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Washington and the Evergreen Floating Bridge, a few miles from Seattle to the west. Dazzling lights after dark. When you could see through the mist.
    The house was designed by a famous Japanese American Seattle architect. It’s what is called “postmodernist,” meaning it doesn’t look like a house exactly, more like a small high-tech building. Glasswalls, skylights, poured concrete, some chilly glaring metal like pewter. There are tubular glass-walled “galleries”—not old-fashioned halls. There are module units, not rooms. There are sliding Japanese screens that “create” rooms, or “remove” rooms. The rooms are echo chambers with “minimalist” furnishings: metallic chairs, translucent tables, halogen lamps that give off a faint blue light. Neutral nothing colors like faded black, pebble gray, sickly white. Low, long sofas with scattered dwarf cushions. What seem like acres of bare gleaming tile, dull black, dead white, with only incidental rugs. Even the lighting fixtures are minimalist, recessed in the walls and ceilings, so they seem to cast shadows in all directions. My mother had hoped to furnish the house herself, but my father insisted upon the most fashionable Seattle interior decorator.
    My father said they couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. The “eyes of the world” would be on them, quick to mock and deride if they slipped up.
    In one of the so-called galleries Dad’s football trophiesand photographs with fellow athletes and celebrities were displayed. It was pretty spectacular: photos of Reid Pierson shaking hands with Seattle politicians, the governor, even then-president Bill Clinton at the White House. Both Reid Pierson and Bill Clinton were good-looking, confident men smiling with their earnest, boyish appeal into the camera. Dad marveled at Clinton’s charisma, which he said you had to experience first-hand to appreciate. Dad said, “You couldn’t help but love that man. You can see why, if people love you enough, they’ll forgive you anything.”
    I was in eighth grade when The Pierson Home in Yarrow Heights, Washington, was featured in Seattle Life , a new student at the preppy Forrester Academy, with almost no friends; overnight, even older students took notice of me, singling me out to say they’d seen the article in the magazine and were impressed by it. I have to admit I was flattered. (“And your dad is Reid Pierson, what’s that like ?”) I’d just started ninth grade when the house was featuredin Architectural Digest , with dramatically posed shots of Reid Pierson (in a tuxedo) and his wife, Krista Pierson (in a skintight black silk dress, shoulder-length red hair glossy as fire), amid the minimalist furniture, with a glimpse of Lake Washington in the background; this time, even teachers I didn’t have sought me out, as well as the school headmaster, to tell me they’d seen the article and were impressed. Mr. Whitney, the headmaster, had already met my mother, of course, but not my father. Earnestly he said, “Tell your father I’ve always been a fan, Francesca. Going back to his Seahawks days. Tell him I hope he’ll drop by Forrester someday soon.”
    That was about eighteen months ago. Dad hasn’t gotten to Forrester yet, but every time Mr. Whitney sees me, he says, “Francesca! Remember, the invitation is always open.”
    Actually, the postmodernist look is mostly for show, on the first floor in what the architect called the “public space” of the house. On the lower floor, our “private space” rooms are more or less normal.Bedrooms, guest rooms, bathrooms, closets. (Though not enough closets.) Here things were built to a smaller scale, as if the architect hadn’t any interest in where his clients might actually live.
    We’d been living in an older, smaller house closer to downtown Seattle, in what was called an ethnically