“Okay, push, Ann,” the doctor said, radiating calm. He was from the Philippines and had a silky, coaxing voice. “Lisa, do you want to come closer?” he asked when the contraction had passed, motioning to a space behind his back.
A front-row seat. I felt cold and wobbly in the head, but I moved to the spot. Another contraction came; my mother threw herself into pushing, then stopped when the doctor ordered, and our eyes met. Uncomfortable as I was, I tried for a game grin beneath my mask.
“Oh, good,” my mother said, beaming at me. “You’re smiling.
Then another contraction, and she flushed and turned inward.
“Boy, that’s a big one!” Jim said, looking at the monitor.
“I know it’s a big one,” my mother hissed through her teeth. It was the only brusque word she uttered through the whole thing.
“That’s good, Ann,” the doctor said, his voice rising. “Here’s the head.”
And then he was there, my brother, little pulpy man, his face furrowed with puzzlement. The doctor cut the cord and laid him on my mother’s chest. Jim leaned over his son, grinning from ear to ear. I had never seen the man so blissed in all my life. “Well, neat-o-rooties,” he kept saying, over and over, peering at his tiny namesake. “Man alive!”
My mother slumped back on her pillows in ruddy contentment, smiling at everyone.
“How do you feel?” I asked her.
“Oh, I feel great,” she said. “How about you?”
“I’m fine,” I said, and I nearly was by then.
My brother was given a warm bath in the room, and I put in a call to the family friend, who brought my sister by. Mother had bought her a new Cabbage Patch doll, meant to quell envy, but my sister didn’t seem to have any. “Oh,” she said, in a mild voice, when the doll was presented. “Thank you.” Then she sat cross-legged on the floor while Jim brought the baby down to eye level, and gave her brother a placid, welcoming smile.
“You know what I’d really love right now?” my mother said, looking down on the scene.
“What?” I asked her. I couldn’t imagine.
She closed her eyes and tipped her head back. “A roast-beef sandwich with onions.”
As soon as I got back to school, I made a beeline for the medical bookstore. It took me a while to locate a text on obstetrics, and the language was a bit technical, but it offered clear descriptions of the various methods of anesthesia. The pelvic block had a few disadvantages: it could be used only late in the game, by which time I might be beyond repair, and it required a needle as long as a drinking straw. I paged right past the section on I.V. narcotics. I had sampled Demerol at eight when I shattered my elbow in a fall from the monkey bars, and knew I wanted nothing more to do with it. It left me woozy and cotton mouthed and made me confuse my mother with a boy from my third-grade class. I finally settled on an epidural, which carried a small risk of paralysis, but which had made certain women report that they barely knew they had a lower half. I was slightly calmer once I had my anesthetic selected, a good decade or more in advance of the event. My mother’s bravery and grit had impressed me, but I didn’t think they were qualities that I shared.
My investigations into sex and its outcomes weren’t purely by proxy. In the final quarter of my freshman year, I started dating Bob, a residence assistant, a liaison in direct violation of the dormitory bylaws. For a number of months it seemed we were both happy. We pretended to study together (he was enrolled in a master’s program), met for trays of casserole in the cafeteria, ran into each other in the elevators and kissed from floor to floor. As an R.A., he had a room to himself, with a sleeping loft and an enormous paper collage covering one wall, which an old girlfriend had made. I spent a lot of time staring at that collage. If you squinted, a jester emerged from the layered triangles and squares, balanced, arms akimbo, on top of a harlequin ball.
“She got too caught up in surfaces,” Bob told me once, when he saw me staring. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by this, but there were other hints that his ex-girlfriend was slightly pitiful, and that finally he’d been forced to give her up. I always imagined this woman hunched amid a confetti of colored paper, trimming doggedly and pining for Bob. In time, I’d come to think of her as a kindred spirit.
