A cascade of crumpled twenties, tens, fives, ones blows about the yachtsman’s head!
And due to some strange laws of circulation in the bird, it’s as though the bills are eerily held aloft, circling, circling, circling…
It’s a blizzard of crumpled little ones, blowing around Disney Hall!
Oh my GOD, I think:
We are SUCH IMMIGRANTS!!!
My father is buoyed by David Robertson’s short but brilliant and not at all casual performance—
Four standing O’s…!
I want to try to bring up kindergarten again, to reveal the happy news that our whole family is moving in with him, and that we will be commuting back and forth between Malibu and Van Nuys…and how we have to do it by August 15…but the applause for David Robertson is literally too deafening.
Or it could be more “selective” deafness—
Well, I know my dad is eager to meet David Robertson, practically in a panic about it, and certainly after he does that he will relax…
So now, in search of David, the three of us hustle, with all the grocery bags of rotted food, downstairs to the café.
We find three steel chairs, sit, and wait, as do a small passel of other audience members, trying to look Casual, as though we are not in fact stalkers waiting to meet the clarinetist who we hope, as in the brochures, will be juggling! What will we speak of, Casually, to one another. “How about those Mets?” “Do you get gassy after eating cherry tomatoes, or is that just me?”
Members of the L.A. Phil start drifting down, but they are not really the A list. There is a trombonist, timpanist, viola player…
There’s not even the first violinist, the concert master…
Oh, look! The guy who played the…triangle.
Three times. Ting, ting, ting.
And looking over…
I have to say I feel for my dad, in his little red V-neck sweater. His entire body betrays utter gouged-out gloom. Conductors and Nobel Prize laureates: These are the people my dad lives for. He is their biggest fan. To him, when the Nobel Prizes in physics are announced—it’s more heady than the Oscars. He devours every word about them, in his stolen-from-Starbucks New York Times.
How many more years does the man have to live?
He’s so small and crushed. And Disney Hall is so vast and wingy, almost threatening to engulf him!
So to cheer my dad up, I give a sense of Event, to the Casualness.
I say, “Oh, look, it’s cellist Barry Gold, who gave that wonderful opening speech!”
And I kid you not, my dad prods Barry Gold in the chest and bellows four words:
“Where is David Robertson?”
The L.A. Phil musicians are very kind. Perhaps, they suggest, the security guard will take a note to David Robertson for us. To give to him…sometime. The fact is, famous conductors rarely stick around after concerts. They’re not part of the oh-so-Casual program.
Indeed, observes the security guard, knowing David Robertson, after the concert, as is his usual habit, he has probably immediately gone out to dinner with his wife, Orli…
And I don’t know how this happens, but with perfect twenty-twenty stalkerazzi vision, I know, in my bones, that our elusive quarry is AT THAT MOMENT DINING next door at Patina!
Off go the three of us—me, Alice, and my dad, complete with Ralph’s grocery bags, and UCLA sac, with bungee cord, doggedly pushing forward like Jack Lalanne—
I locate my inner “Fuck you.” I push open the glass doors of Patina and, with enormous flair, Rigoberta Menchú–like, armed with my own small colorful natives, I sweep past the maître d’.
“I’m looking for a friend!” I breezily tell the startled maître d’. (I have a backup line prepared, in case of trouble: “We are the newest Nobel Prize winners in peace—from a tiny village in Laos called Pnom Thnak! With the Richard Gere Foundation? Surely you heard about us on NPR.”) I hunt table after table after table, of L.A. Phil subscribers with their tiny canape plates and twin flutes of bubbling refreshment, finding nothing, but then, just beyond, there is a wall of frosted glass! The private room!
I boldly push the frosted-glass doors open. Fifteen surprised white heads look up, swirl of diamonds, at the head of the table: David Robertson! GRACIOUS AS PIE!!!
My father barrels in, holds David Robertson in a death grip!
We obtain our half-dozen flash photos before I gently extricate my gurgling father and drive him home to Zuma Beach.
Success!
I have slain a bear…for my father!
