February 2010 Archives

Hazel slips in the door while I am hand-washing dishes in the sink, so quietly that I almost miss her. I feel the door close in its frame and then the air pressure changes. When I turn she has locked the door and is heading down the hall, her shoulders hunched and her head bowed. It is far too early for her to be home.

"Hazel?" Something is wrong. Something is always wrong. I turn off the water, dry my hands and follow her into her bedroom. She lies on the bed, facing the wall, holding her pillow in a fierce hug that whitens her knuckles. I sit down next to her. I am still holding the towel. "What happened to your date?"

I was a liar in several respects, and I lied to Bonnie, too. I lied by omission to Russell, but told him the absolute truth on matters of emotion; Bonnie got the facts, but as far as she was concerned, it had had little impact on me. She was full of advice on all things practical and sought to make drama out of everything. Everything had either a meaning or a terrible consequence, and in the latter case, I was left to play devil's advocate to balance the doomsday scenarios she came up with. "He's spending an awful lot of time with Mia lately," she'd observe, and I'd shrug and say, "Well, she's his girlfriend, Bonnie," and then we'd argue about whether or not I qualified as his daughter. (She thought sort of; I merely wished.)

For the last fifteen years I have entertained thoughts of raising my daughter. I can't say I outright desired to do so, but once you have a kid you think about these things - how old she'd be now, what you'd be doing with her. Emily at two, at five, at ten, at fifteen... I used to go to the grocery store and see some child writhing around on the floor and screaming, only to be offered a Snickers bar for his trouble and I'd think, I could be a better parent than that. I imagined teaching a five-year-old to ride a bicycle, or building a model of a California mission with my fourth-grader, lecturing on economics when I went with my thirteen-year-old to open her first bank account.

The reality is far different.

I was grounded for a week.

Russell told me after Mia left late Wednesday night. No television. I was to come straight home after school, and I had better be there when he called the house. Outwardly, I was contrite, but it was only with much effort that I was able to hide the inward spread of joy that threatened to spill over into a smile. Being grounded was a form of absolution, certainly, but to me it was another sign that I was being absorbed into Russell's house like the cat, like more furniture, like his pots and pans. He might as well have told me that he was so upset that he wasn't letting me leave ever.

Bonnie wasn't convinced. "But you're not even his kid! Who the hell does he think he is?"

I should say that Bonnie was not to blame. Her only crime was her infectious excitement; later it would be made clear to me that she saw me as an abstract, my unbelievable story taking place so far out of the bounds of her limited suburban existence that I might as well have been a character in a book. She saw no consequence in her advice and I drank up the attention. Bonnie was my adoring fan, my follower, the reader who can't put the book down, and she was guilty only of pushing me forward, of revealing more of the story. I was the one who acted - all she did was give me the idea.

I didn't get around to snooping until Wednesday afternoon. It took me until Tuesday night to get used to the idea of violating Russell's privacy, and another half a day to steel myself against the blow-up that should occur if I was caught. I had been the target of two barely-provoked verbal attacks, and I hated to think what he would do or say if he caught me at something that was so far out of the way of acceptable that even I ought to know better. But Bonnie was right. I deserved to know about Emily and I deserved to know about Russell, and why against all reason he had taken me in and given me something of a home - naturally he forfeited his secrets when I walked in the door.

"He's having her over for dinner?"

"Yeah," I said. I had more or less made peace with the idea of having Mia around, and apparently I had also made peace with Bonnie, who was acting like nothing had happened. When I had arrived at class she was there in her seat, doing her pen trick and, by all appearances, waiting to talk to me.

"Like, he's bringing her home to meet you and eat dinner like a family?"

"Yeah." The way Bonnie had said this made me slightly uncomfortable - she seemed as though she was getting ready to deliver terrible news. "What's wrong with that?"

"He's probably gonna sleep with her at your house."

I shrugged.

"What, you don't care?"

