Runaway

I started up in the darkness, my heart pounding. Dread sat like a weight on my chest, the taste of tin in my mouth. A roar in the distance had displaced the air, a heaviness still tremored in the earth below my futon. This was the end, a nuclear bomb on its way to NASA.

I knew what to do. I’d planned for this moment, the short interval after I knew the bomb was coming but before it hit: I would run through the dark center of the house and wake my mother, tell her the bomb was on its way and we had only a few minutes. We would hold each other and cry before we dissolved into the awful radiation and light.

I was up on my feet when I understood the sound was only a freight train. The heavy trains came through at night, longer than the passenger trains. I’d never woken up to the sound of them before.

Before this, when I was eleven, I’d started getting migraines. I knew one was coming when I looked down at my hand and part of it was invisible, or when I looked into the mirror and half my face was gone, replaced by a gray cloud with a shimmering stitch. Within twenty minutes, the first silvery, electric saw would slip down from my forehead, move through my eye and into the center of my brain.

The migraines and the fear of an impending nuclear holocaust became intertwined. A woman on NPR explained that once bombs were launched, it would not be possible to un-launch them. Our missiles were pointed at Russia; theirs were pointed at us. The Russians would have bombs trained on NASA, I thought, because it was strategically important. NASA was only a few miles from us.

That fall I became certain there would be a nuclear attack at Christmas. I also felt it was up to me to stop it, to get the adults to believe me, even though I was only eleven. One day, another migraine starting, my mother called Ron, who still worked at NASA. I hadn’t seen him for a few years. I was lying on my bed with the blinds drawn, dreading the start of the pain. My nerve endings spread out to touch every worry on the planet—each individual suffering, actual or potential.

“How you doing, kid?” Ron asked, walking into my room, where I was lying in bed, the curtains drawn.

“I’m worried about a bomb,” I said. “They’d want to hit NASA, right?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But if it happened—and I’m not saying it would, because it won’t—you wouldn’t feel anything. Not a thing. It would be like, poof. Over.”

“But in Hiroshima—”

“The bombs are a thousand times more powerful now,” he said.

“You mean, faster?” I asked. “Or covering more space?”

“Both,” he said.

“But what about just before it hits? Those minutes after we know it’s on the way but before it explodes?”

“You’d be vaporized before you had any idea. You’d be dead”—he snapped his fingers—”like that.”

“Thanks for coming by,” I said weakly. I didn’t believe anything he said. There would be at least a second when I knew it was coming, when the world still existed and I was still material. I could catch that moment if I was vigilant.

A few days later my father came over, biting triangles off an oversize Toblerone bar. He didn’t usually eat chocolate. A gift, he said, from a woman he’d just started dating.

“It’s mine,” he said, when I asked for a piece. “You know, she’s really smart,” he said. “She’s pretty too. She looks like that model, Claudia Schiffer.” Who was Claudia Schiffer?

It had been only a month or two since the last break with Tina. I figured the attraction would blow over, so I wasn’t very interested. It was too much to keep track of. But I’d never heard him talk about smart before. I hadn’t known to want both: pretty, smart. I felt as if I’d been duped, trying for pretty when pretty was not enough.

“You know, at the end of things, you forget how easy and great the beginnings are,” he said.

When the bomb didn’t come on Christmas, I became sure it would come just past midnight on New Year’s Eve. My migraines continued. My father and Mona had reserved a long table upstairs at Chez Panisse in Berkeley on New Year’s Eve, and my mother and I were invited to come along. At least she and I would be vaporized together.

My father invited his new girlfriend, Laurene, who brought a friend and arrived separately. After the party, my father would drive Mona, my mother, and me back home. I didn’t notice Laurene or her friend, and I don’t remember him introducing them, but there were many people I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. We were all about to perish.

Mona’s friends were there too, including a petite woman with short hair.

“Hello, sweetheart,” she said, leaning down to look into my eyes. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Lisa. Mona’s niece.”

“Ah,” she said. “That’s right. I’m so happy to meet you. And how old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“And that’s—what grade?”

“Sixth.”

“Well isn’t that wonderful,” she said. “And are you having fun?”

Every sound startled me. I looked around for my mother, so I could beg to go home. But she loved parties; we didn’t go to many, and when she would finally agree to leave, she had to say goodbye to everyone she’d spoken with, initiating a new round of conversations, so that the leaving was sometimes longer than the party that came before.

As I walked through the clot of mingling adults, the same petite woman found me again and asked me all the same questions. I’d never encountered a drunken adult before and didn’t understand what it was that made her forget me so soon—unless it was proof that the fabric of the world was in decay, that any minute the bomb would hit.

At midnight there was a cacophony of noise—honking horns, paper whistles like lizard tongues—and my heart flew around in the cavity of my chest. When the noise quieted, however, the dark world was still there, intact. I shook all over but felt grateful for our survival, proud, as if my worry had held the world together.

On the drive back, my father yelled at us. He said that we hadn’t paid attention to his new girlfriend. It was pouring rain. He put the wiper on full blast—his kind of car had only one thick wiper, bending and whipping back and forth like a reed in high wind.

“I didn’t see her,” I said, meekly. He had been told I was anxious about a nuclear bomb, watching for the end of the world. He knew I had migraines, in an abstract way, but he was not one of the people who knew more or soothed me. He was not involved, and now that the world had not exploded I felt relieved but also foolish.

“We were talking with everyone else, Steve,” Mona said. “We had friends there too, you know.”

“For Christ sakes,” he said. “You guys are so damn selfish. Think about how embarrassing this is for me. I told her I had this great family. But why would she want to be with me with a family like this?”

We didn’t look like a family; I hadn’t thought of us that way except for the few times I’d been together with my two parents, but I was surprised he’d admit it. It was nice to hear him say it, even in anger. He seemed to think of himself as undesirable, as if he didn’t notice his own allure, how people hung around him.

As if a woman would leave him because we hadn’t noticed her at a party!

That night I stayed over at his house, as we’d originally planned. He shook me awake several times throughout the night, crouching beside my bed in the dark and shivering my shoulder. By that time I slept in a different room, in a woven-frame bed Mona had bought for me after he painted and carpeted these rooms. “I can’t get hold of her on the phone,” he said. “Maybe she’s mad. Maybe it’s over.” He was on the verge of tears. At first he seemed distant and moody with me, as if insinuating I was to blame while also wanting me to reassure him, but then he sat on the side of my bed and put his head in his hands.

“She’s probably at a friend’s house,” I said. “I’m sure it’s okay. You can talk to her in the morning.”

“I’m so worried she’s gone. She’s never coming back.” It had been only a few hours since we’d seen her; it was the beginning of morning by now, a frail light in the sky.

“She’ll call tomorrow. You should sleep.”

“I’ll try,” he said, and walked back to his room.

For my twelfth birthday, Mona gave me a CD by Patsy Cline, with a sad song about a weeping willow and walking all alone at night. Soon after, she came to visit, and after she’d come into the house to see my mother, I followed her outside. She and I stood on the lawn. It was evening, the light was yellow, the air quiet without the lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and prop planes. Gnats bounced like the surface of carbonated water where the grass met the air.

Mona was small, five feet two, but stood as if she belonged, as if wherever she stood became her plot of land. Her small stomach poked out like a girl’s. I thought of her as both a woman and a girl. I believed she understood me and I trusted her to help me in the future. I knew her father had also left, that she and her mother had struggled with money. Unlike my parents, she’d been to college and graduate school. When she walked, she ticked her hips back and forth. She taught at a college called Bard and used words I had to look up like “amortize” and “salubrious.” She didn’t repeat the good words but said new ones each time, in a clipped way, folded into sentences, as if she expected I knew the meanings.

Now we stood in front of my house together, tips of grass catching the slanting light and becoming translucent, like backlit straw.

“If Steve doesn’t pay for your college, I will,” Mona said, apropos of nothing. College was a long way off, but it worried me in a way I had not been able to articulate to anyone, and I wondered how she knew. When he talked about college, it was often with contempt; he didn’t need it, so why would I? Also, sometimes he decided not to pay for things at the very last minute, walking out of restaurants without paying the bill, refusing to buy things other people bought as a matter of course, like furniture. Everyone in his life had been treated to his whimsy about money, offering and rescinding payments for small and large things.

Once Mona, my father, and I went shopping at a vintage clothing store in Palo Alto. Mona and I found hats and jackets we liked, and he watched us try them on. “They don’t look as good as you think. When you’re shopping in vintage stores, you start to think the things look good when they don’t,” he said too loudly, and walked off down the street, when it had seemed only a moment before that he might treat us to a hat each, at least.

“Thank you,” I said to Mona.

She walked to her car parked under the magnolia tree, waving before she drove off. I ran inside to tell my mother. My mother said, “Did she?” as if she was pondering the significance, or didn’t believe it.

At the end of sixth grade, my homeroom teacher, Joan, called me to her desk. I walked to where she was standing and braced for criticism. I’d been reprimanded often for how I dressed.

