Authors: Mona Simpson
That was the last time I saw my father. It was a weekday in 1970, in Los Angeles. It took me a while to understand that that was the last time I would see him. I don’t think he knew this at the time either.
Three weeks later, we hadn’t heard from him and so my mother called the number in Pasadena he had written down. The operator told us it had been disconnected and there was no new number. I called 411 for every city and town in southern California. None of them found him either.
I decided if I ever saw him again he would not be my father, but just a man.
A
FTER THAT ONCE
, it went back to the way it had always been. He lived everywhere and nowhere. He could come back, any day, so we had to be ready all the time. We lived like that, jangled, for years, looking over our shoulders, feeling nervous and watched, expecting. We tried to have everything about us look nice always but we got tired. It took too much effort. When he came, we knew, we had to be there and open the door. We would not get a second chance. And on that day, he would look at us and judge. It was like a surprise inspection. My father was like God. He seemed always to be watching. You’d
think it would have made us neat and proper, organized, prepared. But we felt defeated. We were only ashamed.
I did certain things for him. And I guess they had to do with pain. I was afraid I would forget. Especially when our life looked normal. Once before, my mother married a man and we lived in a house on a road with other low houses, Carriage Court. I stood outside and the sky was immense and our garbage cans stood dented by the garage, our lawn tools, like other people’s. That was when it was hard to believe. So I touched my tooth in a certain way. I bit my inside cheek so it bled.
I felt an attraction to fire. Always. I took matches from anywhere that offered them. And then I’d go outside alone and light them one by one. I tried to make them burn down as far as I could, so there was nothing left when they went out. For no reason. I came close to burning my fingernails but I never felt it. A lot of the days and nights of my childhood were spent that way, doing tiny things that I couldn’t really explain to anybody else. I’d stop when I heard the train go by, its rush of air like wings.
I used to burn food. I started that in the far yard by my grandmother’s house when I was a child and I did it, even in California. I liked the way different things burned. Once, at my grandmother’s I burned a Rock Cornish hen over a garbage tank. We had a fire and other people were roasting hens and corn on the cob to eat. Everyone had been out for hours raking leaves and now there was the burn. I watched until I was alone and then held my hen on the stick over the fire. I did what the others had but I never took it out. First it just went orange and slick, then it turned dark like caramel but still shiny and that was when it was smelling in a curl high up to heaven, but then it got harder and tight, the skin close to the bones like an old face. Finally it flamed. All the while a transparent banner was lifting, the odor, I felt I was feeding the sky. Once it was pure flame it cracked and popped, a shot of liquid struck out and singed the metal, and it burned itself out, still the same shape and I saw it, like a skeleton, the same thing, but like the ribs of a house, no walls, and then the carbon collapsed and one round ash rose into the air. There was nothing like the smell of burning meat in the night country air. It seemed to feed something invisible and high.
I had rare capacities for concentration, but always for the wrong thing. In school, I couldn’t really pay attention. All our exercises
seemed small, everything on paper made up. I think they thought of me then as a normal kid. They didn’t know. I fasted. I was the first anorexic in America. I made it up myself. All my girlfriends dieted too but I possessed more discipline. It entered me like the spine that had always been missing. I was growing up without order. We had no rules. My mother meant to, but we were always too far behind. So when I made the promise to myself I kept it, absolutely. I’d burn a whole meal and smelling it disappear into the sky was almost the same as eating. I could step into a bakery and distinguish the chocolate and the glazed caramel, the soft bland sweetness of the buns. That was enough.
Once, I went to a fund-raising benefit for the Racine Public Library’s refurbishment. Marion Werth, our librarian, held the sides of the podium and read a speech about the history of Racine, the French fur traders and Menomenee Indians coloring the clear river waters with war paint and open blood. It was my fifth day of eating only lettuce and raw cow corn. My mother would cut a head of tight iceberg into four. We’d sprinkle red wine vinegar and salt on it and stand there eating in the bare kitchen. She was always dieting too. It was May and on the way home from school, I just walked through the cornfields, picked the small fresh cobs and stood there eating them. I was ten. Nobody watched those fields.
