Authors: Mona Simpson
I just started using the name Ann. It seemed pretty much the same thing. Amneh had always been my middle name, one I’d had to spell for a stair of teachers calling roll in elementary school. Somebody told me once that Amneh meant “wish” in Arabic. And that was all the truth in my name. I was almost a Jane, my mother said. But my father thought that was too American. Too short. “A Jane will grow up to have bangs,” he apparently said. He allowed no name that could end up nicked, with a y or an
ie
. That eliminated Jennifer, Catherine and Rebecca. His family name we had lost, although it loosened a small waterfall of sounds: Atassi.
Stevenson was my stepfather’s name. It wasn’t even really his either. Ted had been adopted, back in upstate New York where he was from.
And Ted meant to adopt me as his child. I probably spoiled that. I
couldn’t decide if I wanted to or not. I wanted both at the same time, without my father ever knowing. It was up to me, my mother said, no one could help me, it was my decision, but I knew she wanted me to say yes to Ted. I tried to stall for time and it never happened anyway. My mother and Ted had their own problems and maybe they forgot. But before they honeymooned in upstate New York, my mother dressed in a suit and a square black hat with two feathers, col ted up the cement stairs of the school board building and changed my name on the manila records. That was all she had to do. And when I was returned to my grandmother I was Ann Stevenson. Nothing legal had been done but it was official. And I was too young, it seemed, for any of the procedures to matter much. I guess most everybody in charge thought a mother could call her child whatever she pleased.
It had been more than twenty years since any of us saw Ted. That was longer ago than the last time I saw my father in California, although there was nothing comparable about the two men, and though I suppose I could have seen Ted, any time. Ted Stevenson was not a hard man to find.
The world of professional figure skating is not large. After us, Ted had moved to Milwaukee, remarried a younger woman and with her, he had five children, all boys. He lived, I believed, in Nebraska now, teaching figure skating, as he always had. I suspected he looked about the same too; he was a nice-looking man, thin-faced, not the sort to age. He once told me how he had toured with the Ice Capades through Cuba, before the revolution. Their crew went to small-town arenas and laid out the ice. In one remote province, he was the first man to introduce pictures. The people had seen cameras before, but Americans had come, taken, and never sent the prints. Or perhaps it was the mail down there, Ted said, maybe some sent them and they never arrived. Ted brought a Polaroid. He held the snapshot in his palm, looking from the shiny paper to the old man, tears coming from his face loosely as the picture developed. He was seeing a miracle, Ted told me.
“A science invention,” I’d said. “Not a miracle.”
“To them it was,” Ted said.
“Not to me.”
“Nothing is to you, Maya.” He always called me Maya, like the Indians.
“That’s right,” I said. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus either, in case you have any plans for a costume.”
There was a father/daughter breakfast at my school once and I brought the slip home to my mother. She made arrangements with Ted. And then the day came and he was there looking serious and dutiful in a new white shirt and an ascot. None of the other fathers would be wearing ascots. Most of them worked at the paper mills or at the canning factory. I put on my regular shorts and got on my bike, ready to take off. My mother ran out to where I was, holding her bathrobe together, but you could see her slender naked body curved inside. “Go on in and change. Hurry,” she said, “he took the day off from the rink and dressed up for this.” His voice came from the door like a pulpit, “Let her be, Adele, it’s up to her. Whatever she wants.”
“I want to ride my bike,” I said, my hands still on the handlebars. And I rode away.
A few years ago, I tracked Ted down. It took under an hour. I was working for the Wildlife Sanctuary and I was sitting alone at the little indoor desk that sold postcards and animal pins and ten-cent bags of dry corn to feed the ducks and geese. It was late afternoon. I liked it because you had to wear old clothes. I sat up on a stool. There was corn all over the ground. Once in a while I made long-distance calls from there. They never seemed to check. Certain things have always seemed socialistic. Books. Men’s shirts. The phone.
