Authors: Mona Simpson
“I
have to learn this stuff, Mom. Kids at school have stereos, they know the names of all these songs. It comes up.”
“Okay, okay, but not loud.” She sighed and turned the car radio back on. That was one thing about my mother. She could understand your wanting to fit in. “I can’t bear those drummers,” she said.
Josh Spritzer still seemed to be dropping us. Her last date with him was almost three weeks ago, on a Wednesday. But we kept driving by his house every night, before we went to Baskin-Robbins. First, we drove past the high-rise apartment. My mother couldn’t look for his white T-Bird there because he kept it in an underground garage. You needed a special card to get in, and Josh had never given her one. She had to park on the street. So we craned our necks, counting floors by their balconies in order to find his windows. If my mother saw a light, she sank back in the car seat and exhaled, comfortable at least for an hour.
But now, the windows of Josh Spritzer’s apartment looked dark and she leaned over the steering wheel biting her fingernails. I felt furious, all of a sudden, that he didn’t have a lamp with an automatic timer.
My mother turned the car around in the middle of the wide Century City boulevard and headed towards the house where Josh’s ex-wife and children lived. She snapped the radio off. She drove at sixty miles an hour through the residential streets of Beverly Hills to find the soothing sight of his car in front of his children’s house.
“But Mom, even if he is seeing his kids, he’s still not seeing you.”
“Shhh, be quiet.” We raced down Little Santa Monica. My mother knew herself. All she needed tonight was to forget those dark windows—to relax, enjoy her ice cream cone, sleep.
It seemed strange that my mother didn’t feel jealous of Josh’s ex-wife, Elaine. When Josh visited, he often sat for hours in the living room of the Arden Street house, having a drink with Elaine. We sometimes saw them as we drove by at night, two silhouettes at a low table.
But my mother had very specific fears. As it turned out, she did not consider Elaine Spritzer pretty. Elaine was short, only a little over five feet, with muscular arms and legs. My mother described her hair as frizzy.
The fact that Josh had apparently once found Elaine attractive enough to marry seemed to escape my mother’s attention. And I sure wasn’t going to remind her. We each held our breath as we went over the bump in Arden Street that would give us a clear view of Elaine Spritzer’s driveway. And tonight we were lucky. The T-bird was there.
My mother parked our car in front of Baskin-Robbins and fumbled in her purse for dollars. That night I didn’t fight. We felt relieved, it was late, we were both tired.
Nan Keller knocked on our glass doors. She seemed bored now that Peter had gone away to school. And the backhouse we lived in had been built to be her painting studio. Now, she rented a huge loft in a renovated Venice hotel on Market Street, but she seemed to harbor affection for our place. Every time she came inside she looked around at the low ceilings and close walls and smiled as if they reminded her of things.
“I brought you some sketches,” she said. “I was just drawing. I thought you might want to take a look.”
My mother made a face, scanning the backhouse. The place looked a mess, but we had to let her in. She was our landlord.
They laid the sketches out on the pool table.
“Can I get you anything?” my mother asked, veering towards the half-size refrigerator. “We don’t have much, but I can make some lemonade, or I have carrot juice.”
Nan Keller waved her off. “We had a dinner at Ma Maison and I’m absolutely stuffed.”
“Oh, they’re Ann.” My mother stopped, seeing the pictures.
“They’re
almost
Ann,” Mrs. Keller said. “I was sketching other noses, just to see what could happen with a surgeon. I think this one would be fabulous. Turn to the side, Ann.” Mrs. Keller pointed, her cool fingernails touching my face. “A little off, here and here. Just straight. I think it would be smashing. See, she’s got a little bump from somewhere.”
“Her father,” my mother mumbled. My mother’s hands dug in her pockets and she stared up and down from the sketches to me. She started nodding. “I think you’re right, Nan. Just a little and she’d really be something.” Her eyes opened wider in awe of my potential.
“It’s not inexpensive, but now’s the time to do it, the kids all get them in high school, over the summer or even in fall, it’s no big deal. You see them at Beverly with bandages, the boys and the girls, no one minds, it’s like braces, it’s almost a stigma
not
to have them. And then when they go to college, nobody ever knows. And when the braces come off she’ll be all set.”
