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.
“Let’s not stop at the ATM,” I said. “Please.” But she stopped anyway, on our way out of town. No money came out of the machine, just a paper slip. She grabbed the slip, walked a few feet, and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to examine it, stricken. We went home. She did not answer my questions but told me to be quiet, and she went to her room for the rest of the day.
“Go play,” she said. “I’m fine. Leave me alone, honey.”
Drawing, sorting my clothing, arranging the mice in their cage, doing any ordinary thing at all, seemed risky, like simultaneously being in a little boat out in the middle of a storm. You couldn’t take your attention from it or it would tip when you didn’t expect.
The next week Debbie took me over to the house where she lived with her parents in Menlo Park on Hobart Street. Her mother, blonde and plump with skin like parchment, was sitting in a breakfast nook wearing an apron, cutting rectangles out of colorful newsprint. The scissors made a pleasing rasp.
I asked her what she was cutting.
“Coupons,” she said. “I bring them to the store, and then I pay less.” She put each rectangle of paper into a partitioned section of a plastic box.
There was a secret compartment inside one of Debbie’s dresser drawers. A drawer inside a drawer. “My family doesn’t even know about it,” she said, whispering and leaning down so her face was near mine. Inside was a jewelry case, and inside that was a necklace, the fine chain knotted.
“I wonder if you can undo that with your little fingers,” she said. “If you can untie it, you can have it.” I sat on her bed and worked the filaments away from one another until each knot released.
“Do you have a husband?” I asked her, as she fastened the necklace behind me.
“Not yet,” she said. “But I will. I’ll be out walking, and bam, there he’ll be, around the next corner!”
When we got back, my mother was in her painting clothes.
“Look,” she said, gesturing to an almost-finished painting. Debbie went over to see it close up. “It’s amazing,” Debbie said. “I’ve never seen more beautiful artwork.” (Later Debbie said she wondered why we were poor when my mother had a talent like this. At the very least, she thought, my mother could hawk her artwork on the street. But my mother’s artwork didn’t make money except for a few illustration projects.)
We all sat at the table, me