew where I would come out, on the other side. I didn’t think past that. At the road, I could hitch. The sky was white and blue now. The trees had lost their gold.
When I came out I was on another highway. Trucks and cars passed by. I’d never hitchhiked before. As bad as my mother thought I was, I hadn’t really done much. I was still too scared.
A truck zoomed by and the wind almost knocked me over. I stepped up and stuck out my thumb. I looked ahead of me. Three women, mothers, drove past without picking me up, and I looked down at myself and thought how I must look. My jeans were splattered with mud. Then a truck came and stopped. Feet above me, the cabin door sprang open. The man said he was going as far as the bridge. The seats were leather and cracked, I could feel the tape on the backs of my thighs. The whole cabin smelled of oil. It was a long, easy ride. We passed Dan Sklar’s office and I saw a white car like my mother’s outside on the street, and Saint Phillip’s empty playground. The sky was colored with feathery pink clouds when I got out.
“Say, where’re you
going?”
he said, when I stepped down.
For the first time I thought he might be dangerous. He wore a pale brown uniform with darker brown piping and a clover with his name,
BUD
, over his left breast pocket.
I jumped down the three steps and pushed the door shut. My
ankle twisted and I landed in a puddle. I started running and didn’t look behind me. Suddenly, lights flooded the place between me and a brick wall. It was the truck moving and I turned around, stuck.
His head was in the rolled-down window.
“Girl, where are you going? I don’t like to let you off like this. It’s getting dark.”
I looked at my shoes. They’d gone from white to brown with streaks of mud and coal, in just one day.
“I’m going to my grandmother’s house.”
“She live around here?” His head moved back and forth.
We were downtown, by the quarry. There were old stores here, small stores with gray worn wooden doors and bars across the screens, the only color labels from the orange companies. Ruby Beauty, Sacramento, Indian River.
Two huge piles across the water, the bright soft yellow of sulfur and the smaller mounds of coal; he was staring.
“Yeah,” I said.