“I don’t know why I’m acting like a prick.” Tai had stopped in front of me again and was reaching out, his face too near. “It’s just…you throw me off balance.” He took hold of my upper arms, as if to steady himself.
“Is that right?” And then he was pulling me in and—Jesus—kissing my collarbones. Half a dozen impulses shot through: I wanted to shriek, kick him in the shins, dissolve into his smell. Instead, I held my breath, watching myself fall right through my life, floorboards splintering. I don’t know how long before his lips found my mouth, his tongue unraveling me, the unfamiliar beard scratching my cheeks, solid hip bones pressed to mine. His tongue was warm, not cool like Nathan’s, and tasted of smoke, black tea, Granny Smith apples. Suddenly I was fourteen and hungry, devouring the salty tang of my first boyfriend’s lips before the waiting school bus. I grew dizzy, my heart thumping so absurdly it might have beat its way through my breast had his hand not suddenly been cupped there. His thigh wedged between my legs, I sensed the inevitable, terrifying tension at his groin. Finally pulling back, we both breathed hard, touching each other’s faces, laughing like idiot children who have found themselves in an amusing amount of trouble.
Then I started to shake, so violently I could barely stand.
“Shh—it’s okay.” He pressed my hand like a leaf between his, guiding me down the trail.
I was trembling like an addict as I stumbled after him, my thoughts feral and haphazard—predestination, species extinction. The last plagues—how many were there again? What were they called? I was spinning through climate change, brush fires, my father’s car on fire, how my mother and I stole off with her lover on an August morning like this one…how the sun turns to blood before it’s too late. My brain had come unhinged. It was five, maybe ten minutes before I realized I was apologizing. “I’m sorry,” I was whispering. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Tai said again. “It’s okay, Sylvia.” And then he just kept saying it like a mantra, as if, through repetition, it would become true.
Riding down the highway, my face tilted toward the open window, I closed my eyes against the day. Wind tangled deep in my hair, my hand nesting in the open hand of a stranger, I understood that this was it, the sum total of our mini-relationship—a mishap that we would avoid repeating, and never, ever speak of. We’d see each other and smile ruefully. We’d talk of our children. But there was that thumb caressing my palm, just so, the heat in my solar plexus, the cool breeze against my throat.
Slipping finally into the minivan, I wondered at this life—accountable to no one until the three o’clock pickup, when I’d wander back like a sleepwalker and stare at my children, as if for the first time in weeks. There was that same funny mole on Hannah’s left check, new breasts beneath her thin nylon tee. There was Emmie’s unruly cowlick, plump elbows and sweet apricot smell. There, the buckling driveway, the annoying hydrangea that needs transplanting and all Nathan’s enormous old shoes heaped by the back door. The answering machine flashed like an emergency, the bills piled on the table. All of it, still waiting. I turned on PBS for the girls, climbed upstairs to my bedroom, suddenly exhausted.
An hour later, or maybe two, Nathan slammed the back door, loaded down with birthday cake and takeout, and woke me in the midst of dreaming. I sat bolt upright on the edge of the bed, disoriented in the afternoon light and soaked with sweat, my heart galloping wildly into the past, or away from it; I couldn’t have said which if my life depended on it.
1974
AS A PRESCHOOLER, I BELIEVED THAT MY GRANDPARENTS’ house was Eden, the original home of Adam and Eve, because my cousin Nick told me so. We’d been in Poppy’s orchard at the time, and Nick had plucked a pomegranate to illustrate, peeling back its leathery red skin with the blade of his pocketknife. “See,” he said, handing me the strange, be-jeweled fruit. “This is the very same pomegranate tree that got Eve kicked out of Paradise—try some.” And when I hesitated, he added, “It’s okay. The damage has already been done.” I popped one of the tiny crimson seeds into my mouth, feeling its sour snap against my teeth.
Nick was four years older, and I believed everything he said. Besides, why shouldn’t it be true? What better place to begin the work of creation than here, in the lap of these shining gold hills, surrounded by ancient scrub oaks and wild California poppies?
