Authors: Mona Simpson
“So where shall I take you?”
He shrugged. “Where you going?” He’d opened his coat and he’d crossed his arms, like a pretzel in a black sweater. His big boots crept up on the carpeted walls of my grandmother’s car.
I didn’t exactly know. At the cemetery gate I turned left, towards town. I had no place to be really either. I didn’t want to go to the Briggses’ yet. It was still early. I flicked my hands up off the steering wheel. “Downtown?”
He smiled, head forward, purring. “What, you want to look at the Christmas windows at Briggs’s?”
“No, not Briggs’s,” I said.
“We could go to the church bazaar in your old school basement.”
“Saint Agnes?”
“Mmhm.”
“Oh, let’s do that.” My fingers lifted straight back. “Where?”
“Follow the two steeples and then left.”
Everything here was easy to see. The steeples exceeded everything but the smokestacks in the sky. Danny’s pale fingers fluttered around my grandmother’s car radio. It had hardly ever been used. We should have sold the car, but I just never did. My aunt advertised it once in the paper for me but the best offer we got was four hundred and fifty. That just didn’t seem worth it.
“There’s no music,” Danny said.
And then I realized how still it was here. Everything seemed muffled and colored. The beginning of sunset streaked now between the steel bridges and the smokestacks and paper-mill workings across the Fox River. The clouds bottomed with strokes of pink and a lit orange that wouldn’t last.
“Your radio’s broken.”
“Oh, that. Is it?” There were things about growing up without brothers and sisters. And my grandmother was old. She kept a radio in the kitchen, but she mostly listened to the weather or the talk news or WBAY, looking for a waltz. And with my mother she never let me play rock ‘n’ roll in the car. I couldn’t have told you what it was to begin to hear music.
“It’s my grandmother’s car.”
He nodded. “Your grandmother was a nice lady.”
I coasted to an easy parking place and we walked down into the church basement. Women at a card table handed us white Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate with miniature marshmallows on top. We passed booths of felt sunbursts, painted yardsticks, complete with sewn yardstick jackets, mod woven potholders, family tree kits, child-made multicolored candles, embroidered calendars of the liturgical year, women in bright smocks selling all of it, along with powdered sugar twists, dark ginger cookies and endless crinkly home-baked pies.
“All I do here is eat,” Danny said.
A few card tables looked almost like antique stalls in city flea markets. These were less antiques than stuff from the basement and attic, but at one, Danny found his prize. A tablecloth of names. There it was: a round, standard tablecloth, the borders factory-printed with maroon and brown, green-leaved, unpretty flowers. But a woman must have had all her guests from 1941 on sign the tablecloth. You could see the dull gray lead signatures under embroidery yarn. They spanned the forties though the sixties. Then she’d embroidered each signature a different color.
A tablecloth of handwritten names, colored as a circus poster. I looked it over. I recognized some families I knew, but none of the girls was there.
“And her children are selling it,” he whispered to me. “Twenty dollars. Why would you sell a thing like that?”
I saw a cane. I’d never noticed canes until the man upstairs but this was a pretty one, light wood—all his had been dark—rustic but perfectly smooth, with some gnarls and raised joints of branch intact. The more I looked, it went beautiful. “How much is this?”
“I’ll take three,” the man said, slot-mouthed. He wore a T-shirt, arms crossed in front, muscles pressing everywhere.
I bought it for the man upstairs and then walked with it myself down the aisles. It felt good in the hand. I liked it. I hoped I’d really give it to the old man. My mother did that. Whenever my mother bought a present for anybody she got one for herself too, and she kept the one with the better color or without the scratch. It was so hard for her give away anything. She always felt like she had so little herself.
Danny had spread his tablecloth out across the worn knees of his black jeans. “I wonder who made it. You think their mother? Must be the mother.”
I pulled him back through the crowded aisle. Danny’s mother, Amber Felchner, was the fattest woman we knew growing up. She was a good cook. The other women on Guns Road were always borrowing her recipes. They usually had some chicken or meat in them and a Campbell’s cream soup and biscuits baked on top of it all. But Jim, her husband, and her two boys, they never got fat. Danny and I then were sharing a paper plate of sticky rice crispy and marshmallow squares. You had to grow up in the Midwest not to find these things disgusting, but if you did grow up here there was something indoors about them. All walls and ceilings and safety and rain.