“Who would you take her to, Nan?” My mother became studious. It was easy to imagine her in college, with the tortoiseshell glasses, long since replaced with constantly lost contact lenses, her pencil neatly scribbling, following the teacher’s instructions. My father had been my mother’s professor.
“I don’t know, there’s a Doctor Brey on Roxbury. He’s popular, he did Lexie’s daughter, but I think he does all the same nose. It’s a nice nose, but it’s becoming a cliché, you know?”
“Oh, we don’t want that.” My mother acted so humble with these people.
My mother and Nan Keller continued to talk about plastic surgeons, those who did one tract nose and those who thought they were artists and wouldn’t listen to what you wanted. One took nitrate photographs of his noses before and after and had bequeathed
them to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where his wife served on the board of directors, active in volunteer fund raising. Another looked like Ernest Hemingway; recently divorced, he lived in Malibu.
I excused myself. “HE sounds good to me,” my mother was saying.
Later, when I came down for a Coke from the half-size refrigerator, Nan Keller was still there, sitting on the old red and blue striped couch. On the floor in front of them stood the bottle of Courvoisier we’d moved to all the places we’d lived in California and never opened, my mother not being a drinker. We had the one suitcase we’d taken in our trunk when we left Wisconsin. It was printed with my father’s initials, and missing a handle. We’d kept it together with a belt around it and a dog collar clipped to the handle loops. In it, we’d carried a jumble: our precious things and our old ice skates, and this bottle of Courvoisier. We’d taken it all the way from Wisconsin and then from apartment to apartment and now Nan Keller sat drinking it.
“Well, it’s only a rumor, but apparently, he’s been seen with her by a few people at Hillcrest.”
“Damn. That man,” my mother said.
“Who are you talking about?”
“This isn’t for you, Ann, go to sleep,” my mother said, tapping her nail against a front tooth.
I could have killed Nan Keller.
My mother shook me awake the next morning. “Come on, we’re cleaning up a little.” She squatted down in front of a cupboard, taking out pans and setting them on the floor. The house looked more of a mess than last night. She was wearing her gray sweat shirt and her hair strained up in a ponytail. A sponge rested where she’d started to wash the cupboard. Our suitcase of old photographs, mementoes, my skates from when I was five, lay on the sofa, unzipped. Whenever my mother was upset, she took things apart and unpacked.
She didn’t look at me. Her arms rummaged in the cupboard.
“Take that garbage out this minute,” she said.
Four bags sagged against the doors. I carried two. I could hear her starting to bump things and yell as I opened the gate to the alley. “A damn thing around here. I work and work and slave … who does she think she …”
I lifted the other two bags, slower this time. Birds made small noises in the trees. A white truck whooshed on the clean empty road a block away, at the end of our alley. I leaned against the wall, in back of the house. I didn’t have anything with me.
“Made of money, it’s a thousand for her teeth, now two thousand for her nose and meanwhile, I have nothing, NOTHING!”
I slipped back in and snuck to my closet and took all the money I had, shoving bills in my pocket. It felt good, the slightly oily paper. I crushed it in my fist.
She ran to my room and stood, veering at the door.
“Why don’t you go find your father, you treat me like filth after all I’ve done. I’ll tell you why, because you’re scared. You’d rather stay and sap me. Sure, your dumb mother will always drudge for you. For your bikinis that you HAD to have and never wore after I bought them for you, and your pictures when you thought you were going to be a movie star. Yeah, uh-huh. Well, you’ve got another thing coming, kid, because you don’t respect me. You don’t love me after all I do for you, how hard I work.”
She was waiting and I just stood there for a long curved minute, one rotation.
“Oooh, you—” Then she was coming and I backed into the closet, my arms in front of my face. I knew what I had to do to stop her. Talk. But I held still, I wasn’t going to move. I was a piece of wood. My body turned empty, porous, that was what got her.
Something hovered on the ceiling, a scrap of cloth, I saw everything below, slowly, indifferent, like the blades of a fan, moving at a constant speed. I didn’t want anything. Except to be away, east, somewhere cool. It seemed clear and true. I didn’t love her.