“This,” Joan said, holding one of my papers, a paragraph about Harriet Tubman. “You did something quite good here.” Joan’s glasses magnified her eyes, which were already big and watery. She spoke in an earnest voice, her lips sticking to one another.

I felt a rush of joy. It was the first time I’d been singled out for good schoolwork. I remembered how the night before, while I was writing the assignment, the words had come easily, even delightfully, as if they were greased; they slid out right, and I simply wrote them down.

So I might become smart too. And writing the paragraph had not been boring. The satisfaction I got from Joan’s praise was greater than whatever pleasure I seemed to be getting from the tattered jeans that I alternated with the miniskirts and on which I’d now written the names of all the boys I’d kissed, whose names, coincidentally, all began with a T: Toby, Tom, Trip, Taylor.

The summer before the start of seventh grade, my mother and Ilan took me to a production of A Winter’s Tale at UC Berkeley, the actors wearing modern suits. I liked Hermione, who fooled the king into thinking she was a statue. The king walked around her, speaking about her, wishing he’d been better to her. She didn’t budge until she’d heard her fill.

For the first time, I wanted the kind of clothes my mother would not object to: simple, matter-of-fact clothes that were easy to pick out in the morning, like a uniform. I resolved that in middle school I would change completely from the girl I was into a new studious, smart girl. I needed a wardrobe that didn’t distract me with choice. Jeans and button-down shirts.

The middle school was separate from the elementary school, housed near the upper field on a hill far above the mansion. Steve Smuin and Lee Shult, who had been my teacher in fifth grade, were the main teachers, and were rumored to be very strict.

Seventh grade included a geography class in which we were supposed to learn every country, ocean, sea, and landmark in the world. The assignment was to create a map, with every geographical element included. We worked continent by continent and we’d just arrived at Europe. I would spend ten hours creating this map, even though it would not be graded and was only a tool to learn the placement of the countries we would later be tested on. I spent the hours because I knew that if I made it splendid, it would be praised and pinned on the wall. I didn’t care how long it took—the anticipation of praise kept me afloat.

I was coloring in the Ionian Islands with a sea-foam green called Empire. My mother was wearing her tennis shoes, wrinkled at the toes, paint-stained cotton trousers that bagged, a sweatshirt turned inside out. Her head was cocked to one side, watching me. “You need light,” she said, and took a lamp from the painting studio she’d made by adding Sheetrock to the garage, plugged it in, and bent it over where I sat.

I finished the map that night, turned it in the next day, and Lee pinned it up facing the classroom—the only one pinned up.

At night, in addition to homework, I copied my notes into a large spiral notebook, sometimes ripping out pages and recopying if my handwriting was not neat enough. I stopped dotting my i‘s with circles, and added a sophisticated slant so my words drove forward toward the edge of the page.

Mornings, we were quizzed on the information from the day before, and then we announced our scores in front of the class to Steve, who sat at a computer and entered them without looking up, unless someone scored low enough that he gave a sarcastic look. The room would grow silent. It was as if a low score was not just academically wrong, but morally depraved; as if the low score announced one’s unwillingness to participate in the grand experiment of the school. Almost every day, someone cried.

I was afraid of Steve and this motivated me to work harder. Our poor diction and our selfishness in all its forms were what set him off. His lips were thin, his mouth was small and not fully visible through his short beard. A flash of contempt from those thin, bearded lips was enough to deflate me, sometimes for an entire day. Away from school, whenever I saw a car that looked like Steve’s blue Honda, my heart leapt into my throat, I was self-conscious and careful; I walked with a straighter spine, spoke with clearer diction, for the chance he might be watching. This continued for years, even after I’d left the school.

The work I did was not just for grades or to become smart or to go on the much-anticipated monthlong trip the eighth-graders took to Japan, but to avoid his contempt; to feel myself, never clearly but at least possibly, in his good graces. We were quizzed one morning on the Components of Culture, and I’d memorized them with a friend and a mnemonic device we invented the night before. For the first time, I got a ten out of ten on a quiz—I’d never scored well before—and Steve did not grunt with incredulity but nodded his head in approval.

For the first parent-teacher conference, a few weeks later, my parents arrived separately. The sight of my father walking into the classroom—bouncing on his toes, vibrant and young—gave me a pleasant jangle. The conferences would take place twice per year. At the time, I didn’t think about the similar effect the two Steves had on me.

We sat, the five of us: Steve, Lee, my mother, my father, me. Lee spoke, her triangle eyes winking and sparkling when she blinked. “She’s doing very well. She’s challenged herself.” They commented on the map. They commented on how I’d liked the book The Forest People, how I was prepared for quizzes and early morning tai chi. I kept silent and let them talk about me. They talked about the dramatic change from the previous year’s miniskirts and makeup. Lee’s eyes flicked between me and my mother and father. Mostly my father, who seemed to carbonate the meeting with his presence, both teachers becoming giddy near him. I worried they looked at him too much, ignoring my mother. As if he and I were the show, my mother just the shadow.

“If we expected the student we saw in sixth grade, with her emphasis on boys and clothing, we were mistaken.”

“That’s great,” my father said. “In general, I think middle school is so awful it would be better if kids just sailed around the world instead. Just put them all on a boat. But this place is an exception.”

“Yes,” Steve said. “We’ve been very pleased with Lisa’s progress here.” I tried to hide a smile. “As long as she keeps it up,” he said, before stepping out.

“We’re impressed with her dedication,” Lee continued.

I would get to go to Japan, she said, as long as I kept working at the same level.

“I’m having some trouble getting her to do the dishes,” my mother said, sinking down in her chair. “Just because she’s doing well at school doesn’t mean she should be ignoring her chores.”

“I agree,” Lee said. “At our house, the girls help do dishes; sometimes they make dinner. They also do laundry and some light cleaning.”

Lee looked at me. “Lisa, if your mom comes up with a schedule for chores, would you do your best to do them?”

“Okay,” I said. I could tell my mother was relieved. But I wanted to tell Lee that our fights weren’t really about the chores, but about the way my mother didn’t feel she had enough moral and emotional support. Even though my father was sitting there, she addressed Lee with her concerns.

My mother had already asked my father for help—not the financial kind, but for his time and energy. She said she had begged. She’d never asked him for this kind of help before, but allowed him to come and go, watch me or not watch me, as it suited him. Now, I was becoming an adolescent, and the middle school, which was an hour away by car, began at seven, which meant she had to wake up at five. She wasn’t getting enough sleep. There were other troubles too: my father’s accountant called one day to tell her my father had decided not to pay for her therapy anymore (after paying for a year); she and Ilan were fighting; I was receiving the accolades she’d worked so hard to help me earn, and yet she felt she was being treated by the school as the inferior half of my parentage.

My father refused, saying that if she wanted more help, I’d have to live with him full-time. Later, he said it was the school that had insisted that it would be better if I lived with him, because of our fights and her increasingly violent temper. She believed that if he’d helped more, it wouldn’t have come to that.

After the conference, I hoped my parents would linger. I stood in the classroom for a minute, gathering papers into my backpack; they walked out of the room into the covered walkway, my mother wearing a long skirt, boots, and a blouse, my father in a crisp white shirt and wool suit trousers. It was the kind of day with mist from the ocean hanging in the air; my mother’s hair formed ringlets, my father’s was newly cut and fell like black lacquer. From where I stood near the glass door, I could see them facing each other, talking. I didn’t care what they talked about, only that they kept talking, for the feeling of peace it gave me. I came outside to be near them, but they said they had to get back to work and, parked in different places on the school property, they left separately.

When my mother and I got home after grocery shopping, it was almost dusk; the lowering sun made a wide gold line across the street. We got out of the car and our neighbor Margaret, an older woman who sometimes watched me after school, walked over to us.

Around this time my father had offered to buy us the house we lived in, but the landlord refused to sell. I worried my mother wouldn’t own a house by the time I left for college. I thought we should convince the landlord, or find another house of equal value before my father changed his mind, but my mother did not seem to feel the same urgency. She must have told the neighbor Margaret that we were looking.

“There’s a house for sale,” Margaret said. “The brick one that looks like a fairy-tale house, at the corner of Waverley and Santa Rita?” It was only four blocks away.

“I know that house,” my mother said. “Across from the Nancy’s Quiche house?” A woman named Nancy Mueller had made a lot of money, enough to buy a huge Italian-style house, selling frozen quiche with flaky crusts we sometimes ate.

“That’s the one. It’s not on the market yet. I thought I should tell you in case you want to check it out.” She winked.

My mother thought we should drive over to take a look before it got dark. Up to the top of our street, past the dip, over a block, and then up again a block to the corner: a brick house built in a fanciful style, with a roof composed of overlapping slate tiles. The windows were paned, leaded glass; on the rooftop, the tip of a small spire twisted up in a corkscrew, like a pig’s tail. At one side of the house rose a high wall made out of the same weathered brick as the house, shaped in a curving pattern, surrounding a courtyard. At the part of the wall farthest from the house was a small built-in wooden door with a curved top and an iron latch, as in a storybook.

