Small Fry
Page 29
Canvases were strung up along the walls of her studio in various states of completion, along with used stencil patterns hanging up to dry. I liked sitting in the garage with her as she painted. She seemed to forget about me and dissolved into a deeper part of herself. When she tapped the stencil brush up and down, it sounded like a faraway woodpecker.
I picked at the splotches on the board she used as a palette—indigo, carmine, white, gamboge, which seemed to be a dull, pasty brown but when mixed with water became electric yellow, the color of a mosquito whine. The top layer of the glob of paint was hard, but if I pressed, wet paint inside came oozing out. To clean the paintbrushes, she knocked them against the inside walls of the metal jar of turpentine.
When we heard my father call out, we left the garage and went to find him in the house. He hadn’t come over for years; I wasn’t sure why he’d come this day. He stood in the middle of the kitchen, too straight, wearing a gray sweatshirt with a hood threaded with a red cord that hung on either side of the neck. He looked around as if mildly disappointed.
“Steve,” she said. “How are you doing?”
“Great,” he said. “What are you working on?” He moved his shoulder and scapula like he was carving a semicircle in the air.
“Floor cloths,” she said.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“They’re paintings, but underfoot,” she said, toeing a pomegranate painted on a piece of canvas under the sink. “They’re mats, really, for in the kitchen, or wherever, but they’ve got a protective coating. Anyway, I’m doing them with a friend, and we think there’s definitely a market. We might sell them at Macy’s or Neiman Marcus.”
I knew she wanted his approval and recognition; we both wanted it. He knew about business; he knew about money and the world; he was a success. She became voluble but also unsure, especially when he was about to be unkind—as if she knew he was going to be cruel and knew how to smoke out the meanness first.
I watched them take their places as if in a familiar choreography: she had said she wanted to be free of him, and he had said he wanted to be free of her, but yet, after all these years, they were still entangled; they would thrash around in a single net, becoming more stuck.
“I’m also doing stencils,” she said.
“Show me,” he said. She took him through the screen door under the purple blossoms and the greedy whine of bees into the cool studio. I followed them. He looked around, putting his face up close to each painting, saying nothing—as if he knew what to look for. We hung back near the door where it was still warm, waiting for a verdict.
“You know, Chris,” he finally said, in a friendly tone, “you might as well just have some more kids.”
As he left the garage, he seemed lighter, looser. He waved, walked to his car, and drove away. My mother and I stood in shock at the back of the driveway.
When I went back to my father’s house, Mona arrived for a visit with her husband, Richie, for a weekend. My father had a cold. He was in a dark mood. I avoided him, slipping out of rooms when he entered them, trying to stick near Mona and Richie, who were funny and warm, and feeling panicked when they went for a walk and left me alone in the house with him.
At some point I was hungry and went into the kitchen and found him there standing at the counter, eating from a bag of almonds.
“How’s homework going?” he asked. I could tell he was preoccupied with something, worried.
“Fine,” I said, bracing.
“The thing is, Lis,” he said, in the slow voice that meant he was about to say something incisive and possibly devastating, “you have no marketable skills. Not one.” He popped another almond into his mouth. The subject seemed to come from nowhere—why were we talking about marketable skills midmorning on a Saturday?
“But I’m doing all these activities,” I said, “and I get A’s!” And yet even as I said it—the newspaper, mock trial, the fact that I’d worked at a lab over the summer, and took Japanese—I wilted. I got his point. The confection of extracurricular activities, the flurry of self-importance—it was just a fever dream. No one hires someone for being on a debate team. I had not impressed him or fooled him. He knew all this stuff wasn’t worth much, and he was worried for my future.
I assumed that activities led to other activities in a ladder ascending to adult responsibility. I wasn’t supposed to be prepared for an adult job. Others seemed to think that too. At the same time, because he spoke with authority, and because I had been hoping to impress him, and because he was famous and successful and knew about the world, the remark was devastating.
“I wouldn’t lose sleep over it,” Mona said. “He’s just being silly.” I wanted her to say he was totally insane—to make him recant—in part because I worried he was right, if not about now, then about later, that I’d never be a success, never be able to get a job.
We all made allowances for his eccentricities, the ways he attacked other people, because he was also brilliant, and sometimes kind and insightful. Now I felt he’d crush me if I let him. He would tell me how little I meant over and over until I believed it. What use was his genius to me?
I was weary of going back and forth between my parents’ houses. I decided to split the remaining time before college in half, six months with each. I knew my father would not like the idea. The truth is, I would have moved back into my mother’s house, but I worried this would make him furious, and I didn’t want to leave Reed.
I’d figured out that to negotiate effectively, you must be willing to give up the thing you want, entirely, for something else; you need a fierce apathy. Since he’d said I had no marketable skills, something had shifted and loosened inside me. Things were not going to work out with him the way I’d hoped when I’d moved in.