And during the drive back to Malibu, in the pleasant dim glow of the minivan, I go into a warm, bubbly litany. I am my own magic flute, my own magic flute of champagne. “Wasn’t that fun? Isn’t it nice to be driven home and not have to take the bus? If we lived together, all the fun we could have! We could go to concerts together! Mike and I could give you rides all the time! Everywhere! For free!”
No response.
I press on: “What fun that would be if our family moved in with you! And then, like I said, our girls could go to the Malibu schools.”
And of his five-bedroom house, my dad says flatly, “I don’t have enough room.”
“What are you talking about?” I exclaim.
“My boarders.”
The boarders. For the last decade, to make extra cash on the side, my father has been renting out our childhood bedrooms to Malibu hippie followers of the local guru.
But what does he make? Two hundred dollars a room?
“Four hundred fifty,” he corrects. “I raised it.”
“Well, how many boarders do you have now?”
“Three—and a new one is moving in. Says he’s an old friend of yours.”
Since I’ve been fired from KCRW and been on Real Time with Bill Maher, everyone and his cousin is a friend of mine. Particularly when it comes to the sort of washed-up fifty-something hippie men who want to rent a moldering room from my father. “Hey!” one Vietnam-stare-eyed guy said to me once. He appeared to be sitting in his boxer shorts on a sleeping bag, clipping his toenails. “Your dad says you’re a writer! I’m a writer, too! Screenplays! Thriller screenplays!” A toenail went flying.
“Well, get rid of the boarders!” I cry out. “It’s your granddaughter! Kindergarten! She has nowhere to go! Your boarders can’t be more important than—”
“But I like my boarders!” he says. “And they bring in good money.”
“But you have to think of your…your health!” Here I throw the gauntlet down, the veins practically popping out on my temples. I go for the jugular. I hit below the belt. “You’re an old man. Stuff is falling off you. Malibu is far, far, far away…You and Alice could start experiencing mysterious new medical problems.” I gesture wildly around the car. “And if so, THIS…is your ride to the emergency room!”
“But the Malibu paramedics—they’re very good!” he protests. “They always come right away!” Damn California and the high property taxes that result in such phenomenal city services! Actually, no, wait a minute: Thanks to Proposition 13, in Malibu, my father is still basically assessed on the home price he paid forty years ago…$47,000! While meanwhile in Van Nuys, my child is going to Mexican kindergarten. Thanks a lot!
And still the paramedics zoom to his aid!
“The danger!” I exclaim, through my teeth. “What with no…pacemaker! Without me to drive you—”
“Well, your car’s engine light is on,” he adds with broad good humor. “I don’t know if I could trust this vehicle. Maybe YOU are the one who needs help!”
On the minivan floor, I see one of Hannah’s stuffed unicorns, which due to the constant shampooing has a mane sculpted into a bit of a lopsided Mohawk.
I feel a dark rage coming over me.
“And you call yourself a Chinese father! You used to pull your weight! What happened to you? You were the one manic about education! Don’t you remember all your flash cards at the dinner table, the calculus tutoring, the endless wild diagrams of
ions and pions? Have you offered to teach Hannah conversational Mandarin, a little trigonometry? No! Now that you’re a grandparent, you’re just some kind of PBS-watching slacker on the beach! Maybe she’ll just go to clown school for all you care!
“Or maybe I have myself to blame!” I rail on, my voice hitting a shrapnel tone of fury. In the rearview mirror, I see Alice’s eyes widen in surprise. “I took my Caltech physics education and went into the liberal arts, which to a Chinese father is like pole-dancing! Guess you’re paying me back now, huh?”
This car is hot, so hot!
My shout reverberates!
And in that moment we all stare at one another. My father, Alice, and myself.
We digest, in one shocking moment, the information that I am shouting!
In my childhood, it was my father who shouted!
Back when he was the sole wage earner for a family of five, it was he who had the temper. Now, waiting for rides to Disney Hall, oh, he is quite calm! He has quite the eternal patience. Consuming his moldy bananas, he has all the time in the world.
