The Lost Father (20 page)

My mother worried about my appearance. She didn’t think I made the most of myself. She knew I didn’t pay enough attention. She claimed concern about my personal habits. I wasn’t showing the usual signs. “Boy I don’t know who’s gonna want to sleep with you, all over the bed. Like this, this is what you look like.” She made an ugly position with her arms and then her face like that. She was standing
above me when I woke up one morning. “Do you have to sprawl over the bed?”

“That’s the way I sleep,” I said.

“Well, boy I’d change that if I were you. And fast.”

My mother was young and full of vim. She didn’t worry really at all about my grades. She would have been happier with another daughter altogether. If my mother thought about it now, she would not want a daughter like me. She would have wanted a young woman more like her own self: enthusiastic, spirited, pretty, full of life for the game.

She would not have wanted to make a child like me, even as she was doing so.

Emily’s mother was different but also unhappy. She had the things my mother wanted, but she couldn’t use them right. Emily’s mother had no better life than we did. My mother always sighed when she picked me up. “What I could do with that house. And with her clothes.”

“You could’ve married ’im,” I said.

She sighed again. “I know. And don’t think I don’t think about it.”

Mai linn had no mother.

We worried about Emily, losing her. Emily was beginning to have the kind of looks impossible to miss. She had ankles that dipped before long thin feet, and majestic features, the nose and overfull lips of a Greek statue. Plus she had blond, good hair. Only she was a little chubby.

We kept Emily on our side a little while longer due to a critical mistake she made in the shower one evening in August of our fourth-grade year. She mistook the depilatory bottle for shampoo and was bald the rest of elementary school. That and nothing else safeguarded her virginity. Emily had no will. She had been the kind of child her doctor father could pull up on his lap and arrange her flat-boned legs, putting them on one side of his knee or another. She mostly went along with what we said. But baldness became a mark of identity for Emily. First we all went shopping for a wig for her. Then, her family and I and Mai linn were supposed to be the only ones who knew. The wig shop was serious; it was a large warehouse with wigs and toupees on only one back aisle, the rest of the merchandise was prosthetics, wheelchairs and crutches. There were racks of nurses’ uniforms in the front. We touched the hairs and said, this one seems
pretty natural. I understood that day, you really are alone in life. Because just watching Mai linn try on the blond wig and feel the side of it and look around the store at the strange old ladies who worked there, I knew she was feeling what I was: this is Emily and not me. But somehow the word got around and my cousin Ben pulled the wig off Emily’s head in American history and she cried and ran out of the classroom and everyone had seen and so the whole school knew. I think that was what started the long music of Emily’s fall into love with Ben.

Emily rose to baldness. You could see her article “Baldness Is Freedom” in the January 1969 issue of
Seventeen
magazine. She stopped wearing the wig and her new appearance yielded a kind of dignity and status. She really did look good bald. She had a pretty-shaped head, all the knobs and bumps were in the right places, the two strings of her neck rising up gracefully like stems. She ran for vice president that spring and won. By then she was shaving her head to keep it bald and wearing long very thin earrings her father bought for her in New York City.

The three of us had vowed not to spend any time on the dumb girl things in life. We tried not to want to be queen. Years later we each, separately, set our alarms to get up at four and six o’clock—Pacific and Central time—to watch Princess Diana getting married on television. Jackie Kennedy didn’t help but the others did. With the other presidents you’d rather be them than their wives.

We cautioned each other away from clothes and makeup, the charms that attracted boys, parties, homecoming queen nominations, jangles on one chain. Why? I believed we couldn’t afford that. “While they’re learning eye shadow,” Mai linn said, “we can learn Latin.” And we did, Emily straggling in late and drowsing through Cicero, but passing anyway. Even the old nun who taught Latin couldn’t quite keep immune from our fervor.

With Emily it was only a matter of time. Her father owned Briggs’s, Racine’s largest department store, which supplied the high school girls with all the tools for their ascensions. He opened a boutique, on the second floor for mod, far-out teenage clothes, called The Id.

“We can go when we’re twenty to a department store and buy all the clothes we need then,” I said. It was amazing to me, the stupidity of girls. We marveled over them, girls who spent their afternoons lolling by pools, pulling the elastic of their bathing suit legs out to check
color, their nights talking on Princess telephones about dresses and mascara and shoes, their only progress measured by getting their braces off. These afternoons we were studying our Latin, reading it aloud, declining.

Why? Because Mai linn was an undersized Vietnamese girl in Racine, Wisconsin, in the late nineteen sixties, and with me it was because of my mother. All she did was her looks. While she was married to Ted, she spent hours plucking and preening for Tom Sklarr, who I already knew wouldn’t marry her years before she found the chest of letters from other women in the bar where he stored wine on his boat. I knew he wouldn’t be any good for a father anyway. When my bike was stolen right in front of my own house he didn’t even think of buying me a new one even though he had all that money. He just said it was too bad.

We promised ourselves not to try anything for men, never to go out of our way at all. No makeup, fancy clothes, anything. We each cheated a little and tried not to tell the others. At home, my mother whispered to me that I would be a movie star. Mai linn and I caught Emily once with an ankle bracelet.

Of the three of us Mai linn was the least. But she was an orphan. She had no money.

She came and sat on my bed one day after school, we were studying at my house. She hugged me and said if she were ever to want anything with a girl it would be me.

“No, Mai,” I said. Emily and I and Ben were the only ones who called her her real name. At school, the nuns all said it was too hard to pronounce. They said her American name was Lynn.

She got up and went to the other bed across the room. “Okay,” she said.

A year or two later, Emily confessed that she’d let Mai linn do it to her five or six times.

