It was my mother who helped me build a birdhouse. We built it out of Popsicle sticks. The birds didn’t mind the rain, she assured me, but it was nice to have options.
I detach the empty bird feeder from the bare cherry tree. I collect coins from the carpet and put them in my pocket. Later in the day I wash those pants, forgetting to remove the coins. They come out shiny. I call, “Dad?” and receive no response, though I can hear him in there, shifting.
January 10
I shake the sand that’s collected on the welcome mat and wonder if the saying “To wear out one’s welcome” came about because of the mats. Did somebody visit somebody else so often that the WELCOME actually faded? Then I wonder if everyone who’s ever shaken a mat has wondered this.
I do a load of whites and refill a mug with puffed rice while the clothes spin and stay wet. I fold the white, still damp clothes and eat more cereal and do the darks and listen to the sound of the toilet’s periodic flush. Over the phone, Bonnie complains that Vince has lately been leaving his laundry with her.
“And then expecting me to check his pockets,” she says. “For joints.”
“Remind me how old he is?”
“Twenty-five,” she whispers.
This makes me a terrible person, I know, but it comes as a relief to me that my best friend is in a not-dissimilar boat—the unmarried and careerless boat. Which is more like a canoe.
The unofficial plan had been to never abandon each other. Bonnie grew boobs before I did, but we still wore our first bikinis together. We were at Huntington Beach, wearing big T-shirts over our suits. We were fourteen. Neither of us would take her T-shirt off first.
A man on Rollerblades stopped to say hello. He called us pretty, which was exciting in the moment, but we’d learn, later in life, that men tended to say that when they found your appearance confusing, when they couldn’t tell what you were—when you were half-Armenian in Bonnie’s case, or half-Chinese in mine. The man on Rollerblades bought us each large lemonades. When he handed us the lemonades, we gushed thank you, so excited, never having been recipients of this sort of attention. Then he pulled out a condom from his pocket.
He asked, “Do you know what this is?”
We looked at each other, looked back at him, and nodded.
“Will you show me how to use it?” He grinned.
We abandoned our lemonades. We ran.
When Dad comes to the kitchen to take a banana, he notices the fingernail I’ve drawn on it. He seems to notice me, suddenly, too.
He says, “Ruth.”
I say, “Dad.”
“I’m fine,” he tells me.
“I know,” I assure him.
“I told you I’m fine,” he repeats, annoyed. “Why don’t you go home?”
When Mom gets back later she says, “Howard, don’t be like this,” standing outside my father’s closed office door.
“Irascibility is common,” Dr. Lung had told us. “It is, unfortunately, unpredictable. There might be stretches of confusion, followed by days when he seems nearly back to normal.”
“I’m not hungry, Annie,” comes the reply.
She slips a pizza slice underneath the door, giving me a conspiratorial look as she does. It gets pulled in.
Alone at night in San Francisco, after Joel left me, awake with worry about something or other—like getting diabetes or having an embolism—after it was too late to call Grooms to describe to her my symptoms, I’d hear the building sigh, like it was disappointed. I’d hear my upstairs neighbor, Mr. Deforest, turning over in his bed. And then there were the sirens, the car alarms, the city noises.
Here it is so, so quiet.
January 12
Today a man calls the house and introduces himself as Theo, my father’s teaching assistant. I start to ask if he could please hold, when Theo interrupts and says, actually, it isn’t Howard he wants to talk to—he’s called hoping to talk to me.
He and a few other master’s students want to meet for a class, he tells me. It wouldn’t be a real, for-credit class, but Dad wouldn’t have to know that part. Theo normally took care of the administration, anyway. Everybody else would be in on it: the students wouldn’t get credit, of course, and they were fine with that. It would be a way for my father to continue teaching, stay occupied, keep his mind off, well, losing it.
“We could meet on campus, say, once a week,” Theo says. “Howard would continue teaching as usual. As for the administration—well, there’s no reason Levin or anybody else higher up has to know.”
“Hang on. So you’re suggesting that my dad teach a class”—I’m processing this slowly—“that isn’t real?”
“Except that he won’t know it’s not real.”
“We’d lie to him.”
“It won’t be a legitimate History Department class,” Theo says. “In all other ways, it’ll be a class. He’ll teach; we’ll learn. He wants to be teaching. That’s obvious to anyone.”
“Yeah,” I admit.
“None of this sounds easy for him, and trust me when I say we’d all like to help him out here.”
What’s the harm? is Theo’s argument.
I ask why the students would voluntarily attend a class that offers no credit.
“Because we all care about him,” he says. “Your dad’s a good teacher. And a good friend.”
Which shouldn’t come as a surprise, of course, but does.
To me, his being a good or bad teacher didn’t matter: what I remember are those afternoons Dad was in charge of Bonnie and me—those afternoons he lingered over his work, while we wanted so badly to be elsewhere. One more chapter, he would say, barely registering us, while we found ways to entertain ourselves. We’d harvest sour grass outside and chew on the stems; we played Crazy Eights in the one uncluttered corner of his office while the students stopped by, and discussed incomprehensible-to-us topics. I remember a lot of laughing; I remember wanting to be in on it. I stopped tagging along to campus when I started middle school. That’s when I was allowed—finally, it felt—to stay home to watch Linus.
“He means a great deal to us,” Theo reiterates.
Then Theo makes me take down his number. I don’t write it down the first time, but he asks me to repeat it back to him, and says “Ha!” when I can’t, so I fish a receipt from my purse and write it there.
January 16
I kept a pair of running shoes in my locker at the medical center. Whenever I grew weary—every other day, approximately—I’d eat a few Falafel Planet falafels and head to Kezar Stadium, and attempt to run myself into a euphoric state. It never worked, but I never gave up—I’d make like a hamster and run. If I was lucky I could run myself into a stupor, which was the next best thing.
Here I jog up and down the staircase, and count the flights like laps.
Eat, I try to communicate to the blue jay that’s hopping on the arm of our lawn chair. It is four hops away from the feeder, which I yesterday filled with sesame seeds, when it flies away.