Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

At some point that summer, my mother said, they were down to their last three dollars, and they drove to the beach, where my father threw the money into the ocean. “I was terrified,” she said. “But then he sold more of the blue boxes, and we had money again.”

“See? Look what we can do here,” he said, moving the window around the desktop that contained the tube that held the molecule that continued to bounce, and affecting nonchalance, as his voice was drowned out by thunderous applause. People stood up to clap behind me. I clapped with relief. It had worked. Soon, we were all on our feet. He was smiling, as if he both hoped and didn’t hope the applause would stop—and stood there on the stage before us, everyone’s man.

“You don’t understand,” she said, starting to cry. “The work you do now will lead to the work you do later. It will inform who are the people you spend your life with, how interesting they are. Your colleagues.”

How to explain to her that I’d bought them the more expensive gifts because I worried they didn’t care for me and I wanted them to like me, to love me, even? With them together, the feeling I was loved and belonged was tenuous, superficial, my place in their family not essential or fixed. They did not ask me questions about myself, or seem interested in me the way my mother was, and this made me hunger to impress them.

I would leave my mother—I’d said the words out loud. I felt giddy and guilty and numb. Maybe this was the origin of the guilt that seized me later and left me hardly able to walk sometimes, after I had moved in with them: having stolen her youth and energy, having driven her to a state of perpetual anxiety, without support or resources, now that I was flourishing in school and beloved by my teachers, I cast her out and picked him, the one who’d left. I chose the pretty place when she was the one who’d read me books of old stories with admonishments not to believe in the trick of facades.

“Hey, Lis,” he said. He’d crouched down beside me for a while, and then pulled me up. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, you know. When you were younger.” “It’s okay,” I said, too fast. “I’ll love you until the cows come home,” he said. “Hey, Lis,” he said one day as we passed in the hallway. “Do you want to change your name?”

I walked home. My hands were shaking. I’d abandoned my mother. I’d left her all alone. The street was empty and peaceful. I felt a strange sort of calm, too calm; I was a girl walking and a girl who watched a girl walking. I was what she said I was, the kind of person who left the people they loved.

“It’s better to do your own job poorly than to do someone else’s job well,” she said. It was from Hinduism. She also said, “Mama may have, papa may have, but God bless the child who’s got his own.” That wasn’t Hinduism; it was part of an old song.

“You know, Lis,” he said, “people from the East Coast don’t really understand the West Coast. They try, but they just can’t. It’s not inside them.”

The waitress returned with a bowl, more carrots—fresh and old, combined. She brought a new lemon wedge and the orange juice. “Is this what you were looking for?” she asked, as if she thought it might be right. “Actually, no,” he said. “This isn’t at all what I was looking for. Does anyone know how to do their job here?” he said. “Seriously. You don’t. I asked for fresh carrots.” “Sir, I’ve asked the kitchen to do the carr—” “No. No. You obviously haven’t asked. This is the same shit you brought me last time.” “I’m sorry,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “I’ll take it back.” “I think that would be a good idea,” he said. “You should think about why you’re here and whether you are actually doing your job. Because so far what you’re doing is crap. Everything you’ve done is crap. You just bring this shit again and again. I would like shaved carrots and lemon in a bowl.” He made a gesture to show the size of the bowl. “Yes, I understand, but—” “All I’m asking for is the simplest thing. Do you have carrots.” “Yes, but—” “Do you have a lemon.” “Yes.” She stood very still. “Do you have a grater back there in the kitchen.” He leaned his chair back and looked toward the kitchen opening across the carpeted floor. “Yes.” “Okay. I’d like you to tell them to take three carrots and grate them like this,” he motioned pressing a carrot down a metal grater. The ends of his words were sharp as whips. “And then bring it out with a lemon.”

I cleared my throat. “I’ve been feeling so lonely,” I said. “I was hoping that you could … that we could figure something out.” I paused and looked at Laurene, who held her face very still, as if it was a representation of her face and not her real face. “I’m feeling terribly alone,” I tried again. Still they didn’t speak. I looked at Dr. Lake; he didn’t speak either. We waited. I wished that I wanted less, needed less, was one of those succulents that have a tangle of wiry, dry roots and a minty congregation of leaves and can survive on only the smallest bit of moisture and air. After what seemed an interminable silence, I burst into tears. I hoped it would soften them, that my messiness would give them permission to be messy. I wasn’t perfect or straight-backed or smooth; I didn’t require them to be so either. Laurene finally spoke. “We’re just cold people,” she said. She said it dryly, like a clarification. You’re allowed to say that? I thought. How incredible; that’s what struck me later: that she had dared to say it. How good it would be to know one’s limitations and say them with unapologetic conviction. Her tone was deadpan. I had thought I could shame them for being cold and absent. Now I was the one who was ashamed, for ignoring the simple truth.

