Authors: Mona Simpson
Well, so then they opened the second compartment and it was filled with all kinds of candy. And that was what we loved. The kids ate and ate loads of candy and it was still full to the brim when they went home. The next day they opened the third compartment and that was full of golden coins. They ran their hands through the coins and laughed. They filled their pockets until they bulged and they ran home to their families. The hobo waited until the sun was down and came back to the chest with a sack. He filled the sack with coins and ate candy and ice cream until he couldn’t eat any more and then he jumped on a train. He remembered the stop, he wrote the name of the station down on the inside of his cuff, so he could always come back and get more. He vowed to himself never to tell anyone about the magic trunk, even if he fell in love and found a wife. But he died that very same night. Thieves came into the car he was riding and killed him for the money. They filled their own bags with the golden coins and threw his body in the sack, by the side of the tracks.
The kids who had found the chest made a pact; they could each use it, take as much as they wanted, but they could never tell anyone about it, ever. And they kept their word and always went back and took from it. Their families and friends wondered how they got their treasures; in fact, the families worried. They each had a secret idea: each one decided he would tell his own child about the chest, so that after he died, his family wouldn’t go without. When they were children and first found the chest, they were two boys and a girl. And later, the men watched anxiously over their wives, waiting for them to show, and the woman prayed and prayed to have a child, but she couldn’t have one. They each died true to their word, childless. And there was a drought in the place where they’d lived and the town got poorer and poorer, but no one else knew about the magic chest and there it sat in the field, full to the brim with ice cream and candy and golden coins.
Lan-knows where he got that story, I suppose someone told it to him. I just loved to think about it, I pictured that chest out there in the field, like my mother’s big steamer trunk in the basement,
and it always made me happy. I suppose when you’re a kid like that, just going to sleep at night, you think, even though you know better, Well, maybe you can find it. Art sat on my bed and wrote my name on my back with his fingers. L-I-L-L-I-A-N. He traced each letter big and I felt it through the cotton of my nightgown. His letters made big circles that put me to sleep.
I suppose that was when I first started to like him. It happened slow, he was always around, you didn’t really notice it. I don’t think he really thought anything of me then, I was just a little kid to him. Most of the older boys had a few younger ones to follow them around and help, if they were the least bit nice. That’s the way we did it. I suppose he knew I had a crush, if he ever thought about it, but no one took those things for much. I saw him every day around our house and this wasn’t for a month or two, this was years. And he saw me every which way—with leaves in my hair, all dirty, when we helped him rake and burn, dressed up nice for church, when I first learned to put on rouge. Heck, he still gave Milton and me our bath together, so he saw me that way too.
Milton and I both thought he was just the greatest thing we ever saw and we followed him around when he’d let us. They used to shoot rifle practice in a field back of Swill’s barn. We weren’t allowed when they had guns, but we’d listen from our porch at night and the next morning before breakfast, Milton and I would go and see if we could find skeets in the field. We found plenty of broken pieces, but we didn’t want those, we needed whole ones, ones somebody had missed. When we found one, oh, then we thought we had a prize. We brought them home and gave them back to Art, the next time he came around. He never said anything about it, he just smiled and took it with him in his pocket. I suppose they just threw them in the air again the next time they shot, after all our hard looking.
I think the thing that finally made him look at me, like a girl not just some little kid, was a picture. There were traveling photographers in those days, just like musicians—the little towns couldn’t support such stuff on their own. There wasn’t the business. But once a year they’d come and line us all up outside of
school, the girls together. Cameras were huge then, big wooden boxes, and they brought their own umbrellas and all. When I was a senior, after the class picture, the photographer asked if he could come to my house and take some more pictures of me alone. Well, I had to ask my mother and then I went the next day and said, Why sure.
