by Saskia Vogel
She said: ‘When other people fall, they can get right back up, dust themselves off, and keep going. Not you. You break. And you have to figure out how to put yourself back together each time.’
I pulled my hand away.
‘It’s what I see,’ she said.
I never asked about my future again.
The fortune teller could have put it differently: you’re a sensitive person; you’ll need a thick skin. Then I might have cultivated a callus. Instead, I tried not to break, moving through the world without friction, following the path laid out before me. I’d do well in school, I’d curl my hair and make sure my face was done, ever ready for love’s arrival. Love would be my salvation and the force against which my character would be formed. I suppose that’s how I got into acting, to get an idea of some of the many selves I might become once taken in by love’s power. I liked trying on these other lives, stretching each new role over me, covering the fractures inside.
My first audition was for an innovative yogurt product designed for women on the go. I mean, they were basically large ketchup packets filled with fruit-flavored yogurt that you sucked down, no need for a spoon. It was right before my senior year of high school. The casting agent who’d visited my summer drama program called right after the audition to tell me that I was exactly what they wanted: a fresh face for a fresh product with a major national roll-out. Nothing had ever felt so good. I was young, but I wasn’t getting any younger. I didn’t want to end up like Linda.
Linda was my mother’s friend from the shipping company. Unlike my mother, she had kept her job and would visit sometimes when she was in town for business. I remember her copperred hair and eyes like Cleopatra, the way she smoked and touched my dad on the knee when she addressed him. How the touch made him nervous. I think my mom liked watching him squirm, having something over him.
Linda must have been around fifty and me a teenager when I saw her last, same hair and makeup, same hand on the knee. My father seemed to enjoy her just as much. After dinner, he and Linda left the table to finish the wine on the balcony, and as my mom and I cleaned up the kitchen, she asked if I didn’t think it was about time Linda retired the femme fatale act. I remember dutifully agreeing with her that Linda, the way she was at her age, was tragic. But this agreement settled inside me as a seed of agitation. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I liked seeing Dad happy and relaxed. And I liked Linda. There was so much to her: energy, conviction, and mystery. A lightness my mother did not have. A certain style. In Linda, I saw a woman capable of giving and receiving joy, and the effect it had on my dad. Until then, I’d thought my mother’s dissatisfaction was noble and luxurious: it meant her life was full enough for her to be dismissive of its bounty. I thought my mother’s capacity for displeasure was a sign that she was discerning.
My yogurt commercial was still on the air around the Christmas holidays, when everyone else at school was awaiting decisions on their college applications. But I was ahead of the game. I had a career, so I kept at it and stayed in the Los Angeles area long after most of my classmates moved away. I had a good run. Five years where I was exactly what they wanted, but then whatever shine I’d had dulled, and by the time I entered my mid-twenties, I wasn’t what anyone wanted anymore. All I’d been hearing before my agent dropped me was, ‘They couldn’t see you in the part.’ I knew exactly what they meant. I was surprised it had taken them so long to catch on. I’d never been passionate about acting, I’d just gotten into a groove. But the last real role I’d had was two years ago. I played ‘Young Camp Counsellor’ in a reboot of a nineties show about rich high school kids. It was a three-episode arc. I had a few lines. And after those few days up in Malibu, where I mostly hung out in the shade with the rest of the cast, trading stories about life in the canyons – people who got lost, mountain lions, and secret pot farms – I had a decent year’s salary. Enough to make me want to do better, but still enough to not worry about making too much of an effort. I can’t tell you how I spent my time. I read. I treated dating like it was my job. The men were easy fun. There was more to it, of course, but I liked the customs that came with being a woman on a date with a man. I was well-rehearsed. Women gave me stage fright. With women, there was an open space of possibility, a potential to define the relationship on our terms, but that meant I had to account for myself. After Ana, I was afraid of being hurt. And behind that fear was that wish for love, for sensation, the dreams I dreamt in the silence between two heartbeats.
