Louisa Meets Bear by Lisa Gornick Read Free Book Online Page B

rich. You buy us a hibachi. I learn how to grill eggplant brushed with olive oil.
    In August, we go to San Francisco even though at the last minute my father calls to say he is off to Argentina that week.
    â€œSomething’s come up,” my father says mysteriously.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI have to help a friend with some matters in Buenos Aires.”
    â€œA friend?”
    â€œWell,” my father says, “a lady friend. Her mother just died, and she needs to wrap up her financial affairs. It’s a big mess. I said I’d help her straighten it out.”
    It seems useless to complain. I did a lot of that with my aunt, my mother’s sister, when she first moved to Oakland and would take me or Corrine and me most Sundays to brunch. Enough that I now understand the complaints only confuse my father. Instead, I ask the lady friend’s name. “Juanita. She’s an urban anthropologist. She just published a book on the street children of Buenos Aires.”
    We stay at my father’s house. You are fascinated by your glimpses of him: the First Nations wood carvings he brought back from Alaska, the fossils from Mongolia, his study with floor-to-ceiling books and a library ladder. That there is no TV. Snooping around, I see women’s clothing in my father’s closet (bright silks, a size ten, bigger than I am) and a vial of an expensive eye cream on the medicine cabinet shelf.
    Although my father has left the house unchanged since my mother’s death, her presence has been blurred by the slow accretion of his clutter: papers piled on the dining room table, a beach chair stashed next to the sofa, cans stacked on the kitchen counter. Only their, his, bedroom feels the same—the sheer curtains, the rose-colored dhurrie, the white bedspread with the knotted bumps.
    We sleep in my father’s bed. It is a clear, cool night and the curtains billow in the breeze. My mother lingers near. I realize how little I’ve told you about her: only that I was nine when she died in a car accident, north of the city.
    You rub your nose across the top of my arm. “What are you thinking?” you ask.
    I hesitate, unsure if I want to open this door. “About my mother.”
    â€œWhat about her?”
    â€œRight then, when you asked, I was thinking about the day she died. Corrine was my after-school babysitter. She was thirteen.” I can see Corrine with her dirty-blond hair caught high in a ponytail. “My mother wanted to hire someone older but I begged for Corrine because she was so pretty and she talked to me about junior high and having boyfriends and the music she and her friends listened to.”
    You nuzzle my shoulder.
    â€œCorrine was showing me how to paint my toenails. Chinese-red. I remember the phone ringing and Corrine telling me to sit very still so I wouldn’t ruin the polish.”
    I study the hair on your chest, the way it fans out like a spray of water. Not until I was older, maybe thirteen myself and Corrine was no longer my babysitter, did she tell me that my father, weeping on the phone, had blurted out the news to her. “When she came back in, she took a cotton ball and wiped the red off my toes.”
    There’s an image that often comes to mind of my mother. It’s from a photo album that’s mostly filled with green-tinted pictures of me as a baby. A chubby bundle held high by various adults. Near the back of the album, though, there’s a photograph of my mother from the year before I was born. She’s crouched by a tree, her eyes raised toward the camera, an expression of full deliberateness on her still-childish face. Her hair is cut in a pageboy, swingy and shiny, her skirt encircling her in the crouch. In the look she gives the camera and my father, who says he took the picture, she is both coy and bold, as though saying to my father, I know you want me and I know you want me to act like your sweet girl. When Corrine and I