When I was staying with my father, I babysat for the neighbors’ son, age three. They lived on Waverley, a block down. The family had a two-story wood-shingled house painted light blue, with a white picket fence and a backyard littered with trucks and robots. The parents, Kevin and Dorothy, were both lawyers. I looked forward to eating crackers, soy cheese, and cookies—foods we didn’t have at my father’s house—and reading in a chair under a lamp.
We’d met in the neighborhood one weekend on a walk with my father and my sleeping brother. From the sidewalk my father called out to Kevin, who worked on his car in the open garage, visible from the street. This reminded my father of his father, Paul. Kevin looked and seemed like someone from a lineage of more upstanding, straightforward men. My father and Kevin became friends, going on walks around the neighborhood. Sometimes on weekends we’d drop by their house and sit in the backyard. The car was a Morgan, with a long, vented muzzle, black lacquer paint, glistening chrome exhaust pipes, and a fine red stripe.
Kevin and Dorothy seemed to like me, and overpaid me for babysitting. They invited me to join them one Saturday afternoon on a drive to the ocean, and we wound up the curving road through flecks of light to the clearing at Skyline, passing a restaurant called Alice’s, where swarms of motorcyclists also stopped to eat. Then farther, toward the beach, the landscape changed to hills.
Dorothy lent me a scarf to wear over my hair, Kevin lent me a windbreaker.
“How’s it going over there?” he shouted over the roar of the wind and the engine. He meant my dad’s house.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Maybe a little cold.”
“Cold?” he shouted.
“There’s no heat downstairs,” I yelled over the wind.
“What?”
“He won’t fix it.” We’d reached a stop sign at the crest of a hill. “I have to do the dishes every night and they don’t have heat down there. Or a dishwasher. I mean, it’s broken.”
“Why don’t they get a new one?”
“I don’t know.”
This would change during my last year of high school, when, tired of doing the dishes by hand, I thought to call a dishwasher repairman. He fixed the machine in ten minutes for forty dollars—it was only a rubber gasket, decayed into lace. When I told my father that the old brown machine was working again, he frowned, and the next week, after years without a working dishwasher, a new Miele dishwasher was installed.
“Like Cinderella,” Kevin said. This was the kind of sympathy I was going for, and what I believed about myself sometimes, looking through the photos late at night.
“And they make me babysit a lot,” I said.
“Oh,” Kevin said. He seemed to sympathize, but it was clear this was a lesser offense, and diluted the rest.
“And they won’t get a couch,” I said. Later, I would learn which complaints worked, and which ones, however strongly I felt aggrieved, didn’t trigger much sympathy in others.
He won’t even get a couch, I said, to anyone who would listen.
The fact was, there were other places to sit—the Eames chairs with ottomans, a grand oriental rug, the kitchen table, my desk—so that my insistence on getting a couch, and my strong feelings about the lack of one, confused even me. But I didn’t stop insisting. Whatever we’d lost before would be regained, we could catch up—if only he’d get a couch.
“The worst thing is,” I said, “I get really lonely at night. I just wish my father would say goodnight sometimes. Like, even once a week.”
Kevin shook his head and smiled. He smiled like this, not saying anything and shaking his head, when something made him angry, I would learn later. He had long eyelashes, sparkling eyes, a cleft in his chin, and seemed like a real adult to me then, another species of person from my father, who was more boyish—even though they were around the same age.
Much later, after I’d spent a lot more time with them and even lived at their house, Kevin and Dorothy would go against my father’s wishes and pay for me to finish college. I think they did it for their own reasons—connected to their own history and sense of justice. It made them furious that my father might get away with cutting my college tuition payments, just because he had more power.
“I wish there was someone in that house who was thinking of you,” Dorothy said. “Someone thinking, What does Lisa need?”
Complaining to them, about the heat, the goodnight, the couch, was a relief, and gave me a dual role: I was not only in this pitiable situation, but watching it; I was both the one hurt and the narrator of the hurt. I was meek, wishing someone would make my father do the two or three things I could not get him to do myself; telling others about it—and receiving their sympathy—gave me a power I didn’t have inside it.
We got back after the drive, windswept, and they made tea.
“I’m so lonely,” I told Mona on the phone. “He doesn’t come to say goodnight.”
I relied on Mona to be an intermediary, a role that continued past high school into my adult life, when she would carry bits of information between us. Her place in the middle seemed like a mercy; he might listen to his sister.
“Really?” Mona said. “Have you asked him to?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you ask?” I hadn’t asked because I knew there was something wrong with needing it. I needed too much. There was a difference between the way I knew I should be feeling and the way I actually felt.
“The thing is,” I said, looking out into the emerald garden through the small window—at the cup-shaped roses, their centers densely stuffed with petals like pages in a waterlogged book—”the thing I don’t understand is …”
“What?”
“It looks so good here,” I said.
“It’s a nice house,” she said. When you looked into the windows of other houses, beautiful ones, the people inside the light, you imagined happiness for them. Now I was inside it.
“How can it look so good but feel bad?” I asked. It must be me that was wrong, I thought. Not it.
“What else is money for,” Mona answered, “if not to make it look good?”
“Hey, would you guys come say goodnight to me sometimes?” I asked my father, standing in the kitchen. I’d built up the courage, after talking with Mona.
“What?” he asked.
“Just a couple nights a week,” I said. “Because I’m lonely.”
“Nope, sorry,” he said, without pausing to think. He was bouncing my brother in his lap, sitting in the rocking chair in the kitchen.
A few days later, I asked Laurene, separately.
“Sure,” she said.
I was flooded with gratitude and relief, the same feeling as when she pulled me into photographs, the same feeling that made me shower her with rose petals and lantana blossoms when she walked through the gate after work, so grateful it made me shiver as if from cold.
That night she came down first, sat on my bed, and stretched out her legs. When she stretched her legs, her almost pointed feet looked like a mannequin’s feet, shaped to fit into a high heel. I put my own feet out, imitated the shape. “He’ll be coming down in a minute,” she said.