Small Fry Read online

  “What are we going to draw?” Joe asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “We’ll find something when we get there.”

  She wasn’t like the other mothers; she and I weren’t like other families. I worried that, as our teacher, she would reveal us, how strange we were.

  A few days before, I’d walked in on my mother squatting on top of the toilet seat, perched up high, her trousers around her knees like a curtain, her feet planted on the rim.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, horrified.

  “I learned it in India,” she said. “It’s a better position. Close the door.”

  The farm was inside hills covered in bay laurel trees with thin trunks dropping yellow half-moon leaves, a bright green strip of miner’s lettuce along the road. The air was glassy and fragrant with the smell of the trees. It was a triangle of flat land surrounded by layers of hills, owned by a family that had made money on asbestos. My mother said asbestos was insulation that turned out to be a kind of poison, and I thought about this at the farm, how clean the air was, how lush the farm, yet built on the proceeds of poison.

  We collected our equipment and followed my mother into a field near the parking lot, where a small, barky tree stood up in isolation. A few leaves clung to the branches, shoots of grass like whiskers grew around the base of the trunk, with dirt clods visible between the neon blades. This one, she said.

  We arranged our easels in a semicircle. Past the tree was a fenced garden, a barn, some sheds; beyond those, hills wrinkled up together at the end of the narrow valley like pinched skin. Tree, green grass, blue hills, then purple hills, sky—it would be hard to get the whole scene onto my small piece of paper.

  “Stick the easels deep into the dirt to stabilize them,” my mother said. She went around and pushed our easels into the rough ground, adjusting them, displaying her natural authority and comfort with the physical world, her bold speech and movements new to me, even a little frightening. Once we’d taped the paper to our Masonite boards, she stood in front of us with a pointed brush in one hand, her other hand held up flat like a page. “I want to show you how to use a brush before we start,” she said. “You don’t want to press down, head-on, like this”—she demonstrated, making the hairs on the brush splay out on her palm like a mop—”but draw the bristles along the paper in one direction, moving with, instead of against, the hairs.” I had known for years how to use a brush and was annoyed to be instructed like the others.

  We began to draw. The square-edged conté crayons were brown sticks that looked something like the branches themselves. We would paint on top of the drawing, to add color. “Don’t draw the tree you think you see,” my mother said. “Draw the tree. Trust your eye.”

  I wasn’t sure where on the page to make the tree begin, from where it should grow up through the gradations of hills to the sky—the ground with the grasses took up almost as much room as the hills, I noticed, now that I was really looking at the scene before me. I worried my tree might end up in a tiny spot in the center, surrounded by the blank white space I knew my mother abhorred.

  “That first mark takes courage,” she said, glancing at my blank paper. “And remember: there are no straight lines in nature.”

  I made a few straight marks.

  “A spill on the ground can be more interesting than a drawing,” she said. It was a phrase I’d heard her say before, from one of her teachers at community college. When she and I drew together, she wouldn’t let me use the black paint that came with a set, insisting that black was not a color, and that if I looked harder, I would see something else. She didn’t believe in the “bad guy” and the “good guy” in books or movies either, and became angry with me when I referred to characters that way. To me, such titles, such a color, offered relief because they seemed like ledges where one could rest.

  She walked around among us as we worked, helping one student smudge out a part that wasn’t right, helping another begin to draw the place where a branch shot out from the trunk. “May I?” my mother said before she took the crayon from Mary-Ellen, addressing her as if she were an adult.

  “I want you to try to capture the spirit of the tree,” she said. “Not just the way it looks, but the life force inside it.” It surprised me that no one smirked at this, that everyone continued to draw with the focus I lacked. Earlier I hadn’t wanted to be associated with her; now I hoped to be singled out as her daughter, the insider, possessor of knowledge the others didn’t have. I thought she spoke in a language no one understood but me, and I was ashamed of understanding it myself; but the other students listened as if they, too, understood, and were not ashamed.

  It was difficult to see the tree only as it looked. It felt like writing with my left hand. The idea of the tree kept creeping back into my fingers and into my eyes, so that I had to move fast when I saw something, before it became the idea of the tree again.

  “Close one eye if it helps,” she said. I tried it; the world flattened. And then something unexpected happened: the branch I was drawing didn’t jut. It was no longer a branch but a shape made of light, inside other shapes made of light. A thrill to see it. The tree was just a shape, nothing to do with branches. I drew it quickly, the way it looked, not the way it was.

  There, I was finished. I’d seen it for a moment. It was enough.

  We began to use the watercolors, adding a layer of color to the drawings we’d made.

  “Trees need sunlight, water, nutrients,” she said. “But if they have too many, too abundantly, they also don’t flourish. Some struggle makes them stronger, makes the fruit trees produce better fruit.” She would repeat this idea many times over the years, past the point when I understood it was a metaphor.

  “See colors as they are, not the ones they’re supposed to be,” she said.

  She’d shown me once how an orange in a bowl can be blue, reflecting sky, or purple in shadow, or white with glare. When this sight happens, she said, it’s a surprise; that’s how you know it’s true.

