Small Fry Read online

  “Why don’t you wear a watch?” I asked the next morning. I was already dressed for school. Fancy men wore watches.

  “I don’t want to be bound by time,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I was looking out the kitchen window, pointing to a tall structure that looked like a booth for a ticket collector, with a screen in the front so you could see in, topped by a minaret.

  “It’s an aviary. For birds.”

  “Are there birds inside?”

  “No. A friend gave me a peacock once, but it wandered off.”

  “Will you get some birds to put in?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  I could tell he was getting annoyed by my questions. How big was seven acres, I wondered. If you stood on the huge lawn and looked toward the gathered hills with your back to the tennis court and the pool, and looked past the aviary, past a huge copper beech tree, the raspberries, more oaks, the building where the water tower would have been—maybe that was where the property ended, where the hills rose up and the forest began. “There,” he’d said once, pointing, but I wasn’t sure where he meant.

  He put two apples and a handful of almonds in a paper bag, a grocery bag, not a lunch bag, and rolled up the top. “Here’s your lunch,” he said, handing it over. The almonds rattled around at the bottom of the bag.

  I walked out ahead of him, through the pantry, the dining room, and into the huge room with the piano. On a small table in front of the couch was a coffee-table book called The Red Couch. The pictures inside were of a worn red velvet couch, upon which sat various famous people in different locations around the world. I flipped a page, and there he was. In the picture he looked dreamy, his eyes like vellum. Unlike the others in the book, he steepled his hands, the fingertips meeting, index to index, middle to middle, and so on, the wrists held out from each other like the rib cage of a small animal. Over the next few months I tried to incorporate the steepled hands into my own repertoire—on top of my desk in class, or on the table before my mother and I ate dinner, or on my lap sitting outside with friends at lunchtime. I could never make it look natural; in that position, ballooned out, my hands felt huge and foolish.

  We walked out the door. “You don’t lock it?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing to take,” he said.

  “You could get more furniture,” I said. I imagined how grand the house could be if he’d just get some furniture. I wanted him to be attached to it so substantially that he wanted to decorate it and keep it. At school, we played a game called MASH: mansion, apartment, shack, house, writing down options about cars, husbands, and houses and then counting out our futures based on a random number. I had firsthand knowledge of all four categories—even a shack, if you counted the studio on Oak Grove. My father had a mansion. I didn’t know anyone else who could say that. Everyone wanted a mansion, and also the best kind of car—Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini.

  At the curve that led over Highway 280, my father said, “If you look where you’re going, your hands naturally know how to steer toward that point. It’s really amazing.”

  He had no idea that I’d driven, too, sitting on my mother’s lap when I was six. For him, maybe I had no past; I was simply here now beside him.

  At the top of Sand Hill Road, he pointed to Hoover Tower sticking up past the rooflines.

  “Look,” he said. “It’s a penis.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “The Penis of Palo Alto,” he said. “Just look at it, with that red top.”

  The tower was glowing in the morning sun, and the dome at the top matched the red terracotta of the university rooftops. I’d been up there with my mother, near the bells and the pigeons and the wind. There was a net surrounding the bells so that the pigeons wouldn’t roost inside them.

  “Oh,” I said, laughing a little, trying to make the connection between this structure and the very few penises I’d seen, skin-colored cylinders that dangled down.

  “It looks like a penis,” he said again, defiantly.

  “I’m going to die in my early forties,” my father said to me around this time. He’d come to pick me up at a friend’s house for the first time. His delivery was dramatic, as if to stir some action, but there was no action I could see to take. Forty seemed pretty old from my vantage point of eight. I was secretly happy he’d confided in me, pleased by the implication that we’d have more time together—four to nine years! I already knew he’d predicted both his fame and his early demise. My mother had told me about it. Did he think we didn’t talk about him in his absence? The serious way he spoke suggested he thought that for all those years he’d been gone we didn’t think of him, or talk about him; as if when he left a room, the room ceased to exist.

