Authors: Mona Simpson
Then, I always imagined, he found me. He wrote me a long letter or he called me on the telephone and I had to get rid of my life and of Jimmy. That was never too hard. In my daydream, that part never took too long. Sometimes I confessed and told everyone. And then the priest had to come and tell my parents and Jimmy that since my first husband turned out to be still alive, Jimmy and I weren’t really married. On other days, I didn’t tell a thing to anyone. I just got in my car before supper and drove away. What I spent the most time sitting and dreaming about was when we’d meet together again. He had thick lips and the top one sort of pulled up over his teeth. If I knew how to be a sculptor, I could still make his face. He had a smooth forehead, no lines, high cheekbones like a woman’s, and that straight, plain, even
nose. It was with him I understood that just the plain, the regular, was beautiful. It didn’t have to be something special. It was just the ordinary, not having anything wrong. I suppose he had what people might call a weak chin. His face came to a point and the chin was small and hard, like the tip of an eggshell.
Oh, I’d close my eyes and think of us pressing together, kissing against the wall in a room. I always pictured behind us, one single bed, made up, the cover smooth. I tried to imagine the first instant, that urgency, and then after that—that ohgh—I couldn’t do it anymore, I couldn’t picture. I’d have to open my eyes and be wherever I really was. In the house or the yard, Mom’s house or the water softener store. And then the air and the light in the room where I was seemed thicker and staler than before. I remembered each time then he was dead. That went on for a long time, for years. It didn’t really stop until Benny was born. And then, I don’t know why, it went away. I guess it was hard to want to imagine giving up my babies. And they were Jimmy’s after all. And by then, too, it was just such a long, long time.
I don’t want to make it all sound bad. I had good times when I came home, too. After V-J Day, the young people flooded back to Bay City. There were lots of parties that winter, lot of dances. It was a happy time. Overall, I think the war was a good thing for a lot of people’s social lives. Of course, there were some wounded, but you didn’t see them much. And then there were those like Phil Brozek, who went over to Bikini Island. When he came back, he picked up his milk route again that he’d had before the war. The swelling in his legs, the cancer, all that from the radiation, that didn’t show until much later.
I met Jimmy on the golf course. He had been in the service, too, in New Guinea and then in Australia. He jokes that he should have met me before the war, when I was still a virgin. He knows that much, that it happened with both of us in the war. He grew up in Bay City, too, and we graduated high school the same year, but I never met him. He went to Central High and I went to Catholic, the Academy. We only met the boys from Premontre. He says he wants to go back to Australia sometime and see how many kids look like him; he says there weren’t any women in New
Guinea, just those natives, but there in Australia, apparently, they had their fun.
I don’t know, do you think I should have married him? I don’t know either, I often wonder. Then, at the time, I suppose I thought, why not. I needed something new. Here I was back living at home again, sharing a room with my little sister. And she got into everything—oh, God, was she a snoop. She’d open your mail, go through your drawers, anything. One day she told me she stopped reading my diary because it was too boring to keep her interest up. Oh, she could be a little brat.
And my mother wasn’t the same with me, either. I never told her I was married, but she knew something was different, she could tell. That last year, I didn’t write as much. At the beginning, I’d sent presents from everywhere, but towards the end, I just wasn’t thinking about home anymore. I remember on the train, I was an hour away, and I realized I was coming home with no presents for anybody. I got out at one town, I had only a few minutes, and I bought the first thing I saw that would do—a box of cookie cutters. They were nice cookie cutters, all unusual shapes and good stainless steel, but she must have seen that they were just from around here. But at least I had something to give them when I came off at the station.
I remember that night, the lanterns lit, it all looked real pretty and the town had changed so. I felt happy and sleepy all of a sudden. They took me out to Dean’s for a sundae and they had the hot fudge, like it always was, in the little silver pitcher. The sky outside over the river turned violet, the lanterns and the piles of sulfur were that real pretty yellow. And you know, I was almost relieved to be alone. I was so tired I felt like a girl again.
