Authors: Mona Simpson
It was snowing outside, the street already furred with gray slush.
“Yeah,” I said. That reminded me of when my mother wanted me to write to the United Arab Republic to ask where my trust fund money was. She told me all my life, I had a trust fund for college. Then the summer before I was supposed to go she said she was worried because nothing had come for me in the mail. Who was supposed to send it, I said. Well the Arabs, she said. You don’t have a name or documents? Did you have the name of the lawyer or anything? No, but it was said that it would be done. It was promised me. When? Well, when you were born.
That summer when I was still hoping stupidly and watching the mail just because the other side was shell after shell of horror, I drafted a letter to my father’s family. My mother went to dinner once in a while with a fat dark-skinned man named Fiaz. He was some kind of Arab but he’d said once to me that he didn’t know my father or my father’s family. He was from a different country altogether. I don’t remember anymore which one. But my mother said he could take my letter to the family.
I wrote, “My mother has told me that you made arrangements for my college education at the time of my birth. As I am going to college in September, I need to know as soon as possible whether this is true.”
She rewrote the letter for me with her friend Audrey. Audrey, she said, knows what men over there are like. These Arabs.
“Dear Relatives” (they wrote), “I have not seen my daddy for years and years,” it began. “And now I am a straight A student in Beverly Hills High School hoping to go to college and study medicine. My mother works hard but she is all alone. Men ask her out on dates but she is too worried about me and my education. I have nowhere to turn for help.”
It went on like that, all begging.
I refused. She could write it if she wanted but not like that in my name.
“Okay, it’s your life,” my mother said. “But I know these men. I know what they’re like. They don’t want you to just be so blunt. And tough.”
Later she said my trust fund was her jewels.
J
IM
W
YNNE TOLD ME
the Miramar address had been on my father’s record when he first came to the University of Wisconsin. It was that old. I supposed it was probably his home. I couldn’t believe it would be there anymore.
Dorothy Widmer, that dust-file angel, had located it. I wasn’t that far from Dorothy Widmer right now. Powell Street went along the river a ways and then veered up into the highway. Madison was what, less than a half day’s drive away. I thought, maybe I should meet her. But no, why. The feather had touched her once but never again. Maybe she’d been his lover. I thought a lot of women probably were. Still. I fingered the travel agent’s card in my wallet. On the back, I had the numbers written for the flights to Egypt. I imagined Dorothy Widmer egg-shaped, yearning. Egypt was my last resort. Secret. If I went there, I had to find him. I didn’t tell the detective. I didn’t want him thinking I had any more money.
“Do that,” he said. “Write to them.”
“I did already.”
“Oh. Good,” he said. That surprised him. “See, we’re gettin’ someplace now. See now you’re catching on. Your attitude’s better. We’re makin’ a lot of progress.”
We hung up, together. Except I’d lied. That was my first lie to him. I didn’t feel like writing to those thirty-year-old addresses without zip codes. I just didn’t do it. I never trusted much good coming from the mail. Those systems broke. Or they worked but for other purposes, to relay the mundane tops of things. My grandmother’s letters, sent
and received, all recounted what was that day cooked and eaten. What parts of the body ached how and which ointments were tried as new relief. Those letters arrived. The ten-cent stamp could carry them. Once, absolutely alone with my mother in Los Angeles, I escaped out of the apartment and ran. After a while I just walked. Nobody was following me. She’d wait mad for me to come back in. I passed mansions with vast lawns and saw no people. Just for nothing I opened a mailbox and spread wide a fan of cobwebs.
No one in Los Angeles bothered with letters. It was too long and simple a wait. And people other places were too far away.
Danny Felchner was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette at the counter of Boss’s. Piped Christmas music came in from an old radio on the top shelf. I didn’t want it to be Christmas. I wanted just any other ordinary day. I slid onto the stool beside him.
“Who’d you call?” he said.
“Secret.”
“Try these then,” he said, and slipped a pair of sunglasses over my eyes.
With his finger, he revolved a circular wire rack of sunglasses. Next to it was a standing head mirror. The glasses were tinted silver. I looked criminal and mean. “Nope,” I said.