  Anyway, his pronouncement didn’t seem tragic, but uplifting. I’d take a few years over none at all.

  He was great, and great people, like JFK, like Lennon, died young. I didn’t know about that but he did.

  On the drive to his house that night he said, “It used to be orchards, all of this.” Now the land was roads and low huddled buildings that looked like they’d always been there.

  “When I die, bury me under an apple tree,” he said.

  I remembered to remember later.

  He repeated this often when we were alone, and I figured I would have the responsibility to make it happen. Unboxed, he meant. So the roots could drink him up.

  The next two Wednesdays were similar: the drive to his house with the top down and the heater on, an assortment of cold salads and juice, a hot tub, a movie on laser disc—North by Northwest, Modern Times, City Lights. Before we watched one, he would ask me if I’d ever seen the movie before. When I said no, he’d shake his head, seriously, in silence, like it was some big mistake. Each time I had to pee during a movie, he paused it. The night of the third visit I wet the bed and woke up mortified that the people who made the beds would tell him about it. A couple lived in a small house on the land, made the salads, and washed the sheets. I was almost nine; I hadn’t wet a bed for many years. But the next week the bed was made again and he didn’t mention it.

  Before dinner we played “Heart and Soul” on the piano, alternating parts. I think it was the only song either of us knew how to play. The notes rang out in the large, empty room.

  After I was in bed, I waited as many minutes as possible, building up my courage in the cricket-jangling darkness, then emerged from my bedroom and walked to the end of his bed, fake-crying. Maybe I got the idea from Annie, a girl ingratiating herself with a gruff man. Standing over my father in my sleep T-shirt, looking down at him in his bed on the floor, I was aware of being small and using what I had, as a girl. Inspiring love, I thought, had to do with being defenseless. For him to be close with me, like other fathers with their daughters, he needed to love me. Also, his bed was more comfortable than mine.

  He removed his headphones and looked at me. He watched movies with a big pair of headphones after I went to bed.

  “I had a nightmare,” I said. “Can I sleep in your bed?”

  “I guess so,” he said, and pointed to the side farther away from the television. I jumped in and the pillow dissolved under the weight of my head, as if it were made of nothing.

  My request seemed to annoy, rather than charm him. I hoped this might change over time. He was not the father I’d imagined from the skeleton of facts I’d known. Yes, there was an elevator and a piano and an organ, he was rich and famous and handsome, but none of this satisfied completely; it was tempered by an unmistakable emptiness I felt near him, a feeling of a vast loneliness—the stair behind the kitchen with no light, the wind coming through from the rickety balcony. It was supposed to be what I wanted, but it was not possible to enjoy as I’d hoped, as if it were a sumptuous feast frozen solid.

  He woke me up in the morning by shaking my shoulder very quickly like a pulse. “Rise and shine,” he said.

  I pulled on my clothes, and as he was getting ready I explored, opening a door off his bed
room and peering into what turned out to be a closet with a row of suits hung on matching hangers, the sleeves in a perfect horizontal row. Unlike the rest of this house, these suits had been chosen and collected. You could tell they were new, and expensive. Not one sleeve lower or higher than another. I ran my hand along the rounds of fabric where the sleeves ended, each of them so soft and light it felt like I was brushing my hand over ridges of water in a stream.

  “Ingrid Bergman’s incredibly beautiful,” he said the next week while we watched Casablanca. “Did you know she didn’t wear any makeup? She was that beautiful.”

  I liked her lips, how they were flat and full and formed a ledge where they met her cheeks; I liked her accent, and the way she swayed gently as she walked. It seemed my father’s idea of beauty demanded no artifice, it simply was, although, looking back, I think she must have been wearing mascara, at least.

  I liked women who wore lipstick and makeup and fancy clothing and long painted fingernails and hair spray; those, to me, were beautiful.