Each plate at the benefit was supposed to cost a hundred dollars. But nobody had paid for me. Our eight-plate table had nine people. The Briggses bought a whole table for the department store, and at the last minute they invited me. Emily and I were supposed to share a plate. A Black Forest Torte, intricately layered, waited at the center of the table for Marion Werth to finish. We knew it was a Black Forest Torte because there was a little cream-colored card propped there, calligraphed in brown-gold, that said so. Everyone said Marion Werth wrote only with fountain pens and brown ink. Uniformed Catholic High boys, holding polished silver cake servers, stood stationed by each table. The one by ours slipped his into his pants pocket. The fancy end stuck out. Emily Briggs at that time had a weight problem. She was short-legged: “long-waisted,” she herself called it. She was wearing a blue party dress, and her graduated pearl necklace. Finally the audience was applauding, Marion Werth ducked into something half a curtsy, half a bow and then Catholic High boys bent over tables to cut the fancy cakes. “Two please,” I
heard Emily ask for. Then our small plate was jammed with two large slabs of the thing, one with a huge pink frosting rose. Our plate was so full a side of one piece went over the end of the china. You could see the layers—the middle one seemed to be cream with whole cherries suspended in it. I bent down close to it. I tried to get the smell. There was some bitter chocolate, a high shrill cooling scent like mint.
I promised myself I wouldn’t eat it, but I’d never seen a cake this fancy. My grandmother was a baker, but you needed contraptions to make a cake look like this. It was the kind of cake I’d imagined I’d eat at the big city restaurants I’d go to with my father. I wanted to take the piece home to my mother, to somehow save it. But they had cloth napkins and Emily already had ours on her lap. I didn’t have a purse.
Emily took a bite and then another. She looked around and then whispered to me, “I got two pieces, one for you and one for me, so eat some, okay?”
I picked up a dry fork and fingered it down to the prongs, but I didn’t touch the cake.
“If you don’t eat this, it’ll look like I took two just for me.” There was horror in her voice. She was begging. She wiggled on her seat, shifting weight from one buttock to the other. She squirmed in pinned misery. Emily felt watched, too, not by one high being but by everyone low and close, the teenage boys at every table.
She kept eating and pleading. “They’ll think I’m a pig!” She looked near crying. Her urgent whispers didn’t stop. Neither did her fork. I guess she thought however much she ate would look like less on our plate. I wanted to help her. My fork scrolled the air, my wrist shook, my mouth filled with spit that felt sweet and fattening itself. But I couldn’t. She was temptation. You couldn’t listen to other people. If you did you would get lost in the world. You had to keep the promise. The bad changed itself into pleading faces and good reasons, but as soon as you bent to them, they disappeared, forgetting, and you would lose your course forever. Eating was eating, no matter why. I wanted the cake so water rose from my throat and fell back again in poignant trickles like nostalgia. But I felt commanded not to eat and I didn’t, as if a bar of metal lay in my mouth.
She had gone through a piece and a half and was still working.
My cousin Hal was one of the servers. He bent down behind us, looked at our plate, moved a hand across each of our backs—that stopped Emily, fork partway to her mouth with a whole cherry on it—and
said, “Oink, oink,” and then she did start crying and it was too late, there was no explaining and she would never forgive me.
At my least I was sixty-seven pounds. I went into Bellin Hospital first and then they put me in Brown County. But my mother encouraged me, sort of. She wanted me to be thin.
I was ruined before I ever had my chance. And blame is everywhere and nowhere, pollen in the wind. I was dry now. My period was never much. The doctors said they didn’t know; it may come again, it may not.
And Emily Briggs turned out beautiful, tall and long-legged.
W
HEN
I
WENT
to work in the hospital at night, I bought something to eat on the way. I liked kimchee. It was strange-smelling and hot and it felt like the kind of food that cleaned you out and burned more calories than it was. I got a pound of it at the Korean market across the street from the hospital. I ran streaking across then, it was almost dark, and I felt the water-swelled air in the loose arms of my hospital coat and all the lights—the green traffic lights, the gel of fuzzy deep yellow taxi beams, blue-spilling store signs, red brake signals—seemed to acquire weight and substance jingling on my wrists like transitory jewels.
