Authors: Mona Simpson
In a jolt, I backbreaked for a deer, stopping the bike with dragged feet. It was beautiful, the ragged lope, stiff and unevenly weighted, and it left a trail of new footprints in the snow. I was almost to the parking lot, ringed with woods. I could have ended up at college here. Without knowing. I could have come as a student and he would have stood at the front of the room as my teacher. A podium and behind it, shuffling through notes, him. Dad. Dressed as a college professor. That seemed preposterous, incredible.
Then my mother’s voice stamped through me, laughing: you would have never gone to Firth Adams College. And it was true. I wouldn’t have ended up here. I was always planning for somewhere better.
S
TILL IN MY LONG COAT
, I biked past the theater. I stopped and pushed the big doors back. They were there again, all of them, still the lush full world. Two girls in sheets and head wreaths walked near the lip of the stage. Behind them a brown rabbit streaked across.
From a large old chandelier on the ceiling, ribbons of all colors trailed like a maypole. I just sat down, chin in hands, elbows on knees.
Someone settled in next to me, I felt the knees of their jeans against mine.
They picked up my hand that was stiff like a claw. They set it on their knee where a rip was so I felt the warm hard of skin. Knee. I still wasn’t sure if this was boy or girl. I chanced a look. Boy. Good.
“Remember me?”
No, I told him.
“Remember heaven?” Just then a cymbal sounded somewhere and the shimmers hung in the air. “I’m the angel.”
We were the same size. Our legs matched. Our shoulders leveled. The moon hung low like an ornament and the walls were painted an old orchard. This was almost romantic except for me. I was the same as before. My head itched. I was wrong all over. The shoelaces were unlaced and gray-wet trailing the ground. I had a scratch on one side of my ankle. A rash. I kept putting a finger there and then to my mouth tasting blood.
I said all my things and he listened. I talked and talked for a long time like filling up a bucket with tiny things.
“Mmhm,” he kept saying as I talked too much.
Then he took my chin in his hand between two fingers and kissed me. I felt the rough of his cheeks, his lips fitting into mine. He slipped his tongue under my top lip crossing and recrossing the ridge there.
I must have sputtered and choked. I ended up hugging my knees, head down away from him. “I’m dirty,” I said like it wasn’t bad but I couldn’t help it anymore.
I got up then and ran. I swooned out in the air again, dizzy with high pleasure. He had been the apparition. I thought of the trapeze swinging, empty on an empty stage.
I
WENT BACK
into personnel and started a polite conversation with Denise. But then pretty soon I was yelling. “It’s not my fault this is my father. This could’ve happened to you—you could have been born me. You were just lucky, don’t you see the difference? It’s just one number—”
I was sobbing and yelling, pulling a piece of my hair out and an odd thing happened. I disappeared. I was truly invisible. The office took on an odd sound. A kind of intermediary quiet, like sand running. It was the sound of the world without me.
A wall clock hummed its slow patience. On the other side of the counter someone plucked the keys of an adding machine and then there was the ticker-tape whir of the strip calculations.
Denise stared down at the slow shuffle she was doing with the paper and cards. It was a day. Every person in the office was busy working slowly. I was not there. My spill of noise, my rash, people moved around me. Denise said a bright “Can I help you?” to a man at my left and they didn’t see me or hear me, none of them. I was not there.
If I’d stayed a minute longer I might have never come out the same. That is the tearing, shrill way to madness.
But somehow I found my face in water in a many-sinked bathroom, the cool tick of it, one line streaking down my neck, clavicle, then breast.
Then outside, I was slower now, afraid. It was still daylight but I went back to the motel.
W
HEN
I
OPENED MY DOOR
at the Holiday Inn, Jordan was sitting on the bed, a bag between his knees.
He kept looking at me and looking. I remembered how I was and put my hand on my hair. There was nothing to do to help it anymore. I just stood there unevenly, hands by my sides. He was looking to see me really as I was and he was watching his love leave, like a person packing, it was gathering its things now and clamping the buckles and then with one long glance over the shoulder it was gone and he was only looking at me, raw, a girl he had slept with a couple times and come all this way for, to the far Northwest, because she was in some kind of crazy trouble that had nothing to do with him.
