The Sequel
Fiction by Mona Simpson
“To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.”
– Vladimir Nabokov
No one told me when my aunt Essie died. I still don’t know the exact date. I stumbled upon the fact when, on a breezy afternoon phone call from California near the beginning of this century, my mom referred to her sister in the past tense.
I interrupted, and asked her what she meant.
“Oh, Essie died,” she said.
In response to my angry questions, I learned that my aunt had passed away two years earlier. My mother hadn’t told me. Neither had my cousin Stevie, Essie’s only child. I guessed (correctly) that my mother hadn’t gone to the funeral. Apparently, she hadn’t wanted me to go either.
“Well, you’re always so busy,” she said.
“I would have gone,” I said and hung up.
You would think I’d have called my cousin right then. But I didn’t and a decade passed. Then one morning, in the tardy spring of 2012, a message from him landed in my inbox. I ate breakfast, made coffee and then clicked it open.
I tried to call, got your voice mail. Your recordings are full. I need to let you know, my baby girl Kelly Rose died.
Kelly Rose! Ellen. She was fourteen years younger than me. Only 41.
Had she been sick? I tried to remember the last time I’d talked to her or her dad. It’d been years, but even so, I believed I would have heard if she’d had something serious. Something you could die from.
I called my cousin Stevie and felt momentarily relieved to hear his voice on the machine. We talked seldom enough that every time I dialed, I worried that it might not be the right number anymore. I tried my mom but the nurses station told me she was sleeping.
It must have been a car crash, I thought. How else does a 41-year-old die?
All day I kept my ringer on.
I had written a book about Kelly Rose, whom I’d called Ellen. Help, my first and only novel, had split my life into a before and an after. Some people say that about meeting their husband or giving birth. For me, it was the publication of that slender book when I was 34, the result of a lark.
Throughout my twenties, I spent nights reporting for the freelance articles it took me months to write. Twice, I came close to being hired by a city desk. Though I lived those years without health insurance, each of the near-misses turned out to be good luck; neither newspaper survived the decade.
The lark: A friend from my nine-to-five job at a women’s magazine tried to lure me to a tap dance class one Sunday. I liked Isabel, my putative boss, and so I went, though Sunday mornings offered clear hours to write and I couldn’t dance at all. (I wasn’t thinking of it at the time, but Kelly Rose was the dancer in the family.) Once there, though, I soon fell under the spell of the teacher, an old vaudevillian no taller than I was, named Yugi. Soon, Isabel and I were shuffle-ball-changing not only Sunday mornings but also Tuesdays after work. The classes afforded ninety-minute reprieves from my awkwardness. I turned out to be deft enough flicking extremities, clicking taps on my heels and toes. My middle was what didn’t move. Afterwards, we walked down the empty hall, passing a creative writing class. Through the marbled glass rectangle in the door, we saw drab heads bent over the table. The creative writers looked miserable, while we felt light and flickery from bodily use. When, five years later, Yugi announced his retirement, he recommended another studio but by then, Isabel was preoccupied with a Brooklyn brownstone she and Colin were buying. She promised to give me the lease to her 106th street apartment, a three bedroom higher up, bigger and cheaper than mine. (As in Help, she’d once bribed a superintendent ten thousand dollars to get a lease. Her father really had given her the money.)
We all chipped in to buy Yugi a cake and a Borsalino fedora. At the final class, we performed a dance we’d choreographed to a medley of his favorite songs. Isabel couldn’t make it; she’d had to trail inspectors through the brownstone. Walking to the elevator alone after that last dance, I paused and then finally knocked on the other door. My Sundays switched then from exuberant clattering with fluttery heartbeats (Yugi counted out the time) to a quiet concentration that often felt like punishment. I had the idea that I could make stories out of the scraps my editors took out of my pieces. They always cut the best parts.
I started two different stories, one about Kelly Rose, my cousin’s daughter, visiting me (using outtakes from a feature on treatment for incest victims, which the Sunday magazine editor eviscerated, saying “people don’t want to read that with their bagels”) and another about writing a college essay for my landlord’s granddaughter (started with scraps from a piece I did for Seven Days about the emergence of private guidance counselors on the Upper East Side.) The workshop had the idea that I should put them together. So I jammed them into the same summer.
At the time the book came out, I was involved in the latest of a series of relationships with extravagantly unavailable men.
I worked on Help for three years, bringing in a new chapter every few weeks. Days, I attended my job job. Nights, I wrote. I stayed in the city holidays, while everyone else frittered away time like tossed confetti. Finally, the writing group (which no longer looked uniform or dreary to me) declared it finished. One woman worked as a secretary at a publishing company. I had an offer before it occurred to me to submit to an agent. Like tap dancing, this had only been refreshment from my real work.
The publisher offered me ten thousand dollars. The balance on my J-school loans was $13,890, or $217 a month, and the secretary talked her boss into raising the advance to fifteen. They paid me right away; usually, she told me, they gave half when the writer signed the contract and waited a year to send the rest.