We peered through the gate. “Wow,” my mother said. Her face opened up and flushed, her eyes got sparkly, as if she were letting herself believe it might already be ours, the way when she had just a few sips of wine she let herself feel a little tipsy.

“He’s not going to buy it for us,” I said, to mute her excitement. “It’s too nice.”

“He might,” she said. “He’d finally have done something really good, really generous. I wish he’d just do it. Just buy it for us.”

I’d liked the feeling when he’d bought us the Audi—a miraculous improvement bestowed upon us as if from nowhere.

“He won’t,” I said. Still I hoped. How would it be if I already thought of it as mine? In this house, my mother would be happy. “Anyway, how would we afford furniture?”

“We’d figure it out,” she said.

Peering into other people’s windows made me think of the story of the match girl who stood out in the snow, lighting matches and imagining scenes in the flames, found dead the morning after the last one went out. I felt a sentimental attachment to that story ever since I’d heard it as a girl.

A few nights later my father stopped by. My mother was in the kitchen, making squash soup. She’d already told him about the house on the phone, saying she wanted it. He said he was planning to take a look with a realtor.

“You know what I told Laurene?” my father said.

“What?” my mother asked.

“I told her I come as a package.” He meant that we—my mother and I—came with him.

“She’s really smart,” he said to me, again. “Did I tell you she looks like Claudia Schiffer?” He was repeating himself again. This was frustrating, less because stories and lines twice told are boring, and more because the way he’d told it the first time, with intensity and excitement, gave me a notion the story was specifically meant for me. Sometimes he told me a secret and swore me to secrecy and later I found out he’d done the same with everyone else.

He dipped into the soup with a metal spoon, slurped. “Mmm,” he said, closing his eyes. And then, with his mouth full, “Is there butter in this?”

“A little,” my mother said absently.

At that, he spit the soup out into his hand making a gagging sound, then washed his mouth in the sink.

My father bought the house on Waverley Street for himself. Before moving in he did a few renovations. Walking around with him, as he pointed out what he would change—the floorboards, the high triangle of yellow glass, the light-blocking trellis of a wisteria vine in the courtyard—I felt embarrassed that my mother and I had wished it for ourselves. It had cost three million dollars, after he negotiated the price down. The widow who was selling it became so desperate with his slow pace, he recounted to my mother after he’d bought it, that she had been willing to sell it, finally, for less than she wanted to. He would keep the house in Woodside, which he hoped to tear down anyway in favor of the trees and the land. My mother thought his haggling with the owner was wrong, and was hurt that he’d bought for himself the very thing she’d wanted. It was sad, but it was not unexpected, perhaps, and it was also a compliment: she had good taste; she found the best things first.

Laurene moved into the house on Waverley. One weekend day a few weeks later, I walked over to see them and found her upstairs putting on exercise clothes. She was wearing a new ring. “We got engaged,” she said, and held out her hand. The ring was an emerald-cut pink diamond. “I’ve been proposed to twice before this,” she said. My father was at the grocery store, but I ran out to him when he returned. “I’ve seen the ring,” I said, when he came in through the gate. “Congratulations.”

“She could buy a house with it,” he said, “but don’t tell her,” as if he worried that she might leave, knowing how much the ring was worth. He brushed past me to go into the house and put the juice into the refrigerator.

Sometimes after that I’d walk over to the house on Waverley when Steve and Laurene were out in the midafternoon. They always left the doors unlocked. I went in through the door that opened into a small entrance room and then the kitchen. Continent-shaped blots of sun shone on the wall. It was calm here. A mourning dove trilled high low, high low, the second note seeming to sway the patch of light.

There was a box of Medjool dates on the counter. Beside it was a wooden box of bing cherries from a farm nearby that were allegedly also sent to kings, shahs, and sheikhs, the stems tucked under the fruits, arranged in perfect rows beneath a layer of waxed tissue paper, as shiny and black as beetles.

There was a bowl of ripe, flushed mangoes. When my mother and I bought mangoes, we bought only one because they were so expensive. Here mangoes were unlimited.

I roamed the house. The widow who’d owned it before had left cans of paint in the pantry along with bags of brushes, empty cans of nails, bottles of oil, and instructions written on scraps of lined paper in a fine, tilted cursive.

The house felt alive to me. I walked into the hallway that looked out into the courtyard. It was basically my house, I told myself. It was my father’s house and I was his daughter. I was pretty sure I was allowed to be here, but I still didn’t want to be caught snooping.

The Rinconada house would rattle with the many small earthquakes and the heavy trains, the window glass singing. Here, it was still. It was a few more blocks away from the trains, out of sight of Alma and the tracks. The walls were thick and dense, the doorways and hallways rounded and wide, like Spanish mission buildings.

I walked up the stone steps to the second floor, holding on to the thin iron railing beneath a long paper lantern that twirled slightly in the breeze, feeling as if a string at my sternum pulled me up to Laurene’s closet and her chest of drawers, the pressure inside me growing. I longed to understand her—to see if I could be more like her.

A couple of weeks before, I’d asked her, “If you had to choose one, would you buy clothing or underwear?” I’d gotten the idea from a Shel Silverstein poem—you were supposed to ask people to determine their predilections for the inner or outer life, the soul or the skin.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Do you mean, would I rather have nice clothing or nice underwear?”

“Yes,” I said, losing my conviction that whatever she said would mean something about her character.

“Nice clothing,” she said.

She showed me how she could still do the splits, dropping down to the floor. I observed everything about her, including how, when she talked, she used a group of words I’d never heard people use in speech before—gratify, garner, providence, interim, pillage, marauding—slipping the words into her sentences like jewels. When she said marauding, she elongated the vowels in a way that made it sound like adulthood and self-sufficiency. Her eyes were icy blue, flat, and small. Sometimes it hurt me to look into them; I wasn’t sure why. She said she was legally blind without glasses or contact lenses, the world reduced to shapes.

Her friend Kat lived nearby and sometimes came over when I was there. Both of them were in their late twenties. When she and Kat talked about losers, which they did sometimes, Laurene made an L shape with her thumb and index finger and moved it around. When Laurene said the word, with her clear diction, I knew there was nothing I’d rather not be than a loser. Laurene was from New Jersey, and I got the idea that people were more normal in New Jersey. They didn’t have Birkenstocks and gurus and talk of reincarnation. Around this time, she said a man had followed her around the Palo Alto Whole Foods, saying he was reincarnated from a bumblebee.

Now, upstairs in the house in the muffled silence, I wanted to find out her secret.

I walked into her closet, which had a full-length mirror, a chest of drawers, a rod for hanging clothing. A carpenter had come to build these closets with light-colored wood. On the chest of drawers were two tubes of lipstick: one mauve, the other a light, shimmering pink, both carved by repeated application into pointed crescents so high and thin the top might break off. I tried the mauve. It felt wet and smelled of wax and perfume.

I opened her underwear drawer. Different cottons—white, nude, black—lumped together the way mine were lumped at home. In the depths of the far-right corner was a loop of ivory. I pulled the loop—a web of elastic and lace unfurled in front of me. A garter belt. I knew what it was, maybe because I’d seen one in Playboy, but I’d never seen a real one before.

In the drawer below was a pair of charcoal wool shorts I recognized from a photograph in which she stood in the Stanford Quad, her hair bright blonde and cascading around her face, her feet turned out at ten and two from the heels, one in front of the other, confident. My father kept the picture on his desk. My mother liked candid photographs; I liked them head-on, as in a magazine. I wanted to be Laurene, and if I couldn’t be her now, I wanted to be her later.

I slipped off my trousers and pulled on the shorts. They bagged around my legs; I had to hold them up with one hand so they didn’t slide off. I put on one of her shirts, a sleeveless cream with black stitches around the neck and arms. I tucked the shirt into the baggy shorts, then looked at myself in her mirror from the side and back, hoping that changing the light and the angle would improve the form. I turned my feet out like hers, ten and two, heels in a line, one in front of the other, hid my nail-bitten hands behind my back.

I pursed my lips. I looked nothing like the person in the photograph.

I took everything off, rearranged the lipsticks. I slipped the garter belt into my pocket, walked down the stairs, down the hallway of windows, past the pantry, through the kitchen, and out the door.

That spring, my father invited me on a trip to New York with him and Laurene.

“She’s a great dancer,” he said on the flight. Laurene and I flanked him in the leather seats at the front of business class. He looked at her and ran his hand over her hair the way you might with a sleeping child.

“I’m an all right dancer,” she said, but I knew she must be better than I was, as he’d seen me perform once in a concert and didn’t mention that I danced too.