I waited for him to walk into the hallway after lunch that weekend, sitting on the side of the door.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Yup,” he said, and sat beside me on the dark wooden bench.
“I’m sure you know how difficult it is for me to go back and forth,” I said. “The two houses are polar opposites. I’d like to split the year.” I was shaking. The trick was to make the request before revealing the underbelly, the girders and joists, the pylons.
“But you’re already at two months,” he said. “In fact, I’d like you to start coming more frequently. I don’t like the way you’ve been doing this. If you want to be part of this family, you’re going to have to be here more. You know what? Nope,” he said. “It’s not all right.” Other people sought resolution, but he could sustain a dissonant note.
He got up and started to walk away.
“If you won’t let me split it,” I said, as if in passing, “I’m going to go to my mom’s house for the whole year.”
I watched him from the corner of my eye. He seemed to deflate, all at once. I’d never negotiated with him and won.
“I—” he turned back. “Well, okay. Fine.” The winning felt uncomfortable, as though I’d wounded him.
I felt an obligation to be merciful. “Let me know which half you’d like,” I said.
“I’ll think about it,” he said, walking away.
I’d won. It wasn’t much; it was a step. I would get away. I would work toward freedom—one day, I would dangle my limbs from a car window beneath high arching branches.
Flight
In my senior year at Paly, I was elected to the position of editor in chief of the paper. Now it would be me and three others who would edit the pages and finally deliver the paper to the press late at night. The editors in chief from previous years had seemed to me impossibly mature and knowledgeable. Now we would be the ones to look that way to others.
That year, we published articles about how the school board, amid massive layoffs, had given credit cards to staff members who treated themselves to, among other things, an expensive lunch at MacArthur Park. After the series of articles came out, the head of the school board resigned.
In the middle of one week, there were technical problems.
The computer system crashed, the screens went dark, the printer became inaccessible. If the computers no longer operated and would not reboot, days of work would be lost—all of our carefully designed pages. Josh, his dirty-blond hair the color of a sand dune worn in a thick ponytail, lay down on the floor to inspect and arrange the wires. The rest of us mulled in a daze of terror and tragedy. He always managed to fix it—the computers would sputter back to life, and the printer would aspirate and spit paper again.
“Do you want to come?” he asked me, about a trip to his house to get a missing cord. I noticed Josh more closely: dimples when he smiled, wide shoulders beneath flannel shirts. He was shy, and friendly, and had loose, complicated handwriting, like the bouncing string of a kite.
“Sure,” I said, not knowing then that he lived in Portola Valley, twenty minutes away. His mother and stepfather were lawyers and had managed to get him permission to transfer to Palo Alto School District based on some provision about their commute to work.
He seemed, to me, sloppy. Too relaxed, shambolic. He could fix computers, but he was disorganized, forgetting to do his assignments for Mrs. Paugh’s English class, whereas I was meticulous, a gradegrubber. He never arrived anywhere on time, and he was hopeless with a calendar, wouldn’t have his homework and scrambled to do it in the minutes before class. (Later I would find out that he was taking applied mathematics and differential equations at Stanford, and he would be admitted to college at Stanford and MIT.)
He drove a used ‘83 Toyota Supra in incandescent teal with a pink sine wave painted along both sides. “Sorry about the paint job,” he said as we got in. He’d bought it used from a female physicist in Livermore. He had nice hands on the steering wheel.
His room had a mattress on the floor and a window looking out to a yard and the forest. There were papers and books strewn around, a stack of stereo equipment and headphones. It was large enough to seem empty and cluttered at the same time. He found the cord, and we left.
On the way back we turned onto Arastradero, a two-lane road, rough and patched, that wound beside a nature preserve.
“I’m going to show you a secret,” he said. “Hang on.”
The speed limit was twenty-five; he began to accelerate. We advanced toward a blind corner where the road rose up and then disappeared, a hill on one side, a drop on the other. The road curled back on itself, around the hill, out of sight. Another car might be advancing toward us and smash into us at the bend; a family of deer might be walking across.
He continued to build speed, shifting up: third, fourth, fifth. The car rumbled and whined.
“Are you sure you should be—”
“Don’t worry,” he yelled. “I’ve done it before.”
My mother sometimes said, There are guardian angels just for teenagers.
Oh, help me, God of Teenagers, I thought. Oh God of Teenagers.
“Hold on!” he yelled. The car scraped, the gears sang. I gripped the top of the seat belt in one hand, the door handle in the other. He shifted again, peeled around the blind curve—
And then we flew.
It was because of the uneven road—a raised portion followed by a long dip downhill. If you got up enough speed, you could catch the lip of the up and fly over the concavity, through the dots of light cast by the row of emerald trees and bushes growing alongside the road.
For me, the flight unlidded the town.
There were hidden places of freedom, and he knew them.
After we delivered the third paper a few months later, the other editors in chief—Rebecca, Nicole, Tom—and I stood together near Nicole’s car in the school parking lot in the late afternoon. Most of the other cars were gone, and copper light slanted through pine trees in between the parking spaces. In the distance I saw a couple approaching, holding hands.
