The next weekend, Laurene took me clothes shopping.
“We’ll have to go quick,” she said. “Just one store.” We had an hour. With my mother there was time but no money; with Laurene it was the opposite, and I figured I could keep as much as we found, like a game show my mother told me about, frantic contestants grabbing from shelves and throwing as much as they could into a shopping cart before a buzzer went off.
As we backed out of the driveway in the white BMW convertible my father had bought for her, Laurene slid on sunglasses that were small and rectangular, made of a brushed brown resin with greenish lenses.
“I like those,” I said.
“Oh, they’re silly,” she said, which seemed incredible, to dismiss the glamorous while inhabiting it.
When we got to the mall, a car backed out of a space directly in front of Gap Kids. “Providence!” she said. We went inside and I selected clothes from the circular racks and hung them on the pegs in a dressing room. I modeled a ridged yellow shirt that hugged my chest and black cotton slacks.
“Those are great on you,” she said. “Let’s get them.”
I found yellow socks to match the yellow shirt, a gray shirt, a blue T-shirt, a pair of jeans. She liked everything I liked. I was shy at first, but she didn’t seem to mind when clothes were tight or possibly sexy.
By the time I finished, the changing room was a shambles: shirts draped on hooks, pants on the floor. I’d leave it—assert my entitlement along with her. She and I were queens of this realm; other people would pick up the clothes and hang them. Anyway, we were in a rush.
When I pulled open the curtain, she frowned.
“What a mess,” she said. “You can’t leave it like that.”
She came in and started pulling shirts over hangers and squeezing pants into metal clips. Her movements were forceful and quick. I hurried to join her.
I’d failed to get a part in the fall production of Guys and Dolls and had been assigned the role of assistant stage manager instead. My friend Tess was stage manager. We carried black binders, each scene annotated with props, stage directions, and lighting cues.
“Can you give me a ride home?” I asked my father, assuming he could pick me up on his way home from work at Pixar, where he went on Fridays instead of NeXT. I’d hardly noticed, living with my mother, how easy it was to get from here to there; I just arrived at place to place as if by magic. Despite our fights, there was never any question that she would drive me to and from friends’ houses, doctor appointments, dance classes, and school.
“Nope,” he said. “You’re going to have to figure it out.”
A couple weeks later, it was opening night. In the lead-up to the play, I was probably gone for a night a week, and would have loved to stay late at school more often but did not because if I missed the car, I couldn’t get a ride. On rehearsal nights, I stayed overnight with a friend. Sometimes, when I was at home, my father didn’t talk with me or look at me during dinner, and even Laurene seemed distant and displeased. They did not explain themselves, so I thought they might have just been upset for other reasons. But then my father began to complain that I wasn’t around enough.
For the opening night of the play, I planned to spend the night at Tess’s house. Laurene let me borrow her black leather shoes: Joan & David oxfords with a buckled-over strap. We both wore size six and a half.
The girl playing Miss Adelaide had a long neck, a nasal voice, and black hair cut like Louise Brooks’s that glistened under the lights. I’d developed a burning crush on the star, David, who had an English accent and played Sky Masterson, and who did not seem to notice me as I rushed around with props and papers.
After the play, a group of stagehands and actors and I ran outside. The lawn was dark, damp from sprinklers or dew or fog. We played capture the flag with two sweaters for flags. It was the first time, at the new school, that I was happy and unguarded. I didn’t think about the shoes on the wet grass. In the morning, I noticed they were scraped in the heel with vertical grooves, as if a blade had cut stripes into the leather, and the leather had swelled, soaked in water. How could blades of grass be strong enough to cut leather? I put the shoes back into Laurene’s closet when I got home, hoping she wouldn’t notice. If she did notice, I figured she could certainly afford to buy another pair. She noticed the scratches a few days later, asked what had happened, upset, but then didn’t mention them again.
I left my things in piles around the house, the way I had when I lived with my mother: shoes, sweatshirts, mango skins on cutting boards, papers, crumpled socks like droppings. Maybe I thought they’d find it endearing, or that I’d claim some of the attention allocated to my brother. When Laurene came into the living room one evening shortly after I’d ruined her shoes, and saw the socks and sweatshirt I’d left on the rug, she said, “Lis, I’m going to need you to pick up all your things from now on.” She said it coolly.
“Okay,” I said. It was a reasonable thing to ask.
“I have enough on my plate now with a new baby and starting a company,” she said. “I can’t be picking up after you.”
Her words felt like stabs. Perhaps I’d left those piles unwittingly as a kind of call-and-response, as if I’d asked her to claim me as her child, and she’d replied that she would not. I was humiliated and exposed. I was sloppy; she was not.
My father called the school Lick-My-Wilmerding. I laughed and rolled my eyes.
“You know I wrote you a pretty great recommendation letter to Lick-My-Wilmerding,” he said one morning.
“Really? Can I see it?”
“I thought you were going to save it and give it to her when she’s older?” Laurene said. I could tell she didn’t want me to be arrogant or claim the center of attention. The problem with saving things for later, though, without experiencing them, is that they get lost, or are forgotten.
“Nope. I want to do it now,” he said, went to his study, returned with a sheet of paper, and—standing in the kitchen, barefoot—he read the letter aloud.
I don’t remember the bulk of it, only the last line: “If I were you, I’d snatch her up in a second.”
I decided to run for freshman-class president and began stapling flyers to notice boards around the school. I’d made some new friends and I started an Opera Club, organizing group trips to the San Francisco Opera at group student rates. It was a lark. I didn’t know anything about opera. Before this, I’d never been to one.
On the night of the first performance, my father asked me to save him a ticket, then picked me up at school and drove us to the show. “I’m so proud of you for doing this,” he whispered as the curtain went up. I hoped winning president would please him too.
The election was held a few weeks later, the four contenders giving short speeches. My voice was almost gone from laryngitis. I wore corduroy pants for good luck, and a thick cable-knit sweater. My classmates huddled close, and I felt the surge of goodwill that sometimes happened when I was sick and no longer had the energy to be formal, instead letting others lean in to support me.
That night I missed the car ride home and stayed at a friend’s house in Potrero Hill. I called my father to let him know. I dreaded these calls. Recently, when I’d stayed overnight at a friend’s house in San Francisco, he’d been short and distant on the phone, sighing heavily. Laurene was working hard to start a company, and he worked a lot too. They had Carmen until 5 p.m., but my father didn’t allow employees in the house after he was home from work, and my brother wasn’t sleeping through the night. I wonder if my absences stirred up conflict between them.