Small Fry Read online

  “So this one’s your lifeline,” I said. “And this one’s your mind. This one’s your marriage, and this one’s your heart. See?”

  “Okay, so what does it mean?” he said.

  The line curved from below his index finger to his wrist. “It’s a pretty long life,” I said. “But your mind line isn’t long. See, it’s here. It cracks, splits open.”

  I was predicting what I knew he’d like the least—to live a long and intellectually middling life. It would puncture his arrogance, the way he seemed magnanimous but disconnected, his feeling of his own tragic greatness so strong he had less energy to notice others. I knew he wouldn’t be aware that I already knew this about him, because every time he told me a story about himself and what he wanted, he’d forget he’d told me before. He wouldn’t know that I understood he was sad to die young, but he also found it glamorous.

  “All right,” he said, and pulled back his hand.

  Tina sat still while my friend Lauren and I French-braided her hair beside the pool. Lauren showed me how to save hair as we wove down to the nape of her neck.

  After we were done, my father pulled me onto his lap. He was sitting on a lounge chair and Tina was sitting beside us on another. He told Lauren he wanted some time alone with us, and she left to find her family. I wanted to play but he held me.

  “Look how we both have eyebrows that come together in the middle,” he said. “And how we have the same nose.”

  He ran his index finger down the bridge of my nose.

  “No, we don’t,” I said. “Mine’s smaller. Mine doesn’t point down like that.” “Just wait,” he said, “it will.” Like he knew the future. He grabbed my ankle and held it in his hand, inspecting my foot.

  “Looks like your second toe might become longer than your big toe,” he said. “It’s a sign of intelligence,” he said, to have the longer second toe. “Maybe yours will grow if you’re lucky.”

  “Ha,” I said, as if I didn’t care.

  “Uh-oh,” Tina said, looking at her foot on the ground. I could tell she was joking.

  “Did you know I’ve got narrow feet?” he said. “It looks like you do too. And look at your fingers—they’re like mine too. Our nails are shaped the same.”

  We held out our hands. I couldn’t tell about the nails; mine were so much smaller that it seemed impossible to compare. My heart beat like a bird’s heart, quick and light in my chest: it was what I wanted, all his attention focused on me, all at once.

  “You’re my kid, you know,” he said, holding me even though he’d stopped looking.

  “I know,” I said. I wasn’t sure why he said it. He stopped speaking but kept his hold. I was hoping the moment would end, the heavy, oppressive feeling of being held like that.

  “Let’s just sit here,” he said. “Let’s all just be quiet for a minute and sit here.”

  His arm was like a seat belt around my waist. “Lis, you’re gonna remember this,” he said, full of feeling. I sat still, hardly breathing, hoping it would be enough and he’d let me go. Lunch was being laid out, vats of fresh salads and fish, avocado, grapefruit, crab claws on ice. A separate table just for cakes.

  Finally he said, “Let’s get lunch,” and released me. I took a huge breath and a running leap. They lingered behind, walking slowly toward me and lunch.

  After dinner that night, we walked back to our thatched huts, called hales, on the white-sand path. The tiki lanterns along the path flickered and cast patterns of light and, in pockets, the sour kerosene burned my nostrils. Geckos chirped like metal birds, wound around the poles of black lights stuck in the ground, and spun away when I tried to touch them. The forest was thick with veined, waxy leaves wrapped around leaves wrapped around other leaves. The fragrance was stronger at night, sweet and cool, as if the flowers were exhaling. The air smelled of flowers, decay, and salt.

  “Steve’s taking us out to breakfast at Late for the Train,” my mother said. It was almost the end of my fourth-grade year.

  “Just us three?” It was unusual, now that Tina and Ilan were around, for the three of us to eat together.

  “Yup.”

  The restaurant was nestled up against the train tracks at the Menlo Park station. When a train came through every half hour, it was hard to hear anyone speaking, even those at the same table, but the clanking, deafening noise was part of the experience. The owners were a husband and wife. The curtains were lace, and the place smelled of the buttery whole wheat scones they delivered to tables in baskets inside patterned napkins.