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” my father asked Josh when they met. We were sitting with him on the floor in my brother’s room, near the bookshelf—the first time I’d been alone with the two of them. “I don’t know yet,” Josh said. “I know,” my father said. “You’re going to be a bum.” Josh looked down.

“And what does your father do?” she asked politely. I hesitated, lifting my eyebrows as if to say, “Oh, him?” I took a breath to indicate I hadn’t expected the conversation to go here. “He started a computer company,” I said. “He invented a computer called the Macintosh.” I said it as if she might not have heard of it. At that, the woman stood; she looked alarmed. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She grasped the doorknob and left the room abruptly, closing the door behind her, as if she’d realized all at once she had to attend to something urgent outside the room. It was too obvious; I wondered if it could possibly be happening like this. Would she rush out and stop them from turning down my application? Were there other admissions officers shifting through the files of those being interviewed at that very moment? A few minutes later, she returned. She didn’t explain where she’d been, or why she’d dashed out, but seemed kinder and more attentive. She asked me a few more questions I don’t remember, and the interview concluded. When I left, my cheeks burned.

“There was once a prince and a frog,” I began. I wasn’t sure why I’d made myself into the frog. “The prince loved the frog, and frog loved the prince more than any other prince. They were dear friends. But then, one day, the frog had to go back to his own kingdom.” He listened now, rapt. “Why did he have to go away?” Reed asked. “There were other frogs. A land of frogs. He’d been away for a long time. But, you see, the frog still loved the prince. He wasn’t leaving because he didn’t—he just had to leave for his own reasons.” The story was undeveloped, no real plot, leaden, but he didn’t seem to mind, and wanted more. “But he had to leave?” “Yes,” I said. “Because he needed to go home to the other frogs.”

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.

About heartbreak my parents gave, separately, the same advice: “You’ve got to feel all your feelings. That way, next time, when you fall in love again, it will be just as meaningful and profound.” “The first heartbreak brings up the pain of the past,” my father said. “The first big loss. Harness it.” “If something is really painful, it’s the undertow of a big, beautiful wave,” my mother said. Other people said, “Get over it,” and “Go out.”

I would be starting work as an analyst at a bank in London. It was the wrong kind of job for an English major, and I felt foolish to have joined the normal hubbub of the world, and for being one of the people my father sometimes mocked, but Schroder Salomon Smith Barney would get me a visa so that I could live and work in London. I would be able to support myself.

Bono asked my father about the beginning of Apple. Did the team feel alive, did they sense it was something big and they were going to change the world? My father said it did feel that way as they were making the Macintosh, and Bono said it was that way for him and the band too, and wasn’t it incredible that people in such disparate fields could have the same experience? Then Bono asked, “So was the Lisa computer named after her?” There was a pause. I braced myself—prepared for his answer. My father hesitated, looked down at his plate for a long moment, and then back at Bono. “Yeah, it was,” he said. I sat up in my chair.

“I didn’t spend enough time with you when you were little,” he said. “I wish we’d had more time.”

“Did you come up with a lot of ideas that way? In your dreams?” “Yes,” he said, then fell asleep again.

“I’m sorry I didn’t spend more time with you. I’m so sorry,” he said from the bed. “I guess you were working really hard, and that’s why you didn’t email me or call me back?” He’d rarely returned my emails and calls, did not mark my birthdays. “No,” he paused. “It wasn’t because I was busy. It was because I was mad you didn’t invite me to the Harvard weekend.” “What weekend?” “The introductory weekend. All I got was the bill,” he said, with a catch in his voice.

“About what we said earlier—” he said. It struck me how he referenced a previous conversation about emotions, something he’d never done with me before. “I want to say something: You were not to blame.” He started to cry. “If only we’d had a manual. If only I’d been wiser. But you were not to blame. I want you to know, you were not to blame for any of it.” He’d waited to apologize until there was hardly anything left of him. This was what I’d been waiting to hear. It felt like cool water on a burn.

“He talked to me,” I said. “We exchanged important words. Momentous words. I feel better.” I thought she would ask me about it, but instead she got up to wash a dish at the sink. “I don’t believe in deathbed revelations,” she said.

It was irrelevant that I wasn’t named on the honey-pots. I had not been a mistake. I was not the useless part of something meaningful. 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. 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.

Maybe the meanness protected the part that created—so that acting mean to approximate genius is as foolish as trying to be successful by copying his lisp or his walk or the way he turned around and wagged his hands around his back and moaned to pretend he was making out.

“He’s following you around, your father,” she said, when she came to visit me after he died. “A ghost?” “Him. I don’t know how else to say it. I can feel him here. And you know what? He’s overjoyed to be with you. He wants to be with you so much he’s padding around behind you. I mean, he’s delighted just watching you butter a piece of toast.” I didn’t believe it, but I liked thinking it anyway.