It seemed he had also become confused. “Anyway, it’s simple,” he said.
That night, I wrote in my journal: “When I tell him events, they come alive. When I don’t tell him, they don’t exist.
“My insides are jumping,” I wrote.
Later he rode along with a group of us on bikes into the sleepy town, the houses and shops made out of dark wood, rice paddies all around, the hills carved into shelves. We went to a soba shop and sat at a booth. I ordered kitsune udon, broth with a few globules of fat floating on the surface beside a strip of fried tofu, thick noodles almost visible beneath, like white stones at the bottom of a murky pond. He ordered cold soba with dipping sauce.
“Can I borrow some yen, Lis?” he asked. He’d brought only dollars.
“Okay,” I said. I gave him some of mine from the amount my mother had given me, the amount our parents were instructed to give, calculated by the teachers to cover the days we were free to buy our own lunches and snacks, temple wishes, and transportation.
“I’ll pay you back before I go,” he said.
After lunch we went to a bank; from here, he would catch a train back to Tokyo. Japanese rooms were small but smelled of open spaces, food glistened in separate lacquered compartments, pachinko parlors clinked, the doors open to the street—all of it different, strikingly foreign. But this bank looked like any big bank in California, with carpeted floors, red-rope divisions in scalloped shapes with brass attachments, a line of people waiting for a teller. “Here,” he said, after he talked with someone behind glass who counted out a stack of bills. He handed over a bill of a denomination I’d never seen before—10,000 yen—an amount almost half as much as I’d brought for the whole trip. Other bills were rumpled; his were crisp. “I don’t have a smaller bill, kid. Sorry.”
“Wow. Thanks.” We said goodbye, the bill in my pocket making the day spark.
With the new cash, I bought gifts for my father and Laurene, including four porcelain bowls of different pastel colors, thin-lipped and small, fitted in a wooden box with four compartments. Incense in an oblong paper box that smelled of the forest and resin. “Cedar,” the woman at the counter said. She took the bills I had left over, bowed, returned many fewer bills. For my mother I bought a cotton yukata, size small, in indigo blue with a pattern of opening white fans and a cloth belt of the same fabric. The robe came in a plastic cellophane envelope and cost less than the gifts I’d found for my father and Laurene.
“Did you get them better gifts than you got for me?” my mother asked. We were in her bedroom. I’d brought her gift out of my luggage, still in its plastic sheath.
“No, I got you different gifts—nothing better or worse.”
“But you spent more on them,” she said. How did she know? I should have bought her the best gifts because she had less money and couldn’t buy them for herself.
“I like the yukata. It looks good on you,” I said. She’d put it on over her clothes in the bedroom while I sat on her bed and watched.
“I don’t like things that tie like this,” she said. “It’s too big. Anyway, I’m your mother and you should be more honoring toward me.”
“It’s a size small,” I said. “And I am honoring—”
“But what did you buy them?” she asked, interrupting.
How to explain to her that I’d bought them the more expensive gifts because I worried they didn’t care for me and I wanted them to like me, to love me, even? With them together, the feeling I was loved and belonged was tenuous, superficial, my place in their family not essential or fixed. They did not ask me questions about myself, or seem interested in me the way my mother was, and this made me hunger to impress them.
My mother already loved me. Even when she screamed at me, I knew it. I wasn’t so sure about them.
Reed was six months old by now. I went over to see them the week I returned from Japan, and my father asked me to change his diaper. “It’s part of being in this family, Lis,” he said. “You haven’t done it for a while.”
I took my brother on my hip, walked past the bank of French doors in the hallway and up the curve in the stone stairway, careful to hold the railing. In the rooms upstairs, my father had replaced the floors with foot-wide boards of Douglas fir, a silky, soft texture to the wood. In my brother’s room, a carpenter had built a set of wooden shelves in the same wood that connected to a high changing table.
