Authors: Mona Simpson
Wouldn’t you know it, Milton found the cat two days after the shots were done. And that was when we found out everything. Penny wasn’t alone, she had a father. He was living in the foundations of an old house out by the railroad depot. He had a tent strung over the top for a roof and down inside he got the furnace working. He cooked his meals right there. Milton said he found all our dented cans, empty, piled up neat in one corner. The man was apparently clean. But Milton hadn’t said anything to him; he’d turned around and run home, without even taking the cat. He’d been scared to death, he said, he’d never seen anyone so ugly.
So a group of men went, my father, the doctor, three or four of the other sisters’ husbands. They left that same night, with lanterns, the doctor carried Penny piggyback. It was summer already and warm late. My mother and Milton and I stayed out on the porch, shucking corncobs, waiting.
And when they came back, they had a story to tell. Penny’s father could talk and hear. The men explained about having to test the cat, that there was a possibility it was rabid and the man was happy to give him up. The man had offered them coffee—coffee my father recognized as ours from the dented Holloway tin. He told them they were Oneidas from up near Locknominee.
Penny was half Indian, her mother was dead. Then he showed them what he called his laboratory and in there he had needles and alcohol, all such stuff, and books. Ross Smittie was amazed. Penny’s father had performed plastic surgery on himself, he’d remade his own face. His tribe of Oneidas had always thought he was the ugliest man they ever saw. Even when he was a little boy, they wouldn’t look at him. He had lived with his wife, she was a runaway from the orphanage in Traverse City, outside the tribe, but in those same woods. Then when his wife and two Oneida children died of polio, the Indians decided it was him. His own people stoned him and chased him away. He took Penny and they left—they got a ride on a cart with some gypsies up to Michigan, they picked cherries with the migrants all summer and then they rode the freight trains here. But what was really so hard to think was that this man found a way to sneak into the public library at night—see, he was afraid for people to see him—and read up all about plastic surgery. He wanted to remake his face to be better. He got a hold of needles and suture somehow and from studying those books, he changed himself. I suppose he used mirrors to see. He said it took months, most of the winter. He had to wait for one part to heal before touching another. And he did it. Well, you can imagine the ruckus—Ross Smittie wanted to call in reporters from the newspaper and write to other doctors from all up and down the state to come and see. He said it was a miracle the man hadn’t killed himself, but there were no infections Ross could find, only clear, healed scars.
Now that there was a big to-do, they moved to Clara’s house, Penny and her father and the cat. They had more room there and it was nicer, I suppose. There was a write-up with a picture in the newspaper and a couple other doctors came to see. But it all died down, because the truth was, he still had such an ugly, ugly face. It was scary, I could see how the people were scared.
In all the hoopla for him, nobody did anything with that cat. Finally, my mother went over one day and got him. She had him tested and there were no rabies. But at that time they had to kill the animal to test him for rabies. They cut their heads off. I suppose they found the rabies somewhere in the brain. And we knew
just where they put the animals, too, in a big metal drum out in a field of the dump. We sat on the porch that day thinking of the drum, our cat inside limp like a rag.
It was summer and school was out and so I only saw Penny on Saturday mornings when I went over to Clara’s to make crusts. Penny knew more words and now she could read lips. She put her hand right up against your mouth to feel while you were talking. Her fingers always had a taste, what was it, like apricots, I think. Well, Milton was prettinear all the time over there. He had a real crush. Clara teased about it, she said he chased Penny around in the backyard, pulled her skirt up to see her panties. They were just kids, eight or nine years old, but ooh, was my mother mad. That’s the only time during all those years I saw her mad at him. She got mad at me plenty, I was clumsy and knocked things over and she didn’t think I was quick as I should have been, but she always thought Milton was perfect. To her he was really something.
She gave him a spanking with a willow switch on the kitchen table with his pants pulled down. I watched and he cried, oh ye gods, he cried, you could hear him two yards down. Then after, while he was resting in his bedroom, sulking, she went right to work mixing the batter for his favorite cake. We could smell it coming up from the oven; I sat with Milton on his bed trying to make him laugh, pushing his kneecaps through the covers.
