Authors: Mona Simpson
B
ACK AT HOME ONCE
, at my grandmother’s kitchen table, Paddy Winkler reached out and felt my face. “Tell me what she looks like now, Lil.”
My grandmother had her back to us; she was fixing something at the stove. Paddy Winkler waited, hands politely folded on the table. He relished my grandmother’s food. He had never had anybody to cook for him. In his little kitchen, he only heated beans and franks from a can. He couldn’t see to cook. His fingers were dark with grease that didn’t come off, the same way Chummy’s were. My grandmother lifted up pieces of Czech coffeecake, rich and aromatic. Her hands were just manicured, in round ovals, a pale clear pink.
I sat at the end of the table, my feet playing on the metal bars under the chair.
“Here you go, Paddy, let me get you your coffee. Mayan, put out napkins, would you.”
I gave Paddy his, you had to put a thing right into his hand. I’d been doing that all my life but now I was more conscious of touching. It felt kind of good. His fingers were rough as if you could feel all the lines that make a handprint raised up on his skin.
“I’ve been listening to movies on that TV Dickie and Stevie got me.”
“What do you see?”
“Last night I got on that
Casablanca
again. Practically can remember it from the last time.”
“Oh, you stay up late, Paddy, I can’t stay up so late anymore. She does. This one does. But she studies. She’s a very good student, she gets A’s.” She frowned like there was almost something wrong with that.
He reached out and felt my face again. “You didn’t tell me yet what she looks like now.”
“Ugh, be glad you can’t see her, with all the makeup. She’s a pretty girl underneath it, but out in California they all put on this charcoal, black around their eyes like raccoons. That I don’t like.”
It was strange the things she did and didn’t like. She didn’t like the makeup or the platform shoes I wore, but she liked anything I did to my hair. Little braids I made or dandelion chains, hippie things, reminded her of her own youth. “I think it’s nice with the flowers, real real pretty,” she’d say.
“You know, Mayan, the most beautiful women in the world don’t wear makeup. Ingrid Bergman never wore makeup,” Paddy said.
I gave my grandmother a look, like, what am I supposed to say to this guy, he’s blind.
“Your grandmother don’t wear makeup.”
I skidded my chair back. “Well, I’m not the most beautiful woman in the world, okay, and I think I look better in makeup.” I’d only started then, when I’d moved to California.
“Come back and sit down, why don’t you, eat your coffeecake,” my grandmother called. “To tell the truth, we don’t care what you look like.”
“S’all Greek to me,” Paddy said and then spun in his wild laugh.
I
N
R
ACINE
, we had had our own movie stars and they wore makeup too. They were girls three years older named Carrie, Corinna and Kim. Carrie eventually overtook the others because she got together with Enrico and they were one of those couples everybody watched. It was funny to think how we saw them separate for a year and watched them start to notice each other, like lines coming from two corners destined to intersect. Then they were the total couple.
Every girl in the school would have traded whatever boy she was going with for Enrico and every guy would have done the same for Carrie. You knew that. It was just something you lived with. And anyway, it wasn’t about to happen.
She didn’t let him take her for granted, even after. We all knew just when it happened, what day. It was their prom. Racine had all kinds of fancy dances even for young kids. It started with Cotillion. At the ninth-grade prom, Marion Werth and Eli Timber were still there as chaperones, her in a long colored dress and gloves that went up to her elbow.
We all watched Carrie and Enrico and the ninth-graders come to school different and hazy that day, the older kids. They took over the whole building with their happiness and their childhoods ending. Even nuns relented, studies flew out the windows into the air, I closed my eyes a minute and opened them and saw a swarm of numbers just over the sill like a moving haze of bees, we had every day left for learning, every hour every day all the next years and this was their only one prom.
Carrie stood calm and ripe, ready, nice to everyone in a way that
didn’t matter, seemed superfluous and thereby more kind. She inclined her head towards the nuns and that June day, even Sister Mary Bede felt charmed. The nuns with their other kind of faces looked with fondness at her too that day. They were letting her go ahead and go, and she and they both seemed to accept finally that it wasn’t themselves, they each belonged to a system, a world system bigger and beyond their own powers to resist. In the end, the nuns didn’t put much faith in willpower. For all their talk of phone books under laps and precautions, they themselves lived as women, with timid, curling nervousness, waiting to succumb.
