“Okay,” I said. It was a reasonable thing to ask.
“I have enough on my plate now with a new baby and starting a company,” she said. “I can’t be picking up after you.”
Her words felt like stabs. Perhaps I’d left those piles unwittingly as a kind of call-and-response, as if I’d asked her to claim me as her child, and she’d replied that she would not. I was humiliated and exposed. I was sloppy; she was not.
My father called the school Lick-My-Wilmerding. I laughed and rolled my eyes.
“You know I wrote you a pretty great recommendation letter to Lick-My-Wilmerding,” he said one morning.
“Really? Can I see it?”
“I thought you were going to save it and give it to her when she’s older?” Laurene said. I could tell she didn’t want me to be arrogant or claim the center of attention. The problem with saving things for later, though, without experiencing them, is that they get lost, or are forgotten.
“Nope. I want to do it now,” he said, went to his study, returned with a sheet of paper, and—standing in the kitchen, barefoot—he read the letter aloud.
I don’t remember the bulk of it, only the last line: “If I were you, I’d snatch her up in a second.”
I decided to run for freshman-class president and began stapling flyers to notice boards around the school. I’d made some new friends and I started an Opera Club, organizing group trips to the San Francisco Opera at group student rates. It was a lark. I didn’t know anything about opera. Before this, I’d never been to one.
On the night of the first performance, my father asked me to save him a ticket, then picked me up at school and drove us to the show. “I’m so proud of you for doing this,” he whispered as the curtain went up. I hoped winning president would please him too.
The election was held a few weeks later, the four contenders giving short speeches. My voice was almost gone from laryngitis. I wore corduroy pants for good luck, and a thick cable-knit sweater. My classmates huddled close, and I felt the surge of goodwill that sometimes happened when I was sick and no longer had the energy to be formal, instead letting others lean in to support me.
That night I missed the car ride home and stayed at a friend’s house in Potrero Hill. I called my father to let him know. I dreaded these calls. Recently, when I’d stayed overnight at a friend’s house in San Francisco, he’d been short and distant on the phone, sighing heavily. Laurene was working hard to start a company, and he worked a lot too. They had Carmen until 5 p.m., but my father didn’t allow employees in the house after he was home from work, and my brother wasn’t sleeping through the night. I wonder if my absences stirred up conflict between them.
“I missed the ride home,” I said when he answered. “Because of the election.”
“You’re not putting in the time, Lis,” he said, his voice grim. “You’re not acting like you’re part of this family.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. “The elections were held—”
“I don’t care. I gotta go.” He hung up.
Later that night, I got another call.
“Guess what?” It was Tess.
“What?” After the call with my father, I’d forgotten everything else.
“C’mon, guess.”
“I don’t know.”
“You won, silly,” she said. “You’re class president.”
This meant I’d have to attend after-school meetings for student government about once a week, spending the night at a friend’s house or trying to cadge a ride from the parents of my friends.
“This isn’t working out, Lis,” my father said the next day, when I told him I’d won. “You’re not succeeding as a member of this family. You’re not pulling your weight. You’re never around. If you want to be part of this family, you need to put in the time.”
It seemed strange that he could insist on my continuous presence, having been absent for so long himself. At dinners on the nights I was home now, he and Laurene were aloof. I assumed this had to do with me, but of course it might have had just as much to do with the difficulties of a new marriage, a toddler, and sleep deprivation. My father would make pasta, plain or with avocados, and eat carrot salad. I would slice a black bean burrito and help steam broccoli as Laurene fed my brother. As soon as dinner was over, they went upstairs to try to put him to sleep. I felt their disappointment in me like an augmentation of gravity in the room, and if I made any mistakes, it was a tick on the wrong side of a ledger, creating the sense that I would be forever outside of this thing I wanted: family.
What was the inside like? It would have an adhesive and ordinary quality; once inside it, I could not be dislodged. I’d become indispensable, if only I could get in.
