BACK IN THE EAST Bay by noon, Gwen dropped Rick off at home then drove further up into the hills. She parked in front of a large ranch house and steeled herself to deal with Eva’s unpredictable moods. Waiting in the front hallway, she looked around the spacious living room through bay view windows to a deck and hot tub. Uh-oh, she thought.
Eva, now taller than her mother, came downstairs and eyed Gwen darkly. She politely thanked her friend’s mother for hosting the sleepover. Inside the car, she started in as Gwen was backing out of the driveway.
“Why can’t we live in a bigger house? You’re a doctor. Most doctors are rich. Why can’t you get a job that pays more money?”
“Sorry, Eva, I’m not qualified for any of those mega-buck jobs.”
Gwen had learned to pick battles with her daughter carefully. Passing on this one was a no-brainer. She was grateful Eva had survived her first year of high school unscathed and willing to cut her some more slack.
Though the meeting in Golden Gate Park had reined in Gwen’s euphoria, the rest of her weekend was luxuriously uneventful. She prepared slides for a medical school lecture, caught up on overdue clinic progress reports and performance evaluations, and went for a long walk with Rick.
On Sunday evening, while making dinner, she called out for Eva to set the table. She got no response and went to her daughter’s bedroom. The door was closed. She could hear Eva talking on the phone.
She was about to knock but stopped short when Eva said desperately, “Are you sure she doesn’t like me?”
Gwen gave her another pass.
At dinner, Eva was morose. Her face had no muscle tone. Rick’s attempt to cheer her up made Gwen laugh. Eva gave them an accusatory glance and stomped off to her room.
After dinner, the phone rang. Gwen snuck up to Eva’s door and heard happy chatter. She returned in an hour and heard giggling.
“Kiddo,” she said loudly, “Is your homework done?”
A moment later, Eva bounded out. She grabbed her backpack and sat at the kitchen table, completing work sheets for her Spanish class. At ten o’clock, Gwen checked again and found Eva in front of a mirror, holding two tubes from her collection of lip glosses.
“Tough decisionsville?” she inquired.
Eva’s eyes darted between the mirror and each shade of gloss. She didn’t answer.
Bemused, Gwen climbed into bed where Rick was engrossed in the Sunday newspaper. When I was her age, she thought, friends weren’t that important, were they? No, not for me, not until I met Nan in college.
She had a vague, unsettling sense of guilt, as though something shameful from her past was approaching consciousness. She grabbed the Sunday magazine section and set to work on the crossword puzzle.
The alarm went off at six-thirty the next morning. Gwen promptly arose and crossed the hall to mobilize Eva, who needed to be at the school bus stop in forty-five minutes. Eva muttered a protest that wasn’t overtly hostile. A good sign, thought Gwen.
Coffee, juice, and a bowl of cereal later, Gwen was waiting at the breakfast table, her annoyance growing. She was about to yell an ultimatum when Eva appeared in the kitchen doorway, somnolent but dressed with a coral green backpack slung over her shoulder.
Gwen dropped her off as the school bus door was closing and headed onto the freeway toward the Bay Bridge. She mused over how different high school was for Eva than it had been for her. Just the racial and cultural diversity her daughter had to negotiate seemed daunting. She had heard from other parents that neither black nor Asian kids would socialize with whites. There were exclusive cliques too, like the girls who made the soccer team. At age fifteen, Gwen and her classmates were a monochromatic rock-and-roll nation, united against their parents’ authority. It had been a simple generational conflict.
Remembering high school perturbed her. She turned her mind to the content for a talk she had been invited to give in Chicago.