"Well, it's not like I'm in line or anything." I wasn't letting on, but it did bother me. A little. After so long I had begun to think of Russell as mine, or more accurately, to think of myself as his.

Russell stayed home with me on Monday. I didn't ask why. I heard him get up and call in sick to work, and once we'd finished lying around the living room and eating a late breakfast, we got in his car and drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to a lighthouse on the cliffs. He didn't tell me where we were going, and I didn't ask.

"Seals," he said, "on that rock there," and he handed me the binoculars. We sat on an asphalt path, behind a white fence, looking out at the orange bridge where it met the north part of the city. I put the binoculars to my eyes and watched them impassively, then tilted them up to take in the skyline. It was indistinct, barely there behind a curtain of opaque fog. Up in the sky, a white zeppelin turned and floated toward the east bay.

"You think we'll see whales?" I said.

"Probably not."

Just in case, I looked out to sea for a telltale spout but I saw little. We had picked out a banana slug and butterflies and two species of pinniped, and Russell could name half the flora in the park: Ice plant, sourgrass, a species of wild cabbage whose name I had forgotten.  Many of them were good to eat, he said, although the sourgrass caused kidney stones, and I asked him if someone could survive out here, eating nothing but the local plant life and the mussels and crabs that congregated on the rocky beaches below. Maybe, he said, because after all, the native Americans did it, and I decided that if I was ever homeless again I would come here and make a go of it, away from society and its dollar cheeseburgers. I leaned forward on the fence, my legs dangling over the cliff. "Hey, Russell?"

Russell went out with Mia on Saturday night, and that evening he didn't come home. I sat up waiting and then I gave up and went to bed, and in the morning the house was still empty: No pancakes, no omelets, no French toast. I tried to make myself some fried rice with eggs, but when the rice went into the pan it didn't cook right, and I ended up having to put the whole thing down the garbage disposal. I made plain eggs instead, two of them, and after I was done I put some cartoons on, and alternately watched TV and read.

It bothered me less than it should have. Since the evening he'd brought her by, Russell had kept her away from the house, and I didn't have to think about her. He was getting harder to live with, though, and not because of Mia. Russell was a tactile person, and this carried over to his personal relationships. He was casually touchy-feely with Mia, as I had observed, and, my earlier outburst apparently forgotten, he'd begun to touch me more as well. Certainly there was never any question about his intent - I was rather hypersensitive to that sort of thing, and even at fifteen I had a pretty good idea of where the line was. Russell never crossed it. But he crossed a different line all the time, one the squirming, tense manifestations of my discomfort were apparently not enough to repel him from. On Sunday, rather than being worried that he was trapped beneath a collapsed bridge or poisoned against me by Mia (who I had convinced myself was capable of such things, despite having met her only once), I was relieved to be alone.

"I don't believe you," Bonnie said.

I stared at her from across the cafeteria table. Lunch was nearly over and I had spent most of it recounting (in a somewhat abridged form) the story of my life, particularly the most recent several months.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"It's bullshit, Emily. Jeez, I mean you obviously want attention or something... that stuff is like out of a book. It doesn't actually happen."

We looked at each other steadily, neither of us quite certain what to make of the other. I was the first to make a move; I got up, pushed myself away from the table, took my tray and walked away.

I had known Bonnie a week. In hindsight, I was, perhaps, a little hasty to entrust her with the details of my life, but I had been eager to share it with someone, and Bonnie was the obvious person. As a peer, I thought, she wouldn't pity me like Russell might. It had never occurred to me that she would think I was lying.

I didn't say anything to Russell when he got home on Friday, but he noticed that my mood had improved, and took me out for ice cream after dinner. We sat outside the Baskin Robbins at the strip mall, in the dark of his car, listening to the rain on the windshield. I lived for these moments, where I could look out on what might have been, or in this case, what was, from the shelter of Russell's car and the protection of his presence. It had been only a month since I had, briefly, lived here.

