Small Fry Read online

  Pat had told us that a new boy was coming to join our class.

  “Let’s spit water on him,” I said.

  “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 stickin-the-mud, a dervish of conservatism: my mother’s guardian and jailer.

  But most hippies we knew were harmless, hapless even. I sometimes questioned her about one she’d dated for two months a few years before who apparently told her he’d keep dating her only if she gave me up for adoption. The parallels between hippies were evident, I thought—the long slow vowels, the dun-colored clothes, the dull eyes, the lack of normal jobs—and by bringing up this one, I hoped to show her plainly her lack of discernment.

  What we were really talking about was not hippies, though, but how she hadn’t been sure she wanted me when I was little, and even now I felt her fantasy of escape—from me, from her life with me—and I wanted to make her ashamed, and repentant.<
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  “He was awful,” I said, “that hippie boyfriend you had. I hate him.”

  “Hate‘s a strong word, Lisa. I don’t think you hate him.” She paused. “Though I did hear, after dating me, he was dating some woman who had a dog—she totally loved her dog—and he told her that he’d keep dating her only if she gave her dog away. Can you believe it? He found the one thing that was most important to a person and asked her to give it up for him. He was very troubled, Lisa. We don’t need to hate him for it.”

  I hated him all the same.

  Ada Ellen was thin, a sprite, with a pleasing, scratchy voice, luminous honey-colored skin, green eyes, and golden hair that flew out from her head in ringlet wisps. She was only five, almost two years younger than me, but mature for her age, maybe because she was home-schooled. She and I wore bathing suits.

  We jumped into the pool. Afterward we got towels in the house beside the large tan washing machine, away from the group of adults.

  “Shhh,” she said, showing me a pack of Juicy Fruit gum hidden in her towel. I wondered how she’d gotten it. For both of us, sugar gum was forbidden.

  We slipped past the naked adults and danced carefully over the rocks and pointy grasses to the one bush in the middle of the yard we might hide behind. I walked as fast as I could, finding the blank dirt patches in between tufts of sharp, dry grasses and stones. The bush had hardly enough leaves to give us privacy. We unfolded the silver paper and we chewed piece after piece, eating the powdered sticks like candy. The wads grew in our mouths, pillows of tooth-colored gum.

  “What are you two doing over there?” my mother called.

  Ada and I emerged from the bush and stood side by side, facing the naked adults, my mother in her suit, and continued to chew. Ada’s triangle scapulae poked out of her back.

  “Is that gum?” Anne, Ada’s mother, asked. “Who gave that to you?” Anne’s skin was a creamy yellow hue, like milk left out. Her breasts, small and flat at the top, collected into sacs at the bottom. She wore a batik cloth around her hips.

  “Gum fools your stomach into thinking that food is coming down,” Anne continued. “If your stomach thinks food is coming down, it starts to produce stomach acid to prepare for the food.”

  My stomach ached. It would not stop me.

  A woman I didn’t know who sat beside Anne, naked except for a towel, said, “The acid will eat away at the lining of your stomach.”

  Hippies were not bothered about clothing, I thought, but they sure had strict rules about sugar.

  “It’s true,” my mother said to me.

  “Right here,” Anne said, cupping her hand for us to spit it out. “Spit it out.”

  Ada spit first, and I followed.

  “Go brush. Both of you.” We walked into the dark house, up the stairs to a bathroom on the second floor. I used Ada’s toothbrush. She watched me go to all the sides of my mouth, and as she watched me, she unintentionally moved her mouth like mine, a weak mirror image, her upper left in motion with my upper right, as if she were brushing her teeth at the same time.

  On one of these afternoons after my mother left, I stayed to play with Ada.

  “Follow me,” Ada said, slipping into a bare room at the top of the stairs.

  Anne was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the room, facing the door. She had the batik cloth wrapped around her legs and was naked on the top. Her husband, Matthew, was fully dressed and stood against the two windows at the far side of the room. Ada stood on one side of her mother, facing me.

  “Have you ever tried nursing?” Ada asked in an insistent, cheery voice I’d never heard her use before, as if it were a performance.

  “Ada likes to nurse,” Matthew said from the other side of the room. “You should try it too.”

  I stood facing all of them. “No, thanks,” I said.

  “It’s great. I do it all the time,” Ada said in the same oversweet voice that would be one of the most haunting parts of the incident, how my friend had changed, become robotic and artificial, turned against me. Anne’s arm on her back.

  “No, thanks,” I said, again. “I just don’t want to,” but I could feel pressure building like the air before a storm.

  “Show her,” Anne said, and then to my surprise, Ada knelt down and lay sideways in her mother’s lap and sucked at a breast.

  Matthew took a few steps forward so he was standing behind Anne. “Just try it. You’ll like it,” he said. “Just once.”

  Ada stopped and sat on her knees beside her mother. “I love it,” she said. “It’s great.”

