ARLEN

It’s time, I realize—long past time, really—to introduce Arlen, another major player in my life:

I first met her when I arrived home from high school one afternoon and found her standing on a chair in the kitchen, reorganizing all my mother’s cupboards. She was in the middle of a divorce and had come to the Bay Area to look for a place to rent for herself and her kids, Jeff and Karen, who were still in grade school. She’d been friends with my aunt Dory in high school and had shared an apartment with my mom in college.

Eventually she found a little cottage in El Cerrito with a wild back yard where deer came to graze. To decorate it she bought antiques—in the years before antiquing became a craze—to complement her Danish modern furniture: an ornate rattan bed, an old-fashioned school desk with wrought ironwork, a quaint upright piano… She covered the bathroom counter with patterned wrapping paper that she varnished and painted the interiors of the built-in china cabinets black to show off her blown-glass wine goblets and other glassware. She set a beautiful table with fresh flowers and candles—everything brass, like the candlesticks, polished and gleaming—and an endless variety of mats and matching napkins sent by her ex-mother-in-law, who owned an upscale kitchen shop in New York.

It was partly because of Arlen, I suspect, that I would long, in the years to come, for an old fixer-upper apartment that I could completely transform, rather than a modern one—and it was her aesthetic that would shape my own. But while she played teacher to my pupil when it came to the arts, the dynamic soon reversed itself in the emotional realm. Throughout our friendship, I was the one taking care of her feelings as she pined for her ex-husband, insisting he was everything she’d ever wanted in a man—handsome, brilliant, successful… The fact that they’d fought all the time didn’t dampen her longing for him and the life they’d led.