I knew the things she didn’t like about herself—her thighs, her forehead, her teeth, the wrinkles above her lip—and that she believed these parts and old clothes meant she would not get what she wanted. In fact she was beautiful, her cheekbones high, a delicate nose. She said she, Linda, and Kathy were called the Forehead Sisters in high school, their hairlines starting too high up, but I liked her forehead, bare and smooth like part of an egg. Her figure was like a Rodin sketch I saw later of a woman facing forward looking back, every element feminine and in stunning proportion—back, butt, breasts. A small waist.
That night as she made dinner, she washed the lentils, touching them slowly with the pads of her fingers, looking at them mournfully, as if she were in the process of losing some inestimable thing.
When Debbie and I got back to the house one late afternoon, my mother was waiting for us in front of the garage. I could tell by the way she stood that something was wrong—she held her jaw tight and askew. She held her hand over her eyes to block the sun; I could see she’d been crying.
As soon as we got out of the car, she started talking. “You know what, I’m sick of this. How you think you’re better than I am.”
“Mom,” I said. “Stop.”
“Stay out of this, honey,” she said.
Debbie looked innocent, shocked; she edged her way back toward her car door.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m saying,” my mother said.
“I don’t—I really didn’t mean—” Debbie stuttered.
“You wanted to just march into our lives and judge me in front of my daughter. And you think you’re perfect, when you’re really superficial, silly,” my mother said, through her teeth. There was some truth in what my mother said, which made her fury more terrifying.
“You’re trying to insinuate yourself into Lisa’s life, to be better than her mother. It’s disgusting. Who the hell do you think you are? It’s like some kind of molestation.” She was yelling now. Her brow and her lips wrinkled like tinfoil, she bared her teeth, and Debbie, startled and balanced too high, her heels clicking, retreated, opening her car door.
I was afraid Debbie would think of me as if I was my mother. I imagined others did not see us as separate but as the same person in two bodies.
“Mom,” I said.
“Be quiet, Lisa,” she said.
It was hard to move or think; shock felt like languor. I was ashamed of my mother. How scary she was when she yelled, snarling and unkempt. The scene unfolded like two ribbons, Debbie pleading, my mother responding, fluttering after her to yell more, Debbie retreating, slipping into her car, turning on the engine, and driving away. I never saw Debbie again.
My mother was supposed to go on a first date with Ron.
He would come to pick her up, meet me, and they would go to an early dinner. The neighbors were home if I needed anything. I was old enough now—seven—to stay alone in the house for two hours, but the details were still a negotiation.
“And afterwards?”
I was supposed to be in bed before she returned.
“I guess we might come back,” she said.
I made her promise they wouldn’t go into her room, and for some reason she agreed.
Since she’d become interested in Ron, she no longer paid attention to me as astutely, I thought. She no longer consulted the I Ching. She was half-absent with happiness, the same slight smile on her lips as when she ran up the hill to get the prickly pear.
It was between boyfriends—between the loneliness and despair that followed one and the lift that began at the next—where I hoped to stay forever, she and I the only team, the real couple.
On the night of the date, Ron arrived on time. She was leaning over the bathroom sink doing her makeup when he knocked.
I ran to open the door. I saw right away that Ron wasn’t a hippie. He was bald, with hair tufted on the sides like a clown’s, and had wide bushy eyebrows, glasses rimmed with gold, and large, swollen lips like a fish. He looked clean, and smelled of soap and detergent.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Lisa. My mom’s getting ready.”
“Nice to meet you,” he said, holding out his hand.
He followed me into the living room; I noticed that, as he walked, his feet splayed out dramatically to either side.
My mother called from the bathroom, “I’ll be out in a minute.”
As we passed the bookshelf, I reached for the album of photographs of my birth—this was unplanned, it surprised even me, one arm jutting out as if I didn’t have control of my limbs—and pulled it out of its socket in the shelf.
I’d asked her to get rid of this album many times and she refused, bringing it with us as we moved from house to house. The cover was made of brown woven grasses, and because it was old, the grasses had started to fray at the edges. To me, too, this hinted at the shame of the contents. I suspected other children didn’t have shameful books like this around their houses.
He and I sat down on the flowered couch beside each other.
“I want to show you something,” I said. “Just some photos of my mother and me.”
I opened the book across my lap where he could see it. My mother, younger, lying on a bed with long hair like dark water pooling around her face. These were the pictures of my birth, in black and white, with rounded corners. She had what looked like a man’s shirt buttoned around her chest and she was naked from the waist down, with her legs bent and open in the foreground of the photo. I turned the page: there I was, emerging from between her glowing, white legs like a turtle rising up from a pond.
In the following pictures, once I was out, you could see my body wrinkled, my face wax-white, asymmetrical, and squished.
I felt revulsion and disgust and yet I continued to turn the pages. I would not have known how to articulate it: I wanted to disgust him the way I was disgusted, to scare him away. To show him who we were, so that he might leave now, rather than wait.
“And here’s more,” I said in my sweetest voice.
“Yes,” he said. “I see.” He made no motion to rise and run. He sat, glancing at the pages and then looking away, as if distracted. When my mother came out of the bathroom and saw us, she snatched the album from my hands and stuck it back in its place on the shelf, giving me a furious look.
Let’s Blast
One of the first memories I have of my father is at a birthday party someone threw for him at a house in Russian Hill. He was in his early thirties.
The light was different in San Francisco—we called it The City—slanting and yellow and more watery than it was in Palo Alto. The house, too, was beautiful, tall with soft wool carpets that tucked into the walls and the largest television I’d ever seen. The grass backyard was almost entirely taken up by a trampoline, the large, round kind, high up on metal legs.
My father was on the trampoline, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt.
“Hey there. Wanna come bounce?” he called out to me.
I walked over and someone, not my mother, hoisted me, brought me high enough to lift my leg and grasp the fabric lip, my toes curling like a marsupial’s. The surface was the size of a small pool and caught light like an oil slick. I assumed my father and I would bounce the way I’d learned in my gymnastics lessons, but with two people it was different, the cadence irregular and jostling. Despite my efforts to stay on separate but complementary trajectories, we almost hit each other in midair. He wasn’t coordinated, didn’t have a clear sense of how to fall and rise. Nor did the trampoline have netted walls; we might fly off into the lawn where people were standing, or over the fence. I was lighter, I would be the one to fly. Worse, I might land on top of him. My yellow shorts belled out in the updraft and I worried that he and everyone on the lawn beneath us would see my underwear. But if I held my shorts down I’d lose the small measure of control I had over my movements.