why they bought them at all.
“We need them to make ours,” he said. So computers make computers, I thought.
After that we said goodbye to the men and walked back up the stairs.
I figured we’d head out now, but he left me near my backpack and went back to his office. Soon he was back on the phone.
“Ready to go, champ?”
By this time it was night. Barbara had already left; before saying goodbye, she held her purse against her lap and squatted down to ask me about my drawings. I was woozy with Fanta from the stocked refrigerator.
The thought of going with my father to his big house, alone in the dark, was unsettling. I hadn’t considered the possibility that we’d still be far away from his house—not inside it—when darkness fell.
The town of Woodside, a twenty-minute drive from Palo Alto, was a place with forests and people who owned horses. His house was a mansion built on seven acres of land.
This phrase, seven acres, seemed vast and grand, more grand than anything I knew.
The house was Spanish-style, white stucco, with an old metal gate at the front with a lock strung through that had to be opened by hand, and a flagpole with no flag. The rooms were large and dark and empty, with huge windows on both sides that nevertheless did not let much light in. I knew this from the time I’d been there with him and my mother years before, in the daytime, soon after he’d bought it.
This time he’d said to bring along my bathing suit, just in case, but remembering that dark pool in the middle of the ragged field from years before terrified me now. Would it be filled with dead bugs and dead animals?
Along with the fear was something else, a kind of ecstatic expectation: for on this night, at some moment I couldn’t predict, he’d say, “Let’s blast,” and we’d walk down that wide staircase through the chemical smell of new textiles and out into the sweet-smelling night air, we’d get into his car and it would wheeze and rumble the way it did, and for the first time there would be no one but the two of us, heading for his mansion on the seven acres of land.
We drove with the top down, the heat blasting through the front vents. As we set off I thought: Here I am, with my father, at the beginning. I am Lisa and I have a father and we are driving between the outlines of dark hills, inside a strong wind perfumed with dry grasses. I told the story of myself to myself. I didn’t know what the story would become, but I knew it would be something, maybe something big.
I was too scared to talk. It was almost pitch-black inside the car except for the dashboard lights, the trembling needles and round instruments that were nicer than those in other cars I’d seen. Their movements were precise, and they gave off a whiter glow. His kind of driving felt heavy and light at the same time: the car solid, fastened to the road, but accelerating quickly, with no resistance.
He turned on music, loud: “A Hard Day’s Night.” Ribbons of cool night air slipped in from the outside and mingled with the heat from the vents. I used the lever on the side of the seat to bring it up and forward as far as possible. My butt and thighs grew hot. The leather had small puncture holes like tiny dots—that must be where the heat came through.
We drove over Highway 280 on Sand Hill Road, then into the dark hills where there was only the smell of the grasses and far away the jagged ridge of redwood trees that met the bright night sky. My father didn’t speak or look at me. It was hard to keep thinking of things to talk about. I wanted to be close with him all at once—to feel the way I imagined other children felt with their fathers; I wanted a conflagration of talk, of questions, of noticing. I’d been waiting for so long and now that we were here it felt too late.
Near his busy silence I felt a new kind of dissolution. I was starting to disappear. I noticed details about him with exact focus, but had difficulty locating myself.
I watched his hands on the steering wheel; he had smart fingers with fine black hair that grew straight on the first joint after the knuckle. His