Laurene had taken me to lunch once before this in her white VW Rabbit convertible, taking time out from Stanford’s business school, where she was in her final semester. She seemed rushed, didn’t talk to me or look at me as she drove, but looked straight ahead, as if she wasn’t sure how to relate to a child. She held the gearshift differently from my mother, with less grip, pushing it forward with the heel of her hand. She was pretty, but a different pretty from Tina, who didn’t wear makeup and who didn’t seem interested in the way she looked.

We walked through the Stanford Shopping Center. She walked fast, with her feet pointed out to the sides; she wore black suede shoes with metal clocks on the tops. “Let’s go to the Opera Cafe,” she said. “They make a great chicken Caesar salad without much fat.” This talk of fat was new and enticing—another, more sophisticated world I wanted to be part of in which women watched the amount of fat they ate. I didn’t think of myself as thin or fat. I didn’t go out to eat very often, and looked forward to sampling one of the outlandishly tall cakes so large they looked unreal, like sculptures by Claes Oldenburg. I hoped we’d get more than salads.

But we had to eat quickly; we didn’t have time for dessert. Laurene’s blonde bangs fell over her forehead, curling out from a cowlick at the hairline. When she touched objects, she did it firmly, with precision, as if she knew what she wanted to take before she touched it. I liked the way she held the menu, the steering wheel, the tube of lipstick.

At first, New York City smelled of yeast. Warm pretzels, exhaust, steam.

Laurene took us to Wall Street and showed us around the trading floor, where she’d worked just out of college.

“They used to switch the phones,” she said, of a circular bank of white telephones, each one with a white twisting cord hanging down, “as a joke. They’d hang the earpiece of one phone on the base of another, crossing the cords. So when someone needed to do a trade, and they were in a rush, they’d pick up a phone, dial the number, and then realize they were using an earpiece that didn’t match the keypad.”

Laurene’s friend Shell, a large brunette woman who wore red lipstick and spoke loudly, with a New York accent, came to visit us at the suite at the Carlyle Hotel. She stood beside the piano, playing a few notes. They talked about people I didn’t know, calling them “total losers.”

That afternoon, my father said, “There’s something I want to show you two.” We took a taxi to a tall building and then a freight elevator with blankets for walls up to the very top. My ears popped. The elevator opened onto a dusty, windy space, full of watery light.

It was an apartment at the top of a building called the San Remo. It was still under renovation, and it took me a few minutes to grasp that it was his apartment. The ceilings were at least twice the height of ordinary ceilings. Pieces of cardboard covered the floor; he lifted one up to show us the marble below, a glossy deep black that also lined the walls. He told us that I. M. Pei designed the apartment in 1982, and when one of the quarries ran out, they’d had to find another one and replace the old marble with the new marble. Otherwise the blacks wouldn’t match. Construction had lasted six years and it was still unfinished.

“It’s incredible,” Laurene said, looking around.

Other than a bank of windows along two sides, all the surfaces in the apartment were black marble. I swept up a line of dust with my finger; the marble gleamed beneath. We stood in the main room, with its triple-height ceilings and windows, gaping fireplace, black walls and floor. The staircase looked wet, dripping down from the second floor, each level of stair opening wider than the last, like molasses poured from a jar. He said it was based on the design of a staircase by Michelangelo.

It was hard to tell how a person could possibly be comfortable in such a place. It was hard-edged like rich people’s apartments in movies. It was opulent, the opposite of the counterculture ideals he talked about, a showcase made to impress. Yes, he had the Porsche and the nice suits, but I’d believed he thought the best things were simple things, so that looking at this apartment felt like a shock. Maybe his ideals were only for me, an excuse not to be generous with me. Maybe he was bifurcated, and couldn’t help trying to impress other people in the obvious ways rich people do, even as I’d thought, with his holey jeans, his strange diet, his emphasis on simplicity, his crumbling house, he didn’t care.

“It was supposed to be the ultimate bachelor pad,” he said sadly. “Oh well.”

We went out onto the balcony, a line of stone balustrades like candlesticks wrapped around the corner. From up this high, New York smelled like nothing. The wind made a sound like a sheet flapping. Below us, Central Park looked like it was cut out of the concrete.

“It’s a great view, isn’t it?” he asked.

“It is,” I said.

“This is amazing, Steve,” Laurene said, with a lightness to her voice I wished I felt too. He grabbed her and I looked away. I felt stuck, unable to talk, my feet heavy on the ground.

Soon after I returned, my mother and I bought a couch, a chair, and an ottoman at the mall.

Wings made of white feathers hung in a children’s store window display. “When I was a kid, my mother told me all children are born with wings, but the doctors cut them off at birth. The scapulae are what remain. Isn’t that strange?”

We walked past Woolworth’s, with its tubes of watermelon-flavored lip gloss and packets of press-on nails, past the restaurant Bravo Fono, where we still went sometimes with my father, and into Ralph Lauren. The store was half outside. Cement planters came up to my waist and held impatiens with swollen green seed pods that popped open when I squeezed them, spraying tiny yellow seeds and springing back to a horizontal curl.

“Hey, what do you think of this couch? Do you like it?” she asked. It was two cushions wide. I sat; the cushions did not spring back, but sank slowly under my weight.

“I like it,” I said. “Is it expensive?”

She looked at a price tag pinned to the side and took a sharp breath.

I knew she hated the couch we had, the one we’d taken from Steve’s house years before; it was nothing she would have chosen for herself. It made her feel, I think, like her life was composed of the castoffs of other lives.

She bought the couch, along with its matching chair and ottoman, on her new credit card. It was, by far, the largest purchase we’d ever made. To reduce the cost, she took it in the natural cotton linen it came in—the color of sand—instead of having it re-covered. We were both giddy afterward, as if the mall was a different place to us now, opened up.

We must have more money, I guessed. Why else was she buying big things? She’d wanted a new couch for a long time. Where was she getting the money? I didn’t know. She said no, always. This time, yes. If I asked why, it might pop. She seemed happy and confident, and I thought this is how we should have been at the mall all along, and maybe this is what the future would be like.

At Banana Republic we tried on the same jean jacket in different sizes. It was nicely boxy, with a collar made of stone-colored corduroy. I tried not to act excited; I knew not to push. But she bought them both. Both! Compared with a couch, two jackets were nothing. We walked out of the store with the weighted paper bags.

“That,” I said, pointing to a sweater and skirt in a shop window. The small, minimalist shop sold expensive clothing from Switzerland. The long skirt was dark gray cashmere, the sweater was made of maroon angora with fabric teddy bears appliquéd. “That’s the kind of thing you should wear.” It maybe could have done without the bears, I thought.

“Where would I wear it?” she asked.

“Anywhere,” I said. “To parent-teacher conferences. Out to dinner or lunch.” I imagined another life for her.

“I don’t really like it,” she said.

“Just try it on. You can’t tell on the hanger.” I’d heard someone say that in another shop. When she came out of the changing room, still ambivalent, she looked exactly right. I insisted, the saleswoman insisted, and she bought the set.

When we were almost home, we stopped at the stop sign of the four-way intersection before the turn to our block. My mother began to make the turn, but continued to spin the car past ninety-degrees, missing our street as if by accident. “Oops,” she said, the steering wheel kinked as far as it would go.

She made a full circle, and we came back to our starting position. But again, when the time came to turn, she missed it.

“Oops again!” she said, laughing.

She spun us round and round, as if we were caught in a vortex: sidewalk, lawn, tree, house; sidewalk, lawn, tree, house.

“Turn now!” I yelled each time we approached our street.

“I just … can’t seem … to turn!” she said. Bushes grew halfway up the houses, so they looked like faces with beards, watching us as we spun. She went round and round until we were both dizzy, and then—finally—she made the turn and took us home.

At home that night we heated up chicken potpies in the microwave and watched Masterpiece Theatre sitting on the floor in front of the television. She wanted to read Andy Warhol’s diaries out loud to me in bed before sleep, even though I was too old to be read to, and I let her.

“You’re a Simpleton,” I said, as a joke, a few days later when we were stopped at a gas station filling up and she said she liked the smell of gasoline. I’d never called her that before. I might have gotten the word from the Mock Turtle’s Story in Alice in Wonderland, parts of which she also liked to read aloud to me. When I said the word, I wanted her to deny it. I wanted her to get mad at me: how dare I call her Simpleton—it wasn’t true. But she only laughed.

A couple months later, the new couch, chair, and ottoman arrived upholstered in the dun-colored linen with down-filled cushions and pillows. She gave the old ones away. She wore the skirt and sweater together a few times, for me, and then she must have given those away too. I called her Simpleton when she made mistakes—forgetting directions, insisting that Italian ice cream wasn’t different from or better than the American variety. It made her laugh. I’d been spending more time with my father and Laurene, absorbing their ideas, their sophistication. I’d been to New York, I understood the importance of low-fat, watched Laurene add oil carefully and sparingly to salad dressings. I’d learned that gelato was different from, and better than, ice cream.

