I lurked around all night, listening in on my mom and Eli, half bored.
The first thing I heard that seemed to matter was my mom saying, “I could have worked harder.” At what? She was a pretty hard worker. Way more than me.
“I don’t know, sweetie. If he’d been there with you, you would have rubbed your hands together and blown it into something. You, you and your family romance.” I’d actually seen my mom rub her hands together. “You haven’t had the experience of being married to someone you got along with.”
But my parents did get along! I knew. I was there. I lived with them.
“You had that. Why weren’t you happy?”
“Jean’s like a sister to me. I haven’t had a life with a woman. It’s not just sex. It affects everything. Still, I’m the one who should be guilty. I knew before we married.”
“Why did you, then? Twenty-three is so young. I think of Miles.”
I perked to my name. She’d probably want me to marry Maude Stern, a hand-raising, butt-lifting-off-the-chair, call-on-me type. I would never marry Maude Stern.
“When I found out Jean wanted to get married, I thought she was pretty enough, smart enough. My mother knew I wasn’t in love with her. But I did it. I even proposed.”
“Did you get a ring?”
“No. Not then. Once, later, on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, she saw a ring she liked at a street vendor and said, ‘Buy this for me.’ It cost ten dollars.”
“I wouldn’t want Miles to marry someone he wasn’t in love with.”
“No. You want them to do it right the first time.”
I peeked around the corner. They were sitting on the floor, her hand on his ankle.
My mom shook me awake and gave me a mug of hot chocolate with coffee. I sipped; it was wild in my mouth. “Eli’s taking Jamie to the shelter. She wants you to go along.” I hadn’t even peed yet. My mom gave me two twenties. “Donate this. And throw some clothes in a backpack. Your parka. We’re going somewhere right after. I’ll bring toothbrushes.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. It’s a surprise. Eli said to bring warm clothes.”
I didn’t want to go anyplace. Why weren’t we staying home today to put up lights? I seemed to be the only one who cared about our lights, but I really did care!
It was still dark. At the shelter, I hosed the cages and blasted the animals’ bowls before filling them with new food. We squirted a green liquid in the water for their teeth as the sky lightened. “Your sister has an amazing rapport with animals,” a woman who worked there told me. Weird. Boop Two had a life away from us, apparently. Eli patted a whimpering dog, and it quieted. I guess he had good rapport, too.
I liked cleaning the cages, one by one, down the aisle. I got into it. Finally, I wound up at the shed in the far corner, where Eli stood over a cardboard box filled with straw. Inside, cats tangled together. He lifted one. “You poor thing. You been brave.”
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
“FeLV,” the woman who worked there answered.
“Cat leukemia,” Eli translated.
He handed me the warm throbbing thing and lifted out another. I held it. After a while, I gave it back and asked the woman for a different job. She fitted a sack of vitamin pellets into my arms for me to mix in with the dogs’ kibble. The shelter differentiated between three sizes of dogs. I started with big dogs and worked my way down. I had one more aisle to go when Eli tapped my shoulder.
I didn’t ask, but I knew that the cats were dead. “Where did you put them?”
He exhaled. “In that box. At the end of the day, they’ll probably incinerate the bodies.”
“They can’t get better?”
“It’s incurable. When I see this, at shelters, I just try to give them a good death.” What was it about this guy? I felt an attachment from the part of my chest that was where he’d been holding the cat. It was still so early the air felt thin. We washed our hands with disinfectant.
Outside, my mom and Boop One waited in the running car with the heat on.
“Where are we going?” I asked after I stopped recognizing turnoffs.
“Pine Mountain,” he said.
My sisters and I fell asleep, and when I half woke and heard my mom and Eli in the front, their voices sounded different from altitude. While we’d slept on one another’s bones, they’d driven into snow. A glance out the window showed mountains.
