Before we moved in, a man who worked for my father at NeXT as facilities manager helped renovate the rental house. He was a kind, beanpole-tall man who stooped down to talk to me, telling me that I was allowed to pick out the shape of the bathroom sink and the linoleum for the floor. He had a high laugh and a large, sharp Adam’s apple that bobbed alarmingly up and down his neck. Under his direction, the house was repainted on the inside, the wood floors were refinished and stained blond, linoleum was laid in the bathrooms and kitchen, metal venetian blinds were attached to the windows. In the bathroom, the sink I’d chosen belled out, regally, at the top.
My mother bought a set of encyclopedias with pictures of a gold thistle on the spines, and when there was a question about something, she would rush over and pull one off the bookshelf, dividing the gold-painted seal across the pages to read the relevant section aloud.
She had a walk-in closet. It wasn’t big, and maybe it wasn’t big enough to fit the definition of the phrase “walk-in closet,” but because it was large enough to get inside, and turn around, that’s what we called it. There were bars for hangers and wire shelves for clothes. She also had her own small bathroom, with a skylight.
One day, standing in her bathroom, she showed me her new wallet.
“It’s from Neiman Marcus,” she said. I examined it under the skylight: shades of taupe skin made of strips sewn together vertically, darker in the middle than at the edge, wrinkled at the center of each strip as if a thread was yanked to form tucks. It was the softest leather I’d felt, and waxy.
“It’s eel skin,” she said. “Isn’t that terrible? Eels!”
“It’s like silk,” I said. “Or butter.”
“I know. And look at this.” She showed me the metal snap, the size of a dime. I could feel it was a magnet: it found itself, and pulled shut.
As far as I knew, she’d never owned a wallet before. These luxuries—the wallet, skylight, closet; a new microwave that spun the food as it cooked; a cordless phone—suggested that some great change was brewing, that we were entering a new, more exquisite realm. It turned out that my father had increased the child-support payments to include a larger amount of rent and maintenance. Soon, he would also agree to pay for her therapy once per week. She couldn’t afford to replace the couch, but she got it re-covered in more muted flowers.
My father stopped by a few times, just after the renovations. He and my mother seemed easy with each other, joking and admiring the house, both of them liking the shade of paint inside, the new industrial light fixtures, two white metal bars over a ridged frosted-glass shade, fixtures that were meant for outdoors but looked good inside too. When my parents were together, I felt something inside me click into place, like the magnet clasp.
A few times, during that first year in the house, when it was still new and perfect around us, she would walk in the front door and stop and gasp, putting her hand on her heart, at the beauty of a gold parallelogram made of light glowing on the wall above the heater vent.
Over the years in that house my mother told stories about my father and her family when they occurred to her, or I asked about them. She said my father was so shy and awkward in high school that when he would talk or tell a joke, no one would listen. He had made my mother a kite and a pair of sandals. When they lived together that summer at the end of Stevens Canyon Road in the house with the goats, they slept under quilts my mother’s grandmother from Ohio had made, and for a treat, they ate those cheap, miniature hot dogs out of jars.
At some point that summer, my mother said, they were down to their last three dollars, and they drove to the beach, where my father threw the money into the ocean.
“I was terrified,” she said. “But then he sold more of the blue boxes, and we had money again.”
The story of my parents is not complete without a picture of my mother’s disintegrating family life, of how, after the family arrived in California when she was twelve, her mother became mentally ill. Her parents, Jim and Virginia, had moved the family west when my grandfather’s employer, the Department of Defense, transferred him from Dayton, Ohio, where she was born and both her grandmothers lived, to Colorado Springs, then to Omaha, Nebraska, and finally to California. In California, Virginia was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and my mother’s parents divorced.
My mother spoke of Ohio like a lost paradise: in Ohio her grandmothers had made quilts and doted on her, let her play with the skin on the back of their hands. One of them had a farm and a chicken coop, where my mother ran to collect eggs in the morning. The time before her mother went crazy. Anytime my mother pointed out some beauty around us that looked established and grand—gold dusk light stretched across brick buildings with pillars, great trees—she named the beauty Ohio.
In California, Virginia would sit in the darkened living room drunk, smoking, the only visible thing the lit tip of her cigarette, waiting for her daughters to get home from school. My mother was only a little older then than I was now when Virginia aimed much of her spite and contempt at her—maybe because my mother, sensitive, artistic, and bright, reminded her most of herself. When my mother was twelve, Virginia accused her of playing the recorder only because it reminded her of a penis, and Virginia told the neighbors that my mother had sex with dogs.
When my mother met my father in high school, what impressed her most were his kind eyes, compared with her own mother’s eyes, which by then were hateful, dark sparks.
“The third time I visited Steve’s house in high school, his mother took me aside. She told me that in his first six months she was afraid she might lose him because his birth mother wanted him back, and she couldn’t allow herself to get close to him. At the time, I had no idea why she was telling me this,” my mother said. “I was just a high school student. It wasn’t like I thought I’d know him that long.”
She told the story as if it meant something, but I wasn’t sure what it meant.
They fell in love. My father wrote long notes to Virginia and left them on her front door, telling Virginia she was cruel, imploring her to stop being cruel to my mother. My father was my mother’s savior then, noticing her talent, beauty, and sensitivity, caring for her when her own mother was violent and insane. “You’re the most creative person I’ve ever met,” he told her.
My parents took LSD together. His first time, not hers. The drug took a while to kick in, she said, so you just waited around and then at some point you realized the world wasn’t normal anymore and the trip had started. The idea of my mother doing drugs made me squirm, but she said, “Don’t worry, Lisa. It was just a time—a different era.” She said he was terrified of making a fool of himself on drugs, and made her promise to tell him to snap out of it, in case he got weird. That was around the time my father told my mother he’d get famous and rich one day and lose himself in the world.
“What do you mean, ‘lose himself’?” I asked her. I pictured him confused in the middle of a crowd.
“I mean, lose his moral compass,” she said. “Trade his character, his soul, for power, for money, for worldly gain. Contort himself. Lose the connection to his soul.”
Beside the house where they lived together over the summer before he left for college was another bungalow with a couple of kids in their twenties from a rich family. They did a lot of drugs and sat around waiting for their parents to die so they could get their inheritance. This left a big impression on both of my parents, how people could waste their lives.