  Before the food arrived, after we’d received our goblets of fresh-squeezed orange juice, my father raised his glass.

  “A toast,” he said. “You’re going to a new school. You got in.”

  My mother smiled—she was in on it, I realized. I burst into tears. I would have to leave my friends, again?

  Nueva was a private school in an old Crocker mansion on thirty-three acres of land in Hillsborough that I’d visited for three days a few months before. The school was founded for young musicians and allowed students to leave class for private music lessons. It was meant to be a school for the gifted. I’d visited the classroom of a teacher named Bryna, who played the guitar and ended the days in a group rendition of a song about a man named Charlie who couldn’t get off the subway and never returned home.

  The school was made of gray stone, with balustrades and huge trees. During my three-day application visit, I went each day to the schoolwide thirty-minute morning sing in a room called the ballroom with high curved windows looking out to lawns and forests. I didn’t know any of the songs, but I let them wash over me, including one called “Russian Picnic” with multiple parts. All the students in every grade sat on the floor and sang.

  I learned later that Ilan had resisted the idea of private school. Like Ron, he believed private school was elitist and advised my mother not to send me. But my mother decided not to follow his advice. A few months before, my father had asked my mother, angrily, “What happened to her?” He’d noticed I wasn’t able to do my Current Events homework. She said, “See? I told you so.” She said my eyes had become duller. Before this she’d asked him to pay for private school, but he’d said no, not wanting me to move schools again. Now he made her promise that if he paid the tuition and they moved me to Nueva, she wouldn’t change schools again.

  My mother had pulled me out of speech therapy lessons a month or two before.

  “Why should she take speech therapy?” my mother asked, when the lessons had been proposed at the start of fourth grade.

  “For her lisp. So it doesn’t bother other people,” the woman answered.

  My mother didn’t like the answer—she liked my lisp, anyway—but she thought I might enjoy the one-on-one instruction.

  She came to pick me up one day and looked at the textbooks meant to teach the s and th sounds. They were inaccurate and uninspired, she said.

  “Lisa’s applying to Nueva,” she’d told the tutor, a woman I seemed to like. “Would you be willing to write her a recommendation?”

  “She’s not smart enough,” the tutor said.

  At school, when they did the homework check, calling out our names to verify if we’d put our homework in the basket, I learned I could just say yes, even though I hadn’t and, so far, no one had bothered me.

  We’d applied to Nueva in the middle of that year and I understood I wasn’t admitted because there wasn’t space. Later I learned it was not only space but also my IQ, which was much lower than it had been when I was tested in kindergarten. My mother said that the principal of the school had lectured them, asking them what schools they had been putting me in, and why they’d let me move schools so many times. Mona wrote a recommendation letter. My father asked, uncharacteristically, if he could contribute money to get me in. I didn’t know this then. But the principal said no. It was school policy, in any case, to allow all applicants to do a three-day visit.

  After the visit to her classroom, Bryna, one of the mo
st respected teachers at the school, wrote a five-page letter to recommend me, my mother said, and another girl dropped out, and I was admitted. I don’t know what I’d done to impress her, and I never saw the letter. They wanted me to start soon, right away, at the end of fourth grade.

  For the long drive to Nueva, my father bought us a new car: an Audi Quattro. My mother and I went to the lot and chose the maroon model, with a light-gray leather interior. Under the emergency brake was a stitched leather skirt that bagged loose, like elephant skin; on the dash in front of the passenger seat was a glossy panel of wood.

  “Now I can knock on wood when I’m driving,” my mother said. She knocked to un-jinx. She would knock when she saw an odd number of ravens or a black cat wander across our path. She noticed signs and premonitions and would sometimes become despondent if she saw the wrong number of birds—until she saw another bird that changed the count.

  In the mornings, we drove north down Highway 280, past the reservoir. The drive to Nueva was about forty minutes. There were birds in the rumpled hills around the freeway, turkey vultures, sometimes eagles and hawks.

  “How fast do you think we’re going?” she asked, covering the speedometer with her hand.

