Authors: Mona Simpson
“Will I be rich?” spun the heart waltzing to NO, then YES, then 59.
“Will I ever live with my father?” clearly, evenly spelled out the word DOG.
And “Is my father alive?” made the Ouija heart skitter off the board quickly, exiting straight through GOODBYE.
“No fair, you’re pushing,” my grandmother called in excitement years ago, as the heart flew, warm all over the board.
“No, I’m not, I’m not. Look,” I shouted, and she half-believed, her cheeks flushed and mouth tense, as we felt the mysterious drag us in its trail. She looked up from the board and out the dark window. The lights were on inside so we could see nothing of the sky.
I didn’t remember what all I asked anymore.
Will I be happy?
Does he remember me?
Even after, I never told. She didn’t press. I was preparing for sleep when my grandmother clapped my board into its box, saying, “Well, that was fun, wasn’t it. We all had a good laugh from it.”
But the next time, the girls wouldn’t touch the Ouija. They were afraid of it. They relented, though, and agreed to a game of Monopoly after bridge. I always won at board games. I cleaned them out that night. They all saved. They felt afraid to buy. Meanwhile I spent my money every chance I got and at the end, emptied them out from hotel rents. They counted their toy bills carefully.
“Well at least we
can
pay, I’m glad of that,” my grandmother said, counting out nine hundred and fifty dollars when she landed on my hotel on St. James Place.
I was always trying to lure them into playing for money. Sometimes they would and I’d collect little piles of pennies and dimes. She worried that I might become a gambler like my dad. At home alone, my grandmother wouldn’t use cash but she’d gamble hankies. She lost those too. I kept them in a gold cigar box from Boss’s.
W
E HAD TWO BOOKS:
one old Bible and the
American Heritage Dictionary
from 1957. Stacks of yellow
National Geographics
and
Reader’s Digests
filled the rest of the one bookshelf in the den. I never saw my grandmother read. But she looked at the pictures in the
National Geographics
and she used the heavy Bible to dry fall leaves.
After my grandmother died, I owned her furniture and her clothes. Other relatives and I inherited her money. But none of that seemed personal. I wondered a long time what she left that was her.
People were supposed to tell stories. Secrets. She didn’t do that. People sometimes made a thing that showed themselves. Like my mother’s needlepoint, a gorgeous thing, all her winding chemical rages refined to the points of a picture, frenetic in bright colors. Goldfish dashed maniacally at the center. But my mother couldn’t finish things. She still had a little sweater she’d started knitting me when I was four, it was half finished in a basket, red, one-sleeved.
My grandmother fixed and mended, darned. Her handiwork was fine, but her efforts all attempted the standard. Her homemade things copied the storebought done on machines. Her stitches got that small. That was her goal, so you couldn’t see the difference. You really couldn’t tell her hand.
I don’t have her signature. I have only copies, legal things, deeds, the Xerox of her will.
On letters she just signed Gram, not her name. But when I could have asked for it I was busy chasing other, more elusive things.
Most people tried to make something different, something only them, some proof like a document forever saying, I felt these wide bright things, I used my time on the earth. Most people wanted to leave a scratch of themselves behind here. She just left, giving all her things away before.
But for all the batter of my mother’s madness, the shrill air of the Briggses’ money, what colored my temperament was just the shadow of my grandmother’s hand over me, not even touching, only shading me.
She sought not to alter anything, not to express, only to leave the world just as she found it, as if she had never been here. I kept looking for anything she might have left behind. I wanted that. But she’d taken herself out of the things she used long before she left us. The last few years she was alive, she kept giving away her things. She wanted to give everything away.
When my father left, he took things with him. From him, I wanted my own back. When I tried to imagine him, I thought of caves.
T
HE WOMAN LEFT ME
, my nails suffered to evenness. I felt creased lines in the place where nail, which was really bone, met skin. She returned wheeling a cart of colored polishes.
“So now, what you want?”
Pictures of done hands superimposed on Asian temples hung all over on the walls. All of a sudden I felt shy. I did know what I wanted but I felt afraid to ask. I’d seen it in magazines.
