Authors: Mona Simpson
She moves past us to the table, her caftan brushing the floor. The centerpiece is a three-foot basket of fruit. Apples and oranges, cherries, strawberries, grapes and kiwi spill over the top.
I marvel at the kitchen. Tiny brushes stand next to organic soap, under a framed poster of “All rising to a great place is by a winding stair,” Francis Bacon rendered orange and blue by Sister Corita. Herbs in a hanging wire basket, shells. “Blue! Blue! The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
Foucon. A holy water ox. Orchids in ferns. An old lamp from Wisconsin. A bowl of lemons.
“Oh, come here, you two. Look.” My mother stands on the balcony, letting her wine glass dangle off the rail like a huge jewel.
We watch the waves open, white and then transparent over the sand.
“And look at him, can you see that little porpoise? He’s been visiting me all week. He looks just like a rock, but that’s him.”
My mother’s hands move delicately under running water; she’s a hardworking cook. But she has no sense of timing. The veal burns, curling up at the edges, smelling like milk. She scrapes the pan and sighs, taking the white butcher paper back out of the refrigerator, for more.
I stir the noodles. My mother put in too many and not enough water. I know her logic; it is a beautiful, if small, copper saucepan. But the noodles seem to be dissolving.
“Yuk,” Daniel says, lifting the spoon. He rummages through
the cupboards for a colander. I notice him pausing, on his knees. He holds up a white grocery receipt over a foot and a half long.
I shrug and sponge a line of ants from the counter.
The food arranged on platters at the table, I go to look for my mother. I find her in the bathroom, slowly unpinning electric rollers in front of the mirror. Now she puts on her beads. She wears three strands. She lifts each one and lays it on her chest, then rummages under her hair until she finds the clasp. She doesn’t fasten it in front and then tow it around, the way I do, living alone. We stand there like that a long time, watching her hands worry under her hair.
“Ann, make a list for me of what books I should read. Listening to you kids talk is great but I realize I’ve fallen behind. I just don’t have the vocabularies you kids have. I used to. But I spend so much time reading in my field and writing those damn reports. I want to catch up again and really follow what’s what in the literature and artistic field.”
She looks at me from the other end of the table. “She’s really beautiful, isn’t she,” she says.
“No,” I say.
“That’s what’s so nice about her is she doesn’t know. I’m so happy when you’re here.”
A silence falls like the silence after someone has said they love you. She waits.
The food is terrible, the veal, though perfect looking, is tough, the noodles are the texture of oatmeal. We eat slowly.
My mother stands and claps. “Well, what about dessert? Daniel, what would you like? We have carrot cake and I have everything for hot fudge sundaes, I have vanilla and coffee ice cream, and hot fudge and nuts, I have cream, let me think if I have anything to whip it with.”
Now, the scraps of food seem solid on the dark plates. The candlelight makes it all look old.
“We’ll do it, Mom. What would you like?”
“I think I’ll have carrot cake,” she says.
Daniel switches on the overhead kitchen light and my mother turns her chair towards the window.
I stack our dishes in the sink.
“Daniel, we wanted cake,” I say.
He’s balancing three bowls of ice cream on his arm, and nudging past me to the table. “We’re having hot fudge sundaes,” he says. I flick the light off again and my mother doesn’t say a word about the ice cream, only “Mmmmmm,” when she lifts the spoon to her mouth.
“Comemeer,” Daniel says. My mother zigzagged, tired and glowing, to her bed. She doesn’t usually drink, she never used to. Daniel and I clean the kitchen, the pots and pans, the plates. I start wrapping all the food in sight with Saran.
Daniel opens the garage door and squats on the cement. The carrot cake rests on the floor, untouched, perfect.
“Look.” Daniel points.
Then I see it, my eyes adjust to the dimness. Ribbon-thick bands of ants surround the base, tunneling into its sides. The frosting is dotted with dead ones.
The next day, my mother shows me her new car. It is a white Mercedes station wagon, with silver everywhere, tan leather interior, a dashboard more computerized and beautiful than any stereo. She blushes. We are standing outside on the dirt Colony Road, overgrown with weeds. She backs the car, infinitely slowly, from the garage. Two tan, very blond children wearing shorts and bandannas chase a dog, also wearing a bandanna. Everything is bright. By the driveway leans one spent rosebush. I hear a motor churning, somebody’s pool.