  “Fifty?” In the old Honda we would have had to yell to be heard; inside the Audi, it seemed like we were hardly moving. Nothing vibrated or rasped.

  She removed her hand. “Eighty!” she said, “my God,” and braked.

  My mother learned about a new kind of braces made of a bone-colored polymer to blend in more effectively with the color of teeth. She asked my father to pay for them, and he’d agreed. But the coffee she drank every day discolored the clear bands that surrounded the bone-colored cabooses, browning the bands after just a few sips, making her teeth look yellow.

  “I’m going to quit coffee,” she said. The next day, she had espresso breath, the bands were stained, and she was despondent as she cooked dinner.

  “Quitting is harder than it seems,” she said when I asked her about it.

  When she smiled, her lips got caught and bunched above them. At a shop, a woman said, “I can’t believe you’re willing to wear braces at your age.” She came home, moved around the house in a jerky, angry way, dislodging papers from her desk.

  Soon she learned how to change the bands herself. She ordered bags of extra bands and did it every day, crouching with a knee up on the toilet seat, cutting the old ones out with a silver X-Acto knife into which she’d inserted a new, sharp blade. It made a sound like flick flick flick as the old bands were spliced and flew across the bathroom. She pulled the fresh bands open with her index fingers, releasing them over each brace.

  Mona stopped by one day, and she and my mother stood talking in the kitchen near the microwave. My mother was worried the house was too small for a studio. “Just paint,” Mona said. “Bedroom be damned. Make it into a studio and sleep in it.” Mona had just returned from a residency at an artists’ colony called Djerassi.

  After that, my mother taped up black-and-white photocopies of the etchings and lithographs of Picasso, Kirchner, Cézanne, Chagall, and Kandinsky from the 1920s and ‘30s until her bedroom wall was completely covered in overlapping pages taped at the tops, free at the bottom like tiles or scales, that lifted and fell in the breezes. Soon, she also converted the garage into a studio, adding Sheetrock to the walls.

  In my mother’s final semester at school, in addition to creating lithograph prints, she started making stencils. She hand-cut the patterns in vellum paper, but later she planned to have them laser-cut for mass production and to sell them as a part of a kit.

  “This is going to work,” she said. “How could it not?” She’d seen a stencil of flowers around someone’s living room that struck her as twee. “If a person can make money doing something like that, I can certainly make money doing something much more beautiful.”

  She’d created birds for children’s rooms based on Audubon’s drawings, using multiple anatomically correct stencils in overlapping layers.

  Around this time we became friends with a family that moved in across the street. The mother was named Lisa, her husband was a podiatrist, and I played with their daughter.

  When I turned ten, Lisa insisted that we do a ceremony with a hula hoop in our living room. My mother was there, and my friend and her little brother too, all of us sitting around on the rug near the couch. Lisa wanted me to undress outside the hoop, then step inside the hoop and put on the new dress that was my mother’s birthday gift to me.

  I was skeptical. I didn’t want to undress in front of them.

  “Think of it as a symbolic gesture,” Lisa said. “A new age—double digits! You’re coming into your own, becoming this full, new, beautiful Lisa.

  “And the hoop is like the zero in the number ten,” she added.

  It was a hippie thing.

  I took off my clothes and stepped into the hoop wearing just my underwear. My mother lowered the venetian blind on the front window. All of them were watching me, including the little brother, whom we called the Noodle, or the Naked Noodle, when he was naked. Inside the hoop, I put on the new velvet dress from my mother, turned around, and crouched down for her to zip it up the back.

  While I did this, Lisa began to speak about me in the third person: “Lisa is moving from her childhood into a new kind of maturity. She is stepping into the circle of her life and becoming fully herself. All these wonderful changes are happening in Lisa’s life as she moves from age nine to age ten.” I had to admit, it felt good to be the center of attention, to have a ceremony focused on me. When she said the words, I believed them: my life was special and something new was afoot.

