Authors: Mona Simpson
“No! I don’t want to. I’m here and I’m going to finish this.”
He covered his face with his hands. “Okay, tell you what. You go and meet Emily and I’ll stay here by myself and see what I can do.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“Not from me you haven’t.”
“I’m not going to leave without my car anyway.”
“I’ll drive your car. I’ll give back the rental and I’ll drive all night to Fargo. All right?”
I didn’t say anything for a minute or maybe more.
“Well, okay? Say something, Mayan.”
E
VEN TODAY
I don’t know why I said yes. It was probably only embarrassment. The idea of the three of them having conversations about me in concerned, attractive tones. It seemed the best way to stop it was to be there. I was someone who liked to keep the elements of my life apart. The idea that they’d found one another, Timothy and Emily and this guy Jordan, it made me shudder. And now they were focused on me in Ambrose, it seemed impossible to go on with my activities. I felt watched. There was not enough here to defend. My project had always been a project that depended on the dim light of worldly unconcern. It thrived in secret because there was nothing visible to show.
The Greyhound bus left at eleven.
I went once more to the president’s office. He had on another bow tie and different suspenders. “I have neither seen nor heard of him in the intervening years,” he said, this time.
I told him I just wanted to leave my name and number in case he ever did hear anything. I wrote it all out, neatly on a sheet of paper.
“Where is 212?” he asked.
“New York. I live in New York.”
“I knew it was one: New York, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles.” This seemed to warm him some, it being New York. That was the most impressive thing I’d told him. That I lived in New York. “I use those numbers regularly,” he said. That flimsy vanity made me almost like him.
“Oh, well great. Thank you, Dr. Fipps.”
“And what is your first name?”
“It’s Mayan Stevenson,” I said. I didn’t judge that he deserved an explanation.
We waited for the bus in back of the tin diner. I put my hand on the roof of the car. It was hard to leave the Olds. I had my six things counted and locked in the trunk. He promised not to open it. The bike was strapped now to the top.
I
SLEPT THROUGH
most of the ride and when I woke up, the bus was steeping through mountains and snow, brushing close to wide fir branches. It was too hard to look. I closed my eyes again and went to sleep tasting the collar of my coat. There was always a quarter-sized wet spot there, like a childhood winter, tasting your breath through the scarf.
The bus stopped for food breaks and you could walk down the small main streets of these western towns, but I just stayed in and pressed my head in the corner of the seat and slept.
Emily met me at the station in Fargo, which was next to the YMCA. Fargo was a regular city, noisy, and I was glad to see her. She had a rented red Ford parked out in front, where a line of men sat on benches half bent over. She moved the long stick shift with grace and deliberation. We drove through the old part of the city. Smoke blued out into the sky.
“I thought we could do this dress thing first,” she said. She was following a crude map and gradually the streets became, not newer, but more high and polished. “Believe me, finding someone who knew how to sew around here wasn’t easy. But her name is Alma and she’s
a Czech. Apparently very good. She used to do the costumes for the Kansas City Opera. Now she has her own store.”
“Fashion in Fargo,” I said.
“Don’t laugh. You’re close.”
ALMA’S ATELIER
the sign said in theatrical cream-colored cursive on maroon. The store was wedged between a furrier and a jeweler called LaVake, who seemed to also carry cut-glass and silver. The doorbell pealed a high operatic fall.
Then we were crushed into a small room, lushly carpeted with a little circular rise before full-length three-way mirrors. The mirrors worked as a sort of shrine. The carpeted foyer was a little soiled and jammed with fabric bolts and tiny marked cardboard boxes of thread and pins. The back room was fitted with fabric heads and millinery projects in various states of completion.
Emily opened a large box and extracted the dress. The seamstress bent in close, her head down and her bulbous gnarled hands up under the sheer fabric. It was a fine faint pink, evenly transparent.
“Is gorgeous,” the dressmaker said, lifting the silver framed bifocals down from her heavy hair. “You need underneath something.”
Emily had the underslip folded in tissue. It was the sheerest white cotton, plain, exactly the same straight box shape as the dress.
I hated dresses that showed my legs and especially my knees. I had horrible knees.
“So is for you?” the dressmaker said, running her gaze slowly over my contours a way I hated. “Go. Try it on.”
