Casebook: A novel by Mona Simpson
“Well, I was intimidated there.”
“That was the great house,” Sare said. “And you were the glamour couple.”
They both laughed, a bad way.
Once, my mom was driving us home from school through a huge storm when Eli called and it went to speakerphone. You could hear rain pelting the car on all sides, like drums.
“It’s really pouring,” she said. “I don’t know if I can run.”
“What will happen?” he said. “Will you melt?”
But I didn’t want her running in this. My father never would have suggested that any of us go out during inclement weather. This guy wanted my sister drugged for allergies and my mom to run through a storm while pieces of trees fell, clumps of palm wood, and she could get hit by lightning.
40 • The Double
We had tennis matches Tuesdays and Fridays. My mom learned I was playing first court when Sare called her from our second game, at a school that looked like a country club.
The Friday of a week we’d already been whupped by Brentwood, we took a bus to Polytechnic, leaving early for the long ride. The bus went through an old WPA tunnel into Pasadena and finally stopped under ancient trees, their thick roots running above the ground. There was nothing public-looking about this park: the benches were ornate, new-painted green, and in the distance, old men in white shorts and caps played bocce ball.
Pulling on a sweatband, I started against their third-court player. Here, you felt the heat. My hair dripped water. I should shave my head, I thought as I beat their guy easily, trying not to run. Then I had a break and watched Charlie and Zeke. Our team looked bendy, our timing slightly off. We played close, tight matches, and it all came down to me, playing against their number one, and he stood a foot and a half taller.
On our fourth game, it was deuce; I got a point off of him, and he asked for a break. The air felt powdery, hot but settled. A brown line smudged the horizon. There were mountains here, backing the view. He went to get a towel from his bag. The sun began to pull in as I watched him pour a bottle of water over his head.
My scalp itched and I wondered if I had lice, as I did every time my head itched. Lice liked my hair. I’d forgotten to pack water. Every morning, in the rush to the car, my mom yelled, Remember sunblock and Did you put a thermos of water in your racket bag? I always mumbled It’s all good, sitting in the car stony, half awake. So now I wandered off toward an old drinking fountain outside the courts, held the lever down, and let the little arc of water splash my face. Water from water fountains has the same pipe smell everywhere, and that weird mineral taste. The identical stain on the porcelain. When I pulled my head up, I saw a guy in the distance who looked like Eli, with hair like that. This guy was with a woman and a little kid between; they were going one-two-three-swoosh, the way all parents do, I guessed, with all little kids, and then I thought, Well, no, not all parents with all kids. Like a bell ringing in the distance, I remembered the Boops. They didn’t get that. And then, It couldn’t be Eli, he lives in DC. But it really kind of looked like him. That weird square hair, the white shirt.
I broke into a run, following them, but they were pretty far ahead. I stopped when I started hyperventilating and saw them in the distance, bending down to put the kid into a car. Then I jogged back to my team. My friends stood waiting. “Two minutes more, and they were gonna call it,” my coach said. “Bus gets here, we have to forfeit.”
I served. Their Number One guy returned. We rallied, and then I hit the ball long. I served again and double-faulted.
I couldn’t recapture my concentration and I lost the game for us all.
That night I jumped to answer the phone.
“Are you in DC?” I blurted, when it was Eli.
“Yes. And, well, you, you had tennis today. How was your game?”
“I lost,” I said. I had the strange feeling of something vibrating, like the floor before an earthquake. I handed the phone to my mom.
“You know Eli’s brother?” I asked when she got off. “Are they twins?”
“No,” she said. “The brother’s older.”
“Do they look alike?”
“Not especially, Eli says. Why are you thinking of Hugo?”
The rest of the season, my tennis was for shit. I choked up, even though I kept my eyes trained on the green rectangles. The coaches never knew why their first-court player lost it. The last day of school, I stayed to clean out my locker. At the bottom, old lunches still in their bags had seeped and grown into something like soil. I had to get paper towels to carry clumps of the gunk to the trash can.
“Aren’t you tempted to just close the locker door and leave?” Hector said.
“Yes.” But I kept returning and transferring the gooey slime. I had a foot and a half to go. I hadn’t told Hector about Pasadena yet. This was the first thing I hadn’t told him since his parents’ divorce. By now I was pretty sure it hadn’t been Eli. Anyway, though, I wanted to tell him. About Eli stealing the dog, too. I just remembered that.
Charlie and I still hit balls to the Specials on Mondays. They kept improving, but now there were new Specials, beginners. The coach told us people had heard about the team because we were doing a good job. But the new Specials didn’t know anything. Their wrists wobbled with the weight of the rackets, and they chased after the dropped, wiggling Day-Glo balls like kids going after a faster puppy.
“Retardeds,” Zeke’s nanny whispered.
We hit balls to them and chased down the ones that looped over the high fence. One night, I was hunting down a ball that had gone into the park and I saw a guy who looked like Eli from the back: the white shirt again, that hair. I sped up, ran, huffing; I caught him this time, tagged the papery back of his shirt. But when the guy turned around, it wasn’t him at all. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I had to say. “I thought you were someone else.”