“You’re one too then!” I said.

“I really only liked the back rubs.”

“Why’d you do it, then?” I said. I hated that they did that together. That way.

She just shrugged. Emily was that way with boys too, later, even more so. We’d lost her for good by high school, but by then Mai linn and I had both moved anyway.

When my mom and I moved to California, I found another girl to
boss. Calla and I were the first feminists in Los Angeles. We hadn’t heard of it from anyone. We came to conclusions by ourselves. It wasn’t hard. All you had to do was look.

“I’m never going to cook for a man,” Calla declared one day in her empty kitchen. We were standing around there after school. Nobody cooked in that kitchen. Rosario, a small, frightened Mexican maid who seemed to speak utterly no English, came every day and cleaned, but she darted out whenever we marauded through and the only thing I ever saw her cook was a soft-boiled egg fot herself.

I wasn’t so sure about not cooking. I thought it was fine, all this learning in school now. But I did want to get married. “Well, what are you going to eat?”

“He’ll have to be satisfied eating yogurt for dinner like I am.”

I didn’t say anything. Who wanted to eat yogurt for dinner? At least my mother and I ate a real supper when we went out at night. Ted would have never put up with yogurt. Yogurt’s fine, he’d say, but what’s for dinner?

Calla’s mother was pretty too or at least my mother thought so. She was tall and bird-faced and she floated in her thirty-four-room house like a ghost, often in a bathrobe and puffed slippers. The house held silent as a convent, but dressed up in striped flowered wallpapers and matching elaborate skirted furniture. The living room and game room and den were huge done-up alleys no one used. Calla’s mother lived stringently, treading a line only from her bedroom to the bird-print-walled dining room where she ate her silent pilgrim’s breakfast of eggs and toast with coffee in a decent china cup and saucer and sat looking over bills, for the electricity or phone. Bills seemed to be her most important business with the world. Those were the two signs of life Janine Canter exhibited. She either sat in the dining room doing bills, dressed up in her prim lady’s clothes, or she mooned through the cluttered dim space in slippers. She was a first wife.

Calla’s mother complained in a tiny bitter voice about how evil people were and she was just seeing it now since the divorce. And it did seem unfair. Membership on all the charity boards where she’d worked hard volunteering, baking tea coffeecakes, hostessing cocktail parties, had somehow been mysteriously revoked, and next thing she heard, the new wife, a Swedish model, had been asked to join. What she did outside the house was shop. She had walls of boxes for three-hundred-dollar shoes she kept in her bedroom,
RED
SATIN PUMPS, MEDIUM HEEL
, she’d Magic-Marker on the outside cardboard. She wouldn’t let us borrow them even to dress up in just around the house. “Because they’re too good for kids your age,” she said.

Calla’s mother every once in a while would consternate for a morning over the UCLA extension catalog, deliberating whether she shouldn’t try to take a course. These mornings her toast would lie ravaged as she sat at the dining room table with a huge heated pot of coffee next to her. Her hair stuck out from her pulling it from the pins. “Go ahead, Mom,” Calla would urge. “Sign up for something.” It was hard to see what Mrs. Canter did all day.

She always studied the catalog, deliberated hard and then decided against. “It’s too late for me to have a career,” she said to us, “I would have had to start earlier.”

She was thirty-six years old.

I ran for school president there my sophomore year. I tied with a boy. We each got three hundred forty-eight votes. The history teacher settled it by flipping a coin. I picked tails and he won.

“You’re gonna let a coin decide?” I cried. The history teacher shrugged. “We can’t have two.”

That day the president—a guy named Ronnie—followed me home and asked me out. After that I worked on guys’ campaigns.

I
DIDN’T WANT
to waste my life on frippery and look at me now. Better to have bought bras. I’d watched all those girls giving their lives up to men, spending days in preparation, painting toenails, brushing on powder, opening the flower. That was for men who were there. Men who stroked them and gave them things. I was worse.

I was like a nun, making my whole life for a man who wasn’t even there.

A
ND OUTSIDE
, on the street, after class, I saw men again everywhere, one in a phone booth, hand spread and plastered against the glass wall, his breath steaming a patch around him so I couldn’t make out his face. They were young. I saw it in the tight stretch of skin from the tendon connecting head to shoulder. And so was I.

T
HE PHONE RANG
at eight in the morning. An assured female voice said, “Shawn Timmelund has to cancel his appointment today. His elbow is sore.” This was the guy who cut my hair and made me look better than I did.

I asked if I could reschedule. “You’ll have to call back later in the week,” she said. “Shawn makes all his own appointments.”

It seemed I had to chase everyone. Even paying them didn’t help.

The detective petered out. He hadn’t called at all since I’d left him in the restaurant with the bill. So I began to do more myself. It was hard for me now not to.

But I’d flunked anatomy. The professor asked the three people to stay after class and he told us we would have to take it again next semester. I guessed that was all right.

When I did things to find my father I knew I should really be studying. But I felt like, if I could just get this one thing done, then I could concentrate on everything else, patiently, for the rest of my life.

I
WALKED UP
the United Nations steps again, the near echo of many heels louder than the steady roar of water splashing the somber Las Vegasy fountains. I’d dressed up. Some. Still, as I stood for a moment at the top, before going in, I saw all that made the place feel important and it was nothing—empty flags, towered rows of high straight loud water rushing. But the buildings and their plazas made no monument, nothing really, that would last. No pyramids. Just another committee’s work.

The same Polish receptionist, who showed no flicker of remembering me, looked up Azzam’s name on a computer printout. “Uh, Said Azzam is not here in New York. He’s stationed at the Geneva Mission.”