“When did you?”
She shrugs. “I realized, it was the only car I really liked. I looked at Toyotas and Jeeps, I almost bought a Jeep wagon with the wood sides, you know, but it ended up being more expensive than this was. So … I just picked it up last week.”
“Why do you want a station wagon?”
She inhales, shuddering. “We-ell, I’d like to drive my grandchildren around someday.”
On the long streets of our old neighborhoods in Beverly Hills, new octagonal signs stand on all the lawns.
WESTEC SECURITY: ARMED PATROL
, they read.
ARMED RESPONSE
.
“Oh, come on, after all they’ve done for us. Besides, Peter wants to see you, poor Petey, he’s been calling every day. He still likes you.”
“The Kellers haven’t done anything for me.”
“Well, they have for me.”
Almost a year ago, Nan Keller died in an accident. At Aspen, she was run over by a snowplow. She paused at the bottom of the mountain, between runs. The machine stood idle on top of a pile of plowed snow. Kids had been playing in it and they left the brake open. The plow rolled down the hill, over Nan.
Now, Mr. Keller was suing the ski lodge and arranging a retrospective of her paintings. “I went out with him once,” my mother says, “but I just couldn’t do it. Ugh. I couldn’t kiss him.”
When Peter Keller calls, I won’t talk. Every time my mother lies, says I’m in the bathroom, in the shower, taking a long bath, steaming. He must think I’ve become extremely clean.
Daniel pulls the strap of my suit down, then we are kissing.
“I didn’t think this would ever happen,” he says.
I duck underwater and pull off his suit; it tangles on his feet, but I get it somehow and loop it around my wrist like an enormous bracelet. We kiss hard, imprecisely. We bob. He lifts the elastic away from my leg and he feels enormous, and good, oh so good, inside me. I keep rising to the surface, he pushes my shoulders down.
Then, he yanks out of me, bites the package open, pulls the rubber on underwater. He’d been swimming with it in his hand. Now it starts again, random, hard, real inside me.
“Hi, you two!” My mother stands in yellow slacks and sunglasses on the deck.
“Can she see us?”
“No, we’re underwater.”
But I can see our legs and stomachs, green but distinct, like hands in clear gloves.
I swim away and Daniel yells, hey, grabbing my ankle. A wave comes up over our shoulders, we’re caught in it, tumbling, gasping, clawing the sand bottom, finally bobbing up again, ten feet apart, our hair bunched in our mouths. We can’t find Daniel’s bathing suit. I hold up my arms so he sees and we both start diving for it, looking.
I stand for a second on the ridged sand, closer in than Daniel. My mother bends over, watering geraniums with a hose on her balcony. “She looks so good in her house.”
“The Kellers’ house,” Daniel says.
I start swimming in, hard, breathing underwater, to get Daniel another suit.
“The thing I like about swimming in the ocean is that you can pee whenever you want,” he says.
I guess I should have known. She bought the car instead of a house. She’s borrowing the house, maybe renting, whatever.
In the dark, my mother shakes me. “Hurry up, you’re really lucky. The grunion are running. I have a schedule.”
I pull on jeans and a sweat shirt from the chair. In high school, we went on grunion runs, late night rides to the beach in tiny cars, girls sitting on the boys’ laps, our hoop earrings catching in our long hair. But we never saw any grunion. We’d walk on the beach with flashlights a few minutes, then pair off to make out in the sand. I’d always thought the fish were an excuse.
But my mother has a little pamphlet from the Coast Guard. “The female comes in on one wave and she twirls herself into the sand, so she’s upright, half buried and half out. And there she lays her eggs,’” my mother reads. “ ‘Then, the male swims in. He circles around her and deposits his sperm.’ If they’re lucky, they swim off together on the next wave. But sometimes the female gets stuck in the sand and if she doesn’t catch the next wave, she dies, poor thing. She can’t breathe, I suppose. Aw.”
“Why do people catch them?”
“They’re good to eat, I think. I suppose you fry them.”
We stand on the balcony and don’t see anything. The sand looks the way it always looks, shiny and smooth, dark. My mother bends down to roll up her pants. “Come on,” she says.