Eli called that same night from DC when my mom was out taking food to a geometrician in the hospital. I’d met the guy; he worked on fractals. Ferns and mountains, as I thought of them. Later on, when she got home, she and Eli talked for hours. Or I should say, he talked. She mm-hmmed the way she did when Boop One whined. When I picked up the extension, he was saying if he wasn’t jealous, he’d feel like he didn’t love her well enough. I tried to remember what the fractal guy looked like. He’d seemed pretty old.
My dad hadn’t been jealous. Did that mean he didn’t love her well enough? I thought of the time something had been outside our back window. It had sounded like an animal dying.
Eli couldn’t bear to lose her; I didn’t know if that was good or not.
My dad had lost her and my dad definitely had not died.
41 • Overhearing My Own Business
One morning when I blinked awake, I saw Eli on a ladder in the backyard, hanging the tire swing from our old house. The tree here was better for it—it had a thick branch and clear space around. I stayed in bed, reading comics, and every once in a while, a sister flew past my window, higher than we’d gone before.
My mother knocked maniacally at eleven.
“Stop raping my door.”
“Get up. We’re going out. It’s late.”
“Where you going?”
“We’re shopping for silver.” They thought it would be nice to have silver forks and spoons, she said. Eli was going to buy us a set to use every day. He was big on the everyday thing. Your life with your kids is now, he’d said.
“Eggs in the ref,” she told me, “and there’s bread for pb and j.”
I batted my eyes. “You’re not going to make breakfast for me?”
“Miles, you’re fourteen. We’re dropping Jamie at the pound.”
Batting had always worked before. I blamed Eli. They gallivanted out to shop. It no longer even seemed weird that Boop One had friends and Boop Two volunteered with animals by herself. I blamed Eli for her having that job, too.
I was still in bed when they returned. The store carried five types of silver, and they hadn’t like
“… not only reading,” my mom was saying in the kitchen, “it’s more than books. Emma and Izzy are going to the movies, and she doesn’t want to go along. She says movies are boring. Everything’s boring or scary.”
I knew all this. My mom had talked about it with Sare. I’d overheard Sare say, Boring or scary! That pretty much covers the world.
“I don’t know if she follows the plots of these movies.”
That wasn’t the problem, though. It was a social thing, I was pretty sure. Boop Two knew that Izzy really only wanted her sister and that they had to invite her along.
I walked in, took a sandwich, and headed back to my room as Eli asked my mom question after question. He loved her, I supposed. I couldn’t stand to hear more of this, and it was my sister.
Once upon a time, I remembered, my father had been able to calm her. She called him even now about Boop Two. His refrain was She’ll be fine. I was a late reader, too. And I was a National Merit Scholar.
“You still don’t read,” she’d say back.
“But I can read, Irene. I can.”
Eventually, I supposed, she’d figured out that everything would be fine not because there wasn’t a problem but because my father wanted to get off the phone. When I was older I understood that he couldn’t take anxiety. He seemed to be trying to talk her into the idea that everything would be fine, but really he was talking himself down. One of my discoveries from the extension was that she still called him four, five, sometimes six times a day about us. He seemed in a race against himself, to see how fast he could get off. One Saturday, I timed him. Thirty seconds. Why answer at all? If you’re just going to say, Can’t talk now. Got to call you back.
The douche. He did it to me, too, but not as much anymore. I’d learned how to talk to him. Why hadn’t she?
Eli must have been more selective about when he told her not to worry: she still believed him. The next time I went to the kitchen, she was saying, “She doesn’t seem ADD to me either, but maybe I should have her tested. Sare thinks so.”
Eli was silent, then said, “Well, if Sare thinks so.” He said if she had so many people to talk to, he wouldn’t spend all the time he did thinking a problem through with her to give her his best advice. Then he lit into her about retailing the story. (Did he mean retelling?) I realized then that he didn’t know about all the phone calls to my dad, even if their average length was under a minute.
“I saw your friend in Philadelphia,” he said. “We had dinner.”
“But you said you wouldn’t see her. You promised.”
“I’m teasing you, honey. We didn’t have dinner. I talked to her on the phone.”
“That time we went out, you said she looked like the young Audrey Hepburn! You touched her stomach!”
“I didn’t touch her stomach. I touched your stomach.”
We still avoided the neighborhood where we used to live. We knew all the routes and took long ways around, just not to see our old house.
Then I went to camp. Inside the echoing clomps of guys, I forgot all we’d lost at home. Portaging canoes through the swampy banks of a freezing Maine river, I thought only about keeping up. It was hard. We climbed Mount Katahdin on hands and knees in a hailstorm. Ten times every hour I wished I’d let my mom order the water gear I swore I didn’t need when she tried to make me put it on at REI. My stomach grew fur inside it. We ate Chef Boyardee from the can. I waited for the other guys to go to sleep before I braved the woods to shit. Back at camp, I found a clean facility, off the cafeteria, and hiked there with comic books sent from home. I’d gotten into superheroes that summer. I’d put in orders at Neverland and Malc picked up a batch every week and FedExed them with notes and treats from my dad. Hector sent me postcards. His dad had him reading his extension students’ Merchant of Venice essays, separating them into batches of acceptable, horrible, and even worse.
