“Yeah,” she said. “From the fountain.”
I had a feeling it was going to be funny, that even he would find it funny.
On the morning the new boy arrived, we waited near the water fountain. He wore shorts and had dark hair and looked confident; I’d imagined him to be fragile and small.
We filled our mouths and caught him at the start of the path, under the tree. “Hey,” Shannon said, the cup of her mouth turned up. I glanced at her, trying not to laugh; her neck was shaking, a rivulet of water streaming down her chin. It would be funny, funnier than anything I’d ever done, and also clever.
The boy looked up.
“Uh, uh, uh,” we said, almost in unison. After the final “uh,” we spat. Before his expression changed into shock—before his parents, walking behind him, rushed over and kneeled down and comforted him—and I realized we’d done it, I was full of high confidence.
Shannon and I were separated, our mothers were called to come pick us up.
On the way home my mother spoke continuously.
“How did the boy feel? How do you think he felt?”
“Bad,” I said. A moment after spitting I had been aware that it was not in any way his joke, as it was when I imagined it beforehand. It was only our joke, and it ended when the water hit him.
“I’m embarrassed. I feel bad for that boy,” my mother said, driving too fast. “But I also blame Pat. What did she expect? Pat and her stupid fucking bears.”
The next year I went to a different school, the Waldorf School of the Peninsula. It was new, founded that year. The parents had gathered over the summer to paint the walls of the classrooms, and to choose the wood, sand down, and varnish each of our desks for the start of first grade. The tuition was about six hundred dollars per semester, discounted for us, and my mother figured she could make it work if we didn’t buy any furniture. But still, we were often behind on the tuition, my mother contacting my father and asking if he could send a small check, which he did twice.
One day, from our apartment on Channing Avenue, we drove to Los Altos, where my mother cleaned a house. Her friend Sandra used to have the cleaning jobs, but gave the houses to my mother before she moved away. Sandra liked us; she once saved a newspaper clipping about a mother and daughter driving in winter: the three-year-old girl had walked alone two miles through the snow and found help for her mother, who’d crashed into a snowbank and lost consciousness. “That’s something Lisa would do,” she told my mother.
The woman who owned the house in Los Altos showed me how to use mayonnaise on the leaves of her dusty ficus plant; I polished them into a glossy, deep green. When my mother finished and the woman paid her, we drove straight to the bank to make the deposit, and from there to University Art, a few streets away.
“Hello, I’m a member here,” she said to the man behind the counter. Artists had memberships and received discounts. “I’m worried that a check I gave you a few days ago might have bounced,” she said. She often talked about checks bouncing. I didn’t know what she meant, only that it sounded good even though it wasn’t. “I want to write you another one, but I’d like to get a few paints first?”
“Of course,” the man said. “Come back when you’re finished shopping and we’ll take care of it.”
The man smiled; we smiled back. My mother was earnest and charming. Together we brought light into rooms.
She moved slowly along the row, touching each tube, looking at colors she liked even if she didn’t need them or couldn’t afford them. Turquoise, carmine, burnt sienna, gamboge—all dangling by their necks, the tubes pristine and without dents. “Different colors are different prices,” she said, “based on the ingredients.” The ingredients were colored substances harvested from the earth. The brushes were made of nylon or animal hair, different hair for different purposes, expensive. They were enclosed in plastic tubes and shaped into hard sharp points that broke apart and became soft when used. After my mother used her brushes and cleaned them, she licked them into points herself so they would keep their shape.
That day, she bought a tube of burnt umber. She wrote the check for the full amount at the register. She didn’t take a bag, but cradled the tube in her palm on the way back to the car.
From there we went to a bookstore around the corner from Peet’s. The man behind the desk, who owned the shop, spoke with my mother; I could tell he was intelligent. He was old, bearded, with bushy eyebrows, like an unkempt God. I wanted him to pay attention to me.
“My father is Steve Jobs,” I said to the man. I wasn’t supposed to tell people who my father was. My mother watched, bemused—we were the only ones in the store.
“Oh?” the man said, and put his glasses on his head.
“Yes,” I said. It was like the shine on the leaf, it made him look. “And I’m the smartest girl in the world.”
“We’re going to the Ellens’ house to swim,” my mother said one afternoon when she picked me up from school.
This was mixed news: the Ellens swam in the nude.
“Do we have to go there?” I said.
“I need adult company,” she said. The Ellens weren’t her favorites either, but we didn’t have other friends who hosted gatherings, and they had invited us to swim.
On the car radio on the way over, people talked of the depletion of the ozone layer. It was torn and thinning; I pictured it like ripped tulle in the uppermost part of the sky; without it we would burn under the sun.
The Ellens’ house was large and dark-shingled, in Old Palo Alto, where the trees and the lots were larger. The inside was big and hollow, sepia-toned, with boxes in corners, dirty windows, dust. The pool was a turquoise rectangle inside a large yard surrounded by a tall, dark wooden fence, which, to my relief, blocked the view from the street. Around the pool, pale-skinned, naked adults sat on mismatched chairs or on the concrete lip, talking, occasionally dipping toes and fingers into the water. When women entered the pool, they did it slowly, spreading their hands out on the surface, bracing as they glided in deeper.
“Will you wear your bathing suit?” I asked her.
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Please wear it. Please.”
“Don’t be a grandmother, Lisa. It might be strange if I’m the only one wearing a bathing suit.”
“Do it for me,” I said. I felt safe when her body was contained.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll do it for you, conventional as you are.”
Hippies let dust collect in the corners of their houses. They did not replace old, brown furniture. They spoke with elongated vowels that drooped between consonants like wet sheets sagging on a line. “Heyy there,” they said. They advertised freedom, but it wasn’t the right kind of freedom. It was drifting or sinking. I was convinced that if we mingled with them, whatever feeling of escape, of getting toward the light and buoyancy I could tell some other people had, would be gone, swallowed up, merged with swamp. My mother was susceptible to hippies because she was lonely. She would settle for them. She yearned to get away from me sometimes, to be more free. But hippies gave me the creeps. When she suggested hanging out with them, I became a stick-in-the-mud, a dervish of conservatism: my mother’s guardian and jailer.