As for acting, I guess I’d hoped I could keep doing what I’d been doing. But since ‘Young Camp Counsellor,’ I hadn’t booked anything of consequence. In the past two years, I played the lead in a student feature, helped out behind the scenes on other people’s passion projects, and danced in a music video privately funded by a musician I’d been sleeping with off and on for a few months. He was beautiful, and our bodies were better in conversation than we were, which was its own kind of rare.
To keep myself going, I’d been doing odd jobs. For a while I was earning enough serving drinks, snacks, and views of my ass at a monthly poker party at a private residence off Mulholland. The tips were good if you could just be a body in a tight uniform. The host said there was more work if I wanted it. Did I have a business suit? I did. It had been a graduation gift from my mother, because ‘everyone needs one someday,’ which was really her way of telling me that I was chasing a pipe dream.
‘Here’s the deal,’ the party’s host said. ‘You come over for a “meeting” when my wife is home. Briefcase, files, office-appropriate shoes, tasteful jewellery and makeup. The whole deal. Business formal. And then we fuck on my desk. Fifteen hundred bucks. You’re in and out in an hour.’
One of the other girls I worked with ended up taking the gig, but I don’t know – after I turned him down, something changed. What had felt like fast cash for doing little more than showing up and being friendly turned sour. There was something in the way he’d claimed me with his offer. And how he started to resent me when I didn’t indulge his advances, even though the woman I became at those events had always played hard to get. His breath on my neck against the pantry door when I was restocking the nuts. How satisfied he sounded with himself when he called me incorrigible. I wasn’t planning on going back after Memorial Day, and I’d been looking forward to the long weekend with my dad to think things through. Dad didn’t need to know the details, though telling him would have probably meant he’d slip me a few months’ expenses. He was like that with gifts, haphazard and practical. He’d never have given me a dime if I asked for it straight out. All I wanted that Memorial Day weekend was to pick his business brain. He was good at being dispassionate, catching loose strands and weaving them into a plan. I wanted a plan, some sort of structure. But then he was gone.
IN THOSE BLANK WEEKS of sorrow, it fell to me to keep our fridge stocked. After we had worked our way through the barbecue food from the caterer, I thought I’d start working my way through the pantry, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch any of it, not even a half-eaten bag of tortilla chips kept closed with an ancient rubber band, the kind that my dad had around his file folders when they got thick. I couldn’t bring myself to take that rubber band off. It was stretched out and brittle, and if it broke, I’d have to go through the drawer under the telephone in the kitchen where all the rubber bands, binder clips, and freebie pens ended up. The junk of life, the stuff you think you’re going to organize one day. The very thought of the drawer made me feel unstable. Disturbing anything that was his felt dangerous. So, I kept the door to the pantry shut and filled my time with going to the grocery store. It was, at least, a way to force myself to shower, and because of the distances in this city, a fantastic way of killing time. Some days, I made sure to leave the house when the schools let out, and I’d take the road that always got clogged with moms and minivans so I could sit in traffic, the sun in my face, the radio on, and wait for a flash of how things used to be.
When I’d moved to my apartme
nt in the city, I’d taken what I needed and tossed all the things I didn’t, so my childhood bedroom didn’t have much in it. I borrowed my mother’s clothes: capri pants, leather sandals, and a twinset. The door to my father’s closet was closed, and only once did I slide the door open a crack and sniff. The air was stale but thick with him, and I thought I might be sick. I shut the door.
I would let my long hair air dry in the wind as I drove those miles to the shopping mall, with the windows rolled down. Except for my tangled hair, I looked like every mom around. My mother’s clothes smelled of carnal white florals. And sometimes I saw her feet in the coral shoes, her legs in the pale-blue trousers, which were just shy of being too tight on me. As my mother liked to point out, I’d inherited my father’s bones. It made me think she was disappointed in me, but the feeling was mutual. I might have thick bones, but what kind of life had she given in to?
