When I was reading, I was not lonely or self-aware. I felt upheld by the stories. I read a whole stack of fiction at one time, alternating between books so I could finish all of them together, the multiple endings crashing around me like the cymbals in a musical finale. When I stopped reading, I felt lonely again, like a window had been thrown open.
The same carpenter who built my brother’s changing table also built the bookshelves on one wall of my father’s office, carefully matching the back side of each shelf to the dimpled indentations of the white-painted brick. Some nights, after he’d gone to sleep, I went into his office and perused the books, including one about Noguchi, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Autobiography of a Yogi. On his desk beside the NeXT computer was a box that contained twelve new black uni-ball pens. He used these pens, always, and usually had one in his pocket. I took three. In his office, with everyone else in the house asleep, I sat on his rug and read with a pen in my hand. Here was a feeling of abundance and freedom, any book I wanted, pens, no one bothering me or following me around.
Around that time I read a copy of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. It was a matte white paperback with black text and two stripes of color across the front. I read it repeatedly until my copy frayed, the cover collecting dirt from my hands and my backpack. Trains, frigid train stations, coats, dorms, diners, drinks—here was the East Coast, the Ivy League, Harvard—a different planet, a different class. Did it exist like this, really? I doubted it. The characters used words foreign to me, clipped and slick. Nonetheless, I wanted to be Franny. She was real enough. She gushed with “absolutely” and “lovely” and “love.” Trains were numbers: the ten-fifty-two. They arrived on cold platforms where you could see your breath. Against the cold, people wore overcoats, topcoats, raccoon fur coats, buttoned wool linings.
I decided I would go to Harvard, because that was the college they talked about in the book. I would leave, get away from this town, the world of my parents. I wouldn’t let them know how fixed my plan was, because they might try to stop me.
It was different from anything my parents had done, but might impress them nonetheless. This seemed like the answer: a plan to get out that was above reproach. I didn’t know what I wanted to study or how I wanted college to be, really, but figured if I went to Harvard, those things would become clear.
I started collecting coats, not realizing why, asking for coats as gifts for birthdays and Christmas, even though it was often too warm in Northern California for the kind of coats I received. As the school years progressed, I understood I was collecting for college, and I collected with decisive fervor (even if it would turn out that these coats, although too warm for California, wouldn’t be warm enough for the East Coast).
I didn’t tell my father about how determined I was because it was too delicate a plan to withstand him, too unfinished. I sensed he wouldn’t like it when I left and didn’t understand how soon it would happen—even as he joked about my future marriage to Biff and Tad and the rest. I’d have to get out by stealth. That even if he did not believe in raising the kind of child who would hang around and never leave, feeding off his charisma, he might try to create that kind of child anyway, despite himself.
For a joke, my father would turn his back, moan, and move his hands up and down until they seemed disembodied, like someone else’s hands.
When he spoke to me directly about love and sex, he was curious and interested, the two of us equals, a team.
I did not feel the same revulsion I did when talking about sex with my mother. Maybe it was because I hadn’t grown up with him.
“Let’s go over the bases again,” he said, in a kind but officious tone. We used the language of baseball, a game neither of us knew or cared about.
“You mean—for making out?” I asked.
“Yeah. So first base is kissing …” he prompted.
I knew it was ridiculous, but I liked it. He asked me about once a week, as if he’d forgotten in between. This was a repetitive exercise. I didn’t have a boyfriend and wasn’t making any progress but I went through what I knew. He continued to prompt. The only confusion I had was third base, called “feeling down,” which may or may not have included oral sex, so I didn’t mention that part and hoped he wouldn’t want more details.
“And which base are you at?” he asked.
“Second,” I said, “from Nueva.”
“Ah,” he said. “Great.”
One evening when Laurene got home I went outside to meet her, near the roses beside the gate.
