unlocked. I went in through the door that opened into a small entrance room and then the kitchen. Continent-shaped blots of sun shone on the wall. It was calm here. A mourning dove trilled high low, high low, the second note seeming to sway the patch of light.
There was a box of Medjool dates on the counter. Beside it was a wooden box of bing cherries from a farm nearby that were allegedly also sent to kings, shahs, and sheikhs, the stems tucked under the fruits, arranged in perfect rows beneath a layer of waxed tissue paper, as shiny and black as beetles.
There was a bowl of ripe, flushed mangoes. When my mother and I bought mangoes, we bought only one because they were so expensive. Here mangoes were unlimited.
I roamed the house. The widow who’d owned it before had left cans of paint in the pantry along with bags of brushes, empty cans of nails, bottles of oil, and instructions written on scraps of lined paper in a fine, tilted cursive.
The house felt alive to me. I walked into the hallway that looked out into the courtyard. It was basically my house, I told myself. It was my father’s house and I was his daughter. I was pretty sure I was allowed to be here, but I still didn’t want to be caught snooping.
The Rinconada house would rattle with the many small earthquakes and the heavy trains, the window glass singing. Here, it was still. It was a few more blocks away from the trains, out of sight of Alma and the tracks. The walls were thick and dense, the doorways and hallways rounded and wide, like Spanish mission buildings.
I walked up the stone steps to the second floor, holding on to the thin iron railing beneath a long paper lantern that twirled slightly in the breeze, feeling as if a string at my sternum pulled me up to Laurene’s closet and her chest of drawers, the pressure inside me growing. I longed to understand her—to see if I could be more like her.
A couple of weeks before, I’d asked her, “If you had to choose one, would you buy clothing or underwear?” I’d gotten the idea from a Shel Silverstein poem—you were supposed to ask people to determine their predilections for the inner or outer life, the soul or the skin.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Do you mean, would I rather have nice clothing or nice underwear?”
“Yes,” I said, losing my conviction that whatever she said would mean something about her character.
“Nice clothing,” she said.
She showed me how she could still do the splits, dropping down to the floor. I observed everything about her, including how, when she talked, she used a group of words I’d never heard people use in speech before—gratify, garner, providence, interim, pillage, marauding—slipping the words into her sentences like jewels. When she said marauding, she elongated the vowels in a way that made it sound like adulthood and self-sufficiency. Her eyes were icy blue, flat, and small. Sometimes it hurt me to look into them; I wasn’t sure why. She said she was legally blind without glasses or contact lenses, the world reduced to shapes.
Her friend Kat lived nearby and sometimes came over when I was there. Both of them were in their late twenties. When she and Kat talked about losers, which they did sometimes, Laurene made an L shape with her thumb and index finger and moved it around. When Laurene said the word, with her clear diction, I knew there was nothing I’d rather not be than a loser. Laurene was from New Jersey, and I got the idea that people were more normal in New Jersey. They didn’t have Birkenstocks and gurus and talk of reincarnation. Around this time, she said a man had followed her around the Palo Alto Whole Foods, saying he was reincarnated from a bumblebee.
Now, upstairs in the house in the muffled silence, I wanted to find out her secret.
I walked into her closet, which had a full-length mirror, a chest of drawers, a rod for hanging clothing. A carpenter had come to build these closets with light-colored wood. On the chest of drawers were two tubes of lipstick: one mauve, the other a light, shimmering pink, both carved by repeated application into pointed crescents so high and thin the top might break off. I tried the mauve. It felt wet and smelled of wax and perfume.
I opened her underwear drawer. Different cottons—white, nude, black—lumped