“Smell,” I said and we both sniffed the air. “She’s already trying to make up with you. She likes you better.”
Well, that made him smile, it just came out like he’d been holding still purposely before.
“It’s ’cause I’m a boy,” he said. He was glad it was true, but I suppose he felt bad for me. He knew it wasn’t fair.
“I know,” I said. And there we both sat.
He got his cake but she told him that he was forbidden from playing with Penny ever again. He did it anyway, they snuck. My mother never caught them that I know of. I saw them once in Swill’s barn. I followed him and lay on the ground, looking in one of those low windows. They were close enough so I could hear most everything they said. They were playing doctor.
She lay down on a bale of hay the way she used to on my four-poster bed. He pushed her blouse up and the band of her skirt down. He kneaded her stomach and I watched her muscles jump and sink under his hands.
“And all around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel. And all around the mulberry bush, pop goes the weasel.”
At pop, he stuck a finger down in her belly. That’s all they did, again and again. Lying on that prickly hay, I got bored, but I was afraid they’d hear me if I stood up. I wanted them to be done with it, so I could leave, but every time I looked in again, I got a feeling like goose bumps, I wished it was my stomach giving under his hands like dough and me submitting without ever once crying. But I’d been around all his life. Milton hardly ever noticed me.
Then that fall a circus came to town. We all went to see. They had a big green and white striped tent in a field. It was Indian summer and it was hot. I got sick from being in there, Lan-knows what all we ate, and my father took me outside the tent so I could throw up in the grass. I remember the stagehands standing smoking, the stars and their lit cigarettes and fireflies near the ground by the ropes.
When the circus left, Penny and her father went with them. The two brothers who ran the circus gave him a job. He had a side tent with a two-hundred-twenty-pound lady, and a banner that said
MAN WHO RECONSTRUCTED HIS OWN FACE
. Ross Smittie wrote the story that was going to be painted on a placard. They made a wooden cutout for his face.
The day they left town, Milton and I got up early. Milton shook me awake. There was still dew on the ground when we went out to the barn. Milton rode me on the handlebars of his bike. It was the only time I remember us sneaking together like that. In the barn, he’d found a litter of kittens. He had a cardboard box and we filled it with hay, then lifted the kittens in one by one. Their eyes were still just bulges grown over with fur. I had to hold the mewing box on my lap on the bumpy road home.
My mother didn’t come, she didn’t want anything to do with it, she and the sisters all thought circus people were dirty and they were
none too sorry to see them leave. But my father walked us to the parade, one on either side. The elephant led, then the carts, then the zebras my mother said were painted ponies. When we saw Penny and her father on the back of a covered wagon, we waved and Milton ran to catch up with them. He gave her the box of kittens and that was the last time we ever saw them.
I’ve often wondered about that and whether that might be why Milton turned out the way he did. I suppose he loved her like kids do and then her going off all of a sudden, away into nothing, as if she’d hardly ever been there. Sometimes people did that then, it was harder to communicate; they’d just disappear and you’d never see them again and it was like they were dead. Worse than dead. You didn’t even know a place where they were buried.
Something else happened to Milton that I didn’t know at the time and it might explain some, too. My mother told me fifty-odd years later. I guess once, when Milton was a little boy, this was before Penny, when he was real young, my mother was in the kitchen canning peaches. We had two peach trees in our backyard and they had big good peaches. She used to put them up in mason jars and she made jam. It must have been a Saturday morning because I was somewhere else, baking. My dad would have been out at work. Our kitchen was nice; it was a mint green with nice white counters. We had a white mangle by the window, with a doily. My mother was proud of her kitchen. It faced the backyard and it was sunny and it was always spic and span, real clean. She polished so all the silver on everything and the white of the sink and stove just shone.
