27

Sometimes Dad drove off to the factory, late, after-hours. He would stay there until two or three in the morning, then sit in the kitchen with expanding files of documents he didn’t bother to look at.

Some mornings he would be out in the backyard with his hands on his hips. He showed me what he wanted to have me rake, where he wanted me to put the birdbath when it arrived. He dug a trench for sprinkler pipes. He sketched plans with a pencil, maps labeled DWARF LEMON, FLAGSTONE. He paged through catalogs of lawn furniture.

“The sod I want to get isn’t just bermuda hybrid,” he said. “It’s going to be hybrid bermuda hybrid.”

“Maybe we should be thinking drought resistance,” I suggested. “Sage and poppies.”

He liked that, looking at me over his glasses, his face gaunt and hungry. “Juniper,” he said.

He flew off to Omaha, after a layover at Denver, to meet with Find the Children, and stayed longer than he expected, helping them plan a funding drive.

Before I got my graduation photo taken, my mother drove me to George Good’s on Bancroft Avenue. I had told her that I owned a dark jacket already, and all she had said was, “Go ahead and try putting it on.” I did, and it wouldn’t button over my chest and I came down the stairs like someone tied up with a rope, swinging my arms until the sleeves gave a suspicious little rip.

My mother said, “Case closed.”

She had put on more weight and had trouble if she got up out of a chair quickly, putting her hand out to steady herself. But she was staying calm, sleeping a lot, not talking unless she could say something pleasant, or at least useful, unlike Dad, who carried the phone around with him, even to the bathroom.

My mother and I went into the men’s store, where neckties are lying under glass and men in dark suits with the slow manner of literature professors ask if they can be of any help today. It isn’t like most stores, no one to help, everyone chewing gum. The store was soundless, headless dummies in tweed suits.

“We can’t spend that much on a jacket,” I said.

I liked the jacket. It was like the blazer someone would wear in an ad for Scotch whiskey, and I looked at myself in the mirror in my bedroom. I buttoned it and unbuttoned it. I let it hang off my thumb, flung over my shoulder, the casual Californian. I draped it over my shoulders, cape-like, sleeves dangling, the French aristocrat.

I don’t like having my picture taken. I didn’t realize this until I sat there, and Mr. Quarry, the photographer, marched into the room carrying a stuffed toy bunny. He caught the look I was giving him and laughed, “It’s not for you. I take pix of little kids, too, when I’m not snapping the entire student body of every single high school in the city of Oakland.”

I sat on a hard wooden stool, the kind they have in art classes and biology labs.

“We want that back straight,” said Mr. Quarry, not even looking at me. There was an umbrella in the corner of the ceiling, something to do with reflecting light. I had been here a few times as a boy, and had never really thought about Mr. Quarry, how he smiled so much he had trouble enunciating his words, his lips so tight, the smile stuck into place.

“Okay, on the count of three. One, two. Think: sex!” And there was a flash.

“How did I look?” I asked.

“Okay, here goes another one. Pow! We’re on a roll.”

“Was that one okay?”

“Serious now, very intellectual. No, don’t smile. Turn your shoulders. Beautiful.”

“Is my hair sticking out funny? Is there food between my teeth?”

“You’re star quality all the way. Keep your chin down. Terrific. You and your folks will get a set of proofs in the mail, in a stiff cardboard envelope marked ‘photos.’ These are proofs, and will not be the finished portrait.” He spoke rapidly, mechanically, like someone running an auction.

Only at the end, as he stepped into the waiting room to see the six students who were slumped nervously in chairs, did he slip out of character. He walked me all the way to the front door, and said, leaning against the door frame, “I keep hoping about your sister, Cray.” And he didn’t even look like the same smart, brisk man, his eyes suddenly tired, looking out at the sunlight, blinking.

The look in his eyes reminded me of how I really felt, all the time, inside. It was August. Anita had been gone three and a half weeks.

Paula was leaning against a parking meter on Lakeshore Avenue. “That didn’t take long.”

I unbuttoned my jacket but left it on. “Do you like Mr. Quarry?”

“He’s not my favorite human being,” said Paula. She shrugged. “He was professional.”

“He took all my pictures in as much time as it takes to sneeze,” I said, unthinkingly borrowing one of my grandfather’s favorite phrases. “Decades from now I’ll look at my expression and I’ll see that I wasn’t ready. My face was just hanging there. I didn’t know what to do with my mouth. Or my eyes.”

“You look wonderful.” Paula rarely gave me a flat-out compliment, so I was quiet as we walked past storefronts, to the Jeep. “What are you supposed to do with your eyes—take them out?”

The top of my body was dark jacket, navy blue silk necktie. My bottom was Wrangler’s jeans, cut off experimentally just below the knee the day after school was out for the summer. “The school district should find someone who isn’t l-have-to-do-everything-in-three-seconds.”

“He was the same way with me,” said Paula. “Flash, flash, good-bye. We’ll come out looking pretty good.”

Paula and I were trying out a slightly different relationship. We tried to talk more, about various subjects. She was set to spend the rest of the summer at the Language Institute in Monterey, a crash course in German for students with special talent in language.

I had to bend to one side to hook the key ring out of my front pocket, and it took a few seconds. In that amount of time, I understood why Mr. Quarry had irritated me so much. It wasn’t only because my face would be preserved for history looking vacant and characterless. It was because he had photographed my sister.

I didn’t want Paula to go to Monterey. It was one hundred miles to the south, but in a different world, sun, dunes, and old adobe buildings, and an aquarium with sea otters. Some dark-eyed linguist would sweep Paula into his arms.

Paula was changing. She had learned enough to pass an aptitude test. She had always pretended to know a lot of languages, and now she did not have to pretend.

“Let’s give Bronto a bath,” I said, shifting into third as I accelerated onto the far right lane of 580, having a little trouble finding the gear.

“Why?”

“I’m allergic to him because he’s full of cat dander and dust. I can’t pet him very much. My eyes swell shut. If I wash him, I can be more loving to him.”

“Poor thing.” I didn’t know whether she meant the cat or me.

We were leaning over the bathtub, Bronto with his feet splayed against the sand pink porcelain. My dad had ordered this tub custom designed from a friend in the fixtures business who was on the verge of Chapter 11 and needed purchase orders. It didn’t match the yellow sink.

Bronto was making a long, low rattle, vibrating.

Some of the Palmolive dish soap from the kitchen was sprayed into the tub, a green squiggle. Bronto stopped vibrating and hunched, stiff, unmoving. The water was splattering, too cold, starting to dilute the green soap. I freed one hand to work the hot faucet.

Bronto made his move.

Paula and I grabbed him, holding him down. “This isn’t working, Cray,” she said. Bronto snaked up into the air, and I caught him. I wrestled him back down into the tub, and Bronto began a new kind of low wail. His fur was sticking up in bristling wet spikes all over his body.

“This is a bad idea, Cray,” said Paula, a new tone of voice for her, forceful but keeping her temper. We were all making noise—Bronto, Paula saying she was going to leave if this kept up, my own voice telling everyone to calm down, blood running down my arms, getting into the greenish water as it began to foam.

And I knew what Anita would say. I could hear her, so vividly I turned off the water and stepped out into the hall, Bronto a wet-spiked blur down the stairs.

What you are doing has nothing to do with the cat, Anita would say.

I almost called her name, feeling her there in the house.