Authors: Mona Simpson
She is standing behind me, her fingers light on my back. Together, we watch the water. That’s one thing about my mother, her capacity for awe.
“Isn’t it nice?” she whispers.
All her things are here, the things I’ve heard about for years, the grandfather clock backed into a corner, hidden by ferns and a Kensia palm.
“I don’t want anybody to see it and get ideas,” she says.
The pine bench, stripped blond and waxed, stands in front of a couch, antique armoires are set with green Limoges plates, tiny antlers, dried roses and orange peel. She shows me each thing. The Tiffany lamp, its one original petal-glass shade, the other replicated by a glass blower she met in Santa Barbara, every piece collected slowly. I walk around the rooms and touch.
“It’s worth three times what I paid,” she whispers, her eyebrows lifting.
Sometimes when you walk in a house that has been newly, thoroughly cleaned, you feel light. You’re eating, you’re lounging on a couch, spreading open the pages of a magazine, but you are a
small thing, in the rooms. You’re living the way people live inside movies.
The carpet is new and even, the glass perfect. I’m surprised. I guess I’m even impressed.
This is what is in the bathroom: Porthault scallop-edged towels, organic geranium soap, aloe vera shampoo, fennel toothpaste on the spotless counter and a huge shell filled with natural sponges.
I sit on my mother’s bed and let her show me things. The Tiffany lamp, half Tiffany, half Santa Barbara, sheds soft colored light on the wall. My mother’s closet could be a museum. Each article is tended. The floors shine with oil, her shoes hang in felt bags, tucked in French cloth shoe-panels. Her dresses fall perfectly and sweaters, from Chanel to Lacoste, are stacked according to color, each in its own clear plastic zipper bag. She seems to own nothing old. Most of my mother’s clothes are white.
She sits on her bed, next to the lamp, with her glasses on, mending a torn piece of lace on the hem of my skirt. It caught in my heel; the way I live, I would have left it to rip. I idly pull out one of my mother’s drawers. There are rows of unopened Dior stockings, textured, not, sheer to opaque, in all colors, her silk and lace panties and bras. An antique coin silver evening purse, wrapped in a white felt bag, and a sachet, rose petals and orange peel.
“I make those myself,” she says.
I’m thinking, my mother has changed. When I lived with her, she was more like me. She could walk out of the house looking perfect, nails buffed and polished, hands soft, everything on her bright, pressed, falling in gentle ruffles and folds, the patent leather purse dark and shining like a mirror, but she left a million little odds and ends behind. Old things, gray stained sweat shirts in the closet, clothes she kept for wearing when she was just with me. She didn’t seem to own those anymore. She must have thrown them all out, everything stained. She used to have old purses,
each one containing scraps of things, change, matted brushes, pictures, junk. They seem gone now, too.
She must have always wanted to live like this; from one perfect outfit to the next, nothing in between, every day crisp new clothes, nothing to be ashamed of, ever, anywhere. She always loved new things. Someone could always be watching.
The ocean feels so close and loud, I don’t want to sleep. We drink Kahlua in tall glasses of milk and my mother tells me secrets about her clothes.
The next morning, the living room is a cage of sun. My mother stands by the oven, wearing white, poking at bagels with a fork.
“I have lox and cod and smoked salmon, and onion, tomato and cream cheese and, let’s see …”
“You bought this house?” In the daylight, it seems too good. If my mother bought a house with the check I sent her, I imagined it small, a bungalow in the Valley, or towards Riverside, Pasadena. There are a million little LA towns. Tarzana, maybe. But not here.
Her back turns, there is a flinch of movement in her shoulder, under the loose white shirt. She stiffens and pauses a second.
“Mmhmm,” she says.
Late afternoon, my mother sews over the hem of my skirt, all around, not just where it tore, to strengthen it. She is humble before the ancient delicate fabric, the new, Japanese style. A servant to a beautiful dress. It feels quiet in the house. Dim light. She is bent over, feet clumped pigeon-toed on the floor, knees pressed together, biting a thread. I drop down and do pushups. She is all deft concentration. The skills she’s had forever. She studies careful invisible stitches in the weak light. She puts her glasses on.
“Adele, you have enough food for forty,” Daniel Swan says, closing the refrigerator door.
“Here’s the pasta and here’s lemons,” my mother calls.