Writing for just the workshop I’d used real names, so much of my work with the book editor was a matter of substitutions. I turned Kelly Rose into Ellen and Stevie into Mike. Isabel became Jessica. In almost every case, the real name fit the person better. I wrote a check to pay off my loans and my budget quickly absorbed the extra monthly $217.
I didn’t feel much altered.
So nothing prepared me for the cataclysm. Though I didn’t become rich or famous I was nonetheless a different person on the other side of publication. I suppose it didn’t take much to change the life I’d had. During my years of writing Help, I hadn’t once boarded an airplane.
At the time the book came out, I was involved in the latest of a series of relationships with extravagantly unavailable men. The last one, a married Texan, had once toyed with the crenellated bottom of my jeans and told me, there may be women prettier than you, but no one smarter. He had two children and a plump, estranged wife, who had herself fallen in love with her high school sweetheart, a pulmonologist. This wife now planned to become a doctor, too, and had applied to 13 medical schools. Her husband, my putative boyfriend, would have to follow her wherever she was accepted, most likely Puerto Rico, he told me, as I stood at a payphone on Columbus Avenue, outside a bookstore. The whole front window of that now long-vanished shop was filled with copies of my book, the cover a polaroid of me holding swaddled baby Kelly Rose, in 1970s Michigan. (When I saw that picture multiplied sixty times in the store window, I didn’t think of Kelly Rose, though, or of me as a child. I thought, girl, baby, and, most of all, pink. Why had they made the background pink? Kelly Rose was by then twenty at a small Michigan college.) I put the receiver back onto its metal cradle. Though the Texan and I had just broken up, I felt no pain, no longing. They would catch up to me later, I assumed; I took a breath and walked inside, weaving through a crowd to the podium.
But the pain and sadness never did catch up to overwhelm me; I’d gotten out, that time, scot-free.
Now, in the place of that bookstore, a luxurious shop sells lingerie.
Even before the married man ended things over a payphone, I’d understood that I was the caboose of his particular train and I’d auditioned for a low-cost psychoanalysis. Three analysts interviewed me to see if I had promise as a patient for one of their therapists-in-training. After they rejected me, I called one of my assessors. He’d seemed exactly right; worldly, wise, a foot taller than I was and unattractive, a plus, I thought, because I’d read that people fell in love with their analysts, and with him, that seemed unlikely. I asked why they’d rejected me. He paused, then explained that they selected relatively simple cases. When they’d asked, I’d told them the truth: I met few couples I admired and even during those infrequent sightings, I’d rarely thought that I’d like to marry the man, more often, I thought I’d like to be him.
Was this what had made mine a complicated case?
I asked the tall, jowly analyst if he could take me on himself. He said no; he didn’t have a sliding payment scale and, even if I could afford his fee, he had no room. But when my book came out, I called again and he gave me an appointment.
Years later, he told me, his wife had been reading Help.
The publishing company had no budget for a book tour, but an old friend from J-school arranged for the University of Michigan’s English department to invite me to speak. They bought me airplane tickets and I walked through the pretty campus, a little mad at Kelly Rose for not being a student here.
I hadn’t told Kelly Rose or her dad that I was in Michigan; Ann Arbor was a five-hour drive from where they lived. It seemed impossible that they would hear about my visit, but Stevie eventually did, from a customer’s English-major daughter.
The Editor-in-Chief of the women’s magazine I worked for gave me a party in her Park Avenue apartment, where I turned out to be as much a matter of interest as the book. Her banker husband and his friends marveled over how people who worked in mills and factories could again and again (stupidly, they thought) vote against their own self-interest. And here I was, an emissary from those benighted places who could perhaps explain. But I hadn’t meant to expose my home’s vulgarity. Incredible as it now seems, I hadn’t actually thought about people reading my book while I was writing it, and I certainly never imagined them drawing conclusions about things like education and poverty in Michigan. To me, that background demography was the least of it.
Also, at that time, I didn’t yet consider my family poor.
I happened to be one-eighth Oneida, a fact I considered incidental; it had never been a big deal in my family and was, if anything, a source of embarrassment to my grandmother, who disliked the way her cousins on the allotment drank. But once my publisher gleaned the detail, he wouldn’t let it go. I was surprised to find it in my biography on the jacket flap. Beginning to understand that, like other things—poverty, for example—which one might wish to hide in Michigan, being an Indian was an asset here, and I’d started to research the Oneida Nation. I’d learned that members of its population had been captured and brought as specimens to be exhibited to the London society of Shakespeare’s time. Two Oneida women had died on the sea voyage home.
In fact, for the book, I’d completely made up the romance with the rabbinical-student-neighbor.
Party guests asked me about characters in my book.
“What had happened to Ellen?”
“Was she based on anyone real?”
“Did she make it to Barnard?”