Eli finally parked in front of a shack where a bearded guy, dwarfed by the landscape, fitted us with boots and skis. Hats covered a Peg-Board wall, some fleece, some knit. We each got to pick out one, and Eli bought us gloves, too, working them onto our fingers. Then he gave us paper packets you unwrapped like candy bars and put into your socks to radiate heat. On our skis we followed the bearded guy in two grooves made from packed-down snow. It felt stiff, like walking on stilts. After a while, he said, “Arms opposing. You get the idea. Use your poles.” Awkward and graceful, like a bird with open wings, he turned around in an elastic rectangle and skied back toward his shack.
The Boops got the knack of it right away. Boop One tried to pass me. A very irritating person.
The world felt quiet. Snow slipped off pines onto other snow, but you registered that in the chest more than heard it. Eli’s skis crossed over each other, and he tripped. Boop One shot ahead, Boop Two scooting in behind her. I hadn’t fallen yet, but it was hard work heaving uphill or else terrifying going down too steeply. Eli landed again, and my mom’s ski caught on his. I got split like a V, rolled to the side, and then shoved up. The fresh snow stung at first, then melted cold and wet in my clothes.
Still, it was beautiful for hours. We saw a stiff owl, two families of deer, and comic rabbits tracking the drifts. We fell into a rhythm of numbness, pain, and occasional glory, absolutely alone. We each found a way to do it—the slide exhilarating, as in a dream—only Eli kept falling. He made jokes, brushed snow off, and snapped the toe clasps into place once more and started over again.
By the time the shack came into sight, he and my mom were far behind us. She’d slowed down for him. The bearded man took our skis back and, a few minutes later, passed us scrambled eggs on flimsy paper plates and then sweet chai lattes. He was making it all on a two-burner hot plate. It had just started to snow when my mom and Eli stomped in. Flakes stuck on Eli’s stubble. “Snow-flakes are hexagonally symmetric,” Boop Two said. “Like viruses. The symmetry, I mean.”
“How?” the Mims asked softly.
“I forget.”
“Dodecahedron. And how many symmetrical crystals are there?” my mother quizzed. We didn’t know. She and Eli took their chai lattes to go because we had a long drive. In front, they studied a folded-out map. Later, they shook us awake and told us we’d carry our stuff in a wheelbarrow. We followed them under enormous sycamores. We’d entered different weather. Now it was night cold but without the freeze in it. A cabin stood at the bottom of a hill, and Eli shoved the door open. We slept with just our pants off in tightly made cots that smelled cold while Eli pushed the wheelbarrow up to the car.
In the morning, they already had a fire going. Leaves of the forest waved outside windows in patches of sun. Eli stumbled in with an armful of branches and stuck marshmallows on the ends of the longest ones. He pulled a box of graham crackers and chocolate bars out of a grocery bag to make s’mores.
“For breakfast?” I said.
“It’s vacation,” he answered.
The Mims stood making coffee in the wood-paneled kitchen.
“You’re down with this?”
She smiled. Everything tilted.
We hiked (the Boops whining “Are we almost there?” every fifteen minutes), and Eli showed us things through his binoculars. Beaded ferns. Geometric moss on the trunk of a pine. He and the Mims began to talk about mathematical patterns; were they really present in nature or did we invent them?
I said, “I mean, they seem to be everywhere.”
“But our visua
l system creates illusions,” Eli said.
“Of a seamless world, for example,” the Mims continued. She said that because electrons are the exact same and interchangeable, the universe holds potential for incredible symmetry. Fractals are shapes that have detailed structures on all scales of magnification, like ferns, she said, and mountains.
“Symmetry’s a better illusion than God,” Eli said. “It’s elegant, deep, and general.”
They were talking mostly to each other. I heard my mother vow to become a bird-watcher. They said if everything worked out, they should really start going to church. Church! (What about those nuns and their fucking vows of poverty!)
“I’m so grateful,” she whispered. I wondered if religion was a result of love. That and brain mush.
Eventually, they took out pb and j sandwiches, wrapped in wax paper, and we ate by a waterfall. I felt blurry from not sleeping in my real bed. The cabin had just one bathroom. For number two, I needed comic books and a Boop-free zone.
I had no idea what time it was. Then my distracted gaze landed on a watch on Eli’s flat wrist. Was that the watch? “I like your watch,” I said.