One day, driving somewhere, I noticed a speck of paint on her jeans she hadn’t noticed to wash off and said it again: “You’re a Simpleton.” This time she burst into tears, pulled over, and leaned on the steering wheel, surprising us both, and I never said it again.

My father’s wedding took place in Yosemite, at the Ahwahnee Hotel.

Kobun, a Buddhist monk my parents knew, officiated. During the ceremony, Steve and Laurene stood before three large plate-glass windows through which you could see the mountains, the forest, and the falling snow.

Laurene’s dress was ivory silk; my father wore a jacket and bow tie with jeans, as if he were one of those puzzles where each part of the body is clad in a different outfit.

That morning Laurene had been downstairs in the hotel lobby wearing black leggings with a flower pattern and black-rimmed glasses. In my idea of weddings, brides hid before the ceremony, worried about their beauty, and I liked the way she was playful and among us.

Kobun had asked several people to give short speeches, and I was to be one of them.

There were only forty people invited to the wedding, and afterward we would go for a hike in the snowy forest, wearing fleece jackets they’d given out as gifts. The dinner would be in a room with rectangular tables arranged in a U-shape, a classical guitar performance, and bouquets of wheat.

My mother wasn’t invited, but my father called her the day after the ceremony, something she didn’t tell me until years later. When she did tell me, the fact of the call surprised me because I didn’t realize they were in touch; they could be distant and then close in a pattern I didn’t understand.

My father gave a speech in which he said that it wasn’t love that brought people together and kept them together, but values—shared values. It was delivered to the crowd and to Laurene in a tense way, like a lecture, or an admonition. A few more speeches and then Kobun called my name, and I walked forward toward my father and Laurene, who stood in front of the windows, a thick snow falling slowly behind them that gave the scene the look of being a snow globe. I was holding the paper on which I had written something about how it was rare to get to see your parent get married (a friend suggested this idea), and as I walked toward them, reading the speech at the same time, I started to cry. My father gestured me closer, and I hugged the two of them until Laurene whispered, “Okay, Lis. C’mon.”

I’d been looking forward to the wedding: I would get to eat the food and cake (it was shaped like Half Dome, and tasted of banana), and there might be dancing (there wasn’t). I was prepared for these details, the surfaces of the ceremony. I was unprepared for how it would feel to be this close to the buzzing wire of what I wanted. I hoped to be the very center of it, the matchstick girl who had imagined a scene into being. This wedding was for me. I would be the daughter of married people, even if Laurene wasn’t actually my mother.

When the ceremony was over, however, I felt empty. I was not the center of the affair. I wasn’t invited into most of the wedding photos. My father seemed absorbed with Laurene and everyone else. During the dinner after the ceremony, I braided Laurene’s hair, standing behind her at the table.

Later I wandered down to the lobby and looked around the gift shop. I found a small photo album, the cover made of a piece of cloth that looked like a tapestry of pixelated trees.

“Would you like to pay with cash or charge it to your room?” I’d learned at some point that hotels let you charge to rooms. The woman seemed earnest, not aware of my scheme.

“The room,” I said. I zinged with excitement, my palms got clammy, at the prospect of having a photo album. But my father might see it on the bill. I hoped he would be too busy to notice, or that he had too much money to notice money.

I was sharing a hotel room with my father’s sister, Patty, the sister he grew up with who was also adopted. My father wasn’t very close with Patty—he’d become closer to Mona in the years since they’d found each other in adulthood. I felt upset to be rooming with her, as if it meant she and I were in the same category.

Most of the guests left on the Sunday after the wedding, except for Mona and her boyfriend, Richie, who would stay for a week with my father and Laurene, sharing a honeymoon. Richie and Mona would marry the next year at a ceremony at Bard College, and also share a honeymoon with Steve and Laurene, but then it seemed to me that there was no reason, if Mona stayed, that I could not stay too. Kobun and his girlfriend, Stephanie, were also still around, but would be leaving that afternoon.

“If you’re staying, I want to stay,” I told my father.

“Maybe,” he said. “Let me think about it.” He seemed conflicted, the way he rarely seemed when he said no to me.

But a couple of hours later he said I had to ride home that afternoon with Kobun and Stephanie.

Before I left, he requested the bill for the room I’d shared with Patty at the main desk in the lobby. I stood near him. I didn’t want to be anywhere but at his side.

He looked through the bill and frowned.

“Is this yours?” he asked, pointing at the charge.

“It was Patty,” I lied. I was afraid of him, deeply sad to leave, and terrified of what he would say to me if he found out it was me. “I told her not to get it, but she did.”

Shortly after the wedding, a fight that had been simmering between my parents on and off for more than a year exploded. Before this I had hardly been aware they were fighting, only that the rapport had cooled between our house and theirs. I attributed this to the fact that my mother was having a hard time with her own life. A few years before, my father had hired a man to do gardening at the Woodside house. The same man had recently started to do some work as an assistant gardener at the Waverley house too, and my mother had found out. My mother heard through acquaintances that this man had been accused by his children of sexually molesting them, and the issue of my proximity to him became a catalyst for a larger disagreement between my parents. They had become friendly again over several years without resolving or discussing how my father had neglected us years before, how he had not protected me when I was little. And now he was not protecting me again, and it must have reminded her of his other abandonments and neglect and made her enraged. When they discussed it, she lost her temper and she could hardly speak. She had asked him several times already to fire the man, but he refused.

The final argument happened one evening when I went over to the Waverley house for dinner on my own. My mother knocked on the door, white with rage. It seemed to me completely out of the blue. I watched as the two of them argued, both standing outside the gate on the sidewalk on Santa Rita near her car. I understood the fight was about the man, but it didn’t make sense to me why she should be so upset, why she should be almost incapacitated with anger over what seemed to me to be such a small issue. I remember wishing she would go away, stop humiliating herself.

“How dare you. How dare you,” she repeated, crying. “Promise me you’ll fire him.”

“Nope,” he said. He stood tall, impassive. He looked good, a new black T-shirt, jeans that had not yet sprouted holes. She was wearing shorts and tennis shoes.

Next to him she looked ragged and disheveled. When she spoke, sobbing, she was hardly intelligible. Looking back, I’m ashamed to see that I just wanted her to act neat and quiet—to preserve the semblance of friendship and normalcy that had been established between them. I didn’t want my father to think I was anything like her. If he did, he might not want me. She seemed too dramatic. Crazy, even. I wanted her to feel less, express less. I was embarrassed by the ways her feet kicked and her face contorted.

At some point she got into her car, slammed the door, and drove off. He shrugged, walked back into the house. I followed, pretending along with them, for the rest of dinner, that nothing had happened.

After that night, my father no longer stopped by our house on Rinconada, and my mother wasn’t invited for dinner at Waverley again. The gardener continued to work for my father, and my parents stopped interacting.

The news that Laurene was pregnant hit me like a slap. I thought they’d wait to conceive—for several years, at least. Although I could not have articulated it, I thought I was what they wanted. A house, a woman, a man, and a daughter: now, finally, with the wedding ceremony over, we might enjoy it.

They invited me for dinner. We ate the same food as on other days: vegan food. On this night, vegetable sushi with brown rice. He’d kissed her on the lips like he was Mr. Passion when he came in the door; she had to bend back awkwardly and steady herself on the island. It looked painful for her neck. I said so afterward, and he laughed.

He said that he was a good kisser, and lots of women told him so.

“It looked more like suction than a kiss,” I said.

Laurene raised her eyebrows and nodded at me, in agreement, behind his back.

Now we were in the den, and they had become serious. I wondered if I was in trouble.

I sat on a chair. Laurene sat on an ottoman, my father on the floor.

“We’re having a baby,” he said. I looked at Laurene to see if it was true. She nodded.

The light was dim in that room at dusk—only the lamp on his desk and a weak one overhead and royal blue in the windows.

“That’s great,” I said. I felt the muscles in my face melt and twitch so that I wasn’t sure anymore what the resting position of a face was supposed to be and how to get back to it.

“We’re very excited,” he said, and put his arm around her.

I walked home. The lights were on, two yellow eyes. The house was small now, and far away. It was nothing, my mother was nothing. She was not part of the family and new baby and she couldn’t stop it.

“They’re having a baby,” I told her the next day in the car, both of us looking forward so she couldn’t see my face. I’d kept it to myself, the night before, crying in bed after she said goodnight. When I was with her now, I felt as if I was too much like her, the part of the family that was set aside.

“Good for them,” she said.

“But I didn’t think they’d want—they never mentioned having a baby,” I said.

“That’s why people get married,” she said. “To have babies.”

This baby would have my father from the start, and the right mother. It was born into luck. The baby was not to blame; this made it worse, somehow. I wished that I were that baby instead, and that Laurene was my mother. Soon Laurene’s stomach became round and tight as a drum. Her belly button poked out like a doll’s ear.

I went over to the house, into my father’s study, and saw my father had typed out the name—Reed Paul Jobs, three names, three syllables—in many typefaces, fonts, sizes, filling his computer screen. Garamond, Caslon, Bauer Bodoni. He wanted to make sure the name would be good enough for a whole life of use.

