Authors: Mona Simpson
People told me, after the operation, a heart gets scars and creases, wrinkles, lines like a hand.
He took an interest in new things. He read up on solar. He dreamed the idea for a swimming pool. He’d walk in his aerobics clothes past Brozek’s land and come home wanting to sue.
“Not yet,” I told him. “Nothing doing.”
I was still in the dark, with a long way to walk before the end. I’d be doing the dishes, my ring on the sill, looking out the window to the backyard and I’d try to imagine how Ben would have walked on the grass, without the leg. Sometimes I’d see him walking on water, crooked over the wavy green. Then I’d have to rub my eyes. I couldn’t imagine him with crutches, even limping, I couldn’t imagine Ben slow. He always loved speed, for the feel of it. When he was real little, he used to haul a stick in the backyard and spin, he’d go so fast, he wouldn’t hear you if you called. He got like that sometimes when he ran. And then later, the machines. The minibike, dirt bike, tractors, lawn mowers, snowmobiles. And then the car. I think, truthfully, Benny sped, too, on those empty peninsula highways late at night, sure. It wouldn’t have had to be Jay. It could have been Benny alone. He loved anything that went fast. Nobody could keep up with him.
I thought and I thought and I didn’t get anywhere. I felt a place in me where it hurt every time I touched, the stone. It was the darkness I swallowed.
I told myself: he could have died those minutes on the helicopter in the air, between the peninsula and Milwaukee. But the way it was was the only way it was: while that old doctor fooled, fussing with the leg, pinning it, the heart stopped.
You were the one who let Gram see him. When a person thinks the same thoughts again and again, they each take on a shape and a color, almost a taste in your mouth. And my thinking, Well, at least Gramma saw him, was clear relief, like green-white air, antiseptic as an after-dinner mint from a nice restaurant, that cleans out all your head. It let me go on to other things.
That day in the hospital was a court of law. Gram was already
in for a stroke and then we’d had to tell her about Benny. And even under the drugs, she was fighting us. She wanted to go and see her Ben.
Her arms pushed up, beating out of the blankets, and Adele was standing on one side, keeping her down. When I watched that I remembered years ago, opening the bathroom door and you were standing in the big clawfoot tub. It was the same thing—you were hitting, fighting to come out, and your mother stood pushing you down.
In the hospital, Gram was yelling. “You let me alone. Get away you.” But from the drugs, her voice sounded different, real small and far away. “Get,” she said, as if she were spitting out the pit of something.
“Mom, you’ve got to stay here,” Adele said.
“I want to see him once more and I’m going to,” Gram was saying, but she really wasn’t all right. She bit her own lip so hard it bled. I was on the other side of the barred bed from Adele. I saw that bright blood trickling down her chin and I wiped it off with the hem of my dress.
I think maybe what really hurt Adele was Gram didn’t seem the least bit interested to see the two of you. It had been years already since you’d been gone. That, I’m sure of it, was the drugs. She could only think of one thing at a time and that was, going to see him.
You sat away from us all, in a chair in the corner. Your mom stood on the one side of the bed with a young doctor in those mint green clothes they wear. He kept fingering his stethoscope.
I had the priest over by me. He was fingering his beads. But neither of them said anything, they let us fight over her.
I wanted Gram to go. It was selfish, because I didn’t really know how sick she was either, but I wanted her to go, no matter what. I wanted Adele out of there, back in California. This was our life here. She’d left it.
“She’s got to stay, Carol. She could have a stroke and DIE,” Adele said. Right there, over Gramma.
Gramma started crying, fingering her sheet. “I am
not
going to die,” she said.
Adele turned to the doctor. It was like an instinct in her, turning to men more than women, looking up, and to MDs more than ordinary men.
The doctor dropped his hands from the stethoscope. He seemed reluctant to say. “We can give her another sedative, but it is a risk.”
“Do you really want to go, Mom?” I said. Here I was leaning over and shouting loud as if she were a child. Her hearing was just fine. “You know, if you aren’t so good, you don’t have to go. Benny would understand.”
“OF COURSE he would,” Adele interrupted, yelling. “In fact, he’d RATHER. He’d rather you not go.”
“I want to go and I’m going,” she said. She sat up on the bed. “I told you. I want to see him.”