I bunched the thing in my hands. The woman took it from me and laid it out over my arm. “Is fragile,” she said.
“Where?” I wasn’t going to take my clothes off just me while they both stood there.
She showed me to behind a curtain, a little corner with no mirror.
“With green shoes,” I heard Emily saying, while I pulled my T-shirt over my head. “Light green but rich, you know what I mean? And a square heel. Very simple.”
The dressmaker began to ask Emily about her dress and she started to describe it and then I came out with mine on, still in my sneakers and athletic socks. They stopped talking.
“Mayan, it’s your size. I had it made your size.”
“She too thin,” the dressmaker said, head down, making tching noises even with pins in her mouth. “Got to eat. Eat while you’re young and you can enjoy it. The men they don’t like the skinny skinny
women. They like skinny women. That’s just the women think they do. And when you get older is bad, around the chest is all skin like a chicken, all gathered up like this, no good.”
She was down on the carpet now, I felt her hair against my knees. She took pins from her mouth, setting the hem.
When she came to the back and shoulders Emily stopped her. “Don’t make it as small as she is now,” she said. “The wedding’s still five weeks away. She’ll gain. I’ll make her.”
W
E WAITED IN A SODA SHOP
, sipping seltzer. Emily ate a whole sundae in front of me, black and tan. She made them take it back the first time because they used cold caramel. She wanted hot fudge and hot caramel.
I didn’t want anything. An hour and a half later, Alma came into the store, with the dress in a large cardboard box. She herself was wearing a mink coat and matching hat.
“I leave a little room,” she said, pinching my hips. I was thin enough so the pinch hurt. It hurt a little just to sit.
Emily bent down writing her check. She always looked diligent when she signed credit card forms or wrote checks. She looked more intently serious then than any other time as if money were the most solemn duty in this life.
Jordan arrived in Fargo the next day, with the social security number.
“How did you get it?” I said, the first thing. I hadn’t even said hello. This was the first time he’d truly impressed me.
His voice got sharp. “I don’t want to talk about it now, okay?” he said. This was not like him. At the hotel, he was rushing us around, pushing our backs. “I want to put Emily on her plane and I want us to get going so we can dump this car back in Wisconsin and fly to New York tomorrow night. I have to get back to work and so do you.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. God. “I never said you had to come here.”
“I know. But we’re finished. So let’s just go now.”
This wasn’t like him. And anyway, I had nothing to get back to. But we saw Emily onto her flight.
She stood at the gate looking a way she hardly ever did, the knees of her jeans bagging, her hair uneven. “You sure you shouldn’t chuck the car or get a driveaway for it and come back home?”
They both looked at me. It was up to me.
“I’d take it myself,” Jordan said.
“Nah,” I said, looking at my shoes. “I want to do it.”
She had just the box with the altered dress in it and her bright silver carry-on suitcase. Jordan carried her suitcase until they wouldn’t let him anymore and then he bent down to kiss her.
Then we were in the car driving the straight black road through the flat landscape. It was late afternoon and already getting dark. Everything, all around, looked blue.
He stared straight ahead from the steering wheel. I just studied my hands and low small things out the window. It felt like he was ticking. If he didn’t want to talk to me, he didn’t have to.
“First thing,” he finally said. “Emily is a good woman. I don’t want to hear any more about that dress. She didn’t come out here for the dress.”
“Oh yeah.”
“She loves you, Mayan. She was worried about you.”
He stared at me then and the car swerved a little on the road, but there was no one else for miles, just a red-brown truck that looked toy, it was so far away.
“What are you trying to tell me, you’re interested in her? I don’t care. Be my guest. You think you can break up her and Tad, go ahead and try.”
“I am not in the least interested in Emily and I never would be. Obviously. I’m saying this for you, Mayan.”
I just looked out the window.
“And the way I got the number I don’t want you to ever tell anyone. I mean it. No one.”
I was interested all of a sudden.
“I went to see Rosabeth Larson. One look at that suit made me know there was no asking her. She wasn’t going to break any rules. But there were all these girls in little Rosabeth Larson suits waiting in line with their little clipboards to take a typing test for the job of Ms. Larson’s administrative assistant.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, among many of my talents that you’ve overlooked, I type fast. Plus apparently Rosabeth Larson doesn’t want a younger Rosabeth Larson working alongside her. She wanted me.”
