March 30
Class today is at a Chinese restaurant called the Golden Lotus. On topic because Dad’s lesson is about the Chinese in California: by 1880, Chinese from Canton were a tenth of California’s population—first because of the gold rush, and then as workers on a railroad that would link the West Coast with the East. The Chinese men—and they were nearly all men—labored steadily and well. They could work longer hours than white men, who were nevertheless dicks to them.
There’s an early bird dinner special. We sit around the lazy Susan and spin fried rice and broccoli beef. I’m not in the mood.
There’s Joan, again, next to Dad, always flashing her white teeth, always pouring him tea, and using chopsticks in a stupid way, with her hand held absurdly high on the sticks.
April 1
The soap won’t lather and the reason, it turns out, is Dad’s painted the bar with clear nail polish. “April fool’s,” he says, happily.
April 2
I ask Dad how he and Mom met. Of course I’ve heard it before; I just want to hear it again. She’d appeared the first day of class, and he’d been drawn to her immediately. They’d gone to a student art opening together. They’d stolen a bottle of wine from the gallery—concealed in a purse—and escaped to the park to drink it.
This is when it occurs to me that it isn’t the story of my mother he’s telling—that actually, it’s the story of how he met someone else. He’s telling me about Joan.
“And didn’t you go to a Mexican restaurant after that?” I try to prompt.
“It was Ethiopian.” He frowns.
“Didn’t you eat tortilla chips?” I’m persisting.
“That can’t be right,” he says, with this expression, as though he’s hurt that I don’t trust his details.
My mother had also been his student, but that was different. They were both graduate students. After the semester was over, he asked her to have a drink. They went to a happy hour at a Mexican restaurant, where the deal was cheap drinks and all-you-can-eat tortilla chips. They shared a pitcher of sangria, and when a song with maracas came on my mother said she loved salsa. My father panicked a little, unsure if now was the appropriate time to admit he couldn’t dance. When he raised a chip to his mouth, my mother produced a homemade jar of it, triumphantly, from her purse. My father ate, relieved.
My parents had their wedding in Palm Springs, and my uncle John, ordained for the day, married them.
“May you love each other till the cows come home,” John said. “May all your quarrels be water off a duck’s back.”
He called me the other day—John did—in a panic.
“I locked my keys in the car,” he said. “I’m losing it, Ruth.”
“Did you call triple A?”
“It’s unlocked now.”
“You’re fine.”
“I’m a goner.”
I was about to ask him what he knew about the divorce, when I changed my mind, unsure of how I’d put it—unready, also, to find out. Instead I asked him about my mom’s parents, who died when she was six months pregnant with me. She had been their only child. Sometimes the loss still seemed so powerful I hesitated to ask her anything, and she rarely volunteered.
“Polite Arizonans,” he said, “who cut a mean rug. They danced all night at the wedding. They were wacky. It’s probably where you get it from.”
We’re not really related though, I don’t say.
“She was too young,” John said.
There was a pause so long I thought we’d been disconnected.
“Hello?” I said.
“Your mom, though,” John said. “She doesn’t take any shit. It was all about you, after that.”
April 3
Dad leaves the door to the study open, which I take to mean I am welcome to enter. Inside there’s an aquarium: a big tank with water in it, and a water pump going, and little blue rocks at the bottom, plastic seaweeds waving gently.
“No fish, Dad?” I say.
“I knew it was missing something,” he says.
We go to the pet store. We watch the fish for a while. There are depressed-looking sea snails, sucking algae slowly. It occurs to me that they might be taking their time, enjoying the algae. Maybe they aren’t depressed after all. Maybe it’s the opposite, and the one who’s depressed is me.
There is a crowded tank of transparent guppies. There is a lonely angelfish. We watch an employee shake fish flakes into the water, and I like the sound the tube of food makes. But Dad doesn’t seem interested, particularly, in any of the fish or snails.
We stop by the reptile tanks and watch an iguana chewing a collard green. The turtles are being fed their crickets and there is a cricket that escapes. “Escape” maybe isn’t the word. It jumps neatly into the iguana tank.
“Shit,” the employee says, as the iguana eats the wayward cricket. “He’s an herbivore. He’s supposed to be an herbivore!”
This guy, the pet store employee whose job it is to feed the turtles their crickets, has to be about my age. He’s been telling us that iguanas shouldn’t eat iceberg lettuce because iceberg lettuce has no nutritional value, and an issue is that iguanas can get addicted to it, refusing to eat anything else.
My father hasn’t picked any fish or turtles or snails. He seems displeased with the store’s selection. I don’t want to waste the trip, so I pick up a bag of birdseed, a specialty mix with sunflower and thistle seeds, and millet. In the section with the seeds, an employee named Bill wants to sell me a “wildlife block,” a fifteen-pound cube of seeds.
“Attractive to birds, yes,” Bill says. “But also a variety of critters!”
“I’m not sure,” I say. It seems excessive.
At the very last minute Dad picks out six miniature scuba divers: diverse divers, plastic men of every hair and skin type. At home, into the tank they go.
April 4
We’ve been seeing more of John, who has been stopping by once or twice a week now. He’s been dating a woman he met on the Internet. Her name is Lisa, and she lives in Rancho Cucamonga. She works at the animal shelter. When he visits, I give him a shot of cabbage juice.
Today, while Dad is at the gym with his brother, I let myself into his office again. I open his desk drawers and rifle through them, expecting to find I don’t know what: some proof or clue or sign.
I know it’s pointless. I know it’s stupid and impossible. I know significance, more often than not, is invisible, imbued on things like saltshakers Joel and I stole from the overpriced French restaurant, or the toy from the vending machine, or some sad thing we found on the street and saved.
In the drawers there are packets of instant oatmeal. There are business cards and restaurant matchbooks and a little glass panda bear and a stress ball shaped like a brain. For all I know the oatmeal might be a gift from Joan or the physics professor, and the panda and brain had been gifts from Joan or the physics professor, and the matchbooks are from restaurants of some significance to them. But because there is no way of knowing, and because the scuba divers in the fish tank are watching me judgmentally, I stop looking.