One of the two cops asks Mom questions from the doorway while she sits on the floor with her back against the wall. He’s got a brown mustache and a real live gun in a black holster on his waist. He wants to know if we had any valuables. Any jewelry or a TV set or credit cards?
Mom looks embarrassed as she shakes her head.
“We had a record player,” Tony says. It must be worth something since it’s what filled up the empty room.
Mom kneels down. We sift through the thrift-store jeans and socks, placing them in a big pile in the center of the room. Bob Dylan has a boot mark right through his leather jacket. Some of the other records are under clothes or thrown against the wall. The record player is gone.
The cop asks if it was valuable. Mom shakes her head and tells him it was just an old plastic thing.
* * *
THERE’S A PICTURE of Dad we keep in a small golden frame on the windowsill at the front of the apartment. He’s stretched out on his back smiling with his shaved head, sideburns, and big black mustache. I take it down sometimes to stare at it, trying to imagine where he is and what he’s doing. When I see my face in the mirror, I don’t see him. People say sons look like their fathers but I have corn-silk hair and big funny teeth, a pug nose and Dutch cheeks like Mom. Dad has black hair and a big Italian nose. There’s a darkness around his eyes, his skin deep brown, the color of caramel and there’s something to the smile, something like a flash of light, the feeling that he’s already laughing at the joke he wants to tell you.
Mom said he left Synanon too, that it’s just too crazy now that they’re splitting up marriages and forcing all the men to have vast-ectomies. Since the Old Man’s wife died, he decided no one should be married. So hundreds of couples had to get divorced. It was for the good of the world, he said. So they had a big meeting and decided everyone would get a new partner and one day everyone found out who their new husband or wife was, even if it was someone they didn’t know that well. Mom says that some people thought that was nuts and that’s when a lot of people started to leave. Because only a C-U-L-T would do a crazy thing like that.
This made the Old Man angry so he started a group that had guns and boots and trained how to fight and these men started beating people up who were trying to leave. They called them “splittees,” the people who tried to leave. “Dirty fucking splittees.”
Dad left too. He’s living with another woman and her daughter somewhere near Los Angeles now.
Phil is the only man we know. He’s a friend of Mom’s from Synanon. He parks his van in the long driveway next to the spaceship. He knocks on the door every few days so he can come inside to use our shower. He just left too and is still getting used to the World Outside Synanon. His orange VW camper van looks like a giant pumpkin. He’ll bow his head when he walks through the doorway, holding his towel and toothbrush in his hand, his shoulders hunched, the wire glasses, the soft voice asking about the soap. He stays for dinner sometimes before heading back out to the van where he sleeps at night.
His ex-wife is still in Synanon and so is his daughter, Darla. Mom says Phil wants Darla to live with him but Synanon won’t allow it so Phil went to a judge to prove Synanon is not a good place for a child to live. I hear them talking when I stay up late with the door open because the bedroom is too dark. He says he’s scared, that he got a visit from two men, two of the Old Man’s crew, who told him to “back off the legal stuff” or there could be trouble. He was about to sub-peena the Old Man, which is when you make someone go and face a judge. He thought if the judge knew about the School, how the babies are taken away from their parents like an orphanage, he would let him have his daughter back. But he’s scared of the men because everyone knows they’re beating people up. He doesn’t know what to do. He wants to see his daughter.
I wonder if Dad feels this way. If he looks at pictures of me the way I look at pictures of him or if he’s too busy on his moto-cycle in his new place with his new woman in Los Angeles.
Darla comes for dinner with Phil and we all eat Oscar’s Burgers because it’s a celebration since he hasn’t seen her for so long. Darla is my age and looks more like a porcelain doll than a kid. She has creamy-white skin and black hair cut straight across her eyebrows. She smiles with crooked teeth and eats her fries as she sits in Phil’s lap. After dinner she and I play with the Legos from the big bag that we got at the Goodwill on University Avenue. She says her mom is the prettiest in the whole world and I say my dad is the coolest in the world and Phil and Mom say, “Hey, what about us?”
* * *
WHEN WE MOVE to the house on Spaulding Avenue in Berkeley, Phil moves in with us. He brings his orange VW van, following us as we drive in the old white Vega with wooden doors that Grandpa bought us for eight hundred dollars. It’s packed with pots and pans and clothes that we got at the Salvation Army.
The street looks like a tunnel beneath the branches of the big trees that line the sidewalk. There are leaves on the ground everywhere, over the pavement, the gutters, forming a brown-and-yellow blanket on the lawns and driveways. Mom says we’ll have our very own house where we’ll live with Phil and even Darla sometimes and we won’t hear the neighbors through the walls or have to walk up the big stairs of the spaceship with our bags of food from the food bank where we have to wait in the long line for bags of flour and sugar and milk and the orange rubbery cheese that’s good for noodles or grilled cheese sandwiches.
It’s a brown house with a big porch with nine concrete steps and a long driveway running down the side. There are two bedrooms and a bathroom, a real kitchen, a living room, even a tree in the backyard covered in white flowers. We run inside and call dibs on the bigger bedroom which Phil says we were going to have anyway since the three of us have to share it.
I like Phil and I wonder if this is what dads are like. He doesn’t hug me, but sometimes he puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes it and I feel a warmth in my chest like a hug and it’s good. I know he’s not my dad but I like that he lives with us because it’s safer with more people.
Is this what it means to have a family?
When he gets home, he lifts Darla up in his skinny arms and she clings to him like a little monkey. I think how lucky she is to be with her dad. I don’t even mind when Mrs. Morris thinks he’s my father. She lives next door with her two kids. “You should tell your dad it’s garbage day,” she says to me from the porch next door. I don’t know what to say because my dad is in the golden picture frame, in a house in another city with other people, so I don’t say anything.
Phil walks out and says he already knows it’s garbage day. He puts his hand on my shoulders and squeezes them and I feel the warmth because I know he doesn’t mind if she thinks he’s my dad even though I already have a dad. It means I don’t need to explain to her that he’s gone and we’re sad about it.
A pretend family is better than no family. It’s better than being at a school that’s really an orphanage where you wake up and there’s no one to talk to.
Mom says single mothers have it the hardest in the world and Mrs. Morris is a single mother and we don’t understand how hard it is and it’s not her fault we were in the school like an orphanage even though she sent us there and we shouldn’t make her feel bad about it because Dad would’ve died without that place and all she ever wanted was a man to take care of her and we’re not sad now, we’re happy because we can be a family even though we know it’s just pretend.