We called my grandparents’ twelve hilly acres “Orchard Hill,” as if it were an old plantation. Though my mother had moved from Lafayette at nineteen, when she married Dad, she referred to Orchard Hill as home. She said the word as one might utter a prayer, or the name of a deceased loved one, and I understood. Gram and Poppy’s sprawling California ranch was home to me, too, though my family had never actually lived there. We’d lived in Riverside and East L.A., Chicago and Oak Park, Tustin and Long Beach and finally, Santa Ana, as we followed the arc of my father’s brilliant career. But every summer there was Orchard Hill—Poppy perennially hosing down his Mexican tile patio and recalling the war. Gram refilling her hummingbird feeders under the thick eaves of the veranda, or quoting from the New Testament while pies rose in the oven. Each year, Ali and I wandered up the dirt hill and climbed our favorite redwoods to spy on distant neighbors. Each year, we lay by Uncle Peter’s pool with our cousin Sheila, or blazed the fire roads on the back of Nick’s dirt bike. It was as if Orchard Hill was safe from the transience and bustle of ordinary time.
Their place was so safe, so private, my mother had decided to keep some of her own precious things there—her old mink stole, her wedding gown and a flock of prom dresses from high school. Every summer, she’d try them on for me, slipping the dresses from padded satin hangers, unfolding the minks from faded tissue paper. Even though the dresses were left over from the fifties, starchy as wrapping paper, they took my breath away. My mother had made them by hand, from expensive pastel taffetas, raw silks and tulles, with neat little bodices and extravagant skirts. Looking at them, I could easily imagine her at fifteen, when she first met Dad at their Seventh-day Adventist boarding school in Stockton.
She was a sophomore and he a senior when they met in the lobby of the girls’ dormitory, where he was sitting on the chintz love seat waiting for his fiancée—a buxom almond farmer’s daughter named Vivian who always kept him waiting while she exhaustively applied makeup and fussed with her platinum hair. Sometimes Viv would send down her little sister or a girlfriend to occupy her date while she preened. On this particular Friday, she sent Elaine, who roomed across the hall, because she was the only girl available. According to my mother, Viv grabbed her by the wrist as she was going out to vespers, saying, “Don Sandon is down there—can you be a doll and go chitchat with him for ten minutes?” So great was Vivian’s confidence, she never imagined that her lateness, on this day, would cost her a fiancé. Elaine, coming down the stairs in her peach taffeta, felt suddenly shy before the somber boy with the glacier-blue eyes. Everyone knew about Don Sandon, about his red-winged temper, his Nebraska farming roots, his father who took off when Don was just nine. Everyone knew he was senior class president, head of the debate team and could handle a shotgun. Everyone knew about his plans to be a surgeon.
Short and slight as he was, people stayed out of my father’s way. Elaine, feeling incapable of polite banter, simply sat at the piano near him and played a flawless and tender rendition of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” When she was done, he asked her to play it again, and then again. As she finished the third performance, her auburn hair had ruffled from its chignon and her cheeks were vivid. According to my father, when Viv came down a moment later, he couldn’t look her in the eye. By the end of the week, he’d called off the engagement.
I liked hearing about how my mother had to extricate herself from Ronald Forsyth—the other boy who’d been hot on her heels—and how the boys had fought over her. How beefy Ronald had fractured my father’s arm, though not before getting his front teeth knocked out. I loved hearing about the first time Mom brought Dad home one Easter Sunday to meet her
parents: he drove her through the Lafayette hills in a borrowed Ford with smoke snaking out the back, his bandaged left arm braced in the window, accidentally backing over my grandfather’s prizewinning azaleas while trying to park. It took months before Poppy would speak his name, instead calling him hey you, or pip-squeak.
Poppy, tanned and oxlike in his Bermuda shorts, had inspected his bruised plants, sniffing the foul exhaust, while my father—six inches shorter and skinny as a barn cat—muttered and kicked the ground before this big man who was everything Dad aspired to be: a self-made surgeon with farming roots who had beat poverty; a man’s man who could grow a garden, lay an oak floor and track down a buck. Picturing Dad on the day of the squashed azaleas always filled me with secret pleasure, knowing he’d once been just as terrified of someone as I was of him.