I set my brother down on the table, opened the straps on the sides of the diaper, cleaned him, then turned to grab a diaper, as I’d done before.
In the three weeks I’d been in Japan, he’d learned to roll. No one had told me. I heard the thunk of his skull hitting the wooden floor. I looked down at him, face up on the floor. There was a pause, and I thought that maybe he wouldn’t cry, and they would not notice, and everything would somehow return to normal. One second later, he began to wail. I scooped him into my arms and heard the sound of their bare feet running from the kitchen.
On the way to the hospital, Laurene nursed him. I sat beside her in the back seat, hoping there would be a chance to be helpful. I wanted to go back to the moment just before it happened.
My father drove. He was silent. Finally he said, venom quiet: “Lis, you should learn to understand the impact of your actions on other people.” It couldn’t be undone. I’d meant to protect Reed; now this mistake would become part of the lore, as if I had done nothing good before or after.
But the changing table did not have a lip or fence. The cushion was flat—the curved foam pads that dip in the center had not been invented yet. And the diapers were stacked out of reach.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I want you to consider moving in with our family,” my father said a couple of months later. We were in his Mercedes, driving back to his house from Country Sun, where we’d bought some Odwalla apple juice. My mother and I had already talked about our need for space from each other, in calmer moments realizing we couldn’t keep fighting like this. She needed a break, she said.
He said it sharply, as if I’d done something wrong. I had worried they wouldn’t want me to live with them after my brother fell, but since then they’d had me change his diaper many times, and even asked me to babysit several nights as middle school drew to a close and summer began.
This was what I’d been hoping for. It had happened. He’d asked me to come live with him. But his tone didn’t have excitement or joy in it.
“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to live with you, for now. If you want me to.” I had the idea that if I moved in with him, we’d look at old photographs together to understand what we missed, urgently, like we were cramming for an exam. Also, it would be a novelty, the big house, a family that looked right. I was his daughter, lost to him for a time like Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, now returned; I had noble qualities (I imagined) and was perhaps beautiful, from some angles, and worthy. All this he would see and recognize. It would be glorious. There would be dresses and bowls of fruit.
Later, I heard that when I was in the last year of middle school, when the fights with my mother got bad, the school had called to tell him that if he did not take me in to live with him, they’d call social services. I’m not sure whether this story was true or exaggerated, but in any case, the story repositioned him—after all this time—as my savior.
“It’s not for now,” he said. “If you’re going to live with us, you’ve got to choose. Her or us. I need you to really give this family a chance. If you choose to live with us, I’d like you to promise you won’t see your mother for six months. You need to give it a real shot,” he said. It wouldn’t work if I was going back and forth, it wouldn’t take. He’d decided that a clean break would be the right way; my mother didn’t agree with him, but those were his terms. It was almost summer now, which meant I wouldn’t be able to see her until December. “Otherwise,” he said, “the deal’s off.”
“I do want to live with you,” I said, with a surety I didn’t feel.
“You’ve made a very important decision,” he said, with solemnity. “This is one of those life moments, one of those adult moments.”
I would leave my mother—I’d said the words out loud. I felt giddy and guilty and numb. Maybe this was the origin of the guilt that seized me later and left me hardly able to walk sometimes, after I had moved in with them: having stolen her youth and energy, having driven her to a state of perpetual anxiety, without support or resources, now that I was flourishing in school and beloved by my teachers, I cast her out and picked him, the one who’d left. I chose the pretty place when she was the one who’d read me books of old stories with admonishments not to believe in the trick of facades.
We turned from Waverley onto Santa Rita into the driveway of the house. The fancy car, the young, handsome father, the prettiest house in Palo Alto. I was aware of being part of this picture when I was in it, as if I was also watching it from outside. None of their surfaces spoke of shame or imperfection, and that itself would be a great relief, to relax inside the appearance of the good. When the picture looked pretty, you didn’t have to brace against what others might think, you didn’t have to charm or compensate. He took the apple juice by its hollow handle and walked through the gate toward the house.
