“Slap, slap, slap,” I said.
“Lap lap lap,” he repeated.
Behind us I heard a motor and laughter. I looked up to see a convertible drive past, an old sports car, chrome and cream, limbs hanging out the windows, teenagers. The car crackled its way up the long drive that curved from the hotel to the road under a double row of trees with high, arching branches that created a different sense of scale—a huge enclosed room, light shining through the bright green foliage.
I don’t want to be here, babysitting, I thought. That is where I want to be instead. In that car, with them.
One night, after putting my brother to bed when Steve and Laurene were out, I rooted around upstairs. I searched Laurene’s dressing room, where I hoped to find some trinket or item of clothing or old photograph. Some secret she had that I didn’t. I found a pot of white skin cream, dimpled on the surface where she’d touched it, a tall, thin triangle of perfume with a glass marble stopper, a few photographs of my brother. The full-length mirror warped to make me big-hipped. Her closet was disappointing in its refusal to reveal more about her.
I walked through the bathroom to my father’s closet. His shelves contained socks, ties, sweaters that crinkled with inner tissue paper. In his drawer on the left side I noticed the glossy lip of a small manila envelope.
I looked inside: a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills, two inches thick! More cash than I’d ever seen. It gave me a shock, like when I’d come upon an infestation of ladybugs, a hundred or a thousand crawling around a branch, having seen them only in ones or twos.
I flipped through the stack, my heart pounding. Each bill was new and crisp and gave off a whiff of alcohol and burlap. When I furred the edges, they fell in clumps.
I took one bill, folded it, and put it in my pocket. Then I closed the drawer and went downstairs. My palms were sweating; I wiped them on my jeans.
Had there been a camera? Had I left fingerprints? I was jumpy, as if someone might leap out from behind a door; there was a strange, rubbery quality in my legs, pleasurable electricity racing through my arms.
I was a thief. But I wouldn’t take any more, ever. I wouldn’t push my luck. That was it. If my father found out, he would have proof I was unworthy to the core and deserved any distance he put between us. The knowledge that I had committed a crime made me more eager to please them than ever. I went out and cut flowers in the yard, arranged them in vases around the house.
From that night on, whenever my father said, “Lis, we have to talk,” or even just “Lis,” I braced myself, ready for the accusation.
At the mall, on a mannequin in a window, I’d seen a pewter-colored Benetton trench coat the silvery color of the underside of a leaf. It was seventy-nine dollars. It was unlined, made of the kind of fabric that might be used on a windbreaker, but instead had been made to tie at the waist, appealingly, and with its adult silhouette it reminded me of something Candice Bergen might wear in the rain on the way to an important meeting.
The next time they went out, I crept back up to my father’s closet, shaking with fear and excitement. I couldn’t tell whether the quantity of bills had changed since the last time.
This time, in case I never returned, I took two.
The trouble came with cashing the hundreds. They weren’t accepted everywhere—the first bill I’d stolen had been refused at a café across from my high school. I worried shop owners might become curious about why I had such a large bill, and word would get back to my father. As a result, I was furtive when trying to cash them, never going to the same shop twice, attempting to look nonchalant and confident at the same time.
At Benetton, I braced for the woman to refuse the bill. Instead, she took it without looking up, folded the jacket around itself, dropped it into a paper bag without any tissue paper, and handed me the change. I walked out, the jacket almost as light as the paper that held it. A sensation of floating—the thrill of money transformed into possession.
When I got back, I hid the jacket deep in a drawer. I couldn’t wear it; they might notice. It was one more in my collection for college.
I didn’t save the money because I didn’t understand what savings were for. Instead, I looked for things to buy and spent it all right away. Other than a few things for myself, I bought gifts, mostly, for my parents, Laurene, and my brother, for birthdays and Christmas. I listened to people talk about saving money in order to buy something they wanted in the future—but it didn’t make sense to me because I might find an object I burned with desire to own right away, and what was the point of savings if they accomplished the exact same purpose, only later? I also heard people talking about saving money for emergencies, or saving just to have savings. In the case of an emergency I figured I’d find a way to wiggle out of it, to hustle and charm. I’d outsmart the savers.
At dinner that night, my father said a photographer would come to the house soon to take pictures of the family. My hands began to flutter. I broke another glass.
When the photographer arrived one morning, he and his assistant fastened a roll of white paper to a rafter in the living room, pulling it down to the floor to create a backdrop. First he took pictures of my brother alone, sitting up on the white paper, wearing a jean jumpsuit. Then he took pictures of all of us together, me standing behind them; then of Laurene holding my brother, both facing forward. She wore a long, patterned vest with a fringe, and platform shoes.
“Hey, Lis, we’re going to need you to step out of this next photograph,” my father said.
I stepped out and watched, pretending I didn’t care. At some point during a few shots of my father holding my brother, Reed started to wail, and Laurene took him upstairs to change his diaper. My father slipped away to his study to work, vanishing as he often did in between moments.
It was one of those days when the light was diffuse and watery, the sun a yellow smudge behind clouds. The photographer looked at me, standing beside him. “Can I take some pictures of you?” he asked.
“I’d love it,” I said, even though I sensed it was not allowed.
I was wearing the jeans my father told me to wear. “Wait,” I said, and ran down the hallway to my bedroom and pulled on a dress of my mother’s from the seventies that hung in my closet. It fit like a muumuu: long sleeves that buttoned at the wrists, a pattern of small gold and cream flowers on a black background, and thin gold piping around the neck and the sleeves. From a high flat placket in front it hung down to my ankles.
I’d wanted a professional photograph for years—I saw them framed on walls at friends’ houses; now it was happening, but without my mother. Wearing her dress was a way to have her there too. Who cared if the dress was old and unfashionable.
I ran back down the hall, barefoot and, breathless, stood where he told me to, beside an Eames chair and ottoman. I knew I was getting away with something, stealing the spotlight like this; he might have sensed it. A flurry of clicks; the faster we went, the more photographs we’d get. I smiled big, showed my teeth, made my eyes bright.
My father emerged from his study. “What are you doing?” he asked, looking at me up and down, in the dress.
“He said he would take—”
“Stop it,” he said to the photographer. “Stop it right now.”