  At this point I understood that I would not be able to leave this room until I’d sucked on Anne’s breast. Maybe not for long. It was a humiliating notion; I was glad no one else was there to watch.

  “Okay,” I said, and crouched down into Anne’s lap like Ada had.

  There was no milk at all, her skin was tacky, a few degrees colder than my mouth, and tasted bland. No salt. I wasn’t sure how long it was supposed to last. If I stopped too soon, I might have to do it again. I closed my eyes. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five.

  “Thanks. That was great,” I said, sitting up.

  “The Ellens made me nurse from Anne,” I told my mother a couple of weeks later. I’d just built up the courage. We’d already seen them again; I didn’t want to get stuck alone with them and feared I would if I waited longer to tell. We were sitting in the car in the driveway about to go somewhere.

  “Nurse?” She froze.

  “I had to do it.”

  “They forced you to nurse?”

  “They wouldn’t let me leave.” I hoped she wouldn’t be ashamed of me for giving in.

  She yelled, “What?“ and turned off the engine and ran back into the house. I got out of the car and stood in the driveway near the bottlebrush tree. Over the next few days I heard her speaking to people on the phone. Often she was crying. Years later she said she’d called my father, who said she shouldn’t have called the police, downplaying the seriousness of the incident. She called other people. I assumed her reaction and these phone calls meant I wouldn’t have to be alone with the Ellens again, and in fact we did not see them again after that. I was relieved, although I worried about Ada. My mother’s new boyfriend Ron said she should call the police, and she did, filing a report.

  Before Ron, my mother spent some time with a man who made art out of sticks.

  I didn’t like him, or the way she fluttered near him, sparkled, seemed to levitate and be made up of air rather than a comforting solid. He was aloof, spoke softly, as if he were hiding something, and was shy in a way that made me suspect he was sneaky. One night after dinner we followed him to his car and he opened the trunk. Inside, on a blanket, was a stick he’d wrapped in places with several bands of colored thread and string. Attached to one section was a crystal, and to another, a feather.

  “So these are what I make,” he said softly.

  “It’s beautiful,” my mother said. I hoped she was faking.

  “This is a powerful crystal,” he said. “And I found the eagle feather on a walk.”

  “An eagle feather. That’s incredible,” she said. She took it in her hand, reverent.

  “But you don’t really like them, do you? The sticks?” I said, when he wasn’t around.

  “I do,” she said.

  “They’re just sticks. He’s not a real artist like you.” I wanted to remind her of her talent, the calm woman in the windy mess of papers.

  “I think they’re more than that,” she said. “I mean, he wraps them. It takes a lot of time. Certain sticks call to him. Nature speaks to him. I might even make one myself.”

  “Oh brother,” I said.

  “Really. I might.”

  “They’re sticks, Mom. Sticks.”

  “Okay. Maybe they’re a little silly,” she said.

  She was back.

  My mother worked a few afternoons per week as a waitress at a restaurant and
patisserie nearby, where she’d brought me once. She told me the secret: the owner, a pastry chef who sat in the back making the petits fours, cut the strings of frosting between the cakes by using his tongue to lick the metal nozzle of the frosting bag. When I came to visit her there, I ordered a cake anyway. I wasn’t usually allowed to eat sugar and it was too delicious to care about germs.

  “The world is made of more space than matter,” she said a few days later, when we were at home. She was reading a book about quantum physics, and it put her in an expansive mood. She said the atoms are so far apart that there isn’t a difference between space and matter, because matter is mostly made of space; even if it looks like a body, a couch, a table, it isn’t, it’s space—and if you could really see this, you could walk through walls.

  My mother said that some enlightened mystics could propel themselves through walls, as if walls did not exist; they knew something about quantum physics, even if only intuitively, of the vast spaces between atoms—larger than football fields, she said. I’d never seen a football field. These mystics were not prone to the same illusions of divided space as we were, and because they understood the false quality of solid matter they were no longer forced to abide by physical laws. There were anecdotal reports, she said, of gurus being in two places at once, speaking with two different groups of people at exactly the same time.

  She told me about this in our living room. I tried to imagine the bedroom beyond the wall, to believe in the absence of matter so thoroughly that it dissipated before me. For a breathless few hours the next day—after I put my finger in front of my nose a few inches, focused beyond it, and my finger faded to semitransparency—I thought I could see through my finger. I was capable of miracles. Walls would be next.

  Lifelines

  When I was in second grade, my mother taught a weekend art class for me and five other students. She drove us to a local farm called Hidden Villa where we would draw and paint from nature. “Two to a seat belt,” she said.

  I sat in the front, squished against Mary-Ellen, who had short hair and dimples and a steady, calm way of breathing I could feel against my back. My mother loaded our equipment into the trunk. Each student had a small folding easel, a Masonite board on which to clip or tape the paper, a watercolor paint set, a charcoal, an eraser, and a soft cloth.