It was Josh, wearing a too-big white shirt and trousers that looked like harlequin pants. I found out later he’d made them himself with scraps of cloth, first mixing up the waist and the ankles and then starting again. He strolled toward us, his legs wide and bending at impact with the ground. I didn’t know the girl. She was pretty and thin, with wavy honey-colored hair. They unclasped hands as they got closer.
“Hey, Josh,” Tom said. “We just delivered the paper.”
I felt my face muscles go slack. I had pitied him before, thinking him undesirable; now that he was with another girl, I felt shy and embarrassed and small, standing there near the two of them.
I biked home and cried to Carmen, who ran her fingers through my hair. An hour later, someone clanked open the gate. I looked over the rosebushes. Josh had never come over before, but we had friends in common, so he knew where I lived. He had a bounce in his step as he walked to the door, the white linen shirt swaying over the patchwork pants.
I invited him in and he followed me to my room. The whole thing was strange, how I hoped fervently that he’d come over, even if he’d never done so before, and now he was here.
“What’s up?” I said, standing in the middle of the room under the box-shaped lantern.
“I thought you seemed upset just now.” He stood nearby, his legs apart, his chest high.
“You were with that other girl,” I said.
“She’s older,” he said. “She goes to Stanford.”
“It’s just—I didn’t realize that I liked you and now it’s too late.”
“We’re just friends. I don’t know her that well. Anyhow the truth is—”
“What?” I asked.
“I’ve had a crush on you since freshman year. Since Living Skills,” he said. We had been partners during the section on CPR, although I had forgotten. How was it possible that someone had liked me during those years, when I was new to the school and to my father’s house and didn’t have any friends?
He leaned toward me on one foot and we kissed. Everything was perfect and fluttered open. “Bye,” he said, after that, and smiled. He walked out, his linen shirt rippling behind him, and I ran to the kitchen to tell Carmen.
“What are you going to be when you grow up?” my father asked Josh when they met. We were sitting with him on the floor in my brother’s room, near the bookshelf—the first time I’d been alone with the two of them.
“I don’t know yet,” Josh said.
“I know,” my father said. “You’re going to be a bum.”
Josh looked down.
When I told my mother, she reminded me my father had called himself a bum in high school, when she introduced him to her father, and that he sometimes used his own stories as templates for his idea of perfection.
It was a compliment, even though it didn’t seem so.
Sometimes, after dark, Josh and I would drive to the Woodside house to make out. There were no lights, but you could see the white house, the white mist and silver dew on the lawn sloping down toward the significant trees.
“He said he was going to build a slide from there to there. Into the pool,” I said, pointing up. “But he never did.”
The bedroom and the bed were still the same as when I’d stayed with my father on Wednesday nights. The mattress was still on the floor beside the television. On a dresser was a framed picture of my father and Tina at a party, her wearing a black dress. When he talked about Tina, he said wistfully that she never wore dresses, but there she was. His suits were gone from the closet.
“Follow me,” I said. I took off my shoes and ran through the wet lawn, and whooped, down the slope toward the oak trees. There was no one around. It smelled of cardamom pods, eucalyptus buttons, pepper, water, and bark. The sky was low and heavy with stars. Some stars were dim and fuzzy, and others were pointed and bright, they were messy and close, the sky demanded notice.
“He bought the house for the trees,” I said slowly, in a British accent like Laurence Olivier.
“I would have bought it for the house,” Josh said. Looking back, it was all white arches covered in moonlight, whi
te as salt. It gave me a shiver, the way it looked stark and alone.
“Me too.” I said, “but he says the house is shit.”
The trampoline was covered in leaves from the oak trees. We climbed on and jumped. There was no wall or guard around it. We hit each other in midair.
“What’s over there?”
It was a smaller house on the property, also his—empty. From up here you could see its white outline and, past that, hills. “Seven acres,” I said in the British accent.
If we didn’t go to the Woodside house, Josh would drive over to the Waverley house at night, careful not to clink the ring on the gate. He would creep through the rose garden and climb through my window into my bed, his hands ice cold because he drove with all the windows down. He would stay with me until early morning, then sneak out again through the window or the sliding glass door, and drive home again.
“What if we found out Josh was coming over every night,” my father asked at breakfast, “sneaking through the window.” I gulped, didn’t say anything, and he didn’t mention it again. I managed to convince myself he might not know.
“Are you and Josh going to the Woodside house to make out?” he asked me a few days later. Josh and I had been discovered by a gardener they’d recently hired from Australia, who was staying in the house unbeknownst to me and who’d followed the sound of music and found us one night in an empty room on the second floor. No one had mentioned the gardener was staying there. I thought of lying, or saying we’d been there only once, but the freedom I’d have if he said okay seemed worth the risk.
“Yes,” I said. “Are you okay with that?”