“It’s a false choice. You’re here because your parents got married and had you. Nothing you think or feel could change that. One thing I know for certain is that your parents love you very much. Neither of them, I guarantee it, would trade you in for a different life.”
We passed by the Balboa Theatre, which was having a special showing of The Matrix trilogy, so we talked about that for a few minutes. As a project for her textiles class, Isobel said, she once designed a long black coat based on the one Neo wears. I was struck by the incongruity of Isobel; she seemed to have the knowledge and vocabulary and abilities of a person twice her age, but her understanding of human behavior, the real world, basic interactions, seemed to be somewhere slightly below her age range. I’ve seen this a lot lately. Kids are learning faster and faster about more and more, but their understanding of themselves and those around them seems to be developing even slower than when I was a kid. My colleagues often blame this on smartphones and videogames, but I’m not sure that’s it.
“Here we are,” I announced. “Chino’s. Best burritos in the Richmond. What’ll you have?”
“I’ll order,” she decided, and she stepped up to the counter and confidently ordered a burrito with carne asada, rice, no beans, and salsa verde—all in Spanish, like a true San Francisco kid. I ordered the same, plus chips and guacamole, and grabbed a couple of Fantas from the fridge.
“I looked up your wife on YouTube,” Isobel said, twisting the top off her Fanta. “I watched like four entire concerts from ten years ago. She is so freaking cool.”
“Yes,” I said, “she is.” I like to be reminded of this. I didn’t know Alice ten years ago, when she was making her way up in the music world, playing shows most nights of the week, touring all over the West Coast. She wasn’t huge, she wasn’t famous in the traditional sense, but she did have a following, people who couldn’t wait for her next album, who’d drop whatever was on their schedule to go see her band play at Bottom of the Hill or open up for someone bigger at the Fillmore. She even had groupies—guys, mostly—who’d follow her from show to show and make a point of talking to her afterward, so nervous in her presence that they’d start to sweat and stutter. She’s told me she doesn’t miss the groupies, who always scared her a little, but she misses some of the other stuff. Mostly the music itself. These days, I worry that part of her is slowly getting buried under endless days and nights of legal work and corporate conversations.
“Her lyrics are brilliant,” Isobel said. “Everything about her is brilliant. I was looking at her makeup, and all I was thinking was, why am I such a loser? Why can’t I do my makeup like that?”
“A: You most definitely are not a loser. B: I’m sure you could if you wanted to.”
Isobel was staring at me. “If I come over this weekend and make breakfast for you and your wife, do you think she’d teach me some of her makeup tricks?”
“Sure,” I said, surprised.
The guy called our number and I grabbed our burritos. We took a seat by the window.
“I’m a really good cook,” Isobel said, folding back the foil on her burrito. “I make some seriously great French toast.”
I scooped up some guacamole with a chip. “Alice does love French toast.”
Between bites of her burrito, she told me she’d spent the previous night on Ocean Beach with a surfer named Goofy and a bunch of people from Bakersfield. “It was freezing. I curled up with some smelly guy named DK. He was wearing stupid puka shells, but I was just so freaking cold.”
“That doesn’t sound like fun to me,” I said. “And it doesn’t sound particularly safe.”
“It was fun at first, and then it wasn’t. Everybody was stoned except me. But my phone was dead. My mom recently switched us to a new cell plan, we got new numbers. I haven’t memorized them yet, so I couldn’t even borrow someone’s phone and call my parents. I even thought about walking to the Safeway, but that seemed really dangerous. A lot of creeps hang out around Ocean Beach at night. When I found a coffee shop this morning to plug in my phone, there were a bunch of messages, and I didn’t know what to do.”
I thought of Isobel huddled on the beach, unable to call anyone to pick her up, and my heart ached for her. I guess that’s what I mean when I say kids seem a little younger these days. Back in my day, you memorized your phone number and your address before your first day of kindergarten.
“You know, you really need to go home,” I said. “If not for you, then for your parents. Maybe they don’t communicate as well as they should, but you know they love you. Maybe you don’t want to hear this, but they’re going through a tough time now too. You’re certainly old enough to understand that parents are just regular adults, with regular adult problems that don’t always revolve around their kids.”
Isobel went to work on the tinfoil, meticulously folding it into smaller and smaller squares.
“I remember the first life lesson I learned,” I ventured. For all their eye rolling and disdain, teenagers actually depend on adults having more life experience than they do, more wisdom. That’s why it shatters their world when adults don’t behave well, when they let their flaws and mistakes hang out like dirty laundry.
“Life lesson?”
“You know, something real, something that strikes a chord and sticks with you.”
“Okay,” she said, sounding interested.
“I won’t waste your time with the specifics, but let’s just say I was fifteen, things were bad for a few different reasons. I’d messed things up, and I just wanted to disappear. I was wandering around town, trying to figure out what to do, and I ran into my English teacher out at the Camera Obscura. It was so weird seeing him out of context. He was alone. He was in jeans and a T-shirt, not his usual coat-and-tie thing. He was clearly in a funk, nothing like the even, consistent teacher I’d come to know, or at least thought I knew.
“Anyway, when I texted you this morning, I was thinking of him. The day I ran into him, he must’ve been able to tell right off that I was in a bad way too. He asked if he could buy me a cup of hot chocolate.”
“Sounds familiar,” Isobel said, smiling.
“Long story short, I told him my troubles, and he didn’t give me a lecture or anything. He didn’t make me feel bad about the mistakes I’d made. He just looked at me and said, ‘You know, sometimes you just have to walk back across that burning bridge.’ That was it. When I saw him the following Monday, he didn’t say anything about our conversation. He just asked, ‘Did you make it across that burning bridge?’ And when I said yes, he just gave me a nod and said, ‘Me too.’ That was it, but I remember it more than anything else I learned in high school.”
As we walked back in the direction of my office, my cell rang. “That’s my mother, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Okay,” she said, “make you a deal. If your wife promises to teach me makeup tricks this weekend, I’ll go home.”
“Deal,” I agreed, “but you really have to give your parents a chance.”
“I’ll try.”