THIRTY-ONE

I already knew the name McNorr was not listed in the Pacific Bell White Pages.

Day by day I had been getting ready for this, flipping through the phone book, calling information.

The phone in the kitchen kept ringing, the answering machine picking up after the third ring, but I could hear what people were saying, if there was anything they could do. I tore up the junk mail, taking a liberty, figuring Mom wouldn’t mind. Then, with the Macy’s bill in my hand, I had an excuse to step into her office.

Mom’s home office tends to flow out into the dining room. She keeps multiple listing books and tax records tucked into boxes, but she prefers to spread out. A desk calendar featuring architecture of Julia Morgan perched beside an electric pencil sharpener. Mom likes a number three pencil, very sharp.

It was my way of making a deal with Fate: if I can’t do it, I shouldn’t.

I slipped off the dust cover and let it parachute to the carpet. The tough plastic cover kept the computer’s shape perched on the floor, covering nothing. The old IBM took awhile to boot up, making the usual clicks and chuckles, getting ready. When I was on-line, connected to the main computer at the title company, I entered owners/Oak, just to see if the computer’s internal watchdog was asleep.

When it said Enter passcode I knew the first part would be easy, my mother’s Social Security number. I have a memory for data like phone numbers and scientific names, and I was quick, tapping out the nine digits. But then I needed a three-letter or three-digit code. Guesswork.

I tried my mother’s maiden name, shortened to Gan or Gnt, and each time the computer was prompt in telling me Please reenter.

Maybe the McNorr family didn’t own their house, I told myself. Maybe the computer was programmed to deny all access after the third attempt.

I could hear Dad’s voice clearly in my imagination, my dad coming home early when I was home after school, first grade and already reading faster than all the others. I remembered how he sounded, singsong, telling us he was home, calling out Mom’s name.

I tried again, two-fingering the nine numbers, and then, after the dot, not Flo. I entered Ren, short for Renny.

Often I could read her mood by what she put on when she came home. A bathrobe meant she was ready to relax, drink one of her cocktails, a whiskey sour, an old-fashioned, watching trash on television. If she put on denims and her Green Bay Packers T-shirt she was going to wax floors or paint walls. When she came home that night, she put on a dress, like someone getting ready to go to a party, something dark and flowing, a dress I did not recognize.

“Something your father talked me into buying,” she said. “When we were first married and couldn’t afford it.”

“It looks nice,” I said, careful to keep my tone steady, no feeling in my voice but casual courtesy. She needed a compliment, and that’s what I would give her. But the luster had gone from her hair, and she looked frail, even her hands, chapped and thin.

“It was never in fashion,” she said, “and it was never out of fashion. I almost never wore it.”

“You rented a video?” I asked, noticing the cassette in her hand. Mom was patient with computers and could go toe-to-toe with an accountant, argue depreciation schedules and deferred payments until she got her way every time. But she was always jamming cassettes in backward and pushing the wrong button on the remote, calling my name when the screen was all dancing fuzz.

I took the cassette from her hands.

I sat in my room, on the bed, telling myself I couldn’t really hear it.

The sound of his voice pulled me into the living room.

“What we imagine might be taking place on a distant planet,” my father said. “The sort of being we dream might be thriving in a distant galaxy is living right beneath our feet.”

He knelt on one knee, smiling up into the camera. “Right here,” he said. “On our Earth.” Was it makeup? I wondered. Had he really looked so tanned, so strong? He was like an actor hired to impersonate my dad, someone too handsome, not at all the normal human being who paced up and down the living room, trying to memorize the lines he had written for himself.

“These accidents of nature have lasted five hundred million years nearly unchanged. These remarkable invertebrates are citizens of prehistory.” This was no actor. This was Dad, the enthusiasm in his voice, his joy in sharing what he knew. “When we spy a common little black ant, the imposingly named Monomorium minimum, stealing sugar from the kitchen sink, we are looking down upon one of the triumphs of the animal world, an animal so old and so perfectly adapted to its life that it has not changed since the extinction of trilobites.”

People wanted to watch cheetahs run down gazelles, the PBS executives said. Viewers loved wolves, and bears, and sharks. “Scarabs,” one assistant producer had suggested in a fax from LA. “The dung beetles of ancient Egypt. People love mummies and pharaohs. Work up that angle—the mythic sacred creatures of the Nile.”

Dad laughed off the failure of the PBS pilot of Prehistoric Future—or at least pretended to. The book it was based on was translated into six languages. You could see his faith on the screen, the way he scrambled up a cliff, the Steadicam following, so he could show the viewer a crevice in the sandstone where wasps were hibernating. “They are cold-blooded creatures, and even our mild winters make them slow down to a crawl,” he said, his shadow falling over the stones.

“When they wake,” he said, “they will not have to learn or experiment. They will not have to be told. They will know exactly what to do.”

When it was over we sat for a while.

She got up, turned off the television, and looked around at the living room, appraisingly, like someone house-sitting for a neighbor and tired of it, ready to go home.

“I told Sofia I would stay with her tonight,” she said. She made an expression of ironic fatigue. Mom used to call her Sofa, saying it was the perfect name for someone so good to lie on.

But I knew that Mom’s kindness to Sofia had little to do with Mom’s gradual acceptance of Dad’s second wife. It was a way of helping Dad, a way of working against her own feelings to do something right, even though it meant she was searching the medicine cabinet for antacid, painkillers, settling for a packet of Alka Seltzer so old the tablets barely fizzed.