Hello, girls. One of you want to ride in front?
We shook our heads. It wasn’t safe, everyone knew that except him.
How about something to eat? We’ve got time before your class.
We don’t eat before ballet.
I can’t do anything right with you two, can I?
We shook our heads, and he laughed and began to drive. But when he pulled up in front of the strip mall where the ballet studio was, he turned around and peered at us in the backseat.
I’m your father. You understand that, don’t you?
We nodded in stony unison.
That’s not nothing. That means something. He searched our cold eyes. You don’t like me. Why?
It was not a rhetorical question. He was curious, awaiting a reply.
We looked at our father closely for perhaps the first time: his weathered surfer’s tan and longish blond hair, his crooked front teeth. He watched us watch him, and then he laughed.
How would you know? You’re just two little kids.
* * *
Some girls might have adored a father who came along occasionally in a showy car—pined for him, tried to be pretty for him and distract him from his girlfriends who were closer to their age than his; and ultimately become the playthings of other men with similar tastes. That’s roughly how it went with our three older half sisters, Charlene, Roxy, and Kiki. Roxy was the one we idolized as little girls: Lithe and kinetic, cast in dozens of music videos, she’d achieved such notoriety by age seventeen that you could hardly fathom what kind of future it was all prelude to. But it turned out to be prelude to almost nothing: Roxy’s promise was her main act. She ended up on methadone, with hepatitis C. Eventually only we could still see the flickering specter of her young self, flashing and bird-featured, like an antic ghost haunting a tumbledown mansion. The mannerisms of heroin, the dull eyes and sleepy movements, became her mannerisms. The old Roxy was invisible to everyone but us.
* * *
One day after ballet, our father told us that we weren’t going straight home.
We glowered. Does Mommy know?
Of course your mother knows. What do you think I am, a kidnapper?
He drove grimly, our lack of enthusiasm clearly needling him. We played rock paper scissors in the backseat and pretended he wasn’t there.
Hey. Try looking around for a change.
We were driving along a cliff, the ocean shivering enormously below. It seemed a different world from the parched flat one we inhabited with our mother, full of glittering cars in broiling asphalt lots.
Eventually, we descended the cliff and pulled into the driveway of a house with tiled roofs and magenta flowers overflowing its walls. There were no other houses around it. Rock and roll crashed from inside the house, but our father walked us straight past it to a beach whose fine white sand was different from Venice Beach, where our mother often took us on Sunday afternoons.
Where are the people?
It’s a private beach. We’re the only ones who can be here.
Is it yours?
Yes, it’s mine. Go ahead. Run around. Have some fun.
We stood watching him.
Come on. Play.
When we failed to move, he said, I’ve never seen a pair of kids who wouldn’t play.
It’s your beach.
I’m your father. My beach is your beach.
We like beaches with people.
You’re very tough, you two. Does your mother ever tell you that?
We shook our heads.