Perhaps realizing the irony, the switched places, that now it is I who am manic, my dad says something to Alice in Mandarin and they point at me and they…
They laugh!
I wake up the next morning in my father’s house in Malibu.
There is bottom, there is below bottom, and now this is, well, the flapping left mud-covered cheek of the bottom.
At forty-two, 9:03 A.M. on a Saturday morning—as indicated on the 1970s Panasonic clock radio that used to sit in my sister’s room—I am actually BEHIND where I was as a kid.
At twelve, I actually had my own bedroom. Now some hirsute strange bearded homeless hippie guy flops his hairy balls all over a wrinkled sleeping bag in my room. Meanwhile, I’m sleeping on a cot in a corner of the dining room, behind a ragged curtain of beach towels.
That’s right: I am actually sleeping on beach towels, in lieu of pillows.
I can actually feel the terry-cloth imprint on my cheek.
I am humiliated.
The sting of it is, my dad had invited us to live with him many years ago. His third marriage—to his second Chinese wife—was collapsing, he was seventy-something, it was just him rattling around in his lonely five-bedroom Malibu house.
He had just the one boarder at the time, a three-hundred-pound elderly Greek woman, who was very depressed. Even though she spoke no English, she would always rush right to the phone, stabbing out, “Allo!” half in fear. And I would say, “Can you hang up so I can call back and leave a message on the machine?” “Okay!” she would reply. I’d dial the number again, and again she would rush to the phone, and grab it again: “Allo! Allo! Allo!” Repeat forty times.
The point being that neither Chinese Wives Number One or Number Two had taken. They came full of verve but ended up being flummoxed by the collapsing suburban house. They didn’t know how to make it work. They wanted to update it, but as my dad gave them no actual money, they ended up merely scavenging shiny, peachy Hong Kong–like tiles from their more settled immigrant friends in Monterey Park, and setting them down at various odd places in the house, without grout.
But Alice is of a different sort.
Look at her.
Without even moving on my beach towel pallet, I am aware of Alice’s constant movements, all around the house, as though practically pacing the perimeters of her bailiwick, patrolling the castle.
In the fluttering shadows beyond, on the back walkway, she pins up laundry. Next she is padding about in the kitchen, in a clattering of pans and dishes, boiling rice, stir-frying vegetables.
Good Lord—that is how the woman has always been, always on restless move in this house…because like so many immigrants, she’s ridiculously overqualified for the job of Chinese Wife. She was head of a staff of two hundred nurses in Manchuria…! When baby Hannah first came, Alice was a whirlwind, cooking seven-dish meals, doing all the laundry, massaging Hannah’s chubby little legs, doing these kinds of healthful calisthenic, Chairman Mao marching exercises with them—
It was as if Mike and I suddenly had our own Chinese Wife! It was heaven!
At one point, I remember looking out the window and seeing Alice, with Hannah strapped on her back in a BabyBjörn, calmly hosing down our Toyota minivan, including hubcaps—which literally hadn’t been done in years!
And that’s the way Alice cares for my father. She cuts up his fruit, lotions his bunions…his bunions! Ai! In China, they’re used to things like bunions, but as a lazy American, I have lost it. I cannot contend with my father’s bunions. I can’t…lotion the bunions. This would be like slow torture, like that scene in The Silence of the Lambs. “It takes the lotion out of the basket…”
I mean—I can’t compete with that! What are my domestic skills? What do I cook? Peanut butter on toast? With raisins? And expired Danimals…?!?
I feel like a female character in some kind of Pearl S. Buck novel…battling for a spot in the old master’s house. But I’m like Wife Number Two or Three or Ten. I come with lots of baggage, lots of demands, no skills…and a passel of blond children!
I am the weak second generation in America. The immigrant-offspring generation. We have neither the money of our elders nor the skills. The bunion-lotioning skills.
And now, the final insult?
Because of the new boarder moving in, my father has set several boxes of my stuff before me.
Not only has he kicked me out of my room…he doesn’t even want my stuff around. Boxes of my things sit in front of me waiting, like a small shantytown of failure.
