of college.
She was still living with her boyfriend; I stayed with the neighbors during school breaks. “He’ll never do it,” I said.
“I’m going to keep on asking until he does.”
She had never owned a house. In all the years I was growing up, he had not bought us a house; we had never lived in a house we owned. Surely, if he had been willing, he would have done it then. I wondered why she thought she could get it now, especially now that I had already left home—and he wasn’t even talking with me—and why, if she could convince him to do things, she hadn’t done it sooner.
The idea that it was possible, that it might have even been possible before, enraged me, even if I wanted her to have it.
In fact, several months later, he agreed. She found a house for sale in Menlo Park that met his criteria: within a certain radius of his house, and less than four hundred thousand dollars. It was a thin-walled, two-bedroom wooden house on the busy Alameda de las Pulgas, with a nice back garden. He’d said it had to be close to his house so that he could see it before buying it, but in the end he didn’t even come to look before he bought the house in her name.
The summer after my sophomore year at Harvard, I got a job working at the Stanford Genetics lab, as I had done during high school. This would be the last time I lived in Palo Alto.
My mother made us salads with fresh tarragon leaves mixed in with the lettuces. She made curtains with French seams. She grew tomato plants in the garden in the back, forgetting to water them until the leaves wilted and browned, her neglect making the fruit the sweetest.
That summer, my father would not talk with me but insisted that I babysit my brother, who had been missing me. I’d been over to his house several times to babysit, hoping to talk with him, but he had ignored me. After that, I told my father I would need to talk with him first, and that I wouldn’t babysit unless he agreed to talk with me, but he refused, and said I had abandoned my brother.
One afternoon, Kevin and Dorothy came over to my mother’s house when my mother and I happened to be in a panic. My father had just called me, yelling that I had to babysit my brother, and then sent my mother an angry email. I was horrible and selfish, he wrote, shirking my responsibilities toward my brother. My mother and I were upset, not knowing how to respond. I suspected that, in some way, I must be wrong. I kept repeating to my father, on the phone and then over email, that I would love to see my brother, but would simply need to talk with him first.
“I don’t want to talk to you or see you,” he said to me on the phone. “You won’t see Reed, and I love Reed, and I don’t want to spend time with people who won’t spend time with the people I love,” he said.
Dorothy stood over my mother and dictated a response that began, “Cut the sanctimonious bullshit, Steve.” My mother typed it out. Dorothy spelled out sanctimonious. I was thrilled about Dorothy’s response, and the new word.
At Harvard, I decided to major in English. During my junior year, I took a seminar on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, taught by a Chaucer scholar from England with charming, uneven teeth and tufts of white hair in his ears. At some point, Criseyde has left Troilus, but Troilus can’t seem to forget her.
“It makes Troilus seem so pathetic,” I said confidently during the seminar, “that he can’t get over her.”
“No,” the professor said, looking at me with a kind gaze. “His strength is that he can hold on.”
That spring, soon after I wrote what I took to be a rather poignant villanelle about my eyebrows and entered it for submission in the college literary magazine, I went to see a free campus therapist, writing my name on a sign-up sheet to reserve an hour. She was a thin woman with a thin voice, and thin hair, a thin face, and a thin nose, like a Modigliani woman, with a peaceful expression and a sense of calm around her.
I went to see her a few times over the course of the next few weeks, and before the last