She hit me once, bad, my cheek vibrating like hard metal, and I was falling against the closet wall, the brass hook knocked my
head and I was thinking, this is it, it’s sharp like a deep cut, one red scratch in the sky: she could hurt me so bad we would never forget.
And then it turned adult and clean. This person coming at you, lunging, her mouth opening and closing, teeth an ecstasy, and all of a sudden, you know and then, whack, on your forehead and she’s moving and the picture you saw breaks like crystal.
She hates you. She hates you more than anything she is and she’s tied until she kills you, it’s that deep in her. She will stay. And you know you have to get up. You want to close your eyes and be dizzy, let this blur dark, tasting the blood in your mouth like a steak, and let her come back to you and touch you softly, lead you to your bed, tuck you in, care for you.
Now, still in the closet, but a million miles away (a hawk flying over a blank western sky), you start sobbing. You hear yourself as if it’s someone sitting in a chair across the room.
I stood up and shuffled past her to the door. She pressed right behind me, breathing.
“It’s me or nothing, kid,” she is saying, her voice laughing and crying. She looks at me, slack, her face sags with an intimate apology.
I slide the door shut and I am outside. We look at each other, stunned, for a moment through the glass. Stunned that I would choose nothing.
I slumped in the alley, next to clean garbage cans, mad at myself because I was so weak. My ears were ringing and they seemed to ring through all the other days. Everything looked sharp, the willow branches over the alley fence so brittle they could cut the sky.
“Come on, get in,” my mother said. She slid over and opened my door. She moved quickly now, dressed and businesslike. She sat in the driver’s seat, the passenger door hung open. Then she got out and stood with her hands on her hips. “They turned off the phone and we have to go down there. So if you want the phone to work, when your kids call, then you better get in.”
We sat in silence while she drove. She waited in the car and I went in with our papers, the bills rumpled from being in my mother’s
purse. She counted out the cash she gave me to the dollar, and then she asked me for change. But she was right. I would have stolen from her.
I just went to the people at the desks and gave them everything. I didn’t say a word. My mother would have made excuses, told them our tragic life story, tried to make them like her. But they already knew us, that’s why she stayed in the car. I went in every month. They just did it for me, right away, without questions.
When I slid back in, my mother was sitting sideways on the edge of her seat, looking at her profile in the rearview mirror. She pushed the tip of her nose up with a finger.
“I need a little, too. Just a touch off the tip. Nobody’d even know.” She sighed. “Maybe we’ll both go in.”
My mother finally did call Josh Spritzer’s psychiatrist and he refused to see her. She succeeded, however, with Josh’s son’s psychiatrist. She drove to see him at his office, three afternoons a week, each time dressed as if for a date. After a while, Josh Spritzer stopped calling altogether, but my mother nonetheless remained cheerful. She seemed to be home a lot more.
She spent time on our half-size refrigerator. She polished the glass and the plastic and the chrome and she bought expensive jars of things which she lined up, according to size. Vinegar with herbs floating upside down, mustards, chutney, maple syrup. She pared and peeled carrots, celery, jicoma and green beans for a platter on the second shelf. The parsley was arranged in its own ceramic pitcher. An elaborate fruit bowl, the apples polished and decorated with sprigs of mint, daisies poking out between the oranges, held the prime spot on the top shelf. I caught her rubbing brown eggs on her sweat shirt. And above the glistening eggs, she rested a small Steiff toy chicken.
I took an apple one day after school and lay on the couch, eating. I was happy. I liked having all that food.
Just then I heard my mother’s car outside in the alley. “Honey,” she called. “Come help me, would you?”
The backhouse yard was small enough so we could hear each other from anywhere. In the alley, she bent unloading dark green
shopping bags. They were light. I took them all in one hand. Then she stood at her dresser, smiling, concentrating on a small, flat box. She untied the green satin ribbon. She opened the box and held it out to show me. It was a man’s tie, deep red, with tiny blue dots.
I shrugged. “What’s this?”
She kept grinning. It was the middle of the afternoon. She must have been out shopping all day.
“Isn’t it pretty?” She stared down at the folded tie in the palm of her hand. “It’s silk.”
“Who’s it for?”
She sucked in her breath and pulled her chin up. “It’s a present, Ann.”