“I’m sorry,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “I’ll take it back.”
“I think that would be a good idea,” he said. “You should think about why you’re here and whether you are actually doing your job. Because so far what you’re doing is crap. Everything you’ve done is crap. You just bring this shit again and again. I would like shaved carrots and lemon in a bowl.” He made a gesture to show the size of the bowl.
“Yes, I understand, but—”
“All I’m asking for is the simplest thing. Do you have carrots.”
“Yes, but—”
“Do you have a lemon.”
“Yes.” She stood very still.
“Do you have a grater back there in the kitchen.” He leaned his chair back and looked toward the kitchen opening across the carpeted floor.
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’d like you to tell them to take three carrots and grate them like this,” he motioned pressing a carrot down a metal grater. The ends of his words were sharp as whips. “And then bring it out with a lemon.”
“The kitchen grates the carrots in advance.” She was crying but trying not to show it. “I’ll ask them what they can do.” She started to walk away. He moved in slow motion, looking down at the disappointment on his plate as if he’d suffered a tragedy.
“You know what,” he called out to her across the carpet. “Don’t bother about the carrots. Can I see the menu again?”
She brought it and waited near him.
“I’ll just have this.” He pointed to a pan-seared fish. “Except I’d like it to be steamed, not fried. I don’t want any butter or any cream. I don’t want anything with it. Just the plain fish.”
She wrote it down. She didn’t say anything. This fish would not please him, either, without the ingredients that gave it taste. I knew this. He liked butter, he just didn’t like the idea of it. He should have ordered what Mona had. This resort kitchen would not get it right when he invented the dishes and had so many rules.
The rest of us had almost finished when she returned with his fish: white on a white plate with a cloudy drip of cooking water leaking from the side. This time the manager came out and stood beside her, a squat man with a mustache.
With the edge of one tine of his fork, my father pulled up a piece of white flesh the size of a matchstick and put it into his mouth. He winced.
“It’s not any good, but thanks anyway.” He dropped the fork. He looked wounded.
“We’re sorry it’s not what you wanted, Steve,” the manager said. “What can we do so you’ll be happy with your dinner?”
“Nothing. You can’t do anything. Too bad your dinners are so bad,” He leaned the chair back, smiling the tight smile. “But, you know, the rest of this place is great. So I guess that’s just the way it is.”
“We’ll do everything we can so this doesn’t happen again,” the manager said.
As we walked back from dinner, the geckos chirped, their bodies twirling around the poles of the low lights beside the white sand paths. Laurene wore a white dress that glowed in the near-dark. Walking along the paths, I felt we were all inside the movie Citizen Kane. My father had come over a few afternoons when I was younger and whispered, “Rosebud” to me, like a growl, before we went to see the movie at the newly reopened Stanford Theatre. I hadn’t thought much of the story, but the sets, the palm fronds and long shadows, the glowing white clothing, the torches, reminded me of this place, so that I felt swept up in a fantastical world.
The next day we discovered that a friend of my father’s, Larry Ellison, was at the resort too. He wore a straw hat. After lunch I sat with Larry and my dad at a table on the lava rocks that jutted out near the ocean. Larry said he’d been reading about how evolution didn’t happen in gradual stages but bounded and stuttered—that, if you looked at the fossil record, there wasn’t a linear progression. It was impossible for animals to have adapted at the rate they did through gradual random mutation.
They made business jokes I didn’t understand. Larry had a low voice but he laughed high and fast as if he’d sucked on a balloon, as if the man who spoke was a different man from the one who laughed. He’d arrived with one woman who flew home on a United flight that day. Another woman was flying in to visit him tomorrow, he said. The second woman also wore high heels, and was unaware of the first.
My father grabbed me and squeezed. His affection surprised me, seemed complete, and then vanished, and then reappeared, like the two different landscapes on the island.
“What do you think, hon,” I overheard my father say to Laurene the next day. “If you gave a kid a trip to this resort in Hawaii every year or sent them to college, which one would be better?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “This place is pretty great.”