Ted’s wife answered. She was nice. She said how lucky it was that I’d called when he was home. But then when he got on the phone, we couldn’t find much to say. He seemed slightly unhappy to hear from me. “Yeah, your mother,” he said with a bad laugh. He had a rind of bitterness. I must have given him my address because his wife followed up our conversation with a photo Christmas card—the five boys in gray and green suede climbing shorts and green suspenders—and that was the end of that. On the bottom of the card, the wife had scribbled, “Ted is going to write you a letter.” He never did.
I
FINISHED
my childhood without a father. I remember the consternation: I used to stand outside, my arms crossed, tennis shoes scraping the porch lip just for the feel of it, counting cars from the highway. It was still light out and my grandmother was asleep, already done for the day. This was the year before my mother and I left. I could see cars in the distance but from our porch I couldn’t tell what make they were or if there was one person inside or two. I’d follow them to see if they’d turn at our off-ramp. They almost never did. I
still believed my father would come back. But would he make it
in time
.
If you asked me if I thought he was alive, I would have said, yes, and I’d have meant it. Sometimes I wondered, would I ever just see him again in my life without my doing anything. If someone else, something, would arrange it. Now, I figured, if I found him, I would never know.
It is possible to believe and not to believe in someone’s existence, equally, at the same time.
B
UT FAR AWAY
as my mother and I went, we both still kept Ted’s name. In California, we tried to be that family for a while, proper, behind its screen door. It was like a raincoat. Stevenson. Sounding everything we were not: rich, old, respectable, standard, British. Not even legally mine.
In California, my mother bought things to make us seem like once we’d had more. Somewhere else, back in Wisconsin, where the new people here couldn’t check. I’d come home from school once in the afternoon, during the rainy season, and a whole set of china was in the cupboards: plates, salad plates, cups, saucers, everything. The fragile china was shining, painted with blue and green peacocks, in the dull kitchen, on that dark afternoon.
My mother lifted one down to show me but we didn’t eat on them. My mother focused her homemaking on kitchens. She didn’t really know how to cook, but she could make a kitchen look beautiful. We had the plates and clear light-blue glasses and a yellow gingham tablecloth and curtains and by the sink, we had brushes made of rush twigs twined together, a deep yellow soap in the perfect shape of a moon.
Once a friend of mine came over after school, a true rich girl from the far north side. Calla lived in a mansion. This was a rainy day too. I never knew what would happen when I had a friend come over, but my mother was there that day and she was almost normal. She hovered near the kitchen, which seemed to me what she was supposed to do, to be a mother. In a while she came to my room and knocked and asked us if we wanted hot chocolate or tea and cookies. I loved her then. I don’t know where she found the cookies. We hadn’t had any cookies before. Then we sat in the kitchen with our tea and cookies, served, in honor of my friend, on the peacock china. Calla picked up the saucer and turned it over, and looked around the room in a
distracted, enchanted way. That was one of those moments when I felt quiet because my mother was right. That was what she had intended.
Now, it seems to me wastefully funny: all the stunts and extravagant effort, the telephone wheedling after money, all to fool a dreamy thirteen-year-old girl on a rainy afternoon.
M
Y MOTHER SHRUGGED ONCE
. “It’s a great name,” she said. “With Atassi, no one ever said it right. You always had to spell.”
That was true. I was Mayan Atassi for seven years and I remembered saying “A-T-A-S-S-I” as if that were the name. I was Atassi with the nuns. On their simple elementary school rolls, that was my name. We had a white curved Volkswagen bug then, too, with plaid seat covers and the window on the passenger side wouldn’t go all the way up. Both these circumstances, the oddness of our name and the cold wet from the window, formed snags I minded, but they were also ours and I would have never dreamed of changing them. I thought that was our car, we would have it forever. Once we ate creamed shrimp on toast in a restaurant downtown and when we came onto the street again, other cars had parked too close for us to get out. Our bug’s name was Ginny. My mother pounded the front fender and said damnit and tears watered her face, but then she shrugged and sighed “Hokay,” and pushed my neck with her hands, walking, until we stopped at the cab stand in front of Boss’s Tobacco and Magazine Shop.
Later, I’d thought of changing my name back but there was the trouble of everyone else. I had been Stevenson for too long. A lot of my friends said they thought Stevenson was a better name. I felt the other but I wasn’t sure. Plus about something like this, nobody else really cares. The world is busy.