  It gave me a strange feeling when he talked of the beauty of other women, the longing in his voice when he talked of blonde hair or of breasts, gesturing weights in his cupped hands. When he talked about them, they were all details, no movement, exempt from the mess of life.

  I would be truly loved by him only if I was tall, blonde, and large-breasted, I would gather later. I had a fantastic notion that it might happen, despite the evidence.

  “You know, I heard this great story about Ingrid Bergman once,” he said. “But it’s kind of a secret, so you can’t tell.”

  We’d finished watching the movie and he was putting the laser disc into its case.

  “I won’t tell, I promise,” I said.

  “I have this friend,” he said, “his father was a movie producer, and when he was a boy, Ingrid Bergman came to stay at his house. They had a pool, and she was lying on a chair beside it.”

  My father was crouched on the side of the bed, near the television. When he told gossip and secrets, he used better diction and spoke more rapidly.

  “Well,” he continued, “it turns out Ingrid Bergman liked to sunbathe in the nude, and my friend, who was a boy then, whose bedroom looked out over the pool, was watching her. And then she was, well, she was …”

  He trailed off. I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

  “Anyway,” he said, “the moment it happened, the climax, she looked up at him. Right at him.”

  “Oh,” I said. What had she done? What did he watch? Why was she naked? “I mean, the friend is my age now,” as if to clarify. “Anyway, for him it must have been incredible,” he said, shaking his head and looking down, smiling to himself.

  He repeated this story several times over many years, each time telling me he’d heard a great story, and a huge secret, forgetting he’d told me before.

  At some point around that time, with my new allowance (five dollars per week), I bought a navy blue eyeliner pencil and brought it over to his house. In the morning before we left for school, while he waited for me, I went into the bathroom and leaned against the sink so I was close to the mirror and tried to apply it to an eyelid.

  “Come on,” he said holding the screen, standing out on the balcony.

  “One minute,” I said. The liner was waxy and didn’t set down like pencil on paper. I was afraid of making it too dark, so I drew it on very lightly, almost imperceptibly. I’d heard my mother say that makeup was good when it was not obvious. I was giddy with the idea that he would realize how sophisticated I was; my hand shook. At the door I asked if he noticed anything on my eyes.

  He leaned down. “Nope,” he said.

  “Good,” I said. “You’re not supposed to see it.”

  “See what?”

  “Eyeliner,” I said. “I put some on.”

  “Go wash it off,” he said, angry. “Now.”

  “Look at the sky,” my mother said. She was driving us home. “Isn’t it incredible?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a stripe of hot-pink clouds running over the telephone wires, and glowing gold leaves on the sycamore trees beside the road.

  “I guess,” I said.

  My mother felt color acutely; it was one of the ways we communicated, her driving around the town, pointing out colors. She’d broken up with Ron, and although I was initially relieved to be rid of him and have my mother to myself again, now I wasn’t so sure. I’d found him annoying, but once he was gone I missed him. Ron had been variety, someone else besides my mother and me. When he walked into our house, he disturbed the air. Men brought life. You couldn’t take the measure of it until they were gone and left everything flat, without zest or surprise. We couldn’t afford to go out for dinner or to the museum in San Francisco.

  Now, in the car, she wanted me to look at the sky.

  “Look up,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  I slouched in my seat like the flare of color was the most boring thing in the world. It seemed to me it would take too much energy to appreciate every phenomenon she pointed out. It was just a sunset. We’d seen a lot of them already; already, life had begun to repeat.

  Kirsten invited me to her house to spend the night. She was the girl who’d followed me around announcing my father’s name. Since then, she’d stopped doing that, and we were part of the same group of friends at school. We had permission to walk from school to her dad’s house, which was north past University Avenue, the opposite side of Palo Alto from where I lived. It was a privilege to be able to walk that far alone, without an adult.