“I’d like it clear but with the white underneath?”
“French. You want Fench manicure. The white under nail. But no can’t have that. No nail. You let grow first, then I do. Now pick color.”
M
Y GRANDMOTHER’S COLORS
were winter in the place she lived. Her hair was white but the clean shock of real white, no yellow or blue in it. Her skin tinted softer, a pink beige, her teeth the patina of yellowed ivory.
I thought of her pearls, no long, flapper pearls, but pearls around her neck like two hands clasped, that kind of pearls. Of course they were never real. Nobody we knew had real, except the Briggses. My grandmother could have been a flapper. She was the right age during the twenties. But those city ways would have dismayed and even frightened her. Self-attending, that kind of flair, even just an open shout for joy, went all against her nature. That quality of suppression turned my own mother against her and sent us to Los Angeles chasing beautiful clothes and sun tans, every form of immediate pleasure in this world.
My grandmother never changed friends, all her life. She stuck with her regular foursome. Gish was Jen’s sister; her real name was Francesca but she’d never been called that since she turned nine and tried to mimic a movie star. Because of that, she had always been known as wild. The girls were deeply, habitually loyal, even to a common name.
I knew these were good qualities. But after a whole night of their trilled conversations, more repetitive than the most conventional fugue, I felt so alone.
Marion Werth had given me a book about Madame Curie. She died of her work, eventually, leukemia. She was an early widow, like my grandmother, and like my grandmother she never remarried. But she was a woman of science.
At the time of their lives when Marie Curie was traveling the world for science with her daughter—who also died of her work, leukemia, again from radium—my grandmother and the girls toured Europe, sightseeing and playing cards.
I was a teenager by then and I lived with my mother in apartment after apartment, all furnished or empty, in California.
Why did the girls go to Europe? They missed dancing. Their husbands had died early. All their lives, before and through the wars, the fun they knew best was dancing. But there was nowhere in Wisconsin that they could dance. Maybe a niece’s or a nephew’s wedding if one of the young men was courteous enough to ask them. And even then they’d only get the one dance. Jen had seven children and so one of the grandsons always seemed to be having a wedding. But the girls didn’t like the music they played by then anyway.
“I can’t pick up a beat,” my grandmother said, whispering
one
two three,
one
two three.
My grandmother resorted to me, when I was there, on the carpeted living room floor. First she’d try to find a song with the right beat on the radio, but failing that, she’d hum,
ta
da deedum, ta
da
deedum,
de
de dah, teaching me the two-step and waltz. We practiced that way, there on the floor, and I did all the time, on the lawn, on the frozen-over driveway, I waltzed to the mailbox, polkaed to the school bus.
But in the European hotels where each of the girls had her own room, they danced. They came home with pictures of their guides. The guides were young men who took them climbing in the Alps, made sure they saw museums and choir boys in the city, and sat and joked with them in the good Swiss coffee houses.
In the old, grand hotel, the guide would take turns and dance with them each, gliding the women over the floor, their mouths held careful, their feet knowing the steps for years.
My grandmother packed good dresses to dance in, both times she went. And the first time she took her jewelry, her watch and pearls.
On the first trip, their guide was Hans. He accompanied them through Greece, Rome, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, finally parting from them in Vienna, putting them on the train to Paris. He was their favorite guide, then and always. They had taken that first trip when the last of the husbands died. That had been Jen’s Alfred. Gish planned a month off from her job at the Coliseum Theater. She worked as hostess there, which meant she took the tickets in a long formal dress every evening. She’d had the idea to go abroad and they all agreed, the trip did them a lot of good. When they went back for the second time, they tried to arrange, through the travel agent, to tour with Hans again. Naturally, this posed difficulties to the agent,
who told them flat out that finding and retaining a guide from five years earlier would be near impossible. Guides tended to be young. They took time off from their studies or went into businesses. It was hard and aimless work, abounding in flattery and remembrances, but leading nowhere. “You wouldn’t want to be a guide when you’re fifty,” the agent said.
