Small Fry Read online

  I found an elevator and went up and down it several times until Steve said, okay, enough.

  The face you saw upon entering the driveway turned out to be the thin side, and on the other side, the one that faced the lawn, it was vast, huge white arches with hot-pink bougainvillea billowing off. “The house is shit,” Steve said to my mother. “The construction’s shit. I’m going to tear it down. I bought this place for the trees.” I felt a stab of shock, but they continued walking as if nothing had happened. How could he care about trees when there was such a house? Would he tear it down before I had a chance to come back?

  His s‘s sounded like a match doused in water. He walked tilted forward as if he were walking uphill; his knees never seemed to straighten all the way. His dark hair fell against his face, and he cast it out of his eyes by jerking his head. His face looked fresh against the dark, shiny hair. Being near him in the bright light with the smells of dirt and trees, the spaciousness of the land, was electric and magical. Once I caught him looking at me sidelong, a brown sharp eye.

  He pointed to three huge oak trees at the end of the large lawn. “Those,” he said to my mother. “That’s why I bought this place.”

  Was it a joke? I couldn’t tell.

  “How old are they?” my mother asked.

  “Two hundred years.” My arms could reach around only the smallest section of trunk.

  We walked back up toward the house then down a small hill to a large pool in the middle of a field of tall, untended grasses, and we stood on the lip looking in where thousands of dead bugs webbed the surface of the water: black spiders, daddy longlegs, a dead onewing dragonfly. You could hardly see the water for the bugs. There was a frog, white belly up, and so many dead leaves the water had turned thick and dark, the color of ink.

  “Seems like you’ve got some pool cleaning to do, Steve,” my mother said.

  “Or I might just take it out,” he said, and that night I dreamt the bugs and animals rose up from the pool as dragons, flapping violently into the sky, leaving the water a clear turquoise netted with white light.

  A few weeks later, my father bought us a silver Honda Civic to replace our green VW. We went to pick it up at the lot.

  Several months after that, my mother wanted a break and we went on an overnight trip to Harbin Hot Springs. On the way back it was night and raining, and on a freeway that wound through the hills, a couple of hours from home, she got lost. The wiper was better on her side; the one on my side was warped in the middle and left a streak. The windshield was chipped in front of my seat in the shape of a small eye where a pebble must have hit at some point and left a mark.

  “There’s nothing. Nothing,” she said. I didn’t know what she meant. She started to cry. She made a high and continuous mew like a bow drawn along a string.

  At twenty-eight, and newly single again, she found it much harder than she’d anticipated to raise a child. Her family was unable to offer much support; her father, Jim, who lent her small amounts of money and would soon buy me my first pair of sturdy shoes, was not present in any larger way. Her stepmother, Faye, would later babysit me sometimes, but did not like babies in her house, mussing up her furniture. Her older sister, Kathy, was also a single mother with a small baby, and her two younger sisters were starting their own lives. My mother felt deeply ashamed to be unmarried and felt herself cast out of society.

  We passed the same hills we’d passed in the daytime, when they’d seemed smooth and benevolent like camel humps. Now they made desolate black curves below a dark sky. She cried harder, in round sobbing gasps. I was stoic and silent. An oncoming car approached from the other side of the freeway, and I glanced at her to see her face as the strip of light from the headlights fell on her for a moment.

  “I think we missed the exit. I have no idea.” It rained harder and she turned the windshield wipers to high. The rain filled in the half-circles as soon as they were cleared.

  “I don’t want this life,” she sobbed. “I want out. I’m sick of living. Fuuuuuck!” She screamed loud, a wail. A foghorn. I covered my ears. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” she screamed at the windshield. As if she were furious at the windshield.

  I was four and strapped down by two belts in my car seat, facing forward beside her (this was before children sat in the backs of cars). In the cars that passed and the ones around us, I imagined peace, and I wished to be inside one of those cars instead. If only she would be the way she was before, in the daylight. One version of her was inaccessible to the other. As she was yelling, she said later, even if she could not stop herself, she was aware that I was old enough to remember this.

  “I have nothing,” she said. “This life is shit. Shiiiiit.” She struggled to catch her breath. “I don’t want to live anymore! This shitty life. I haaaate this life!” Her throat was like gravel, her voice hoarse from yelling. “This hell life.”

  She pushed hard on the pedal when she yelled, so the car leapt forward, ground down along the road, rain like spit flying, like she wanted the engine to be part of her voice.

  “Fucking Time magazine. Fucking fucking fucker.” Fucker was sharper than fuck, had a spark at the end. It poked my sternum. She let out a yell, no words, shook her head side to side so her hair flew, bared her teeth, slapped the dash with the flat of her hand, made me jump.

  “What?” she screamed at me, because I jumped. “Whaaaat?”

  I remained stiff; I became the idea of a girl stiff in her car seat.

  Suddenly she veered off the freeway with such violence I thought we were driving off the road to our death, but it was a ramp.