In the meantime, Bob and I took long drives out to Malibu in his 280Z, listening to Al Jarreau and letting the city haze unravel behind us. I had rarely been off campus since I left the catering job, and Bob became my escort to the wider world. I was particularly grateful for this one night, when a prankster pulled the fire alarm at 3 A.M. This happened quite often, and each time we had to wait out on the curb, sometimes for an hour, while the fire department checked each floor for the phantom blaze. But that night Bob and I slipped off to his car, rolled out the back end of the parking lot with the headlights off, and drove down to Ships café, where we sat for hours, still in our pajamas, drinking coffee and crisping English muffins in the tableside toasters.
It all came to an end one afternoon when we were lounging around on the couch in Bob’s dorm room, talking of nothing in particular. Suddenly he jumped up and announced that he had to go running. He seemed nervous, and paced around the little room, stretching his quads. “I’ve got to get a regimen going,” he said.
“Well, I guess I’ll see you later then,” I said, confused by this rush to fitness. He had never mentioned running before.
Bob left in a brand-new running suit, and I don’t think we spoke for more than five minutes after that. He began a series of elaborate evasions, acting as if there were nothing worth discussing about the fact that we had gone from lovers to strangers in the span of an uneventful half-hour. Of course, it hadn’t happened like that. It must have been brewing for some time. Certainly I had been oblivious to the signs and no doubt had played my part, but the question was, In precisely what manner had I made him disappear?
Hoping for an answer, I knocked on his door one night, when I was too drunk to be ashamed. The long hallway was buffed to a shine. I stared down its length, swaying slightly, waiting for the man in the cheerful I.D. photo taped to the door to appear in the flesh. “Hi, I’m Bob,” said a little dialogue bubble rising from his mouth. The hallway smelled of laundry soap and stale beer, and from an open door somewhere issued the hoarse strains of Sade. “Smooth operator,” she crooned. “You’re a smooth operator.” I thought I heard voices murmuring from behind the door, and the peephole darkened, but Bob never answered my knock.
Once I was away from Bob and had time to think, I realized that I knew almost nothing about him. Time has not improved my perspective. I would like to say Bob was looking for—But there the sentence ends. I was blindly in love with him, and I hadn’t the faintest idea what he wanted from life or why he was living in a dormitory at twenty-three, supervising a floor of late adolescents.
After Bob made his exit, I began to sleep sixteen hours a day, pulling myself up like some sluggish swamp creature just in time to make it to class. At one point I called my mother to tell her the sad tale.
“Well, my goodness,” she said. “This must be the first time in your life anyone’s ever rejected you.” It wasn’t true, but she meant it as a compliment.
“Is that how you see me?” I asked her.
“Well, you just seemed from the start to be whole unto yourself. Everything you ever really went for, you got. Even your father—you had power over him. You were the first person he changed his life for.”
I was quiet, taking this in.
“What you need to do now is expand your options,” my mother said. “Check out the bulletin boards around campus. Take a dance class. Join the spelunkers’ club.”
What could I say? The last thing I wanted was to go tramping around in a cave with a bunch of headlamped troglodytes. I already felt like I was underground. I didn’t hazard this, though. I said sure, I’d make an effort, and mumbled my way off the phone.
My mother would have liked to give me strength. And in odd ways she did. On the path from
the dorms to the campus I had to pass a hedge of Daphne odera, a shrub with clusters of citrusy flowers that grew around my mother’s house. I wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but I plucked a sprig and held it to my nose, and that scent was restorative; it led me down the path. As I walked, an old Latin hymn she used to sing drifted into my head. Dona nobis pacem. A simple phrase, carried on a changing rivulet of melody. I sang it over and over until I reached the doors of the classroom, unaware of what the Latin meant: grant us peace.
