We peered through the gate. “Wow,” my mother said. Her face opened up and flushed, her eyes got sparkly, as if she were letting herself believe it might already be ours, the way when she had just a few sips of wine she let herself feel a little tipsy.
“He’s not going to buy it for us,” I said, to mute her excitement. “It’s too nice.”
“He might,” she said. “He’d finally have done something really good, really generous. I wish he’d just do it. Just buy it for us.”
I’d liked the feeling when he’d bought us the Audi—a miraculous improvement bestowed upon us as if from nowhere.
“He won’t,” I said. Still I hoped. How would it be if I already thought of it as mine? In this house, my mother would be happy. “Anyway, how would we afford furniture?”
“We’d figure it out,” she said.
Peering into other people’s windows made me think of the story of the match girl who stood out in the snow, lighting matches and imagining scenes in the flames, found dead the morning after the last one went out. I felt a sentimental attachment to that story ever since I’d heard it as a girl.
A few nights later my father stopped by. My mother was in the kitchen, making squash soup. She’d already told him about the house on the phone, saying she wanted it. He said he was planning to take a look with a realtor.
“You know what I told Laurene?” my father said.
“What?” my mother asked.
“I told her I come as a package.” He meant that we—my mother and I—came with him.
“She’s really smart,” he said to me, again. “Did I tell you she looks like Claudia Schiffer?” He was repeating himself again. This was frustrating, less because stories and lines twice told are boring, and more because the way he’d told it the first time, with intensity and excitement, gave me a notion the story was specifically meant for me. Sometimes he told me a secret and swore me to secrecy and later I found out he’d done the same with everyone else.
He dipped into the soup with a metal spoon, slurped. “Mmm,” he said, closing his eyes. And then, with his mouth full, “Is there butter in this?”
“A little,” my mother said absently.
At that, he spit the soup out into his hand making a gagging sound, then washed his mouth in the sink.
My father bought the house on Waverley Street for himself. Before moving in he did a few renovations. Walking around with him, as he pointed out what he would change—the floorboards, the high triangle of yellow glass, the light-blocking trellis of a wisteria vine in the courtyard—I felt embarrassed that my mother and I had wished it for ourselves. It had cost three million dollars, after he negotiated the price down. The widow who was selling it became so desperate with his slow pace, he recounted to my mother after he’d bought it, that she had been willing to sell it, finally, for less than she wanted to. He would keep the house in Woodside, which he hoped to tear down anyway in favor of the trees and the land. My mother thought his haggling with the owner was wrong, and was hurt that he’d bought for himself the very thing she’d wanted. It was sad, but it was not unexpected, perhaps, and it was also a compliment: she had good taste; she found the best things first.
Laurene moved into the house on Waverley. One weekend day a few weeks later, I walked over to see them and found her upstairs putting on exercise clothes. She was wearing a new ring. “We got engaged,” she said, and held out her hand. The ring was an emerald-cut pink diamond. “I’ve been proposed to twice before this,” she said. My father was at the grocery store, but I ran out to him when he returned. “I’ve seen the ring,” I said, when he came in through the gate. “Congratulations.”
“She could buy a house with it,” he said, “but don’t tell her,” as if he worried that she might leave, knowing how much the ring was worth. He brushed past me to go into the house and put the juice into the refrigerator.
Sometimes after that I’d walk over to the house on Waverley when Steve and Laurene were out in the midafternoon. They always left the doors unlocked. I went in through the door that opened into a small entrance room and then the kitchen. Continent-shaped blots of sun shone on the wall. It was calm here. A mourning dove trilled high low, high low, the second note seeming to sway the patch of light.
There was a box of Medjool dates on the counter. Beside it was a wooden box of bing cherries from a farm nearby that were allegedly also sent to kings, shahs, and sheikhs, the stems tucked under the fruits, arranged in perfect rows beneath a layer of waxed tissue paper, as shiny and black as beetles.
There was a bowl of ripe, flushed mangoes. When my mother and I bought mangoes, we bought only one because they were so expensive. Here mangoes were unlimited.
I roamed the house. The widow who’d owned it before had left cans of paint in the pantry along with bags of brushes, empty cans of nails, bottles of oil, and instructions written on scraps of lined paper in a fine, tilted cursive.
The house felt alive to me. I walked into the hallway that looked out into the courtyard. It was basically my house, I told myself. It was my father’s house and I was his daughter. I was pretty sure I was allowed to be here, but I still didn’t want to be caught snooping.
The Rinconada house would rattle with the many small earthquakes and the heavy trains, the window glass singing. Here, it was still. It was a few more blocks away from the trains, out of sight of Alma and the tracks. The walls were thick and dense, the doorways and hallways rounded and wide, like Spanish mission buildings.
I walked up the stone steps to the second floor, holding on to the thin iron railing beneath a long paper lantern that twirled slightly in the breeze, feeling as if a string at my sternum pulled me up to Laurene’s closet and her chest of drawers, the pressure inside me growing. I longed to understand her—to see if I could be more like her.
