The emotions didn’t feel real, but like a performance. Like Cary Grant in North by Northwest, kissing Eva Marie Saint on the train.
I could see a scythe of her white cotton underwear between her legs under the hem of her jean skirt. My mother had taught me to close my knees when I wore a skirt; I wondered, did her mother not teach her that? I was angry that she was doing something like a child and an adult at the same time, letting him kiss her like this in front of me, and that she didn’t know, or care, to close her knees.
I started to rise, finally, and moved toward the door of the house. They detached. “Hey, Lis,” he said. “Stay here. We’re having a family moment. It’s important that you try to be part of this family.”
I sat still, looking away as he moaned and undulated in the side of my vision. It was not clear how long it would go on. I looked into the grass of the courtyard, at the blooming crab apple tree that grew beside the curving brick path, a profusion of tiny white and pink blossoms hovering above the trunk.
Although I couldn’t have known it clearly then, I hoped Laurene would fix our family, pry my father open, demand his full heart and attention, and get him to acknowledge what he’d missed.
If I was angry, now, that she was also human and flawed—she didn’t close her knees, didn’t push him away in front of me—it was because of the immensity of the job I had in mind for her. She was the last resort, after everyone else had failed. But in this girlish lapse, I saw hints that she might not choose or even be able to inhabit the role I’d assigned her, that she was not here to fix my father for me.
My mother and I planned to meet for brunch on a Saturday. Since our reunion at Christmas, we’d seen each other twice, but these visits had devolved into fights. I picked Il Fornaio because it was close enough that I could get there and back on my own—a twenty-minute walk to my father’s house. I didn’t have a new bike yet. If she lost her temper, I could leave. When I arrived, she was already waiting. We hugged. She was wearing a new dress. The maître d’ with the gray mustache said, “Follow me,” and walked us into the courtyard, past the fountain, to a round metal table near a potted tree covered in purple flowers. He didn’t seem to recognize me, even though I’d come here many times with my father to pick up marinara pizzas with onions, olives, and oregano.
My mother faced out and I faced the back of the courtyard, where there were no more tables. We put our napkins in our laps. We weren’t connected anymore but separate. I wasn’t sure how to let her know that I was still her daughter. If she yelled, I would get up and leave; just imagining it, the boldness of it, made me feel giddy and guilty both.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine. I miss you. How do you like Paly?”
“It’s all right.” It was terrible. “I mean, I think it will get better,” I said in a cheery voice.
The formality could not continue. I knew she would break it.
“So it sounds like everything’s just great,” she said—a hint of sarcasm.
The waiter came and asked if we were ready to order, jolly, as if he was interacting with any mother and daughter on any morning. I ordered the pancakes with stewed peaches and whipped cream.
“You just seem like this strange, distant person,” she said, when the waiter left. “Completely different. It’s like you’re not even my daughter anymore since you moved out.” She sounded curious about it, and the curiosity hurt me—as if she noticed but didn’t care. I wondered if it was true; I might be worse than I thought, irreparably changed. Near her I was a perfect shell that even I could not break.
“I moved out because we were fighting,” I said. “I didn’t want to.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You just worry about yourself. Your perfect life. Things get tough and Lisa goes with the rich people. Poof.”
My life didn’t feel rich; maybe it looked rich, or richer, from the outside. It was true I had nicer clothes now. Not a lot of clothes, but better ones, and newer. When we went for Indian food at the mall, my father would sometimes guide us into Armani Exchange, where he would buy me a T-shirt or a pair of trousers. Before this, when I got something new, I’d wear it a lot and wear it out until it looked like the other things in my closet, but shopping with them worked differently: small and more frequent renewals, nicer fabrics, and because most of the clothes came from the same shop at around the same time, they went together. Blue, white, charcoal. For the first time, when I looked into my closet, I could find something newish that fit and could be worn with something else newish that fit. I knew my mother would have loved to have this same feeling, and I felt guilty to have it first. “You have a real problem, Lisa,” she continued, growling through her clenched teeth. “You know what’s wrong with you? You want to be like them so much that you have no idea what’s important in life.”
In fact, I wanted to be just like them, but it wasn’t possible, hard as I tried. I stuck out. I did not blend, needing more than I was given and hoping to hide it.
My mother began to speak in a high, piercing voice meant to mock mine.
“I’m just so delicate, such a princess,” she said.
“You’re like them,” she said. She began to raise her voice and speak angrily. “Cold, and heartless, and phony. I guess you might as well be with them.”
I looked around at the other tables—no one was sitting too close, but a few people looked. “This isn’t okay,” I said, standing. “You can’t yell at me anymore. I’m leaving.”
She looked at me, stunned. I walked through the courtyard, through the belly of the restaurant past the row of chefs, the bustle, the warmth, and din. I was self-conscious about my back and my legs. Everything she could see as she watched me go—the way I moved, my clothes, the way I walked—might confirm what she’d said about me. I tried to walk as I’d always walked, the way I’d walked when I was with her, so that she would see this walk and understand that I was still who I was before. I quickened my step as soon as I was out the door, in case she was following me to yell more. I wanted her to follow me; I was terrified she would.