"I met a girl at school," I said, after I had finished the ice cream and crunched through the cone. He was a slower eater; he liked to savor his food.

"Did you."

I passed the week in abject misery. My teachers knew nothing of me, my classmates knew nothing of real problems, and I drifted from class to class, paying little attention. As far as I was concerned, I need only show up and do the work, and though the chemistry problems had, over the course of a few days, become a welcome diversion in the afternoon, I hid in the back of the classroom during the day and pretended I was somewhere else. It worked, mostly.

Friday came, and with it an unspoken reverence for the weekend, those precious two days without homework or responsibility. I had had little time with Russell all week and just wanted out of this horrible school thing. Geometry turned to US History, which turned to English, and twenty minutes before lunch I was trying to focus on the discussion the class was having on Lord of the Flies (though not very hard), and I felt something poke my arm.

I turned and met the eyes of the girl next to me. She was slouched at her desk, knees against the seat of the boy in front of her, feet resting on the basket welded under his chair. Idly, she spun a mechanical pencil - the apparent poking implement - around and between her fingers in some impatient tic. Every once in awhile she paused and clicked the eraser to advance the lead, and held the point down on the table and pushed it back in. This had been driving me crazy for awhile.

She rolled her eyes and leaned over and whispered, "This is bullshit, huh?"

I nodded.

"You're new, right? I'm Bonnie."

School was a repatriation. I had grown in many ways, receded in others, and my world had grown with me; I had cast my mother out of my life and traded her for a stranger (a decision I didn't regret), I had been through real hunger and pain and cold and uncertainty. At the risk of sounding wistful, staring off into the sunset with pain-filled eyes and other purple prose: That sort of thing changes you, and it does it in a way you don't see until the past creeps up on you and pounces.

I approached the Before without knowing what it was, backpack on my shoulders and hair done up in a ponytail. Russell had taken me out on Sunday and bought me some more clothes so I wouldn't get laughed at for wearing the same things all the time, and every stitch on me was clean and new. I had showered, I had slept, I had eaten breakfast and brushed my teeth. I figured if I could handle sleeping in a parking garage for two months then returning to high school would be easy.

It's eight o'clock in the morning, and the sun shines, hostile, over the baked asphalt. I am wearing shorts and sandals and can feel the heat on my legs, rising from the blacktop. The scent of pine chips is heavy in the air, and the atmosphere pulses with excitement, shouts and laughs and occasionally, tears. Mom is in a hurry. I want to stop and look around, but she has to be at work, she's starting late today just for me and it was a bitch to find someone to cover, she should have just made Zachary take me but then he'd be late and he has that hardass Walker for first period. Pay attention, she said, because I can't take you every morning and you're gonna have to walk yourself to school.

The kindergarteners' area is separated from the main playground by a cyclone fence and a gate whose latch is too tall for an ordinary child to reach. It reminds me of a dog park, but I don't say so; I'm too busy taking in the sights. There are probably more grown-ups than children here today, and most of them are couples, men in slacks and nice shirts, women in jeans or business clothes. Is this what kindergarten is going to be like? I think. I had been imagining school books and math tests and lockers, but so far it looks like a party.

Mom lets my hand go to open the gate, and I dart inside. There are other children, of course, but I have eyes only for the adults. I run up to one woman, lose my nerve at the last moment and sidle up to another, tall and cool-looking with her dark curly hair and sunglasses. She is drinking a Pepsi.

"Hi," I say, and reach up to take her hand. Before I can tell her my name my mother is there, flushed from running in the heat, and she pulls me away.

"I'm so sorry. She just goes right up to strangers like she knows them. I don't know what I'm going to do with her, it's a miracle she hasn't gotten herself kidnapped."

I know of kidnapping only from Disney movies and think it involves being taken away to Louisiana and put to work collecting diamonds - it sounds to me like an exciting adventure.