Carrie had always been pretty; it wasn’t only that. She owned something else that day. The color of her lips changed. It was a real red now, even in the daytime dullness without makeup. She’d put on weight and it went to all the right places the way it never would on any of us ever again. Her breasts turned up at the nipples like the stems of pears.
I was studying the way her brow went and how her ankles dipped and her thighs squared at the top. Everyone did that.
All the guys, the lay teachers and the priests too, and even Eli Timber, they all looked at her and you could see they were idly wishing they could do it, instead of Enrico. They noticed him with a new sharpness, almost like respect.
This was a warm Friday. The Monday after Enrico stood high, one of those guys: tall, thin-faced, incredibly long-necked, not serious. His red hair fell floppy in long tight curls, and his high beak-nosed face always roved open, ready for new interest.
You could imagine it: his high white butt, nose tipped up, eyes straight to her a plumb line, mouth pursed into something serious and small but only once. Enrico understood a hundred men and boys had looked at him and wished they could do what he was doing now. Naturally unsusceptible to solemnity or even the bands of concentration, still, numbers had not failed to impress him. And then too, she was his first girl, perfectly pretty. With her knees bent, her calves lay open on the bed, in the smooth curve of cut calla lilies.
Monday in school he was the same as ever but more, more with the guys, their laughter even easier and more free. She wore a gauzy dress and high sandals anyone else would have been sent home for, her hair pinned up on top of her head. You could see the whole shape of those legs through the dress. Stevie moved staring at her in the guidance office. She stood like a vase.
“Are you wearing a slip?” he asked.
“Yes, I am wearing a slip, Steven, and panties and a bra, too,” she said.
I saw a priest and a teacher look right at her crotch, like a target, then away.
She still had her confidence, we saw that.
The last day of school, before I moved to California, I heard her in the bathroom, talking to Kim through the stalls.
“So he calls Thursday night and says, ‘Hey, Cay, how ’bout Saturday?’ I said, ‘I’m very sorry, Rico, but I made other plans.’ ‘You did who-at?’ he says. And I said, ‘You didn’t call and I made other plans.’ ”
I knew, even hearing her over the high bell sound of peeing, that she meant it. She wasn’t going to change her other plans to see Enrico the way any of the rest of us would.
See, they had you after, because you didn’t want to be a slut. After the once, they’d turned you into a girl sleeping with her boyfriend. That wasn’t so bad. Some mothers would have died from heart attacks on cement floors, finding out, but for us, that wasn’t so bad. It depended a lot on how you both looked, really.
But how could you leave him? What would you be then? A girl who’d slept with two of them? That was different.
Carrie was willing to hurl the risk.
Good for her, I thought, good for her.
“I always liked Enrico,” I’d said to Eli Timber at the Briggses’ Christmas party, “but I don’t know if I respect him.” By now Enrico already worked at the paper mill. For a while he’d been a salesman at Briggs’s.
“I respect him,” Eli Timber had said, “for being the first guy to get Carrie Hudson.”
Carrie told me once, “You know how before you sleep with a guy, nothing works, you’re always bumping into each other’s foreheads, his arm’s uncomfortable, you can never walk with your hands on each other, it’s too awkward? Well, after you sleep together, everything fits.”
But nothing turned out the way it seemed it would. Fifteen years later, Carrie was at home, working at Briggs’s, bottom-heavy like a pear. Kim ran away to Chicago and became a fashion model in Japan. And when she came home, she paid for everyone, Eli Timber, Sister
Mary Bede, Carrie and Corinna. They all said she was real loose with money. They kept the clippings of her from the magazines. Nuns from other Wisconsin cities who’d never met Kim sent her cut-out picture to Sister Mary Bede.