He wanted me to be around, but in another room, in his orbit, not too close. I was supposed to occupy the path drawn by a compass circling around the point that was him.
During this period when I was increasingly away and he was increasingly angry with me, I mentioned to my father that the schoolwork was not rigorous compared with Nueva’s. Sometimes I got bored and doodled in class.
“Doodling?” he said. “That’s not good. That’s not good at all.”
“In history, we’re learning about the Renaissance. But I already learned about it.”
What followed was a strange flurry: he and I driving up to the school to meet with the head of the school, the admissions director, and several teachers, and him telling me to repeat the story about doodling, about how I was bored sometimes in class. In my imagination I became the kind of extraordinary student for whom certain private schools are woefully inadequate. My father indulged the lie, becoming indignant on my behalf, perhaps believing me, perhaps seeing in my vanity a way out of the after-school-ride conundrum. Emboldened by my father beside me, I believed my own stories: the top-rated school wasn’t academically rigorous enough for me.
I was too afraid to admit, even to myself, that the problem wasn’t the school but the fact that I couldn’t participate in it, or see friends, or leave the house without feeling that I had betrayed some essential agreement.
On the way home from another visit to the school, he suggested that we stop at Palo Alto High School—”Paly” for short—just to see what it was like. It was late in the afternoon and school was out. For a few minutes we walked around the empty quad. Many of the buildings looked like bunkers. I felt uncomfortable, as if we were trespassing. But then we heard music coming from somewhere, and we followed it over to where a tall boy was standing beside the door where the music was coming from. I was too shy to speak, but my father asked, “What’s going on in here?” and the boy said, “It’s the paper,” and we peered into the room. There were lots of people inside, working on computers and lounging on beanbags, and I thought, if I did decide to go here, I’d work on the paper too. “You know what’s great about going to a school nearby your house?” my father asked as we left. “You can walk to it, like I did. And if you walk a lot, over the course of time, you get to see the seasons change.” He said it in the same slow way he spoke of beautiful women. Walking to school didn’t sound very romantic to me. I decided to transfer anyway—it seemed like the only way to make it work at home.
It was midyear when I decided to transfer to Paly, and my father drove me over to sign up for classes. The administrative offices were off a long, glossy corridor that smelled of the same cleaning fluid as the public library, and had the same combination of muffled sounds and sharp echoes. I felt the glow of nearness to my father, his attention on me. Walking beside him down the corridor I felt protected; he was confident in this school.
We sat down in the office of a registrar who helped to fill out my schedule, sometimes placing me in classes I needed that were already full.
“Is there a student government?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe you could run for representative. There are two per class—the elections are soon.” A demotion, I thought. I’d run for president instead.
&n
bsp; Several Christmas wreaths arrived from Smith & Hawken. Three were the size of small bird’s nests. My father carried one through the kitchen, to hang on the wooden beam between the banks of French doors in the hallway. He didn’t want me or anyone else to touch the wreaths, or any of the Christmas decorations he’d ordered. Even the tree lights—which he insisted on hanging by himself, looping the twisted cords around the branches of a Douglas fir in a process that took him the whole day—were off-limits. He fussed about the small round wreath, adjusting it on the nail, stepping back; adjusting it, stepping back again.
I laughed, watching him. “I guess you have to get it just right,” I said.
“If it’s not just right,” he said, in a high falsetto, rolling the r, “I will perish.” When he was happy, he became goofy, able to laugh at himself and his fastidiousness.
Sometimes my father sang extemporaneous rhyming songs about me to me—the way Bob Dylan did in the recording studio, he said. My bike and hike I liked to school, my books, my looks, my life as a wife of a fife.
He adjusted the wreath one last time and lunged for me, wiggling his index finger under my rib cage. I reached for him too, trying to dig my hand into his armpit to tickle him first. He got me, I laughed—a shrill laugh that did not sound like part of me. He jumped away so that I couldn’t reach him, sashaying, his bare legs tapered, silly-looking, like a frog’s.
