The diction of Jane’s new family was High English. They whistled Mozart, roller-skating under the full dark trees or pushing the stroller. Since the valley had become rich, most of the old houses had been refurbished and some of the bungalows had been torn down and replaced with structures built out to the lot lines. Fathers could be seen through yellow windows, sitting down to read. If you asked any one of them how his day was, his answer was apt to be “Great!”
So the old ones gave their gifts and bowed away after the ceremony, and Jane settled the strange assortment in a bag, holding the puppy under her dress. She sighed. These were precious oddments she had no use for, typical of her mother’s friends.
“Did you see Ozzie’s father over there? He was all proud, saying, ‘Attaboy. That’s my boy.’ He gave him a thousand-dollar bill.”
“What does his father do?” Mary asked.
“Counterfeiter,” Owens said.
Owens was still famous. A woman he didn’t know walked up to him and said, “Oh, I’m so glad you shaved off your beard. It was really ugly.”
He shrugged and said, “I’m speechless.”
Another of his theories concerned summer. He decided Jane should do nothing. He wanted her to sleep late and slouch around the house. Pick roses and put them in vases if she wanted to.
Weekdays, between the hours of nine and five, Alta reverted to its long-ago memory and lived in Spanish. Gardeners tilled yards and dispensed water they would never own. Soft religious women held babies too young to talk, feeding them things their mothers disapproved of, because they knew what God wanted with children, and it was quiet and graceful repose.
Owens could be counted on to believe in love, not only his own but yours too, if you told him so. It was his supreme value in life, even when he’d worked twenty hours a day. For him, it was the slender everything.
He believed in Jane’s loves when she was too young to really have any. And he was loyal. He sang:
I’m just that man
whose sperm fertilized the egg—
half your chromosomes—
who made sure you weren’t a man.
Or, into the telephone, calling Eliot Hanson, “We’re sitting around in the foyer, trying to call our favorite lawyer….”
This was embarrassing but also consoling. The way he was.
They ate at six o’clock and walked at seven. They fell asleep at nine-thirty or ten, and beyond the screenless windows crickets sounded their two notes under the dark stateliness of the old oaks and a tilted moon like an ironic earring.
Owens knew odd facts—for example, that Mount Whitney is the highest point in America, Death Valley the lowest, and California has both. He loved to explain things to Jane, small things that were part of the everyday world but that would neither come up in ordinary conversation nor help her get into graduate school.
He pointed at the triangular device he was pushing the baby in.
“Why does it stop so evenly, Jane?” He always quizzed her to make sure she understood.
One night, she asked him about his youth.
“I wrestled for six months over whether I was going to start Genesis. I knew I wanted to do it but just not then. I wanted to wait. I thought maybe I should go and join a monastery. But I also knew that was the time.” He looked at her as he did only with Eve and, sometimes, her. “I knew it was going to be really big.”
They walked with that for a moment, then Owens stopped at a bush of open roses. He cupped one and dunked Jane’s head down to smell. She loved thinking of her parents together, sharing a bed that had white sheets and no blanket, never made. She pictured it in an empty room, with one chair.
“You know, rock and roll started here. The Grateful Dead was here. The Whole Earth Catalog started here. It’s hard to explain, but it was really wonderful here then. It was—well, I want to say the sixties, but the sixties were really the seventies. You could date it with Sergeant Pepper. It’s like the universe cracked open for a little while and a certain number of people got out, some of the brightest people in the world. Chemists and poets and philosophers.
“I feel lucky to have been in it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It was like, it was like this….” He swept his arm off the handle of the baby carriage, “This time of night in summer, about seven o’clock, a little balmier than right now.”