“From your mother.” He looked at her. “I’ve never had a watch like this before.”
Sare had told her to give it to him, not me. All of a sudden, I thought Sare must have been the one who’d ratted about soup selling, too. Charlie was a traitor.
“You did Christmas presents already?” I said.
“What did he get you?” Boop One asked.
The Mims looked down. He hadn’t given her anything. I just knew.
“I sent, I sent a box that hasn’t arrived yet,” he said. “I’m glad my gift is kind of elaborate, too.” He said gift, no s. Did that mean there were no presents for us in the box he’d sent? When we returned to the cabin, we fell back onto our cots around the dwindling fire. Eli turned on the old-looking television, fiddled with the antenna, and switched channels until he found a movie starting. All About Eve. My mom made popcorn in a big pot; we heard it thumping against the lid. Miniature fireworks noise. When the movie finished, Eli suggested we take a drive to look at Christmas lights. He drove our car again, to a street lined with pine trees that must have been a hundred years old, their thick boughs draped with lights. My mom looked at me. Here, you have your lights, she meant, but even under this wattage and the dark canopy of fir, I still wanted our lights.
We ate at a Mexican restaurant where they served Mexican Coke in bottles. After, Eli said we could drive to the city to shop.
“What city?”
“Pasadena.”
“We’re near Pasadena?” I’d thought we were someplace remote. And Hector was supposed to be in Pasadena! His mom had a job planning a party there. I tried to call them, but the Mims’s cell phone had no reception. Eli drove us to a district called Old Town, and we walked on cobblestone streets, he and my mom bumping into each other on purpose. They veered us into a tiny bookstore, where we scattered in the aisles. Boop One found a collection of old Nancy Drew mysteries. Boop Two sat cross-legged on the dusty floor in an aisle of sheet music.
Eli seemed to be compiling a small stack of books.
“Do you have this?” he asked my mom, holding out an old hardback called The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.
“No,” the Mims said, “but you met him, right?”
Eli opened the book to show me a picture of an old man. “I knew him a little when he lived with Ron Graham.” They told me about the guy. He was the most published mathematician who’d ever lived. After his mother died, he was homeless. He traveled from one mathematician’s house to the next, carrying his belongings in a plastic garbage bag. He won prizes, and he gave away all the money. He put out contracts for whoever could solve certain problems. It turned out that both the Mims and Eli had sent money so that those contracts could still stay open after he died. He called God the Supreme Fascist and referred to children as “epsilons.” He was a drug addict—amphetamines (the Mims shot Eli a look when he said that). He collaborated with so many people that mathematicians assigned themselves an Erdos number according to whether they’d ever collaborated with him, or collaborated with anyone who’d collaborated with him. The Mims had an Erdos number of 3, because she knew Marge, who’d written a paper with someone who’d coauthored with Erdos. He had no interest in food, sex, or art. He didn’t bother with anything but math. He left ten notebooks when he died. He used to say that God kept a book of all the best proofs. “God’s proofs,” Eli said. “He’d arrive at Graham’s place with his pillowcase of clothes and say, ‘Is your brain open?’ ” Eli asked the Mims, “You know Graham, don’t you? They’re in San Diego now.”
A little bit later, at the counter, Eli showed me another book, called The Man Who Knew Infinity. This was about a guy who’d been a twenty-five-year-old uneducated clerk in India who wrote to the best living mathematician in the world in 1913. That guy was named Hardy, and he was at Cambridge. Hardy and one of his pals went out to lunch to study the Indian clerk’s letter; they thought he was either crazy or brilliant. They decided he was a genius and brought him to England. But the isolation from his family plus the work killed him within seven years. He was dead in his thirties. But for Hardy, the collaboration was the one truly romantic incident in his life.
Eli offered to buy it for me. I shrugged. I didn’t want a book.
Eli debated between the two hardbacks for Boop Two, but in the end settled on a used paperback called Letters to a Young Mathematician. I was surprised he didn’t buy her all three. In our family, neither parent stinted on books or music. Eli found a green hardback for the Mims called A House for Mr. Biswas.