“I’m proud of you,” he said.
Small Nation
A few weeks later, on a weekday morning in June, my mother and I packed my things and drove to my father’s house. A four-block journey with a single kink in the path.
She parked on Santa Rita in the shade. We walked through the metal gate with the metal ring on top that clanked and echoed through the yard. I knew we didn’t belong here together, although no one had said so. The side door was unlocked. “Hello?” I called. No one. My father was at NeXT, Laurene at TerraVera. My brother must have been out with Carmen, his babysitter, who came from nine to five on weekdays.
We stepped inside. The house was moist and cool, like the shadow beneath big trees.
“Follow me,” I said. Left at the low hallway under an arch, then left again at the first door into my new bedroom.
The room was square, with brick walls painted white and a window looking out onto the rose garden and driveway. I could reach up and touch the box-shaped rice paper lantern hanging from one of the fat wooden beams. There was a futon on a frame, a desk, a chest of drawers; an adjoining bathroom in green tile. It didn’t feel like my room. I didn’t want to touch any of the surfaces, or sleep in the bed, or use the shower. I’d chosen the room for its proximity to the kitchen. The kitchen was where they spent time together, feeding my brother. I wanted to be as near to my father and Laurene and my brother as possible.
When I first saw the house, before they were married, I’d told my father I wanted the bedroom near theirs, lying down on the floor and imagining it was mine, with its windows on both sides, a fireplace with a curved hood made of painted brick. I liked the way the light shone into the room, and the idea that I’d be close to them. “You can’t have that one,” my father said, and then, “We might expand.” It did not occur to me that Laurene was pregnant, or what he might mean by “expand.” When I asked him about it, he said, “Sorry, kiddo.” Only later, soon before I moved in, after my brother was born and slept in the bedroom I’d originally picked, he said I could have a bedroom too, and told me to choose between the two that were left. Both were far from their room. One was over the garage at the end of a long, dark, musty corridor. The other was downstairs, near the kitchen.
“It’s small,” my mother said, “but I like the view. And you know I love these tiles.” For years she’d been talking about wanting terracotta tiles.
She walked to another small room at the end of the hallway. I was starting to worry that we’d be caught—that the front door would jangle open and my father or Laurene would find us here together. I wished she would hurry. At the same time I didn’t want her to leave. I needed her to stay close and protect me.
“There still isn’t any furniture,” my mother called out, her voice echoing in the hallway.
“I know,” I said. “I wish they’d get a couch or something.” Most of the rooms were empty. Sound traveled unobstructed and bounced off glass and clay and brick, did not catch or absorb or muffle. For the years I lived there, I longed for more furniture; the longing would grow into a feverish craving for the furnished rooms I’d seen in other houses.
“All right,” she said. She was standing in the doorway of my room, her eyes watery. “I’m going to miss you. I hope this is for the best.” We hugged. “Don’t worry about me, I’m going to be fine.”
“You’ll go to Greece,” I said.
“Yeah. I’m not looking forward to it right now,” she said. Her skin became luminous when she was sad, like it was backlit.
“It’ll be great,” I said.
In October, she left for three weeks to travel in Europe, in Italy and Greece, a trip my father had promised her as a kind of restitution when I moved out. He’d given her ten thousand dollars.
She would be traveling alone, going to Venice and to a yoga retreat in Greece. My mother had taken up yoga for the first time since I’d moved out.
Later she would tell me how lonely she’d been, how she cried the night she’d arrived in Venice—absurd, foolish, all that water instead of streets!—but how the next morning she’d flung open the layers of curtains, then the shutters, then the windows, and there it was before her, shimmering in the morning light, the coruscating Grand Canal.
