him!” I felt it there inside my chest like my heart would rip apart with it.
My mother was admitted into California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco, where she would work toward her bachelor’s degree. My father offered to take me on Wednesday nights, the only night of the week she had class. I would be alone with him for the first time. We would sleep at his mansion, with its glowing white face and seven acres.
It gave me a shiver of excitement and disbelief, sitting in school that first Wednesday. My new fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Keatsman, sat at the front of the class and twisted a snug gold ring around and around her finger when she was upset with us for being unruly, the flesh tugging near the band. At the end of the day I ran outside at the bell, the first one, and looked for the white Honda Civic I’d been told to watch for—Barbara, my father’s secretary, would pick me up.
She was parked against the curb in front of the school. She leaned over and rolled down the window.
“Lisa?”
“Barbara?”
“That’s me,” she said, opening the latch of the passenger side door.
She drove us to my father’s office. Her fingernails on the stick shift were painted red and she wore a long skirt and a blouse with two sections of cloth at the collar that tied in a bow. Her brown hair fell straight in a glossy line that almost hit her shoulders. She wore glasses. I liked being near her; I realized later this was true of the people I knew who worked with my father during the years I was growing up. They were kind and gentle; often I felt more at home with them than I did with my father. They seemed soulful and modest—I think he must have admired these qualities and chosen them, even though he was not always like that himself. Barbara had a matronly presence, calm and mature, although she couldn’t have been much older than my mother.
I sat on the carpeted floor in the middle of a huge room with a few low couches, large cement pillars painted white, a plant, and offices around the outside windowed wall of the building. The room smelled like new paint and carpet. Barbara brought me paper and an assortment of pens. From the place where I sat, I could see my father’s office across the expanse of floor, the same size as all the offices around him, the door open. I could hear him talking on the phone. People would walk into his office, talk with him for a while, and then stop and say hello to me and ask if I was all set and look at my drawings. I couldn’t see him behind his desk because there was a venetian blind, mostly closed, on the window that faced into the central room, but I could hear him, and sometimes he would walk out of his office, waving and smiling at me, and I’d think that maybe we were leaving, but then he’d return to his office again. All the offices had whiteboards. When he was speaking with someone else, he spoke very fast and loud. His office began to glow brightly along with several other offices along the same wall, lighter as it grew dark outside.
“I wanna show you something,” he said at some point, walking up to me. “Leave your backpack.” I followed him down the stairs, into another set of closed rooms. We passed a wall with a whiteboard with names and photographs with numbers beside them.
“At other companies they try to hide what people are earning and it’s this big secret,” he said. “We just write it here and everyone can see it. It stops all the stupid gossip.”
I followed him down into a basement office with bunch of desks, a low ceiling, lots of computers, and a few men standing around. Most of the people must have already gone home. He introduced me as his daughter, and then they started talking to each other rapidly, and I couldn’t understand what they were talking about.
“Look at this,” he said to me, pointing at a computer with a large screen. “And this and this. It’s like they have a blind midget on the assembly line.” He was pointing to Sun Microsystems logos on big monitors, each attached at a different place along the panel at the bottom of the screen.
His voice was so sharp that I wondered