  On the night of my tenth birthday there was a dinner at a big table at a restaurant called Greens in San Francisco, including Mona, Tina and Tina’s brother and her cousin Finn, my mother, my father, and me. At the end, we all walked out into the night together, and I walked between my parents, holding their hands. It was ecstasy. My arms were like the hyphen that would be added to my name later, joining the two sides.

  “We’re going to play hooky,” my father said when he came over the next time.

  “What does it mean? Hooky?” I asked my mother when he left.

  “He’s going to skip work, you’re going to skip school, and you’ll have a day together.”

  We drove to the city on a Tuesday morning, first stopping at a tailor’s shop overlooking Union Square with bolts of fabric strewn over a table. “Just one second, kiddo,” he said.

  “Versace really does have the best fabrics,” he said to the tailor, running his thumb over a plaid made of grays. “Better than Armani.” He said this with a mournful note, as if there was something sad about how good it was. Versace made two lisps. He handed me each fabric sample after he’d felt it and I felt it after him.

  We drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and parked at the start of it and got out to walk across, as he’d planned for us. In the city, looking at the fabrics, he’d been voluble and confident, but with no one else around, wearing a backpack, he seemed less sure, and younger.

  “People jump,” he said, looking toward the Marin side. “That’s what the nets are for.”

  “Really?” I figured they were there for the workmen who repaired and painted the bridge. The bay below us was the waxy, opaque green of a diorama, and from so high up it seemed as still and fixed as resin, the white edges unmoving and permanent.

  “If you jumped from here, the water would hit you like a brick wall.” He slammed the flat of his hand onto the other one.

  The walk across the bridge was long and windy, with neither of us speaking much, and we’d forgotten to bring any water, so by the time we walked into Sausalito, past a thin stretch of sidewalk over the hill with the cars and buses passing close beside us, we were ragged and thirsty. We took a taxi back to the car.

  I figured we’d have many other days like this, playing hooky, but we never did it again.

  A few weeks later it was the night be
fore my mother’s final project for an art class was due, and she was frantic, still not having a piece to show. At some point late at night after I was asleep, she enlisted the help of a neighbor who was also an artist; he said he had a good idea, and he brought over a trash bin and shook it, emptying its contents on the floor of our house. Crumpled papers, a nest of brown hair from a brush, boxes, plastic bags. She’d thought he had a good idea, but all he had was this. But then she started to stuff his trash inside a garbage bag, the thin kind made of semitransparent black plastic, adding in a string of small white Christmas lights held in cardboard as a kind of spine. These lights glimmered from its depths, shining through the blackish-green plastic like a flash of a fish belly in a murky pond. She arranged the object in a heap on the floor, smaller at the top and wider at the bottom.

  “It’s a Trash Buddha!” she told me in the morning. There it huddled, bright and wrinkled against a wall on the living room floor. It was two feet tall, squat, lumpen, its lights plugged in. The plastic skin flickered slightly in the currents. It seemed to breathe. It made me uncomfortable that she would bring it to school and show others, as if it would expose us. What would they think? Maybe it was her idea of herself, or of us: holy refuse.

  The configuration and shape changed every time she picked it up and placed it somewhere else, but it still had the same quality of being not quite trash.

  The next afternoon, my father stopped by. “Come in!” my mother called out. “Look,” she said, taking him over to where she’d resurrected the Trash Buddha against the wall. “What do you think?” In art school, she said, she’d turned off the overhead lights and the object had seemed alive.

  He glanced at it but said nothing. You could tell by the way he was walking and standing that he was suffering. I’d seen him approach the house hunched over, too thin. He had a stricken look.

  “Tina and I broke up,” he said. “It’s over,” and then he collapsed on the flowered chair in front of the window. Or he sat at a chair at our table and didn’t speak and leaned back, tipping the chair back until he was almost horizontal so that I could not focus on anything else. Over the next six months, they broke up and got together again at least ten times. When he and Tina broke up, he could hardly walk or talk for grief; he had trouble lifting his feet in between steps and became yellow and wan, fasting on carrots. When they were together again, he bounced when he walked, he crowed, forgetting how he’d been before. Each time they broke up, we were supposed to believe this time it was it.