Authors: Mona Simpson
Uta was up and down a lot, getting him things. He took no more notice of her than you would a small, tail-beating, somewhat fragile and always beckoning dog. In fact they had such a dog. I’d made them put the dog upstairs because I was allergic. Every once in a while the dog would scratch and whimper and Uta would say, “Aw, he’s lonely for his daddy. He loves his daddy so much.”
“I
SEEM TO REMEMBER
something about your father promising me a sheep.”
“That right?”
“Could that have been?”
“Well, you never met him, Mayan. When we were over there, you weren’t born yet.”
“And then you, we, lived for a little bit in Michigan.” For years I’d had a red toy truck from East Lansing.
“Was Adele with you the whole time in Michigan?” Uta asked him.
“Yes, we broke up in Michigan,” he said. “I had made the mistake of inviting some Egyptian immigrants who lived in the Ann Arbor area to my house for dinner. And you know these people had never been to Egypt. So we’re talking, they knew Adele and I had been there and they wanted to get some first-hand information. Our impressions.
“What I’m going to say is not very nice about your mother but she was young and we were unhappy. But she, she knocked things down, she told them the most miserable things, how dirty the people were, how dusty, how pessimistic. And these people, you know, they didn’t want to hear that.”
“They wanted to go there,” Uta said, trying to follow along.
“Sure, they want to go there! It’s their whole life, their homeland, I mean they want to hear some nice things about it.”
I smiled. They were probably second generation like me, or third. Egypt was never my whole life.
“Well, didn’t you speak in Arabic, sweetheart, and tell them what it is really like?” That was Uta.
“They didn’t speak Arabic. They were immigrants, you know. So after that I remember I took my suitcase and got the car and that’s the last I saw of Adele, I mean, we saw each other again but that was really it. And the next day I resigned, took a train to Chicago and got on a plane and went back home. I was going to go and I wasn’t going to come back to this country ever.”
Well that’s a good father, I was thinking.
“W
OULD YOU LIKE
a glass of champagne to celebrate our reunion,” he said. It was not much after noon, but this was less a question than a statement and he returned with a wash towel and the opened bottle and poured a glass for each of us.
His stories were never an explanation really. Uta made a few attempts. When she came in and joined us again with napkins for the champagne, she said how hard my mother had made it for him.
“Oh, she was terrible, she made him feel so bad, Mayan. I remember she’d call him and tell him he could see you and then she’d call back and call it all off. Many times I know she hurt his feelings bad.”
“She’s crazy,” I said. She was.
“He wanted to see you but …” She just bent her neck down and shook her head.
“Is she still crazy? She always was,” he said, his head rising. He had a flat smile, buoyant. “She was a great girl, beautiful, very intelligent, everything, but always a little crazy. But you shouldn’t talk bad about her, Mayan, because she is the one who really raised you.”
What did he mean, really. She is the only one who raised me at all.
He just patted my hand, sometimes looking at the low ceiling. “The daughter I never had.”
And whose fault is that, I want to say now, remembering. Whose fault was that?
At the time, though, it was a romance. The day was like a river trip on slow brown water, the banks always changing, water the same. I didn’t have to do anything. Everything made sense before he said it and I’d forgiven him already. I kept looking at him and he was beautiful. Everything was easy that day. Love was perfect. Roses, champagne, our hands fit. The day went on. It was long and unfolding. We talked and stopped talking and everything he said was right.
I was quiet, still. I didn’t have to do anything.
H
E SIGHED
and looked at his hand. He picked up his champagne glass and held it up in front of him a level moment, then took a sip. His face closed on the taste, severe a moment.
“This is very good champagne,” he said. “Drink some, darling.”
“Mmm, very very good,” Uta churned her slippered legs, which didn’t reach the ground.
“And then, and then, I couldn’t do anything to Mayan, you see,” my father said.
“That’s what you told me, sweetheart.” That whole day, Uta really only talked to him.
“I couldn’t hold her, I couldn’t pick her up.”
“That she wouldn’t let you.”
“No. I couldn’t do anything.”
“She wouldn’t let him kiss her. Kiss you.”
