As she scans the room to check for anything she might have forgotten, her eyes land on me and she laughs inexplicably.
“Wanna have lunch at Ajax?” she says, and I have to hide the thrill I feel at being tossed a slice from the hours she owes her employer. We agree on 12:30 and I watch her walk out of the bedroom. That’s my girlfriend, I think.
After she’s gone I embark on a careful and unsatisfying survey of her things. The furniture is from Ikea. The plants are both thriving. No personal photographs are on display. On the bookshelves are canonical works of poststructuralism—History of Sexuality, Gender Trouble, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place—with yellow USED stickers on the spines and, in the margins, ballpointed notes that refer to a private set of associations. Everything in this room is part of a hermetic system, like a dictionary of an unfamiliar language: you can look up a word, but all you’ll find are more words you don’t know. I spot myself in the full-length mirror, standing in a girl’s room in my undershorts, examining her copy of Of Grammatology, and the exercise suddenly seems ridiculous. I shower, uncertain which products are Maya’s and which Bradley’s, careful to replace everything properly, then dress and make coffee and sit in the tiny, tidy kitchen with wet hair, reading yesterday’s Chronicle. This solitary domestic activity makes me feel possessive of the apartment, and when it’s time to leave for our lunch date the click of the front door behind me is a small banishment.
In the middle of the café, unmissable, is the familiar mountain of my father, his haunches spilling over the sides of a wooden chair. Across from him is a younger man in rimless glasses, typing into his PowerBook as my dad talks. Maya is two tables over, reading a newspaper. The sight of Maya Marcom and Barry Muller in a single space detonates a little charge of incongruity, like those episodes of Scooby-Doo with guest appearances by Don Rickles or Batman.
There’s no safe way to get Maya’s attention without my dad noticing. To keep him from turning and seeing me I duck onto one of the couches. Peering through the gaps in the crowd I line up a view of Maya, then reach for my cell phone to call her. Her small hand darts into her purse. Watching someone you love when they don’t know you’re there is always briefly heartbreaking. She answers, and I hear her voice in stereo, digitally clear in my right ear, in my left faint but perceptible amid forty other conversations and the unpleasant background music.
“Don’t look around,” I tell her. “Meet me out front.”
“Gotcha,” she says, strangely unsurprised to be drafted into some secretive operation. She folds her paper and shrugs on her overcoat, glancing at the people around her. Then she strides past me and I follow her out into the cold sunshine.
“Sorry about that,” I say on the sidewalk. “My dad was in there.”
“I knew it!” she says.
“Uh, how?”
“He’s hard to miss,” she says. “His features kind of look like yours.”
“I’m going to kill myself now.”
“No, you’re not fat, and your eyes are different. But there’s a resemblance. God, now I’ve seen your dad!” She seems happy about this. “So what do you want to do?”
Introducing them is not an option. It’s bad enough that she saw him: now she has this nightmare image of what I’m going to look like in twenty-five years, swollen with carbohydrates and self-regard. Meanwhile I will never see her mother and thus will be denied a glimpse through the spyhole that parents open into the past and the future, evidence of your childhood and a preview of your inevitable decline. I carry this unease with me as we head down the block to another restaurant, a frighteningly cheap taqueria. The decor suggests a school cafeteria, and the pervasive smell of disinfectant is paradoxically evocative of filth, but Maya assures me that the enchiladas are fine. Sitting at an uneven table by the big refrigerators, I take a tentative bite — they’re good.
“So what if that had been your dad in there instead of mine?” I say.
She peers out from behind her glasses as though we’re playing chess and I’ve overlooked something important: Are you sure you want to do that?
“He abused me, sexually,” she says. “Starting when I was nine.” She stares at me, eyes narrowed, challenging me to disappoint her with some failure of compassion.
This new information requires me to rearrange various ideas and assumptions in its light. I can see her through time, the terrified nine-year-old girl and the fierce, brilliant woman she called into existence to protect her. I had imagined meeting Donald Marcom over dinner, trying to persuade him that my intentions are honorable.
“So you were trapped with him for another nine years,” I say. “And your mom wasn’t there to protect you.”
Her shoulders relax, and the confrontation goes out of her stare: I’ve passed a test.
“I blocked it out,” she says. “I didn’t even remember it until I was in college.”
She calls her editor and tells him she’s doing an interview, and we drive back to her house in silence. I hope I’ll be able to do whatever it is I’m supposed to do now. She looks through the windshield and sits very still.
Back inside we hang our coats and take off our shoes. The faint thump of house music signifies that Bradley is at home, and we move carefully to avoid provoking him out into the common space. In her room she leaves the lights off, and the clouds outside the window make everything seem dim and insulated. We lie on her bed in our clothes and as it gets darker she tells me as much as she can.
After her mom dies it’s just the two of them. At school she forgets for most of the day that her mother is dead, just as she used to forget that her mother was alive, until at 3:45 she sees her father standing stone-still outside the school gates, surrounded by women. They go home together and he tries to make the foods her mother made, but he does it wrong. As a family they are incomplete, a stool with two legs. He can only make conversation by quizzing her. She learns to speak articulately on any topic.
Her classmates’ parents offer to help, and for the next few months Maya is taken to one of their houses most weeknights after school. Every family is different. Some watch TV during dinner and some don’t watch until after dinner and the Lehrmans don’t even have a TV. Later she will realize that her father was grieving, that while she was playing with Nina Barrick or Jenny Chen or Jenny Goldish he was lying on his bed curled into a ball or sitting on the couch watching TV with his hand in his pants. At the time she didn’t think of him as having internal states; she thought of him as being somehow missing, even when he was driving her home or serving her dinner.
She learns that when you say My mom is dead, kids say things like Did your dad kill her? Grown-ups, on the other hand, usually give you whatever you want. As a teenager she will realize that she has learned to deploy her mother’s death to her advantage. She has to train herself to stop.
Starting in the fourth grade, the texture of her memories is different, as though seen from a greater distance. She remembers her teachers, her best friend Christine Dunlap, a class trip to the La Brea Tar Pits, but not much that happened at home. She has a generic memory of her father sitting in the living room, reading a book and watching television at the same time. It’s important that he be sufficiently entertained. Did he read with the TV on every night? Just once? Never? She spends a lot of time in her room, where she inhabits a vaguely sketched fantasy world in which she has a dog who speaks to her telepathically and accompanies her on adventures. As an adult she sometimes remembers the dog as though it were a real pet. She knows that she didn’t just gradually outgrow the fantasy; it ended with some specific event. She can’t think of this without a pang of guilt, and she suspects that she must have killed the dog.