“It’s his loss,” my mother said as we skated home. “His great, great loss. He’ll get it someday. He’ll come back and it’ll rip his heart open, when he sees you, how much you’re like him, and how much he’s missed.”
I sensed it was the right time to make a play for a kitten.
The office of the Humane Society was located on the edge of the Baylands Nature Preserve, in a government-style building.
“They have too many kittens,” my mother said on the drive over, as I tried to contain my excitement. “If they don’t find homes for them, they put them to sleep.”
The main room was open-plan, echoey, with a beamed high ceiling and a stone floor. The animals were in the back, through a door. The woman at the front desk was dressed in an army-green uniform with a matching belt and many stiff pockets. She pulled out a clipboard and asked where we lived and how long we’d been there.
“A house in Menlo Park,” my mother said. “For a few months now.”
“And before that?” the woman asked.
“We stayed in a friend’s house for two months,” my mother said, her tone flat. “And in the place before that, four months.”
The woman’s mouth became fixed as she wrote all this down on her clipboard. I wished my mother would lie, or skip some of the moves, to make us look better; it wasn’t until she’d started telling this woman about all our moves that I understood this was something we should have kept hidden. Even though my mother had agreed to come here and get a pet, I began to suspect that she was still ambivalent, and so refused to shade her answers, letting the woman’s impression of us sour. Or that she was profoundly dedicated to honesty. Or that she began to derive satisfaction from the dry clarity of an aerial view that this woman’s questioning provided, becoming more interested in this unfolding narrative than she was in a cat. Here was the landscape of our lives, seen as a pattern from way high up.
“We have a yard,” I said.
The woman addressed my mother. “Do you think you’d be able to care for an animal with so much shifting around?”
“I think so,” my mother said. “We’ve stabilized somewhat.”
The woman sat up straight. “I don’t think it will be possible for us to give you a kitten at this time.”
I didn’t expect such decisiveness. We were not even taken in to see the animals. My mother and I walked out of the building into the pungent salt air of the Baylands, not talking to each other, shocked and weary.
A few days later, we stopped at a pet store, where she bought me two white mice and the most expensive cage they had, made of glass.
The bed arrived at some point without my father. It was a loft bed composed of a series of red metal cylinders that twisted into one another, like a circuit, forming a kind of jungle gym. My mother assembled it and flattened the boxes it came in. Beside it, connected with the same metal tubing, was a small white desk made of particle-board and, above the desk, a matching white shelf. I climbed a ladder to the bed at the top, right under the skylight. It was my first bed, and the first gift from my father.
I began going on outings—to the zoo, the park, shopping—with Debbie, the older sister of my mother’s ex-boyfriend the rock climber. She taught ESL, worked at the cosmetics counter at Macy’s in downtown San Francisco, and cleaned house for a bachelor in a nearby town called Atherton. Debbie was around thirty, like my mother, but without children. She’d offered to take me on outings, inspired by an older girl who had once taken an interest in her when she was young and had difficulties at home, showing her how to apply makeup and wear perfume and accessorize.
My mother and I waited for her near the road on the appointed day. When she got out of the car, she was wearing light pink jeans, white high-heeled mules, a red top with a ruffle. Multiple Bakelite bracelets clacked against one another when she moved; she wore large hoop earrings and a patterned scarf. She was like a tropical bird in a realm of browns.
She drove a red Ford Fiesta stick shift and exuded a blithe optimism that seemed like a high calling, a layer of light that made everything else irrelevant. I was being introduced to the good life. Around her was a haze of scent, of orange blossoms and pleasing chemicals. Her hair was short and coiffed; the color and form gave the impression of soft waves breaking around her head, even though, when I touched it, I was surprised to feel a crust.
“Hair spray,” she said.
I hoped to use hair spray, too, when I was older.
On the drives to and from Macy’s, the Rinconada pool, the zoo, or her house, on El Camino or on Alameda de las Pulgas or Highway 280, she would talk about finding the Skyway, a road that she said ran way up above us, above the ground, in the clouds.
“If only we could find it,” she said. “There’s an on-ramp somewhere around here.” We both looked for the on-ramp, though I wasn’t sure what such a ramp would look like.
“Darn,” she’d eventually say. “I must have missed it. Sometimes they close it. Next time.”
The year before, Debbie had been living abroad in Italy with a family in a house on the Adriatic coast, and she’d thought she might stay forever, but her mother flew over and brought her back. Now she was taking the first difficult steps to create a life. I didn’t know any of this at the time, only that she seemed unencumbered, a miraculous departure from adult seriousness, delightfully unreal, like the Skyway.
I looked forward to our outings all week and chose my outfits in advance, careful to preserve them, separating them from my other clothing so that I would be sure they were clean on the appointed day. I fell in love with Debbie the way that young girls sometimes fall in love with women who aren’t their mothers. With her I was my most pleasing self. Debbie and her airy voice, the oblique angles from which she looked at her life, the percussive sounds of her bracelets, her clothing—a riot of distinct shapes and bright color, chromatically alive—were the counterbalance to my mother, who was slipping into a depression.
“That’s how it should have been,” my mother said after she saw a documentary about whales, who are born already knowing how to swim, drift, float. No diapers, no being stuck, no mind-numbing tasks.
Since she and the stick artist had broken up, my mother didn’t want to do much, nor could we afford to do much. She prepared food—brown rice, tofu, vegetables—that neither of us was excited to eat, and she spent long periods in her room, from day into evening, doing I Ching divination with the lights out, the semidarkness scaring me because it spoke of our strangeness, of no formality or separations.
One day she was feeling better and said she would take us to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but first she wanted to stop at an ATM machine. At the museum we would walk through the galleries, the room with huge, silly Claes Oldenburg sculptures, me lounging on the benches or doing headstands while she looked at the art, her whispering into my ear about the artists, a snack at the café at the end.
“Let’s not stop at the ATM,” I said. “Please.” But she stopped anyway, on our way out of town. No money came out of the machine, just a paper slip. She grabbed the slip, walked a few feet, and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to examine it, stricken. We went home. She did not answer my questions but told me to be quiet, and she went to her room for the rest of the day.