Ah. So I’m seeing the real you. The real you, plural.
No, she is.
She may think so. But I know better.
Visibly heartened by this notion, he unbuttoned his Hawaiian shirt. Our father wore shorts year-round, day and night, but we’d never seen him bare-chested. It turned out that today—maybe always—his shorts were actually swim trunks.
C’mon, kiddos, he said, taking our hands and trotting us over the powdery sand toward the sea.
We don’t have bathing suits!
You’re wearing leotards. That’s the same thing.
It was true. We each wore a sleeveless Danskin with an elastic-waisted ballet skirt pulled over it, and the soft leather ballet slippers we’d gotten for Christmas.
Wait! We need to take off our skirts!
He paused while we slid them off and folded them neatly on top of our ballet slippers: two little piles in the blinding white.
I like that. The way you take good care of your things.
We stepped into the shimmering water with our father. The absence of a crowd, of music playing on boom boxes, of roller skaters and dogs and cigarette butts and Popsicle sticks buried in the sand, made it seem like an imaginary beach.
We swam with our father. We were seven and eight years old, and we remembered that swim as the first nice time we ever had with him.
* * *
The music had stopped by the time he brought us inside his house, which was big and airy with warm tile floors and ceiling fans slowly spinning and bright flowers in vases and a swimming pool in the middle of everything. We had lived in that house, which might have been why we felt comfortable there, despite its grandeur. A maid showed us how to work the fancy shower and gave us huge fluffy towels to dry off with. We kept the towels around us while our Danskins dried in the dryer.
Tell me when you’re dressed, our father called from outside the bathroom door. Only after we chanted, “We a-are!” did he open it.
On the drive home, we looked out over the cliff at a dusty orange sunset. We felt fresh and clean and enchanted, like we were returning from a land in a fairy tale.
Down below, where our apartment was, it already seemed to be night. Our mother was waiting for us outside. Gosh, you’re even later than I thought! she said.
We ran to her and threw our arms around her waist. We missed you! We went to the beach!
Our father stood in the shadows until we remembered to turn and say goodbye.
I’d like to spend more time with them, he said.
* * *
He learned pigtails, ponytails, even ballet buns, which he sculpted fastidiously, insisting on starting over again if hairs were stray or sloppy or caught. Other parents smiled at the sight of him pinching bobby pins between his lips. Everyone knew who he was; he’d made the careers of enough rock stars to be a star himself. People joked with him and tried to act like they knew him better than they did. Our father froze them out. He was prim in our company, as if his fame were a dull encumbrance he would have liked to be rid of.
* * *
Our father’s swimming pool looked nothing like the garish turquoise tubs we’d glimpsed in apartment complexes near ours, littered with palm tree debris. His pool was the color of stone, full of lightly salted water, accessible from almost every room in the house. The pool was to his home what the palm tree was to ours.
On our second visit, he evaluated our swim strokes, found them dangerously wanting, and arranged for twice-weekly lessons with an instructor in his pool. Occasionally, we stayed for dinner. Eduardo, our father’s cook, made fajitas and guacamole and pitchers of margaritas for whoever was around—usually some combination of our four half siblings （whom we barely knew） and musicians our father was working with. Under a cast-iron chandelier whose fat candles dripped wax into the middle of a massive slab of dining table, our father grew loud and loose, a showman we didn’t recognize, or like.