We never shared those wishes. We were scared that by sharing them, they wouldn’t come true. But now it occurs to me that if we’d divulged them to each other then, we’d be better able to remember them now: we’d have someone else to help with half the work of remembering.
Summer afternoons, one of our dads would pick us up from our day care and seat us in the back of their afternoon classes. We’d whisper and wriggle through the two hours. On the days it wasn’t too hot out, we would lie out on the lawn with our fathers’ students, who found us funny: their professors’ strange little girls. What I remember are the days when there were clouds, when they’d try to get us to see shapes. We were always disappointing them, I think. Clouds looked like scrambled eggs to me.
“Cotton candy,” Bonnie would suggest, not helping.
“Ground beef?” I’d try, and they wouldn’t be pleased with that answer, either.
“But what else?” they’d persist.
My parents don’t have a clue that I didn’t graduate. I had to lie to them only barely. I told them I didn’t want them to fly all the way to see me walk—the ceremony would be silly and expensive. I told them I’d been mailed my diploma. They had no reason to believe otherwise, and they didn’t insist, because I so vehemently out-insisted them.
I try not to make a habit of playing out the possibilities: if I’d finished college, I’d have been this or that, or something else. It’s a game I try not to play because it doesn’t end any way but the way that it does—the way that it has.
It was idiotic of me not to finish school, though. Idiotic, and stupid, and now what?
February 5
There’s a lone page on the kitchen counter.
Today you had me excavate your nose, which you’d put corn into.
Today, while I was trying to teach you to swim, you asked how deep the pool was. When I said four feet, you looked incredulous, and said, Whose feet!
Today we went over to your mother’s friend’s house for dinner. We’d asked you to be polite, so you said, “No more, please, it’s horrible thank you.”
Today was my birthday, and you asked me how old I was. When I told you thirty-five you seemed stunned. You asked me if I started at one. Then you asked: When do we die?
Today you said, apropos of nothing, “Good corpse, bad corpse.”
February 7
Bonnie and I are lying on Vince’s little black couch, in his little adobe house in Highland Park. I can count the number of times I’ve hung out with Vince on one hand. Right now is the fourth. Vince, whom Bonnie has dated for the past three years, is tan, compact, and doesn’t read the news or eat anything with legs. He will sometimes press eyedrops into his eyes while he’s talking to you. At some point I stopped judging friends’ boyfriends, because who knows? But even Bonnie is aware of Vince’s ridiculousness.
His Boston terrier is chasing a rolling Pringles tube across the carpet. Vince is in the kitchen cooking and telling us, “If you’re a sled dog, and you need to take a shit, you just do it. The other dogs drag you along. While the shit’s falling out of you!” A few moments later he emerges from the kitchen and presents a stir-fry.
“This is good,” we say.
“I’ve had Chinese girlfriends,” Vince says, and beams, proudly.
February 8
In the morning, from Bonnie’s, I make my way to Uncle John’s. He lives like an obdurate bachelor, on the same acre of land in Tehachapi where he’s lived since I was a teenager. There’s a shooting range and a little decorative koi pond with an elegant and healthy population of fish. He likes to feed them good bread—nothing Wonder.
His golf cart isn’t in its regular spot when I arrive so I trek to the range, where he’s been shooting a happy face into a watermelon. When he sees me he doesn’t put the gun down immediately. I approach when he’s through. He’s shot angry eyebrows into it.
He hands the padded vest to me and lets me shoot a few. He launches some strange skeets and when I shoot them they make a funny noise. He reaches into his pack, holds up what looks like a hardened biscuit.
“The biodegradable skeet,” he says. “This is how I’m going to make my millions.”
He cooks lunch: mackerel buried in salt and wrapped in aluminum foil and baked. He roasts lemon wedges. We squeeze juice from the browned lemons over the fish.
I remember when I was eleven or twelve, on a camping trip, Uncle John cooked Linus and me a trout we’d caught, over a fire, and we ate peaches from a can, and nothing—it seemed—had ever tasted and would ever taste so good.
“Foil,” I say now. “Didn’t you get the memo about foil?”
“Your mother is nuts,” he says.
I ask if he remembers the time she tried to make Cheetos from scratch. I was nine or ten and Cheeto obsessed. She drove us two-plus hours to the Frito-Lay factory in Bakersfield, where we toured the plant in hairnets and shoe covers. At the end of the tour, we sampled the freshly manufactured Cheetos, still warm from the industrial process they had undergone. A few weeks after that trip, she arrived at an actually impressive Cheeto—cheese dusted and craggy.
“Your mother is nuts,” he repeats. “But she is the best.”
February 9
This is our plan for this week’s class: an acquaintance of Theo’s who teaches chemistry, another PhD student, is on vacation for the next two weeks. His classroom is open. Our excuse, to Dad, is that last week’s classroom is being refurbished.
“It’s really outdated,” he agrees.
Before we leave for campus, my phone rings. The screen says PHILLIP is calling. I hurry to the bathroom.
“Hi, Phillip,” I say, casually.
“What?”
“That’s your code name,” I whisper.
“Oh hey, uh, Ned,” Theo replies.
“Ned?”
“I saw Levin’s car in the parking lot,” says Theo. “At least I think it’s his. So maybe, to be on the safe side, don’t park in the visitors lot? And maybe don’t walk past the Arts buildings?”
To Dad, I propose dinner at Se?or Amigo’s. It’s a block from school and northwest—Levin’s office is southwest—and I can leave the car parked in the restaurant’s lot.
Our waitress is a teenager. She tilts her sombrero up to register my father.
“Professor Young!” she squeals.
“I’m Layla!” she says to me.
She tells us about her semester—boring so far, she misses Dad’s class—then sneaks us guacamole, magnanimously, and whispers, “Shhh.”
After dinner, we walk briskly to the classroom. It’s lightly raining so I hold an umbrella over the two of us, low, and usher us hurriedly.
This is what we learn from Dad: The name “California” came from a sixteenth-century romance novel that was popular in Spain. In the novel, California was a land where Amazonian warriors lived—all women, no men, with beautiful, strong bodies.