I could imagine, too, how Mom must have felt, at fifteen, falling for a boy of whom her beloved father disapproved. I could feel the fast tightening in the back of her throat, the first taste of rebellion mixed with real terror. This was the father who whipped the backs of her knees with a dog leash, the war hero who taught her how to shoot a .22 and skin a rabbit, the man who had nearly disowned his own son—my uncle Peter—for smoking cigarettes in the school palm trees. The blood must have roared in my mother’s ears the day she announced that she was going to marry Don Sandon, with or without my grandfather’s consent, consent which Poppy denied after giving Dad a physical exam. “His testes are too small for siring children,” Poppy had announced. “No daughter of mine is going to marry a man with undersized balls!” Incensed, she went ahead with her wedding plans.
In fact, until the summer of ’74, Mom’s one obvious trespass. She’d paid for it dearly—for the first few years of their marriage, Poppy had refused them any help, despite their poverty and my Gram’s attempts to intercede.
Things had improved some between them over the years, in part because Poppy knew he was my father’s idol. That Friday in late June, they sat in my grandfather’s den watching the Watergate coverage with Uncle Peter and organizing their fishing gear for an angling trip. Poppy and Dad would leave in the morning, spend a few nights in the Sierras and be back for the annual July Fourth celebration.
It was the same every year. The men and boys watched TV while the women and girls collected in the kitchen, talking and pitting peaches, pounding dough, shelling peas. I was always amazed by how nimbly my mother slid into this role. Before our suitcases were even unpacked, she’d be dicing onions for the veggie meatloaf. Now she was well into the rhubarb pie, gossiping with Aunt Janie about girlfriends from church school and nodding at Gram’s disapproval of the new preacher’s wife, who wore too much makeup and who Lolly Schaef had spotted at the mall one Sabbath afternoon.
“Well, what was Lolly doing at the mall on Sabbath?” gasped Janie. Mom clicked her tongue in agreement, as if going shopping on Sabbath was among the worst indiscretions she could imagine, as if she wasn’t concealing an arsenal of letters in the top of her daughter’s closet.
In previous years, I’d tire of this feminine bustle and banter and would sneak in to join the men. Usually, I’d end up in my grandfather’s lap, perched on the shiny brown skin of his knees, breathing in his smell of oak leaves, leather and beeswax. Despite Poppy’s gruffness, I felt a familiar ease with him that I’d never felt with my father. It made me proud to have such a difficult grandfather who nevertheless treated me kindly. Still, the things men watched on TV bored me, and soon I’d be wandering back into the kitchen like a migratory bird. Back and forth, back and forth, each time unsure of my place, or which alliance I wished to be included in.
This year, for the first time, I felt I had no choice: the womanly repartee suddenly seemed like a code I needed to crack. I was staring at the energy in Mom’s hands as she shaped the crust, her eyes darting to the clock as she placed the pie in the oven. Now there were piles of fresh beans to trim, and the men’s lemonade glasses needed refilling, but my mother simply unfastened her apron, rinsed her hands. Still glancing at the clock over the stove, she said, “I guess I’ll just run to the store now to get a few things.”
“What on earth could you need to get, Elaine?” Gram asked, staring over the tops of her spectacles. “We have enough food here for God’s army.”
“You’re getting low on butter,” Mom explained, gathering her purse from the table. “And I forgot face cream—I can’t get through the weekend without face cream.”
“But it’s almost Sabbath.” Gram tilted her head toward the glass door, through which the hills blazed in afternoon sunlight. I’d heard stories about the early days of their marriage, when Gram wouldn’t even flip a light switch or draw a bath after Friday sundown. “Besides, I have plenty of cream,” she added. “Don’t go wasting money and gasoline on stuff you don’t need.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Elaine said breathlessly. “I’ve got a special brand I like. I’ll take Poppy’s convertible. You girls going for a dip in the pool before dinner?”
