So MANY THINGS I would never have imagined. She wrote tiny haiku that she slipped into his pockets. I fished them out whenever I got a chance, to see what she had written. It made me blush to read them: Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battleground.
One morning at the magazine, she showed me a picture in the weekly throwaway Caligula's Mother, taken at a party after a play's opening night. They both looked bombed. The caption dubbed her Barry's new lady love. It was exactly the kind of thing she hated the most, a woman as a man's anything. Now it was as if she'd won a contest.
Passion. I never imagined it was something that could happen to her. These were days she couldn't recognize herself in a mirror, her eyes black with it, her hair forever tangled and smelling of musk, Barry's goat scent.
They went out and she told me about it afterward, laughing. "Women approach him, their peacock voices crying, 'Barry! Where have you been?' But it doesn't matter. He is with me now. I am the only one he wants."
Passion ruled her. Gone were the references to his physical goatishness, his need for dental work, his flabby physique, his squalid taste in clothes, the wretchedness of his English, his shameless cliches, the criminal triteness of his oeuvre, a man who wrote "snuck." I never thought I'd see my mother plaster herself against a stout ponytailed man in the hallway outside our apartment, or let him inch his hand up her skirt under the table when we ate dinner one night at a dark Hunan restaurant in old Chinatown. I watched her close her eyes, I could feel the waves of her passion like perfume across the teacups.
In the mornings, he lay with her on the wide white mattress when I crossed the room on the way to the toilet. They would even talk to me, her head cradled on his arm, the room full of the scent of their lovemaking, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It made me want to laugh out loud. In the courtyard at Crossroads of the World, I sat under a pepper tree and wrote "Mr. and Mrs. Barry Kolker" in my sketchbook. I practiced saying, "Can I call you Dad?"
I never told my mother I wanted a father. I had only questioned her once on the subject, I must have been in kindergarten. We were back in the States that year, living in Hollywood. A hot, smoggy day, and my mother was in a bad mood. She picked me up late from day care, we had to go to the market. We were driving in an old Datsun she had then, I still remember the hot waffled seat and how I could see the street through a hole in the floorboards.
School had just started, and our young teacher, Mrs. Williams, had asked us about our fathers. The fathers lived in Seattle or Panorama City or San Salvador, a couple were even dead. They had jobs like lawyers or drummers or installing car window glass.
"Where's my father?" I asked my mother. She downshifted irritably, throwing me against the seat belt. "You have no father," she said. "Everybody has a father," I said.
"Fathers are irrelevant. Believe me, you're lucky. I had one, I know. Just forget it." She turned on the radio, loud rock 'n' roll. It was as if I was blind and she'd told me, sight doesn't matter, it's just as well you can't see. I began to watch fathers, in the stores, on the playgrounds, pushing their daughters on swings. I liked how they seemed to know what to do. They seemed like a dock, firmly attached to the world, you could be safe then, not always drifting like us. I prayed Barry Kolker would be that man.
Their murmured words of love were my lullabies, my hope chest. I was stacking in linens, summer camp, new shoes, Christmas. I was laying up sit-down dinners, a room of my own, a bicycle, parent-teacher nights. A year like the one before it, and the next like that, one after another, a bridge, and a thousand things more subtle and nameless that girls without fathers know. Barry took us to the Fourth of July game at Dodger Stadium and bought us Dodger caps. We ate hot dogs and they drank beer from paper cups and he explained baseball to her like it was philosophy, the key to the American character. Barry threw money to the peanut vendor and caught the bag the man threw back. We littered the ground with peanut shells. I hardly recognized us in our peaked blue caps. We were like a family. I pretended we were just Mom, Dad, and the kid. We did the wave, and they kissed through the whole seventh inning, while I drew faces on the peanuts. The fireworks set off every car alarm in the parking lot.
Another weekend, he took us to Catalina. I was violently seasick on the ferry, and Barry held a cold handkerchief to my forehead and got me some mints to suck. I loved his brown eyes, the way he looked so worried, as if he'd never seen a kid throw up before. I tried not to hang around with them too much once we got there, hoping he would ask her while they strolled among the sailboats, eating shrimp from a paper cone.
SOMETHING HAPPENED. All I remember is that the winds had started. The skeleton rattlings of wind in the palms. It was a night Barry said he would come at nine, but then it was eleven and he hadn't arrived. My mother played her Peruvian flute tape to soothe her nerves, Irish harp music, Bulgarian singers, but nothing worked. The calming, chiming tones ill suited her temper. Her gestures were anxious and unfinished.
"Let's go for a swim," I said.
"I can't," she said. "He might call."
Finally, she flipped out the tape and replaced it with one of Barry's, a jazz tape by Chet Baker, romantic, the kind of music she always hated before.
"Cocktail lounge music. For people to cry into their beer with," she said. "But I don't have any beer."
He went out of town on assignments for different magazines. He canceled their dates. My mother couldn't sleep, she jumped whenever the phone rang. I hated to see the look on her face when it wasn't Barry. A tone I'd never heard crept into her voice, serrated, like the edge of a saw.
I didn't understand how this could happen, how he could give us fireworks and Catalina, how he could hold that cold cloth to my forehead, and talk about taking us to Bali, and then forget our address.
ONE AFTERNOON, we stopped by his house unannounced.
"He's going to be mad," I said.
"We were just in the neighborhood. Just thought we'd stop by," she said.
I could no more keep her from doing this than I could keep the sun from coming up through the boiled smog on an August morning, but I didn't want to see it. I waited in the car. She knocked on the door and he answered wearing a seersucker bathrobe. I didn't have to hear her to know what she was saying. She wore her blue gauze dress, the hot wind ruffling her hem, the sun at her back, turning it transparent. He stood in his doorway, blocking it, and she held her head to one side, moving closer, touching her hair. I felt a rubber band stretching in my brain, tighter and tighter, until they disappeared into his house.