“You know that computer, the Lisa?” she said, closing the gate, the ring clanking, her hair flashing in the sunlight, a large leather satchel on her shoulder. “It was named after you, right?” We’d never talked about it before and I wasn’t sure why she was asking now. Maybe someone had asked her.
“I don’t know. I think so,” I lied. I hoped she’d drop it.
“It must have been,” she said. “Let’s ask him when he gets back.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” I said. I didn’t want him to say no again. Though maybe if she asked him, he would say yes?
A few minutes later, he came in the gate and Laurene walked up to him. I followed.
“Hon,” she said, “that computer was named after Lisa, right?”
“Nope,” he said.
“Seriously?”
“Yup. Seriously,” he said.
“Come on.” She looked him in the eye. I was impressed and grateful she kept pushing when I would have given up. They faced each other, stopped on the path on the way to the door.
“It wasn’t,” he said.
Then I wished she hadn’t asked. I was embarrassed for her to discover that I wasn’t as important to him as she might have thought.
“Well then, who was it named after?”
“An old girlfriend,” he said, looking off into the distance, as if remembering. Wistful. It was this dreamy quality that made me believe he was telling the truth, because otherwise it was quite an act. I had a strange feeling in my stomach, the same one I got when something was fake or phony, but I was getting that feeling a lot lately. And why would he lie, anyway? His true well of feeling was clearly reserved for the other Lisa. I’d never heard of a girlfriend named Lisa from when he was young, and when I mentioned it to my mother later she said, “Hogwash.” But maybe she didn’t know, maybe he’d kept the first Lisa from us both.
“Sorry, kid,” he said, patting me on the back, then walking into the house.
My father opened a large, thick-paper envelope—an invitation to a wedding in Napa.
“Hey, Lis, you wanna come?”
Often when my father and Laurene went to parties, I babysat for my brother. This time I would be included, in public, part of the family! The daughter, the sister. I thought of what dress to bring, and how I’d have to buy nylons, an ecstasy of decision-making. A few weeks later, the date of the wedding arrived.
On the way we stopped for sandwiches at a fancy grocery store, and later, on the road, my father shook a water bottle when I said I had to pee. My brother sat beside me in his elevated seat.
Shortly before we arrived, my father delivered a lecture about Risk and Consequence that seemed like a performance. “Lis, do you know about Risk and Consequence?” he asked. “It’s a way of evaluating whether to do something, a sliding scale. For example, if the risk is low, but the consequence is high, you might decide not to do something.”
“Right,” I said.
“Even laws,” he said. “They aren’t about what you can and can’t do. They’re based on whether or not you get caught. For example, cars can do one hundred twenty miles an hour, way faster than any speed limit in this country. You can drive as fast as you want—as long as you don’t get caught.”
I remembered a story my mother told me about how, before I knew him, he’d drive home so fast down the roads in Woodside, and without license plates, that for almost a year the cops couldn’t catch him. He was the cool one, the
fast one, telling me how to break rules. I could see the freedom of his intelligence, how it made you lighter on your feet.
The ceremony would be held at the Meadowood Napa Valley, with its grand curving entrance, somewhere near the golf course, past pools and suites that looked like wood cabins.
When we arrived at the hotel and got into the room, we all got ready. Laurene put my brother in a light blue cotton confection, pantaloons with straps over the shoulders. She wore a dress made of vintage Japanese kimonos stitched together; my father wore a black formal jacket, a white shirt, and jeans.
“Okay, we’re off,” he said, almost to the door.
The idea that I was invited to the ceremony had been implied but never explicitly stated.
“Hold on. I’m not ready yet,” I said. I’d just hitched up my stockings; damp skin made them stick midway.
“That’s all right,” Laurene said. “Take your time. Here he is.” She handed Reed to me in a way that suggested she was in motion and I would be still.
By her tone and movement, I understood. They were moving quickly, as if to flee. No time to mention what we should eat for dinner. When I realized my mistake, I felt ashamed most of all to have presumed. But in the car when I’d hung the dress, they might have told me I wouldn’t need any dresses.
