The Candy House(33)
Tell the end.
Well, I stopped going to anthropology school and I married your daddy and we brought you into the world. And here you are! It all worked out perfectly.
Where is Daddy?
You’ll see him next week. He’s taking you to ballet.
Last time he never came.
I’ll be here. Just in case.
He can’t make a bun.
That’s not important, honey.
Before ballet…?
Don’t whine, sweetie.
He threw Tam-Tam out the window of the car. He said she was moth-eaten.
That was unfortunate.
How could you marry him?
Love is a mystery.
Does Daddy love you?
He loves you. That’s what matters.
He said we were young spendthrifts.
Did he, now.
He said—
Can we not talk about what he said?
We’re just telling you…
I don’t need to be told. I know your father very well.
* * *
How did she endure these conversations? Of course our father didn’t love her, any more than she loved him. He was fifteen years older than our mother, twice divorced when they met, with four kids—two by each ex-wife. How’s that for a rotten prospective husband? But he was charming, a famous record producer, and above all (we later surmised), he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Why he wanted our mother to say yes is another mystery; they had nothing in common beyond a taste for beauty (his) and beauty (hers). But she never lived by her beauty—she was the kind of mom who rarely wore makeup, who let her hair grow wild and didn’t bother to shower on Sunday, her day off from the travel agency where she went to work after our father stranded her without any money to raise us.
* * *
The sun-gnawed apartment complex where we lived with our mother starting as toddlers in the late 1970s—the first home we remember—seemed to be populated entirely by females: aging B-movie actresses who took deliveries of Gallo wine in gallon bottles, and aspiring starlets whose much older boyfriends had white stripes on their ring fingers. The apartments surrounded a “garden” containing a single gargantuan palm tree—either a relic of some agricultural prehistory of that patch of land or a decorative feature that had bloated grotesquely out of scale with the modest complex it was decorating. The bedroom we shared with our mother faced a canopy of fronds like the fingers of a dozen hands. Even on sunny days, it made a sound like rain.
On Sunday mornings, we climbed into our mother’s bed to “be the monster,” which meant lying with our chests on top of hers so that all of us could feel our three beating hearts. Our hair tangled with her hair, and our breath melted into hers, until we were one creature lying under the moving, whispering hands of another creature, the palm tree. The tree had a name, we told our mother: Herbert.
What if it’s a girl tree?
A girl can be Herbert.
Our mother propped herself on one elbow and studied us. There aren’t a lot of men around here, are there? Do you wish you saw more of your daddy?
No!
He loves you very much.
We love you.
You can love us both, you know.
No. We can’t.
* * *
Our parents’ marriage collapsed when a San Francisco high school student washed up on their Malibu doorstep, having run away from home and hitchhiked south after our father seduced her on a business trip. We were three and four years old. Our father managed, on paper, to appear penniless. He left our mother with nothing but us—which, by his calculation, probably meant less than nothing. But for our mother, who had little else, we were infinite. She loved us infinitely in return, and gave us that rare thing: a happy childhood. She never told us why she’d left our father. Much later, he did.
* * *
On the occasions when our father showed up to take us to ballet, we walked grimly down the cracked outdoor steps from our second-story apartment to one of his many cars.
Hello, girls. One of you want to ride in front?
We shook our heads. It wasn’t safe, everyone knew that except him.
How about something to eat? We’ve got time before your class.
We don’t eat before ballet.
I can’t do anything right with you two, can I?
We shook our heads, and he laughed and began to drive. But when he pulled up in front of the strip mall where the ballet studio was, he turned around and peered at us in the backseat.
I’m your father. You understand that, don’t you?
We nodded in stony unison.
That’s not nothing. That means something. He searched our cold eyes. You don’t like me. Why?
It was not a rhetorical question. He was curious, awaiting a reply.
We looked at our father closely for perhaps the first time: his weathered surfer’s tan and longish blond hair, his crooked front teeth. He watched us watch him, and then he laughed.
How would you know? You’re just two little kids.
* * *
Some girls might have adored a father who came along occasionally in a showy car—pined for him, tried to be pretty for him and distract him from his girlfriends who were closer to their age than his; and ultimately become the playthings of other men with similar tastes. That’s roughly how it went with our three older half sisters, Charlene, Roxy, and Kiki. Roxy was the one we idolized as little girls: Lithe and kinetic, cast in dozens of music videos, she’d achieved such notoriety by age seventeen that you could hardly fathom what kind of future it was all prelude to. But it turned out to be prelude to almost nothing: Roxy’s promise was her main act. She ended up on methadone, with hepatitis C. Eventually only we could still see the flickering specter of her young self, flashing and bird-featured, like an antic ghost haunting a tumbledown mansion. The mannerisms of heroin, the dull eyes and sleepy movements, became her mannerisms. The old Roxy was invisible to everyone but us.