A couple months later, the new couch, chair, and ottoman arrived upholstered in the dun-colored linen with down-filled cushions and pillows. She gave the old ones away. She wore the skirt and sweater together a few times, for me, and then she must have given those away too. I called her Simpleton when she made mistakes—forgetting directions, insisting that Italian ice cream wasn’t different from or better than the American variety. It made her laugh. I’d been spending more time with my father and Laurene, absorbing their ideas, their sophistication. I’d been to New York, I understood the importance of low-fat, watched Laurene add oil carefully and sparingly to salad dressings. I’d learned that gelato was different from, and better than, ice cream.
One day, driving somewhere, I noticed a speck of paint on her jeans she hadn’t noticed to wash off and said it again: “You’re a Simpleton.” This time she burst into tears, pulled over, and leaned on the steering wheel, surprising us both, and I never said it again.
My father’s wedding took place in Yosemite, at the Ahwahnee Hotel.
Kobun, a Buddhist monk my parents knew, officiated. During the ceremony, Steve and Laurene stood before three large plate-glass windows through which you could see the mountains, the forest, and the falling snow.
Laurene’s dress was ivory silk; my father wore a jacket and bow tie with jeans, as if he were one of those puzzles where each part of the body is clad in a different outfit.
That morning Laurene had been downstairs in the hotel lobby wearing black leggings with a flower pattern and black-rimmed glasses. In my idea of weddings, brides hid before the ceremony, worried about their beauty, and I liked the way she was playful and among us.
Kobun had asked several people to give short speeches, and I was to be one of them.
There were only forty people invited to the wedding, and afterward we would go for a hike in the snowy forest, wearing fleece jackets they’d given out as gifts. The dinner would be in a room with rectangular tables arranged in a U-shape, a classical guitar performance, and bouquets of wheat.
My mother wasn’t invited, but my father called her the day after the ceremony, something she didn’t tell me until years later. When she did tell me, the fact of the call surprised me because I didn’t realize they were in touch; they could be distant and then close in a pattern I didn’t understand.
My father gave a speech in which he said that it wasn’t love that brought people together and kept them together, but values—shared values. It was delivered to the crowd and to Laurene in a tense way, like a lecture, or an admonition. A few more speeches and then Kobun called my name, and I walked forward toward my father and Laurene, who stood in front of the windows, a thick snow falling slowly behind them that gave the scene the look of being a snow globe. I was holding the paper on which I had written something about how it was rare to get to see your parent get married (a friend suggested this idea), and as I walked toward them, reading the speech at the same time, I started to cry. My father gestured me closer, and I hugged the two of them until Laurene whispered, “Okay, Lis. C’mon.”
I’d been looking forward to the wedding: I would get to eat the food and cake (it was shaped like Half Dome, and tasted of banana), and there might be dancing (there wasn’t). I was prepared for these details, the surfaces of the ceremony. I was unprepared for how it would feel to be this close to the buzzing wire of what I wanted. I hoped to be the very center of it, the matchstick girl who had imagined a scene into being. This wedding was for me. I would be the daughter of married people, even if Laurene wasn’t actually my mother.
When the ceremony was over, however, I felt empty. I was not the center of the affair. I wasn’t invited into most of the wedding photos. My father seemed absorbed with Laurene and everyone else. During the dinner after the ceremony, I braided Laurene’s hair, standing behind her at the table.
Later I wandered down to the lobby and looked around the gift shop. I found a small photo album, the cover made of a piece of cloth that looked like a tapestry of pixelated trees.
“Would you like to pay with cash or charge it to your room?” I’d learned at some point that hotels let you charge to rooms. The woman seemed earnest, not aware of my scheme.
“The room,” I said. I zinged with excitement, my palms got clammy, at the prospect of having a photo album. But my father might see it on the bill. I hoped he would be too busy to notice, or that he had too much money to notice money.
I was sharing a hotel room with my father’s sister, Patty, the sister he grew up with who was also adopted. My father wasn’t very close with Patty—he’d become closer to Mona in the years since they’d found each other in adulthood. I felt upset to be rooming with her, as if it meant she and I were in the same category.
Most of the guests left on the Sunday after the wedding, except for Mona and her boyfriend, Richie, who would stay for a week with my father and Laurene, sharing a honeymoon. Richie and Mona would marry the next year at a ceremony at Bard College, and also share a honeymoon with Steve and Laurene, but then it seemed to me that there was no reason, if Mona stayed, that I could not stay too. Kobun and his girlfriend, Stephanie, were also still around, but would be leaving that afternoon.
“If you’re staying, I want to stay,” I told my father.
“Maybe,” he said. “Let me think about it.” He seemed conflicted, the way he rarely seemed when he said no to me.
But a couple of hours later he said I had to ride home that afternoon with Kobun and Stephanie.
Before I left, he requested the bill for the room I’d shared with Patty at the main desk in the lobby. I stood near him. I didn’t want to be anywhere but at his side.
He looked through the bill and frowned.
“Is this yours?” he asked, pointing at the charge.
“It was Patty,” I lied. I was afraid of him, deeply sad to leave, and terrified of what he would say to me if he found out it was me. “I told her not to get it, but she did.”
Shortly after the wedding, a fight that had been simmering between my parents on and off for more than a year exploded. Before this I had hardly been aware they were fighting, only that the rapport had cooled between our house and theirs. I attributed this to the fact that my mother was having a hard time with her own life. A few years before, my father had hired a man to do gardening at the Woodside house. The same man had recently started to do some work as an assistant gardener at the Waverley house too, and my mother had found out. My mother heard through acquaintances that this man had been accused by his children of sexually molesting them, and the issue of my proximity to him became a catalyst for a larger disagreement between my parents. They had become friendly again over several years without resolving or discussing how my father had neglected us years before, how he had not protected me when I was little. And now he was not protecting me again, and it must have reminded her of his other abandonments and neglect and made her enraged. When they discussed it, she lost her temper and she could hardly speak. She had asked him several times already to fire the man, but he refused.
The final argument happened one evening when I went over to the Waverley house for dinner on my own. My mother knocked on the door, white with rage. It seemed to me completely out of the blue. I watched as the two of them argued, both standing outside the gate on the sidewalk on Santa Rita near her car. I understood the fight was about the man, but it didn’t make sense to me why she should be so upset, why she should be almost incapacitated with anger over what seemed to me to be such a small issue. I remember wishing she would go away, stop humiliating herself.