Daniel unrolls white butcher paper with pink, round pieces of veal on it. There must be thirty medallions.
“That’s okay, whatever we don’t use, we’ll keep.” My mother sighs and lightly claps. “So.”
I cut a lime for my gin and tonic. We’ve been drinking for hours. My mother washes vegetables, individually, in the sink, drying each mushroom with a paper towel. She stops, looks at us and smiles. “If I ever have a man around again, he’s going to have to cook. You bet.”
She moves past us to the table, her caftan brushing the floor. The centerpiece is a three-foot basket of fruit. Apples and oranges, cherries, strawberries, grapes and kiwi spill over the top.
I marvel at the kitchen. Tiny brushes stand next to organic soap, under a framed poster of “All rising to a great place is by a winding stair,” Francis Bacon rendered orange and blue by Sister Corita. Herbs in a hanging wire basket, shells. “Blue! Blue! The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
Foucon. A holy water ox. Orchids in ferns. An old lamp from Wisconsin. A bowl of lemons.
“Oh, come here, you two. Look.” My mother stands on the balcony, letting her wine glass dangle off the rail like a huge jewel.
We watch the waves open, white and then transparent over the sand.
“And look at him, can you see that little porpoise? He’s been visiting me all week. He looks just like a rock, but that’s him.”
My mother’s hands move delicately under running water; she’s a hardworking cook. But she has no sense of timing. The veal burns, curling up at the edges, smelling like milk. She scrapes the pan and sighs, taking the white butcher paper back out of the refrigerator, for more.
I stir the noodles. My mother put in too many and not enough water. I know her logic; it is a beautiful, if small, copper saucepan. But the noodles seem to be dissolving.
“Yuk,” Daniel says, lifting the spoon. He rummages through
the cupboards for a colander. I notice him pausing, on his knees. He holds up a white grocery receipt over a foot and a half long.
I shrug and sponge a line of ants from the counter.
The food arranged on platters at the table, I go to look for my mother. I find her in the bathroom, slowly unpinning electric rollers in front of the mirror. Now she puts on her beads. She wears three strands. She lifts each one and lays it on her chest, then rummages under her hair until she finds the clasp. She doesn’t fasten it in front and then tow it around, the way I do, living alone. We stand there like that a long time, watching her hands worry under her hair.
“Ann, make a list for me of what books I should read. Listening to you kids talk is great but I realize I’ve fallen behind. I just don’t have the vocabularies you kids have. I used to. But I spend so much time reading in my field and writing those damn reports. I want to catch up again and really follow what’s what in the literature and artistic field.”
She looks at me from the other end of the table. “She’s really beautiful, isn’t she,” she says.
“No,” I say.
“That’s what’s so nice about her is she doesn’t know. I’m so happy when you’re here.”
A silence falls like the silence after someone has said they love you. She waits.
The food is terrible, the veal, though perfect looking, is tough, the noodles are the texture of oatmeal. We eat slowly.
My mother stands and claps. “Well, what about dessert? Daniel, what would you like? We have carrot cake and I have everything for hot fudge sundaes, I have vanilla and coffee ice cream, and hot fudge and nuts, I have cream, let me think if I have anything to whip it with.”
Now, the scraps of food seem solid on the dark plates. The candlelight makes it all look old.
“We’ll do it, Mom. What would you like?”
“I think I’ll have carrot cake,” she says.
Daniel switches on the overhead kitchen light and my mother turns her chair towards the window.
I stack our dishes in the sink.
“Daniel, we wanted cake,” I say.
He’s balancing three bowls of ice cream on his arm, and nudging past me to the table. “We’re having hot fudge sundaes,” he says. I flick the light off again and my mother doesn’t say a word about the ice cream, only “Mmmmmm,” when she lifts the spoon to her mouth.
“Comemeer,” Daniel says. My mother zigzagged, tired and glowing, to her bed. She doesn’t usually drink, she never used to. Daniel and I clean the kitchen, the pots and pans, the plates. I start wrapping all the food in sight with Saran.
Daniel opens the garage door and squats on the cement. The carrot cake rests on the floor, untouched, perfect.
“Look.” Daniel points.
Then I see it, my eyes adjust to the dimness. Ribbon-thick bands of ants surround the base, tunneling into its sides. The frosting is dotted with dead ones.