  There’s no such thing as a color without a color around it. Even the color of the paper is not nothing. Everything matters, not just of itself, but in relation to everything else. At some point she must have touched her face, maybe brushing a strand of hair away, and when I looked, she had a brown smudge across the ridge of her nose. “Mom,” I said, “you have charcoal on your face.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Lisa,” she said.

  Before the parents came, she went around and made comments, looking at our drawings. She called it “the Critique.” “I love the composition,” she said to one student.

  “Beautiful, subtle,” she said to another.

  She found Joe’s picture particularly impressive. “This part,” she said, pointing to the hills, “is sublime. Wow.”

  In mine, she complimented the swishy movement of the tree but said it was incomplete. I’d finished too quickly, she said, drawing and painting impatiently, as if the whole exercise had been a race.

  “Steve’s supposed to come over and bring the bed tomorrow.” She said his name like we knew him. He’d offered to bring this bed over twice already, but then he didn’t show. My mother had curtained the small alcove with a skylight off the living room, and this was where the bed would go, replacing the futon on the floor where I slept when I didn’t share her bed. His girlfriend, whom we’d never met, had even called my mother to apologize, promising that this time he’d show up.

  Steve. I knew so little about him. He was like those Michelangelo sculptures of men trapped in rough stone, half smooth, half rough, that made you imagine the part inside that had not yet come out.

  “He didn’t come last time,” I said. We’d waited for an hour. Maybe he didn’t know what bed to buy; maybe he didn’t know how to find our house. Maybe my mother told him the wrong time.

  “He’s promised to come this time,” she said. “So we’ll see.”

  We waited inside first, and then we went outside to the asphalt circle and watched the s
treet. I was so excited for his arrival that I’d worn my nice dress, given to me by the rock climber, and I was fluttery in my stomach. Cars passed outside the driveway. Each one held the possibility of being him. We waited. “I don’t think he’s going to come,” my mother finally said after some time. We went back inside. I felt like I’d been emptied out. The day, charged with excitement, newness, extravagance, and mystery, unlike other days, changed back into a dull and ordinary day. Just us again, and nothing to do.

  “Let’s go for a skate?”

  When my mother and I went roller skating, our favorite thing was to find the soft cement. If you were walking, the seam between one type of pavement and another was not obvious, but on skates you felt a clear difference between the two. We said the soft pavement was “like butter.” Transitioning onto the buttery parts after the rough, jangly pavement—the roughest parts vibrating up through my knees and hips to made my cheeks shake and my eyeballs itch—felt like floating.

  One section we’d found was near the lot on Oak Grove where we used to live. Our old detached studio, along with the main house, had since been ripped down and replaced with a brown-shingled Comerica Bank. “Your umbilical cord is buried in the dirt somewhere underneath that bank,” she said when we passed it. This disturbed me; surely other mothers didn’t bury umbilical cords in yards.

  The soft cement was located in front of a faux-Palladian office building, with two swooping walkways curving up over a rock garden to an entrance door made of tinted glass. The cement on the ramps was silken, lined with curved iron banisters. We skated in a circle up one, down the other, and back up again.

  She kept glancing at me as we skated; I didn’t let on that I knew she was looking. “You know, you’re just the daughter I wanted,” she said. “Exactly the one. On the farm before you were born there was this little girl, three or four years old, with her mother. A little Taurus girl, precocious and smart. I thought, I want that.”

  “I know,” I said. She’d told me the story before. (“I don’t only love you,” she’d said often. “I also like you.”) “And he named a computer after me?”

  “He pretended he hadn’t, afterward.” And then she told me the story—again—of how they’d named me together in the field, how he vetoed all her choices until she thought of Lisa. “He loves you,” she said. “He just doesn’t know he loves you.” This was hard to grasp. “If he saw you, really saw you and understood what he was missing, how he wasn’t showing up for you, it would kill him. He’d be like this.” She stopped skating and grabbed the railing and clutched her heart, gave an anguished, grief-stricken look, hunched her back as if she’d fall over and die.

  I tried to think of what he’d been missing. Nothing came up.

  I heard from a few people much later that in those days my father carried a photo of me in his wallet. He would pull it out and hold it up at dinner parties, showing it around, and say, “It’s not my kid. But she doesn’t have a father, so I’m trying to be there for her.”

  “It’s his loss,” my mother said as we skated home. “His great, great loss. He’ll get it someday. He’ll come back and it’ll rip his heart open, when he sees you, how much you’re like him, and how much he’s missed.”

  I sensed it was the right time to make a play for a kitten.

  The office of the Humane Society was located on the edge of the Baylands Nature Preserve, in a government-style building.

  “They have too many kittens,” my mother said on the drive over, as I tried to contain my excitement. “If they don’t find homes for them, they put them to sleep.”

  The main room was open-plan, echoey, with a beamed high ceiling and a stone floor. The animals were in the back, through a door. The woman at the front desk was dressed in an army-green uniform with a matching belt and many stiff pockets. She pulled out a clipboard and asked where we lived and how long we’d been there.

  “A house in Menlo Park,” my mother said. “For a few months now.”