I would push the cart around the grocery store and keep my sunglasses on. I wanted something between me and the world, a different surface for the world to interact with, so I could be left to my sadness. Not only sadness but a poisoned feeling, like there was something wrong with the groundwater and I had to keep it away from my skin. I hoped I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew. In a community as small as ours, anyone I went to school with would know me by my walk, the back of my ear.
Neither my mother nor I had it in us to cook. Our freezer had been full of casseroles that had been dropped off at our house like offerings to an angry god, but this had now stopped, as though there were an expiration date on sympathy. I took the end of these gestures as a judgment: the first swell of grief should have passed by now, the absent dishes seemed to say. From the deli counter, I bought concoctions for which my dad used the umbrella term ‘salad’ and that never seemed to spoil. Foods like those the caterer had brought for the barbecue, as if by stocking the fridge just so, I could live that day again. This time he wouldn’t fall.
If the counter was out of potato salad, my throat would close up and my sinuses would swell. I’d go straight to the checkout, grab a roll of mints and crunch my way through the packet, the menthol clearing my nasal passages. Even in those fits of despair, there was value in my shopping routine. When our pantry and fridge were full, I still did my rounds of the aisles. My mother was either asleep, busy with the people who administrate death, or on the phone with relatives overseas. The one time she handed me the phone, I could just about manage to speak German to my cousin. My cousin and I didn’t know each other well so our exchange was short, dutiful, and polite. My shopping routine gave me something of my own in those weeks. And it was during these trips, as I pulled in and out of our driveway, that I began to notice the men.
Initially, I thought the men were one man in particular: the old neighbour across the street, a retired longshoreman who split his time between Alaska and Hawaii. But I didn’t recognize him. Maybe it was a brother or a cousin. Workmen, I thought one day when there was a truck outside packed with lumber and shopping bags from the home improvement store. There was a man my father’s age with a ponytail who carried the lumber in, and a petite man who walked with a self-conscious shuffle. The first time I saw the builder’s car on the curb outside the neighbour’s house, I parked on our driveway at an angle that allowed me to watch him in my rear-view mirror. He did things that Dad used to do: home improvement projects that involved tarp, tools, plants, and wood. He left orange buckets filled with gloves and paint rollers on the driveway, which the smaller man would rearrange behind the pygmy palms flanking the entryway, so the mess was less visible from the street. Surely, I thought, there must have been more to my father than home improvement, but every attempt at memory felt contrived. My memories could have been the memory of many dads, I thought. Had I already forgotten what had made him mine? One day when she found me crying, Blanca held me and told me that Mr. Jack was a good man, he worked hard and loved his family very much. In that moment, her words were everything, but when I repeated them to myself they were just other words. I watched the builder and the petite man install a trellis at the front of the house, and together they planted jasmine and honeysuckle. The next day the builder and his truck were gone. The front door was open, and I heard hammering and drilling and the drone of a vacuum cleaner. One day, as I was driving off, I thought I saw the petite man wave.
I assumed the hybrid car in the driveway belonged to him, but I hadn’t seen anyone driving it, though I did see other cars and other men. Their comings and goings caused an uncommon amount of traffic for our street, but it was really only noticeable if you spent as much time staring at the street as I did. The more strange cars I saw, the more I kept watch. The men flowed into the house. I imagined them accumulating there, like fish attracted by the algae and other life forms found on wharf pilings. A house crowded with men who built, carried file folders, made phone calls, fell asleep to the Weather Channel. What gravity had drawn these men here, what had tugged at their souls? I would catch myself thinking that my daddy would soon be drawn here, too. I looked for him in every man who came to the neighbour’s door and found him every time: the waves had turned him old, or young, or sometimes bald. The depths of the ocean had compacted him. The moon’s pull had stretched him long, and there he was, transformed, knocking at my neighbour’s door. I thought about the moon at work on the tides, and I wished for its gravity to remake me too as I drove across the peninsula. When I parked at the shopping mall, I’d catch my reflection in the mirror, disappointed it was still me. I searched my image for his bones, but all I saw were my mother’s keen eyes, her disappointment with our life.