“I brought donuts,” he said, holding up the bag. He said that with incredible sadness. I had told him about how nowhere but the West had decent donuts, how Stevie and I had become connoisseurs. Jordan remembered every little thing I said. This was a funeral for him. He lifted the lids off take-out coffees and extracted small white napkins from the bag. He looked pretty good even here. His shirt was wrinkleless and he wore a quilted orange down vest. His hiking boots were brown leather, worn in the right amount.
I reached in the donut bag and didn’t even look. I guess I was hungry. He must have just gotten there. The bag was still warm and smelled like sugar. I pulled out a big one. “Nutmeg?”
“Cardamom. You were right. This is the kind of town that would have great donuts,” he said. He and I lamented the lack of fine donuts in New York or California or anywhere we’d want to live. You had to be in Wisconsin, the Midwest, somewhere that didn’t get many kinds of lettuce.
He lifted up my hand, very gently—more gently than he would’ve still in love with me, because then there was an element of rough fear—opening it on his palm. “You know I’m taking you home.”
“I have a lot more to do here.”
“Go look at yourself in the mirror.” His voice was hard.
The donut was greasing my chin and nose tip and all around my mouth. “I wasn’t expecting guests,” I said, lifting the donut delicately like a wineglass. “Anyway, let me eat first.”
“Eat. We have lots of time. And you need it. I got us two seats on a noon flight tomorrow.” He crossed his arms over his head and slowly reclined, as if he were at the end of a sit-up. He landed softly on the pillow. I kept eating. He’d bought all different kinds. This one was chocolate glazed. “There’s another coffee in the bag,” he said, “milk instead of cream.” Another thing he remembered.
I just kept eating. It was all quiet. I heard myself chewing, the unevenness. Jordan’s eyes had closed and I was glad not to be watched while I ate. I ate the way a fox does. I held the food, tore at it, looking at nothing else, felt only the blood rising to my face. Then after the excitement of the first three, I looked around. He was a kind of man I couldn’t bear; he was always listening. He remembered me. I was conscious about my table manners. In a little while he got up fast and darting in a way that reminded me of a mosquito. “I’m running a bath for you,” he yelled over his shoulder. I was to the end of the bag anyway, the bottom now transparent with the gold shine of oiled wax paper. Walking away he had a swing to him. He walked like he knew he had a right to walk on the earth.
I kept eating methodically. I was finishing what I’d started. I looked at the eclair while I ate it, appreciating the cool custard filling. I was trying to remember when I’d last eaten. Breakfast and then breakfast the day before.
Then I gave in. I took clothes off, dropping them as I went across the floor, so by the time I met the steam of the bathroom, it was only a T-shirt. I stood in the tub water and he pulled it off as if I were a child.
“Mayan, you’ve lost about fifteen pounds.”
“Good.”
He put his fingers around my wrist. “Not good. Your bones show through. You’re too thin, Mayan.”
He bent over the bath, reaching the little plastic bottles the Holiday Inn provided.
What day was today, I was thinking. Oh no. Back in New York City, I’d had a hair appointment. All that was a different life. I’d missed my appointment with Shawn.
He sat on the closed toilet seat and I just sunk in warm water. It was good to weigh for a while in someone else’s hands.
My one arm dangled out over the porcelain, I wanted to feel the cool. He picked it up, turned the wrist so it almost hurt and then stared at my palm again. I yanked it back and under the water. I had writing on that hand, my left. I’d scribbled a note to remind myself, “Gamblers Anonymous.”
“I thought of that too,” he said. “Actually, my father did.” His father was a journalist and he’d always done well with the Anonymouses. He’d written articles about groups like that. He’d won some prize.
“You’re ruining yourself.”
I didn’t say anything. What could I say?
“Well, now tell me,” he said.
“What?”
“Start anywhere. Just blab.”
“I’m nowhere. After all this. I’ve burned my life down to the ground. The detective has started treating me like an old lover.” I looked at him. He was listening. We were talking, this time, like friends.
“He lies. He contradicts himself. Things he said were any day now, like checking passport records, two months ago, he doesn’t even mention. One minute he’s telling me he could have gotten the social security number from here if I hadn’t gone and blown it and then I find another place in Nevada where my father worked and he tells me to go do the same thing again.”