When he came to our house, my mother had us all ready. I was wearing a white lace dress, all pressed and starched and my boots were polished so the buttons shined. She’d braided my hair and pinned it and she’d dressed up Milton too. All the furniture in the house had been oiled. She had flowers from the garden set out in silver vases. My little dog, Blackie, had a big blue satin ribbon around his neck. My mother asked the photographer if he didn’t want to take Milton in the picture, too, but he said no, and so it was just me sitting on the piano bench, holding Blackie on my lap. He came around the next day with the picture all mounted on fancy black paper and he left it with us. It was nice of him. My mother had already been figuring out how she could scrape together the money from our food allowance, but he just gave it to us and went on his way.
Then, after that, every time anyone walked into the house, they had to see my picture. Why sure. I was big stuff then for a week or two. And that’s when they all got the idea that I was pretty. I was just a little runt before, but now they all thought I was swell. I could tell, because they treated me a little different. Even my mother, she was careful. She looked at me more. It made her think of me better. Everyone but Milton. It didn’t make one bit of difference to him, one way or the other. He didn’t care what I looked like.
But what I worried about was with Art. You know, at that age, you don’t think so much about your family. You think they’ll always be around and you can forget about them for a while. Art was the one I wanted to look at the picture. And he finally did. All that summer, I palled around with Art and his crowd of older kids. They were from big families most of them and they had to work—they picked strawberries for Swill, the nurseries could hire kids cheaper then than the migrants—and after their day,
we’d all do something. They’d be tired from kneeling under that hot sun, so we’d just walk around town, maybe buy an ice cream if we had a little money. Then ice cream was more of a treat, they made it in molds, like cookies, so you’d get a new shape every time. A clover or a heart or a flower. And each one would be a different flavor.
And then on the weekends we had our real fun. We went swimming in the quarry or down by Baird’s Creek. We’d each take a sandwich and a towel and we’d wear our bathing suits under our dresses and hike out there. We hung our dresses on the branches alongside the creek. I loved to swim, that feeling of getting all wet and drying off so quick in the sun, and then sliding in again.
We could have gone on like that forever. We didn’t worry then, like kids do now. Both my daughters worried so much about themselves. More than I ever did. And the granddaughter is the worst, yes you are, it’s the thighs one week, and of course the breasts aren’t big enough, next thing you know, it’s the knees or the ankles. Pretty soon it’ll be the ear, you just wait.
We were too shy to think about our bodies. And we wore bathing suits that came almost to our knees, so you couldn’t see much anyway. I still have mine; it’s a blue with white buttons, I don’t know why I keep all such stuff.
And in the country, there where we were, it was quiet. Quieter than it is anywhere now. We didn’t have the cars and the trucks or the highways. Once in a very long while we’d hear a train go by and you’d stop whatever you were doing and listen because it was a change. It always seemed sort of sad, a train, but an everyday sadness. To me it did. It made you think of the things you didn’t know. Most of all day it was silent, except what noise we made ourselves, diving in the water, splashing. I remember lying flat on a rock for hours under a tree that would sway, just the littlest bit, in the breeze. We could have gone on like that for years, and it was my fault that we didn’t. That was my one big mistake, but what did I know?
For my seventeenth birthday, I made a big cake and we had a party. It was just girls, that was the way they did it, with ribbons hanging from the ceiling, and all the aunts came. My mother’s old
steamer trunk sat in the front parlor, repapered inside, and they each brought something for me to take along to college. I’d already gotten in for the next year, at the Catholic college in Marquette, it was all set I was going to go.
I suppose I was so puffed up from the party and everyone giving me something that I said yes when I really shouldn’t have. When Art came that night and gave me his present—it was a black pin, I still have it—he asked would I go swimming with him the next day and I said yes.
And wouldn’t you know, sure, that was when it happened. He was young, too, just eighteen, he didn’t know any better. He’d never been alone with a girl before, except maybe his sisters. First we swam and then after, it was still morning, we were lying on that rock, under the tree. The way the branches moved, the air went on your skin like from a fan. All of a sudden he came and lay on top of me and I didn’t know what was what. All the time I was growing up, I thought a soul lay in your chest, I even thought I knew what it looked like. It was a wide, horizontal triangle like a yoke, made out of white fog, like clouds are. I thought married people had babies by somehow pressing their chests together so their souls touched. That’s how dumb I was. That was as much as I knew. I was pretty sure it had something to do with kissing, and so I was careful we didn’t kiss. I hadn’t really pictured more than that—but there it was, our chests felt real warm and pressed next to each other, so I could feel his sharp bones. It was uncomfortable, but not an altogether bad feeling either.
