“So how was your day?” I asked. I’d turned the overhead lamp on, although I usually kept it off at this time of night. I wanted to make things pleasant, so they wouldn’t think of it as a burden to come down, more like a treat. I wouldn’t have minded if they simply tucked their head around the door—I only cared about the fact of the goodnight, not its duration.
“Great, Lis. Tell me about what you’re reading.” She eyed the stack of books beside my bed, all of them partially finished. She was a reader too. I was reading Franny and Zooey again, and the last book in the Cairo Trilogy. Also a book called When Nietzsche Wept, with fictionalized accounts of psychological revelation, including one about an overweight girl who seeks therapy during the process of weight loss and who, with each successive pound lost, relives the difficulties she faced at that exact weight. It left an impression on me for the idea of cell memory—that whatever we undergo is stored within the physical body, even when conscious memory of the event has disappeared.
My father came down and sat beside Laurene on my bed. The joy and relief of this event made it hard to relax, like trying to breathe in a high wind.
“All right, well—goodnight, Lis,” my father said grandly as he got up, as if to underscore it. We hugged.
After that, they didn’t come down again. I asked one more time, my father said no, and I stopped mentioning it.
Marketable Skills
I joined the debate team. It was one more thing I might do to get into college, and like the other activities I did for that purpose, it consumed me until I’d forgotten why I started to do it in the first place. The type of debate I chose was called Lincoln-Douglas, named for the famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. The debate topic was printed on a long, thin sheet of paper: “Majority rule versus minority rights.” What did it mean, exactly? And how would we make questions about a statement? I didn’t know.
After we had prepared our arguments for both sides, done many practice rounds, and gone to one small competition at Stanford, which I’d lost, a small group of us left for another debate competition at a school called Lincoln, an hour away. Debates were held in empty classrooms, moderated by volunteers, parents, and teachers. After each round, paper assignments were posted on the wall with the next classroom assignment. In between we found each other, the four people from our school; we bought snacks, sat on the lips of concrete planters, this school much larger than ours, with charts on classroom walls that seemed more sophisticated and difficult than our charts. We whispered stories about the inanity of our opponents’ arguments.
When I argued, my cheeks got red. When that happened, I felt as if I were floating and sparking. Ideas seemed to be delivered to me, the right series of words in the right time allotments. While my opponents spoke, I had ideas for how to crush them rhetorically. The issue of minority rights or majority rule felt personally important to me. The only debate I was pretty sure I’d lost was against a boy in the first round.
That night, we returned home. The following day, Sunday, was the second and last day of the tournament. We left early, in the same van.
“We’ll return home as soon as we’ve all lost or, otherwise, we’ll wait as long as someone is still being placed in tournaments,” the coach said. I’d told my father I’d be gone for another day; he seemed wary, as if I’d made up the debate team. “I should be back by dinnertime,” I said.
But I kept winning. My cheeks continued to burn, so hot that as I formulated my counterarguments, I put a hand on my cheek, alternating between left and right, to cool them down.
I called home in between rounds, letting Laurene know that I would be later than I thought. I could tell from her flat voice that my father wasn’t pleased.
“You can talk to the debate coach, if you’d like,” I said. “To verify.”
“No, thanks,” she said. “We’ll just see you when you get back. We might be asleep.”
If I won, I could show him the trophy. I’d never won a trophy before, and it began to seem necessary to get it.
Day turned to night, the number of competitors who remained on the white sheet of paper pinned onto the wall after each round dwindled to very few, and when I walked into a room for what I heard were the semifinals (it wasn’t clear), there were three judges instead of one.
I don’t remember the look of any of the contestants I debated except the first, but I do remember the feeling in the room, during the final round, when I knew I was winning. It didn’t take long. By that time I didn’t care which side I got, my opinion papers were wrinkled from use. Any arguments could be overcome; I knew them all. We shook hands at the end. I felt a great magnanimous love for my opponent as well as for all the competitors who had come before.
Twenty minutes later, we gathered for the awards ceremony. “We have two winners in the Lincoln-Douglas category,” the man said. He was holding only one trophy in his hand. I started up from my seat. “Unfortunately, we only seem to have one trophy, so I’m afraid it’ll go to whoever gets up here first.”
I was already scrambling up the steps to the stage, trying to look graceful and nonchalant. The other winner, I saw now, was the boy I’d debated first, who had probably won the first round, meaning that his opponents had been more difficult after that. But he had not been quick, and as I neared the podium, the man reached out with the trophy. I grabbed it, transferring it to my left hand as the boy arrived behind me. We shook hands, and smiled.
The next day, in the car with my father, I mentioned the tournament.
“I won the whole thing!” I lied. I’d pulled out the trophy that morning, but he hadn’t seemed sufficiently impressed, so I’d brought it up again.
“I know, Lis. Maybe that’s all you need,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re done. You proved it,” he said.
“But that was just one. There are others. It might help me get into college.”
“Better to debate in real life,” he said. “Better to save it for when you need it. The club’s kind of lame.”
Off Highway 101 was a squat building set at an angle to the road. The marquee said Ruby’s, with an image of tipping martini glasses.
“That’s where Lis is going to work,” my father said, pointing to it as we sped past, all of us in the car, me and my brother in the back. He’d made the joke before. Now I understood the place was a strip club. I pictured women in scenes from movies, women writhing naked on countertops inside. There were hardly any cars in the parking lot.
“Ha,” I said, trying to play along.
When we got home, he played a CD in the living room. He’d been saying he wanted to play something for me for a while. “Listen,” he said, chuckling, “This one’s for you, Lis.”
The song was “Short People,” by the composer Randy Newman, who was writing the music for Pixar’s Toy Story.
Toy Story would be the first fully computer-animated feature film, he said, bringing home tapes every week as work on the movie progressed. The tapes included drawn sketches interspersed with computer-animated segments and blank spots. There were various voices for the characters, some rough, some polished, some movie stars and some people filling in for movie stars—a patchwork movie in progress.