  She pulled over, jammed on the brakes, and sobbed into her folded arms. Her back shook. Her sadness enveloped me, I could not escape it, nothing I could do would stop it. In a few minutes, she started driving again, took a freeway overpass toward another road. She continued to cry, but with less violence, and at some point I asked the cracked glass eye, the nick in the windshield where the pebble had hit, to watch the road for me, a kind of prayer, and I slept.

  At the height of her hopelessness and noise, I’d felt a calm presence near us, even though I knew we were alone in the watery hell, the car jerking. Some benevolent presence that cared for us but could not interfere, maybe sitting in the back seat. The presence could not stop it, could not help it, only watch and note it. I wondered later if it was a ghostly version of me now, accompanying my younger self and my mother in that car.

  The next morning, the man who tended the bees wore a white crinkly suit with attached gloves and a hat with a net sewn in. The bees lived in a slatted box in the small backyard. From the side of the kitchen, an attachment at the back of the bungalow, we looked out at the yard. He called to me, motioning for me to come over and look.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said.

  “She’s fairly allergic to bees,” my mother called to him. Once I’d stepped on a bee and my foot swelled up; I couldn’t walk on it for a week.

  “My bees are really happy,” he said. “They’re not going to sting.” He removed his hat while he spoke so we could see his face. “These are honeybees; they’re friendly,” he said.

  “But you’re wearing a suit,” my mother said. “She’s in shorts. She has no protection.”

  “It’s because I have to get in there, take their honey. Otherwise, I’d be dressed like you. They don’t want to sting you,” he said to me. “Do you know what happens to them if they do? They give up their life.” He paused. “Why would they want to give up their life to hurt you when they’re happy and you’re not doing them any harm?”

  “Are you sure?” my mother asked him again. The setup looked wrong, but what did we know about bees.

  “Yeah,” he said, putting on his hat. I’d never seen a hive up close.

  “Okay …” my mother said, only partially convinced. I walked over to where he stood and looked down at the teeming, velvety mass. The bees made a shimmering brown carpet. Some flew higher, bobbing above like tiny balloons on
strings. One landed on my upper cheek and began to walk in a circle. I didn’t know this circling was a kind of preparatory dance. When I tried to swipe it off, it was affixed, then it stung.

  I ran back to my mother, who pulled me into the kitchen. The open windows carried her voice.

  “What were you thinking?” she yelled at him, opening cabinets one after the other, then grabbing the baking soda, mixing it into paste with water in a bowl. “How dare you.” She squatted beside me, pulled the stinger out with tweezers, then patted the paste on my cheek with the pads of her fingers as it began to swell.

  “What an idiot,” she muttered. “In a full body suit. Telling a girl she wasn’t in danger.”

  When we had a little money to spare, we drove to Draeger’s Market, where a wall of rotisserie ovens behind the deli counter held rows of slowly turning meat. It smelled of sweet dirt and steam. You could tell the uncooked chickens because they were bright white with orange powder dusted on the surface; the cooked ones were brown and taut. She pulled a number.

  “One half rotisserie chicken, please,” she said when our number came up. A man used what looked like garden shears to cut the bird in half, the ribs making a satisfying crunch. He slipped the half into a white bag lined with silver.

  Back in the car she put the bag between us on the emergency brake and ripped the bag open and we ate the chicken with our fingers as the windows steamed up around us.

  When we finished, she crumpled the bag around the bones and wiped my oily fingers with a napkin, then examined my palm. The place where my hand folds made grooves across the surface like a dry riverbed seen from a great height. No two people have the same lines, she’d explained to me, but everyone has a similar pattern.

  She tilted the plane of my palm to make the indentations catch the light.

  “Oh, God,” she said, wincing.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s just … not so good. The lines tatter.” Her face looked stricken. She went distant, quiet. We went over this same routine many times in different variations, accruing details as I got older, each time my mother making the same mistakes, as if it was new.

  “What does that mean?” Panic in my chest, stomach.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. The lifeline, the curved one, this one—holes, bubbles.”

  “What’s wrong with bubbles?”

  “They mean trauma, fracturing,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” I knew she wasn’t apologizing for the hand, but for my life. The start of my life that I didn’t remember. For how hard things were. She might have assumed I didn’t know what a family was supposed to look like, but once, around this time, as I’d chased a boy in a playground wearing a pair of too-big shoes, she overheard me say to him, scornfully, “You don’t even have a father.”

  “What’s that line?” I asked, pointing to the one that ran from below the pinkie finger.

  “Your heart line,” she said. “Also difficult.” I was swept up in what felt like grief, even though we’d been happy a moment before.

  “And this one?” The last one, straight through the middle of my palm, branching off the lifeline. Crisper than the others at first—oh, hope!—but then it drooped, then thinned and split, like a twig.

  “Wait,” she said, brightening. “This hand’s your left hand?” She was dyslexic and had gotten them mixed up.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay, good. The left tells me the circumstances you were given. Let me see your right one.”

  I gave her my other hand and she held it carefully, tracing the lines, turning it to see. The residual grease from the chicken made the skin reflect. “This hand tells me what you’ll make of your life,” she said. “It’s much better on this side.”

  How did she know? I wondered if she learned to read palms in India.