“Maybe we should give him some more. Throw money at him,” Jordan said.
“My millions.” I laughed in a bad way, with sharp points. “I’m scared. I am literally scared to know how in debt I really am, Jordan.
My phone bill. It’s got to be over a thousand dollars. But anyway, I’m gonna pay the guy
more
when for this much he got us to 1957? I got us to 1976 and I’m supposed to pay him?”
“I know. But you’re in this far already and now you’ve got some information. Maybe with what you know now he can really do something.”
“I don’t trust the guy anymore. Before Christmas he told me he had someone checking out the passport records. Any day now, he says. He’s inconsistent. It goes on and on. Oh, and it was paramount that I find out if my father had any insurance. Then I did. And I got the name of the company. We’ll see what he does with that.”
He lost my track halfway through. I must have sounded cracked. I did.
“Are you crying?” he asked, after a while.
“I’m tired. How can you even see in this steam? There’s so much still to do. There’s old addresses I want to check, if I can go to places like the gas and electric company, all kinds of little things like that you wouldn’t think of, they have records, maybe they’d tell me where he lived here and what was his forwarding address.”
Jordan just sighed and squeezed my hand and I stayed in the water a long time, now and again saying more ideas of where to look. When I finally stood up, he covered me in towel.
“Go to bed now,” he said.
“It’s not even eight.”
“You need it,” he said. “I’ll sit by you.” I lay with my back to him under the covers. He sat on the bed, sheltering. “The thing about all these little leads and hints, Mayan, they’ll never end. They’ll go to infinity and you could spend the rest of your life. We’ve got to go.”
“You go.”
He sighed and I slept in and out and I heard him stand up and sigh again and stretch and move around the room. When I woke up more, he’d opened the curtains and the night was true and black with stars and he was sitting in a chair reading my little Hans Christian Andersen book I’d found in a box Gish had saved for me of things from my grandmother. It was a tiny book with my name written in it by my mother, signed,
Love, Mother and Dad
. That was how old it was. The book was covered in waxed paper, I knew by my grandmother, the edges folded perfectly, like an envelope.
“Look what I found,” he said.
It was a piece of old wide-lined elementary school paper I’d written on and stuck in the book. It was a list:
Gills Rock
Ironwood
Escanaba
Flint
Madison
Chicago
Peshtigo
Janesville
Kewaunee
Those were places I’d taken field trips and looked up my father’s name in the telephone book. I’d been keeping track. The farthest was Chicago. The rest were in Wisconsin and Michigan. I knew he probably was not there. But they were the only places I’d been to yet then. I’d meant to always keep track; if I kept track long enough … The pencil marks had faded and the penmanship was primitive, big, like drawings of animals.
If someone had told me then as a child that phone books came out new every year … I couldn’t have borne it, the exhausting size of work ahead.
He stood up, wringing his hands. The room seemed all shadows, the one bureau a rounded known thing. “I’ll stay and help you one day. Can we make that deal?”
Wind rattled the cheap metal window frame.
I waved him away.
“I wasn’t going to tell you this right away, but Emily’s coming tomorrow. She’s flying in to Fargo.”
“What’s
Emily
going to do in Fargo?”
“She’s coming with a dress she wants to have fitted on you. And she wanted to go to Fargo instead of here, she called all around to find the closest place to Montana that had a seamstress. Apparently you have to have a certain sort of seamstress to sew this kind of Italian silk she has.”
I snorted. “No you don’t.”
“That’s what she said. It’s not as if I grew up around a lot of Italian silk. Anyway. And she and I both talked to Timothy. He thought that it was a good idea too.”
“You shouldn’t have done that. I’m fine. And I’m embarrassed now. Getting all my friends, everybody talking about me.”
“She wanted to come, Mayan. I didn’t make her.”
Now we were yelling. We had hardly ever been like this.
“Anyway, Fargo’s not—where is Fargo anyway? It’s far.”
“It’s not so far. We’ll get you on a plane or a train or a bus, I don’t know, anything, and she’ll meet you at the station. You’ll forget this, have a good time, eat and drink a little, do whatever you do with a dressmaker.”