“You know, I heard this great story about Ingrid Bergman once,” he said. “But it’s kind of a secret, so you can’t tell.”
We’d finished watching the movie and he was putting the laser disc into its case.
“I won’t tell, I promise,” I said.
“I have this friend,” he said, “his father was a movie producer, and when he was a boy, Ingrid Bergman came to stay at his house. They had a pool, and she was lying on a chair beside it.”
My father was crouched on the side of the bed, near the television. When he told gossip and secrets, he used better diction and spoke more rapidly.
“Well,” he continued, “it turns out Ingrid Bergman liked to sunbathe in the nude, and my friend, who was a boy then, whose bedroom looked out over the pool, was watching her. And then she was, well, she was …”
He trailed off. I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
“Anyway,” he said, “the moment it happened, the climax, she looked up at him. Right at him.”
“Oh,” I said. What had she done? What did he watch? Why was she naked? “I mean, the friend is my age now,” as if to clarify. “Anyway, for him it must have been incredible,” he said, shaking his head and looking down, smiling to himself.
He repeated this story several times over many years, each time telling me he’d heard a great story, and a huge secret, forgetting he’d told me before.
At some point around that time, with my new allowance (five dollars per week), I bought a navy blue eyeliner pencil and brought it over to his house. In the morning before we left for school, while he waited for me, I went into the bathroom and leaned against the sink so I was close to the mirror and tried to apply it to an eyelid.
“Come on,” he said holding the screen, standing out on the balcony.
“One minute,” I said. The liner was waxy and didn’t set down like pencil on paper. I was afraid of making it too dark, so I drew it on very lightly, almost imperceptibly. I’d heard my mother say that makeup was good when it was not obvious. I was giddy with the idea that he would realize how sophisticated I was; my hand shook. At the door I asked if he noticed anything on my eyes.
He leaned down. “Nope,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “You’re not supposed to see it.”
“See what?”
“Eyeliner,” I said. “I put some on.”
“Go wash it off,” he said, angry. “Now.”
“Look at the sky,” my mother said. She was driving us home. “Isn’t it incredible?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a stripe of hot-pink clouds running over the telephone wires, and glowing gold leaves on the sycamore trees beside the road.
“I guess,” I said.
My mother felt color acutely; it was one of the ways we communicated, her driving around the town, pointing out colors. She’d broken up with Ron, and although I was initially relieved to be rid of him and have my mother to myself again, now I wasn’t so sure. I’d found him annoying, but once he was gone I missed him. Ron had been variety, someone else besides my mother and me. When he walked into our house, he disturbed the air. Men brought life. You couldn’t take the measure of it until they were gone and left everything flat, without zest or surprise. We couldn’t afford to go out for dinner or to the museum in San Francisco.
Now, in the car, she wanted me to look at the sky.
“Look up,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”
I slouched in my seat like the flare of color was the most boring thing in the world. It seemed to me it would take too much energy to appreciate every phenomenon she pointed out. It was just a sunset. We’d seen a lot of them already; already, life had begun to repeat.
Kirsten invited me to her house to spend the night. She was the girl who’d followed me around announcing my father’s name. Since then, she’d stopped doing that, and we were part of the same group of friends at school. We had permission to walk from school to her dad’s house, which was north past University Avenue, the opposite side of Palo Alto from where I lived. It was a privilege to be able to walk that far alone, without an adult.
Her house was a Victorian with a cement path leading up to the wooden steps. Tree roots snaked and strained through the dirt yard like neck tendons. Her bedroom was under the eaves at the top of the house, the ceiling tucked into the floor. She had her own small television. I sat down on the bed and it shifted around me like Jell-O, a surprise.
“It’s a water bed,” she said, stretching out.
There was something exotic about her, and slippery, that made me feel conservative and ordinary. I also got sleepy around her, the way I would get sleepy around people who cared about my father being famous. We went downstairs, where I followed her into the kitchen.
She pulled a big carrot out of the fridge.
“You know what some women do with these, right?” she said. “Put it inside them. Instead of having sex.”
“That’s gross,” I said. The world contained disgusting, revolting elements—like sex, which I knew about, and which still felt unsettling, how people might be doing it and yet continuing to exist in an ordinary fashion on the surface, like an infestation of bugs under a clean, white wall.
“Look,” she said, pulling out a black gauzy string from her chest of drawers. It was a bra made of elasticized lace, two triangles bound by black strips of Lycra. It looked like a woman’s bra—sexy for a grown-up—yet small, made for a child. I’d had no idea something this perfect existed in the world, in these proportions. It was tantalizing for being a perfect miniature, the way dollhouse furniture, food, and cutlery had been thrilling to me before. I wanted all of what she had—the remote, the television, the water bed, the lacy bra.
“Hey, you want to watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?”
“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t sure what it was. She took a tape out of a worn paper case, pushed it into the VHS player under her television. The film was grainy like a sweater woven out of too many colors of yarn. I could make out only the figure of a man walking up a path in dry grasses, toward a house.
“I watch this a lot,” she said. “Before I go to sleep.”
Before we turned off the light, her father came in to check on us.
“Dad?” Kristen said.
He sat down on the edge of the bed facing her.
“I’m feeling insecure,” she said, in a baby voice. “You told me to tell you when I was feeling like that, and I’m telling you now.”
“Oh, honey,” he said. He hugged her close.
I’d had no idea she was feeling insecure. I was impressed she knew that word, and jealous that she could say something like this to her father. It was an adult word. I wouldn’t have thought to say it, ever.
“Sorry, dear,” he said and then stood up and looked at both of us. “Well, goodnight, you two. Sleep tight.” The stairs creaked on his way down.
In the morning, just before my mother came to pick me up, after Kirsten had gone down to the kitchen, I found the bra in the thicket of rumpled cotton in the top drawer and stuffed it into my backpack.
By the fifth visit to his house I was impatient. For a long time I hoped that if I played one role, my father would take the corresponding role. I would be the beloved daughter; he would be the indulgent father. I decided that if I acted like other daughters, he would join in the lark. We’d pretend together, and in pretending we’d make it real. But if I had observed him as he was, or admitted to myself what I saw, I would have known that he would not do this, and that a game of pretend would disgust him.