move us back to the Bay Area, where we would sublet a room for a month in Menlo Park in a house on Avy Avenue with a hippie who kept bees.
The day after we returned from Tahoe, my father wanted to show us his new house. I hadn’t seen him for years, and I wouldn’t see him for years after that. The memory of this day, the outlandish house and my strange father, seemed surreal when I thought of it later, as if it hadn’t really happened.
He came to pick us up in his Porsche.
The house had no furniture, only many cavernous rooms. My mother and I found a church organ set up on a raised part of floor in a huge, dank room somewhere, a wooden shell of foot pedals arrayed below and two whole rooms with latticed walls filled with hundreds of metal pipes, some so large I could fit inside them, some smaller than the nail on my pinkie finger, and every size in between. Each was held vertically in a wooden socket made specifically to hold it.
I found an elevator and went up and down it several times until Steve said, okay, enough.
The face you saw upon entering the driveway turned out to be the thin side, and on the other side, the one that faced the lawn, it was vast, huge white arches with hot-pink bougainvillea billowing off. “The house is shit,” Steve said to my mother. “The construction’s shit. I’m going to tear it down. I bought this place for the trees.” I felt a stab of shock, but they continued walking as if nothing had happened. How could he care about trees when there was such a house? Would he tear it down before I had a chance to come back?
His s‘s sounded like a match doused in water. He walked tilted forward as if he were walking uphill; his knees never seemed to straighten all the way. His dark hair fell against his face, and he cast it out of his eyes by jerking his head. His face looked fresh against the dark, shiny hair. Being near him in the bright light with the smells of dirt and trees, the spaciousness of the land, was electric and magical. Once I caught him looking at me sidelong, a brown sharp eye.
He pointed to three huge oak trees at the end of the large lawn. “Those,” he said to my mother. “That’s why I bought this place.”
Was it a joke? I couldn’t tell.
“How old are they?” my mother asked.
“Two hundred years.” My arms could reach around only the smallest section of trunk.
We walked back up toward the house then down a small hill to a large pool in the middle of a field of tall, untended grasses, and we stood on the lip looking in where thousands of dead bugs webbed the surface of the water: black spiders, daddy longlegs, a dead one-wing dragonfly. You could hardly see the water for the bugs. There was a frog, white belly up, and so many dead leaves the water had turned thick and dark, the color of ink.
“Seems like you’ve got some pool cleaning to do, Steve,” my mother said.
“Or I might just take it out,” he said, and that night I dreamt the bugs and animals rose up from the pool as dragons, flapping violently into the sky, leaving the water a clear turquoise netted with white light.
A few weeks later, my father bought us a silver Honda Civic to replace our green VW. We went to pick it up at the lot.
Several months after that, my mother wanted a break and we went on an overnight trip to Harbin Hot Springs. On the way back it was night and raining, and on a freeway that wound through the hills, a couple of hours from home, she got lost. The wiper was better on her side; the one on my side was warped in the middle and left a streak. The windshield was chipped in front of my seat in the shape of a small eye where a pebble must have hit at some point and left a mark.
“There’s nothing. Nothing,” she said. I didn’t know what she meant. She started to cry. She made a high and continuous mew like a bow drawn along a string.
At twenty-eight, and newly single again, she found it much harder than she’d anticipated to raise a child. Her family was unable to offer much support; her father, Jim,