My father invited his new girlfriend, Laurene, who brought a friend and arrived separately. After the party, my father would drive Mona, my mother, and me back home. I didn’t notice Laurene or her friend, and I don’t remember him introducing them, but there were many people I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. We were all about to perish.
Mona’s friends were there too, including a petite woman with short hair.
“Hello, sweetheart,” she said, leaning down to look into my eyes. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Lisa. Mona’s niece.”
“Ah,” she said. “That’s right. I’m so happy to meet you. And how old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“And that’s—what grade?”
“Sixth.”
“Well isn’t that wonderful,” she said. “And are you having fun?”
Every sound startled me. I looked around for my mother, so I could beg to go home. But she loved parties; we didn’t go to many, and when she would finally agree to leave, she had to say goodbye to everyone she’d spoken with, initiating a new round of conversations, so that the leaving was sometimes longer than the party that came before.
As I walked through the clot of mingling adults, the same petite woman found me again and asked me all the same questions. I’d never encountered a drunken adult before and didn’t understand what it was that made her forget me so soon—unless it was proof that the fabric of the world was in decay, that any minute the bomb would hit.
At midnight there was a cacophony of noise—honking horns, paper whistles like lizard tongues—and my heart flew around in the cavity of my chest. When the noise quieted, however, the dark world was still there, intact. I shook all over but felt grateful for our survival, proud, as if my worry had held the world together.
On the drive back, my father yelled at us. He said that we hadn’t paid attention to his new girlfriend. It was pouring rain. He put the wiper on full blast—his kind of car had only one thick wiper, bending and whipping back and forth like a reed in high wind.
“I didn’t see her,” I said, meekly. He had been told I was anxious about a nuclear bomb, watching for the end of the world. He knew I had migraines, in an abstract way, but he was not one of the people who knew more or soothed me. He was not involved, and now that the world had not exploded I felt relieved but also foolish.
“We were talking with everyone else, Steve,” Mona said. “We had friends there too, you know.”
“For Christ sakes,” he said. “You guys are so damn selfish. Think about how embarrassing this is for me. I told her I had this great family. But why would she want to be with me with a family like this?”
We didn’t look like a family; I hadn’t thought of us that way except for the few times I’d been together with my two parents, but I was surprised he’d admit it. It was nice to hear him say it, even in anger. He seemed to think of himself as undesirable, as if he didn’t notice his own allure, how people hung around him.
As if a woman would leave him because we hadn’t noticed her at a party!
That night I stayed over at his house, as we’d originally planned. He shook me awake several times throughout the night, crouching beside my bed in the dark and shivering my shoulder. By that time I slept in a different room, in a woven-frame bed Mona had bought for me after he painted and carpeted these rooms. “I can’t get hold of her on the phone,” he said. “Maybe she’s mad. Maybe it’s over.” He was on the verge of tears. At first he seemed distant and moody with me, as if insinuating I was to blame while also wanting me to reassure him, but then he sat on the side of my bed and put his head in his hands.
“She’s probably at a friend’s house,” I said. “I’m sure it’s okay. You can talk to her in the morning.”
“I’m so worried she’s gone. She’s never coming back.” It had been only a few hours since we’d seen her; it was the beginning of morning by now, a frail light in the sky.
“She’ll call tomorrow. You should sleep.”
“I’ll try,” he said, and walked back to his room.
For my twelfth birthday, Mona gave me a CD by Patsy Cline, with a sad song about a weeping willow and walking all alone at night. Soon after, she came to visit, and after she’d come into the house to see my mother, I followed her outside. She and I stood on the lawn. It was evening, the light was yellow, the air quiet without the lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and prop planes. Gnats bounced like the surface of carbonated water where the grass met the air.
Mona was small, five feet two, but stood as if she belonged, as if wherever she stood became her plot of land. Her small stomach poked out like a girl’s. I thought of her as both a woman and a girl. I believed she understood me and I trusted her to help me in the future. I knew her father had also left, that she and her mother had struggled with money. Unlike my parents, she’d been to college and graduate school. When she walked, she ticked her hips back and forth. She taught at a college called Bard and used words I had to look up like “amortize” and “salubrious.” She didn’t repeat the good words but said new ones each time, in a clipped way, folded into sentences, as if she expected I knew the meanings.
Now we stood in front of my house together, tips of grass catching the slanting light and becoming translucent, like backlit straw.
“If Steve doesn’t pay for your college, I will,” Mona said, apropos of nothing. College was a long way off, but it worried me in a way I had not been able to articulate to anyone, and I wondered how she knew. When he talked about college, it was often with contempt; he didn’t need it, so why would I? Also, sometimes he decided not to pay for things at the very last minute, walking out of restaurants without paying the bill, refusing to buy things other people bought as a matter of course, like furniture. Everyone in his life had been treated to his whimsy about money, offering and rescinding payments for small and large things.
Once Mona, my father, and I went shopping at a vintage clothing store in Palo Alto. Mona and I found hats and jackets we liked, and he watched us try them on. “They don’t look as good as you think. When you’re shopping in vintage stores, you start to think the things look good when they don’t,” he said too loudly, and walked off down the street, when it had seemed only a moment before that he might treat us to a hat each, at least.
“Thank you,” I said to Mona.
She walked to her car parked under the magnolia tree, waving before she drove off. I ran inside to tell my mother. My mother said, “Did she?” as if she was pondering the significance, or didn’t believe it.
At the end of sixth grade, my homeroom teacher, Joan, called me to her desk. I walked to where she was standing and braced for criticism. I’d been reprimanded often for how I dressed.
“This,” Joan said, holding one of my papers, a paragraph about Harriet Tubman. “You did something quite good here.” Joan’s glasses magnified her eyes, which were already big and watery. She spoke in an earnest voice, her lips sticking to one another.
I felt a rush of joy. It was the first time I’d been singled out for good schoolwork. I remembered how the night before, while I was writing the assignment, the words had come easily, even delightfully, as if they were greased; they slid out right, and I simply wrote them down.