“It’s okay,” I said, mortified for him.
When my father and I got back to my block, kids were out playing in the yards and on the sidewalks. Straight across from our house lived a tall, short-haired woman named Jan, whose husband worked at NeXT. Farther down the long driveway that ran beside Jan’s house was the dark wooden house of a woman who’d dated my father when my mother was pregnant with me, and who was now married and had a baby boy. It was a strange coincidence to move here and find ourselves living on a line with two people connected to my father; my mother said he attracted coincidences in an uncanny way.
We stopped on the sidewalk across from our house, and a few men who lived nearby gathered around my father—three fathers holding three babies. They wanted his opinions, wanted to know what he thought about this or that. The mothers chased after the toddlers to give the fathers a chance to talk. I stood nearby, proud that it was my father they wanted to talk with. They discussed people I’d never heard of and companies I didn’t know.
Soon, the babies began to fuss, squirming, letting out little cries and yelps.
My father continued to talk—hardware, software—the same discussions that seemed to come up over and over with all the men we saw in Palo Alto those days. All three babies began to wail. My father talked as if nothing had changed, and the men tried to listen, bouncing the babies, who wailed louder. He talked louder, faster, so his words got through the noise. His voice was high, loud, and nasal, with sharp points at the end of his phrases that hurt my ears and knifed into my sternum, and I wondered if that’s what it was like for the babies who were bawling. The fathers had to stop talking and take them away.
Back inside, he and I stood by the radiator and took off our skates and my mother joined us. My parents liked each other, you could tell. I leaned over to make folds in the legs of my jeans, pulling the extra fabric over itself and rolling it up. This gave the impression of a thinner leg. With my jeans pegged, my proportions were right: I favored a big T-shirt that bagged around my upper body, my legs like sticks poking out.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Pegging my jeans,” I said.
“Do you think that’s cool?” he asked. “Yes. I do.”
“Oh,” he said. Then, in a mocking tone, he said, “Oh, Biff! Oh, Blaine! I hope you like my jeans.”
“Steve,” my mother said. She was smiling but I could tell she didn’t like it.
“Maybe she’ll marry Thaaad,” he said.
Dirk, Blaine, Trent, Trav—these were his names for my imaginary future boyfriends and husbands. I was nine, the thought of marriage irrelevant to my life. I laughed, to show I knew it was a joke, but I wondered if he picked ugly, truncated names and fretted about my marriage prospects because he thought I was ugly or without promise.
“Or maybe you’ll marry Christian,” he said.
Christian lived across the street and was around my age, with blond hair and gold-rimmed glasses and a trace of an accent from Georgia, where he was from. He wore plaid shorts and T-shirts, and he was skinny, and he did his homework in a tiny scrawl with a mechanical pencil. He also had a single mother. I liked him, but I knew I didn’t want him to be my boyfriend. Once a month or so, another boy, named Kai, with dark hair, petal-light skin, and red lips, would visit his father, who lived in the house beside us. He poked his head up at the window that looked into my bedroom window, a surprise. He was shy and didn’t want to play, but his presence gave me such a thrill I thought I might pick him, if I was required to choose a husband, but I didn’t say it.
“Let me see your teeth,” I said, to change the subject. “Show me how they come together like a zipper.”
“No way,” he said, as if I might be trying to mock him, when I felt only admiration and curiosity.
“Please,” I said.
He leaned down and opened his mouth. No overbite, no underbite, no spaces in between: a mountain range and sky.
“They’re amazing,” my mother said, “how they come together like that.” He closed his mouth.
“Let me see yours, Lis,” he said. I showed him.
“Interesting. And yours?”
He looked into my mother’s mouth. Her bottom teeth were fine, but crowded, like too many guests mingling in a small room.
“They don’t look so great. Might want to see about that,” he said, even though he’d been kind just a moment before. She winced and closed her mouth. It was as if the magnet changed direction suddenly and now they repulsed each other; it was not possible to know in advance when the switch would occur.
“Maybe she’ll look like Brooke Shields,” he said, about me.
“Who’s Brooke Shields?” I asked.
“A model,” my mother said.
“With these really great eyebrows,” my father said.
After that, he left, saying something like may-be you wi-ll in a trailing voice across the lawn. He was in stocking feet, carrying his skates over his shoulder. When he left, it was like stepping into a dark room after being in the bright sunlight. It was dim and uniform, washed out with the afterimage of light. I played the flute, my mother ordered new tropical fish–patterned sheets for my bed, my cousin Sarah was coming to visit in a couple months. Before he’d arrived, these things were exciting, but for days after his visits they didn’t seem so important anymore. It would take time to build it all back up again.
I saw, now, in my eyebrows, promise.
This was around the time, my mother would say later, that my father fell in love with me. “He was in awe of you,” she said, but I don’t remember it. I noticed he was around more and grabbed me and tried to pick me up even when I didn’t want to be picked up. He had opinions about my clothes and teased me more about whom I would marry. “I wish you’d been my mother,” my father said to her, strangely, one afternoon, as she was preparing lunch and I was playing. Another time he said, “You know she’s more than half me, more than half my genetic material.” The announcement caught my mother off guard. She didn’t know how to respond. Maybe he said it because he’d started feeling close to me and wanted a greater share.
I remember an abundance of crisp sunlight, shadows like blotches swaying inside the light, as if there was more sunlight in those days than there is now.
We looked for houses we wanted while we skated around. He liked dark wood-shingled ones, vines twisting up the dark brown or grayish face. Wood so old it silvered. Mullioned windows, small panes of glass. Gardens with plants that looked blown into heaps. If you looked in the windows of those houses, you could tell they’d be dark inside. I liked the houses that were painted white, symmetrical, with columns and plain lawns, heavy and sturdy on the land, like banks.
“You gotta stop and smell the roses,” he said. He said it urgently, then stopped and put his nose deep in a rose and sighed. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was only an expression. But soon I got into it anyway, and we looked for the best rosebushes in the neighborhood, crisscrossing the streets. Roses were plentiful in the yards. I noticed good ones he’d missed behind fences, and we trespassed across lawns on the toes of our skates to get to them.
Since Ron was out of the picture and my mom and I were on our own again, I figured it was clear to both of us by now that we didn’t want anyone else. We didn’t need boyfriends. We were doing pretty great: the new house, my father dropping by. So it had surprised and infuriated me when she told me about a new man named Ilan. Ilan would be the one who stuck around the longest—seven years—and change my life for the better, but first I would ignore him for six months, and smirk at him, trying to get him to leave us alone.