Mother Daughter Me Read Online Free Page A

Dutch Colonial; a Queen Anne confection next door to a Georgian fortress—many with postcard-worthy vistas of the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge. Pacific Heights has the signs of contented wealth stamped all over it. It’s long on boutiques and short on gas stations. You’ll trip over day spas and specialty pet shops, but don’t go looking for Walmart.
    The neighborhood runs along a series of hills so steep that the population remained sparse until the late nineteenth century, when the construction of a new cable-car line finally made the area accessible. After the 1906 earthquake—then fire—that destroyed the grand homes on Nob Hill, many of the city’s wealthy families migrated to Pacific Heights and built new mansions. Many of those old families—the Hellmans of Wells Fargo, the Haases of Levi Strauss, and the descendants of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty—are still there. But there are plenty of ten-thousand-square-foot estates to go around, and since the 1960s, when the computer industry started churning out millionaires, a steady stream of new wealth has arrived in Pacific Heights. The neighborhood also has an abundance of apartment buildings, as well as apartments carved from single-family homes, which brings a measure of economic—if not racial—diversity to the neighborhood. It was Zoë’s choice of high schools that had first brought us to Pacific Heights, and we were living in a cozy and quiet two-bedroom apartment close to Zoë’s school when I started searching for a place with room for the three of us.
    Stately and commanding, the house I found on Sacramento Street, in Lower Pacific Heights, was an architectural jewel; tour buses drove down the street several times a day and the guides pointed out our Victorian “painted lady” not just for its curb appeal but also for itslucky survival of the earthquake. Meticulously renovated, the house had a layout that I was sure would work perfectly: a three-room suite on the lower level with a bathroom and laundry room for my mother, living space on the next level, and, on the top floor, bedrooms for Zoë and me. The master bedroom was large enough to double as my office. Moreover, it seemed symbolic that we should find a three-story nineteenth-century Victorian, whose original intention was to house multiple generations. Set back slightly from the street, the house had the additional, and much desired, perk of a spacious two-car garage. When Zoë saw the house, she begged me to rent it. We could never have afforded to buy it, but, thanks to the recession, the rent had already been reduced twice, and with my mother paying half, we could swing a year’s lease. My mother couldn’t have been more pleased. She started calling our experiment “our year in Provence.”
    Bringing my mother to San Francisco made perfect sense to me, if not to others. “Isn’t this all happening kind of quickly?” asked Candace, my best friend, who knows me better than I know myself. I explained to her just why it would work. I described the house I had found, with kitchen, living room, and dining room on the middle level, serving as the buffer floor between my mother’s domain and Zoë’s and mine. I emphasized the word “buffer,” as if I could use it to erase any lingering doubts Candace might have about my moving in with a woman whose behavior three decades earlier—on a night when Candace had witnessed my mother in a flat-out vicious alcohol-fueled rant against me—had horrified her. Candace remained unconvinced that a buffer floor was enough, but she stopped questioning it. She saw that I had made up my mind.
    In the face of naysayers, I chose instead to embrace the reaction of another friend, who was living in Beijing: “How Chinese of you!” she said upon hearing the news. When I told my mother, she was delighted. “What have the Chinese got on us?” she declared. And I agreed. The Chinese revere their elderly. If they could live happily with multiple