A few minutes later, she runs back up the redwood stairs, two at a time. “It’s thick with them. They’re all over. You just can’t see them from here.” She takes pails from the garage, stepping over the carrot cake, and we fill them with water from the hose. The buckets feel heavy and the slap of water on my leg is cold as we lug them down to the beach.
It takes my eyes a few seconds to adjust. But then, I see them everywhere, wriggling like corkscrews in the sand, silver on one side. The shore comes alive with them.
“You catch them with your hands,” my mother yells, running, her arms low to the ground.
Holding a grunion is like holding a muscular beam of moonlight. It’s that fast. They try to squirm up out of your fist. Some flop down, slithering back into the dark shellac of water. The ones we catch clap against the sides of our pails.
There are hundreds of them. When you put your foot down in a cluster of grunion, they spread away from you in starlike migration.
I look up at the bowl of the sky, alive with stars and stars. They seem to be wriggling, too, burning holes in the dark. My mother knocks the pail over, giving a slush of fish back to the water. We turn it right and start again. It seems we can go on all night. My hands grow quicker and bold.
Our buckets thump like hearts and we keep running. It seems they will come all night, the wet fish we can touch.
“So you didn’t buy a house.”
She sighs. “I really want a house in just the RIGHT spot, where I can see the mountains and the ocean, and where there’s a little artists’ colony and I can take a ceramics class and make stained-glass windows, all these various things. I’m just going to wait until I can afford a real choice place. The house can be little, cute, but small.”
“You bought the car, though.”
“Yes,” she says, cautiously, not sure what she’s admitting.
We leave the beating pails on our balcony and take our clothes off there, letting them fall in soft piles. I don’t know what time it is. The sand still glitters with grunion. Now I see them everywhere. We run the cold hose water over our bodies, before we go inside.
In the morning, we take showers, still smelling of seaweed. I pack. We step over the carrot cake and the murky buckets of dead black fish in the garage, into the white car in the sun. I bring my suitcase with me. I’m leaving my mother to deal with the stink and dead things when I am gone.
“Today is Sunday. It is the third of March, 1979.” There is a sign on the fourth floor of my mother’s convalescent home in Santa Monica. The bright crayoned letters continue, “The weather today is mild and sunny. ‘Nice.’ ” I follow my mother through the nursing station where she flips through charts, marking files. She moves with competence, the flaps of her lab coat brisk behind her. Everyone knows her here.
“I told you about Miss Eldridge,” she says. “She’s the one who had beautiful, beautiful things. This may be hard for you, but it’s good, I think. You should see what happens.”
My mother told me about Miss Eldridge; she came to Los Angeles from Medford, Oregon, during the First World War and lived with her fiancé, who was in the service. She waited for him and he was killed in the war. Then, she worked all her life as a legal secretary, never married.
The curtain is drawn, separating Miss Eldridge from someone else in the room. What I am not prepared for is her beauty. She sits up on the bed, perfectly clear, her hands the conscious hands of anyone.
“Claire, I told you I’d bring my daughter to come meet you and I brought her. Here she is, here’s my Ann.”
Miss Eldridge looks at my mother and then at me, and shakes my hand. Miss Eldridge is crying without any noise, and my
mother begins to cry too. I go over to a bulletin board and study the pins. There are three postcards. I remember now that Miss Eldridge has no children. “I’ll change it again this month,” my mother says.
“Thank you for bringing her to see me.”
“I told you I would. And I did. I brought her. And now she’s off again.”
Miss Eldridge nods.
We sit in the car.
“She’ll never leave there,” my mother says, “it’s really sad, because she’s mentally as clear as you or me.”
My mother’s open eyes are as motionless and blue as a fish’s. “But they don’t have it that bad, you know?” She looks down. “I feel like you’re always leaving.”
“I always come back,” I say.
“But not for long.”
I shrug. “That’s what kids do, they leave.”
I only left home once and that was years ago.
My mother drives a freeway to the Valley. She turns onto an exit I don’t recognize and slows at a gas station. Across the street is a school, fenced with high aluminum.
She pulls up around the back and then I see it: our own Lincoln, up on cinderblocks.
“Do you want it, Ann? I’ve had them keep it for you. He says it’ll only cost two hundred to spiff it up and it might still run a long time. I’ve got the keys for you.”