I barely remember studying that quarter. When my midterms arrived with As and Bs, it seemed to be the work of some other girl. In the mornings, after rising from my narrow bed, I would slide the window open and sit with my feet out on the ledge, staring at the banked greenery of the rec center and the shimmering blue rectangle of the pool. From down on the pool deck, the residence hall loomed above the trees like an enormous waffle iron, its windows framed with concrete squares. When I had been in better spirits and spent my afternoons down there sunning on the grass, I used to count up and over from the edge of the building to find my particular box, and I remember thinking of the oddity of this arrangement, the way we were housed like rabbits in a hutch, pacing within feet of each other, walled up with our private worries and wishes. Walking down the hall to the communal shower with my towel cinched modestly around me, I was aware that I lived in a hive of other girls, but once I returned to my room and shut the door, the world dropped away around me. The walls jutting out from the window frames seemed designed to prevent us from catching sight of one another, or perhaps they were meant to prevent drunken rabblers from dropping bottles on each other’s heads. Either way, when I sat at the window, feeling virtuous for getting myself a little sunshine and air (it wasn’t spelunking, but it was a start), I could see only my allotted square of the view. There might have been another girl, one window over, leaning out beside me with a similar expression, but I would never have known she was there.
When my depression didn’t let up, I made my way to the psychology clinic on campus, where I was assigned to a young man named Charlie, who would meet with me once a week for three months as part of his clinical training. I didn’t ask to be assigned to a man. There was some question as to whether I would be assigned to anyone at all—I wasn’t an emergency case—and then this chance came up. But in hindsight it seems lucky that I went each week into a tiny room with two chairs and a desk and a box of tissues and spoke to that dewy-faced man. He restored my faith in the gender. I thought I was there to tell him the story of Bob and my broken heart, and I did talk of this now and then, but I was surprised—though surely Charlie was not—to find that I filled the bulk of those hours with stories of my father. It was as if I had lost him all over again. Out came stories of his long-ago disappearance, which was preserved in my toddler’s mind with the same abruptness, the same lack of explanation. Charlie listened carefully, while pulling on his mustache, a delicate boyish fringe. I had the impression that he was afraid to say much, for fear of misstepping, but his face was the most marvelous tonic—full of curiosity and compassion—and little by little, sitting across from him, I recovered my spirits.
I remember only one thing that Charlie said in those months, and he said it hesitantly, with a brief glance at the tape deck whose reels spun silently on the desk, recording our sessions for his adviser’s review.
“You know, I’m feeling angry at your father, listening to your story,” he said, placing a hand on his chest as if to make clear the prejudice of this emotion. His admission shook me like a thunderclap. I had talked over those early years plenty of times, and they summoned in me a variety of feelings, but anger wasn’t one of them, at least not one I could admit to myself then.
At the end of that session, I bumped into my father on campus. He had been given a fellowship by the Institute of Industrial Relations, and was taking a three-month sabbatical from the line to do research for a book on the labor movement. I left the air-conditioned lobby of the clinic, saw him walking up the path, and my first response was delight. That familiar face, that reliable enveloping hug. He asked how I was doing. There, in the face of the actual man, I couldn’t bring myself to speak of resentments. I shrugged and looked down at my feet. I was wearing red Converse high-tops, borrowed from a friend, and a shirt patterned with red paisleys. I realized it had been months since I’d worn anything vivid, or taken care, for that matter, with what I wore. I felt as I were resurfacing from a dream, and in that first flush, my gripes didn’t seem worth mentioning.
“I’m doing fine,” I told my father, smiling.
“You look good,” he said. “I mean you always look good, but you look happy.” He seemed honestly glad of this—his face buoyed up—as if knowing I was content lightened something in him. I was grateful I’d held my tongue. We walked together into the campus, talking about my sisters, his relief at being granted time to think and write, until we came to a fork in the path.
“Hey, Converse,” my father said, catching sight of my shoes. “You know how I love those.”
It seemed that only a few weeks later the quarter was over and I was out on the curb, my clothes stuffed into plastic garbage bags, waiting for my father to pick me up for the summer. I could barely stomach the giddy atmosphere. The walkway was lined with piles of monogrammed luggage. Someone’s dad, a man in a pink polo shirt, snapped photos and glad-handed the residence staff. Everyone around me seemed to look on the summer as a respite. They whooped and cheered, waving from car windows as they pulled away. I sat on my trash bags, indulging in bitter thoughts. They would return to neatly manicured homes in the suburbs, where their mothers kept the counters wiped and served fruit plates in the afternoons. They would take jobs lifeguarding at the local swim club, and drink beer in the evenings with their high school friends.