This was a new thought for the girls. They worried. They each privately wrote Hans long letters about his future prospects, and my grandmother considered the merits of sending along a check. They didn’t tell each other. However, they assured the travel agent, there would be no problem locating Hans. They each possessed his full address and that of his mother in Bremen. They’d received Christmas cards from him just this last year. That had been the day. The girls on the phone like teenagers. Gish’s was held up in the mail over the weekend, desperate thirty-six hours of wondering, had she done something wrong? She went to church Saturday morning before the matinee for an extra confession.
I think they really returned to Europe just to see Hans again. Word came through their travel agent at last, six weeks before their departure. Hans would not be their guide. Hans had married and had a child and there was some rumor of illness in the family. Hans wasn’t working as a tour guide anymore.
They went anyway, secretly, conspiratorially, planning to make a visit to Hans themselves while there. They didn’t reveal their plans but took off on the departing day full of exhilarated gigglings, carrying suitcases heavy with dresses and dancing shoes and suits and the machinery of undergarments, boxes of Kleenex, first-aid equipment, cough drops and Handi Wipes.
Hans—in the picture I still have of him—didn’t look like a Hans. He looked like a George or a Scott. He was clean-cut, soft-haired, with a long nose, but his smile was slack and seemed to bespeak a love of pleasure. His lower lip drooped on the left.
I found out later about their pilgrimage to him. Apparently, Europe had less to see this time and they came home with colds and indigestion, complaining of the prices and telephones and toilet plumbing. They knew when they settled home that they would not go back for a very long time. My grandmother understood that she would never return. Never. She felt perfectly comfortable with notions of mortality of that kind.
I was not. I felt I’d missed too much already and I was missing things every day. Things I should have been learning, experiences. I didn’t know how to keep up with my homework or make money or forget about my mother blowing up at me or how to stop being in trouble all the time. I didn’t even know how to stop biting my nails.
I wanted to be whole, what I would have been. And I knew that wasn’t going to be now. I couldn’t live with the idea that what was supposed to be a gorgeous part of life was already over.
A
PPARENTLY
, it was the last week in Europe when my grandmother and the girls found Hans. This new guide—the Swiss, they called him—couldn’t understand why they so wished to see Bremen. “It is”—he shrugged—“what you call, university town. College only.” But that last week, they broke away. They were already tired, Rene and Jen were sick, Gish had lost her best shirt in a Hamburg dry cleaner.
They hadn’t danced as much on this trip. In fact, I had a feeling they hadn’t danced at all. Who knows what they thought they’d find when they traced the streets to Hans’s address and turned up at his door. Maybe they had lingering hopes, like the aftertaste and dissolve of a lunch sugar mint, for dancing there. They didn’t know. Perhaps he’d come into money and lived in an old mansion with twenty-foot ceilings and velvet curtains and marble floors and an entryway and a balcony and …
But they were sensible women who lived ordinary lives back in Wisconsin. I suspect they already knew. They turned the corner to a house that was gray and run-down. The yard was small and mean, poor shoots of grass grew like a few hairs on the side of a bald man’s head. Mostly, it was worn down to smooth, packed dirt. Things from inside spilled to the three bare stairs, a child’s truck, a rubber ball, a bone, an old platform shoe.
Of course, they knew then. And the good religious women that they were, they felt no flashing urge to walk on—the way I would have—find an intersection, hail an anonymous taxi.
I wish they had. I wish they’d turned and gone, run helter-skelter, fast as they could in their pumps with their little purses hanging off their hands, asked the taxi for the best hotel in Bremen, gone there and sat in a wood-paneled room, listening to a string quartet, taking tea.
What they found was not so much worse than what they knew at home, in the bad parts of Racine, in their own parish, during some patchy years of their own children’s lives. With my mother, my grandmother had known even worse.
Apparently, Hans’s living room had been small and held the shrill reek of diapers somewhere nearby. He was there and the wife too, him hapless, holding the baby in just its rubber pants. It was the white and brown of winter then, the same time of year they’d come before when it was the red and white, the ermine and red velvet of a king’s coat and outside the planted rows of pale, match-colored bare trees … The wife had heavy, messy hair and didn’t shave under her arms.