The Vinyl Princess (3 page)

Kit also handpicked the boy who delivered each of us our first kiss after rejecting several other candidates at the last second. I should probably also mention that we were eight and we each had to give him a dollar. I can’t remember a time when Kit didn’t have a boyfriend. I can’t remember a time when I did. Kit is handbags and high heels to my backpacks and Converse sneakers. Kit would never set foot on a skateboard, let alone consider it a mode of transportation, and I couldn’t live without mine.

In matters pertaining to music, however, Kit lets me lead and she does not judge. I could show up at her house with
The Best of the Partridge Family
under my arm and she’d say, “Cool. Let’s put it on.” Her knowledge of music runs deep and she has a small collection of rare picture-sleeve 45s, but she’s no match for me.

Kit is telling me all about the road trip she and her boyfriend, Niles, are planning for next summer. Niles is a bass player in a garage band called Auntie Depressant. They met when Niles came into the vintage store looking for stage clothes. Kit sold him a white shirt with ruffles on the cuffs and a pair of women’s leather capri pants. When I met Niles, I immediately pegged him as one of those guys who works hard to look a lot more dangerous than he is. He went to private school in the Oakland Hills, and his techno-geek parents paid for his private bass guitar lessons. He somehow never has any money and Kit ends up paying for almost everything. Admittedly, he’s adorable, and Kit loves him, so I’ve never shared my real feelings about him with her.

Kit and I have our distinct roles in this relationship. She is the outgoing boy magnet who always arrives with a good story about a boy, and I am the faithful, long-suffering best friend who listens to it and then offers up advice, pretending that I could possibly be qualified to do that.

Kit already has their route mapped out on a dog-eared road map of the U.S. she carries everywhere with her. They’re planning on stopping at every kitschy roadside attraction and every indie record store that they can find along the way. Kit’s been saving money for this trip for over a year now. I’m going to assume that Niles hasn’t saved a dime.

Kit starts to describe to me a record store on her road-trip itinerary, a place called Hot Poop in Walla Walla, Washington, that she found online this morning. It’s right next to a vintage-clothing store called Sunset Boulevard. I have a forkful of spinach in midair when he walks past the window. It’s him again. Two sightings in a day? Unprecedented. I drop my fork and look up at him. He sees me too. He has the most unusual eyes: pale blue-green but dark rimmed, like an Egyptian cat. Kit sees him too.

“Who is
that
?” she asks, abandoning the road-trip highlights.

I shrug. “I dunno. Probably a customer,” I say, embarrassed about my possible crush on a total stranger.

She cranes her neck to watch behind her as he disappears up the avenue. “Cute.”

She’s right. He is cute. I grin at Kit and dip my fork into the spinach again.

M
y mom and I live in an ancient low-slung house in the Elmwood District, seven and a half minutes from Bob & Bob’s by skateboard. This time of year the wisteria vines dangle the last of their lacy purple flowers through a trellis that hangs over a deep porch out front, where two old, sagging wicker chairs sit empty most of the time. We rarely sit out here, even though it looks pretty inviting. A glass pitcher of frosty lemonade and a basket of mending would look right at home on the little table between the chairs, but we’re not the Waltons; we’re the Westons, and half of us live somewhere else.

About a year ago, at yet another cocktail party featuring academic blowhards spouting off about something they read in a book or wrote in a book (and likely stole from another book), my mom was discussing her dissertation topic, Pushkin’s poetry, with a colleague from her PhD program when my dad turned to her and told her that he didn’t want to be married to her anymore. My mom reached for a cheese puff and asked him why not. He said that he didn’t think she completed him. My mom was mystified by this. She’d never really completed anything in her life. Half-finished crossword puzzles were scattered about the house, half-read books, half-read articles; piles of clothes that could be worn if they were ironed sat in a basket under the ironing board; half-eaten food filled the fridge; and her half-written dissertation sat in a jumbled pile next to her computer under a half-eaten apple. How on earth could she be expected to complete another human being if she’d never even finished a carton of yogurt?

My dad moved out shortly after that conversation and moved in with Kee Kee, who lives on a massive spread in Santa Cruz. I’m not sure if Kee Kee “completes” my dad, but she’s completely rich, so that probably helps. Kee Kee’s dad invented some sort of medical software that changed the world (he couldn’t have known how much it would change
my
world) and he bought Kee Kee a ranch, so now all she has to do is ride her very expensive Austrian horses all day and kick the help around. While we’re on the subject, why are rich girls who ride large animals always named after small dogs? Anyway, my dad hates horses, so he “dabbles” in real estate, a career he sort of fell into when he retired from playing drums in a band. Real estate offices in California are filled with ex–rock stars. They put on suits and pretend they know how to golf, but every now and then a tattoo will emerge from under a sleeve or a skull ring will show up on a finger or a roach clip will peek out of a car ashtray on the way to an open house.