  Her house was a Victorian with a cement path leading up to the wooden steps. Tree roots snaked and strained through the dirt yard like neck tendons. Her bedroom was under the eaves at the top of the house, the ceiling tucked into the floor. She had her own small television. I sat down on the bed and it shifted around me like Jell-O, a surprise.

  “It’s a water bed,” she said, stretching out.

  There was something exotic about her, and slippery, that made me feel conservative and ordinary. I also got sleepy around her, the way I would get sleepy around people who cared about my father being famous. We went downstairs, where I followed her into the kitchen.

  She pulled a big carrot out of the fridge.

  “You know what some women do with these, right?” she said. “Put it inside them. Instead of having sex.”

  “That’s gross,” I said. The world contained disgusting, revolting elements—like sex, which I knew about, and which still felt unsettling, how people might be doing it and yet continuing to exist in an ordinary fashion on the surface, like an infestation of bugs under a clean, white wall.

  “Look,” she said, pulling out a black gauzy string from her chest of drawers. It was a bra made of elasticized lace, two triangles bound by black strips of Lycra. It looked like a woman’s bra—sexy for a grown-up—yet small, made for a child. I’d had no idea something this perfect existed in the world, in these proportions. It was tantalizing for being a perfect miniature, the way dollhouse furniture, food, and cutlery had been thrilling to me before. I wanted all of what she had—the remote, the television, the water bed, the lacy bra.

  “Hey, you want to watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?”

  “Okay,” I said. I wasn’t sure what it was. She took a tape out of a worn paper case, pushed it into the VHS player under her television. The film was grainy like a sweater woven out of too many colors of yarn. I could make out only the figure of a man walking up a path in dry grasses, toward a house.

  “I watch this a lot,” she said. “Before I go to sleep.”

  Before we turned off the light, her father came in to check on us.

  “Dad?” Kristen said.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed facing her.

  “I’m feeling insecure,” she said, in a baby voice. “You told me to tell you when I was feeling like that, and I’m telling you now.”

  “Oh, honey,” he said. He hugged her close.

  I’d had no
idea she was feeling insecure. I was impressed she knew that word, and jealous that she could say something like this to her father. It was an adult word. I wouldn’t have thought to say it, ever.

  “Sorry, dear,” he said and then stood up and looked at both of us. “Well, goodnight, you two. Sleep tight.” The stairs creaked on his way down.

  In the morning, just before my mother came to pick me up, after Kirsten had gone down to the kitchen, I found the bra in the thicket of rumpled cotton in the top drawer and stuffed it into my backpack.

  By the fifth visit to his house I was impatient. For a long time I hoped that if I played one role, my father would take the corresponding role. I would be the beloved daughter; he would be the indulgent father. I decided that if I acted like other daughters, he would join in the lark. We’d pretend together, and in pretending we’d make it real. But if I had observed him as he was, or admitted to myself what I saw, I would have known that he would not do this, and that a game of pretend would disgust him.

  Now we were together in his car driving to the Woodside house in the dark. Tonight he wore a leather jacket with black fabric at the cuffs that matched the color of his hair and gave him a rakish look. He was still quiet. But I felt bolder.

  “Can I have it, when you’re done?” I asked him, as we took a left at the leaning, crumbling white pillars that flanked the thin, bumpy road that ended at his gate. I’d been thinking about it for a while but only just built up the courage to ask.

  “Can you have what?” he said.

  “This car. Your Porsche.” I wondered where he put the extras. I pictured them in a shiny black line at the back of his land.

  “Absolutely not,” he said in such a sour, biting way that I knew I’d made a mistake. I understood that perhaps it wasn’t true, the myth of the scratch: maybe he didn’t buy a new one with abandon, maybe the idea that he was profligate was false. He was not generous with money, food, or words; the idea of the Porsches had seemed like one glorious exception.

  I wished I could take it back. We pulled up to the house and he turned off the engine. Blue hydrangeas with flowers bigger than my head billowed out from both sides of the gate to the courtyard.