  “And before that?” the woman asked.

  “We stayed in a friend’s house for two months,” my mother said, her tone flat. “And in the place before that, four months.”

  The woman’s mouth became fixed as she wrote all this down on her clipboard. I wished my mother would lie, or skip some of the moves, to make us look better; it wasn’t until she’d started telling this woman about all our moves that I understood this was something we should have kept hidden. Even though my mother had agreed to come here and get a pet, I began to suspect that she was still ambivalent, and so refused to shade her answers, letting the woman’s impression of us sour. Or that she was profoundly dedicated to honesty. Or that she began to derive satisfaction from the dry clarity of an aerial view that this woman’s questioning provided, becoming more interested in this unfolding narrative than she was in a cat. Here was the landscape of our lives, seen as a pattern from way high up.

  “We have a yard,” I said.

  The woman addressed my mother. “Do you think you’d be able to care for an animal with so much shifting around?”

  “I think so,” my mother said. “We’ve stabilized somewhat.”

  The woman sat up straight. “I don’t think it will be possible for us to give you a kitten at this time.”

  I didn’t expect such decisiveness. We were not even taken in to see the animals. My mother and I walked out of the building into the pungent salt air of the Baylands, not talking to each other, shocked and weary.

  A few days later, we stopped at a pet store, where she bought me two white mice and the most expensive cage they had, made of glass.

  The bed arrived at some point without my father. It was a loft bed composed of a series of red metal cylinders that twisted into one another, like a circuit, forming a kind of jungle gym. My mother assembled it and flattened the boxes it came in. Beside it, connected with the same metal tubing, was a small white desk made of particle-board and, above the desk, a matching white shelf. I climbed a ladder to the bed at the top, right under the skylight. It was my first bed, and the first gift from my father.

  I began going on outings—to the zoo, the park, shopping—with Debbie, the older sister of my mother’s ex-boyfriend the rock climber. She taught ESL, worked at the cosmetics counter at Macy’s in downtown San Francisco, and cleaned house for a bachelor in a nearby town called Atherton. Debbie was around thirty, like my mother, but without children. She’d offered to take me on outings, inspired by an older girl who had once taken an interest in her when she was young and had difficulties at home, showing her how to apply makeup and wear perfume and accessorize.

  My mother and I waited for her near the road on the appointed day. When she got out of the car, she was wearing light pink jeans, white high-heeled mules, a red top with a ruffle. Multiple Bakelite bracelets clacked against one another when she moved; she wore large hoop earrings and a patterned scarf. She was like a tropical bird in a realm of browns.

  She drove a red Ford Fiesta stick shift and exuded a blithe optimism that seemed like a high calling, a layer of light that made everything else irrelevant. I was being introduced to the good life. Around her was a haze of scent, of orange blossoms and pleasing chemicals. Her hair was short and coiffed; the color and form gave the impression of soft waves breaking around her head, even though, when I touched it, I was surprised to feel a crust.

  “Hair spray,” she said.

  I hoped to use hair spray, too, when I was older.

  On the drives to and from Macy’s, the Rinconada pool, the zoo, or her house, on El Camino or on Alameda de las Pulgas or Highway 280, she would talk about finding the Skyway, a road that she said ran way up above us, above the ground, in the clouds.

  “If only we could find it,” she said. “There’s an on-ramp somewhere around here.” We both looked for the on-ramp, though I wasn’t sure what such a ramp would look like.

  “Darn,” she’d eventually say. “I must have missed it. Sometimes they close it. Next time.”

  The year
before, Debbie had been living abroad in Italy with a family in a house on the Adriatic coast, and she’d thought she might stay forever, but her mother flew over and brought her back. Now she was taking the first difficult steps to create a life. I didn’t know any of this at the time, only that she seemed unencumbered, a miraculous departure from adult seriousness, delightfully unreal, like the Skyway.

  I looked forward to our outings all week and chose my outfits in advance, careful to preserve them, separating them from my other clothing so that I would be sure they were clean on the appointed day. I fell in love with Debbie the way that young girls sometimes fall in love with women who aren’t their mothers. With her I was my most pleasing self. Debbie and her airy voice, the oblique angles from which she looked at her life, the percussive sounds of her bracelets, her clothing—a riot of distinct shapes and bright color, chromatically alive—were the counterbalance to my mother, who was slipping into a depression.

  “That’s how it should have been,” my mother said after she saw a documentary about whales, who are born already knowing how to swim, drift, float. No diapers, no being stuck, no mind-numbing tasks.

  Since she and the stick artist had broken up, my mother didn’t want to do much, nor could we afford to do much. She prepared food—brown rice, tofu, vegetables—that neither of us was excited to eat, and she spent long periods in her room, from day into evening, doing I Ching divination with the lights out, the semidarkness scaring me because it spoke of our strangeness, of no formality or separations.

  One day she was feeling better and said she would take us to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but first she wanted to stop at an ATM machine. At the museum we would walk through the galleries, the room with huge, silly Claes Oldenburg sculptures, me lounging on the benches or doing headstands while she looked at the art, her whispering into my ear about the artists, a snack at the café at the end.