“Steve’s taking us out to breakfast at Late for the Train,” my mother said. It was almost the end of my fourth-grade year.
“Just us three?” It was unusual, now that Tina and Ilan were around, for the three of us to eat together.
“Yup.”
The restaurant was nestled up against the train tracks at the Menlo Park station. When a train came through every half hour, it was hard to hear anyone speaking, even those at the same table, but the clanking, deafening noise was part of the experience. The owners were a husband and wife. The curtains were lace, and the place smelled of the buttery whole wheat scones they delivered to tables in baskets inside patterned napkins.
Before the food arrived, after we’d received our goblets of fresh-squeezed orange juice, my father raised his glass.
“A toast,” he said. “You’re going to a new school. You got in.”
My mother smiled—she was in on it, I realized. I burst into tears. I would have to leave my friends, again?
Nueva was a private school in an old Crocker mansion on thirty-three acres of land in Hillsborough that I’d visited for three days a few months before. The school was founded for young musicians and allowed students to leave class for private music lessons. It was meant to be a school for the gifted. I’d visited the classroom of a teacher named Bryna, who played the guitar and ended the days in a group rendition of a song about a man named Charlie who couldn’t get off the subway and never returned home.
The school was made of gray stone, with balustrades and huge trees. During my three-day application visit, I went each day to the schoolwide thirty-minute morning sing in a room called the ballroom with high curved windows looking out to lawns and forests. I didn’t know any of the songs, but I let them wash over me, including one called “Russian Picnic” with multiple parts. All the students in every grade sat on the floor and sang.
I learned later that Ilan had resisted the idea of private school. Like Ron, he believed private school was elitist and advised my mother not to send me. But my mother decided not to follow his advice. A few months before, my father had asked my mother, angrily, “What happened to her?” He’d noticed I wasn’t able to do my Current Events homework. She said, “See? I told you so.” She said my eyes had become duller. Before this she’d asked him to pay for private school, but he’d said no, not wanting me to move schools again. Now he made her promise that if he paid the tuition and they moved me to Nueva, she wouldn’t change schools again.
My mother had pulled me out of speech therapy lessons a month or two before.
“Why should she take speech therapy?” my mother asked, when the lessons had been proposed at the start of fourth grade.
“For her lisp. So it doesn’t bother other people,” the woman answered.
My mother didn’t like the answer—she liked my lisp, anyway—but she thought I might enjoy the one-on-one instruction.
She came to pick me up one day and looked at the textbooks meant to teach the s and th sounds. They were inaccurate and uninspired, she said.
“Lisa’s applying to Nueva,” she’d told the tutor, a woman I seemed to like. “Would you be willing to write her a recommendation?”
“She’s not smart enough,” the tutor said.
At school, when they did the homework check, calling out our names to verify if we’d put our homework in the basket, I learned I could just say yes, even though I hadn’t and, so far, no one had bothered me.
We’d applied to Nueva in the middle of that year and I understood I wasn’t admitted because there wasn’t space. Later I learned it was not only space but also my IQ, which was much lower than it had been when I was tested in kindergarten. My mother said that the principal of the school had lectured them, asking them what schools they had been putting me in, and why they’d let me move schools so many times. Mona wrote a recommendation letter. My father asked, uncharacteristically, if he could contribute money to get me in. I didn’t know this then. But the principal said no. It was school policy, in any case, to allow all applicants to do a three-day visit.
After the visit to her classroom, Bryna, one of the most respected teachers at the school, wrote a five-page letter to recommend me, my mother said, and another girl dropped out, and I was admitted. I don’t know what I’d done to impress her, and I never saw the letter. They wanted me to start soon, right away, at the end of fourth grade.
For the long drive to Nueva, my father bought us a new car: an Audi Quattro. My mother and I went to the lot and chose the maroon model, with a light-gray leather interior. Under the emergency brake was a stitched leather skirt that bagged loose, like elephant skin; on the dash in front of the passenger seat was a glossy panel of wood.
“Now I can knock on wood when I’m driving,” my mother said. She knocked to un-jinx. She would knock when she saw an odd number of ravens or a black cat wander across our path. She noticed signs and premonitions and would sometimes become despondent if she saw the wrong number of birds—until she saw another bird that changed the count.
In the mornings, we drove north down Highway 280, past the reservoir. The drive to Nueva was about forty minutes. There were birds in the rumpled hills around the freeway, turkey vultures, sometimes eagles and hawks.
“How fast do you think we’re going?” she asked, covering the speedometer with her hand.
“Fifty?” In the old Honda we would have had to yell to be heard; inside the Audi, it seemed like we were hardly moving. Nothing vibrated or rasped.
She removed her hand. “Eighty!” she said, “my God,” and braked.
My mother learned about a new kind of braces made of a bone-colored polymer to blend in more effectively with the color of teeth. She asked my father to pay for them, and he’d agreed. But the coffee she drank every day discolored the clear bands that surrounded the bone-colored cabooses, browning the bands after just a few sips, making her teeth look yellow.
“I’m going to quit coffee,” she said. The next day, she had espresso breath, the bands were stained, and she was despondent as she cooked dinner.
“Quitting is harder than it seems,” she said when I asked her about it.
When she smiled, her lips got caught and bunched above them. At a shop, a woman said, “I can’t believe you’re willing to wear braces at your age.” She came home, moved around the house in a jerky, angry way, dislodging papers from her desk.
Soon she learned how to change the bands herself. She ordered bags of extra bands and did it every day, crouching with a knee up on the toilet seat, cutting the old ones out with a silver X-Acto knife into which she’d inserted a new, sharp blade. It made a sound like flick flick flick as the old bands were spliced and flew across the bathroom. She pulled the fresh bands open with her index fingers, releasing them over each brace.
Mona stopped by one day, and she and my mother stood talking in the kitchen near the microwave. My mother was worried the house was too small for a studio. “Just paint,” Mona said. “Bedroom be damned. Make it into a studio and sleep in it.” Mona had just returned from a residency at an artists’ colony called Djerassi.
After that, my mother taped up black-and-white photocopies of the etchings and lithographs of Picasso, Kirchner, Cézanne, Chagall, and Kandinsky from the 1920s and ‘30s until her bedroom wall was completely covered in overlapping pages taped at the tops, free at the bottom like tiles or scales, that lifted and fell in the breezes. Soon, she also converted the garage into a studio, adding Sheetrock to the walls.