I looked at my priest. He bent his head down so I could see the freckles on his balding head. He prayed.
“Carol, I just don’t think she should go. It’s not going to help Benny anymore and it could, you know—”
I just didn’t know. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”
Your mother turned all of a sudden and looked at you. “What do you think, Ann?”
We all looked at you then, in the corner. You were wearing scuffed-up cowboy boots, like they wore around here, and your legs crossed. That was the first time I’d noticed you’d grown up. Your legs were long and you moved your arms like someone definite.
“Let her go,” you said. You recrossed your legs, put the other one on top. Your boot was worn down in the heel. “She should go.”
“You really think so, Annie?” your mom asked.
And you nodded.
So she had a sedative and we held her, me on one side, Adele on the other. Just that walk from the station wagon to the back door of Umberhum’s, it seemed like a long ways. I parked as close as I could to the door. The sun was so bright she couldn’t look. We walked real careful but her face was confused, as if she
thought her ankles were going in different directions, out of control.
I’d driven by Umberhum’s Funeral Parlor a million times, but that day I felt like I owned it. Adele and I almost carried Gram in, she was so light, like nothing on our elbows, as if we were fooling, playing the Emperor’s New Clothes, and everyone stepped back, hushing, for no one who was there.
Then her weight seemed to fall back into her in a heap from the sky when she knelt on the pew by the coffin. For the first time she seemed to me an old woman, the way she settled on that pew. She reached over and touched Benny’s hand. I was thinking how weak and helpless she looked, that we still had to get her up and back, and maybe Adele was right and this was a mistake. I couldn’t tell from her face if she knew anything that was going on. She stayed a long time before we realized she’d fallen asleep.
But it wasn’t a mistake. She didn’t die, either.
I didn’t like anything, anymore, for a long time and that’s why I had to go away. I saw the bad in everyone around me. As soon as she was well, my mother bored me. Her life seemed like a windup toy. She traced the same steps, through the same little rooms, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, every day. She ate her meal off the same dish and then she washed it. And that’s all she talked about, what food she put on that same plate in that same kitchen and how much she paid for it.
Hal was worse. Merry left, Tina was gone, they lived in a truck up out of town by the bay, with Merry’s new boyfriend. And Hal had a girl, that Patty, who I’d always liked, but he treated her like dirt, like nothing. I saw him hit her, plenty, he used to hold her jaw and slap her. And she didn’t even fight back. She just stood there and her bangs shook.
There was nothing I did. I went into the store one day to balance the books. I had a cup of coffee from the Big Boy, I was just going to concentrate down in the darkness and do the numbers of the books. I wasn’t going to pay any attention.
Then Hal walked in. “How’s Patty?” I said, trying to be nice.
He shrugged. “I only like her because she goes down on me.”
I shut the drawer in my desk that was open and got my keys out of my purse. I went out to the car and drove home. For a long time, the books didn’t get done.
Adele always called, always asking for money. Once she said she had cancer. She sent Gram a Polaroid of herself opened up, in operation on the surgery table. I’m not sure why, but I knew right away she was lying. That made me so mad, she gets you down. It was the first thing Jimmy and I did together for a long time. We needed to find out for sure. She’d told us the hospital she’d been in and from them we found the doctor. He confirmed it to us: there was no cancer. My sister was a fine, healthy woman. Her operation had been purely cosmetic. He turned out to be a plastic surgeon. Apparently, sometime in college, your mother had silicone implants. One had shrunk and now she was having her breasts evened out.
Well, we told Gram and, that once, Adele didn’t get her money.
See, it was around that time I found the stone in me, that hardness I’d swallowed. I felt it, a cold dark, it pressed back against my fingertips. I didn’t tell anyone, I hoarded, kept it to myself. It stayed under my left breast, always. The hook was there. As soon as I found it, it stopped hurting. I touched it many times, to test. I couldn’t sit still, I always wanted to be alone. I excused myself four, five times in an hour to go to the ladies’ room to touch it. I went into a trance like that, I didn’t think. Touching the stone in me.
I went away to their retreats. In the woods in Michigan, Minnesota, I even drove up to Ontario. Never once to a doctor. For a long time it was my secret. I read the Bible. I memorized:
the fear of God is clean, enduring forever
.