But that was why I never liked parties. The first question was always, What is your name? Then, And where are you from? Both of those, for me had more than one answer. The truth was spiked and jagged and took too long for social conversation.
At least I was old enough now so people didn’t ask right away, What does your father do? Children demand that of other children. When I met my college boyfriend’s family, his little brother badgered me, “Come on, what does your dad do? He’s a lawyer, right? Come on, tell us. I know it’s either law or medicine.”
It was neither law nor medicine, wherever he was. That much I did know.
“Gigolo,” I said.
A thousand times people had said to me in my life, You don’t know your father?
No, I’d answer. Or, well, some but not much.
And I lied. Once I told a man on a bus that I had six brothers and sisters and that my father was a baker and I played the violin. A lot of times I tried to tell the truth but making it sound more normal than it was. Well, we lived in different cities. I lived with my mom. He was a divorced dad. I didn’t really know him that well.
Now, Atassi sounded to me like a shoe, I could draw it, a fancy slipper, tilting up at the toes. At the time, when it was my name, it seemed like a pair of thick squarish black eyeglasses that I always wore.
Ann Stevenson was like a name. But the name of someone else. I saw her in a boxy suit, bought this season or last, cautiously. I imagined Ann Stevenson as some young woman at a convention with a name tag on her upper left suit-jacket pocket. The suit was melon-colored or pale green. Dull blue. Maybe I had become a little this conventioneer.
I’d hated the name Mayan and liked it and gone around and around. Most of the time I didn’t think of it. There are aspects of yourself you grow into with time, your nose, your face, your legs. You know them, finally, only as your own, the way you could never, except for a few flashing moments, love or hate your own body.
So many Americans were like me—changed. Look at the phone book. Anything foreign got ironed. Thousands of women sealed away their names for a husband’s. And to their children, the old name was no big deal. They didn’t think of it as her real name any more than they thought of their mother’s childhood as her real life.
It happened to practically every woman in the world. I don’t know what my problem was. It was common. All of this was. It didn’t make me special. Still, I hadn’t married Ted. I didn’t love him.
I did love my father, though. However unrequited the feeling was.
I
DROVE BACK TO THE HOTEL
, drew the blinds and flopped on the made bed, belly down, chin to fabric so I smelled the old cotton and bleach, harshly clean. He wasn’t anywhere when I was in high school, he was
just here. Living a life. Breezing out in good suits to meet the high weather and his ambition. Dinners at so-and-so’s to insure such and such a position. A gift for thus and such. Not thinking of me or my mother. Not ruining his life over us at all. Not even hampering it. He was just a man, nothing higher. And I was a fool. My grandmother had been right.
I had liked the old men, their fastidious distinctions, the way none of this moral business mattered to them anymore. They almost liked my father for his scandal, the way they once had for his clothes. A little color. Greed, ambition, all the vanities seemed milder to them now, themes like melodies with ends already known. But they were no relation. Neither of those men could have been my father.
After a little while on the bed, things began to be different. He’d never left his life to look for me.
I wanted to go home. I remembered coming out of a movie on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon and walking with Timothy to Tacita de Oro for cafe con leche and fried plantains. I craved rice and beans.
I called Mai linn. “Get this,” I said. “Everybody I talk to here calls everybody else Doctor. They take the Ph.D. very seriously in the state of Montana. Even after my dad dumped these old ladies in a Cairo jail, he’s still Dr. Atassi.”
Mai linn told me, “One day last spring I was just walking, it must have been May or June, and there was this little ceremony going on in front of the bell tower. They were giving doctorates to four or five people. One was a woman, the rest were guys. And I just stood behind a tree and watched. And when they lifted the tassels around the woman’s shoulders, that’s what they do, I started crying. I couldn’t believe it.” Mai linn was two years away from her Ph.D.
It was still day. I had to get to work. I didn’t feel like it much anymore. But I thought I better try and find Uta’s maiden name. Maybe I’d call J.D. Nash and ask about the marriage records in Nevada. I’d go to the library here tonight and read through the local newspapers, then tomorrow, first thing in the morning, I’d hit all the administration buildings.