Then the other began. Neither of us said anything. I was afraid to move, I was ashamed of how much I didn’t know. That’s how dumb I was. And he was different, too, I was afraid of how his face looked, stern and sealed like a stranger’s, like a profile of a man you see a distance away, working up on a power line.
He started rubbing me all over and I knew you weren’t supposed to let them touch you. I didn’t know exactly why and to tell you the truth, I didn’t know how to stop it. Then he reached under my back and opened my swimsuit. Then all of a sudden, I was a little smarter, because I knew enough to know it shouldn’t go
much below the waist. At first it didn’t. Then he reached down by my left leg and went up under the band around one thigh. It hurt, like something sharp, the edge of a thing. I kept hoping nothing more would happen. Then he pulled the suit down so above my waist was bare. Right away, I thought, all right, that’s done now, just as long as he doesn’t pull it down any further. I kept thinking like that, nervous, until it was all off. Then when he was right there, over me, I understood more. I cried a little, I suppose most people do, especially like me when they don’t know what’s coming and feel that first burning, oh it hurts, but then it went on and on and I closed my eyes and all I thought of was my mother.
I thought of her room. I could exactly picture the furniture. The high bed, square and neat, with the white chenille spread, the tassels just touching the floor, the mirror, the white bureau, the one fern and then the white curtains, blowing at her windows. I had gone into my mother’s room alone in the afternoon. The white walls had a bluish color, like light around an egg. I thought of my mother with my father in that room and the white cotton nightie she wore to bed and how she must have wanted to touch her soul to his and I tried to feel that way and be that way with Art, my chest pressed right under his, collapsing, so we could both feel the warm.
And that’s when I got pregnant with Carol, from that one time. We did have bad luck, that I’ll say. I had wanted it, though, I was thinking of it. Wanting it made the pain seem important, for that one second the whole thing seemed holy, like a sacrifice. Maybe you get pregnant easier when you think like that.
My mother and father sure weren’t happy. Oh, no. My mother had worked hard saving and fixing up my college trunk and she never liked Art so well anyway. She wanted Milton and I both to marry better families, families she knew. Cousins even.
I got married in a dark blue dress. My mother didn’t come, but I went home after, alone, she wouldn’t let him in the door again. She was just wearing a housedress. She was sweeping when I came in. I half kissed her, she moved her cheek away and for a long time I remembered her face inside the oval glass of the door. I felt my braid swish on my back as I walked down the path. She
was watching me and I left that day. Art met me down the road. Art was scared too, but there we were married. We had no choice but to do it.
For him it was a kind of adventure. And he never did have to go to a war. He went and tried to enlist for the first one. They sent him back because he was too young. Then, by the second, he was too old already. I was born in May 1900, Art in 1899, so between us, one was always the age of the year. And he had an idea that we had more fun somehow because it was the beginning of a century. He told that to Adele once and oh, was she mad. We had the whole century in front of us. He always liked gadgets, balloons, fireworks, everything new. See, I didn’t learn all his crazy ideas till then when I was stuck with him.
We moved sixty miles to Bay City and at first we lived on top of a store. It was all new people. I wrote to my mother and dad, one letter a week for more than a year before she would even answer me. I don’t think she ever really forgave me. She had to some later, when she was sick and living with me. But she never liked Carol because of it. As if Carol could help what we did.
Then a year after we left, Milton ran away. That must have been hard on my mother. He went off to San Francisco to join the merchant marines. From what I heard after, we were the only ones in Malgoma who were the least bit surprised. And when I knew, it seemed right, it made sense. He had always wanted to get away. Even when he was a little, little boy and I had to watch him, he’d crawl off the blanket, under the fence, out of the yard, away from where he was supposed to stay.