He spun the rack harder, then lifted off another pair. “These are better.” He fitted them over my ears. This pair was delicate, bookish. I liked them. I’d always believed people looked more intelligent in glasses.
Danny took them off my eyes and put them in my coat pocket. “Here,” he said, patting the pocket. At first I flushed embarrassed, pleased. That he was going to buy me something. I liked it so much when someone did something for me I didn’t know how to be. It pleased me too much just when someone liked me.
“Come on,” he said, a hand under my elbow. Then I understood. He wasn’t going to buy them for me. We were going to steal the sunglasses from Boss’s. Then I felt ashamed for being so happy.
I was scared, real scared but with a sharp edge of thrill too, walking out as if something electric and loud, a buzzing, might start when I passed under the nickel plate door and my whole body felt different that second, but then we were out going to the car and his hand was still on my elbow and I shrugged it off. I wanted to be alone and all of a sudden it seemed late, night was blowing over the river, silver clouds, and the joy ride felt done.
Sunglasses. Now I’d have them. I already did have health insurance from school. Two out of three. But I didn’t like stealing from Boss’s.
It seemed to end our aimlessness. “I better get there,” I said, my foot on the car floor. “Where should I bring you?”
He shrugged. “I’m parked by Price’s,” he said. “You can leave me anywhere.”
“What are you doing? Are you going to your parents tonight?”
“No,” he said.
I all of a sudden wanted to invite him with me. But it was the Briggses’ and I couldn’t really. I mean I could but it was a statement. But then I got mad.
Emily could always do anything and it was just because it was never my house. So I did invite him. He wanted to go and change first and come up later. I dropped him off at his car, an old car like mine. I wondered if it had been Amber’s.
The Briggses lived on the Hill, a little out of town. Just driving there, I tried to subdue my excitement over the snow, lines and lines, curves overlapping, like stilled waves on the far distant ridges of old Italian paintings, the fields in their blue cartilage of snow, going on and on far enough to see stands of trees and beyond them, nothing; the dusk settling. Black stark twigs, the dried earth poking out at ditches, the lowness and closeness. I knew it wasn’t so much. Everybody feels that way about the place they grew up.
A
N EVENT YOU DREAD
enough is always a relief when you arrive. Parties. Briggses’ were always so much bigger on the way.
I parked about twenty feet down the hill and sat in the dark quiet car. The house was already lit. The made-to-look-old gas lanterns lining the drive from here really did seem tonight like torch flames. They had a gate, swung open now. The house, set halfway up old Baird’s Hill, was pink brick in the shape of the White House. It was higher in the middle and that part had white pillars. There were two fancy neighborhoods in Racine, the old one along the Fox River and this. Pat Briggs’s father and his grandfather both owned huge old houses in town on Mason Street. His Swiss grandfather had built an all-stone house there and he’d built his own church, of the same stone. Otto Kapp. He’d started Kapp’s, a German restaurant and bakery on Main Street. Otto’s wife was dead now for a long time, but he was still alive and so was his sister Clara, who’d never weighed more than about
eighty pounds and who had seemed attached by wires to the cash register in the middle of the candy and cookie counter where you went in and out of Kapp’s. People said that’s why they got so rich, because either Otto or Clara was always at that register. “They never let anyone else get near it.” I’d heard that all my youth. If someone got rich in Racine you could bet it was from some character defect.
Otto had been some kind of actor and singer when he was young and he spent his money building the church so he could start a boys’ bell choir.
His only daughter had married Seamus Briggs and Seamus Briggs had started Briggs’s. According to everyone alive to remember, that was some wedding in Otto’s church. They still had the dress in a vault at Briggs’s. It was supposed to have cost a thousand dollars then in the Depression. When Pat married Merl, he’d wanted to start a new neighborhood and they bought up Baird’s Hill. They’d brought architects from Spring Green and from Chicago—in medical school in the East, Pat had followed the fashions—but the architects had begun excavating and planning something with local wood and clay and stones they just found in fields outside town and cement, all things which seemed to Merl dirty. She had wanted something fancy. The only person Merl really got along with during that period of construction was Scully, the stonemason for the cemetery. He and she were finally left together planning the house after everyone else went away. She’d wanted something grand. She’d always imagined columns and huge velvet stage curtains, that sort of thing. And she’d gotten it. There were bay windows with windowseats and a lot of statues. In the backyard, down the hill a ways, were the carved-out foundations the old architects had made, before they left in their muddy boots and yellow slickers. “Dirty men,” Merl said whenever they were mentioned in the newspaper. We used to play there as children, we used it as an amphitheater.
