Years later she would tell me this story as a way to explain why my father wouldn’t help me with money, repeating the story of those lazy, lost children he’d seen and didn’t want me to become.
“When were your parents divorced?” other kids would ask me.
“They were never married,” I said. I liked saying it: it was usually a surprise, disarming the questioner. It gave me distinction. Instead of a dad who was around and then left, mine was a story in reverse: parents who spent more time together now than they’d spent when I was born.
Now on weekends when he was around, my father came over to take me skating on my own, my mother staying home to paint, waving goodbye to us as we set off. He called me Small Fry. “Hey, Small Fry, let’s blast. We’re livin’ on borrowed time.”
I assumed small fry meant the kind of french fries left at the bottom of the bag, cold and crusty; I thought he was calling me a runt, or misbegotten. Later, I learned fry is an old word for young fishes sometimes thrown back into the sea to give them more time to grow.
“Okay, Fat Fry, let’s go,” I said, once my skates were on. Sometimes he worried he was getting too thin. “They say I need to gain weight,” he said. “Who?” I asked. “People at work,” he said, standing in the middle of the room with his skates on. “What do you guys think?” Other times he worried he was getting a paunch, and asked us about that too.
We would head for Stanford University. On this day the pavement was still wet from rain.
The palm trees that gave Palm Drive its name grew in the dirt between the sidewalk and the road, their roots winding beneath the old cement path so the cement was ridged severely, and layered over several times in messy uneven layers, but these hadn’t worked to hold down the roots, each layer buckling up. We bounced our knees to absorb the shock. Fronds had fallen from the trees, sometimes blocking the path, so we had to step around them into the dirt on our skates. The missing fronds left a pattern on the trunks like fishes, stacked.
“I wish I’d been a Native American Indian,” he said, looking up at the hills beyond the university—from far away they appeared smooth and unblemished. The neon-green blades shot up through the dirt clods two or three days after the first heavy rain and remained through winter.
“They walked barefoot, you know,” he said. “On those hills. Before all this was even here.” I knew from school they left traces where they had ground acorns into flour on slabs of rock. “I love the green hills,” he said, “but I like them best when they’re yellow, dry.”
“I like them green,” I said, not understanding how anyone could like them when they were dead.
We reached the Oval and then the Stanford quadrangle with its covered, shaded pathways made of diamonds of cement in alternating earth-toned colors like a faded harlequin costume.
“Want to get on my shoulders?”
He leaned down and grasped me under my armpits—I was nine and small for my age—and hoisted me up. His weight tilted and bobbed. We did a loop around the square, under the arches, past the gold numbers on the glass doors. He held my shins in his hands, but let go when he started to lose his balance. He tripped, tripped again, struggling to stay upright—I swayed, terrifyingly high up. And then he fell. On the way down I worried for myself, for my face and my knees, the parts of me that might hit the pavement. Over time I learned he would always fall. Still, I let him carry me because it seemed important to him. I felt this like a change of pressure in the air: this was part of his notion of what it meant to be a father and daughter. If I said no, he would retract.
We got up and brushed ourselves off—he wound up with a bruise on his butt and a scrape on his hand; I got a skinned knee—and headed for the drinking fountain at the side of the quadrangle. It was built into a wall of patterned tiles. From there I could see the green leaves in another, smaller courtyard beyond us, like stained glass. I liked looking at sunlight from the shade, the way it didn’t wash all around and blind you, but was a separate, glowing thing.
We skated farther into the university. The asphalt was rough, full of rocks; skating over it tickled my throat and my thighs, made a tune play in my bones. We skated uphill past the fountain and the clock, to the metal tables in the courtyard of a Tresidder café, where we sat for a moment and drank apple juice. I strummed my legs with the weight of the skates and poked my fingers through the cool metal lattice of the chair. There was an oak above us on a raised part of the courtyard with silver ridges twisting up the trunk and deep grooves with black at their centers.
On the way back through the campus, on the sloping downhill on the rough cement, I was a tuning fork for the road, flying out ahead of him. “Ah AH!” I sang, my throat vibrating with the stones.
“You’re all right, kid,” he said. “But don’t let it go to your head.”
“I won’t,” I said. I’d never heard the phrase before: Let It Go To Your Head.
He pointed out the stained glass and golden tiles, the way the masons had used local sandstone, from the pillars to the big rocks that made up the exterior walls. The stone had thick granules of sand in it; the light gave it dimension, made it look faceted and rough; some areas had carvings, like the stone was embroidered.
“Do you think these stonemasons came from other countries to do this?” he asked, touching one of the big rectangles tufted out like a pillow.
I saw the building the way he did then, just a pile of stones that human hands had carved and placed. I began to see how inside my father there were two competing qualities: one sensitive and specific as a nerve in a tooth, the other unaware, blunt, and bland. Because he noticed the details and care of the craftsmen who built this place, the way they’d chipped at every block and arranged it, I knew he must be capable of noticing other people too. Of noticing me.
“You know, I didn’t go to college,” he said. “Maybe you won’t go either. Better just to go out and get into the world.”
If I didn’t go to college, I would be like him. At that moment, I felt like we were the center of the world. He carried it with him, this feeling of center.
“They teach you how other people think, during your most productive years,” he said. “It kills creativity. Makes people into bozos.”
It made sense to me. Still, I wondered why he always wanted to skate around Stanford, why he seemed to love it, if he didn’t believe in it.
“He’s just got a chip on his shoulder,” my mother said, when I told her we thought college was a waste of time.
When we crossed the street, he grabbed my hand.
“Do you know why we hold hands?” he asked.
“Because we’re supposed to?” I hoped he’d reply, Because I’m your father. Other than these crossings, we didn’t hold hands, and I looked forward to it.
“Nope,” he said. “It’s so, if a car is about to hit you, I can throw you out of the street.”
On University Avenue he pointed to a bum crouched in a nook with a cardboard sign. “That’s me in two years,” he said.
A few minutes later, as we got into the residential streets farther away from the main street of the town and closer to my house, he farted, the sound loud and high like a balloon opening, interrupting the silence. He kept skating like nothing happened. When he did it again, I looked away. After the third time, he muttered, “Sorry.”