“Excuse me, he just bought this from you. Do you know who made it?”
An older woman with an ample face, vastly freckled, waited before us, her square hands useless, lifted. “Oh, why sure, my mother made that. She did it for their twenty-fifth anniversary. Never used it. ’S never been used. I found it upstairs in a drawer wrapped in brown tissue.”
“You don’t want it yourself? You sure you want to sell it?” Danny held it out as a kind of accusation. He couldn’t help himself. It occurred to me then how he had loved his mother and that, by now, she might be dead. Fat people died. “She’s gonna die soon,” my mom had said about Amber Felchner, thirty years ago. She’s gonna die soon. Every time you mentioned Amber Felchner, that was her refrain. My grandmother would shake her head, saying, “Such a pretty, pretty face.”
The woman shriveled, somehow folding the many freckles. “Shucks no, I’ve got so much of such stuff around the house. You take it. Take it if you think you’ll use it.” The woman picked up the tiny white price tag affixed with white string to the corner, professionally, as if this were a store. “Twenty. I put on twenty.” She reached into the glass mason jar and picked out a ten, moved to give it back. “That was high. Here. Take this.”
Danny backed off, mouth open, jawy. “No, are you kidding? It’s a great price, do you know what I’d pay for this in Chicago?” He pressed it, folded, to his chest. “I love it.”
“Enjoy it, I’ll be glad if you get some use out of it,” she said. “And
remember it all goes to Saint Agnes. New altar boys’ robes and choir books.”
“What a trip,” he said, walking out to the car. Now we were eating Mexican vertical donuts, hot and melting with powdered sugar. International sophistication in Racine seemed to exist mainly in baked goods. Sweets from many countries. I’d been there under a day and I could feel I’d already gained.
“I should really go back and give her another twenty. Can you be
lieve
she sold this?”
I could believe. No problem. I’d known houses choked with hand-touched things. One tablecloth wouldn’t be this mother’s only legacy. People repeated themselves. There were few true quirks in character. This solid freckled woman, a daughter still at fifty, had probably always lived cluttered and impeded by meant mementos from her mother. Children like that don’t need to save.
I tried to remember Danny better from when we were little. His brother was normal, but I don’t think Danny had many friends. He was always at home with his mother.
I thought of the freckled woman, her red, preparatory hands. Her mother every day gave her what we looked for at flea markets. I remembered Emily’s monument of a birthday cake, built and worked over with butter cream. I could see the little glass cups of food coloring, tinting the white frosting, the metal fluting frosting gun, their maid did most of the work but Merl signed her name, in frosting, at the end, on the right-hand bottom corner. It had a flourish to it. People who expressed themselves expressed everyplace, signing even things they barely touched. People like my grandmother kept on hiding over and over again, every day of their lives until the end when they finally disappeared, once and for all, leaving behind not even a signature.
I looked over at Danny. “You remember my mom?”
His head went down so it shook parallel to the ground. “Your grandma was such a nice person,” he said. “Yeah, she was a great woman. I remember kids laughing at me over something and your grandma saying, ‘Ugh, don’t you care what they say, you just go about your own business, let ’em laugh, they’ll get tired of it pretty soon and pick on someone else.’ ”
The funny thing was my grandmother was as bad as the others about Amber’s Danny, behind his back. She blamed Amber for it.
“Where to now?” He put his boot on the dashboard. I must have looked at it funny because he said sorry and pulled his leg back, both arms around the knee. I’d never seen a boot on that dashboard before. My grandmother always kept her car perfect.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you have to be somewhere?”
He shrugged. Bells began to peal from churches. It must have been five o’clock.
I said, “I kind of don’t want to go where I’m supposed to.”
“Well, let’s go downtown then.”
Nothing here was far from anything else. I parked halfway down the block on Main Street. The library was one way, Boss’s the other. “Where to?” I said. We just sat.
“I can buy some tobacco at Boss’s. Check out the magazines.”