“Why don’t you two head out, maybe to the pool?” Laurene said, as they walked through the door.
I changed into jeans. Outside the door of each room was parked a red wagon. I put Reed inside, leaving his fancy outfit on. He wanted to be pulled, and then carried, and then pulled again. The weather was damp and cool, too cool for swimming. “Ky,” Reed said, pointing up. Bug, tree, pool. The light was muted under a thin layer of clouds like tissue paper that made it diffuse, everywhere and nowhere.
When we reached the place where the pavement ended and the field began, I lifted him out of the wagon and he ran forward, toward the edge of the pool, almost tripping on clods of dirt in the grass but managing to stay upright, always on the cusp of falling, like a marionette held under the armpits by strings. I ran after him and caught him, helped him lie belly-down on the concrete lip so he could touch the water. I crouched beside him, grabbed a leg. He smacked his hands against the surface of the water.
“Slap, slap, slap,” I said.
“Lap lap lap,” he repeated.
Behind us I heard a motor and laughter. I looked up to see a convertible drive past, an old sports car, chrome and cream, limbs hanging out the windows, teenagers. The car crackled its way up the long drive that curved from the hotel to the road under a double row of trees with high, arching branches that created a different sense of scale—a huge enclosed room, light shining through the bright green foliage.
I don’t want to be here, babysitting, I thought. That is where I want to be instead. In that car, with them.
One night, after putting my brother to bed when Steve and Laurene were out, I rooted around upstairs. I searched Laurene’s dressing room, where I hoped to find some trinket or item of clothing or old photograph. Some secret she had that I didn’t. I found a pot of white skin cream, dimpled on the surface where she’d touched it, a tall, thin triangle of perfume with a glass marble stopper, a few photographs of my brother. The full-length mirror warped to make me big-hipped. Her closet was disappointing in its refusal to reveal more about her.
I walked through the bathroom to my father’s closet. His shelves contained socks, ties, sweaters that crinkled with inner tissue paper. In his drawer on the left side I noticed the glossy lip of a small manila envelope.
I looked inside: a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills, two inches thick! More cash than I’d ever seen. It gave me a shock, like when I’d come upon an infestation of ladybugs, a hundred or a thousand crawling around a branch, having seen them only in ones or twos.
I flipped through the stack, my heart pounding. Each bill was new and crisp and gave off a whiff of alcohol and burlap. When I furred the edges, they fell in clumps.
I took one bill, folded it, and put it in my pocket. Then I closed the drawer and went downstairs. My palms were sweating; I wiped them on my jeans.
Had there been a camera? Had I left fingerprints? I was jumpy, as if someone might leap out from behind a door; there was a strange, rubbery quality in my legs, pleasurable electricity racing through my arms.
I was a thief. But I wouldn’t take any more, ever. I wouldn’t push my luck. That was it. If my father found out, he would have proof I was unworthy to the core and deserved any distance he put between us. The knowledge that I had committed a crime made me more eager to please them than ever. I went out and cut flowers in the yard, arranged them in vases around the house.
From that night on, whenever my father said, “Lis, we have to talk,” or even just “Lis,” I braced myself, ready for the accusation.
At the mall, on a mannequin in a window, I’d seen a pewter-colored Benetton trench coat the silvery color of the underside of a leaf. It was seventy-nine dollars. It was unlined, made of the kind of fabric that might be used on a windbreaker, but instead had been made to tie at the waist, appealingly, and with its adult silhouette it reminded me of something Candice Bergen might wear in the rain on the way to an important meeting.
The next time they went out, I crept back up to my father’s closet, shaking with fear and excitement. I couldn’t tell whether the quantity of bills had changed since the last time.
This time, in case I never returned, I took two.
