Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

“I’m your father.” (“Like he was Darth Vader,” my mother said later, when she told me the story.) “I’m one of the most important people you will ever know,” he said.

On our street, pepper tree seeds in pink casings dangled down from tree limbs low enough to touch, crackling apart when I rubbed them between my fingers. The leaves, shaped like fish bones, swayed in breezes. Mourning doves made calls like out-of-tune woodwinds.

When my mother turned the water to hot, we yelled, “Open pores!” and when it was cold, we yelled, “Closed … pores!” She explained that pores were holes in the skin that opened with heat and closed with cold.

She held me in the shower and I nestled against her and it wasn’t clear to me where she ended and I began.

I was wormy inside, as if I’d caught whatever diseases or larvae were passed through raw eggs and flour when I snuck raw cookie dough.

“Trees need sunlight, water, nutrients,” she said. “But if they have too many, too abundantly, they also don’t flourish. Some struggle makes them stronger, makes the fruit trees produce better fruit.”

I was trying, and failing, to express gratitude and worthiness by becoming the long-lost daughter they might want. Yet my hands continued to feel as if they might float up and disappear, and I kept breaking glasses.

I don’t remember the bulk of it, only the last line: “If I were you, I’d snatch her up in a second.”

I felt owed trifles, so resolutely, so achingly. In fact it was something bigger— something I’d felt for a gut-visceral moment on the phone as a whole intricate universe: the kind of care and love we’d missed that can occur between a father and child.

I’d figured out that to negotiate effectively, you must be willing to give up the thing you want, entirely, for something else; you need a fierce apathy.

you still desire a thing, its time has not yet come. And when you have what you desired, you will have no more desire, instead you will have time. Weak desires protect you from disappointment. But nothing keeps you safer than being a visible ruin. —Fanny Howe, Indivisible

“If something is really painful, it’s the undertow of a big, beautiful wave,”

“You know,” he’d said then, “those years you lived with us—those were the best years, for me.” This was news—I didn’t know what to say—for me they’d been difficult, and I’d thought for him they were some of the worst.

What I wanted, what I felt owed, was some clear place in the hierarchy of those he loved.

It seemed unlikely, and possibly insane, that our relationship was pinned on one weekend. I didn’t believe it. I’d ascribed some sort of overarching wisdom to him, but people who are dying and trying to set things right aren’t necessarily reflective and profound.

But in fact, in the weeks following this visit and after he died, it was our missed chance at friendship I grieved about.

I heard from someone that the pattern of our breath isn’t supposed to be even, regular. Humans are not metronomes. It goes long and short, deep and shallow, and that’s how it’s supposed to go, depending at each moment on what you need, and what you can get, and how filled up you are.