Cover

Dedication

To my Wellesley friends, with gratitude for a lifetime of friendship: Aimee, Betty, Cameron, Hye-John, Lesly, Nicole, Sarah, Sarah, and Vincent. Thank you for being there for me, always.

2008

Chapter 1

I started calling my grandmother by her first name when I was thirteen. It was the summer before Grandpa died, and Dad and I were spending the month of July with them in Woodacre, California. They owned a cedar-shingled cottage there where they’d go for weekends and vacations, and after Grandpa retired from Berkeley, they moved into it permanently.

My grandmother was an artist who was known primarily for her paintings and photographs. She was always mentoring a few art students, and one of them had a show opening in San Francisco during our visit. My grandmother took me with her.

The show was in SoMa at a garage that specialized in hybrid and electric vehicles, and doubled as an art gallery. A red plug-in Prius was elevated on a lift at the back of the garage, which had the cleanest polished concrete floors I’d ever seen. I had expected to see paintings hanging on the walls, but this artist made wire sculptures. They hung from cables that stretched across the space, twirling slowly in the air like graceful dancers made of silver mesh. Other sculptures were installed on stands scattered across the floor. Most were abstract in form, but some resembled female bodies or animal-like shapes: arms and tails extended, or elongated heads that seemed to look at you, even without eyes.

I was the youngest person there. As soon as we arrived, my grandmother was pulled away by a stranger, and then another one, and after a few minutes of awkwardly hovering a few feet away, I retreated to the rear of the garage by the Prius. Nearby, two couches were arranged around a sky-blue shag rug, and I sat down by myself while more people came through the garage’s huge open doors.

I could see the traffic whooshing by on Mission Street in the dusk. As Saturday evening settled into Saturday night, growing shadows blurred the city’s hard edges and turned them into soft-focus suggestions. I had been to plenty of art galleries before but not a Saturday night opening, and I’d dressed up for it in a teal-and-white sundress along with a carefully applied coating of lip gloss. Sitting on that sofa, I felt grown-up, almost.