With a sigh, I swing my legs down off the bed, lift the lid off the first box, and…
Oh! And here’s the next insult!
This particular box is not even of my stuff. It’s Kaitlin’s old school stuff! I guess he can’t tell his daughters apart anymore. We’re just people who are NOT David Robertson.
It’s a box of Kaitlin’s old high-school papers…
I pick up the top one. It is on France. It’s yellowed, crispy, thirty years old.
“A city of lights, and of sophistication, and of romance, Paris will forever glamorously remain.”
Oh my God! The grammar! My mother’s tortured German grammar!
And I realize that pushy parents didn’t appear yesterday.
I remember now how my Danzig-born mother wrote all my sister’s papers, which Kaitlin then dutifully copied as her own. But the result was less Ivy League early admissions than, as my sister will joke, “my strange German syntax, to shake, I have never quite been able.”
Oh my gosh!
And now here is my old lab book from 1980, the time of my summer job in freshman year at college, the job my dad got me at his own place of employment, Hughes Aircraft.
Taped to the back?
My father’s Hughes long-distance codes! Or at least the ones he stole.
Yes, my father was always professionally eccentric. He carried not a briefcase but a brown paper grocery bag filled with empty Frosted Flakes boxes. Scientific papers would slip inside the Frosted Flakes boxes, pens would clip on the outside. To get to work sometimes, we’d hitchhike together on the Pacific Coast Highway. He’d push me forward and hide in the bushes, thinking that pitying motorists would stop sooner for a sad, lonely girl.
It all seemed so logical!
But this list of numbers reminds me of the strange habit my father actually practiced while at his desk at Hughes Aircraft. Dialing out long-distance in those days required punching in a special five-digit long-distance company code. Each employee had their own. Including my dad—
But what fun was using your own code? Sometimes, just out of curiosity—that was the brilliant scientific mind at work—my dad would amuse himself by sitting in his office trying different five-digit sequences at random to see which ones worked. He probably single-handedly held the U.S. missile program back five years. He’d write down the correct codes on the back of an envelope and, when we’d visit him
in his office, grandly offer us the keys to his illicit telephone kingdom…
“Is there someone you want to call long-distance, Sandra? A boyfriend? In Alaska maybe? Pick a number! Any will work! I’ve triple-checked them!”
And to think, this free spirit was the same one who, during my senior year at Caltech, kept calling my dorm to shout, over the thumping ZZ Top, “SANDRA! APPLY TO ANY GRAD SCHOOL IN ANY ENGINEERING MAJOR!” Sadly, thanks to the freedom of the EZ student loan the great cheapskate himself had helped me secure, I was already off dating a rock bagpipe player and spectacularly bombing my physics GRE. (Out of a possible 99, my percentile was 07—a number so low, it inspires almost Talmudic awe in those who hear it.)
“Ah, Malibu,” I say suddenly aloud, lifting out…what a treasure trove!
Because now, oh! My old yearbooks!
Oh my goodness!
Malibu Park Junior High. Nineteen seventy-six! The horror, the horror!
Look how pathetic!
Sandra Loh, Student of the Month… Well, it appears I am that every single month. In tiny photos. In fields no one else would even publicly admit to pursuing. Along with president of the Debate Club, treasurer of the French Club, and first viola, out of two. Oh my God. It was large acne-scarred me and my lonely achievements, against a groovy, much larger, much more cinematic background of Hang Ten T-shirts, puka shells, and drugs—which apparently, to hear my classmates tell it twenty years later, they all enjoyed very much!
Jeez.
Things were so much simpler in those days. No one expected school to be anything but horrible.
My mother never angsted over different schools, researched them, toured them, interviewed them. In her words, it was always: “There’s the junior high school…good luck.” And then of course: “Horribly miserable, try not to be, if you are able.”
In those days, there was just one school in the town that everyone went to.
This was in California in the supposed golden years, pre–Prop 13. My high school had four thousand kids and no one said boo about it.
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 21