Ali and I shot each other a glance; of course we wanted to swim with our cousins, but there was something about the way our mother stood, bouncing on the balls of her feet, one hand jingling the car keys. There was something about the tremor in her voice, the eyes jumping to the clock. Even if we hadn’t known that Mom never used any cream on her face but Mary Kay (which wasn’t sold in stores) we still would have understood that something was up.
“We’ll come with you,” I blurted, grabbing Ali’s arm before she had time to protest.
Mom hesitated a second too long. “Well, you certainly don’t have to come. There’s no need. I’m sure it would be more fun to go see Sheila.”
“We want to ride in the convertible, don’t we, Ali?” I chirped.
“Yeah, sure,” said Ali. Janie had paused over her pile of beans, knife poised.
“Oh, all right,” conceded Mom, stealing another look at the clock. Somehow I knew that she wasn’t counting out the minutes until sundown. “Let’s go, then.”
My cheeks buzzed as we slid onto the polished seats of my grandfather’s convertible. The warm June wind whipped hair into my eyes and Mom steered us past all the familiar landmarks that suddenly seemed alien—the row of shaggy eucalyptus trees at the bottom of the hill, the white colonial where the senator lived. We passed the Snyders’ peach orchard, where Mom had gotten stuck in the mud as a girl, the elementary school and the new BART station, finally arriving at the tiny market where we’d gone, year after year, to collect things for Gram’s kitchen. Mom pulled into the lot and fussed with her hair, checked her lipstick. Ali heaved herself out of the car. We both understood our mother needed looking after these days, and it wouldn’t do to have her driving all over the East Bay in a Mustang convertible alone.
While Alison flipped through the teen magazines, I followed Mom through the narrow aisles. She filled her basket with random items: some day-old dinner rolls, a bouquet of daisies, a pair of nylons. Then she loitered in the deli section, eyeing prepared salads.
“Mom, Gram has enough food for, like, twenty people.” I came up behind her, making her startle. Her hair was drawn from her face, clipped on one side with a slim barrette, and her eyes glittered with extra plum shadow. She batted them dangerously.
“It’s almost Sabbath, Mom.” Ali appeared from behind the bread rack. “Gram and Poppy will have a cow.”
“I know, I know.” She walked heavily toward the front of the store. Ali sucked in her cheeks. I wondered if she knew what I knew, or suspected—that Mr. Robert most likely lived or worked nearby, since he sent his mail from Orinda. I wondered if he’d been sending Ali letters, as well. I wanted to believe I’d been singled out as his special ally; at the same time, I was ashamed by the thought. So I just followed my sister to the cash register, where she plunked down her Tiger Beat magazine with my mother’s odd purchases.
“You forgot the butter,” Ali said, folding her arms.
“Oh—so I did!” Mom giggled. “Would one of you be a do
ll and fetch it?”
“I’ll get it,” I said, not bothering to mention the face cream. For some reason, I couldn’t bear her knowing that we were just here to spy on her. It seemed a bit unfair. After all, she was at the end of her errand, getting out her checkbook, fishing in her purse for a pen, and nothing odd had happened. Why hadn’t we just gone to Nick and Sheila’s?
I continued to chide myself as I carried the bag outside. The sun was red now, slipping toward the bay, and we stood staring at its bright beauty long enough to be momentarily blinded, unable to see the face behind the voice that was calling our names.
“What a coincidence to see you three ladies!” Mr. Robert’s voice boomed across the parking lot. “Why, you should have told me that you were planning a trip to my part of the world.” His face came into view—the dimples deeper than ever in the fading light. He came right up and hugged me, patting me on the back. “How’s my little twerp?” Before I could respond, he was kissing Mom’s check. When he got to Alison, she stepped back.
“Who said it was your part of the world?”
“Alison,” my mother chided. “We were just running an errand for Gram. What brings you to Lafayette?” Ali rolled her eyes. I, too, wished they’d dispense with the pretense about this being an amazing coincidence. How stupid did they think we were? Still, I felt an unexpected pleasure at seeing him—the impish smile, the way he called me his twerp, the way my mother’s eyes ignited, as if she’d been only half-alive five minutes before.
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