But that didn’t last. Pretty soon I couldn’t stand it anymore. After all the excitement of the war, the travel, the uniforms—you know, sometimes it was like one long parade, you were always sort of tired and excited and you were usually around so many people—Bay City just didn’t seem like much anymore. That first night when I was exhausted, it felt perfect, just the way you’d want a town to be. But then when I got some sleep it seemed too small. And here I was plunked back in the same house on the
same road. I was shampooing and styling again at the Harper Method Beauty Shop.
And one thing I can say for Jimmy, he knew how to take a girl out on a date. He always took me to a nice supper and then after we’d do something; we’d go to a club and hear music or we’d go dancing. And every couple of dates I’d get a corsage. I have them all here, pressed in the dictionary. And he always had a big crowd of friends and they gave parties. Twenty, thirty people over for fish fry or chicken bouya. And my parents never did that. We didn’t have as many friends.
So we went ahead and got married. We had the service at Saint Phillip’s. Jimmy was a Catholic, too, so that was never a problem. I think my mother and dad liked Jimmy, if they didn’t, they never said anything. And I was already twenty-eight. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t get any better.
And wouldn’t you know my little sister managed to ruin my wedding. She was a bridesmaid, with two others, my two best girl friends from the Harper Method. I wore Granny’s wedding dress. See, my mother never had one. It was a beautiful dress, that old-fashioned pearl-white satin with a long train. Adele walked behind me holding it up. I remember she had a white dress, too. I’d wanted the bridesmaids in pink or mint green, but no, Adele said it was either black or white. And so the others had to be white, too, they all had to match. She herself got married in a suit, I remember.
It was a small wedding, a hundred, hundred fifty people. We had the reception at my parents’ house, in the backyard. We had tables spread out with white tablecloths and white and green balloons tied up in the oak tree. My dad’s men from the mink had rented tuxedos and they stood behind the tables pouring champagne. There was champagne everywhere and trays of food. My mother had been baking for days.
She’d made the cake herself. It was a lemon cake inside, real moist and tart, with a beautiful, fluffy white frosting. Adele had decorated it that morning—and I have to hand it to her, it was beautiful, she covered the whole thing with sugared flowers, real flowers, violets and pansies from the yard, and with cookies in
shapes from those cookie cutters I brought home. She was always good at such stuff. But then, she didn’t want us to cut it. She made them take about a hundred pictures, before she’d let us touch it. We have more pictures of that cake than of the rest of the wedding put together.
I do have a picture of the women, when I threw the bouquet. I still had my big nose in the pictures, so we don’t put them out anywhere in the house, but we still take the book down and look at them once in a while. Jimmy says he liked my nose big, he says he didn’t mind it.
All Granny’s sisters were there from Malgoma and Granny, and all the neighbor women. My mother was wearing a peach-colored dress with a corsage. My dad had bought us each special corsages, he had them in the refrigerator when we woke up that morning.
Well, we didn’t have a balcony or anything, so I threw the bouquet from the porch. It was just those couple of steps. In the picture, the ladies are all standing on the grass in a line; the married women closest to me, with their hands at their sides, they’re not trying to catch it. My mother is the most beautiful one in the picture and you can barely see her, she’s standing behind two of the aunts. She really had a perfect profile, like that on a coin, so even, and her hair grew thick and nice. Even then when it was turning gray, it turned that beautiful silver white. And I think she was happy for me. All that day, I’d looked at her from somewhere, when I was going down the aisle at church, later, on the lawn during the party, and her face was so nice, she was glad for me. She’d worked so hard on all the food and the house. And her cake turned out so good.
In the picture, she’s got her hands behind her back and this big gorgeous smile. You hardly ever saw her smiling big like that. She was shy. She wasn’t a smiler. You know, of my mother and my sister and me, I was the only one with a regular wedding and it made her happy, I suppose. In the picture, the bouquet is blurred in the air. It looks like I’m throwing it to my mother.
Two of my bridesmaids are in the front, crouched and ready like football players. Their knees bent, their arms out, their eyes
are on the bouquet. They were both single girls and my age, they were ready, I suppose. Would you believe I don’t know who they are anymore? My two bridesmaids, and I can’t remember their names. And Adele is standing there, coy, her hands intertwined together. She is looking down at her shoe in the grass.