A couple of weeks before, I’d asked her, “If you had to choose one, would you buy clothing or underwear?” I’d gotten the idea from a Shel Silverstein poem—you were supposed to ask people to determine their predilections for the inner or outer life, the soul or the skin.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Do you mean, would I rather have nice clothing or nice underwear?”
“Yes,” I said, losing my conviction that whatever she said would mean something about her character.
“Nice clothing,” she said.
She showed me how she could still do the splits, dropping down to the floor. I observed everything about her, including how, when she talked, she used a group of words I’d never heard people use in speech before—gratify, garner, providence, interim, pillage, marauding—slipping the words into her sentences like jewels. When she said marauding, she elongated the vowels in a way that made it sound like adulthood and self-sufficiency. Her eyes were icy blue, flat, and small. Sometimes it hurt me to look into them; I wasn’t sure why. She said she was legally blind without glasses or contact lenses, the world reduced to shapes.
Her friend Kat lived nearby and sometimes came over when I was there. Both of them were in their late twenties. When she and Kat talked about losers, which they did sometimes, Laurene made an L shape with her thumb and index finger and moved it around. When Laurene said the word, with her clear diction, I knew there was nothing I’d rather not be than a loser. Laurene was from New Jersey, and I got the idea that people were more normal in New Jersey. They didn’t have Birkenstocks and gurus and talk of reincarnation. Around this time, she said a man had followed her around the Palo Alto Whole Foods, saying he was reincarnated from a bumblebee.
Now, upstairs in the house in the muffled silence, I wanted to find out her secret.
I walked into her closet, which had a full-length mirror, a chest of drawers, a rod for hanging clothing. A carpenter had come to build these closets with light-colored wood. On the chest of drawers were two tubes of lipstick: one mauve, the other a light, shimmering pink, both carved by repeated application into pointed crescents so high and thin the top might break off. I tried the mauve. It felt wet a
nd smelled of wax and perfume.
I opened her underwear drawer. Different cottons—white, nude, black—lumped together the way mine were lumped at home. In the depths of the far-right corner was a loop of ivory. I pulled the loop—a web of elastic and lace unfurled in front of me. A garter belt. I knew what it was, maybe because I’d seen one in Playboy, but I’d never seen a real one before.
In the drawer below was a pair of charcoal wool shorts I recognized from a photograph in which she stood in the Stanford Quad, her hair bright blonde and cascading around her face, her feet turned out at ten and two from the heels, one in front of the other, confident. My father kept the picture on his desk. My mother liked candid photographs; I liked them head-on, as in a magazine. I wanted to be Laurene, and if I couldn’t be her now, I wanted to be her later.
I slipped off my trousers and pulled on the shorts. They bagged around my legs; I had to hold them up with one hand so they didn’t slide off. I put on one of her shirts, a sleeveless cream with black stitches around the neck and arms. I tucked the shirt into the baggy shorts, then looked at myself in her mirror from the side and back, hoping that changing the light and the angle would improve the form. I turned my feet out like hers, ten and two, heels in a line, one in front of the other, hid my nail-bitten hands behind my back.
I pursed my lips. I looked nothing like the person in the photograph.
I took everything off, rearranged the lipsticks. I slipped the garter belt into my pocket, walked down the stairs, down the hallway of windows, past the pantry, through the kitchen, and out the door.
That spring, my father invited me on a trip to New York with him and Laurene.
“She’s a great dancer,” he said on the flight. Laurene and I flanked him in the leather seats at the front of business class. He looked at her and ran his hand over her hair the way you might with a sleeping child.
“I’m an all right dancer,” she said, but I knew she must be better than I was, as he’d seen me perform once in a concert and didn’t mention that I danced too.
Laurene had taken me to lunch once before this in her white VW Rabbit convertible, taking time out from Stanford’s business school, where she was in her final semester. She seemed rushed, didn’t talk to me or look at me as she drove, but looked straight ahead, as if she wasn’t sure how to relate to a child. She held the gearshift differently from my mother, with less grip, pushing it forward with the heel of her hand. She was pretty, but a different pretty from Tina, who didn’t wear makeup and who didn’t seem interested in the way she looked.
We walked through the Stanford Shopping Center. She walked fast, with her feet pointed out to the sides; she wore black suede shoes with metal clocks on the tops. “Let’s go to the Opera Cafe,” she said. “They make a great chicken Caesar salad without much fat.” This talk of fat was new and enticing—another, more sophisticated world I wanted to be part of in which women watched the amount of fat they ate. I didn’t think of myself as thin or fat. I didn’t go out to eat very often, and looked forward to sampling one of the outlandishly tall cakes so large they looked unreal, like sculptures by Claes Oldenburg. I hoped we’d get more than salads.
But we had to eat quickly; we didn’t have time for dessert. Laurene’s blonde bangs fell over her forehead, curling out from a cowlick at the hairline. When she touched objects, she did it firmly, with precision, as if she knew what she wanted to take before she touched it. I liked the way she held the menu, the steering wheel, the tube of lipstick.
At first, New York City smelled of yeast. Warm pretzels, exhaust, steam.
Laurene took us to Wall Street and showed us around the trading floor, where she’d worked just out of college.