“Where did I imagine her now?”
I didn’t have to imagine. Kelly Rose, the real Ellen, had not “made it” to Barnard. She hadn’t attended the University of Michigan either, though she’d had the qualifications; I’d seen to that. She was studying marketing at the small college her father had once dropped out of and worked for a trucking company part-time. As for the me-character (about whom fewer guests asked) there was no happy ending yet either. In fact, for the book, I’d completely made up the romance with the rabbinical-student-neighbor. The person I’d turned into Gaby had only ever been just a friend. Julian was real but he’d left me even earlier than in the book. I bumped up the breakup to make my narrator less pathetic. I was hopeful for her, I said. I didn’t mention that “she” was spending money on a shrink, a shrink who hadn’t been interested in her, pre-publication. I wasn’t sure how the analysis was going, anyway. In our first session, the tall jowly doctor had summarily dismissed the only person who’d shown any interest in me (another married man, but this one was separated, I’d emphasized, which seemed to me like progress) and when I complained about my mother harping on me—long distance—to wear more dresses, he took her side.
Many women enjoy the feeling of warm air on their bare legs, he said.
But I rode my bike everywhere, I’d argued, requiring me to pull my hair back in a ponytail and to wear pants compatible with a clip.
“You could always walk,” the shrink had dryly said.
In fact, this very night, I’d ridden my bike to the Editor-in-Chief’s Park Avenue apartment, where my friend Isabel (Jessica) asked, “Will there be a sequel?”
I wasn’t sure. I was beginning to understand the value of my hometown; its hundred-and-fifty-year-old paper mill which managed to bust organizers and still wasn’t unionized; the canning factories and meat packing plants, our polluted river. The migrant workers, the immigrants who stood at the conveyor belts. I could maybe Dickens them into something.
“Now we just have to find a nice guy for this one,” the Editor-in-Chief said to Isabel at the door, quickly looking me up and down, with a frown. I’d put on my helmet and my left pant leg was clipped. She put a finger on the hem of my bulky sweater. She’d huddled with me under an umbrella at Isabel’s wedding in the Brooklyn brownstone’s garden. I was a much bigger challenge, she was thinking.
The migrant workers, the immigrants who stood at the conveyor belts. I could maybe Dickens them into something.
My Aunt Essie, still alive then, transplanted to Florida and always the celebratory sort, talked her local bookstore owner into contacting my publisher, whom she persuaded to send me down. The bookstore turned out to sell crystals and new age self-actualization tomes. They’d scheduled me the day of the small city’s parade and incredibly, the bookstore’s employees had constructed a float for me to ride atop, with a ten-foot facsimile of Help’s pink cover. Once, a lifetime ago, in Michigan, my girl scout troop made a float, so I knew it was painstaking work to frill the squares of tissue and fit them into chicken wire.
After the slow parade, I delivered a reading to three people, one of whom was the bookstore owner and another, my aunt Essie. As I talked to the one unaccounted-for audience member about how he might sell his own novel, my aunt stood at the register buying Help. I tried to stop her, but she insisted. “Now, I’ll have to read it,” she said, laughing.
“Oh please don’t,” I said, meaning it.
I stayed the night with my aunt and uncle in a tract house on a golf course. My uncle, whom I’d feared through childhood, was now a diminished being, who, as far as I could tell, spent his day ordering his wife to put on and take off his shirt. One of his arms hovered, bent, by his belly, fingers pedaling the air.
“Oh, that means he wants me to button,” Essie said.
The circumference of his attention had shrunk to his arm span. He looked at me with menace and spoke only to Essie, who sighed as she always had. I’d known these people my whole life, they were my only aunt and uncle, but I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
On the drive to the airport, I asked my aunt (nervously but trying not to show it) about Kelly Rose, and she told me she thought she’d “go into something with business” after graduation. She didn’t think she was dating anyone special. A sequel to Help sounded unlikely. Nothing in Kelly Rose’s adult life sparked interest.
I hadn’t told Kelly Rose about Help. With later books, I sent them to anyone I quoted or wrote about ahead of time, but I hadn’t thought to do that. At 34, I’d felt already late and was always rushing.
Saying goodbye, I’d gathered that this was the last time I’d see my uncle but I didn’t guess, when I hugged my aunt, feeling the bones in her back at the small airport, that I would never touch her again.
And now Kelly Rose was dead too.
The afternoon more than two decades later, when Stevie finally called me back, I learned that Kelly Rose had died in Florida. Her body would be flown back to Michigan for a service. Her son, Stevie told me as an afterthought, was six years old now. Stevie promised to call when he had a date for the funeral.
The son. Six years old. I vaguely remembered sending a baby gift.
What happened? I asked.
“She took her life,” he said. And as soon as he said it, I realized I’d known.
I hoped Help didn’t have anything to do with this.
This short story appears in the 2024-25 issue of the Berlin Journal.
Image generated by Canva AI.