surprise, they remained in the front seat and let me finish the story, speaking from the back seat. Usually they were in a rush. They sat very still, facing the windshield, listening.
If I hoped Laurene would save me, I also wanted to save her, and imagined myself as her savior, powerful and generous. One day she had turned to me in the kitchen and said, “I was too young.”
“For what?”
“Marriage,” she’d said dryly.
She’d harvested cauliflower from the garden and put it to steam in the new Alessi pot my father had recently brought home, about which he’d been excited, showing us that it rounded out at the sides instead of being straight, a cauldron-shaped pot that was made of the same materials, at the same price point, as an ordinary pot. But you could see the impact of a better design. “It’s so simple, and so beautiful,” he said, turning it under the kitchen lights.
Laurene had gone upstairs and forgotten about the cauliflower, and the water at the bottom had boiled dry and ruined the pan. The idea of getting another one didn’t occur to me, and I had no idea where he’d bought it or even how much pans cost, and anyway we didn’t have time to buy another before he got home. The kitchen was filled with smoke. “Oh shoot. Shoot,” she said, opening all the windows and the door and fanning furiously with a newspaper. I’d never seen her panic before; she was usually calm. I helped her fan. The house smelled like sugar and carbon and burnt metal. We both fanned furiously.
He sometimes pointed out how she came from New Jersey and had wide feet, and how she liked the wrong kind of trees. The cauldron pot might symbolize a whole realm of aesthetics he felt she didn’t have. (“She doesn’t have taste,” he’d said to dinner guests, after she left the room.) When he saw the burnt pot, he might be unkind to her for it, as if here was further evidence that she would lay ruin to his refinement.
She could do better than him, I thought. I would rescue her; we could rescue each other, drive off in her white BMW, like in Thelma & Louise. I was overcome with affection for her, how in spite of it all she kept being positive, kept working hard to make her company succeed. She understood that life took a certain relentlessness, she continued despite his disapproval, and this forward motion was a model for me. If she was hesitant to leave because she thought no one else noticed, or she doubted her own perceptions, I noticed, I saw. I wanted her to have fulfillment and joy, I believed in her capacities, and I thought that my confidence and my encouragement might be just what she needed to escape.
Afterward, the close feeling between us did not remain. It surprised me, each time we were close, that it did not stay, but snapped back and became more formal. My father, displeased about the burnt pot, was taciturn for days.
I was still seeing the same therapist, Dr. Lake. I’d been seeing him once a week since I was nine, my father paying for the weekly sessions. His office was a room on Welch Road near the Stanford Hospital. He was tall, with dark hair and a kindly face. When I’d first started coming to him, he’d let me paint a doll with nail polish and ruin it, not complaining when I gave her a short skirt, scissored her hair into a frizzy zag. Now I sat on a daybed against a wall, and he sat in an Eames chair facing me. Sometimes we played checkers or chess. He had a jar of Oreo cookies; part of the reason I’d agreed to keep seeing him years before was the accessibility of these cookies, which I was allowed to eat at will. Before he worked on Welch Road, when he worked at a different office, we would sometimes walk to the Fosters Freeze down the road, talking as we walked. Now we sometimes walked to the Häagen-Dazs in the Stanford Barn where he bought us ice cream. “Freud would roll in his grave,” he joked.
After asking for several months, I finally persuaded my father and Laurene to come along with me for a session. I had a crazy idea that Dr. Lake would say something to them, or he would be silent when they said something, and they would just get