  In India, people didn’t use their left hand in public, she said. In social situations, the right was used exclusively. This was because they didn’t use toilet paper, but used their left hand instead, washing it afterward. This horrified me.

  “If I go to India,” I said, whenever India came up, “I’ll carry my own roll.”

  She told a story about India, how she went to a festival in Allahabad called the Kumbha Mela that happened only once every twelve years, this one located at the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna Rivers. There was a huge crowd. In the distance, a very holy man, sitting up on a parapet, was blessing oranges and throwing them into the crowd.

  “He was so far that he seemed like he was only an inch tall,” she said.

  The other oranges didn’t land close to her, she said, but then he threw this one orange and she could tell it was coming toward her and—bam—it hit her right in the chest, right in the heart, took the wind out of her.

  It bounced off and a group of men jumped after it, she said, so she didn’t get to keep it. But I knew it meant something special about her, about us, that the holy orange thrown from so far away had hit her in the heart.

  “You know,” she said, “when you were born you came shooting out like some sort of rocket.” She’d told me this many times before, but I let her say it again, as if I’d forgotten. “I went to these birth classes and all of them said I’d have to push and then there I was and you were coming out so fast I couldn’t stop you.” I loved this story—how, unlike other babies, I had not made her force me into the air and this had saved her something, and meant something about me.

  All of this—the palm, the orange, the birth—meant I was going to be just fine, as an adult.

  “When I’m an adult, you’ll be old,” I said. I imagined myself progressing down the lifeline; getting older would mean I was further down the line.

  We walked to Peet’s Coffee around the corner, where the man gave her a free coffee, and then we sat on the bench outside, where it was warm in the sunlight. The double line of sycamore trees around the square across from the coffee shop had been pruned down to their stems almost and looked like playing jacks, short branches with fat balls at the ends. The air smelled like raw trees.

  “Like this?” She pretended to walk like an old lady with a cane, slumped over with no teeth. She straightened. “But sweetie, I’m only twenty-four years older than you are. I’ll still be young when you’re grown up.”

  I said, “Oh,” as if I agreed. But it didn’t matter what she said, or how she explained. I saw us as a seesaw: when one of us had power or happiness or substantiality, the other must fade. When I was still young, she’d be old. She would smell like old people, like used flower water. I would be new and green and smell of freshly cut branches.

  Halfway through the school year I joined a kindergarten class in a public school in Palo Alto. Before this I’d gone to another school, but my mother thought the class there had too many boys, so I’d transferred here. On my first day, one of the teaching assistants led me out to the side of the building and took a Polaroid, which she tacked on the board near the photographs of other students, and wrote my name underneath. I had foolishly wrapped my hand around the top of my head because I thought it would look good, while the other students were seated in front of a blue backdrop. The image was light-saturated, makeshift. I felt it revealed not only that I had started late but also that I was insubstantial, washed out by light.

  The teacher, Pat, tall and plump, had a singsong voice and wore jean skirts down to her ankles, sandals with socks, Tshirts that hung over her large bosom, and reading glasses on a string. During recess, we played behind the classroom on a wooden jungle gym with a series of planks connecting the parts. A rope net between two wooden platforms was called the humping pit. Humping, the way I imagined it, demanded an undulation and a catch, an undulation and a catch. There was something sickly about it. Soon after I started at the school, I fell inside the netted part, and others yelled, “Humping! Humping!” as I scrambled out.

  This kindergarten put an emphasis on reading, but I couldn’t read. For each book completed, students received a small teddy bear.


  I memorized a book to trick one of the teaching assistants into handing over a bear.

  “I’m ready,” I said. We sat down on the floor with our backs against the bookshelf in the reading section, the book on my lap. I spoke the words I believed to be on each page, based on what I’d memorized and the corresponding pictures. Two pages in, her face hardened and her lips thinned.

  “You turned the page at the wrong place,” she said. “And you missed a word.”

  “Just one bear,” I said. “Please.”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  Daniela had amassed twenty-two; I asked her if I could have one.

  “You have to read a book to get one,” Daniela said.

  I began to feel there was something gross and shameful about me, and also to know that it was too late to change it, that nothing could be done. I was different from other girls my age, and anyone good and pure could immediately sense this and would be repulsed. One indication was the photograph. Another was that I could not read. The last was that I was meticulous and self-conscious in a way I could tell the other girls were not. My desires were too strong and furious. I was wormy inside, as if I’d caught whatever diseases or larvae were passed through raw eggs and flour when I snuck raw cookie dough. I felt this quality in myself, and I was sure it must show when people saw me, so whenever I passed a mirror, caught my reflection by accident, and saw that I was not as dirty or repulsive as I pictured myself, it gave me a start.

  During the free reading period, Shannon and I snuck around the back of the kindergarten classroom, past the jungle gym, to a hidden area paved with rocks between thick bushes and elementary school classrooms. Shannon had white blonde hair, white whiskery eyebrows and lashes; she also could not read. Her trousers were twisted so the seam did not line up with the middle of her legs. We threw rocks at the classroom windows and then clutched each other as though we were humping and writhed around on the rocks together.