I sat on the benches and watched mothers pick up birthday cakes from the baker my mother used, children being ferried to and from karate, sitting with nannies at the ice-cream parlour doing homework, mothers clutching yoga mats and coffees, fumbling with their handbags as the sun pounded the hoods of their polished cars. I watched other women whose lives were not mine. Sometimes I saw older girls I remembered from school, married with kids and running errands. I remembered how hard they’d tried to get into college, how focused they were on achieving. Girls who’d expended all that energy just to end up right back here. Look how they fit in. Theirs was the life that had been mine for the taking. I had my apartment and a life up in the city, almost an hour’s drive away, but seeing them, even that didn’t seem like enough distance, because here I was again. I never said hi.
Toward the end of June I spotted a flyer from the community art centre on the noticeboard at the grocery store. It was pinned near want ads for dog-walkers, cleaners, and people offering bodywork, horse-back riding, and Mandarin lessons. The thought of interacting with kids or dogs or families drove me to tears. I wouldn’t be able to control my tongue, and yet I didn’t want to talk about my father. I knew what words could conjure, and I wasn’t ready to be a fatherless child. But seeing that familiar logo made me smile. Ana and I had taken drawing classes there, sometimes with our mothers, and those were happy times. The art centre was looking for models. The pay was good, but not like the poker party: it was regular-pay good. I needed to do more than shopping and liked the idea of having a job where I didn’t have to say a word.
THE MODEL FOR THE SCULPTING workshop had cancelled her bookings last minute, so I had a gig for the next month if I wanted one, Fumiko, the instructor, told me on the phone. The students had already built their armatures and needed a female figure to work from. All I had to do was show up five minutes before class and bring a robe. On Wednesday evening, I drove to the top of the peninsula. I took my place on the model stand, took Fumiko’s instruction, and dropped my robe when she said it was time.
I didn’t notice him right away. He was outside my field of vision and I was busy practicing a technique I’d learned in an acting class, relaxing my body so that it was working with gravity instead of against it. But with acting, you were in motion. A few minutes in, I could already feel the strain in my hip where I was putting most of my weight. I was trying to keep my ar
ches high and not sink into my heels, to make sure my ankles were balanced and toes relaxed. My raised arms were tingling. The coastal breeze had chased the heat off for the night and a low fog rested on the hills. A fan heater ticked to and fro, burning my calves when it swung my way. I counted the seconds until its return, because burning was better than the dim chill of the studio. I tried not to think of the tingling, ache, and cold as I monitored the timer’s slow march from twenty to zero, but as my body began to sink, my position shifted enough to see who it was. His face was thinner than I remembered, but it was him. Ana’s father, slicing through his block of clay with wire string, thick lumps dropping to the linoleum floor. I had to force myself to stay put. I had never wanted to see him again. And now here I was, legs on fire, nipples puckering, drafts catching in my pubic hair. Too aware of my skin, my blood. My body’s refusal to be still – especially in front of him – seemed obscene. I focused on Fumiko. It was all I could do. I hoped no one could see how my body had begun to pound.
Fumiko was padding around the room, nodding at some, grunting commands at others and taking their hands in hers to correctly fit them around their tools, slicing at the edges, jamming her fingers into the clay to show what it means to make the hollow of an eye. At Ana’s father’s piece, Fumiko shook with what sounded like a dry cough. I kept my arms up and folded, but turned my head enough so I could see her. She was chuckling sweetly, as though she’d bumped into an old friend. She gave the flanks of his sculpture a hearty slap. She ran her hands over the mounds of clay that made up the breasts, then pinched off a protrusion that seemed to be a nipple and stuck it to his pedestal. The narrow waist was a bridge losing its fight to keep the mighty bosoms connected to the boulders of her ass. Of course his sculpture was confused. He didn’t know how to see me.