said that the principal of the school had lectured them, asking them what schools they had been putting me in, and why they’d let me move schools so many times. Mona wrote a recommendation letter. My father asked, uncharacteristically, if he could contribute money to get me in. I didn’t know this then. But the principal said no. It was school policy, in any case, to allow all applicants to do a three-day visit.
After the visit to her classroom, Bryna, one of the most respected teachers at the school, wrote a five-page letter to recommend me, my mother said, and another girl dropped out, and I was admitted. I don’t know what I’d done to impress her, and I never saw the letter. They wanted me to start soon, right away, at the end of fourth grade.
For the long drive to Nueva, my father bought us a new car: an Audi Quattro. My mother and I went to the lot and chose the maroon model, with a light-gray leather interior. Under the emergency brake was a stitched leather skirt that bagged loose, like elephant skin; on the dash in front of the passenger seat was a glossy panel of wood.
“Now I can knock on wood when I’m driving,” my mother said. She knocked to un-jinx. She would knock when she saw an odd number of ravens or a black cat wander across our path. She noticed signs and premonitions and would sometimes become despondent if she saw the wrong number of birds—until she saw another bird that changed the count.
In the mornings, we drove north down Highway 280, past the reservoir. The drive to Nueva was about forty minutes. There were birds in the rumpled hills around the freeway, turkey vultures, sometimes eagles and hawks.
“How fast do you think we’re going?” she asked, covering the speedometer with her hand.
“Fifty?” In the old Honda we would have had to yell to be heard; inside the Audi, it seemed like we were hardly moving. Nothing vibrated or rasped.
She removed her hand. “Eighty!” she said, “my God,” and braked.
My mother learned about a new kind of braces made of a bone-colored polymer to blend in more effectively with the color of teeth. She asked my father to pay for them, and he’d agreed. But the coffee she drank every day discolored the clear bands that surrounded the bone-colored cabooses, browning the bands after just a few sips, making her teeth look yellow.
“I’m going to quit coffee,” she said. The next day, she had espresso breath, the bands were stained, and she was despondent as she cooked dinner.
“Quitting is harder than it seems,” she said when I asked her about it.
When she smiled, her lips got caught and bunched above them. At a shop, a woman said, “I can’t believe you’re willing to wear braces at your age.” She came home, moved around the house in a jerky, angry way, dislodging papers from her desk.
Soon she learned how to change the bands herself. She ordered bags of extra bands and did it every day, crouching with a knee up on the toilet seat, cutting the old ones out with a silver X-Acto knife into which she’d inserted a new, sharp blade. It made a sound like flick flick flick as the old bands were spliced and flew across the bathroom. She pulled the fresh bands open with her index fingers, releasing them over each brace.
Mona stopped by one day, and she and my mother stood talking in the kitchen near the microwave. My mother was worried the house was too small for a studio. “Just paint,” Mona said. “Bedroom be damned. Make it into a studio and sleep in it.” Mona had just returned from a residency at an artists’ colony called Djerassi.
After that, my mother taped up black-and-white photocopies of the etchings and lithographs of Picasso, Kirchner, Cézanne, Chagall, and Kandinsky from the 1920s and ‘30s until her bedroom wall was completely covered in overlapping pages taped at the tops, free at the bottom like tiles or scales, that lifted and fell in the breezes. Soon, she also converted the garage into a studio, adding Sheetrock to the walls.
In my mother’s final semester at school, in addition to creating lithograph prints, she started making stencils. She hand-cut the patterns in vellum paper, but later she planned to have them laser-cut for mass production and to sell them as a part of a kit.
“This is going to work,” she said. “How could it not?”