M
Y GRANDMOTHER
was always getting old. As if time were running out and nobody knew but us, a chestnut fallen on the sidewalk that she couldn’t pick up anymore—I reached down to get it, my hand touching the stain on the cement, and when I rose our eyes met and we were in love for a moment the way anyone is in love, a man and a woman, a mother and a child. It was a kind of race. Could she stay standing long enough to deliver me, done, an adult? Or would she have to give me back to my mother? Even then, she’d lost her vigilance. She must have known something about Stevie. I expected her to stop me, but she didn’t. She was tired. She climbed upstairs to go to bed at five after seven. It was more than tired. She was old. She didn’t care so much anymore or she did care, but about different things, vastly different things than younger, headstrong parents. They had ego in their children, themselves planted over again like sex. My grandmother held something else altogether and what it was in her wasn’t attached to me but by then to something high and vague as heaven.
All that time, I assumed, she was holding on to see me into college. We’d talked about college, the nuns and she and I in a conference room. This was during one of the times my mother was away without me. But my grandmother always seemed mild about college, veering into, We’ll see. You never know, she’d say.
She would have rather delivered me to a husband. That would have let her rest.
F
OLLOWING THE ROAD
I was supposed to be on, I drifted into a windy, rising neighborhood of comfortable houses with shallow lawns and two-car garages. Lights began softening windows but there was still daylight too, a poignant winter blue. Finally I found the address and stopped the car. It was a stone house made with thin horizontal stones and a wooden garage door, shrubs lining the walkway. I stepped out slowly and straightened my skirt. I hadn’t really thought
that much about what I’d say to this man. The air smelled good, someone had a fire going. An open garage door across the street showed a boy mandering over a flat table of tools, his large, labile back. I remembered the luminous beauty of suburbs, the deep safety.
I walked up to the door thinking this was the same uncertainty I’d have when I neared the house that held my father, but it wasn’t true, this was easier, and when I stood there hearing the doorbell ring through the house, what I felt was hot, real embarrassment.
Then I thought, what if nobody’s home?
But a tall woman opened the door, a beagle beating against her leg, and she smiled, asking if she could help me. She was long-necked, long-faced, long-thighed, her hair pulled up and behind her in an oval bun.
“Is J.D. Nash here, please?”
“Sure, come on in. Jay,” she called through the house, “you have a vis-itor.” I followed her, her long feet canvassing the stone floor. Then the man emerged, blinking, fitting on a pair of thick plastic glasses.
He, too, was long-faced, long-legged and long-armed. And bald. One hand took the glasses down again and polished them on his shirt while the other arm was already out meeting me. He couldn’t have guessed who I was yet. I knew he’d be nice. The sleeves of his shirt came down almost to the elbows.
“Do I know you?” He looked at me as if he were on the verge of recognition.
“No you don’t. I’m Mayan Stevenson and, God—”
“Oh, I know who you are.” He had a soft voice. I wondered if he was always like that.
“My grandmother got in touch with you a while ago.”
“Yes.” He nodded. His face was so long it seemed to be composed of two interlocking circular compartments. When he smiled, the bottom became rounder, cinching the middle.
“To find my father.” This last thing seemed a confession.
He led me through a family room where two tall teenage boys lounged in stocking feet, long-faced, big-eared, blond. “Paula? I’ll be in the office, this is Mayan Stevenson, Lillian August’s granddaughter.”
Now it seemed incredibly right that my grandmother had found this J.D. Nash. He was a civil servant. A blotter printed State of Wisconsin
Bureau of Vital Statistics covered his desktop and there was a State of Wisconsin Municipal Authority paperweight, too. I suppose that was just the place I’d expect Jackson Fenwick and my grandmother to dream up. It was the obvious place, the bureau you’d get if you looked in the phone book for it. My grandmother had such trust. If you were missing a person, you looked in the state of Wisconsin’s lost and found. She had no idea what vanishing power she was up against. He could disappear between the lines of an alphabetical listing, he could will himself invisible and remain forever. I thought of my grandmother’s weekly letters to me and to all her relatives. She believed the systems worked the way they were supposed to.
“And my grandmother died now six years ago.”
“Yes, I know that. I was sorry to read about it when we processed it—you know, my department, Bureau of Vital Statistics, well, the notice came in to me and of course, I recognized her name. I sent a card, I don’t know if it got there and you saw it, I’m assuming it did.” He said all this in a mumble with his long head near his chest.