Now we were together in his car driving to the Woodside house in the dark. Tonight he wore a leather jacket with black fabric at the cuffs that matched the color of his hair and gave him a rakish look. He was still quiet. But I felt bolder.
“Can I have it, when you’re done?” I asked him, as we took a left at the leaning, crumbling white pillars that flanked the thin, bumpy road that ended at his gate. I’d been thinking about it for a while but only just built up the courage to ask.
“Can you have what?” he said.
“This car. Your Porsche.” I wondered where he put the extras. I pictured them in a shiny black line at the back of his land.
“Absolutely not,” he said in such a sour, biting way that I knew I’d made a mistake. I understood that perhaps it wasn’t true, the myth of the scratch: maybe he didn’t buy a new one with abandon, maybe the idea that he was profligate was false. He was not generous with money, food, or words; the idea of the Porsches had seemed like one glorious exception.
I wished I could take it back. We pulled up to the house and he turned off the engine. Blue hydrangeas with flowers bigger than my head billowed out from both sides of the gate to the courtyard.
(Many years later he would quiz me. “What do you think is the best kind of hydrangea?”
“The blue ones. The bright blue ones.”
“I used to think so, too, when I was young,” he said. “But it turns out the white ones, the cone-shaped ones, are actually much nicer.”)
Before I made a move to get out he turned to face me.
“You’re not getting anything,” he said. “You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.” Did he mean about the car, something else, bigger? I didn’t know. His voice hurt—sharp, in my chest.
The light was cool in the car, a white light on the roof had lit up when the engine turned off. Around us was dark. I had made a terrible mistake and he’d recoiled.
By then the idea that he’d named the failed computer after me was woven in with my sense of self, even if he did not confirm it, and I used this story to bolster myself when, near him, I felt like nothing. I didn’t care about computers—they were made of fixed metal parts and chips with glinting lines inside plastic cases. They mesmerized you when you sat in front of them, but were otherwise boring to look at, not beautiful—but I liked the idea that I was connected to him in this way. It would mean I’d been chosen and had a place, despite the fact that he was aloof or absent. It meant I was fastened to the earth and its machines. He was famous, he drove a Porsche; if the Lisa was named after me, I was a part of all that.
I see now that we were at cross-purposes. For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite: the closer I was to him, the less I would feel ashamed; he was part of the world, and he would accelerate me into the light.
It might all have been a big misunderstanding, a missed connection: he’d simply forgotten to mention the computer was named after me. I was shaking with the need to set it right all at once, as if waiting for a person to arrive for a surprise party—to switch on the lights and yell out what I’d held in. Once he’d admitted it—yes, I named a computer after you—everything would click into place. He would patch the holes, get furniture, say he’d been thinking of me the whole time but had been unable to get to me. Yet I also sensed that if I tried too hard to set it right, it might tip some delicate balance, and he would be gone again. And so I waited in this suspended state, in order to keep him.
I followed him from the car into the house. We didn’t take a hot tub. We ate salads as he read the paper, we watched Flashdance. I didn’t try to sleep in his bed. At some point I awoke in the dark because I had to pee, the darkness pressing on my eyes, nothing visible. It was silent; the crickets had stopped. I wouldn’t be able to find the bathroom in the pitch-black. I couldn’t even tell what direction I was facing, or whether I was upright. I waited with my eyes open in the darkness and nothing emerged; it was as if the darkness were pressing back at my efforts to penetrate it.
To get to the bathroom I would have to walk through his room, down a few more steps in a hallway that led to another empty room and, off that, the bathroom.
I crawled out of the bed and found the door frame, also chalky, half-there, but now shapes emerged with more clarity, and I saw that in his bed across the room was someone with bright blond hair.
It was a man who had come to kill my father—he’d killed him already and was now sleeping in his bed! I already knew what this new man was like with his shining white hair: phony and full of blandishments. He’d say he was my new father, but he would be nothing like my father. I couldn’t see his face, but I was terrified; the blond hair glowed in the dark. I could hear my breath. I worried for my real father. After I crept to the bathroom, I crept back through the room and the blond man was still there, in the bed. He moved in his sleep, diving down under the covers as if plunging underwater. I returned to my bed and spent what felt like hours terrified, wondering what to do, dreading the morning when it would be clear that my life would be different forever and my father would be gone. I was too afraid to get up again and confront the blond man. I decided to wait until morning, and at some point I must have fallen asleep.
In the morning, there was no blond man and my father was alive. I thought I must have imagined it—I didn’t ask him about it. I was embarrassed for the terror I’d felt, and the protectiveness.
The next Wednesday night, my mother drove over to visit us when her class was unexpectedly canceled. We didn’t know she was coming. She found us in the kitchen, having knocked and called out and then entered through the unlocked front door, walking through the dark house into the bright and cold kitchen where we were sitting, eating. She sat with us as he teased me in the usual ways.
“How about that guy for your boyfriend,” he said pointing to a picture of an old man in the paper he was reading while we ate. I looked, then sneezed, and a few grains of the salad flew onto the picture. “The boys’ll love that. You’ll have that bed warmed up in no time at all,” he said, about a new bed Mona was planning to buy for me. “Who you gonna invite over?” The jokes were profoundly awkward. He was refined in other ways, but seemed unsure about how you were supposed to talk with children. I wanted to be close with him, but the jokes confused me. I didn’t know how to respond. That might have been the look she saw on my face.
Later she said his jokes that night, his avuncular manner, and my obvious discomfort in the kitchen had surprised her. I had a look of being lost, she said, not confidant the way I usually was. She arranged for me to stay at a friend’s house on those Wednesday nights, telling me that he planned to come and take me skating instead. I thought that sounded okay.
Small Fry
Our next house would be the place we’d live the longest during my childhood, seven years, a Craftsman bungalow on Rinconada Avenue in Palo Alto—the only house on the lot, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a separate garage my mother would later transform into an art studio. It was a real house, painted light yellow with royal blue trim, a blue door. It was symmetrical from the front, with a cement path that bisected the lawn, and dirt patches under two front windows where my mother would plant multicolored impatiens. An arbutus tree grew on one side of the driveway, with scaly twisting bark and fruits we did not yet know would ripen and fall onto the lawn in the autumn rains and burst open, leaving a slimy orange jelly we would be forever wiping off our shoes. The side door opened to a thick bower of wisteria that smelled of soap and candy when it bloomed, and attracted bees.