“I think it might be best to just bring them here every year. That might be better than college, if you weigh the two.”
Were they joking? He didn’t mind being strange compared with other parents. At restaurants, he blew his nose right into cloth napkins. I should have asked about college before coming on this trip; I hadn’t considered the possibility that in agreeing to one, I might be forfeiting the other. I am a girl who goes on vacations, I’d thought, and I am a girl who will go to college. It was an entitled way of thinking, I knew, and I liked thinking it. Both. Now, so many virgin piña coladas in, the trip was spent. How much did it cost to come here? It must have been less than college. I didn’t know. I regretted everything about it. The smells and the trees and the birds made me sick.
“Yes, I think that would be worth it,” Laurene said, “in the balance.” She said it in her joke voice. Maybe she thought he would never do it, not really. How ridiculous, I wanted her to say.
“What did you tell your teachers?” my mother asked when I called her on the white resort phone, one of two phones stationed in a room near the reception office.
“I told them I was going on a college trip,” I said. “If I’d told them the truth, they wouldn’t have let me go.”
“I’ll tell them,” she said. I hadn’t imagined there was a way out of it, other than continuing to lie. I’d been staying inside, to avoid tanning.
I gave her the names of my teachers, the classrooms, and the following morning she went to the school and spoke to them, telling them I could not find a way out of it and had lied because I was ashamed. When I returned to school, I got a few quizzical looks from teachers, and Ms. Lawrence teased me, but soon the matter was forgotten.
On one of our last nights in Hawaii, I stood on the place where the lava overhung the ocean, near the restaurant. Below me I watched a series of tiny waves lapping, illuminated by a dim lamp attached to the bottom of the overhang. The warm wind swirled, and I saw a fish lit up and swimming out toward darker water, a bright star hanging far above it. In that moment I saw—sensed, really—a cord strung between the fish and the star, connecting them. It was silvery and strong, like a rope, distinct, obvious, as if it were really there.
There was no unimportant, no negligible, being, I felt, just then; something as small and seemingly insignificant as one fish in the slapping ocean was connected to the galactic immensity.
I told Laurene and my father about the fish and the star soon after we returned to Palo Alto. We were sitting in the car, in the parking lot of the Tower Records in Redwood City, where we’d come to buy CDs. My father turned off the engine. My brother was asleep in the car seat beside me. To my surprise, they remained in the front seat and let me finish the story, speaking from the back seat. Usually they were in a rush. They sat very still, facing the windshield, listening.
If I hoped Laurene would save me, I also wanted to save her, and imagined myself as her savior, powerful and generous. One day she had turned to me in the kitchen and said, “I was too young.”
“For what?”
“Marriage,” she’d said dryly.
She’d harvested cauliflower from the garden and put it to steam in the new Alessi pot my father
had recently brought home, about which he’d been excited, showing us that it rounded out at the sides instead of being straight, a cauldron-shaped pot that was made of the same materials, at the same price point, as an ordinary pot. But you could see the impact of a better design. “It’s so simple, and so beautiful,” he said, turning it under the kitchen lights.
Laurene had gone upstairs and forgotten about the cauliflower, and the water at the bottom had boiled dry and ruined the pan. The idea of getting another one didn’t occur to me, and I had no idea where he’d bought it or even how much pans cost, and anyway we didn’t have time to buy another before he got home. The kitchen was filled with smoke. “Oh shoot. Shoot,” she said, opening all the windows and the door and fanning furiously with a newspaper. I’d never seen her panic before; she was usually calm. I helped her fan. The house smelled like sugar and carbon and burnt metal. We both fanned furiously.
He sometimes pointed out how she came from New Jersey and had wide feet, and how she liked the wrong kind of trees. The cauldron pot might symbolize a whole realm of aesthetics he felt she didn’t have. (“She doesn’t have taste,” he’d said to dinner guests, after she left the room.) When he saw the burnt pot, he might be unkind to her for it, as if here was further evidence that she would lay ruin to his refinement.
