“Everybody has a father,” I said.
“Fathers are irrelevant. Believe me, you’re lucky. I had one, I know. Just forget it.” She turned on the radio, loud rock’n’roll. It was as if I was blind and she’d told me, sight doesn’t matter, it’s just as well you can’t see. I began to watch fathers, in the stores, on the playgrounds, pushing their daughters on swings. I liked how they seemed to know what to do. They seemed like a dock, firmly attached to the world, you could be safe then, not always drifting like us. I prayed Barry Kolker would be that man.
Their murmured words of love were my lullabies, my hope chest. I was stacking in linens, summer camp, new shoes, Christmas. I was laying up sit-down dinners, a room of my own, a bicycle, parent-teacher nights. A year like the one before it, and the next like that, one after another, a bridge, and a thousand things more subtle and nameless that girls without fathers know. Barry took us to the Fourth of July game at Dodger Stadium and bought us Dodger caps. We ate hot dogs and they drank beer from paper cups and he explained baseball to her like it was philosophy, the key to the American character. Barry threw money to the peanut vendor and caught the bag the man threw back. We littered the ground with peanut shells. I hardly recognized us in our peaked blue caps. We were like a family. I pretended we were just Mom, Dad, and the kid. We did the wave, and they kissed through the whole seventh inning, while I drew faces on the peanuts. The fireworks set off every car alarm in the parking lot.
Another weekend, he took us to Catalina. I was violently seasick on the ferry, and Barry held a cold handkerchief to my forehead and got me some mints to suck. I loved his brown eyes, the way he looked so worried, as if he’d never seen a kid throw up before. I tried not to hang around with them too much once we got there, hoping he would ask her while they strolled among the sailboats, eating shrimp from a paper cone.
SOMETHING HAPPENED. All I remember is that the winds had started. The skeleton rattlings of wind in the palms. It was a night Barry said he would come at nine, but then it was eleven and he hadn’t arrived. My mother played her Peruvian flute tape to soothe her nerves, Irish harp music, Bulgarian singers, but nothing worked. The calming, chiming tones ill suited her temper. Her gestures were anxious and unfinished.
“Let’s go for a swim,” I said.
“I can’t,” she said. “He might call.”
Finally, she flipped out the tape and replaced it with one of Barry’s, a jazz tape by Chet Baker, romantic, the kind of music she always hated before.
“Cocktail lounge music. For people to cry into their beer with,” she said. “But I don’t have any beer.”
He went out of town on assignments for different magazines. He canceled their dates. My mother couldn’t sleep, she jumped whenever the phone rang. I hated to see the look on her face when it wasn’t Barry. A tone I’d never heard crept into her voice, serrated, like the edge of a saw.
I didn’t understand how this could happen, how he could give us fireworks and Catalina, how he could hold that cold cloth to my forehead, and talk about taking us to Bali, and then forget our address.
ONE AFTERNOON, we stopped by his house unannounced.
“He’s going to be mad,” I said.
“We were just in the neighborhood. Just thought we’d stop by,” she said.
I could no more keep her from doing this than I could keep the sun from coming up through the boiled smog on an August morning, but I didn’t want to see it. I waited in the car. She knocked on the door and he answered wearing a seersucker bathrobe. I didn’t have to hear her to know what she was saying. She wore her blue gauze dress, the hot wind ruffling her hem, the sun at her back, turning it transparent. He stood in his doorway, blocking it, and she held her head to one side, moving closer, touching her hair. I felt a rubber band stretching in my brain, tighter and tighter, until they disappeared into his house.
I played the radio, classical music. I couldn’t stand to hear anything with words. I imagined my own ice-blue eyes looking at some man, telling him to go away, that I was busy. “You’re not my type,” I said coolly into the rearview mirror.
A half hour later she reappeared, stumbling out to the car, tripping over a sprinkler, as if she were blind. She got in and sat behind the steering wheel and rocked back and forth, her mouth open in a square, but there was no sound. My mother was crying. It was the final impossibility.
“He has a date,” she finally said, whispering, her voice like there were hands around her throat. “He made love with me, and then said I had to leave. Because he has a date.”
I knew we shouldn’t have come. Now I wished she’d never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.
I was afraid to let her drive like this, with her eyes wild, seeing nothing. She’d kill us before we got three blocks. But she didn’t start the car. She sat there, staring through the windshield, rocking herself, holding herself around her waist.
A few minutes later, a car pulled up in the driveway, a new-model sports car, the top down, a blond girl driving. She was very young and wore a short skirt. She leaned over to get her bag out of the backseat.
“She’s not as pretty as you,” I said.
“But she’s a simpler girl,” my mother whispered bitterly.
KIT LEANED on the counter in the production room, her magenta lips a wolf’s stained smile.
“Ingrid, guess who I saw last night at the Virgins,” she said, her high voice breathless with malice. “Our old friend Barry Kolker.” She stage-sighed. “With some cheap little blond half his age. Men have such short memories, don’t they?” Her nostrils twitched as she stifled a laugh.
At lunchtime, my mother told me to take everything I wanted, art supplies, stationery. We were leaving and we weren’t coming back.
3
“I SHOULD SHAVE my head,” she said. “Paint my face with ashes.”
Her eyes were strange, circled dark like bruises, and her hair was greasy and lank. She lay on her bed, or stared at herself in the mirror. “How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?”
She didn’t go back to work. She wouldn’t leave the darkened apartment except to go down to the pool, where she sat for hours watching the reflections in the shimmering blue, or swam silently underwater like a fish in an aquarium. It was time for me to go back to school. But I couldn’t leave her alone, not when she was like this. She might not be there when I returned. So we stayed in, eating all the canned food in the apartment, then we were eating rice and oatmeal.
“What do I do?” I asked Michael as he fed me cheese and sardines at his battered coffee table. The TV news showed fires burning on the Angeles Crest.
Michael shook his head, at me, at the line of firemen straddling the hillside. “Honey, this is what happens when you fall in love. You’re looking at a natural disaster.”
I vowed I would never fall in love. I hoped Barry died a slow lingering death for what he was doing to my mother.
A RED MOON rose over downtown, red from the fires burning to the north and out in Malibu. It was the season of fire, and we were trapped in the heart of the burning landscape. Ashes floated in the pool. We sat on the roof in the burnt wind.
“This ragged heart,” she said, pulling at her kimono. “I should rip it out and bury it for compost.”
I wished I could touch her, but she was inside her own isolation booth, like on Miss America. She couldn’t hear me through the glass.
She doubled over, pressing her forearms against her chest, pressing the air out of herself. “I press it within my body,” she said. “As the earth presses a lump of prehistoric dung in heat and crushing weight deep under the ground. I hate him. Hate. I hate him.” She whispered this last, but ferociously. “A jewel is forming inside my body. No, it’s not my heart. This is harder, cold and clean. I wrap myself around this new jewel, cradle it within me.”