Well, it was a summer day and she was canning and I suppose the mason jars, some filled already, some waiting, were lined up on the counters. The peaches boiled in a big white pot on the stove. I was at an aunt’s house, my father was at work and Milton sat on the kitchen table, swinging his legs below him. He’d just gotten a splinter from lifting the crate he wasn’t supposed to touch, the crate that held the milk bottles on our porch. He’d wear just his knickers, no socks, and his bare legs would dangle from the table. He liked to sit like that. She took the splinter out with a needle and a knife. She was good at it. She could get deep ones in one piece and it only hurt for a second.
She told me she didn’t know what happened but the weather changed outside. One minute it had been raining and then it was fair and drops lit up against the window. She had been looking there at a spiderweb outside shining with colors. Milton had his eyes squeezed shut. “Is it going to hurt?” he asked her. She laughed because it was all over. She showed him the sliver on her palm.
“Lil, I was so happy all of a sudden, I don’t know what came over me.” She said all at once she felt real happy alone by herself and with Milton. I guess she sat down on a chair and took him in her lap—and my mother wasn’t that way. She told me, he hung on to the back of her neck and started kissing her and she was distracted, thinking of something else I suppose or nothing, not thinking, and she didn’t know how much later, maybe a minute, she realized her eyes were closed and she had been kissing Milton like a man. Their mouths were open and he tasted like peaches, she said. She supposed they both did. He was sucking her chin like nursing again almost. She pulled him against her shoulder then and shuddered when she thought what she was doing. She said she found her hand just laid soft over his britches. It all seemed terrible, wrong, like an accident. Then she set him on the floor, stood herself back at the stove and slapped her hands together. She used to do that whenever she finished something, even when she got real old. It was a habit with her.
And nothing happened. The day went on, no one knew, I suppose she finished her canning. And later on, when she thought about it again, it didn’t seem to matter so much. Milton had gone outside and played in the afternoon, it was just one minute in the kitchen, in with so many others. He was so young, too, she didn’t suppose he’d remember anything. And at that age, they didn’t know yet what you are and aren’t supposed to do. After a while, she said, she didn’t think about it anymore. She wasn’t even sure it happened. Or maybe only a few seconds.
But when she finally told me, she said she sometimes wondered if it could be the reason why Milton went away. She didn’t know, it wasn’t much, she said she sometimes had a feeling. What did I think? Did I think it could have mattered, something less than a minute, so many years ago?
“Oh, no, shucks no, Milton is Milton,” I told her. We sat in my kitchen then. “He always wanted to go away. He wanted to see the world and now I suppose he’s seen it.”
That seemed to make her feel better. She nodded. “Yes, I suppose he is seeing it.”
We were drinking tea that day and we stopped talking. She was already old, in her eighties. But I still sometimes wonder whether that might have had something to do with it. Because Milton always loved his momma, he loved her but he had to get away.
There was a boy who came and helped my dad with the yard. That was Art. He lived on the other side of town, poorer than we were. He was a year older and that seemed like a lot to me then. One night, he baby-sat for us, it was in summer, and my aunt Ruth was having a garden party. My mother and father left, all dressed up, carrying a rhubarb pie I’d baked that morning, a deep dish, with a fancy lattice crust. Rhubarb grew in our ditches, all over. It was like a weed. Milton and I used to hide in it when we were real little, behind those huge leaves. It grew bigger than we were then. In summer, we ate it for a snack, just plain. We dipped the stalks in a bowl of sugar before each bite and the sugar would get real pink.
That night we had to be in our beds early, when it was still light out. I could hear water dripping down from the pump onto the cement in front of our house. Then Art walked into my room. I don’t know why, maybe I went down first and asked for a glass of water, but he sat in my little rocker, with his bare feet on the curved runners. I’d never seen that before. All my boots were dainty, lined up pointed straight front in the closet. He told me a story. Oh, and I just loved it. I still remember how it went. He said an old hobo and some kids were playing down by the tracks and in one of those fields, they found a trunk. And the trunk had three compartments. They opened the first compartment and there was ice cream in it. And they all ate and ate the ice cream. And then the kids went home. And when they came back the next day they ate more ice cream—they figured out no matter how much they ate, there was still the same amount left. It was a
magic chest. Things didn’t get used up. The ice cream knew how to replenish itself.