I’d grown up as an only child with siblings. It’s complicated; I’d need poster-size paper and a Sharpie to explain it all. But in briefest terms I am the only child of my two parents, both of whom went on to marry other people who already had kids of their own, and then to have kids with those people.
During my earliest years it was, on a daily basis, just me and my mom, an intrepid team of two. My dad was a weekend dad. A loving dad, but a distracted dad. A dad who remarried when I was six, to a woman who had three young children. Suddenly, every other weekend, I was one of four kids, and, then, with the birth of my sister, one of five. Partly it was fun. At last, other small people! My dad, in a last grasp at bachelorhood, kept his little red Karmann Ghia, from which our newly minted family poured out like clowns.
But mostly I did not like it at my dad’s; it was chaotic and multispoked and no longer revolved around me. In one year my dad went from part-time parenting one low-key kid to full-time parenting a cabal of kids, several of whom openly resented him. Under stress he turned, periodically, into the kind of tyrannizing father I’d only encountered on TV. My dad, I saw, was too dazed by the turbulence in his own life to care about or respond to the turbulence in mine.
Life with my mom was equally unpredictable. Though it looked like a buddy movie starring a plucky, pretty single mom and her pigtailed sidekick, it also starred a rotating cast of boyfriends, not all of them well-meaning. When I was sixteen, and she was thirty-seven, she finally remarried. She was pregnant and in love with a man who, at month eight of her pregnancy, became so enraged by something she’d said that he badly bruised her right arm, shoulder to elbow.
One afternoon I came down the hill after walking the fire trails to piercing screams, the kind of screams people produce when they are under the impression that their life is in danger. As I began to run down the driveway, my mom tore past me in the car. “He’s crazy,” she said through the car window, “really crazy.” And kept driving. I turned and walked back up the hill, back to the fire trails.
Later, from a pay phone, I’d called Cassie. We were both familiar with domestic drama of one kind or another. She came for me, as she always did, in her teal blue Mazda, circa 1970, with the white rag top. Her parents were on the verge of a divorce, but they did not fight loud. And their house was soothingly full of her mother’s sculpture, oblique figures in alabaster. A good place to wait out any storm.
Except this storm had no definite end.
When my brother Evan was born, I stared at him through the window of the nursery at UCSF, crying. I must have cried for a long time because a nurse came by and said something to soothe me. I tried to tell her that these were tears of joy, which they were. But they were also tears of frustration, and shock, and an annihilating impotence; my mom was going to keep this man around. In fact, she was going to have another son with him, my brother Dylan, just a few years later. I couldn’t imagine choosing a violent man to father my child. But then her own father had been violent both professionally (he was a boxer and a wrestler) and domestically, and so the circle goes.
My family of birth—extending outward from my two parents in a complex web of attachments—contained multiple fissures, outlying siblings, half-attached parents, unclear rules, an abundance of love, but also true harm. Family life with a father, as created by each of my parents, looked at best unappealing and at worst outright dangerous.
The calmest and easiest years of my childhood were early ones, those years that count most and shout the loudest, when I lived in a kid/mom dyad. That was my map, and consulting my map, I couldn’t figure out where Brian fit, much less whether I could trust him.
While I’d lollygagged along, Lulu had dashed off to join the two black labs on the adjacent hilltop. The baby and I trudged after her. As we watched Lulu play, Gracie squealed again. I kissed her head; she grasped two of my fingers and squeezed. Not a reflexive squeeze, an intentional one. “You are mine,” her squeeze said. “I couldn’t agree more,” I said. But our world was insular, an airtight system of singular authority. And too familiar. I’d already lived this story from the role of the little girl.
I wanted to know how it felt to be a family of three, two stable adults with a child between them. Maybe I would fail, maybe I would not be able to forgive Brian, or maybe unconscious motives I couldn’t envision from the top of this hill would derail us. Maybe Brian’s nature was not roomy enough to accommodate change on this scale. Maybe mine wasn’t either. But at least this would be a new plot, something beyond mom-and-girl versus world. It held the potential for being a surprising life, a life that was the product, the gift, of multiple imaginations.
I started back down the hill. What was the worst that could happen? Something bad, I thought. The worst, from what I knew of fathers and father figures. Unbearable. But maybe that wasn’t Brian. He was reactive and selfish when cornered. But who wasn’t? He was not like the fathers I grew up with. Not dangerous in the ways I feared. He was in good faith. And he was smart, kind, funny. The trifecta of marriage material. And Jewish! Jewish was a bonus.
Lulu was trotting along beside us, sniffing the perimeter for anything untoward. I kissed Gracie’s nose, cold from the night air. “Do you have a general position on fathers?” She pulled my hair. Affectionately.
I took out my cell. “Okeydoke,” I said when Brian answered. “You can come over.”
By the time we reached the top of our street, Brian was leaning against my mom’s mailbox, holding Proust. When he and Gracie spotted each other, he broke into a grin and she kicked her feet. At least these two were unambivalent.
“Hi, Gracie,” he said. He leaned in and kissed her cheek, leaned in further and kissed mine. In the studio we put Gracie to sleep in her bassinet downstairs and went up to the loft. “It won’t be long until we hear from her,” I said. “She’s still waking up every few hours.”
“That sounds nice,” Brian said. “I’d like to hear what she sounds like at all hours of the day.”
“You say that now, but it’s not really that fun to pull yourself out of REM and fumble down the ladder.”
“Actually, that sounds fantastically fun.”
We lay down side by side in my loft bed. Brian lifted my hair away from my face. I put my hand into his hair; I loved its texture. It was wavy, coarse, athletic, outdoorsy hair, antithetical to the rest of him. Hair I’d wanted to sink my hands into, even before we’d spoken.
“Salt-and-pepper hair,” I said.
“I think the color you’re looking for is brown,” Brian said.
“It’s salt-and-pepper, and it’s outstanding. No intellectual deserves hair like this.”
“You’re my kind of gal.”
“What kind is that?”
“The you kind.”
“That’s circular logic.”
“I know,” Brian said, “all roads lead to this.” He ran his fingers up my throat, to my lips.