And she was the one who caught the bouquet. Seventeen years old and she caught the bouquet, sure enough, and without hardly trying. My dad was mad, he thought she was too young to even be in the line for it and he wanted me to throw it again. But she said, nothing doing. She wouldn’t give it back.
Then she pulled her real stunt: she locked herself in the bathroom and took a shower! Well, all those people drinking all afternoon and only the one bathroom in the house. Pretty soon they were lined up into the kitchen. Adele was in there humming in the shower. Oh, ye gods. She washed her hair and set it, and so she was in there a long time, hour, hour and a half maybe. And was I mad.
Some of the men walked up the dirt road and went in the field by the barn. But a lot of people just drove home. The party started breaking up. The neighbors ran down the road to their own bathrooms. My father stamped in and rattled on the doorknob—we were afraid he’d break the door down. That was their worst fight I ever saw. When he couldn’t get the door open, he went around to the other side of the house and yelled at her through the window. The next day, we went out and my mother showed me: he trampled her whole bed of lilies of the valley.
Well, it was a hot day and I suppose Adele thought she wanted to cool off. Can you imagine, a hundred fifty people, all drinking, and one bathroom, locking yourself in for over an hour? By the time she came out, most of the people were gone. Pretty much just Jimmy’s family and our relatives from Malgoma were still there. And the bridesmaids. My sister always did manage to get herself right in the middle of everything. Jimmy still blames her for ruining our wedding. We were planning to party all night! My dad had set up a record player downstairs, in the basement, and his Polynesian room was all set for dancing. But everyone had gone home already! My mother cooked for the relatives and Jimmy
and I went out with the bridesmaids and the ushers to a supper club, Jantzen’s. I remember we drank lime bitters.
Really, outside of the war, my life has been pretty much in the ordinary and I suppose that’s been okay with me. I don’t think I would have liked moving around and always having to look right and talk right, like your mother does. But you know, I wish I had gone to college. I listen to Adele and to you talk and you just say things so very well. You know how to speak nice, you do.
We went to Niagara Falls for our honeymoon, just the typical thing, but we had fun. I remember the first night, I suppose from the excitement of the wedding and the party and then traveling, my period came on. It wasn’t due then, it was over a week early. I told Jimmy and he said, okay, and said I should just put my hair up and do whatever I needed to do to get ready before bed. See, he knew, he had sisters. And we each got into our single bed and said good night. Every night then, when we came into the hotel room, he’d look at me and I’d say no, not yet. Then our last night before we had to go home, I winked and said, “Tonight.”
I don’t remember ever deciding to build right next door to my mom and dad, somehow we just knew that’s what we were going to do. The land was there already, so at least we had that. My dad helped a little with the foundation, but mostly Jimmy built this house by himself with one other fellow he hired. He was already in the water softeners then. Sullivan Water Softeners. All those years, it was us against Kinsley. That was the other brand. I remember once after we were in the house, I looked out the window while I was doing the dishes and there were all these silver water softeners, shining like torpedoes, leaning against the back of the house. Well, of course, we put in a water softener and Jimmy gave one to Mom and Dad one Christmas. Adele would have gotten one too, but she was never settled down long enough anywhere.
I suppose if I could do it again, I’d build farther away from my parents. It really was just too close. But then, who knows, if I did it again, if I would even marry Jimmy.
And it was a help to me those first years with Hal, to have my mother right next door. And then when Dad was sick. Your mother
was out in California at that time, doing something or other in school. We called and called and she wouldn’t come home. She was lucky; she barely made it.
When she finally did come, your dad was up here all the time with her. I liked Hisham, he was a nice fellow. Not responsible, well, you know that, but nice. And oh, he was a very handsome man. Tall and dark, with big, big white teeth. I remember him at Dad’s funeral. He didn’t like the open coffin. He thought that was such a barbaric thing. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, he fainted. He was with Adele and she bent down to kiss the cheek and I’m pretty sure he fainted. He was just appalled. The Muslims didn’t do that, see. Over there, they cremate them. I suppose maybe they don’t have the room to bury.