She could do better than him, I thought. I would rescue her; we could rescue each other, drive off in her white BMW, like in Thelma & Louise. I was overcome with affection for her, how in spite of it all she kept being positive, kept working hard to make her company succeed. She understood that life took a certain relentlessness, she continued despite his disapproval, and this forward motion was a model for me. If she was hesitant to leave because she thought no one else noticed, or she doubted her own perceptions, I noticed, I saw. I wanted her to have fulfillment and joy, I believed in her capacities, and I thought that my confidence and my encouragement might be just what she needed to escape.
Afterward, the close feeling between us did not remain. It surprised me, each time we were close, that it did not stay, but snapped back and became more formal. My father, displeased about the burnt pot, was taciturn for days.
I was still seeing the same therapist, Dr. Lake. I’d been seeing him once a week since I was nine, my father paying for the weekly sessions. His office was a room on Welch Road near the Stanford Hospital. He was tall, with dark hair and a kindly face. When I’d first started coming to him, he’d let me paint a doll with nail polish and ruin it, not complaining when I gave her a short skirt, scissored her hair into a frizzy zag. Now I sat on a daybed against a wall, and he sat in an Eames chair facing me. Sometimes we played checkers or chess. He had a jar of Oreo cookies; part of the reason I’d agreed to keep seeing him years before was the accessibility of these cookies, which I was allowed to eat at will. Before he worked on Welch Road, when he worked at a different office, we would sometimes walk to the Fosters Freeze down the road, talking as we walked. Now we sometimes walked to the Häagen-Dazs in the Stanford Barn where he bought us ice cream. “Freud would roll in his grave,” he joked.
After asking for several months, I finally persuaded my father and Laurene to come along with me for a session. I had a crazy idea that Dr. Lake would say something to them, or he would be silent when they said something, and they would just get it. Then they’d agree to all my (reasonable, I thought) ideas, like getting a couch, saying goodnight, and heat. His presence would make them unable to deny how reasonable I was.
My father and Laurene had dressed for the occasion—how coupled and taut they looked, walking in—she smelling of soap and pressed linen, wearing a crisp white shirt and the small, gold-rimmed glasses my father had bought for her. My father had put on a new black shirt, and jeans without holes. It looked as if he’d just gotten a haircut.
Dr. Lake had arranged four wooden chairs with black foam-covered arms around a wooden desk. They sat down, backs straight. I had long since abandoned formality around Dr. Lake, and I hoped they would find him comforting too, with his teddy-bear nature, his corduroy trousers, his messy but thoughtfully designed office.
“We’re here to talk about Lisa,” Dr. Lake said.
Silence. I knew Dr. Lake was good at allowing long silences, and sometimes, in order to get him to speak, I would have to let time pass, an uncomfortable pause beyond what seemed reasonable.
I cleared my throat. “I’ve been feeling so lonely,” I said. “I was hoping that you could … that we could figure something out.” I paused and looked at Laurene, who held her face very still, as if it was a representation of her face and not her real face.
“I’m feeling terribly alone,” I tried again. Still they didn’t speak.
I looked at Dr. Lake; he didn’t speak either.
We waited. I wished that I wanted less, needed less, was one of those succulents that have a tangle of wiry, dry roots and a minty congregation of leaves and can survive on only the smallest bit of moisture and air.
After what seemed an interminable silence, I burst into tears. I hoped it would soften them, that my messiness would give them permission to be messy. I wasn’t perfect or straight-backed or smooth; I didn’t require them to be so either.
Laurene finally spoke. “We’re just cold people,” she said. She said it dryly, like a clarification.
You’re allowed to say that? I thought. How incredible; that’s what struck me later: that she had dared to say it. How good it would be to know one’s limitations and say them with unapologetic conviction. Her tone was deadpan. I had thought I could shame them for being cold and absent. Now I was the one who was ashamed, for ignoring the simple truth.
How obvious it was—they were just cold people! The clarity of the pronouncement stopped my tears. I looked to my father, who did not speak. He isn’t cold, I thought; he just withholds his affection in a pattern I can’t predict or control. In the end, maybe it added up to the same thing.