Years later, Frank Lloyd Wright came to the public library and gave a speech. The Better Homes and Gardens Society had brought him up and they’d driven him around and asked him to pick the best house in town, from the architecture point of view. Marion Werth had introduced him at the podium. That was her first month at the library. He said in his speech that he could not select a winner because after a day tour he had not seen one example of architecture in Racine. All we had, he’d said, was building. He’d criticized the
whole town as they sat below in their best clothes from Briggs’s, and they all clapped politely when he was done talking.
I took a hard breath. I had to go in. I went around to the trunk and got out my backpack. I always felt sloppy and like a student when I walked into Briggses’. Sometimes I was fine about that. I thought it was good for them to just see how normal people lived when they were doing something serious. Tonight, though, I felt pretty shabby.
I expected Dorothy to be somewhere near the door. They had a maid and that was just natural to them. I can’t quite explain the way that seemed to me. I was disappointed. It wasn’t all neat and ordered, it didn’t have that air of in-control comfort maids brought in the movies. It was just one other thing that couldn’t touch the real mess of life.
The tall front door hung open a little, supporting an elaborate wreath, excrescent with dried flowers and miniature fruit. Inside, Emily waved at me. She was on the phone, stretching the cord the length of the circular marble foyer. “Tad,” she mouthed. She always looked different at home, a way she didn’t anywhere else. It was as if other places when she was sitting or standing, she was folded into too little space. Tonight, her feet pawed the pink stone floor and stretched. Her toenails were polished under the nylon.
She finished with Tad and then immediately began dialing again. “I’m trying to get this jacket before it’s all sold out everywhere,” she told me, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder. She showed me a page ripped out of a magazine. She’d always been a cutter-outer. Collage maker. The jacket was black with gold chains and spangles. I guessed it was nice.
“Aren’t they closed?”
“Pacific time,” she said. “Dad gave me a list of buyers.” The Briggses shopped the way other people worked. Grimly. As if it made a difference. Gish had told me that when Mr. and Mrs. Briggs first married, he’d wanted her to throw out all she had, come to Briggs’s and let him give her everything new, from the top lines. In Briggs’s the top lines were all on the top floor. It went down that way to the bargain basement. But Merl hadn’t liked much and when she did take to a sweater or a coat or pair of gloves, she insisted on buying duplicates. Closets filled with unused triplicates of four years ago’s sweater. Mr. Briggs, a retailer, tried endlessly to explain to his wife
about fashion, that it didn’t last. But he never could teach her frivolity. For her it was all effort and no joy. She worried about waste. She could never see clothes as dispensable, understand that there would always be new and more.
Pat’s wisdom worked on Emily, though. She really was his daughter. When she’d first moved to New York, I found her cross-legged on the floor of her empty apartment, having spent two hours calling Neiman Marcuses across America because she’d seen a dress in a magazine that seemed to her the dress Isabelle Archer had worn the day she landed in England. When the dress finally arrived, it didn’t looked right on her. “Not enough butt,” she’d decided, patting herself. A month after that, I got it. But she got sick of seeing her old things on me, so now she gives them to her cleaning woman.
“Hello. Size eight, but I could even take a six or a ten,” she was saying, her voice loud on the phone.
“Can you do that?” I whispered.
She covered the mouthpiece. “Sure. Dressmaker.”
“Oh,” I nodded. I should know these things. Why didn’t I?
She minced around the foyer, almost dancing, phone between cheek and breastbone, wearing just a pale peach slip and nylons. Her hair lifted way out crinkly the way it got when she braided it wet into a hundred tiny braids. The bottom almost reached her waist. She lifted some and pushed it back lightly. She was someone whose hair had always been brushed by another person. She treated it like a major personality.