I was becoming a doctor because going to the doctor’s office as a child meant going downtown, to the city part of where we lived. There, on Monroe Street, the office held a kind of clean peace. Music came out of the walls, we waited in rooms full of shiny, expensive new magazines. We felt rich and clean. Our grandmother had scrubbed us carefully beforehand, using the rough corner of a washcloth for our ears. She seemed timid, holding her purse, facing the doctor.
“What do you hear from Adele?” the doctor asked. My mother was gone a lot then. Before we moved, she’d take off for California by herself and leave me with my grandmother.
“Nothing, why?” My grandmother looked up at him, curious, but curious the way someone is, prepared for pain.
“Just wondered. Great girl, Adele. Spunky.”
“Not a thing, I heard. I haven’t heard a thing.”
Doctors’ offices seemed to make even my mother feel she had to behave like other people. Later, when we lived in Los Angeles, it was
the one place I could count on her kindness. Sometimes I would get candy, a slow lollipop that lasted hours until the white string came out bare and stained with color.
The hospital I worked in felt so different from those clean offices.
Now, my mother tells me, I wouldn’t recognize her anymore. I have lots of gray now in my hair, she said, with a little falling laugh.
I
’ve stopped taking it out, you know, dyeing it.
I try to imagine it hanging, pewter-colored, the same hair, just the same.
I want my mother to have whatever limited happiness she can still find on the earth.
We had been through something amazing together. Our drive west, our life alone, without other people. We had been to such heights maybe nothing in either of our lives again would equal. A violent intimacy full of animal sweetness, rage, diamonds of light raw sun, blooded fur, a mixing of spit and tongue.
We have been, ever since, too dull. As if our life then spent the most of us.
B
EFORE
I
LEFT
the hospital for the night, I walked to Emory’s door. I turned the knob, heard the thick metal apparatus crunching and stepped in the cold gray room. He was on his belly on the bed, clutching his pillow the way he did when things were worst. The room smelled wet and dim. The blinds weren’t drawn and light from outside cornered in.
“Do you want company?”
He waited a moment before answering, as if reviewing hope. “No.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“I should be alone.”
“Have you taken your medicine?”
“No.”
“Should I make you, Emory?”
“Not now, Doc. Just leave me be.”
Other people would have made him, doctors, the candy striper Lynn would, I probably should have, but I left Emory as he was and stepped out, leaving him to one of his nights. The days after gave his best hours of work. I knew this cycle, instinctively, from my childhood with my mother. I could remember the watery, just-born cast of the
world, as if it were always Sunday morning, with new irises, sharp-pointed, deep purple and frail papery yellow, after one of those nights. Then, the same red terror ran in both of our veins and we were on the long bad ride together.
I left with my carton of kimchee, eating the end of it. Outside it was warm. The dark seemed to carry water sounds. Okay, I’m out, I’m done, I thought, and the moisture lipped my skin. A streak of fear ran through me as I bent down to unlock my bike, already thinking of being home in my apartment, whom I’d call, what if Emory woke up bad and I’m not there.
All you have to do to become somebody’s God is disappear.
2
I CALLED THE
FBI.
First I’d started a letter to Marion Werth, who worked at the Racine Public Library. All my life, she had stood behind the main desk and stamped my books every Tuesday afternoon, small-eyed, quick-fingered, interested. She was a tall woman with red curly hair and freckles, who wore a suit each day in a different color. She wore primary colors, no prints, and each with matching earrings and accessories. She had six in all. I’d counted. She was the aunt type. She took an interest in every kid’s personal life and she tried to instruct us with books. I knew her because she had taught me how to pin and label my butterfly collection. She felt glad I read—not that many children in Racine did—but she didn’t trust me, because I wouldn’t sit on the chairs.
For all her size, she moved with a dainty grace. I would have bet anything that she had never, even at ten years old, been a tomboy. Nothing I could do with my legs felt right. So I crouched in the stacks, leaning against walls, dustying my school uniform on the floor. My grandmother didn’t mind. It gave her something to do. Keeping me clean.