Our time was up. We filed out of the office together, Dr. Lake surprising himself, he told me later, by what he said to them in the hallway between the office and the waiting room as they walked out: “You were just as I expected you to be.”
“You’ve got to trust in your life,” my father said, coming into my room that night as I sat at my desk copying notes in small handwriting on small note cards for memorization. “If you trust your intuition, and listen to it, it will speak louder. Ever heard of the concept Be Here Now?”
What did it mean? Something about existing in the moment. But I had homework to do. I found most of the work boring, motivating myself with the idea of Harvard. To be here now was to be miserable.
“Lis,” he said.
“What?”
“You should smoke some pot,” he said.
I was too serious, was the implication. But I didn’t trust him. I was a junior. Grades mattered.
“I’ll do it with you,” he said. “If you want.”
“No, thanks,” I said. He’d make me lose my motivation in a stupor of weed (or so I imagined). Then he could say, See, she wasn’t worth it.
“You’ll be a hippie someday,” he said. “Trust me.”
“No, I won’t,” I said. I knew he meant the word as some kind of shorthand for peace and relaxation. But I’d known hippies before I’d known him—men who wore brown and let their hair grow. The memory left a dusty taste in my mouth.
“Suit yourself,” he said, and walked out of my room, springing on the heels of his Birkenstocks, whistling, as if to parade his own peace and happiness before me.
Later that night I dreamt that a classmate I hardly knew named Josh and I hovered, side by side, above the hills that wrinkled up west of the town. Josh and I were in the same English class and also on the staff of the school newspaper, but we’d hardly ever talked. In the dream we were wearing special backpacks that allowed us to float. We bobbed in the air, lazily, looking toward San Francisco in the distance: the spikes and glints of high buildings and Victorian houses in slanting pastel arcs and, be
yond them, the bright, friendly Pacific Ocean lapping against the shore. The city was more vivid than in life, both far away and near, the perspective foreshortened, the way certain atmospheric conditions will make distant things appear alternately far away and very close.
In the dream I looked at Josh, joy welling up like a balloon rising from my chest into my throat. I was so excited I had to be careful to say the words slowly, to not let them rip out: “Let’s go,” I said. We bobbed slowly forward toward the great metropolis—the most thrilling city I knew.
The next morning in class, I leaned over my desk and tapped him on the shoulder before Mrs. Paugh arrived.
“Hey, I had a dream about you last night.”
He turned around to face me. “Uh-oh,” he said, smiling. “What was it about?”
“We flew to San Francisco. Floated, actually. I mean we had these flotational backpacks.”
“Well, we should do it then,” he said. “We should—” but then Mrs. Paugh arrived, and Josh turned to face the front, and class began.
At my mother’s house I was vaguely aware that at some point, maybe when I left for college, the child-support checks from Jeff Howson would stop arriving. My mother had no other reliable source of income. She must have been aware of this too, and also wanted to be independent of my father.
She approached each new moneymaking idea with fervor and optimism. She admired Mrs. Fields, who made the chocolate chip cookies, and Nancy of Nancy’s Quiche, women who’d made a fortune in business. But what she failed to account for is that it wasn’t just the quality of the product that turned ideas into money, but business savvy—marketing and strategy know-how.
Once my mother planned to have a garage sale, but until the day before, she didn’t put up any signs. We had nice things to sell, nicer things than in most garage sales, but few people knew about it; almost no one came. She was likewise not methodical about selling her art. When her stencils didn’t sell at Neiman Marcus or Smith & Hawken, or get snapped up via word of mouth, she was discouraged, and put her hope in a new project, floor cloths—paintings that went on the floor. They were colorful acrylic squares and rectangles of unmounted canvas—deep plum and rich orange and all different shades of green. Ripe fruits, blossoms, and leaves in patterns, some stenciled, some painted, lacquered with expensive Jolly Glaze she poured over the paint to protect it that cracked pleasingly like the surface of old porcelain. She and her friend were both working on them, but her friend had no artistic training; hers were far better.
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