He’d recently bought a CD he played for me, a recording of the last castrato, who didn’t sound like a woman or man, but had a haunting high kind of voice in between, like someone singing after sucking on a balloon. “Perish, simply perish,” he sang again in that high voice, on the way back to his office to make a series of work calls under the spotlight of a desk lamp that looked, bent and hovering, like a praying mantis.
For Christmas he gave Laurene a ball gown from Giorgio Armani and a pair of shoes, too narrow for her feet. He gave me only the pair of shoes, the same ones he’d bought for her—slim black loafers, also from Armani. They fit me perfectly. He was cold toward Laurene after noticing the shoes didn’t fit, as if her wider feet were an indication of some deeper offense. I was jealous of the ball gown, which was diaphanous, long, and unfolded out of the box. I felt superior about my feet, though, for a little while, as if their slim shape was an indication of something noble and pure.
It had been more than five months since I’d seen my mother. I was angry with her; I missed her. I hated her, I pitied her, I wanted to eradicate all the signs of her in myself, I missed being touched by her. She didn’t know what I did every day now, how I babysat my brother and sometimes he cried and I didn’t know what to do or how to soothe him.
During the months we didn’t see each other, my mother had a recurring dream of a nuclear attack in which she would throw a sheet over her head and run over to get me.
Finally, for Christmas, my father agreed we could see each other again.
As soon as I felt I could leave, I walked to the Rinconada house and opened the front door. It had a smell, warm wood and soil and paint, that I hadn’t noticed when I lived there. I hopped into her lap—I was still small enough for that—and she grabbed me, felt my shoulders and my head, my arms and legs, my fingers, and smelled my hair. Later she described that moment for her, a shock, a relief, to hold me—that some part of her, after not seeing me for so long, had felt as if I were dead. I remember that she wouldn’t let me go.
I started school at Paly after the holidays, using my new name.
The Paly quad was grass worn away in places to stubble or bald dirt. I went to the classes in the sequence the registrar had arranged for me, using the textbooks with holes in the cover where brown cardboard showed through, notes from previous students written in the margins.
I’d never had trouble making friends before; now I was cripplingly shy, doubting myself before raising my hand in class. I didn’t have a single friend.
The algebra lessons at the new school were different from the ones at Lick-Wilmerding, based on formulas I didn’t know, more difficult. Most evenings for a couple of months I asked Laurene to help, and she would get up with a sigh, we’d go downstairs, she’d work out the problem in a businesslike way, and then tell me the procedure to follow to get the answer.
At night, after they went upstairs, I was incredibly lonely and cried myself to sleep. I was also cold. I discovered the heating didn’t work in my part of the house.
I might have asked to move into the bedroom upstairs, the one located over the garage, with slanted windows along the roof. It was the room my father had first offered to me, thinking I would like it the most because it was large, with a fireplace, and its own Juliet balcony with stairs leading down to the courtyard. When he offered it, he said I might sneak out at night, and winked. But that room had since been turned into a guest room, and when I finally asked to move, he said no.
“I’m cold,” I said to my father in the kitchen in the morning. “Would you get the heater fixed?”
He pulled an apple juice from the fridge. “Nope. Not until we renovate the kitchen,” he said, “and we’re not going to do that anytime soon.”
The next weekend, I parked my bike outside a clothing shop called Roxy, a white cube with English punk music blasting at noon, racks of clothing hanging so high the clothing brushed against my cheeks: short, loose jackets with shoulder pads, pleated pants, Tshirts in bright pastels. I’d been there with my mother, among the pleated, silky pants and patterned shirts and music, and I’d come back to feel the familiar surroundings. When I walked out of the shop, the bike was gone.
I figured my father would get me another one, now that he didn’t have to pay for the car service or the private school. Also—although I couldn’t articulate this—I had a feeling he owed me. I thought he and Laurene would come to understand that, and try to make it up to me; that he would pity me, eventually, and it would hit him.
The feeling of being owed was like a cloud darkening the air around me that would lift and disperse when my father was kind to me, but then settle again, thickly. I couldn’t get it to go away for good.
Anyway, I needed a bike now that I was supposed to get myself around.
“Lis,” he said, when I told him about the bike, “you’re not doing a great job keeping track of stuff.” It was morning at the table with my father, Laurene, Reed, and me.
“I’m trying.” I hoped Laurene would come to my rescue.
“You’re letting things slide,” he said.
“It was a mistake.”
“Well, I have an idea. I’ll get you a new bike if you do the dishes. Every night. And babysit whenever we need you.”
“Okay,” I said quickly. It was a bad deal and I knew it. I should have negotiated. I was certain he knew it was a bad deal too, but I thought that if they observed me take it anyway, they’d be more generous with me. It would compensate for the way I was absent before. It would give me a chance to prove my dedication.
The dishwasher that came with the house was built into the kitchen island and didn’t work, and my father said he wouldn’t replace it, so I did the dishes by hand with a sherbet-colored sponge. I stood on the cold terracotta tiles, seeing my reflection in the window turned into a mirror at night, and lined up the plates to dry in the slats of a wooden rack. The requests that had seemed oppressive and Sisyphean at my mother’s house—to make the bed, set the table, clean the counters, write thank-you notes—I did now, mostly, without anyone bugging me.
When I finished the dishes, I looked through the family photographs in a shoebox kept in a kitchen drawer, noticing how many pictures there were of my brother, how few of me. I flipped through the stack, removing the pictures of myself I didn’t like. Maybe they’d notice there were too few and realize their mistake in not taking more.
After they put my brother to sleep, my father would come down to his office to work for a few hours. Sitting at my desk, I could hear when he left his office again to go up to bed. I listened to his feet on the tile as he turned l
eft at the staircase and went upstairs. It would have been easy for him to walk a few more steps, duck his head into my room, and say goodnight. But I was fourteen, too old to need a goodnight. My mother had always done so, a part of our pattern that was, I thought, infantilizing, and that I could have done without. Here I burned for it.
What did I want? What did I expect? He didn’t need me the way I needed him. A dark and frightening loneliness came over me, a sharp pain beneath my ribs. I cried myself to sleep, the tears turning cold and pooling in my ears.
Yet even in the middle of my most profound, heavy-legged self-pity, I was aware of the fact that my bedroom wasn’t that cold—it was California—and if the house cleaner didn’t wash my dirty laundry, she did wash my sheets every couple of weeks, and some pictures did contain me.
After school, Carmen sometimes braided my hair in the kitchen while my brother napped. She was loving toward me. She knew how to make a variety of braids, including a braid in a circle around my head like a crown. Her braids didn’t fray or slip but remained for a couple of days, despite the fact that my hair was fine and slick. I wore them until they became loose, muzzy with escaped hairs that formed a halo in the light. I sat in the kitchen chair as she shivered my scalp with her fingernails pulling strands. I closed my eyes. I liked being touched. In those moments I thought she and I were lucky to be in this house, with its brick and sparkling windows, the jasmine vine that bloomed around the front door and gave off a quenching smell like you could drink it.
As my brother slept one weekend afternoon, my father, Laurene, and I went to sit outside at the table in the courtyard. Laurene cut watermelon and brought it out on a plate. Before she ate each piece, she rubbed it around her lips like a gloss, wetting them with the juice.
My father was sitting beside her, watched her wet her lips, then grabbed her shoulder and pulled her toward him, leaning across the chair. I wanted to leave, but my feet were heavy on the brick, as if some invisible external pressure compelled me to stay. The two of them formed a tableau; him pulling her in to kiss, moving his hand closer to her breasts and the part of her leg where her skirt ended, moaning theatrically, as if for an audience. He’d done the same with Tina. Why didn’t these women push him away, I wondered. I felt my aloneness in the courtyard acutely, how there was no one else there to say, Stop.
Small Fry Page 23