He paid for it all, packing the twenty-six Nancy Drews in a box. After a trip to the car to put the books in the trunk, they found another store of old things. There, Eli plucked a set of German binoculars in a leather case from a jumbled shelf, and as I was wishing I’d spotted them first, he looped them over my head, saying, “You need a pair.” Later, I wondered about the fact that Eli had sent me Sherlock Holmes and bought me binoculars. Does everyone finally want to be caught? The Boops hated the smell of this store; they asked if they could go across the street to Patagonia. The Mims sent me along, and in a good mood from the binoculars, I said they could each pick out something from me. Boop One found a black fleece hoodie. Boop Two chose a birdcall. In line for the cash register, we started petting the fleece. I told Boop One to go get another for her sister. But the Santa Claus feeling froze when I saw the total. How much would you think two miniature sweatshirts plus a birdcall could cost? A fucking fortune was what. But, with my sisters watching, I handed over the last of my money.
Boop One skipped outside the thrift store. I didn’t see the Mims at first, and then I heard something near the back. “Are you the personal shopper?” someone asked. The Mims stood in front of a mirror in a dress like a dress in the old movie we’d seen. The store lady was kneeling on the linoleum with pins in her mouth. I lingered behind a rack of musty clothes. Eli draped his arms around our mom from the back. They looked at themselves in the mirror. I wasn’t used to seeing my mom look at herself.
She had never been beautiful before. But she was—there, then, in that mirror. And what my father had once called Eli—a less-good-looking version of himself—that seemed a little off now, too. My dad was best in profile, still. He was a great-looking man. You saw Eli’s handsomeness only in movement. “Wow,” he whispered, eyes stretching, looking at her in the mirror. “We’ll take it,” he said to the woman with pins in her mouth. “Merry Christmas.”
At the counter, the woman showed us a label in the dress’s collar. HATTIE CARNEGIE. “This was a thousand-dollar dress, once,” she said. Our great-grandmother Hart had worn thousand-dollar dresses during the Depression, we’d been told. The woman wrapped the dress in a long plastic bag, tying the end in a knot.
My mom’s phone finally worked, and I called my dad. My sisters huddled together, ready to leave, while I paced the brick stre
et, gossiping about the weekend’s releases and how they’d opened. Some things I said made my dad speed up. Questions about his work, about the studio executives who drove him crazy, unrumpled his voice and slowed him. I had him pausing now, for emphasis. My sisters kept staring at me. But this was a good talk, the first time I’d really figured out how to be with him on the phone. It was okay to make them wait. Then, as an afterthought, I called Hector. He turned out to be a mile away, where his mom was supervising the cleanup after a party for the Southern California Realtors Association. They invited us to come over.
We parked in front of a huge old wooden house. The night had turned colder. Both Boops wore their fleece. They looked good. They should, I thought, for that price. Crossing the wide lawn, Eli and my mom started singing. Horribly.
Eli was still the dork guy. He was turning her dorky, too.
I’m a-gonna wrap myself in paper.
I’m gonna daub my head with glue.
“I’ve never been to the Gamble House,” she said.
In an old-fashioned kitchen, Kat was supervising kids in aprons who were packing up plates. Both boys and girls had ponytails. About fifty glass cups of what looked like chocolate pudding waited next to a metal bowl of whipped cream.
We found Hector and Jules sitting on a huge staircase. Eli started explaining Japanese influences on the wood joining. My mom smiled a way I didn’t like. Hector and I lagged behind on the tour. In the big rooms the furniture looked spindly and uncomfortable. We ended up in the kitchen; Kat gave us each a chocolate pudding, with a cap of whipped cream.
My mother never seemed happier than on that day, eating chocolate pudding in the cold. She shivered and smiled. A mother’s happiness: something you recognize and then forget; it didn’t seem to matter much at the time, though it spread through our bodies. How did I know a moment like that was something I’d collect and later touch for consolation?
We waited while Kat checked doors and lights and turned down thermostats. We heard a train moan. When it had passed, Eli squinted and recited: