Authors: Mona Simpson
Milton and I both thought he was just the greatest thing we ever saw and we followed him around when he’d let us. They used to shoot rifle practice in a field back of Swill’s barn. We weren’t allowed when they had guns, but we’d listen from our porch at night and the next morning before breakfast, Milton and I would go and see if we could find skeets in the field. We found plenty of broken pieces, but we didn’t want those, we needed whole ones, ones somebody had missed. When we found one, oh, then we thought we had a prize. We brought them home and gave them back to Art, the next time he came around. He never said anything about it, he just smiled and took it with him in his pocket. I suppose they just threw them in the air again the next time they shot, after all our hard looking.
I think the thing that finally made him look at me, like a girl not just some little kid, was a picture. There were traveling photographers in those days, just like musicians—the little towns couldn’t support such stuff on their own. There wasn’t the business. But once a year they’d come and line us all up outside of
school, the girls together. Cameras were huge then, big wooden boxes, and they brought their own umbrellas and all. When I was a senior, after the class picture, the photographer asked if he could come to my house and take some more pictures of me alone. Well, I had to ask my mother and then I went the next day and said, Why sure.
When he came to our house, my mother had us all ready. I was wearing a white lace dress, all pressed and starched and my boots were polished so the buttons shined. She’d braided my hair and pinned it and she’d dressed up Milton too. All the furniture in the house had been oiled. She had flowers from the garden set out in silver vases. My little dog, Blackie, had a big blue satin ribbon around his neck. My mother asked the photographer if he didn’t want to take Milton in the picture, too, but he said no, and so it was just me sitting on the piano bench, holding Blackie on my lap. He came around the next day with the picture all mounted on fancy black paper and he left it with us. It was nice of him. My mother had already been figuring out how she could scrape together the money from our food allowance, but he just gave it to us and went on his way.
Then, after that, every time anyone walked into the house, they had to see my picture. Why sure. I was big stuff then for a week or two. And that’s when they all got the idea that I was pretty. I was just a little runt before, but now they all thought I was swell. I could tell, because they treated me a little different. Even my mother, she was careful. She looked at me more. It made her think of me better. Everyone but Milton. It didn’t make one bit of difference to him, one way or the other. He didn’t care what I looked like.
But what I worried about was with Art. You know, at that age, you don’t think so much about your family. You think they’ll always be around and you can forget about them for a while. Art was the one I wanted to look at the picture. And he finally did. All that summer, I palled around with Art and his crowd of older kids. They were from big families most of them and they had to work—they picked strawberries for Swill, the nurseries could hire kids cheaper then than the migrants—and after their day,
we’d all do something. They’d be tired from kneeling under that hot sun, so we’d just walk around town, maybe buy an ice cream if we had a little money. Then ice cream was more of a treat, they made it in molds, like cookies, so you’d get a new shape every time. A clover or a heart or a flower. And each one would be a different flavor.
And then on the weekends we had our real fun. We went swimming in the quarry or down by Baird’s Creek. We’d each take a sandwich and a towel and we’d wear our bathing suits under our dresses and hike out there. We hung our dresses on the branches alongside the creek. I loved to swim, that feeling of getting all wet and drying off so quick in the sun, and then sliding in again.
We could have gone on like that forever. We didn’t worry then, like kids do now. Both my daughters worried so much about themselves. More than I ever did. And the granddaughter is the worst, yes you are, it’s the thighs one week, and of course the breasts aren’t big enough, next thing you know, it’s the knees or the ankles. Pretty soon it’ll be the ear, you just wait.
We were too shy to think about our bodies. And we wore bathing suits that came almost to our knees, so you couldn’t see much anyway. I still have mine; it’s a blue with white buttons, I don’t know why I keep all such stuff.
And in the country, there where we were, it was quiet. Quieter than it is anywhere now. We didn’t have the cars and the trucks or the highways. Once in a very long while we’d hear a train go by and you’d stop whatever you were doing and listen because it was a change. It always seemed sort of sad, a train, but an everyday sadness. To me it did. It made you think of the things you didn’t know. Most of all day it was silent, except what noise we made ourselves, diving in the water, splashing. I remember lying flat on a rock for hours under a tree that would sway, just the littlest bit, in the breeze. We could have gone on like that for years, and it was my fault that we didn’t. That was my one big mistake, but what did I know?
For my seventeenth birthday, I made a big cake and we had a party. It was just girls, that was the way they did it, with ribbons hanging from the ceiling, and all the aunts came. My mother’s old
steamer trunk sat in the front parlor, repapered inside, and they each brought something for me to take along to college. I’d already gotten in for the next year, at the Catholic college in Marquette, it was all set I was going to go.
I suppose I was so puffed up from the party and everyone giving me something that I said yes when I really shouldn’t have. When Art came that night and gave me his present—it was a black pin, I still have it—he asked would I go swimming with him the next day and I said yes.
And wouldn’t you know, sure, that was when it happened. He was young, too, just eighteen, he didn’t know any better. He’d never been alone with a girl before, except maybe his sisters. First we swam and then after, it was still morning, we were lying on that rock, under the tree. The way the branches moved, the air went on your skin like from a fan. All of a sudden he came and lay on top of me and I didn’t know what was what. All the time I was growing up, I thought a soul lay in your chest, I even thought I knew what it looked like. It was a wide, horizontal triangle like a yoke, made out of white fog, like clouds are. I thought married people had babies by somehow pressing their chests together so their souls touched. That’s how dumb I was. That was as much as I knew. I was pretty sure it had something to do with kissing, and so I was careful we didn’t kiss. I hadn’t really pictured more than that—but there it was, our chests felt real warm and pressed next to each other, so I could feel his sharp bones. It was uncomfortable, but not an altogether bad feeling either.
Then the other began. Neither of us said anything. I was afraid to move, I was ashamed of how much I didn’t know. That’s how dumb I was. And he was different, too, I was afraid of how his face looked, stern and sealed like a stranger’s, like a profile of a man you see a distance away, working up on a power line.
He started rubbing me all over and I knew you weren’t supposed to let them touch you. I didn’t know exactly why and to tell you the truth, I didn’t know how to stop it. Then he reached under my back and opened my swimsuit. Then all of a sudden, I was a little smarter, because I knew enough to know it shouldn’t go
much below the waist. At first it didn’t. Then he reached down by my left leg and went up under the band around one thigh. It hurt, like something sharp, the edge of a thing. I kept hoping nothing more would happen. Then he pulled the suit down so above my waist was bare. Right away, I thought, all right, that’s done now, just as long as he doesn’t pull it down any further. I kept thinking like that, nervous, until it was all off. Then when he was right there, over me, I understood more. I cried a little, I suppose most people do, especially like me when they don’t know what’s coming and feel that first burning, oh it hurts, but then it went on and on and I closed my eyes and all I thought of was my mother.
I thought of her room. I could exactly picture the furniture. The high bed, square and neat, with the white chenille spread, the tassels just touching the floor, the mirror, the white bureau, the one fern and then the white curtains, blowing at her windows. I had gone into my mother’s room alone in the afternoon. The white walls had a bluish color, like light around an egg. I thought of my mother with my father in that room and the white cotton nightie she wore to bed and how she must have wanted to touch her soul to his and I tried to feel that way and be that way with Art, my chest pressed right under his, collapsing, so we could both feel the warm.
And that’s when I got pregnant with Carol, from that one time. We did have bad luck, that I’ll say. I had wanted it, though, I was thinking of it. Wanting it made the pain seem important, for that one second the whole thing seemed holy, like a sacrifice. Maybe you get pregnant easier when you think like that.
My mother and father sure weren’t happy. Oh, no. My mother had worked hard saving and fixing up my college trunk and she never liked Art so well anyway. She wanted Milton and I both to marry better families, families she knew. Cousins even.
I got married in a dark blue dress. My mother didn’t come, but I went home after, alone, she wouldn’t let him in the door again. She was just wearing a housedress. She was sweeping when I came in. I half kissed her, she moved her cheek away and for a long time I remembered her face inside the oval glass of the door. I felt my braid swish on my back as I walked down the path. She
was watching me and I left that day. Art met me down the road. Art was scared too, but there we were married. We had no choice but to do it.
For him it was a kind of adventure. And he never did have to go to a war. He went and tried to enlist for the first one. They sent him back because he was too young. Then, by the second, he was too old already. I was born in May 1900, Art in 1899, so between us, one was always the age of the year. And he had an idea that we had more fun somehow because it was the beginning of a century. He told that to Adele once and oh, was she mad. We had the whole century in front of us. He always liked gadgets, balloons, fireworks, everything new. See, I didn’t learn all his crazy ideas till then when I was stuck with him.
We moved sixty miles to Bay City and at first we lived on top of a store. It was all new people. I wrote to my mother and dad, one letter a week for more than a year before she would even answer me. I don’t think she ever really forgave me. She had to some later, when she was sick and living with me. But she never liked Carol because of it. As if Carol could help what we did.
Then a year after we left, Milton ran away. That must have been hard on my mother. He went off to San Francisco to join the merchant marines. From what I heard after, we were the only ones in Malgoma who were the least bit surprised. And when I knew, it seemed right, it made sense. He had always wanted to get away. Even when he was a little, little boy and I had to watch him, he’d crawl off the blanket, under the fence, out of the yard, away from where he was supposed to stay.
Milton’s birthday is September first, the same as our Adele’s. And they are a lot alike, so I’ve often wondered if there isn’t something to that. There’s one such a one like Milton in every family. One who thinks he has to get away.
We lived above a little grocery store, which was a help to me with the baby. Art was gone all day and some at night, too, he was just starting up, trying to make a go of it, and he was still young enough to want some fun. So I took the baby downstairs and sat in the store with Mrs. Sheck. She knew babies, she had three schoolchildren of her own. She’d hold Carol, too, and we’d
talk all day about babies, she’d show me one little product or another. We got through.
Art began as a photoengraver just when they were starting up the newspaper. He worked Sundays and all night sometimes to get it out when he was supposed to. I still have the first year of newspapers all bound up in such a book, this big. I should call the museum, see if they want the old thing. I just haven’t wanted to lug it out to the dump.
Then, when we’d saved a little money, after the first few years, we bought the land for this house. We rode all over, looking at land. I picked out this spot for the oak tree. I liked that big tree in the front yard. The land was cheap then and this was nowhere. We were the first on Lime Kiln Road. Art bought past where the barn is now and all the way down to the tracks.
“That swamp?” I said. “What are you ever going to do with that swamp?”
I should have kept my big mouth shut, because now that land is worth a lot of money. It was outside of the city limits, part of a new little town, Ashland they were calling it then. Art was already thinking he wanted enough land so when Carol grew up she could build and live here, too. He was hoping if we built a nice house, others who wanted to live in the country and were just getting a start would move out. He thought we could all pitch in and help with the work, women and men. The newspaper gave him his ideas. He started town meetings and they drew up a plan for every house to have sewer and water and electricity.
Then he got into the mink and was that a lot of work. He built that barn in back prettinear by himself. And they were temperamental, those mink. If you didn’t do every little thing just right, they could die and then you were out.
By that time, too, other people built on our road like Art wanted. Mack Griling moved in down where they are now and he built a house, and the Brozeks came across the road. They built a house and that little apartment above the garage, for her brother who was in the navy, for when he came home.
See, all the time Carol was growing up, we were so busy, thinking of other things, trying to make a go of it.
And we were still so young. Lot of other people our age didn’t have children. I made friends with the other mothers, though, even if they were older. Amber Brozek across the street—she had Chummy—and I was even friends with Mack’s first wife. Tinta was her name and ooh, was she a pack rat, every inch of that house was full of junk. And she painted paintings too yet, all of them landscapes from around here. So every little spot on the wall that wasn’t full already, she covered with one of her paintings. Some were so small like a postcard. That end of the road was never any good. I was sorry they moved there, I still am. Ugh, I didn’t like going with Carol into all that dust and dirt, you knew there were plenty of germs. I don’t think Tinta ever cleaned. And when she opened a drawer once, I saw she had her clothes all rolled up in little balls. But, still, she was a neighbor too, and we didn’t have very many. Amber and I went with our babies once a week or so for tea. We’d dress Carol and Chummy in their oldest clothes before we walked down and then, after, we’d let them play in the dirt. That’s when they made their mud pies. They loved that, sure. And then we plunked them right down in the tub.