I ran first to the library. It was still early but already darkening, winter. People rushed by carrying packages in both hands. I was thinking, I didn’t even know what the country looked like: Egypt. I wanted to see and for some reason I wanted to know now, before I had to face the Briggses. I shuffled up the white long steps to the big doors. The Racine Public Library and Museum were attached, in this old building with the columns. At the main desk, under a huge wreath, I asked for Marion Werth. She had an office upstairs in a cage but I expected she would be walking through some part of the library now. Maybe they had their own Christmas party. I looked forward to her right then, her round face and red fringe of bangs. I wondered if it would be a red dress or a green dress. Her earrings would definitely have a Christmas theme: wreaths or trees or sleighbells that jingled.
“Up, they’re gonna say, whatever happened to the girl that jingled,” Eli Timber teased her one year. Stevie Howard was there too. All the teenage guys noticed what she wore and flirted with her. It was like practice.
“The girl
who
jingled? That was me!” she said, stamping a bookleaf. She had a cheerfulness, something proper you found only in the Midwest.
“She’s not here anymore,” the kid behind the desk said. I looked at him. He was someone I didn’t know.
“Will she be in next week?” I thought vacation. Maybe she even found some relative on the family tree and took the train to meet him. Despite myself, I got excited about that.
“She doesn’t work here anymore.”
“Since when?”
“August.”
I asked him where she worked now and his lips went tight and his chin crumbled the way some people’s do. “I can’t say that, ma’am, only that she is no longer employed by the Racine Public Library.”
The kid was what, no more than eighteen or nineteen. Stern. I wanted to slap his chin for daring to imply anything less than right in Marion Werth’s conduct. He bothered me so much I forgot what I was there for. Then I turned around and saw into the big reading room, the library tabletops under the slow shower of electric light: a father stood behind two children; leaning over them, pointing to things in a big book. A black teenaged boy stood gazing at the standing globe, his fingertips all on the surface of one yellow continent. An old woman sat in the corner by a swan’s-neck lamp, the newspaper stretched taut between two gloved hands. The pads of her glove fingers were black. Kids browsed, slouching, at the new arrivals rack. A deep bright blue pressed against the long windows. It was quarter after five, the big clock on the north wall said. I went to the world atlas and found it: Egypt. It looked pretty large. I drew the shape in pencil on my checkbook. I decided I’d learn it the way I could anytime draw Wisconsin.
Wind skeeted down the empty main street, newspapers caught on alley garbage cans. I pulled up my collar. This was what it was like here. Sunset, brown-red and a sorrowing pink under looming purple clouds, stretched between the smokestacks across the river. The brick paper mill’s windows lit yellow-orange.
I stopped at a phone booth on Main Street and called the detective long distance. I couldn’t stay mad at anyone long. I had too many of my own problems. And with Jim Wynne, it was just like making up after any fight. We both sounded subdued, lower now. I put my hand on the glass, pressing to stretch, and for one moment, I looked down and saw myself in my jeans and thought, someone across the street could be glancing at me right now the way I’d watched people in phone booths, and I must—from this far away—assume some mystery, too.
We decided. I’d open the box and then he’d start work on whatever leads I found from that. So I’d have to get through Christmas alone.
“And what about the passport guy?” I said. “You were going to
check on that.” I’d gotten to feel that I had to keep the lists and remind him. That was a bad feeling, but if it was true, it was true. He’d never surprised me with anything good. Not since the very beginning, before the check was cashed. Still, I didn’t think he was a bad man. I guessed it was normal to be lazy.
“Yeah, he’s workin’ on it, you know for what I paid him he’s not gonna rush, but he’ll, he’s a good guy, he’ll do it. I should be getting something from him any day now.”
I tried to force him into a dinner when I got back.
“I’ll have whatever’s in the box then, we can just go over it together. I’ve got my calendar,” I said. I already owned a calendar for the new year. I balanced the thing on my bent leg in the phone booth. January 5. I dallied a moment, writing his name down.
“Awright,” he said in an upsigh way that made me know he was going to cancel. “Do you have those two addresses in Egypt, the Shahira Miramar and the Refinery? From that report I gave you?”