tortilla chips kept closed with an ancient rubber band, the kind that my dad had around his file folders when they got thick. I couldn’t bring myself to take that rubber band off. It was stretched out and brittle, and if it broke, I’d have to go through the drawer under the telephone in the kitchen where all the rubber bands, binder clips, and freebie pens ended up. The junk of life, the stuff you think you’re going to organize one day. The very thought of the drawer made me feel unstable. Disturbing anything that was his felt dangerous. So, I kept the door to the pantry shut and filled my time with going to the grocery store. It was, at least, a way to force myself to shower, and because of the distances in this city, a fantastic way of killing time. Some days, I made sure to leave the house when the schools let out, and I’d take the road that always got clogged with moms and minivans so I could sit in traffic, the sun in my face, the radio on, and wait for a flash of how things used to be.
When I’d moved to my apartment in the city, I’d taken what I needed and tossed all the things I didn’t, so my childhood bedroom didn’t have much in it. I borrowed my mother’s clothes: capri pants, leather sandals, and a twinset. The door to my father’s closet was closed, and only once did I slide the door open a crack and sniff. The air was stale but thick with him, and I thought I might be sick. I shut the door.
I would let my long hair air dry in the wind as I drove those miles to the shopping mall, with the windows rolled down. Except for my tangled hair, I looked like every mom around. My mother’s clothes smelled of carnal white florals. And sometimes I saw her feet in the coral shoes, her legs in the pale-blue trousers, which were just shy of being too tight on me. As my mother liked to point out, I’d inherited my father’s bones. It made me think she was disappointed in me, but the feeling was mutual. I might have thick bones, but what kind of life had she given in to?
I would push the cart around the grocery store and keep my sunglasses on. I wanted something between me and the world, a different surface for the world to interact with, so I could be left to my sadness. Not only sadness but a poisoned feeling, like there was something wrong with the groundwater and I had to keep it away from my skin. I hoped I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew. In a community as small as ours, anyone I went to school with would know me by my walk, the back of my ear.
Neither my mother nor I had it in us to cook. Our freezer had been full of casseroles that had been dropped off at our house like offerings to an angry god, but this had now stopped, as though there were an expiration date on sympathy. I took the end of these gestures as a judgment: the first swell of grief should have passed by now, the absent dishes seemed to say. From the deli counter, I bought concoctions for which my dad used the umbrella term ‘salad’ and that never seemed to spoil. Foods like those the caterer had brought for the barbecue, as if by stocking the fridge just so, I could live that day again. This time he wouldn’t fall.
If the counter was out of potato salad, my throat would close up and my sinuses would swell. I’d go straight to the checkout, grab a roll of mints and crunch my way through the packet, the menthol clearing my nasal passages. Even in those fits of despair, there was value in my shopping routine. When our pantry and fridge were full, I still did my rounds of the aisles. My mother was either asleep, busy with the people who administrate death, or on the phone with relatives overseas. The one time she handed me the phone, I could just about manage to speak German to my cousin. My cousin and I didn’t know each other well so our exchange was short, dutiful, and polite. My shopping routine gave me something of my own in those weeks. And it was during these trips, as I pulled in and out of our driveway, that I began to notice the men.
Initially, I thought the men were one man in particular: the old neighbour across the street, a retired longshoreman who split his time between Alaska and Hawaii. But I didn’t recognize him. Maybe it was a brother or a cousin. Workmen, I thought one day when there was a truck outside packed with lumber and shopping bags from the home improvement store. There was a man my father’s age with a ponytail who carried the lumber in, and a petite man who walked with a self-conscious shuffle. The first time I saw the builder’s car on the curb outside the neighbour’s house, I parked on our driveway at an angle that allowed me to watch him in my rear-view mirror. He did things that Dad used to do: home improvement projects that involved tarp, tools, plants, and wood. He left orange buckets filled with gloves and paint rollers on the driveway, which the smaller man would rearrange behind the pygmy palms flanking the entryway, so the mess was less visible from the street. Surely, I thought, there must have been more to my father than home improvement, but every attempt at memory felt contrived. My memories could have been the memory of many dads, I thought. Had I already forgotten what had made him mine? One day when she found me crying, Blanca held me and told me that Mr. Jack was a good man, he worked hard and loved his family very much. In that moment, her words were everything, but when I repeated them to myself they were just other words. I watched the builder and the petite man install a trellis at the front of the house, and together they planted jasmine and honeysuckle. The next day the builder and his truck were gone. The front door was open, and I heard hammering and drilling and the drone of a vacuum cleaner. One day, as I was driving off, I thought I saw the petite man wave.
I assumed the hybrid car in the driveway belonged to him, but I hadn’t seen anyone driving it, though I did see other cars and other men. Their comings and goings caused an uncommon amount of traffic for our street, but it was really only noticeable if you spent as much time staring at the street as I did. The more strange cars I saw, the more I kept watch. The men flowed into the house. I imagined them accumulating there, like fish attracted by the algae and other life forms found on wharf pilings. A house crowded with men who built, carried file folders, made phone calls, fell asleep to the Weather Channel. What gravity had drawn these men here, what had tugged at their souls? I would catch myself thinking that my daddy would soon be drawn here, too. I looked for him in every man who came to the neighbour’s door and found him every time: the waves had turned him old, or young, or sometimes bald. The depths of the ocean had compacted him. The moon’s pull had stretched him long, and there he was, transformed, knocking at my neighbour’s door. I thought about the moon at work on the tides, and I wished for its gravity to remake me too as I drove across the peninsula. When I parked at the shopping mall, I’d catch my reflection in the mirror, disappointed it was still me. I searched my image for his bones, but all I saw were my mother’s keen eyes, her disappointment with our life.
I sat on the benches and watched mothers pick up birthday cakes from the baker my mother used, children being ferried to and from karate, sitting with nannies at the ice-cream parlour doing homework, mothers clutching yoga mats and coffees, fumbling with their handbags as the sun pounded the hoods of their polished cars. I watched other women whose lives were not mine. Sometimes I saw older girls I remembered from school, married with kids and running errands. I remembered how hard they’d tried to get into college, how focused they were on achieving. Girls who’d expended all that energy just to end up right back here. Look how they fit in. Theirs was the life that had been mine for the taking. I had my apartment and a life up in the city, almost an hour’s drive away, but seeing them, even that didn’t seem like enough distance, because here I was again. I never said hi.
Toward the end of June I spotted a flyer from the community art centre on the noticeboard at the grocery store. It was pinned near want ads for dog-walkers, cleaners, and people offering bodywork, horse-back riding, and Mandarin lessons. The thought of interacting with kids or dogs or families drove me to tears. I wouldn’t be able to control my tongue, and yet I didn’t want to talk about my father. I knew what words could conjure, and I wasn’t ready to be a fatherless child. But seeing that familiar logo made me smile. Ana and I had taken drawing classes there, sometimes with our mothers, and those were happy times. The art centre was looking for models. The pay was good, but not like the poker party: it was regular-pay good. I needed to do more than shopping and liked the idea of having a job where I didn’t have to say a word.
THE MODEL FOR THE SCULPTING workshop had cancelled her bookings last minute, so I had a gig for the next month if I wanted one, Fumiko, the instructor, told me on the phone. The students had already built their armatures and needed a female figure to work from. All I had to do was show up five minutes before class and bring a robe. On Wednesday evening, I drove to the top of the peninsula. I took my place on the model stand, took Fumiko’s instruction, and dropped my robe