The trouble came with cashing the hundreds. They weren’t accepted everywhere—the first bill I’d stolen had been refused at a café across from my high school. I worried shop owners might become curious about why I had such a large bill, and word would get back to my father. As a result, I was furtive when trying to cash them, never going to the same shop twice, attempting to look nonchalant and confident at the same time.
At Benetton, I braced for the woman to refuse the bill. Instead, she took it without looking up, folded the jacket around itself, dropped it into a paper bag without any tissue paper, and handed me the change. I walked out, the jacket almost as light as the paper that held it. A sensation of floating—the thrill of money transformed into possession.
When I got back, I hid the jacket deep in a drawer. I couldn’t wear it; they might notice. It was one more in my collection for college.
I didn’t save the money because I didn’t understand what savings were for. Instead, I looked for things to buy and spent it all right away. Other than a few things for myself, I bought gifts, mostly, for my parents, Laurene, and my brother, for birthdays and Christmas. I listened to people talk about saving money in order to buy something they wanted in the future—but it didn’t make sense to me because I might find an object I burned with desire to own right away, and what was the point of savings if they accomplished the exact same purpose, only later? I also heard people talking about saving money for emergencies, or saving just to have savings. In the case of an emergency I figured I’d find a way to wiggle out of it, to hustle and charm. I’d outsmart the savers.
At dinner that night, my father said a photographer would come to the house soon to take pictures of the family. My hands began to flutter. I broke another glass.
When the photographer arrived one morning, he and his assistant fastened a roll of white paper to a rafter in the living room, pulling it down to the floor to create a backdrop. First he took pictures of my brother alone, sitting up on the white paper, wearing a jean jumpsuit. Then he took pictures of all of us together, me standing behind them; then of Laurene holding my brother, both facing forward. She wore a long, patterned vest with a fringe, and platform shoes.
“Hey, Lis, we’re going to need you to step out of this next photograph,” my father said.
I stepped out and watched, pretending I didn’t care. At some point during a few shots of my father holding my brother, Reed started to wail, and Laurene took him upstairs to change his diaper. My father slipped away to his study to work, vanis
hing as he often did in between moments.
It was one of those days when the light was diffuse and watery, the sun a yellow smudge behind clouds. The photographer looked at me, standing beside him. “Can I take some pictures of you?” he asked.
“I’d love it,” I said, even though I sensed it was not allowed.
I was wearing the jeans my father told me to wear. “Wait,” I said, and ran down the hallway to my bedroom and pulled on a dress of my mother’s from the seventies that hung in my closet. It fit like a muumuu: long sleeves that buttoned at the wrists, a pattern of small gold and cream flowers on a black background, and thin gold piping around the neck and the sleeves. From a high flat placket in front it hung down to my ankles.
I’d wanted a professional photograph for years—I saw them framed on walls at friends’ houses; now it was happening, but without my mother. Wearing her dress was a way to have her there too. Who cared if the dress was old and unfashionable.
I ran back down the hall, barefoot and, breathless, stood where he told me to, beside an Eames chair and ottoman. I knew I was getting away with something, stealing the spotlight like this; he might have sensed it. A flurry of clicks; the faster we went, the more photographs we’d get. I smiled big, showed my teeth, made my eyes bright.
My father emerged from his study. “What are you doing?” he asked, looking at me up and down, in the dress.
“He said he would take—”
“Stop it,” he said to the photographer. “Stop it right now.”
One night, doing dishes and talking on the phone with my mother, I mentioned that I had a dentist appointment, and she offered to pick me up and take me. I accepted her help, guiltily, sensing that my father and Laurene would not approve of her ferrying me places. I would be under her influence when I was supposed to be under theirs. I might have biked to my appointments, as they said I should, but I was too lazy for the forty-five minutes across town to the dentist, the doctor, the therapist, especially if my mother would give me a ride. Was it these sorts of tasks that had made my mother unable to care for me? Now, burdening her, I might push her past a limit.
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