When I got home, it felt strange to be clean again, as if I were a smaller self. I roamed loose in my clothes, slept in late, then woke up to the smell of good hot food. Boop One could do side splits now. Boop Two had grown taller, but despite new glasses, she still didn’t read. She’d developed math talent, though. “I can tell you a trick for squaring numbers that end in five,” she said. I couldn’t do that in my head, I told her. I was more patient, partly because they felt less like my sisters, after six weeks away, partly just from something shed by the old trees. Trees in Maine had a smell. Petrichor, Hector wrote in a postcard. Here, August was dry. You didn’t smell the trees, but you heard them at night, like string instruments.
When my dad came to take me out for dinner, I saw the first gray in his hair.
I overheard Sare trying to talk my mom into the swim team for me. The swim team? Really, people! The annoying thing about wiretaps was that you couldn’t talk back. Then I learned that my mom had signed me up for cross-country! I’d never run in my life! Philip had joined Hector, too. It was all his doing.
I’d have to get out of it, of course, but I couldn’t start arguing until I officially knew. This was a huge downside to reconnaissance. And Hector wasn’t even home yet.
He finally returned from surf camp taller and tan. They’d made bonfires on the beach and heard waves boom and crash over and over, all night long.
“You like Surferdude better, then?”
“No. I still hate him.”
Hector had gotten to be an even bigger reader over the summer. Or at least he read bigger books. He was in the middle of Moby-Dick. I’d gone the other direction. Floppies, superhero comics. I followed ifanboy.com. Hector had a bracelet tied on his ankle, woven from string that looked like it had already been wet and dried a lot of times. I kicked it. “Where’d you get that?”
“A counselor,” he said. “College woman.”
If that bracelet had been on the ankle of any other Rabid Rabbit, I would have teased him, but Hector was the last of us to show any interest in sex. Other Rabbits wondered if he was gay. I didn’t know. It seemed the one thing from his parents’ divorce; he just didn’t have that yet.
He kept the string on his ankle all that year. It was the most romantic I’d ever seen him and ever would, for almost a decade up till now.
42 • A Full House and a Borrowed Dog
It was the Mitzvah year, Bar and Bat, for the Boops, and so far Boop One had received thirty-six invitations and Boop Two five. Hector and I hadn’t been invited to many either when we were in seventh grade, just to Simon’s and the ones that included the whole class, but what mother would allow her brat to invite one twin and not the other?
Apparently, quite a few of them.
Our whole family got invited to Simon’s sister’s, and the Mims decided I had to wear a suit. She trudged me through department stores and appraised me in mirrors, where, even after climbing the mountain Emerson called a “vast aggregation of loose rocks,” and someone else famous said was the most treacherous in America, I still appeared stout. As opposed to pleasantly plump, which is how I liked to think of myself, or even as about to shoot up.* All through that miserable afternoon, the Mims called Eli. This is what she’d always wanted with my dad: a running commentary on her life with us. An endless conversation. “It’s all good,” I said to the first two suits, but she trucked me halfway across town to Brooks Brothers. Eli’s idea, probably. We wore the salesguy out until he produced a suit that made her shoulders drop when she surveyed me. She took a picture on her phone, and Eli called back in about ten seconds. “That’s the one,” he said from Washington.
“Let’s pin it,” my mom told the salesguy.
She hadn’t even asked me! And I was there! In the store! In Los Angeles!
I had to admit, though, when I glimpsed mysel
My dad loved the suit, too, when I modeled it. He clapped a baseball cap on me backward and told me to put it on with sneakers. My dad wore a baseball cap backward after he washed his hair; he’d figured out if he put one on while his hair was drying, it went a way he liked. “That’s great,” he declared, looking at me. My mom agreed. She seemed happier now with him. He gave her the same attention he’d always offered, but now she had Eli talking her through the rest of the day.
Boop One insisted on wearing Uggs with a borrowed black dress, and the Mims said, “You are not attending a Bat Mitzvah in Uggs, young lady,” and she said back, “Then I’m not going!” and I said, “Don’t be such a brat,” when she stomped into the kitchen and the Mims said, “Oh, that’s adorable. I was wrong.” Boop Two had on tights and the Doc Martens Eli had bought for her that looked leather but weren’t, a plain dress, and her hair in one thick braid. Then Eli showed up, carrying a suit on a hanger and a dog on a leash in the other hand. “Your dog!” Boop One said, but he said no, it was a friend’s.
“Are those leather?” Boop Two whispered, looking at his shoes.
It may have been the first time I’d ever seen him in hard shoes.
“Yes. I already owned these, so the damage is done. I keep getting them resoled. They’re going to have to last me the rest of my life.” They looked wrong. Square-toed. Even now, I don’t understand how fashion gets to us. Why did I think those shoes looked wrong? I’d certainly never picked up a fashion magazine.
In the beach club I severed myself as quickly as I could from them all and found Simon, sucking a Coke. Hector hadn’t been invited. “Hey, dude, you hear what happened?” Simon said. “Zeke got kicked out.”