“They used to switch the phones,” she said, of a circular bank of white telephones, each one with a white twisting cord hanging down, “as a joke. They’d hang the earpiece of one phone on the base of another, crossing the cords. So when someone needed to do a trade, and they were in a rush, they’d pick up a phone, dial the number, and then realize they were using an earpiece that didn’t match the keypad.”
Laurene’s friend Shell, a large brunette woman who wore red lipstick and spoke loudly, with a New York accent, came to visit us at the suite at the Carlyle Hotel. She stood beside the piano, playing a few notes. They talked about people I didn’t know, calling them “total losers.”
That afternoon, my father said, “There’s something I want to show you two.” We took a taxi to a tall building and then a freight elevator with blankets for walls up to the very top. My ears popped. The elevator opened onto a dusty, windy space, full of watery light.
It was an apartment at the top of a building called the San Remo. It was still under renovation, and it took me a few minutes to grasp that it was his apartment. The ceilings were at least twice the height of ordinary ceilings. Pieces of cardboard covered the floor; he lifted one up to show us the marble below, a glossy deep black that also lined the walls. He told us that I. M. Pei designed the apartment in 1982, and when one of the quarries ran out, they’d had to find another one and replace the old marble with the new marble. Otherwise the blacks wouldn’t match. Construction had lasted six years and it was still unfinished.
“It’s incredible,” Laurene said, looking around.
Other than a bank of windows along two sides, all the surfaces in the apartment were black marble. I swept up a line of dust with my finger; the marble gleamed beneath. We stood in the main room, with its triple-height ceilings and windows, gaping fireplace, black walls and floor. The staircase looked wet, dripping down from the second floor, each level of stair opening wider than the last, like molasses poured from a jar. He said it was based on the design of a staircase by Michelangelo.
It was hard to tell how a person could possibly be comfortable in such a place. It was hard-edged like rich people’s apartments in movies. It was opulent, the opposite of the counterculture ideals he talked about, a showcase made to impress. Yes, he had the Porsche and the nice suits, but I’d believed he thought the best things were simple things, so that looking at this apartment felt like a shock. Maybe his ideals were only for me, an excuse not to be generous with me. Maybe he was bifurcated, and couldn’t help trying to impress other people in the obvious ways rich people do, even as I’d thought, with his holey jeans, his strange diet, his emphasis on simplicity, his crumbling house, he didn’t care.
“It was supposed to be the ultimate bachelor pad,” he said sadly. “Oh well.”
We went out onto the balcony, a line of stone balustrades like candlesticks wrapped around the corner. From up this high, New York smelled like nothing. The wind made a sound like a sheet flapping. Below us, Central Park looked like it was cut out of the concrete.
“It’s a great view, isn’t it?” he asked.
“It is,” I said.
“This is amazing, Steve,” Laurene said, with a lightness to her voice I wished I felt too. He grabbed her and I looked away. I felt stuck, unable to talk, my feet heavy on the ground.
Soon after I returned, my mother and I bought a couch, a chair, and an ottoman at the mall.
Wings made of white feathers hung in a children’s store window display. “When I was a kid, my mother told me all children are born with wings, but the doctors cut them off at birth. The scapulae are what remain. Isn’t that strange?”
We walked past Woolworth’s, with its tubes of watermelon-flavored lip gloss and packets of press-on nails, past the restaurant Bravo Fono, where we still went sometimes with my father, and into Ralph Lauren. The store was half outside. Cement planters came up to my waist and held impatiens with swollen green seed pods that popped open when I squeezed them, spraying tiny yellow seeds and springing back to a horizontal curl.
“Hey, what do you think of this couch? Do you like it?” she asked. It was two cushions wide. I sat; the cushions did not spring back, but sank slowly under my weight.
“I like it,” I said. “Is it expensive?”
She looked at a p
rice tag pinned to the side and took a sharp breath.
I knew she hated the couch we had, the one we’d taken from Steve’s house years before; it was nothing she would have chosen for herself. It made her feel, I think, like her life was composed of the castoffs of other lives.
She bought the couch, along with its matching chair and ottoman, on her new credit card. It was, by far, the largest purchase we’d ever made. To reduce the cost, she took it in the natural cotton linen it came in—the color of sand—instead of having it recovered. We were both giddy afterward, as if the mall was a different place to us now, opened up.
We must have more money, I guessed. Why else was she buying big things? She’d wanted a new couch for a long time. Where was she getting the money? I didn’t know. She said no, always. This time, yes. If I asked why, it might pop. She seemed happy and confident, and I thought this is how we should have been at the mall all along, and maybe this is what the future would be like.
At Banana Republic we tried on the same jean jacket in different sizes. It was nicely boxy, with a collar made of stone-colored corduroy. I tried not to act excited; I knew not to push. But she bought them both. Both! Compared with a couch, two jackets were nothing. We walked out of the store with the weighted paper bags.
“That,” I said, pointing to a sweater and skirt in a shop window. The small, minimalist shop sold expensive clothing from Switzerland. The long skirt was dark gray cashmere, the sweater was made of maroon angora with fabric teddy bears appliquéd. “That’s the kind of thing you should wear.” It maybe could have done without the bears, I thought.
“Where would I wear it?” she asked.
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