right,” I said, and contemplated the idea. It was a stab at first, but after that, it felt almost like a relief to say it like it was.
“How dare Kevin say that. He does love you,” my mother said on the phone when I told her.
“But love is a verb,” I said. “So what does it matter?”
“It matters,” she said.
I thought maybe she didn’t know. I experimented with the idea as I walked around. He doesn’t love me and that’s why he’s like this.
The plain truth.
Kevin and Dorothy paid my tuition for my final year.
My mother said she had tried to sell her new house to pay for it, but there wasn’t much time, and she couldn’t find a buyer. She also said she had a vision of an enormous, brilliant gold angel towering behind the neighbors. It was impossible, I knew, but the image made the gift easier to receive, if I could imagine the money came from an angel and not just from them, whom I worried I could never repay. The gift was unfathomably big.
At times, I wished that these stable, responsible neighbors were my family instead, and if I yearned to be good enough for a family like this, they might have liked being an example to me, and delighted in how I saw them heroically. They were often cracking jokes and giving me ideas about how people lived, and how families interacted, and how I shouldn’t interrupt, and what questions were rude, and how to defend myself with my words, and how to think about the people who fawned on my father and stepmother and did not notice or care about me. I flipped back and forth between wanting to be exactly like them and wanting to be myself, with them as my doting parents. For a while, perhaps, all of us were caught up in the wish that we could be a family.
My mother called a friend to ask him what he thought would come of all this.
He said, “Lisa’s going to find out she can’t replace her parents, and Kevin and Dorothy are going to learn they can’t buy a daughter.”
I had already committed to study abroad at King’s College in London for my final year of college, and Kevin and Dorothy insisted that I go.
That year, near my dorm, the London Eye was lifted from the surface of the water.
Toward the end of my year abroad, I dated an English lawyer with a high-standing blond ruffle of hair.
“You should invite your father to your graduation,” he said.
“No way,” I said. I told him everything my father had done wrong.
“But he’s your father,” he said. He kept pressing, saying that it didn’t matter what one’s father had done; he was still one’s father, that fathers had done worse things and still should be invited to momentous events, and if I didn’t invite him, I’d regret it later when it was too late to fix. I was ambivalent, but in the end I sent my father and Laurene two tickets and a note.
Kevin and Dorothy, whom I invited and who planned to come, were deeply hurt that I’d invited my father, after all they had done for me when he had not, and decided not to come.
My mother was worried she wouldn’t be able to afford the trip, but at the last minute she got a consulting job with Hewlett-Packard, bought a flight, reserved a hotel room, and bought a stunning black cotton dress that was ruched up at the bottom like a parachute.
Later, when my father talked about that day, he said, several times, “Your mother was so graceful.” He did not know what I knew—that she’d carefully rationed her words to him, giving him a maximum of twenty-five. To him she spoke deliberately and carefully, to protect this economy.
My father and Laurene had slipped through the river gate of Winthrop House to watch me walk down the line and receive my diploma. When I came to join my mother, I found them standing beside her. “I don’t believe in genetics,” my father blurted out after we’d exchanged hellos. He sometimes made pronouncements like this. At other times he had talked about how powerful genes were. I didn’t know how to respond.
“What are you going to do next? Do you have a job?” he asked.
I was almost too embarrassed to say, because I knew he didn’t respect banking, or what he called “the straight and narrow,” and neither did I, and I withered