The next day, my mother shows me her new car. It is a white Mercedes station wagon, with silver everywhere, tan leather interior, a dashboard more computerized and beautiful than any stereo. She blushes. We are standing outside on the dirt Colony Road, overgrown with weeds. She backs the car, infinitely slowly, from the garage. Two tan, very blond children wearing shorts and bandannas chase a dog, also wearing a bandanna. Everything is bright. By the driveway leans one spent rosebush. I hear a motor churning, somebody’s pool.
“When did you?”
She shrugs. “I realized, it was the only car I really liked. I looked at Toyotas and Jeeps, I almost bought a Jeep wagon with the wood sides, you know, but it ended up being more expensive than this was. So … I just picked it up last week.”
“Why do you want a station wagon?”
She inhales, shuddering. “We-ell, I’d like to drive my grandchildren around someday.”
On the long streets of our old neighborhoods in Beverly Hills, new octagonal signs stand on all the lawns.
WESTEC SECURITY: ARMED PATROL
, they read.
ARMED RESPONSE
.
“Oh, come on, after all they’ve done for us. Besides, Peter wants to see you, poor Petey, he’s been calling every day. He still likes you.”
“The Kellers haven’t done anything for me.”
“Well, they have for me.”
Almost a year ago, Nan Keller died in an accident. At Aspen, she was run over by a snowplow. She paused at the bottom of the mountain, between runs. The machine stood idle on top of a pile of plowed snow. Kids had been playing in it and they left the brake open. The plow rolled down the hill, over Nan.
Now, Mr. Keller was suing the ski lodge and arranging a retrospective of her paintings. “I went out with him once,” my mother says, “but I just couldn’t do it. Ugh. I couldn’t kiss him.”
When Peter Keller calls, I won’t talk. Every time my mother lies, says I’m in the bathroom, in the shower, taking a long bath, steaming. He must think I’ve become extremely clean.
Daniel pulls the strap of my suit down, then we are kissing.
“I didn’t think this would ever happen,” he says.
I duck underwater and pull off his suit; it tangles on his feet, but I get it somehow and loop it around my wrist like an enormous bracelet. We kiss hard, imprecisely. We bob. He lifts the elastic away from my leg and he feels enormous, and good, oh so good, inside me. I keep rising to the surface, he pushes my shoulders down.
Then, he yanks out of me, bites the package open, pulls the rubber on underwater. He’d been swimming with it in his hand. Now it starts again, random, hard, real inside me.
“Hi, you two!” My mother stands in yellow slacks and sunglasses on the deck.
“Can she see us?”
“No, we’re underwater.”
But I can see our legs and stomachs, green but distinct, like hands in clear gloves.
I swim away and Daniel yells, hey, grabbing my ankle. A wave comes up over our shoulders, we’re caught in it, tumbling, gasping, clawing the sand bottom, finally bobbing up again, ten feet apart, our hair bunched in our mouths. We can’t find Daniel’s bathing suit. I hold up my arms so he sees and we both start diving for it, looking.
I stand for a second on the ridged sand, closer in than Daniel. My mother bends over, watering geraniums with a hose on her balcony. “She looks so good in her house.”
“The Kellers’ house,” Daniel says.
I start swimming in, hard, breathing underwater, to get Daniel another suit.
“The thing I like about swimming in the ocean is that you can pee whenever you want,” he says.
I guess I should have known. She bought the car instead of a house. She’s borrowing the house, maybe renting, whatever.
In the dark, my mother shakes me. “Hurry up, you’re really lucky. The grunion are running. I have a schedule.”
I pull on jeans and a sweat shirt from the chair. In high school, we went on grunion runs, late night rides to the beach in tiny cars, girls sitting on the boys’ laps, our hoop earrings catching in our long hair. But we never saw any grunion. We’d walk on the beach with flashlights a few minutes, then pair off to make out in the sand. I’d always thought the fish were an excuse.
But my mother has a little pamphlet from the Coast Guard. “The female comes in on one wave and she twirls herself into the sand, so she’s upright, half buried and half out. And there she lays her eggs,’” my mother reads. “ ‘Then, the male swims in. He circles around her and deposits his sperm.’ If they’re lucky, they swim off together on the next wave. But sometimes the female gets stuck in the sand and if she doesn’t catch the next wave, she dies, poor thing. She can’t breathe, I suppose. Aw.”