“That’s not good,” I said, but all I could think was how Uta was. What a rah rah.
“I couldn’t do anything, you see. If the baby cried and I went to pick it up, that was all wrong. She wouldn’t let me change you. She wouldn’t let me touch you. You would cry and I’d go to pick you up and she’d say, Let her cry. She should cry. She read all these books,
see. And I thought, if I can’t touch my own baby, then fuck it. Anything I would do was the wrong thing to do. So we got in fights over it. From the beginning. From the day you were born. That’s the way it was. Everything had to be her way and she had a whole philosophy about child-rearing and so on and I was a dummy.”
“And believe me she wasn’t so good.”
“She was pretty good. Because after all she raised you. She did it. Not me. She and your grandmother. From the little bits and pieces I gather, your grandmother really raised you.”
“Is that your mother?” Uta shrilled.
“No no, that’s her grandmother.”
Now Uta addressed me. “His mother’s sister lived in Cairo and we visited her. And his mother was there too. That’s how I met her.”
My mother had always told me my father left because I cried. She’d always said it was because I cried and he said, let her cry, he wanted to go out and go dancing. But she wouldn’t let me cry. I would never know what was true.
T
HE DAY WAS BORING
in the way most important, unrepeatable days are. Funerals, weddings and the ceremonies surrounding birth when no one is sure what to do. None of us was at our normal work.
After a while he stood up. “I suppose I better get dressed so you can see your father looking a little better than just a couch potato.” He still had his foreigner’s accent.
And they went upstairs to dress. I relished the time alone. I stood up and explored. It was a small kitchen, a small living and dining room. They had the latest video equipment. Everything else seemed about five years old. There were no pictures or anything personal that I found. There were no books. Upstairs I heard Uta cooing at the dog. Its tail beat hard through the floor.
There was a wedding that day at The Lighthouse, which was why, it turned out, it was closed, and there was much discussion of how long he would have to go in. He decided he’d work for a few hours and then after we would have dinner. It took a long time for him to get us a reservation. That seemed much on his mind—getting us the very best place. “It’s Saturday night,” he kept saying, as if we were defeated already, as if I should have given him a week’s notice to get reservations.
“His restaurant is the best in town,” Uta offered, looking at him. “They get married there even.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“And the receptions. Wedding receptions and so forth,” she said.
The restaurant he really wanted was booked. He was a single-activity man. When he was talking on the phone he was talking on the phone, not like my mother, or me for that matter, who were always dancing, mimicking, pacing, tapping, fidgeting, carrying on primarily with each other, the one present there with us in the room.
He asked if he could speak to the owner. But the owner wasn’t there. Then he made a bid to whomever he was talking, saying he was John Atassi from The Lighthouse and his daughter was here and it was a special night and could they possibly get us in. “No,” he repeated the other man’s word. “All right. I understand.”
I remembered my mother slipping the waiter two rolled-up twenty-dollar bills so we could get in to see Barbra Streisand at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas. My mother and I—we would never take no so easily.
He looked at Uta and shrugged. “If they’re booked they’re booked,” he said. He said it again later when we were walking up the gravel, my heels sinking, to the restaurant he’d chosen second, as he was explaining the hierarchy of restaurants in Modesto. “But,” he shrugged, “when they’re booked they’re booked.”
“W
ERE YOU IN
C
HICAGO
for a while?” Uta asked me.
“No.”
“Somebody told us sometime or other that you were in Chicago and in some kind of television work or radio work …” That seemed to be all. Somebody told them that and that was it.
“No I’ve been in New York doing graduate work, well medical school.”
“That right?” he said.
“Following in your dad’s footsteps, huh?” Uta said.
“My mother went to graduate school too.”
“Do you go full-time to graduate school? Daytime?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You can’t really do medical school at night. They don’t have it.”
“That right?” he said. “You didn’t want to go on and get a Ph.D.?”
“No,” I said. “The only other thing I really was interested in is architecture. And you don’t need a doctorate for that either.”
“New York,” Uta said. “Well there’s always something to do there, that’s for sure.”
“It’s the most cosmopolitan city in the world, really,” he said.