The Dance
To Noah’s wedding, Jane wore the first dress her father had finally bought her. He’d taken her to the fifth floor of Alta’s old department store, where she’d carried dresses to the assigned room and walked out in her rubber shoes and thick socks, the flimsy fabric tickling her knees. They’d agreed on the dress; it was black and sleeveless. And every time Jane wore it, she felt the thrilling bareness again as air tangled around her legs and scarfed inside the armholes. By now, she owned many dresses. Eve took her shopping and let her pick out what she wanted. One thing Jane liked about Eve was that even though she didn’t care much about clothes herself, she didn’t make Jane feel bad because she did. Still, once Jane could wear anything, she found she was most comfortable in the jeans and tee shirts of her childhood.
The wedding was outside, in the stunted orchards adjoining the Copper King’s mansion, and Jane had flown home for it. Home: it slipped over you like a dress when you stepped outside the airport doors into the transparent weather and saw the ridge of pines with palms. She found her father the way he’d become: outside, in his garden, the infant girls at his feet. The oldest was standing now, wearing overalls, bending the corn.
He was a man who could have only girls. In this epoch of genetic understanding, everyone knew whose fault this was. He could have eleven more children in the next twenty years, all daughters, he said, and that would be fine. “It’s a lot more important than work,” he told Jane and winked, handing her the warm bundle.
He’d given away the cars and made a regular triangle between the college library, the farmers market and home. “I find, as I get older, what I care about most is I love watching things grow.”
Only now, living away, Jane began to understand how many kingdoms there were. His was not the first or the largest. A lot of other people, even in college, tried to be showy. And the East counted all kinds of things she’d never even heard of, or heard of only in bad ways from old-fashioned books. But in the sphere of home, very little was enough, and probably, all over the country that was once a frontier, they were all emperors to their children: a chicken in every pot and a king in every living room.
Louise, Noah’s bride, had silver-gray hair and a dress that was absolute white, dimming the fog as it sailed up the mountains, snagging on pine.
Jane remembered the first time she had come to this place. What if it had been empty, as it was now? She would’ve lived off the stunted orchards and vagrant gardens, with the hulking walk she’d had in the mountain town.
The ceremony was over; and they were beginning to serve food. It was just dusk, and people Jane didn’t know—scientists maybe—were crowding around Noah. She wandered through the whole wedding and found no boys her age.
But the Copper King’s mansion had not been empty. Her father lived in three cold rooms, and Noah found her and saved her for him. She’d always wanted to know her father, the way she knew her mother, and now she did. But with her mother it was still different. She and her mother had always had the bird time of day. About now, they stopped wherever they were, together or apart, and stood still in the new dark, looking outside and listening to the trees. Her mother sometimes relaxed, almost alone, even with Jane. “Listen to the birds,” she’d say, without ever expecting an answer. “Smell the lavender.”
She wanted Jane to hear every sound and see every beauty she did. She didn’t expect conversation. In fact, if Jane said something, it startled her. This must have begun when Jane was newly born, long before she could talk. Her mother spoke to her when she took long walks pushing the stroller.
“Hey, I brought you some chow,” Owens said, handing
her a bowl and sitting down next to her. “There wasn’t much we can eat. These carnivores.”
Jane sometimes ate a hamburger at school and regular things like cheese he didn’t believe in, but her father always assumed she was as pure as he was. Now she had acne and often felt the craving for the clean taste of his vegetables. Jane ate the bowlful of rice, picking out the broccoli with her fingers. She used a spoon, not a fork, and pushed the rice into the spoon with her other thumb. This was one of the things her mother, glancing from two tables away, knew her by. They ate in silence under a canopy of rustling, cheeping birds.
Then, on the big black-and-white floor inside the tent, people were beginning to dance. Jane bit her lip. She wanted to. A long time ago, before she came to Alta, she knew how to dance. In the mountain town, it had been all she cared about, and for years she’d watched grown-ups dancing. Having studied this evolution, she now saw each stage of her parents visible here. The tuxedo dance her father had done with Olivia on marble floors, each of them as tall as the other—Louise’s mother was waltzing that same way, with a man in a white jacket and an orthopedic shoe. And her mother and Eli swinging in a folk turn, as they had in the desert, with opposite hands meeting in the middle—a dance of people who didn’t know steps but felt love. Back East, the old bells would sometimes ring from church steeples, summoning the rare devout from their shaded streets: Olivia had that air to Jane now, slightly out of date, without the constituency and power she once had.