We are strangers before thee
.
I came to know my own wickedness, how I hoarded. Around campfires in pine woods, clearings like our own in the Vale of Valhalla, painted rocks in a circle, I knit and felt alone. The others, nuns and churchwomen, fell in together and did good. They darned the priests’ socks. They made potato salad, they
gossiped and laughed, washing pots and pans. I wouldn’t join. I prayed. I pleaded for cleansing, there in the north. I wanted the cold to come and burn the dust, everything impure out of me. A crystal agate, something forced by fire. I touched the stone while I prayed, the stone I wanted to save. It was the deepest part of me. My fire. My good.
But the others complained. Priests took my hands and asked me to forget. One of them read my palms; the right hand and the left, what you are and what you were born to be.
There is a time to mourn and a time to forget
. I yanked back. Father James sat me down and gave me suggestions, how to make my way with the other women, as if I were an unpopular girl.
That was when I finally went back home. The women stood in front of a silver trailer, opening bottles of relish and ketchup for a barbecue. All of a sudden, they looked mismatched and shabby to me, the nuns in their hiking clothes. Socks under sandals, the red acne scars on their skin, they were women who had never been pretty, women who would never have sons.
I didn’t want to scrub with them on the ground, in a campsite. I’d wanted silence and cold, I’d wanted to climb. Gossip, cooking—those nuns played bridge on picnic tables—all that I could have with my own.
I drove home. And when I got there, I knew I’d given in. I was tired, I unloaded all my gear and dumped it in the basement. I made a call for an appointment with the doctor.
And what did I see that first day back from Canada, when I opened the newspaper, but a picture of Ben’s little Susie engaged to marry to Jay Brozek. All five of those Brozek boys came back from Vietnam. No one else ever died. The Brozek girls were pretty, three or four of them went to college, all on scholarship. Sheila got married and now she lives across the street. Every year, Christmas Eve, they sent their youngest with a basket of cookies to Gram. Phil and Jimmy talked when they met on the yard, Phil told Jimmy to sue. It got me down.
I cut out the picture and put it under glass on the desk top where I paid my bills. I went into the bath and soaked for a long
time. I looked at my breast, felt for the stone. I seemed so different now that I was back and given up, I almost thought it wouldn’t hurt, I wouldn’t find it. But there it was, rubbery, mobile, the same as when I’d first touched it and I knew then that it was something bad they would take away from me. I’d have to go in the hospital for them to cut it out.
I don’t know what I thought, that that Susie wouldn’t ever get married. She was only sixteen when it happened. She had to go on and have a life, too. I kept looking at that picture every month when I paid my bills, it’s still there, under the glass. And now, you know, it doesn’t bother me. Because around the eyes and the mouth, Jay turned out to look like Benny. She must have seen that, too.
I was glad about you but you weren’t here. The season you were on TV, we bought a machine to tape your show. During the daytime, I’d put you on and just look at you. I thought of you every once in a while and thought that you’d turned out to be a nice girl. I was glad to have you for a niece. But I never wrote. I could have, I had time. I could have at least sent a card. I should have, I was still too much by myself, I wasn’t near as good as I should have been.
You came the one Christmas from college on the Greyhound bus, you saw Hal and Jimmy fight. Gram didn’t feel too well, she wouldn’t have even stayed up if you hadn’t been here, but Hal came late and then he played rough with Tina. Poor Jimmy said, maybe next year we could all get to Florida and Adele could come and meet us there.
And Hal said by next year, he’d be a millionaire and he’d have a helicopter. He said maybe he’d visit us for a day in Florida and then go to Haiti.
That Patty put up with all of it, his drinking, everything, and all the while, she worked too. She typed for a pediatrician. Now, she won’t even speak to him, he says, she won’t say hello when they run into each other in the mall.
That night, your mom called and I think she felt bad because
you were here and she was alone then out in California. Well, she started in on Gram. Did you get the sweater, Did you get this, Did you get that. Oh, we were so used to it by then, it didn’t get us down anymore. Gram and I just said no, no, not yet, real quietly, but we blamed it on the Christmas mail, said we were sure it would come tomorrow or the day after. And that seemed to calm her down.