It was determined that the dog needed to go out. Uta went up to get it on its leash. He rose and stretched, offering me the last glass of champagne. I refused and he poured it for himself. “What time is it now?” he said, walking to the clock. “Two o’clock.”
When Uta descended with the dog she asked how I got there. “Did you come on 580?”
“Yes, I came on 580, it was very easy.”
“You could have flown into here.”
“I don’t think there’s a direct flight,” I said.
“Well honey, your dream came true,” she said, lingering at the door.
“I’ll show you something,” I said to him. I took the chain out of my pocket. I’d brought it along but I hadn’t decided until just this minute that I would tell them. “You gave me an add-a-pearl necklace when I was very little. So right before when I left on the plane I found it to bring along.”
He took it in his hands, examining it under the lamp.
“She has the long fingers like you, honey,” Uta said.
“No, I have my mother’s hands,” I said.
He handed the chain back to me and I put it away. “The daughter I never had,” he said again, looking into his champagne. “Yah.”
“Now you have her, honey,” Uta said.
“Yeah, you’ve got to give me your phone number now,” I said. “Masters of the unlisted, you two.”
Uta said, “We’ve always been unlisted.”
“I think I’m going to get unlisted too, actually,” I said. I was just talking.
“It’s kind of nice. For a while there we didn’t have it and you get so many calls that you don’t care about. This way you talk to who you want to call.”
Uh-huh, I was thinking, hearing her. Yup. “I’m sorry to just surprise you like this,” I said. This was absurd. I heard myself and hated it.
“Well that’s okay, that was nice,” Uta said. This woman will cure
me of just talking to fill the space, I understood. I heard myself like her. “I don’t think you ever could have done anything more delightful for John.”
“I’m still in shock,” he said. “The most gorgeous surprise. Really it was a shock. For about a fraction of a second, you know, you looked familiar. But I couldn’t trust my eyes.”
“You have a dad you can be very proud of.”
“What, you’re trying to do a sales job on the poor girl?”
“No, honey, but she doesn’t, she hasn’t had a chance to know you before. He’s really something else.”
“Well, I’m making some progress now. I had some very—”
“He was a rascal for a while there.”
“I was a bum.”
“No, you weren’t a bum. You were mixed up. You made a few mistakes in life but we all do, you know. We’ve had a good life, haven’t we, honey?”
He didn’t answer. He looked down into his champagne and swirled the glass.
I
WENT BACK TO MY MOTEL
while he went to his restaurant to tend the wedding. There was some talk of Uta giving me a tour of the city but for once I said what I wanted, that I was tired.
“We’ll do that tomorrow, darling,” he said. “You’ll stay with us a couple days.”
I felt caught in lights. “I can’t,” I said. “I have to get back tomorrow night.” My mouth went rigid, strange.
I didn’t know how much more I was up for. I was exhausted, truly drained. I fell on the made motel bed with clean gladness. They’d wanted me to get my stuff and check out and stay with them. I’d used the dog as my excuse. There were so many people I was supposed to call. Venise King. Marion Werth. Emily. But I was tired. Purely, simply tired.
Now I was really ready to go home. I wanted to be there and start again. I knew I would think of this later. Maybe I would understand more then. I had so much to do home again, just to begin. I was out of school, out of a job and out of money. People had given up on me.
The phone rang and I jolted. “Hello, Mayan, this is your dad.”
Somehow him calling us that. I was bolt up in the bed. It felt strange, him calling me. “I told them to go to hell, they can manage the damn wedding by themselves. No really, it’s fine, I’ve got a good staff, everything’s under control, so we can come early and we can go and get a drink.”
I said okay, I’d be ready in fifteen minutes, even though I wanted the long hump of afternoon to sleep.
I
WAS WAITING IN THE LOBBY
. I didn’t want them in my room, I felt funny even just getting into their car like that. I really didn’t know him.
The restaurant was small-town fancy, even though Modesto wasn’t that small. It was in a three-story Victorian house, with excess atmosphere. Orchids at our table. A framed poster-art reproduction on the wall. Leather-bound books on glass shelves, backlit.