Then the music changed, and they were all hopping, dancing rock and roll, as Owens and Eve had goonily after Jane’s graduation. Little children jumped on the floor, a boy in a fancy blue satin suit. Eve danced neatly; she told Jane she’d learned from copying black women in jazz clubs. Owens was a goof, his legs far apart, stomping like a bear. Julie and Peter reminded her of Minna and her father on the kitchen floor. Huck was dancing now with her mother, bending her backwards.
But there was no one to ask Jane to dance. Noah and Louise were sitting holding hands. Jane didn’t want to split them. Noah couldn’t dance, and Louise didn’t seem as if she wanted to.
Then a man introduced himself. “I know you,” he said. “You were born on my farm in Oregon.”
Jane had always thought she’d someday meet this man and asked him if he’d like to dance.
“Oh, no, sweetie,” he said. “I don’t dance.” He winked. “I would if I was twenty years younger.”
Maybe she could dance alone, or else grab the hand of that little boy in the blue satin suit.
A waiter came by and handed around champagne in tall swirled flutes. Jane sipped the top and felt froth in her nose.
Finally, she asked her father.
He stood up and took her hand, but then the music changed again, into a circle dance, the vine step. Jane knew that from Bixter; it was easy. She leapt up with her father, then looked over at Louise and Noah and said, “You guys should come too, even if you just clap.”
Then she broke two hands and joined in, around and around, faster and faster. Everyone was rising from the tables, the sky patched in a faceted circle the quicker she went, stumbling a little, her heart heavy but aloft, and she saw people clustering around Noah as he danced with his hands, clapping overhead. Someone tore the chain and led his line under another bridge of hands so the circles intersected and twined inside each other like a seashell. The grandmother across from her was light on her feet, and Eve kicked off her heels to dance in her stockings, while the music kept building more and more, and Jane was sweating but it was a clear blue night and now this was fun. And all of a sudden, two guys stamped a chair in the center of the circle and everyone kept going, frenzied as some kind of pipes or harmonica burst, high and shrieking, crazy into the music. Jane heard the pop of a champagne bottle just over her right ear and felt some of the froth land on her wrist, wishing she could lick it, the sweet and the salt, but she couldn’t stop now. She was in until it was over, and then in the center her father and Huck and Frank and some men she didn’t know were lifting up the bride in her long white dress and Noah in his chair, and they were raised high in the air by a crowd of tuxedoed men for a long time, Noah still holding his flute of champagne. He threw out a white cloth, a handkerchief, and in the excitement, he tossed the champagne too, which arched up and then rained on them all.
The white cloth had two tiny spots of blood, like a bite. Jane watched her father. If he weren’t down, she wondered, would I be up? It was a question she’d asked herself before. If he hadn’t lost, would he love her? She looked around the night, considering this sliding register. She was becoming an adult.
This was not really the first dress. The first real dress was the uniform for school, when they’d finally let her go. Ruby had patiently hemmed it, while Jane stared at her new self in the mirror. Then, with the wool jumper over a white blouse and knee socks, she’d stood outside the pink-brick public school, carrying a notebook. A bell rang and the front hall began buzzing with footsteps, as she’d imagined for years, and she hurried to get into the crowd.
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful for the generous intelligence of my friends Allan Gurganus, Rob Cohen, Cristina Garcia, Lewis Hyde, Jeanne McCulloch, Ileene Smith, Ben Watson, Binky Urban and my editor, Gary Fisketjon. I would also like to thank Pamela Bjorkman, of Caltech, Lucila Cordero Nual, Roy Schafer and Mathew Soyster. The MacDowell Colony and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center offered sanctuary during the writing of this book.
Most of all I want to thank my family—especially my husband, Richard Appel, for his jokes, editing, understanding, patience and the ever endowing wisdom that comes from having fun along the way.
Mona Simpson, A Regular Guy
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