Our new place, an apartment in the back of another house, was less than half the size of the small house we’d moved from, but with just as many rooms. It was like a playhouse. The wooden floor, newly sanded and varnished for our arrival, yellow as hay, shone like it was wet. Before this, we’d lived on a series of old wall-to-wall carpets, and my mother’s joy about this floor surprised me. She reassembled the tubular bed in my new room.
One night, soon after we moved in, she rented Desperately Seeking Susan to watch on our new television. I wasn’t allowed to watch it. Before this, we hadn’t owned a television. After she put me to bed, I turned myself so my head was where my feet usually were, careful not to jostle the singing springs. From there I could open the door a crack and see the screen over the back of the couch.
In the movie, a woman wore tattered black clothing, her hair in spikes, necklaces layered. The more I watched, the more I knew I wanted to look like this woman.
My mother spun around and caught me watching.
“I thought so,” she said. “Get to sleep.” She came over and shut the door.
A few days later I found a picture in a magazine—it might have been an ad for Guess or Jordache jeans—in which a woman with short, tousled hair, wet maybe, was leaping. She flew above the dark asphalt, toes pointed: perfect splits in the air. She wore a T-shirt and stonewashed jeans. I wanted to be that girl too.
Ron came over while my mother and I were standing in the kitchen. The kitchen alcove was straight across from the front door; when he stepped in, he lifted his camera to his eye.
“Don’t move,” he said, clicking. “This is really good.” We didn’t own a camera.
At first the shots were candid, but now he wanted us to pose. Click click click. I could feel my smile hardening.
In his interactions with me and my mother he often insisted too much—my mother said he “went too far”—as if only by extreme repetition would he be noticed.
I knew Ron was kind. He’d bought us matching gold necklaces, hers wider and thicker than mine, made of two rows of jointed segments that met like herringbone. It was only because he went on too long and didn’t listen that we became infuriated and pushed him away. Now, in the kitchen, it was my mother and me against his frantic urgency. We gave him insolent looks. He turned on the flash.
“Ron, enough,” my mother said. “We’re done, okay?”
My mother ran into the bathroom; I ducked behind the wall.
“Guys, come back,” he said. “Let me take just a few more.”
When Ron didn’t stay over, I slept with my mother in her bed, which I preferred to sleeping alone.
“Why don’t you leave him?” I asked her the next day.
“I just might,” she said.
Ron brought over the developed photographs in a paper envelope. As soon as he stepped inside, my mother grabbed the envelope out of his hand and ran to the couch and started looking through the stack. I tried to get at the pictures, and so did he, but her back was curved against us as she flipped through them, yanking out the photos she didn’t like and hiding them in a pile beneath her leg.
She had long believed that the essential perspective of the photographer was captured in his or her photographs; flattering or interesting pictures would mean that Ron noticed her beauty and even her soul; ugly pictures would reveal that he did not see, appreciate, or love her.
“Let me see,” I said, reaching around her, trying to grab them, but it was too late: she ripped the photographs beneath her leg in half.
She turned and shrugged, tilted her head, lifted her eyebrows—acknowledging our anger and frustration, but smug, the way she always was when she ripped up photographs of herself.
It enraged me when she did this. I became more critical of her. I noticed the way she walked with her toes pointing in, and how her pinkie toes formed yellow calluses sharp as blades that ran vertically along the bottom pad where the toes had been flattened in shoes. She added flakes of brewer’s yeast to her salads and they smelled of dusty rooms. Her cakes collapsed with fault lines because she was too impatient to let them cool. Once, I had loved the way the tip of her nose bobbed up and down when she chewed, and sat in her lap to be closer to the sound, like a blade through tall grasses, but now both her nose and her chewing seemed strange and wrong. All these factors, I believed, were why she was only able to date someone like Ron, not my father. I came to believe it was her fault: she wasn’t beautiful enough, and was therefore unloved, unloveable—and might make me so, too.
At my new school, the buildings were single-story and Spanish-style with dirty stucco walls, arches, and courtyards. The hallways between classrooms were open to the elements, covered by porticoes, and paved with shiny cement squares. On rainy days, the water poured into the courtyards and over the fenced field at the back of the school. My teacher, Miss Johnson, was young—it was her first year teaching. Her hair fell in a perfect blonde curtain around her face, and her bangs were curled in toward her forehead. When she smiled, cushioned circles formed in her lower cheeks, as if she were holding something delicious in her mouth.
I didn’t know the Pledge of Allegiance; the first time the class stood to recite it, I tried to mouth the words. Only one girl stayed seated. She sat as if she meant to sit, not as if she’d forgotten to stand.
“I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,” she said.
After that, I stayed seated too.
“Why aren’t you standing for the Pledge?” Miss Johnson asked.
“I’m a Buddhist,” I said. That was the religion my mother said she and my father had practiced.
“Oh,” she said, and didn’t ask me about it again.
“It’s not just parents who decide to have children,” my mother said. I was pretty sure this came from Buddhism. “Some say children choose the parents too. Before they’re born.” I tried to take stock of what I’d chosen: my father far away, glinting like a shard of mirror; my mother so close and urgent. If it was true that I chose my parents, I would choose them again, I thought.
At school, I wasn’t supposed to mention my father.
“You could be kidnapped,” Ron said.
In high school, my mother knew of a girl abducted in a windowless white van, her hands and legs tied up. After they’d driven her outside the town, they’d stopped at a gas station and the girl had managed to open the door and get free. I understood in some vague way that I could be kidnapped because of my father; but because he wasn’t part of my life in a daily way, the idea seemed far-fetched and glamorous.
At Ron’s urging, my mother and I went to the police station, where they took my fingerprints. A man dipped my finger in thick black liquid, pressed it down on paper from one side of the nail bed to the other, hurting me a little each time as he tried to grip my small fingers and roll them, leaving a pattern of lines on the paper my mother said were unique to me. Whorls, she said they were called. She showed me how hers resolved in a perfect circle, like a topographic map of a hill.
“I have a secret,” I said to my new friends at school. I whispered it so that they would see I was reluctant to mention it. The key, I felt, was to underplay. “My father is Steve Jobs.”