My brother was born with long fingers and curling fern hands that grasped my finger, miniature fingernails with white tips. How I loved him! It was involuntary; I couldn’t help it. The way he smelled, his proportions—his perfect heels and loose-skin knees. I went over to visit him after school and on weekends. I changed his diapers. I wondered who he would become. Curled on his stomach, I noticed the downy hairs on his back, his abdomen flaring out under his ribs like a roasting chicken. Dark straight hair grew around a soupy area on his skull that pressed in like the center of a pie. His lips were pink and made of a different kind of skin, like a clean pink worm that contracted. His tiny diapers made him seem even smaller, spindly thighs and tiny feet shooting out of a big white casing. He had an old, dreamy look in his gray eyes, like he came from a wiser place.

Sometimes, in the evenings, creditors called. “What’s your name,” my mother said, when she picked up the phone, frowning into it. “I want to get your name. You’re not allowed to call at this hour. I’ll report you.”

“Who was it?” I asked when she’d hung up. At the time I believed they were people calling to sell us things. Later I learned it had been the purchase of the couch, chair, and ottoman at Ralph Lauren that day that led to the debt she could not pay, then to the stress of creditors calling; and later, when I was in high school, unable to pay off the cards, she went through bankruptcy.

I heard her complain about the carnations Ilan sometimes brought—he might have sprung for better flowers. Later she told me that one night when he said he had to work late, she bought a ticket to an opera at Stanford, went alone, and saw him there with another woman. Over the course of the next couple of years they were off and on, sometimes fighting, sometimes separated or back together, broken up for the last time before I started high school. When they weren’t getting along, she and I fought more too.

“You know Ilan’s pinkies? How they twist inward?” she asked me one day in the car. The second joint of both his pinkie fingers bent in at a thirty-degree angle. “It’s a sign that someone isn’t faithful.”

I felt myself above the menial tasks she wanted me to do. I felt humiliated and bored taking out the trash or doing the dishes, and so I would perform these tasks with lethargy and carelessness, doing a sloppy job and then rushing back to my room to work at the earliest opportunity, lazy about anything that didn’t result in academic praise. One night she was still in the kitchen when I came back from dragging the trash to the canister at the side of the house, waiting for me with an air of expectancy.

“Look at the counter,” she said.

I looked for the sponge, but she’d already grabbed it and wrung it out, and was furiously wiping crumbs on the countertop into her cupped hand.

“All I’m asking,” she said, “is that you do the dishes and wipe the counter. Dishes, counter. Get it?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll do it next time.”

“No, you’ll do it this time,” she said.

“But it’s already done,” I said.

“You need to change the behavior.”

“I will,” I said. “I promise. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, mimicking me in a high baby voice. “Little Miss Princess,” she spat.

At the beginning of these mounting arguments, I would try to reason with her, in case I could calm her down. Later, when it was clear she wouldn’t stop, when it was clear that the fight would go on and on, I stood very still and stopped speaking.

A few times before, the phone had rung at the beginning of a fight, interrupting it; she took the call in her room, where I could hear muffled noises. Her friend Michael or Terry had called. Later, when she came to say goodnight, she was no longer upset. I was innocent, I thought, her unhappiness nothing to do with me—she was lonely. This is what I believed and told myself when she started screaming, and it was one of my excuses for being lazy with the dishes, and unhelpful around the house, and contemptuous of her.

“Do you think I’m your maid?” She said it through her teeth, snarling.

“Mom, call a friend,” I said. “Please.”

Besides me, the people my mother yelled about during our fights were Jeff Howson, my father’s accountant, who sent the monthly child-support checks that I was acutely aware were lifelines and, increasingly those days, Kobun. (Compared with how much she mentioned these two men, she rarely brought up my father.)

“Kobun said he’d take care of us, then left me to rot.” Her voice was almost gone. “That crook,” she said, wrinkling up her face.

I didn’t know what she meant. As far as I knew, Kobun didn’t have much to do with us. He was just a Zen Buddhist monk my parents had once known, who’d officiated at the wedding, and who hardly spoke.

Only later would I learn that because her own mother was mentally ill and my father was unresponsive, it had been Kobun my mother had turned to when she got pregnant, asking him what he thought she should do.

“Have the child,” Kobun had advised. “If you need help, I’ll help you.” But in the intervening years he had not offered any help. No one had promised as much as Kobun or had seemed, to my mother at the time, as trustworthy. At the time, my young father had also trusted Kobun, who told him that if I turned out to be a boy, I would be part of a spiritual patrimony, and in that case my father should claim me and support me. When it turned out I was a girl, my mother later found out from others in the community, Kobun had told my father he had no obligation to care for my mother and me.

The next evening, we had the same fight.

“Oh, poor me, poor me,” she said in the mimicking baby voice. And then, yelling, “You have no idea what I’ve done for you.”

“I promise I’ll do a better job,” I said. “I’ll do the dishes and I won’t complain at all. And I’ll do the counters right.” She wanted me to wipe hard, and hold my hand underneath the spot the sponge swiped to catch the crumbs.

“It’s not the counters, you ignorant little shit. It’s this fucking life.” She began to sob, taking in big breaths like gusts of wind.

I stood very still and tall and kept my face the same. I couldn’t feel anything below my head. I was standing like a house I saw in Barron Park, knocked down with the exception of the facade: viewed from any angle other than straight-on, there was nothing to it. No rooms, walls, substance.

“I’m very sorry,” I said again. “I mean it.”

“Sorry means nothing!” she screamed. “You have to prove it. You have to change the behavior now.”

She hit her flat palm against the kitchen cupboards, against the counter—slap, slap. She took another long, deep breath through a closed throat as if she had asthma, as if she could hardly breathe.

“You know what I am?” she screamed. “I’m the black sheep. I’m the one who has done everything for you. But nobody gives a shit.” She extended the “shit,” at full volume, for a long time, gravelly, so I was sure the neighbors, the whole quiet street, would hear.

“I’m the Nothing,” she yelled, starting to cry. “First with my family, now with you and Steve. That’s what I am. The Nothing.”

She turned on a lamp in the kitchen, a gesture remarkable for how ordinary it was in the midst of this. On nights we weren’t fighting we turned on lights in other rooms, and the house glowed on the dark street beside other glowing houses.

“No you aren’t,” I said, deadpan. My feet hurt.

“Fuck you, universe. Fuck you, world.” She stuck out her middle fingers on both hands, pointed at the ceiling.

She went and stood by the screen door, her back up against it, sliding down it so that she was squatting with her head in her arms, the way she did when the fight was nearing an end.

“I don’t want to go on,” she said, crying softly.

She made it sound like it could just happen, not going on, the way my ankle sometimes gave out and curled under when I was walking and I fell.

Without her I would cease to exist; there would be only emptiness.

I crouched down beside her and put my hand on her arm. “What do you mean, you don’t want to go on?” I asked.

“This life,” she sobbed. “I can’t do it any longer. You have no idea what I’ve been through. You have no idea how it’s been, raising you, with no help from anybody. I’m trying so much, but I don’t have enough support. It’s too hard.”

Every denouement felt like the end of a long, tiring journey, disorienting, gravityless. Sounds around us returned. Smells. By that time I could no longer feel the outline of my body.

She stayed on the floor in front of the screen. The fight was over. She wasn’t angry anymore, only sad, and I couldn’t imagine, now that the storm had raged through and left her weak and defeated, how I had ever wanted anything but good for her.

As my mother foundered, I fantasized about living at my father’s house. To traipse around the clean white rooms—still with hardly any furniture—and to sample from the bowls of unlimited fruit. Laurene was starting a business called TerraVera with a petite man from business school, making vegan wrap sandwiches on whole wheat lavash bread. She was chipper when I asked how her day was when she walked in before dinner, with the mane of blonde hair, a leather satchel she carried with papers. Her jeans were cut unevenly on each side, a frayed line at different heights above her ankles, which stuck out below, like the tongues of bells.

Around that time I also began to walk with my toes facing out. My feet, on their own, pointed straight. I was different when I walked this way, more in charge, more promising, more deliberate.

The fights continued for months, becoming more frequent, so that soon they happened almost every night for several hours. When we were together but not fighting, I watched her face for when her mood might turn.

I would tell my teachers, Lee and Steve, of particularly bad fights. This worried my mother, who was mortified if others were talking poorly about her, and who then started bringing Lee up in our fights, mocking me for running, always, to complain to Lee.

She hit the wall, hurt her hand, yelled so that blood vessels rose around her face, her neck turned into sinews. Doors slamming, charcoal half-moons below her eyes. A couple of times she grabbed the top of my arm and shook it hard.

“I shouldn’t have had you,” she said one Saturday afternoon, toward the end of a fight. “It was a mistake to have a child.” She wept, not looking at me, then got up, went to her room, and shut the door.

