The living room had a sliding glass door that opened onto a small deck. Beyond the deck was a patch of dry grass and thistles, a scrub oak and a fig—both spindly—and a line of bamboo, which my mother said was difficult to get rid of once it took root.
After we finished unloading, she stood with her hands on her hips, and together we surveyed the room: with everything we owned, it still looked empty.
The next day, she called my father at his office to ask for help.
“Elaine’s coming over with the van—we’re going to your father’s house to pick up a couch,” my mother said a few days later. My father lived near Saratoga in Monte Sereno, a suburb about half an hour away. I’d never been to this house or heard of the town where he lived—I’d met him only a couple of times.
My mother said my father offered his extra couch when she called him. But if we didn’t get it soon, she knew, he’d throw it away or rescind the offer. And who knew when we’d have access to Elaine’s van again?
I was in the same first-grade class as Elaine’s twins, a boy and a girl. Elaine was older than my mother, with wavy black hair and loose strands that created a halo around her head in certain lights. My mother was young, sensitive, and luminous, without the husband, house, and family that Elaine had. Instead, she had me, and I had two jobs: first, to protect her so that she could protect me; second, to shape her and rough her up so that she could handle the world, the way you sandpaper a surface to make the paint stick.
“Left or right?” Elaine kept asking. She was in a hurry—she had a doctor’s appointment to keep. My mother is dyslexic but insisted that wasn’t the reason she eschewed maps. It was because the maps were inside her; she could find her way back to any place she’d ever been, she said, even if it took her a few turns to get her bearings. But we often got lost.
“Left,” she said. “No, right. Wait. Okay, left.”
Elaine was mildly annoyed, but my mother did not apologize. She acted as if one is equal to the people who save them.
The sun made lace on my legs. The air was wet and thick and pricked my nose with the smell of spicy bay laurel and dirt.
The hills in the towns around Palo Alto had been created by shifting under the earth, by the grinding of the plates against each other. “We must be near the fault line,” my mother said. “If there was an earthquake now, we’d be swallowed up.”
We found the right road and then the wooded driveway with a lawn at the end. A circle of bright grass with thin shoots that looked like they’d be soft on my feet. The house was two stories tall, with a gabled roof, dark shingles on white stucco. Long windows rippled the light. This was the kind of house I drew on blank pages.
We rang the bell and waited, but no one came. My mother tried the door.
“Locked,” she said. “Damn. I bet he’s not going to show.”
She walked around the house, checking the windows, trying the back door. “Locked!” she kept calling out. I wasn’t convinced it was really his.
She came back to the front and looked up at the sash windows, too high to reach. “I’m going to try those,” she said. She stepped on a sprinkler head and then a drainpipe, grabbed a lip of windowsill, and flattened herself against the wall. She found a new place for her hands and feet, looked up, pulled herself higher.
Elaine and I watched. I was terrified she would fall.
My father was supposed to come to the door and invite us in. Maybe he would show us other furniture he didn’t want and invite us to come back.
Instead, my mother was climbing the house like a thief.
“Let’s go,” I called out. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be here.”
“I hope there’s no alarm,” she said.
She reached the ledge. I held my breath, waiting for a siren to blare, but the day was as still as before. She unlatched the window, which scraped up and open, and disappeared, leg by leg, and emerged a few seconds later through the front door into the sunshine.
“We’re in!” she said. I looked through the door: light reflected on wood floors, high ceilings. Cool, vacant spaces. I associated him that day—and later—with pools of reflected light from big windows, shade in the depths of rooms, the musty, sweet smells of mold and incense.
My mother and Elaine held the couch between them, maneuvered it through the door and down the steps. “It doesn’t weigh much,” my mother said. She asked me to step aside. A thick woven raffia frame held wide-weave linen upholstery. The cushions were a cream color spattered with bright chintz flowers in red, orange, and blue, and for years I would pick at the edges of the petals, trying to dig my fingernails under their painted tips.
Elaine and my mother moved fast and seriously, as if they might be angry, a loop of my mother’s hair falling out of its band. After they’d shoved the couch into the back of the van, they went back inside and brought out a matching chair and ottoman.
“Okay, let’s go,” my mother said.
The back was full, so I sat in the front, on her lap.
My mother and Elaine were giddy. They had their furniture and Elaine wouldn’t be late for her appointment. This was the reason for my vigilance and worry: to arrive at this moment, see my mother joyful and content.
Elaine turned out of the driveway and onto a two-lane road. A moment later two cop cars sped past us, going in the opposite direction.
“They might be coming for us!” Elaine said.
“We might have gone to jail!” my mother said, laughing.
I didn’t understand her jaunty tone. If we went to jail, we’d be separated. As far as I understood, they didn’t keep children and adults in the same cells.
The next day, my father called. “Hey, did you break in and take the couch?” he asked. He laughed. He had a silent alarm, he said. It had rung in the local police station, and four cop cars had sped to the house, arriving just after we left.
“Yes, we did,” she said, a flaunt in her voice.
For years, I was haunted by the idea of a silent alarm and how close we’d been to danger without knowing it.
My parents met at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, in the spring of 1972, when he was a senior and she was a junior.
On Wednesdays, through the night, she animated a student film in the high school quad with a group of friends. One of those nights, my father approached her in the spotlight where she stood waiting to move the Claymation characters and handed her a page of Bob Dylan lyrics he’d typed out: “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”
“I want it back when you’re done,” he said.
He came the nights she was there and held candles for her to see by while she drew in between takes.
That summer they lived together in a cabin at the end of Stevens Canyon Road, my father paying the rent by selling what they called blue boxes that he made with his friend Woz. Woz was an engineer who was a few years older than my father, shy and intense, with dark hair. They’d met at a technology club and become friends and collaborators and would later start Apple together. The blue boxes emitted tones that made phone calls go through for free, illegally. They’d found a book by the phone company in the library that explained the system and the exact series of tones. You’d hold the box to the receiver, the box would make the tones, and the phone company would connect the call to wherever in the world you wanted. At that house the neighbors owned aggressive goats, and when my parents arrived home in the car, my father would divert the goats as my mother ran to the door, or he would run to her side of the car and carry her.