My father commissioned a low split-rail fence to run like a brace around the cornered front yard of the house. The grass was torn out and only dirt remained. A tree would be planted there on the Waverley side.
“I like East Coast oak trees,” Laurene said in the car, when they were talking about what to plant.
“Do you know about the East Coast kind, Lis?” my father said, glancing at me in the back seat. He usually used the words “East Coast” as a synonym for “inferior.”
“What do they look like?”
“There,” he said, pointing to one growing between the sidewalk and the road. It looked nothing like a California oak. Its leaves were larger and shaped like they’d been perforated around the edge by a large hole puncher.
In the end, they chose to transplant a mature copper beech. The tree was inserted with a crane into a deep hole. A huge trunk, a wiry ball of roots. The beech stood as tall as a two-story building, taller than the top of the house, the limbs reaching up and sideways like a broom, dead leaves dangling on otherwise bare branches.
When I left the house in the mornings, and in the evenings when I returned from school, I looked for evidence of life—leaves, buds—something to indicate the tree would grow and flourish. After about a month, the tree still hadn’t changed. It didn’t leaf out or unkink to become symmetrical like other trees, but still listed, bare. One day, a crew of men arrived, sawed the trunk and branches into sections, and took it away.
A friend of my father’s, Joanna, came over for lunch—she’d been part of the original Apple team and had a son who was about nine months old, like Reed. Steve gave her a tour of the house. “These,” he said, pointing to the silvered wooden beams on the ceiling of a small alcove, “were used to build the Golden Gate Bridge.” I thought he meant they were part of the structure itself, but later I understood they’d been part of the scaffolding.
“Don’t you worry about protein, Steve?” she asked while we ate. She spoke with a pleasing accent. She talked about children’s developing brains, how a vegan diet might not contain enough protein or fat. You could tell she was a worrier.
“Nope,” my father said, with a calm authority. “You know breast milk—what a baby drinks during the time they’re developing most?”
He began this line of reasoning with anyone who asked about our vegan diet.
“Yes?” Joanna said.
“Well, guess what? Breast milk is only six percent protein,” he said. “So, getting a lot of protein can’t be that important.”
He delivered his conclusions so convincingly that I didn’t question them for years. He believed dairy products were mucus forming; mucus blocked spiritual clarity the way it blocked a nose. It was diet, most of all, that he used to differentiate himself from other people. He’d been a little more relaxed about his diet when I was younger, occasionally even having a scoop of ice cream at the Häagen-Dazs shop at the Stanford Barn. Now he’d become even more rigid than he was before, not wanting a single animal product to pass the lips of anyone in the family, especially Reed’s.
I noticed the way Laurene seemed confident; her face was symmetrical and serene, whereas my face was composed of uneven halves, the eyebrow, ear, and eye of one side higher than those on the other. Without my permission or knowledge, my face would fall into expressions that revealed thoughts and feelings like weather patterns. I began to imitate the way Laurene tossed her long hair. She wasn’t a hippie or bohemian. She had fended off two marriage proposals and then captured my father. Because of this I supposed she could do other great feats. My father talked about her to me in the third person when he grabbed her to kiss her, “She was a cheerleader, you know?”
For lunch my father made pasta, and on a serving plate I arranged a TerraVera burrito—black beans, salsa, and avocado wrapped in lavash bread—sliced into sections like sushi rolls. At that moment, I liked the purity and abstemiousness of our diet, the sparse furnishings of the house exposing the beauty of its bones, beams like ribs, the entrance left unlocked, so that anyone could wander in. The gardener had planted chamomile in between the paving stones, and when you walked across, the scent drifted up. We ate our wholesome food at the round wooden table in the kitchen, my brother’s high chair pressed up against the edge, and at moments like this—with a guest over, my brother slapping his plastic tray, my father humming, serving his pasta topped with avocado cubes and drizzled with his fancy olive oil—I felt like I was part of the family.
The only problem was my hands. Since moving here they’d become detached-feeling, conspicuous. They fluttered and lifted in an embarrassing way, as if they too, separately, wanted attention; otherwise they hung dead at the ends of my wrists in an obvious, strange way I was sure everyone noticed. I was severely conscious of them. When we sat down to meals I begged them, silently, not to betray me. Yet almost every evening at dinner I broke a glass.
I was terrified my father and Laurene might tell me at some point how insignificant I was, what a disappointment I was, sloppy and repulsive, breaking things like a baby. They already had a baby. How little I fit into the picture of family. I could see it and feel it. They’d made a mistake in allowing me to live here; I was unsure of my position in the house, and this anxiety—combined with a feeling of immense gratitude so overwhelming I thought I might burst—caused me to talk too much, to compliment too much, to say yes to whatever they asked, hoping my servile quality would ignite compassion, pity, or love. They had taken me from a drab life and brought me into this perfect house: she was strong and intelligent, he was glinting with genius and aesthetic mastery.
I fawned over Laurene, pulling lantana blossoms off stems in the garden and throwing them at her, making a shower of blossoms around her when she came home from work. I was trying, and failing, to express gratitude and worthiness by becoming the long-lost daughter they might want. Yet my hands continued to feel as if they might float up and disappear, and I kept breaking glasses.
One day, after school, I rushed over to where my father and Laurene were standing beneath the Juliet balcony in the courtyard, the green-leafed wisteria vines winding up fat wooden beams. They were discussing the landscaping.
“How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?” I asked. I didn’t usually tell jokes, but I’d heard this one at school and thought it might impress them. The joke hadn’t seemed particularly funny, but the other students had laughed.
They looked at me, expectantly.
“How many?” my father asked.
“They don’t screw in light bulbs,” I said. “They screw in hot tubs.” The moment I said it, I understood for the first time the double meaning of screw, and something in my face changed even though I willed it not to.
Neither of them laughed.
“I don’t think she gets it,” my father said.
“Oh, I think she does,” Laurene said, studying me. “I think she definitely does.”
That evening I broke another glass at dinner and ran to my room.
I hid in the closet with the light out, crouched on the floor. My father followed me and found me there, like I hoped he would.
“Hey, Lis,” he said. He’d crouched down beside me for a while, and then pulled me up. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, you know. When you were younger.”