But over the next months when we weren’t talking for the first time in my life and I didn’t know how she was doing, guilt would be heavy on my chest, like a large animal hunched down. Some crime I’d committed but couldn’t quite remember. Leaving my mother? Dropping Reed? Sometimes I would be unable to speak, terrified to say the wrong thing and wound others with the slightest mistake.
I followed her out of the house and stood near the door. At the gate she turned and waved: the flap of a bird’s wing in the sharp white light.
My mother and I had agreed to his conditions. I sensed it was a drastic rule for two people who’d hardly missed a few days together for thirteen years—and that the formation of a new family needn’t hinge on the eradication of the existing one. Secretly, I also felt relief. It gave me the perfect excuse: I would not have to see my mother for six months, my mother who was angry at me, and yet it wouldn’t be my fault, because he had required it, even if later I would feel guilty and complicit.
Also, I figured that if I demonstrated such loyalty to my father, it would impress him, and make him love me more. In fact, I was so convinced that he would understand the extent of the sacrifice he’d required, that when, later, he did not seem to understand but said I did not give enough to be part of the family, I was confused. I’d thought it was clear: I’d given him everything.
That first summer away from my mother, I continued to go to Lytton Gardens, an assisted-living facility, a couple of days a week for a volunteer job I’d started the year before. I took the old women for walks, pushing their wheelchairs through the leafy streets near University Avenue. Mostly, I took one of two women, Lucille or a woman who called herself Zsa Zsa, who often sang “Tiny Bubbles” as we walked. The women seemed to enjoy our time, but they didn’t remember me between visits.
I ran into my mother a few times near that part of Palo Alto, once on Hamilton on my walk back from volunteering, when she was getting into her car after a yoga class. She called out to me, and we talked for a few minutes, small talk. I was careful to leave quickly. When I saw her, I was filled with simultaneous feelings of longing and dread. I tried to get away as fast as possible, so I wouldn’t be caught. I was afraid of someone seeing us together and reporting it to my father, afraid of going against the rules, and also afraid of her anger.
I did not want to admit how much it had been a mistake, how horribly lonely I was already, how I needed her again. And I didn’t see a way to get out of it.
My father hadn’t
forbidden calls, and some evenings in the fall, after the rest of the family was asleep, after school had started, my mother and I began to talk on the phone.
I pulled the box of the landline phone as far as it would go on the wire, and then pulled the looped cord behind the dish rack and wedged the headset between my head and shoulder. We talked as I washed the plates. I worried she would say I had betrayed her, but she didn’t. These nights on the phone, her curiosity and warmth lifted me up. We did not talk about the fact that we weren’t supposed to see each other. We didn’t argue. She didn’t let on, but later she told me that she was worried about me, and that she began to stay at home in the evenings so she’d be there to pick up the phone in case I called.
My father commissioned a low split-rail fence to run like a brace around the cornered front yard of the house. The grass was torn out and only dirt remained. A tree would be planted there on the Waverley side.
“I like East Coast oak trees,” Laurene said in the car, when they were talking about what to plant.
“Do you know about the East Coast kind, Lis?” my father said, glancing at me in the back seat. He usually used the words “East Coast” as a synonym for “inferior.”
“What do they look like?”
“There,” he said, pointing to one growing between the sidewalk and the road. It looked nothing like a California oak. Its leaves were larger and shaped like they’d been perforated around the edge by a large hole puncher.
In the end, they chose to transplant a mature copper beech. The tree was inserted with a crane into a deep hole. A huge trunk, a wiry ball of roots. The beech stood as tall as a two-story building, taller than the top of the house, the limbs reaching up and sideways like a broom, dead leaves dangling on otherwise bare branches.
When I left the house in the mornings, and in the evenings when I returned from school, I looked for evidence of life—leaves, buds—something to indicate the tree would grow and flourish. After about a month, the tree still hadn’t changed. It didn’t leaf out or unkink to become symmetrical like other trees, but still listed, bare. One day, a crew of men arrived, sawed the trunk and branches into sections, and took it away.
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