Now my dad and I talk on the phone about things that never mattered when we lived under the same roof, like the weather and school. Sometimes he’ll drive to Berkeley and we’ll go somewhere stupid to eat. Ever since he moved out, my dad treats me like an appliance that he just pulled from a box and hasn’t read the manual for yet. He has no idea how to make it work. Sometimes he’ll try to inject Kee Kee into the conversation; like he’ll say, “Kee Kee thinks—” and I’ll say, “Whoa, stop right there; we both know Kee Kee doesn’t think.” And then he’ll sigh and say, “I wish you would try to get to know her.” And I’ll say, “Dad, she listens to Dave Matthews. It’s not gonna happen.”

I leap up the wide, sagging wooden steps to our house, passing Pierre on his way out. He pretends not to know me. Pierre is our cat, although I’m sure he doesn’t see it that way. Even as we were rescuing him from certain death at the animal shelter when he was a kitten, he seemed to have complete disdain for us. We decided that he must be French: hence the name.

I yank open the front door and drop my skateboard in the foyer next to a Chinese urn filled with umbrellas that my mom steals from restaurants. I smell exotic spices, which means Ravi is here. My mom and Ravi are sitting at the big French farm table in the dining room with mugs of chai in front of them. My mom bought this table after my dad moved his drum kit out of our dining room and into Kee Kee’s house. The dining room had never actually been used for dining before, and we left it empty for a long time, detouring around the big empty space, not sure how to deal with it. The table arrived one afternoon but we didn’t actually sit down at it for months. We stood next to it and looked at it a lot, running our hands along the smooth grain of the old wood. Pierre liked to groom himself on it and stretch out in the afternoon sun. Then my mom came home with two old wooden chairs she found at a garage sale and we started eating the occasional meal sitting at it instead of cross-legged on the kitchen counter or standing over the sink or lying in the bathtub. Now the table is a part of us. We like it. It’s amazing how much crap you can put on a table and still find room to eat. I often wonder where we put stuff before the table appeared.

Ravi is a professor of literature at UC Berkeley. He’s writing a book about Alexander Solzhenitsyn and my mom is his research assistant. Ravi is the classic rumpled-professor stereotype. He wears a threadbare tweed jacket that smells of wet wool and the same corduroy pants year-round. His salt-and-pepper hair falls into little curls at his collar, and his disheveled beard often has crumbs of food in it. He grew up in New Delhi but he’s British educated, so even though he looks rumpled, he’s always unnecessarily formal. He nods at me when I walk in the door and his dark, expressive eyes wrinkle into a smile.

“Miss Allie. How are you today?”

“I’m good, Ravi, how about you?”

“I’m very good today,” he says, pulling strips of fruit leather off a roll. “Your mother has just given me this delicious sweet snack made from apricots.”

My mom rolls her eyes at me over her laptop computer. Ravi travels through his life somewhat oblivious to any form of pop culture, but when you introduce him to something new, he’s all over it. You have to appreciate that naive enthusiasm.

Ravi spends a lot of time over here because his apartment is teensy, and once my dad left and the massive table arrived, it seemed to make more sense that they work from here. Ravi has written four books and he’s won all kinds of literary awards, but it seems to make no difference to the way he lives his life. He doesn’t seem to need much to make him happy. He reads books almost every waking moment of his life, and I don’t think he has a lot of friends outside his little academic world. My mom likes working for Ravi because she can poach a lot of the research she does for him for her own half-finished dissertation. I also think she likes Ravi. He’s a nice person in a bumbling, neurotic sort of way. He’s like an East Indian version of Woody Allen.

“Oh, and, Miss Allie?” he remarks. “Thank you for the Tchaikovsky. You’re right: It’s outstanding, the finest recording of the unfinished symphony that I’ve ever heard. I don’t have any idea how I’ve lived so long without it in my collection.”

“You’re welcome, Ravi.”

“There’s tea on the stove,” says my mom.

“Thanks.” I wander into the kitchen. The pot of chai sits on the gas. My mom buys the spices in Little India on University Avenue and then she slow-cooks it with the milk and sugar on the stove like they do in India. Ravi taught her how to do this and to my mom it’s culinary quantum physics. It’s the only thing my mom knows how to cook. I take a mug from the cupboard and pour the fragrant steaming milk into it. I hold it up to my face and inhale. It’s glorious, nothing at all like Starbucks.

I balance the mug on a stack of LPs I “borrowed” from Bob & Bob’s and make my way upstairs, stopping in front of Suki’s door. I press my ear against it and listen for signs of life, a habit I developed soon after she moved in. When my dad moved out, my mom decided to rent out his old office to a student. We cleaned it up and painted the walls a soft green. My mom put an ad in with student housing and Suki arrived on our doorstep the next day. She looked to weigh about ninety pounds soaking wet, and she really was soaking wet. It was pouring rain and she had no raincoat or umbrella. We showed her the room, she signed the lease, and my mom handed her a stolen umbrella on the way out.