I knew other parents didn’t say such things to their children. If I’m ruining her life, I thought, why does she often follow me around from room to room, as if we’re chained together?

I tiptoed quickly to the front of the house, went out the front door, down the steps, across the lawn, onto Rinconada toward Emerson.

Nobody was out in the quiet afternoon, the houses like blank faces, cars gone or in driveways. I walked quickly to the corner, self-conscious of how I was walking, wearing a skirt and flat shoes, looking back in case my mother was coming. She probably hadn’t left her room or even noticed I was gone.

I turned east, south, east, toward Embarcadero, toward Highway 101. Once past the corner, where I might have gone straight, or turned, where she would not have been able to find me easily, I began to breathe. I felt elation and freedom I hadn’t expected, an exciting shiver in my knees. More than escape: relief.

I was light, becoming myself again, feeling the lines around my body where it met the still air.

I looked at my palms. It was true: my left palm was like a thicket of sticks with no clear path. The lines on my right palm were not clearly defined either, but the lifeline was better. I knew the bubbles weren’t good, but how was it possible to tell when one would happen, how far along I was on the line? I kept her vision of my future, even as I cast her off.

At some point, I had to pee. There was a round front window as tall as a person, with rosebushes planted close together on the front lawn of a putty-colored Spanish-style house. I looked both ways—no one around—and peed quickly on the dirt underneath the rosebushes.

I walked around until dusk. I’d been gone for hours, it seemed; there was nothing to do now but go home.

A block away, I saw people on our lawn and heard a sound like insects: walkie-talkies, chattering and static. Lights in our front windows, the porch light, a police car.

A woman in uniform saw me half a block away and started walking toward me. My mother stood with her legs apart on the lawn, her arms crossed.

“You’re back,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

She approached me cautiously.

The female officer spoke to my mother. A male officer, also buzzing with a walkie-talkie, stood farther off, talking into the handset, looking away.

“Thank you,” my mother said, nodding to the policewoman, who nodded back and walked toward the car.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said, after the cops were gone. “You can’t just run away.”

“You shouldn’t have yelled at me.” I stood strong, with my legs apart, like her. Some new power I wouldn’t have guessed I had.

“I’m sorry I yelled,” she said.

That night, before I went to sleep, she came into my room. She’d washed her face, and when she leaned over me and said, “I’m sorry,” she smelled like soap. “Are you hungry?”

“A little,” I said.

She cut apples and cheese in the kitchen and brought them back to my bed on a plate and we ate them together propped up against pillows with our legs under the covers. “You’ll tell everyone,” she said. “You’ll make me out to be an ogre. You’ll tell Lee.”

“No I won’t,” I said emphatically.

The next morning, I found Lee. She was behind a partition in the big classroom.

“Look,” I said, pointing to a bruise on my upper arm like a smudge of dirt. “And she told me I shouldn’t have been born.”

“She shouldn’t have said that,” Lee said. “She doesn’t mean it.”

“The fights take hours,” I said. “By the time they’re finished it’s late and I can’t focus on homework. I ran away. But then I went back.”

Recently, my mother had started to have some wine with dinner.

“And she’s been drinking,” I said.

“Really? How much?”

“A glass of wine, some nights,” I said darkly.

Lee’s face changed; I understood this detail was not as compelling as the rest.

“That’s not a lot,” Lee said. “But we do want you to consider where you might stay during finals—the trip to Japan is right around the corner.” The next week, I stayed at Kate’s house in Burlingame. My mother drove me to school on Monday with an overnight bag, saying she also needed a break. Kate’s mother picked us up after school. She was large and tall; her glasses hung from a long beaded necklace that rustled pleasingly when she walked. “Good things come in small packages,” she said when we reached the house and she examined me, looking down at me in the white tiled kitchen.

“Thank you,” I said, all at once aware of how small I was compared with them.

We flew into Kyoto and stayed in rooms in a gated temple, the girls in one room, the boys in another, the teachers in a third. We slept on futons on tatami mats, folding the futons and storing them behind shoji-screen closets in the morning, and pulling them out again at night.

In the mornings we ate breakfast on our knees at a low table in the courtyard surrounded by trees. On the third day, we discovered microscopic silver fishes mixed in with the morning rice.

We were supposed to keep track of our spending in the same journals in which we wrote about our experiences. I wrote expenses scattered around the pages as they arose, in a disorganized way, including, on the first day, three hundred yen to make a wish at a temple at the top of Mount Hiei, so that toward the end of the trip, when it would have been useful to count up what I’d spent, it was difficult to find the numbers hidden around the pages.

At the temples, Japanese girls came up to us, giggled, asked to take photos with us. When they laughed, they covered their mouths. They held out bunny ears behind one another’s backs before the click. I paid to write wishes on slips of paper, pushed them through an opening in a granite stone to be burned later by praying monks.

We traveled to Ikeda, where we stayed for a week, and one evening we went to a bathhouse. We brought towels into the baths for modesty, but I found I wasn’t uncomfortable. It seemed like nothing to be naked here.

The room was large, with three different baths, a sauna in the back, a warm, hot smell of sandalwood and steam. There was a hot pool, a cold pool, a dark sauna that made a ringing sound from an electric grate. There were young women and thin old women, with skin dripping down, bones showing through. Women with towels around their chests leaned back in the hot pool with closed eyes.

A few hours later, when we left through the metal turnstile into the night, the heat of the pools clung to me, insulating me against the night air. We all gave off steam.

Toward the end of the trip, we arrived in Hiroshima.

Inside the dark hallway of the museum were lit cases containing fingernails, hair in boxes, burned pieces of kimonos, black-and-white photographs of children abandoned and crying. Some children had been vaporized immediately; others survived but then lost their hair in large tufts, lost their fingernails, even their fingers, in the following weeks. The bomb created tornado-like effects. Radiation was carried by the wind in irregular patterns.

For school, I’d read a book about a mother and daughter on a bridge. When the bomb hit, the daughter had become a soot smear on the ground, while the mother was left naked, her skin charred with the shapes of the dark flowers on her kimono. The image haunted me.

That afternoon a few of us went to look at the epicenter of the bomb, a fenced-off area with an old building that remained standing. There were cement benches surrounded by planters looking into this fenced-off area, and sycamore trees with mottled trunks dropping leaves that curled like hands on the asphalt around the benches.

I bought a tray of unagi on rice from a mini-mart nearby and sat on one of the benches. Inside was a plot of land covered in scrub grasses. The land around the building was more expansive than other plots of land I’d seen in Japan, except at the temples. It reminded me of the empty lots between buildings around Palo Alto off El Camino Real, weeds sticking up in the dirt.

In the middle was an old see-through structure, a curved dome made of only panels of steel, like scaffolding, or a dressmaker’s form. This was a building standing on the morning the bomb was dropped that had been reduced to its skeletal structure below paint and plaster, like a dry leaf worn away to a system of brown veins. It remained because, given the physics of the bomb, the place at the epicenter of where the nuclear bomb was dropped was not destroyed.

We left Hiroshima and went to a town in the countryside where we stayed in a low, flat building with a meeting room in the middle. We’d already been to many temples in the mountains, green and smelling of peat and rain. We’d been on the bullet train, so smooth it hardly felt like we were moving.

I’d been thinking about my mother and our fights. It was a relief to be away from her. I knew that when I returned the fights would continue.

On the second day in the countryside, near the end of our trip, a man walked through the door and into the meeting room. It took me a moment to realize who it was: my father, barefoot, flipping the hair out of his face.

“Steve?” I said.

“Hey, Lis,” he said, smiling. The whole class looked. “I was nearby on a business trip. I thought I’d come find you.”

“But how did you know I was here?” We were far from Tokyo and Kyoto, where he went on business trips.

“I have my ways,” he said.

I looked at Lee, who winked.

How young and handsome he was. I felt the same zing I would feel when I saw his face on the cover of magazines.

That afternoon, I was not required to participate in regular activities. We were left alone in a room with a rice paper screen, a window, and pillows on the tatami floor. I drew my hands across the shiny reeds woven in a herringbone pattern with cloth seams. Being with him was awkward at first, the way it was with boys, when it was clear we liked each other and yet there was nothing to say.

“I’m so glad you came,” I said.

“Me, too, Lis. I wanted to spend some time with you.”

At some point I was sitting on his lap. I was too old to sit on laps—I’d just turned fourteen—but I was small for my age and sometimes sat on my mother’s lap too. When I sat on my mother’s lap, I accidentally dug my ischial bones into her thigh, but I didn’t want to do that to him, I didn’t know him well enough, so I sat as carefully as possible, curving my spine.

I was shaking a little. Was it fear? Excitement? I couldn’t tell. I was afraid of him and, at the same time, I felt a quaking, electric love. I hoped he didn’t notice how red and hot my cheeks were: to have a father now, the way I’d hoped for so long. Having a father, as far as I understood, felt not like being ordinary but like being singled out. Our time together was not fluid but stuttered forward like a flip book.

