THREE

Bea was sitting on the curb in front of my house, her cap off, her head small and round. It made me pause, how delicate she looked with her new hairstyle. She pulled the cap back on when my shadow fell over her. Her new hairdo was an attempt to compete with her mom’s full-color good looks, a stab at finding a style of her own.

“Your mom was worried about you,” I said.

I had never told Bea about her mom’s moment of over-friendliness with me on New Year’s Eve. I considered it one of those things that happen over the holidays that you try not to carry with you into the new year.

“Aren’t you a little warm?” Bea asked. Bea must have noticed the way I kept my arm stiff over my jacket pocket. I ignored her, pinching the end of her knit cap and pulling it off in little jerks.

I wished I hadn’t. She hung her head and examined the residue left by the street sweeper. She sat there pressing her foot into the thin layer of dried silt left by the machine that careened up and down the street on the first Tuesday of every month. If someone left a car parked by the curb on those mornings the machine had to pass by, leaving a loop of faintly ridged dust you could see for days.

Her head was as close cut as you can get without a razor. It had the soft, burry look you want to reach out and touch. Bea was wearing a piece of jewelry, a little golden horseshoe pinned over her heart. Bea was obedient to her mother in a spiritless, mildly humorous way. Once I had asked Bea why her mother was heavily preoccupied with cowboys and cowgirls, and Bea had expressed a theory. She had said that some white people did not have much ethnic identity the way other races and cultures did, and that her mom was trying as hard as she could to come up with something resembling a folk tradition.

She said, “I had a feeling you might run off and leave me. I wasn’t all that surprised.”

I had nothing to say, taking a long look at the surface of the street.

I looked okay in the downstairs bathroom, except that the whites of my eyes were red, like beet juice.

My mom hates to stand still, and she’s always running late. When she’s home she likes to plant trees, paint the garage floor with waterproof sealant, replace the rubber washers in the pipes under the sink, running nonstop. One time I came in from a long trip delivering shower stalls to Stockton and she was in my room in a sleeveless sweatshirt, vacuuming my closet, the contents of my closet all over the room. Sometimes at seven in the morning she will decide to get the hedge trimmer out, and once she cut the electric cord in two, shorting out every light in the house. I woke up and found every lamp, the microwave, the television, dead to the world.

Mom manages a title company on Solano Avenue in Berkeley, and all her friends are manic, too. At parties they stand inches apart from each other and yell nonstop about capital gains. A title company orchestrates real estate sales and guarantees that the seller is the actual owner of the property. Mom has a computer with every house and apartment building in Alameda County.

Bea and I knew we were alone because the house was so quiet, so there was no danger of interrupting a meeting between Mom and her bookkeeper/boyfriend, Webster. Webster was a cheerful man who always had a pager clipped to his jogging pants. Somehow I knew Webster was not a replacement for my dad, but only temporary, and not likely to graduate into anything beyond the service department of my mom’s life.

The house was very quiet. Ever since I had started paying rent on my room as a symbolic gesture, Mom tried to leave my room alone, but when she was in the house you knew it. She was always on the phone, managing the Western hemisphere. Sometimes I wore yellow earplugs I had bought at Payless, although I could hear her voice perfectly through a couple of slugs of sponge rubber.

Bea was sometimes dazzled by my mother, afraid Mom would have her help tear up the kitchen tile or hold a wrench while Mom ripped out the garbage disposal. Listening to Mom explain mortgage rates, sometimes Bea’s eyes would meet mine and she would give me a smile with her eyes. It was something I have never seen anyone do so well—show a feeling or thought with a look.

I folded my jacket carefully and put it in a place where it did not belong, on the top shelf of my closet. Bea watched me favor the weight in the jacket, holding it in place so it wouldn’t fall out, but she made no comment.

Her eyes asked me what I was hiding in the jacket, and my eyes looked right back.

A school bus in Los Angeles had run into a sanitation truck, and children were critically injured. A space probe was getting close to the planet Jupiter, and even though its main antenna was not responding to commands, the backup system was expected to creak into life. After that the anchorman said, “Meanwhile, in Oakland tonight …” and the story covered mainly the traffic snarls from the “fracas caused by what police are calling out-of-town visitors cruising the streets around Oakland’s Lake Merritt.” Tear gas was mentioned, plus three arrests for public drunkenness.

My phone rang as the news went on to sports, basketball, huge guys arguing with a ref, thrown out of the game. I picked up the phone and heard the jolly voice, a voice so confident it was like an actor pretending to be hearty. I could imagine the director saying, “You’re very intelligent and very sure of yourself, a man of science.”

I turned off the television with my stocking foot, popping the knob with my big toe, mouthing Dad to Bea’s questioning glance.

“I just wanted to wish you luck.” He lived in San Francisco, just across the Bay, but in a way he occupied another world entirely, always traveling to give lectures or sign books he had written.

“Confidence is the key,” said my dad, a perky, gravelly voice, a voice they could use in ads, the manly optimist. People like my dad. He talks, and they listen. Even my mother gets along with him. “You know what Napoleon said about character.”

“It’s just a test,” I said, meaning that I had taken a thousand just like it.

“Sure, but they call them tests for a reason,” said my dad. His voice had a tone of argument running through it now. There were a lot of things he wanted to say but didn’t. I had promised him that I would get the degree, that quitting high school didn’t mean I would never get an education. I wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but I now thought that quitting school had been a mistake, a result of my hurt pride and general feeling of pointlessness when Perry took all his books about military history and left town with his parents.

Maybe if I hadn’t been so angry at Mrs. Hean I would still be in school. And if Perry hadn’t moved north, and if I had been born with a different nervous system, one that didn’t feel pride and anger. I wasn’t a hopeless student, although I preferred articles about armor-piercing bullets, friend-or-foe identification codes, and howitzers, to The Scarlet Letter. Perry and I had wanted to design a tank warfare game, but our plans were interrupted when his dad got transferred, Sea/Land expanding its Seattle office. Perry’s dad was a rising expert in robot off-loaders and was going to design ways to unpack ships full of bananas and cocoa butter.

“Napoleon said, ‘Character is destiny,’” I heard myself say.

“What?” My dad was distracted by someone in the room with him, his second wife or his toddler son. I wondered if that babbling in the background was their three-year-old, unable to sleep. Or did Sofia, his young wife, engage in baby talk, sitting around in her nightie with a pout?

I repeated myself.

I had the books my dad had written, Tiny Eden and The Armies of the Earth. He beamed at me from the back cover of Prehistoric Future, a man who didn’t seem to get older from photograph to photograph. At some point in my childhood, he had gotten a little weather-beaten, a little bald, and then stayed that way, sometimes tanned and sometimes needing a shave, just back from Brazil or a conference in Copenhagen. Through the years his image smiled out at all of us, people who didn’t know as much as he did.

“That’s what he said,” my dad agreed. “Hey, we’re going butterflying on the Peninsula this weekend, don’t forget.” He had been wanting to show me the Serra Skipper, an orange-and-white butterfly of the Hesperidae family, native to three acres of serpentine outcropping along the San Andreas Fault.

My careless attitude toward the test was a front. I had been studying every night, keeping quiet about it, English grammar and the U.S. Constitution and those workbooks, how to annihilate the Graduate Equivalence Degree exam.

“You’ll call me,” he said.

Perky but commanding, the way he always is, telling me not to let him down.