My father fancied himself a shrewd landlord—he refused to rent to lawyers, the children of lawyers, even a college girl who “had law school written all over her”—but he probably bit off too much when he sublet to the mime. That was the summer after I turned eleven, when we lived in the dilapidated Oakland duplex that my father billed as South Berkeley in the real estate listings. The structure itself was an ugly stucco cube, topped with red slate. But it sat at the end of a row of once fashionable ranch houses and bungalows, shaded by eucalyptus trees and jacaranda. The colorful hedgerows—hibiscus, thundercloud plums, bougainvillea—lent a false air of elegance, though you didn’t have to look too closely to spot the cracked terracotta and chipped paint. After the computer science department terminated my father’s graduate studies (a parting he attributed to politics and they, to plagiarism), he earned some cash by renting the bottom half of the duplex. The first tenant was a hippie-turned-clairvoyant who conducted séances in her kitchen. Aquamarine had childbearing hips and didn’t seem to own a bra. Sometimes she sunbathed topless in the backyard, displaying her generously-oiled flesh to anyone peering out a second-story window. After six months, our clairvoyant tenant connected with her late grandmother, who insisted that Aquamarine tend to her grave in Newfoundland. The result was that the rooms stood vacant while my father and stepmother bickered over money.