There are two per class—the elections are soon.” A demotion, I thought. I’d run for president instead.
Several Christmas wreaths arrived from Smith & Hawken. Three were the size of small bird’s nests. My father carried one through the kitchen, to hang on the wooden beam between the banks of French doors in the hallway. He didn’t want me or anyone else to touch the wreaths, or any of the Christmas decorations he’d ordered. Even the tree lights—which he insisted on hanging by himself, looping the twisted cords around the branches of a Douglas fir in a process that took him the whole day—were off-limits. He fussed about the small round wreath, adjusting it on the nail, stepping back; adjusting it, stepping back again.
I laughed, watching him. “I guess you have to get it just right,” I said.
“If it’s not just right,” he said, in a high falsetto, rolling the r, “I will perish.” When he was happy, he became goofy, able to laugh at himself and his fastidiousness.
Sometimes my father sang extemporaneous rhyming songs about me to me—the way Bob Dylan did in the recording studio, he said. My bike and hike I liked to school, my books, my looks, my life as a wife of a fife.
He adjusted the wreath one last time and lunged for me, wiggling his index finger under my rib cage. I reached for him too, trying to dig my hand into his armpit to tickle him first. He got me, I laughed—a shrill laugh that did not sound like part of me. He jumped away so that I couldn’t reach him, sashaying, his bare legs tapered, silly-looking, like a frog’s.
He’d recently bought a CD he played for me, a recording of the last castrato, who didn’t sound like a woman or man, but had a haunting high kind of voice in between, like someone singing after sucking on a balloon. “Perish, simply perish,” he sang again in that high voice, on the way back to his office to make a series of work calls under the spotlight of a desk lamp that looked, bent and hovering, like a praying mantis.
For Christmas he gave Laurene a ball gown from Giorgio Armani and a pair of shoes, too narrow for her feet. He gave me only the pair of shoes, the same ones he’d bought for her—slim black loafers, also from Armani. They fit me perfectly. He was cold toward Laurene after noticing the shoes didn’t fit, as if her wider feet were an indication of some deeper offense. I was jealous of the ball gown, which was diaphanous, long, and unfolded out of the box. I felt superior about my feet, though, for a little while, as if their slim shape was an indication of something noble and pure.
It had been more than five months since I’d seen my mother. I was angry with her; I missed her. I hated her, I pitied her, I wanted to eradicate all the signs of her in myself, I missed being touched by her. She didn’t know what I did every day now, how I babysat my brother and sometimes he cried and I didn’t know what to do or how to soothe him.
During the months we didn’t see each other, my mother had a recurring dream of a nuclear attack in which she would throw a sheet over her head and run over to get me.
Finally, for Christmas, my father agreed we could see each other again.
As soon as I felt I could leave, I walked to the Rinconada house and opened the front door. It had a smell, warm wood and soil and paint, that I hadn’t noticed when I lived there. I hopped into her lap—I was still small enough for that—and she grabbed me, felt my shoulders and my head, my arms and legs, my fingers, and smelled my hair. Later she described that moment for her, a shock, a relief, to hold me—that some part of her, after not seeing me for so long, had felt as if I were dead. I remember that she wouldn’t let me go.
I started school at Paly after the holidays, using my new name.
The Paly quad was grass worn away in places to stubble or bald dirt. I went to the classes in the sequence the registrar had arranged for me, using the textbooks with holes in the cover where brown cardboard showed through, notes from previous students written in the margins.
I’d never had trouble making friends