“You got the job.”
“No, not exactly. Your ex-asshole boyfriend, no I’m sorry, your ex-boyfriend who is still an asshole, Bud Edison, he got the job.”
I laughed. Then I looked at him with my head down.
“But seriously. I’m a lawyer, Mayan, and stealing documents like that, it’s illegal, I could be disbarred for that. And then what would I do? My grandfathers come to my law school graduation to have me kicked out of the bar forever for impersonating a secretary in Montana? I don’t want Emily or anyone else to find out about this. I mean, even if we don’t know each other in a year, don’t tell anyone.”
“But what did you do?”
“Oh, she showed me around the whole place and then she went to lunch. They’ve got four filing cabinets. It didn’t take too long.”
“And then what?”
“And then I left.”
“You just split?”
“I didn’t leave a formal letter of resignation.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, thanks.” There really was no way to thank him. It was just numbers. All this for numbers.
We drove all night, taking turns, and we entered Wisconsin at dawn. He kept calling ahead for the plane schedules. He was so eager to get home. I wasn’t. I felt a little insulted or something that he wanted this to be over so. The last plane out was at seven o’clock. I called Danny Felchner from Route 29 between Wausau and Shawano. He said he’d meet us at the Radisson. We could have a few drinks there, he’d take the car to my cousin’s and first drop us at the airport across the highway.
And it all went just that way.
The Radisson across from the airport was new and redwood, with young Oneida kids in black jeans taking drink orders and carrying in luggage.
Danny had brought my cousin Hal along. I never hardly saw Hal anymore. Hal looked good; he was thin again and his hair now was light blond. His eyes came out stronger, their pale blue. He was one of the ones in Racine who weren’t prospering. What he did for a living was travel to Wisconsin Catholic schools and lecture about drugs and how they’d gotten him in trouble. I kept staring at his hair.
“You been outside a lot?” I said finally.
“In summer I’m out in the sun, in winter it’s Sun In,” he said. He shrugged. “Works. Five or six women on the string, that’s not bad, worth the price of peroxide.”
Jordan gave him a look like, you heathen, but there was some awe
in it too and appraisal, all while his lips stayed steady on his straw. Jordan was drinking diet Coke.
“You serious about any of them?” I said.
“See, the one I like is married to somebody else see. And she’s a good Christian woman so she probably won’t leave him. But I think she kind of likes me too.”
Hal described the four others, just as Danny Felchner picked up my hand. One worked at Van Zieden Grieden, another at Fort Howard, one was a teacher and one a nurse. “In fact she was on the ward when Gramma was in, that last time.”
I didn’t remember any nurse. Apparently she was freckled, thin, light brownish hair. But I only got there the last two days.
“I remember her,” Danny Felchner said.
I looked at him funny.
“I was there when your grandmother was in the hospital, the three or four days before.”
“You never told me that.”
“I really liked your grandmother.” He said that as if it had not the slightest thing to do with me, and I guess it didn’t.
“Yeah, this Wendy told me something I didn’t even remember about that,” Hal said. “She said when Gram was in the delirium—”
“I remember that,” I said. I was getting almost competitive, everyone else with their memories of her dying. When I came up that time, she didn’t even know me, any of us.
“She kept saying, ‘Kids, have fun while you’re young. Live while you’re young.’ ”
Danny Felchner looked at me, his crooked smile. “That’s true,” he said. “I heard her.”
I’d never known. I punched my cousin in the arm. “And look at what a good job we’re doing.”
“Live while you’re young,” Hal bellowed. Then he raised his drink. It was vodka and colorless.
10
I
LANDED HOME
if you could call it that. Bad. There was no real reason for me now to be anywhere. And New York was not a kind place to return to. It was busy and I didn’t look good and I had nothing. The
sky was a strange color so I didn’t look up, and snow by the sides of the highway was old and pocked. I heard the steady roar of industry in the towered distance and closer, outside the taxi window, the equal bluff other random noise of a basketball on an empty playground. The school seemed vacant, abandoned. One black man, older than me, was dribbling.