I walked home. My hands were shaking. I’d abandoned my mother. I’d left her all alone. The street was empty and peaceful. I felt a strange sort of calm, too calm; I was a girl walking and a girl who watched a girl walking. I was what she said I was, the kind of person who left the people they loved.
I kept looking back. In between looks I stepped carefully to avoid the hard fruits from the sweet gums. The trees were fiery orange and red, with star-shaped leaves, and because it had rained the day before, there were leaves on the ground, unnaturally bright on the gray sidewalk. The fruits were the size of cherries, brown with brown spines. They left rust-colored marks on the sidewalk. These same fruits had fallen from the tree in the backyard at the Rinconada house, thonking on the deck—so many that it had been impossible to walk without losing my balance until my mother came outside and swept them away.
When election season arrived a month or two into the semester, I handed out flyers announcing my candidacy for class president. Passing them around, I realized the problem was that I didn’t know the other students, who all knew one another, and they didn’t know me. I wore a black skirt that fell to my mid-calf; they walked by in jeans, in groups of two or three, and gave half-smiles. Some took my flyers. Some smirked and said, “No, thanks.”
“Sorry, who are you?” a girl said.
“A new freshman,” I said. “I just transferred in.”
“And you’re running for president?”
“Yeah,” I said, realizing at that moment how absurd it must have looked.
She took a flyer and walked away.
At Lick-Wilmerding, students had come from a variety of schools; here most had known each other since kindergarten. The gossip circulated that I was Steve Jobs’s kid, which likely made my run for president even less attractive, but at the time, I wasn’t aware of it. I was only embarrassed,
and a little ashamed, driving for the position of president with stubbornness—as if, with enough willpower, I could re-create the triumph from my old school.
When the votes were counted, a boy named Kyle had won. He wore plaid shirts and khakis and had a strong, definitive voice, a large Adam’s apple, a long neck.
That night my father and Laurene went to a dinner party, and I looked after my brother. They had me babysit a lot, telling me at the last minute as their plans resolved. I loved my brother and didn’t mind watching him, but I felt unseen as they put him into my arms without asking and left. My father had already left me when I was little; now he made me care for the next one as he walked out the door.
I fed my brother as he squirmed, delightfully, read him books he tried to rip, and tried to sing him to sleep. He would not sleep. He cried, unconsoled by the milk I’d heated and tested on the inside of my wrist. He wailed for what seemed like hours, his face crimson, his cheeks wet, his mouth wide open.
I called the number they’d left. No one picked up. I paced back and forth with him in my arms, in front of the windows that became mirrors at night, wondering if this is what it had been like for my mother, alone with me.
A week or so after our brunch at Il Fornaio, my mother and I talked on the phone. She said she was sorry, that she shouldn’t have yelled, that she wasn’t mad at me and understood why I’d moved out. She’d been offered a lucrative job painting stenciled images and signage for a large women’s and children’s hospital in Los Angeles, which meant she’d be gone most of the time for a month or so and we wouldn’t see each other, but we’d continue to talk at night.
When she returned, she would start making canvas stick-on animals for the walls of children’s rooms. A hospital nearby hired her to do stenciled murals covering the walls of several rooms, and for another hospital she was hired to paint trees with stenciled donor names on the fruit. She hired an assistant to help with the larger projects, and they worked together in her converted garage, playing the Cranberries, Talking Heads, Paul Simon, Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
My parents would see each other around town occasionally, at Country Sun or Whole Foods. I heard about these encounters from my mother, who didn’t relish running into him, but reported that they’d been kind to each other, saying hello or mentioning something about me, or him asking her to say hello to Tina.
Tina and my mother were still friends, and they sometimes had breakfast at Joanie’s Cafe on California Avenue. When I asked how Tina was doing, my mother said that my father had been calling her ten or twenty times a day, leaving messages on her answering machine about wanting to get back together.
One morning my father read the newspaper and then sang “This Old Man” to my brother, identifying the paddy-whacked part and rolling my brother’s hands for the dog and the bone, my brother squirming to get free.
Laurene left the kitchen to change clothes for an aerobics class; my father stopped playing with Reed for a moment and looked at me.
“Hey,” he said, “how do you think Tina’s doing?” He had begun to ask about Tina when the two of us were alone, or alone with Reed, asking each time like it was the first time, as if the question had just occurred to him. It soon became the only topic, then, that he spoke with me about directly, making me feel important, so that even though it made me feel furtive, I also liked it.
“I think she’s doing okay,” I said. I didn’t let on that I knew about the phone calls, or that I understood that his question was less about Tina and more about himself. I knew too much. I didn’t want to give him so much information that he stopped asking. I felt a strange and wonderful power; knowing about Tina I was useful to him, even if I was disloyal, and sneaky.
“I really miss her,” he said.
When Laurene returned, we played with Reed in the kitchen and made lunch. My father left the room and returned with his camera, the big-lensed, expensive camera no one else was allowed to touch. I wanted to be in the pictures he took. I wanted it with an unseemly desperation.
