There was a bowl of ripe, flushed mangoes. When my mother and I bought mangoes, we bought only one because they were so expensive. Here mangoes were unlimited.
I roamed the house. The widow who’d owned it before had left cans of paint in the pantry along with bags of brushes, empty cans of nails, bottles of oil, and instructions written on scraps of lined paper in a fine, tilted cursive.
The house felt alive to me. I walked into the hallway that looked out into the courtyard. It was basically my house, I told myself. It was my father’s house and I was his daughter. I was pretty sure I was allowed to be here, but I still didn’t want to be caught snooping.
The Rinconada house would rattle with the many small earthquakes and the heavy trains, the window glass singing. Here, it was still. It was a few more blocks away from the trains, out of sight of Alma and the tracks. The walls were thick and dense, the doorways and hallways rounded and wide, like Spanish mission buildings.
I walked up the stone steps to the second floor, holding on to the thin iron railing beneath a long paper lantern that twirled slightly in the breeze, feeling as if a string at my sternum pulled me up to Laurene’s closet and her chest of drawers, the pressure inside me growing. I longed to understand her—to see if I could be more like her.
A couple of weeks before, I’d asked her, “If you had to choose one, would you buy clothing or underwear?” I’d gotten the idea from a Shel Silverstein poem—you were supposed to ask people to determine their predilections for the inner or outer life, the soul or the skin.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Do you mean, would I rather have nice clothing or nice underwear?”
“Yes,” I said, losing my conviction that whatever she said would mean something about her character.
“Nice clothing,” she said.
She showed me how she could still do the splits, dropping down to the floor. I observed everything about her, including how, when she talked, she used a group of words I’d never heard people use in speech before—gratify, garner, providence, interim, pillage, marauding—slipping the words into her sentences like jewels. When she said marauding, she elongated the vowels in a way that made it sound like adulthood and self-sufficiency. Her eyes were icy blue, flat, and small. Sometimes it hurt me to look into them; I wasn’t sure why. She said she was legally blind without glasses or contact lenses, the world reduced to shapes.
Her friend Kat lived nearby and sometimes came over when I was there. Both of them were in their late twenties. When she and Kat talked about losers, which they did sometimes, Laurene made an L shape with her thumb and index finger and moved it around. When Laurene said the word, with her clear diction, I knew there was nothing I’d rather not be than a loser. Laurene was from New Jersey, and I got the idea that people were more normal in New Jersey. They didn’t have Birkenstocks and gurus and talk of reincarnation. Around this time, she said a man had followed her around the Palo Alto Whole Foods, saying he was reincarnated from a bumblebee.
Now, upstairs in the house in the muffled silence, I wanted to find out her secret.
I walked into her closet, which had a full-length mirror, a chest of drawers, a rod for hanging clothing. A carpenter had come to build these closets with light-colored wood. On the chest of drawers were two tubes of lipstick: one mauve, the other a light, shimmering pink, both carved by repeated application into pointed crescents so high and thin the top might break off. I tried the mauve. It felt wet and smelled of wax and perfume.
I opened her underwear drawer. Different cottons—white, nude, black—lumped together the way mine were lumped at home. In the depths of the far-right corner was a loop of ivory. I pulled the loop—a web of elastic and lace unfurled in front of me. A garter belt. I knew what it was, maybe because I’d seen one in Playboy, but I’d never seen a real one before.
In the drawer below was a pair of charcoal wool shorts I recognized from a photograph in which she stood in the Stanford Quad, her hair bright blonde and cascading around her face, her feet turned out at ten and two from the heels, one in front of the other, confident. My father kept the picture on his desk. My mother liked candid photographs; I liked them head-on, as in a magazine. I wanted to be Laurene, and if I couldn’t be her now, I wanted to be her later.
I slipped off my trousers and pulled on the shorts. They bagged around my legs; I had to hold them up with one hand so they didn’t slide off. I put on one of her shirts, a sleeveless cream with black stitches around the neck and arms. I tucked the shirt into the baggy shorts, then looked at myself in her mirror from the side and back, hoping that changing the light and the angle would improve the form. I turned my feet out like hers, ten and two, heels in a line, one in front of the other, hid my nail-bitten hands behind my back.
I pursed my lips. I looked nothing like the person in the photograph.
I took everything off, rearranged the lipsticks. I slipped the garter belt into my pocket, walked down the stairs, down the hallway of windows, past the pantry, through the kitchen, and out the door.
That spring, my father invited me on a trip to New York with him and Laurene.
“She’s a great dancer,” he said on the flight. Laurene and I flanked him in the leather seats at the front of business class. He looked at her and ran his hand over her hair the way you might with a sleeping child.
“I’m an all right dancer,” she said, but I knew she must be better than I was, as he’d seen me perform once in a concert and didn’t mention that I danced too.
Laurene had taken me to lunch once before this in her white VW Rabbit convertible, taking time out from Stanford’s business school, where she was in her final semester. She seemed rushed, didn’t talk to me or look at me as she drove, but looked straight ahead, as if she wasn’t sure how to relate to a child. She held the gearshift differently from my mother, with less grip, pushing it forward with the heel of her hand. She was pretty, but a different pretty from Tina, who didn’t wear makeup and who didn’t seem interested in the way she looked.
We walked through the Stanford Shopping Center. She walked fast, with her feet pointed out to the sides; she wore black suede shoes with metal clocks on the tops. “Let’s go to the Opera Cafe,” she said. “They make a great chicken Caesar salad without much fat.” This talk of fat was new and enticing—another, more sophisticated world I wanted to be part of in which women watched the amount of fat they ate. I didn’t think of myself as thin or fat. I didn’t go out to eat very often, and looked forward to sampling one of the outlandishly tall cakes so large they looked unreal, like sculptures by Claes Oldenburg. I hoped we’d get more than salads.
But we had to eat quickly; we didn’t have time for dessert. Laurene’s blonde bangs fell over her forehead, curling out from a cowlick at the hairline. When she touched objects, she did it firmly, with precision, as if she knew what she wanted to take before she touched it. I liked the way she held the menu, the steering wheel, the tube of lipstick.
At first, New York City smelled of yeast. Warm pretzels, exhaust, steam.
Laurene took us to Wall Street and showed us around the trading floor, where she’d worked just out of college.
“They used to switch the phones,” she said, of a circular bank of white telephones, each one with a white twisting cord hanging down, “as a joke. They’d hang the earpiece of one phone on the base of another, crossing the cords. So when someone needed to do a trade, and they were in a rush, they’d pick up a phone, dial the number, and then realize they were using an earpiece that didn’t match the keypad.”