She moved in a week later with her meager belongings and, although she shares a bathroom and the kitchen with us, we never see or hear her. We’ve never even heard her so much as flush the toilet. Curiosity got the better of us one day and we broke into her room while she was at school. My mom insisted that it isn’t technically a break-in if you have a key and you suspect foul play. I’m not sure what she meant by
foul play
. Someone who never makes a peep would seem like the opposite of foul to me. I expected something monastic, and it was rather spare, but Suki had everything she needed in that tiny room: A hot plate and packets of miso soup and green tea were neatly laid out on an empty suitcase on the floor. A tiny desk with her computer and a small collection of books sat up against the only window, and a tidily made futon was rolled out on the floor with a clock next to it. A plain wood-framed mirror hung on the wall with a snapshot of a smiling Japanese family tucked into its frame. Her clothes were lined up in a neat row in the closet. We closed the door and felt incredibly guilty for being such busybodies. We accepted Suki’s ghostliness after that, just as she seemed to accept our tendency to shout at each other and play weird music at all hours.

I carry the chai into my room and set it down on the desk next to the chaotic jumble of wires and components that I call my stereo system. I suppose that
system
might not be the right word. None of my pieces came from the same place or even the same era. I have an ancient Technics turntable. I prefer it to the one I grudgingly got recently with a USB plug for making mixes. I have a newish Sony CD player, four Infinity speakers I inherited from my dad, a set of enormous headphones that look like the Professor from
Gilligan’s Island
made them out of coconut shells, and a Pioneer amp that looks very mid-eighties to me that I bought at a garage sale for ten bucks. It’s a mess to the naked eye but, after years of my tweaking and moving and adjusting, the sound quality is finally magnificent. Two entire walls of my room are lined with wooden cases filled with vinyl LPs, a collection that consumes my thoughts.

I flip through the stack of LPs from Bob’s and decide on a European import of David Bowie
—Young Americans
. I slide the vinyl LP out of its jacket, holding it with my fingertips. I love the look of vinyl, the smell of it, the tiny crackles you hear before the song starts. I place it on the turntable, click on my amp and lower the diamond needle on the first song. The honky-tonk piano and sax intro to “Young Americans,” possibly—no, definitely—one of the most amazing songs ever recorded, starts up. I arrange myself on my bed with the album cover and my mug. I sip the chai and lie there watching Bowie watching me in all his airbrushed, androgynous perfection. Cigarette smoke curls around his painted fingernails. He dares me not to fall in love. I close my eyes and listen.

As I’m flipping the record over to the B side I hear my mom saying good-bye to Ravi at the front door. She comes up the stairs and leans far enough into my room to lower the volume on my stereo.

“Hey, I’ve got that thing tonight,” she says, running her fingers through her long brown hair and letting it fall onto her shoulders. She looks tired. “I think I’ll wear my Nicole Miller.”

“Good. I like that dress.” I smile at her.

“Would you mind taking your sneakers off the bed? That’s gross.”

I kick one Converse onto the floor and then the other; they land with a clunk on the rag rug next to the bed.

My mom has recently started roaming the vast and perilous sea of love known as internet dating, searching for her intellectual equal. When it comes to men, my mom’s at a bit of a loss. She fell in love with my dad when she was nineteen. He was drumming in a band called Fool’s Gold, a retro-Byrdsy, vocally heavy group. They sounded a bit like the Jayhawks. My mom was in the first row, a pretty college girl with a tan and a wide smile. My dad was smitten. Now, at forty-two, my mom says she refuses to give up on men just because Dad turned out to be a huge disappointment. She’s taken a sort of “someday my prince will come” attitude to surfing for love, and I hate to discourage her, but I just don’t think it works that way. My mom’s already been on two dates with toads. The first one was with a guy who listed reading and opera as two of his interests. He made a reservation at Chez Panisse for dinner and my mom ran around like a schoolgirl getting ready for her prom, trying on every piece of clothing she owns. She was home two hours later. Jeff didn’t read much beyond the sports page and the backs of cereal boxes, and he’d never actually been to the opera. He was quick to mention that he did write a tax-deductible check to the San Francisco Opera every year on behalf of his business, which had something to do with bilking retirees out of their retirement money. Turns out he was getting his sister-in-law to respond to my mom’s emails because he wasn’t much of a writer (duh). He snapped his fingers at the waitress at Chez Panisse and that was it for my mom. She pretended to have a migraine and excused herself. She was back from the second date even faster, looking pale, and she wouldn’t talk about that one. Now she asks for IQ scores. She’s not leaving the house for anything less than one twenty-five. For one forty, she’ll even shave her legs. Tonight’s date is a civil engineer, a freshly divorced transplant from the Midwest with an IQ of a hundred and twenty-eight, or so he says. Who wouldn’t lie about their IQ score? And besides, smart doesn’t always mean nice.

Mom reappears in my doorway in the dress, a simple black sleeveless thing that makes her look like the opposite of who she is. She turns around and shows me the back.

“How does my butt look?”

“Good. You might want to consider a thong, though; you have VPL.”

“VPL?”

“Visible panty line.”

She moves to a mirror on top of my bureau and cranes her head around, straining to catch a glimpse of her butt.

“I can’t wear one of those things. They’re like medieval torture devices. Why am I supposed to look like I don’t wear underpants? Wouldn’t a man assume that I have underwear on under this?”

I shrug. “I dunno. It’s complicated.”