I also wished to be my brother instead of myself. It didn’t matter if I had to give up my life until now because that was nothing. The way I imagined it, this would not be death but just, lucky me, I get to be him, this time born right. I could imagine the exhilaration. The wish was more powerful than any wish I’d felt before, and had an unfamiliar, urgent force, and because of this difference from ordinary life, I believed in some small way that it could happen. I searched my palms for a hint of when or how.
“Lisa, step aside,” he said, in a business voice, holding his camera in front of his eye, the lens like a marble or a deep, still pool.
I jumped toward the sink, out of the frame. From behind him, I continued to coax my brother to smile, so my father wouldn’t know it hurt.
“Lis can come in, Steve,” Laurene said. She held her hand out to me. “C’mon, Lis.” I went to stand beside her. I was so grateful to her it made me shake.
Early one morning Laurene took me with her on a trip with the Audubon Society. We rode in a van full of people to a nature preserve, with thin, tall trees on either side of a sand path, birds moving the branches.
A few days later, my father came into my room. He was distraught, pacing.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“What matters in life,” he said, “is only what you do with your own hands.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“That bird trip,” he said. “That sort of—thing.” What did he mean? The trip had seemed innocent, the quiet footsteps, heads up, carrying binoculars, looking for the origins of the trills.
“These sorts of things don’t mean anything. They aren’t real.”
“I know,” I said, emphatically, though I didn’t. Later, I understood the trip had been given to us with the hope that he or Laurene would contribute money to the Audubon Society, and this bothered him profoundly.
I didn’t want to be his conscience—the one he confided in when something went wrong, the one with whom he shared a stricter value system. I was some grainy old photograph from before he’d “lost himself,” as my mother had said. The photograph got dusty, and he’d return sometimes to look at it, to wipe away the dust and look, but then he’d leave again and forget.
“People who aren’t born here”—he meant California—”they just don’t get it.”
Sometimes, when I left the house, Laurene would slip me a twenty-dollar bill where he couldn’t see it. She told me I looked pretty.
I asked once if he gave to charity, and he snapped at me, saying it was “none of my business.” Laurene had bought a velvet dress for her niece on his credit card, and he gave her a hard time, reading the bill aloud in the kitchen. I assumed his frugality was part of the reason we didn’t have much furniture, and that the reason he wouldn’t hire more help to take care of my brother or clean the house was that he was tight, although this may not have been true. He made calculations out loud about what things cost, at the grocery store, and at restaurants and the Gap, and what a normal family could afford, and was indignant when things were too expensive and refused to buy them, when I wished he’d just accept that he wasn’t normal and splurge. I’d also heard of his generosity, how he’d bought an Alfa Romeo for Tina, and a BMW for Laurene, and paid off her school loans. I thought he was mostly frugal with me, refusing to get me more jeans, or furniture, or heat, and generous with everyone else. It was hard to understand why someone who had enough money would create a sense of scarcity, why he wouldn’t lavish us with it.
Besides the Porsche, my father kept a large silver Mercedes. I called it “Small Nation,” a nickname I made up.
“Why ‘Small Nation’?” he asked.
“Because it’s big enough to cover a small nation, heavy enough to crush it, and expensive enough to feed the population for a year,” I said. It was a joke, but I also wanted to hurt him for what I thought was his extravagant spending on himself, throw him into self-reflection, bring about so
me revelation.
“Small Nation,” he said, chuckling. “That’s really funny, Lis.”
One day at home, passing me in the hallway, my father said to me, “You know, each of my girlfriends has had a more difficult relationship with her father than the last.” I didn’t know what to make of the statement, or why he’d said it.
Like me, most of the women I knew did not have fathers when they were growing up: fathers died, divorced, or left. Not having a father wasn’t unique, or even significant. My father’s significance was elsewhere. Instead of raising me, he was inventing world-changing machines; he was famous, mingling, accruing, driving stoned in the South of France with a billionaire named Pigozzi, dating Joan Baez. I figured no one would think, Hey, that guy should have been raising his daughter instead. What presumption. To whatever degree I felt grieved by having lost him for so long, and to whatever extent this grief arose powerfully in me, I suppressed it, or was not fully aware of it: it was wrong, selfish; I was nothing. I dismissed the fact of my own importance to him, his importance to me, or even the importance of fathers and children more generally—a dismissal so familiar to me then that I didn’t even notice it: it was part of the air.
It was only recently, when an older friend, a father himself, called to tell me about his daughter’s engagement, that I understood something new. His daughter and her fiancé came to tell him the news and he’d cried, surprising himself.
“What was it that made you cry?” I asked.
“It was this: since the day she was born, it had been my job, our job, to protect her and care for her,” he said. “I realized that from now on it would be someone else’s job. I was no longer on the front line, no longer the main person.”
When we got off the phone, I started to suspect I’d underestimated what I’d missed, what my father had missed. When I lived with him, I’d tried to put it into the language of dishwashers and couches and bikes, as if to reduce his absence to things. I felt owed trifles, so resolutely, so achingly. In fact it was something bigger—something I’d felt for a gut-visceral moment on the phone as a whole intricate universe: the kind of care and love we’d missed that can occur between a father and child.
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