I seemed to be the only one who wanted to remain in the warrenlike coziness of the dormitory. I had found there the first breath of independence, the merest whisper of what it would be like to shape my life. I knew no one from my year at Fairfax High; Hana had since moved to Boston. And, truth told, I dreaded the return to my father’s house, where the tensions of the previous year still hung in the air. My father and I had been jousting for so long, we didn’t seem to know any other way. We were like exhausted boxers who refuse to call the fight. When the bell rang, we both came out of our corners.
That summer, in the mornings, before I reported to my evening shift at a furniture-rental store, I drove to UCLA and wandered around the campus. Perhaps I wanted to reassure myself that the scholarly life was not an illusion, and that I might still belong there. I slipped into Powell Library and read newspapers in the domed rotunda. Above me, the walls were set with Moorish tiles; below me, the stone floors polished by countless feet. I put down my paper and walked through the stacks, pulling out titles at random. I didn’t read much, but I liked knowing it was all there: yellowed maps of Namibia, the complete works of Flaubert.
It was on one of these nostalgia visits that I ran into Mike, whom I had met in a history class during spring semester. He was attractive, in a generic, hulky kind of way. He wore Bermuda shorts and thongs and seemed glad to see me, which caught me off guard. Amid the ranks of sun-kissed sorority girls, I was certainly no prize. When Mike invited me to a party at his fraternity that weekend, I agreed to go.
That Friday, at eight, I changed in the bathroom at Easy Rents and locked up the store. I had spent hours that morning fretting over my outfit, and it is a measure of my self-consciousness that I can still remember exactly what I wore: a long straight skirt with a black hieroglyphic print, a mango-colored tank top, and silver earrings. I drove down Wilshire Boulevard, parked outside the fraternity house, and had a momentary crisis of confidence. I imagined myself braving a solo entrance only to find Mike tucked in some corner, nuzzling with his early pick of the evening. The vision nearly made me turn over the engine and head home, but in the end the relative desert of my social life forced me out. I picked my way up a
yellowed stairway flanked with men and headed straight for the keg.
I was in line, plastic cup in hand, when I spotted my old boyfriend Bob. He hadn’t caught sight of me yet, and for a moment I considered tossing my cup in a corner and fleeing the scene, but instead I froze. Just then he turned and called my name, walking over with a smile. I don’t know what attracted him—perhaps the novelty of my presence at a frat house whose members were known for their thick necks and bad motives.
“Hey, what have you been up to?” he asked, moving as if to give me a hug, then settling for an awkward open-armed gesture. He seemed drunk.
“Not much. Working.” I was embarrassed to mention my job. “How about you?”
“I’m getting my real estate license. Doing an internship at Coldwell Banker.” He bent his head forward and gave me a sly smile.
“What happened to the master’s program?” I asked, stalling for time. I was trying to figure out how I could cut him off—a small blow for the misery he’d caused me—when I felt a warm hand on my shoulder. It was Mike, looking surprisingly sober among his sodden brethren. He barely even glanced at Bob, who underwent a sudden adjustment of scale. I had never noticed how insubstantial he was.
“I’m so glad you made it,” Mike said. “Can I get you a beer?” Bob saw the lay of the land and mumbled a quick goodbye.
“Old friend?” Mike asked, after Bob had disappeared into the crowd.
“Barely know him,” I said. It struck me then that this was the truth.
“We’ve got a few of those oldsters hanging around,” Mike said as he filled my cup. “College is over and they keep coming back for the free beer.”
Mike’s payment for my rescue was made in the usual coin of the realm. We rode his motorcycle to his apartment in Benedict Canyon—he was an upperclassman, and moneyed; the fraternity was purely a social affiliation—and had dull, drunken sex. In the morning, he gave me a lift to my car and saw me off with a flannel-mouthed kiss.
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