go away. I hoped she would wait patiently; maybe she would understand that nothing could be more important than this.
She leaned on the horn, a long honk like a foghorn. Wasn’t she worried about the neighbors? Wasn’t she ashamed? When she honked like this, I had to rush out of the house as fast as I could. Why did it seem these minutes of what felt like family closeness always came at the moments my mother was there to take me to an appointment?
By the time I got out to the car, she was fuming and spoke between her teeth.
“You promised,” she said.
“I know, but—”
“I don’t like waiting in front of that house like I’m your maid.”
Not only did she drive me places, but also I’d started to stay at her house, for one week every two weeks. It was the space in between that was perilous, the walk to her car, the four blocks, the few days of adjustment—as if my parents (who had similar values, diets, and mystical beliefs) were not only separate people but operated on contrasting principles. The houses were close but their atmospheres so starkly different it reminded me of something I’d read about the surface of the moon, how if you put your hand on the line where the light meets the shadow, one side will freeze and the other will burn.
Soon I reduced the transfers between houses, extending my stays from one week to two weeks, to a month, to two months.
“I’d like to stay at Mom’s house more,” I said to my father at the end of the summer before my sophomore year. “Maybe half the time.” Because my parents had never been married or divorced, there was no official custody arrangement. And now that we’d fulfilled his requirement of not seeing each other for six months, I figured I was allowed to decide where I went. He didn’t seem happy about it, but he didn’t say I couldn’t. He wouldn’t give me rides between the houses, though, and when I stayed with my mother, he’d give me the cold shoulder for several days around the transfer.
The first two days at my mother’s felt excessively warm, almost cloying, as she followed me around, tending to me, cooking with what I’d recently understood to be an excess of oil, and profligate butter. I felt superior. I knew things she didn’t know. I had aesthetic refinement she didn’t have, I thought. She touched my hair and came in to say goodnight to me, when I had already learned to do without her. I hated how needy she was, how vulnerable, wanting to be with me even when I said I was fine alone; I hated the fact I was related to her, that because of her I was unable to belong in the other house. It was messy, I noticed, her kind of love. With her affection, I felt how she wanted to please me, and I thought less of her for it.
I wanted to be someone else, to be prettier, blonde, tall, worthy—but she seemed to love me, to like me, as I was. I doubted her taste.
I hoped she would not notice how I judged her. I bit my tongue and spoke in a brittle, condescending voice, pitied her strangeness and her adoration of me.
Then we would get into a fight, and she would sob, saying that she was hurt and I treated her badly, and I would see her as human again, some defense would fall, my perspective would shift, and I’d feel close with her again. We couldn’t help repeating this pattern every time, even after we became aware of it.
“Steve doesn’t love me,” I told her. “I was born too early.” We were sitting outside on the side steps, under the wisteria vine, eating half a watermelon with spoons.
“He does love you,” she said. “He just doesn’t know it. You, you are what is important to him.”
Her words produced a great bloom inside me.
“He knows it,” she said, “he’s always known it, but he’s disconnected from himself. He doesn’t know his own heart, because he lost it.”
I wasn’t nothing; I was something. I thought of how he asked me about Tina: he doesn’t know what he has until it’s too late, and the pattern is overlapping. He uses me to find out about her, and later he will use someone else to find out about me, and on and on—the tragedy, for him, of no two points connecting.
“It’s better