Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

She sobbed for too long in a way that I knew must be about more than the fall.

Even though the rock climber was the one who took care of me, I pitied him now for his inconsequence, and also felt bad to pity him, because he was the one who was around.

I heard from a few people much later that in those days my father carried a photo of me in his wallet. He would pull it out and hold it up at dinner parties, showing it around, and say, “It’s not my kid. But she doesn’t have a father, so I’m trying to be there for her.”

Even though my mother had agreed to come here and get a pet, I began to suspect that she was still ambivalent, and so refused to shade her answers, letting the woman’s impression of us sour. Or that she was profoundly dedicated to honesty. Or that she began to derive satisfaction from the dry clarity of an aerial view that this woman’s questioning provided, becoming more interested in this unfolding narrative than she was in a cat.

I fell in love with Debbie the way that young girls sometimes fall in love with women who aren’t their mothers.

Near his busy silence I felt a new kind of dissolution. I was starting to disappear. I noticed details about him with exact focus, but had difficulty locating myself.

“Why don’t you wear a watch?” I asked the next morning. I was already dressed for school. Fancy men wore watches. “I don’t want to be bound by time,” he said.

I see now that we were at cross-purposes. For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite: the closer I was to him, the less I would feel ashamed; he was part of the world, and he would accelerate me into the light.

Instead of a dad who was around and then left, mine was a story in reverse: parents who spent more time together now than they’d spent when I was born.

Later, I learned fry is an old word for young fishes sometimes thrown back into the sea to give them more time to grow.

“They teach you how other people think, during your most productive years,” he said. “It kills creativity. Makes people into bozos.”

My father gave a speech in which he said that it wasn’t love that brought people together and kept them together, but values—shared values.

“You know what’s wrong with you? You want to be like them so much that you have no idea what’s important in life.”

“It’s better to do your own job poorly than to do someone else’s job well,”

We all made allowances for his eccentricities, the ways he attacked other people, because he was also brilliant, and sometimes kind and insightful. Now I felt he’d crush me if I let him. He would tell me how little I meant over and over until I believed it. What use was his genius to me?

If 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

Many parents spent time with their children for years, and had learned to abide loss in smaller increments—but he was new at it.

It was as if famous people needed other famous people around to release their secrets.

During that weekend, he repeated it over and over: “I owe you one, I owe you one,” he said, crying, when I went to visit him in between his naps. What I wanted, what I felt owed, was some clear place in the hierarchy of those he loved.

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. I wouldn’t trade any part of my experience for someone else’s life, I felt then, even the moments where I’d wished I didn’t exist, not because my life was right or perfect or best, but because the accumulation of choices made had carved a path that was characteristic and distinct, down to the serif, and I felt the texture of it all around me for just a moment, familiar, like my own skin, and it was good enough.