“Did you get them better gifts than you got for me?” my mother asked. We were in her bedroom. I’d brought her gift out of my luggage, still in its plastic sheath.
“No, I got you different gifts—nothing better or worse.”
“But you spent more on them,” she said. How did she know? I should have bought her the best gifts because she had less money and couldn’t buy them for herself.
“I like the yukata. It looks good on you,” I said. She’d put it on over her clothes in the bedroom while I sat on her bed and watched.
“I don’t like things that tie like this,” she said. “It’s too big. Anyway, I’m your mother and you should be more honoring toward me.”
“It’s a size small,” I said. “And I am honoring—”
“But what did you buy them?” she asked, interrupting.
How to explain to her that I’d bought them the more expensive gifts because I worried they didn’t care for me and I wanted them to like me, to love me, even? With them together, the feeling I was loved and belonged was tenuous, superficial, my place in their family not essential or fixed. They did not ask me questions about myself, or seem interested in me the way my mother was, and this made me hunger to impress them.
My mother already loved me. Even when she screamed at me, I knew it. I wasn’t so sure about them.
Reed was six months old by now. I went over to see them the week I returned from Japan, and my father asked me to change his diaper. “It’s part of being in this family, Lis,” he said. “You haven’t done it for a while.”
I took my brother on my hip, walked past the bank of French doors in the hallway and up the curve in the stone stairway, careful to hold the railing. In the rooms upstairs, my father had replaced the floors with foot-wide boards of Douglas fir, a silky, soft texture to the wood. In my brother’s room, a carpenter had built a set of wooden shelves in the same wood that connected to a high changing table.
I set my brother down on the table, opened the straps on the sides of the diaper, cleaned him, then turned to grab a diaper, as I’d done before.
In the three weeks I’d been in Japan, he’d learned to roll. No one had told me. I heard the thunk of his skull hitting the wooden floor. I looked down at him, face up on the floor. There was a pause, and I thought that maybe he wouldn’t cry, and they would not notice, and everything would somehow return to normal. One second later, he began to wail. I scooped him into my arms and heard the sound of their bare feet running from the kitchen.
On the way to the hospital, Laurene nursed him. I sat beside her in the back seat, hoping there would be a chance to be helpful. I wanted to go back to the moment just before it happened.
My father drove. He was silent. Finally he said, venom quiet: “Lis, you should learn to understand the impact of your actions on other people.” It couldn’t be undone. I’d meant to protect Reed; now this mistake would become part of the lore, as if I had done nothing good before or after.
But the changing table did not have a lip or fence. The cushion was flat—the curved foam pads that dip in the center had not been invented yet. And the diapers were stacked out of reach.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I want you to consider moving in with our family,” my father said a couple of months later. We were in his Mercedes, driving back to his house from Country Sun, where we’d bought some Odwalla apple juice. My mother and I had already talked about our need for space from each other, in calmer moments realizing we couldn’t keep fighting like this. She needed a break, she said.
He said it sharply, as if I’d done something wrong. I had worried they wouldn’t want me to live with them after my brother fell, but since then they’d had me change his diaper many times, and even asked me to babysit several nights as middle school drew to a close and summer began.
This was what I’d been hoping for. It had happened. He’d asked me to come live with him. But his tone didn’t have excitement or joy in it.
“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to live with you, for now. If you want me to.” I had the idea that if I moved in with him, we’d look at old photographs together to understand what we missed, urgently, like we were cramming for an exam. Also, it would be a novelty, the big house, a family that looked right. I was his daughter, lost to him for a time like Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, now returned; I had noble qualities (I imagined) and was perhaps beautiful, from some angles, and worthy. All this he would see and recognize. It would be glorious. There would be dresses and bowls of fruit.
Later, I heard that when I was in the last year of middle school, when the fights with my mother got bad, the school had called to tell him that if he did not take me in to live with him, they’d call social services. I’m not sure whether this story was true or exaggerated, but in any case, the story repositioned him—after all this time—as my savior.
“It’s not for now,” he said. “If you’re going to live with us, you’ve got to choose. Her or us. I need you to really give this family a chance. If you choose to live with us, I’d like you to promise you won’t see your mother for six months. You need to give it a real shot,” he said. It wouldn’t work if I was going back and forth, it wouldn’t take. He’d decided that a clean break would be the right way; my mother didn’t agree with him, but those were his terms. It was almost summer now, which meant I wouldn’t be able to see her until December. “Otherwise,” he said, “the deal’s off.”
“I do want to live with you,” I said, with a surety I didn’t feel.
“You’ve made a very important decision,” he said, with solemnity. “This is one of those life moments, one of those adult moments.”
I would leave my mother—I’d said the words out loud. I felt giddy and guilty and numb. Maybe this was the origin of the guilt that seized me later and left me hardly able to walk sometimes, after I had moved in with them: having stolen her youth and energy, having driven her to a state of perpetual anxiety, without support or resources, now that I was flourishing in school and beloved by my teachers, I cast her out and picked him, the one who’d left. I chose the pretty place when she was the one who’d read me books of old stories with admonishments not to believe in the trick of facades.
We turned from Waverley onto Santa Rita into the driveway of the house. The fancy car, the young, handsome father, the prettiest house in Palo Alto. I was aware of being part of this picture when I was in it, as if I was also watching it from outside. None of their surfaces spoke of shame or imperfection, and that itself would be a great relief, to relax inside the appearance of the good. When the picture looked pretty, you didn’t have to brace against what others might think, you didn’t have to charm or compensate. He took the apple juice by its hollow handle and walked through the gate toward the house.
“I’m proud of you,” he said.
Small Nation
A few weeks later, on a weekday morning in June, my mother and I packed my things and drove to my father’s house. A four-block journey with a single kink in the path.