How close are you supposed to be with your father? I wanted to collapse into him, to be inseparable. In his presence I wasn’t sure how to hold my hands, how to arrange my limbs. Other daughters would have known this by now.

In the cool, quiet enclosures of the temples, I’d felt as if I were more than just myself, part of some larger and benevolent system or plan. I wondered what I would do when the trip was over and life resumed with my mother. Would my father say I could live with him?

“Do you believe in God?” I asked now, to find out if he’d had the same feeling I’d had at the temples. I was too scared to ask about living with him, in case he said no. I would impress and distract him with grand curiosity unlikely to come from a young girl.

“Yes, but not in the ordinary sense,” he said. “I believe there’s something. Some presence. Consciousness. It’s like a wheel.” He moved to stand, and I got off his lap. He crouched on the ground and drew a circle on the tatami with his finger, and then a smaller wheel within that. I crouched down too, my heart beating fast. This was closeness! I wanted more of this! For him to talk to me as if he was interested, to say what he thought, knowing I could understand because I was his daughter. “The wheel has nodes at different points, something greater on the outside, the outside and the inside connected.” He drew two spokes between the smaller circle and the larger one. “I don’t know if that makes any sense.”

It seemed he had also become confused. “Anyway, it’s simple,” he said.

That night, I wrote in my journal: “When I tell him events, they come alive. When I don’t tell him, they don’t exist.

“My insides are jumping,” I wrote.

Later he rode along with a group of us on bikes into the sleepy town, the houses and shops made out of dark wood, rice paddies all around, the hills carved into shelves. We went to a soba shop and sat at a booth. I ordered kitsune udon, broth with a few globules of fat floating on the surface beside a strip of fried tofu, thick noodles almost visible beneath, like white stones at the bottom of a murky pond. He ordered cold soba with dipping sauce.

“Can I borrow some yen, Lis?” he asked. He’d brought only dollars.

“Okay,” I said. I gave him some of mine from the amount my mother had given me, the amount our parents were instructed to give, calculated by the teachers to cover the days we were free to buy our own lunches and snacks, temple wishes, and transportation.

“I’ll pay you back before I go,” he said.

After lunch we went to a bank; from here, he would catch a train back to Tokyo. Japanese rooms were small but smelled of open spaces, food glistened in separate lacquered compartments, pachinko parlors clinked, the doors open to the street—all of it different, strikingly foreign. But this bank looked like any big bank in California, with carpeted floors, red-rope divisions in scalloped shapes with brass attachments, a line of people waiting for a teller. “Here,” he said, after he talked with someone behind glass who counted out a stack of bills. He handed over a bill of a denomination I’d never seen before—10,000 yen—an amount almost half as much as I’d brought for the whole trip. Other bills were rumpled; his were crisp. “I don’t have a smaller bill, kid. Sorry.”

“Wow. Thanks.” We said goodbye, the bill in my pocket making the day spark.

With the new cash, I bought gifts for my father and Laurene, including four porcelain bowls of different pastel colors, thin-lipped and small, fitted in a wooden box with four compartments. Incense in an oblong paper box that smelled of the forest and resin. “Cedar,” the woman at the counter said. She took the bills I had left over, bowed, returned many fewer bills. For my mother I bought a cotton yukata, size small, in indigo blue with a pattern of opening white fans and a cloth belt of the same fabric. The robe came in a plastic cellophane envelope and cost less than the gifts I’d found for my father and Laurene.

“Did you get them better gifts than you got for me?” my mother asked. We were in her bedroom. I’d brought her gift out of my luggage, still in its plastic sheath.

“No, I got you different gifts—nothing better or worse.”

“But you spent more on them,” she said. How did she know? I should have bought her the best gifts because she had less money and couldn’t buy them for herself.

“I like the yukata. It looks good on you,” I said. She’d put it on over her clothes in the bedroom while I sat on her bed and watched.

“I don’t like things that tie like this,” she said. “It’s too big. Anyway, I’m your mother and you should be more honoring toward me.”

“It’s a size small,” I said. “And I am honoring—”

“But what did you buy them?” she asked, interrupting.

How to explain to her that I’d bought them the more expensive gifts because I worried they didn’t care for me and I wanted them to like me, to love me, even? With them together, the feeling I was loved and belonged was tenuous, superficial, my place in their family not essential or fixed. They did not ask me questions about myself, or seem interested in me the way my mother was, and this made me hunger to impress them.

My mother already loved me. Even when she screamed at me, I knew it. I wasn’t so sure about them.

Reed was six months old by now. I went over to see them the week I returned from Japan, and my father asked me to change his diaper. “It’s part of being in this family, Lis,” he said. “You haven’t done it for a while.”

I took my brother on my hip, walked past the bank of French doors in the hallway and up the curve in the stone stairway, careful to hold the railing. In the rooms upstairs, my father had replaced the floors with foot-wide boards of Douglas fir, a silky, soft texture to the wood. In my brother’s room, a carpenter had built a set of wooden shelves in the same wood that connected to a high changing table.

I set my brother down on the table, opened the straps on the sides of the diaper, cleaned him, then turned to grab a diaper, as I’d done before.

In the three weeks I’d been in Japan, he’d learned to roll. No one had told me. I heard the thunk of his skull hitting the wooden floor. I looked down at him, face up on the floor. There was a pause, and I thought that maybe he wouldn’t cry, and they would not notice, and everything would somehow return to normal. One second later, he began to wail. I scooped him into my arms and heard the sound of their bare feet running from the kitchen.

On the way to the hospital, Laurene nursed him. I sat beside her in the back seat, hoping there would be a chance to be helpful. I wanted to go back to the moment just before it happened.

My father drove. He was silent. Finally he said, venom quiet: “Lis, you should learn to understand the impact of your actions on other people.” It couldn’t be undone. I’d meant to protect Reed; now this mistake would become part of the lore, as if I had done nothing good before or after.

But the changing table did not have a lip or fence. The cushion was flat—the curved foam pads that dip in the center had not been invented yet. And the diapers were stacked out of reach.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I want you to consider moving in with our family,” my father said a couple of months later. We were in his Mercedes, driving back to his house from Country Sun, where we’d bought some Odwalla apple juice. My mother and I had already talked about our need for space from each other, in calmer moments realizing we couldn’t keep fighting like this. She needed a break, she said.

He said it sharply, as if I’d done something wrong. I had worried they wouldn’t want me to live with them after my brother fell, but since then they’d had me change his diaper many times, and even asked me to babysit several nights as middle school drew to a close and summer began.

This was what I’d been hoping for. It had happened. He’d asked me to come live with him. But his tone didn’t have excitement or joy in it.

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to live with you, for now. If you want me to.” I had the idea that if I moved in with him, we’d look at old photographs together to understand what we missed, urgently, like we were cramming for an exam. Also, it would be a novelty, the big house, a family that looked right. I was his daughter, lost to him for a time like Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, now returned; I had noble qualities (I imagined) and was perhaps beautiful, from some angles, and worthy. All this he would see and recognize. It would be glorious. There would be dresses and bowls of fruit.

Later, I heard that when I was in the last year of middle school, when the fights with my mother got bad, the school had called to tell him that if he did not take me in to live with him, they’d call social services. I’m not sure whether this story was true or exaggerated, but in any case, the story repositioned him—after all this time—as my savior.

“It’s not for now,” he said. “If you’re going to live with us, you’ve got to choose. Her or us. I need you to really give this family a chance. If you choose to live with us, I’d like you to promise you won’t see your mother for six months. You need to give it a real shot,” he said. It wouldn’t work if I was going back and forth, it wouldn’t take. He’d decided that a clean break would be the right way; my mother didn’t agree with him, but those were his terms. It was almost summer now, which meant I wouldn’t be able to see her until December. “Otherwise,” he said, “the deal’s off.”

“I do want to live with you,” I said, with a surety I didn’t feel.

“You’ve made a very important decision,” he said, with solemnity. “This is one of those life moments, one of those adult moments.”

I would leave my mother—I’d said the words out loud. I felt giddy and guilty and numb. Maybe this was the origin of the guilt that seized me later and left me hardly able to walk sometimes, after I had moved in with them: having stolen her youth and energy, having driven her to a state of perpetual anxiety, without support or resources, now that I was flourishing in school and beloved by my teachers, I cast her out and picked him, the one who’d left. I chose the pretty place when she was the one who’d read me books of old stories with admonishments not to believe in the trick of facades.

We turned from Waverley onto Santa Rita into the driveway of the house. The fancy car, the young, handsome father, the prettiest house in Palo Alto. I was aware of being part of this picture when I was in it, as if I was also watching it from outside. None of their surfaces spoke of shame or imperfection, and that itself would be a great relief, to relax inside the appearance of the good. When the picture looked pretty, you didn’t have to brace against what others might think, you didn’t have to charm or compensate. He took the apple juice by its hollow handle and walked through the gate toward the house.

“I’m proud of you,” he said.