Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Instead, she had me, and I had two jobs: first, to protect her so that she could protect me; second, to shape her and rough her up so that she could handle the world, the way you sandpaper a surface to make the paint stick.

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

We’d lived in Tahoe for almost two years when my mother wanted to leave the rock climber and move back to the Bay Area. This was around the time the story came out, the “Machine of the Year,” about my father and computers in Time magazine, in January 1983, when I was four, in which he’d hinted that my mother had slept with many men and lied. In it, he talked about me, saying, “Twenty-eight percent of the male population of the United States could be the father”—probably based on a manipulation of the DNA test result.

After she read the article, my mother moved in slow motion, the muscles on her face slack. She cooked dinner with the kitchen lights off, except for a dim light shining from under one cabinet. But in a few days she’d recovered herself and her sense of humor, and she sent my father a picture of me sitting naked on a chair in our house, wearing only those Groucho Marx joke glasses with the big plastic nose and fake mustache. “I think it’s your kid!” she wrote on the back of the picture. He had a mustache then, and wore glasses and had a big nose. In response, he sent her a check for five hundred dollars, and that was the money she used to move us back to the Bay Area, where we would sublet a room for a month in Menlo Park in a house on Avy Avenue with a hippie who kept bees.

She tilted the plane of my palm to make the indentations catch the light. “Oh, God,” she said, wincing. “What?” I asked. “It’s just … not so good. The lines tatter.” Her face looked stricken. She went distant, quiet. We went over this same routine many times in different variations, accruing details as I got older, each time my mother making the same mistakes, as if it was new. “What does that mean?” Panic in my chest, stomach. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The lifeline, the curved one, this one—holes, bubbles.” “What’s wrong with bubbles?” “They mean trauma, fracturing,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” I knew she wasn’t apologizing for the hand, but for my life. The start of my life that I didn’t remember. For how hard things were. She might have assumed I didn’t know what a family was supposed to look like, but once, around this time, as I’d chased a boy in a playground wearing a pair of too-big shoes, she overheard me say to him, scornfully, “You don’t even have a father.”

I said, “Oh,” as if I agreed. But it didn’t matter what she said, or how she explained. I saw us as a seesaw: when one of us had power or happiness or substantiality, the other must fade. When I was still young, she’d be old. She would smell like old people, like used flower water. I would be new and green and smell of freshly cut branches.

One indication was the photograph. Another was that I could not read. The last was that I was meticulous and self-conscious in a way I could tell the other girls were not. My desires were too strong and furious. 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. I felt this quality in myself, and I was sure it must show when people saw me, so whenever I passed a mirror, caught my reflection by accident, and saw that I was not as dirty or repulsive as I pictured myself, it gave me a start.

The ingredients were colored substances harvested from the earth.

A few days before, I’d walked in on my mother squatting on top of the toilet seat, perched up high, her trousers around her knees like a curtain, her feet planted on the rim. “What are you doing?” I asked, horrified. “I learned it in India,” she said. “It’s a better position. Close the door.”

“I want you to try to capture the spirit of the tree,” she said. “Not just the way it looks, but the life force inside it.” It surprised me that no one smirked at this, that everyone continued to draw with the focus I lacked. Earlier I hadn’t wanted to be associated with her; now I hoped to be singled out as her daughter, the insider, possessor of knowledge the others didn’t have. I thought she spoke in a language no one understood but me, and I was ashamed of understanding it myself; but the other students listened as if they, too, understood, and were not ashamed.

Steve. I knew so little about him. He was like those Michelangelo sculptures of men trapped in rough stone, half smooth, half rough, that made you imagine the part inside that had not yet come out.

We waited inside first, and then we went outside to the asphalt circle and watched the street. I was so excited for his arrival that I’d worn my nice dress, given to me by the rock climber, and I was fluttery in my stomach. Cars passed outside the driveway. Each one held the possibility of being him. We waited. “I don’t think he’s going to come,” my mother finally said after some time. We went back inside. I felt like I’d been emptied out. The day, charged with excitement, newness, extravagance, and mystery, unlike other days, changed back into a dull and ordinary day. Just us again, and nothing to do.

She kept glancing at me as we skated; I didn’t let on that I knew she was looking. “You know, you’re just the daughter I wanted,” she said. “Exactly the one. On the farm before you were born there was this little girl, three or four years old, with her mother. A little Taurus girl, precocious and smart. I thought, I want that.”

“I know,” I said. She’d told me the story before. (“I don’t only love you,” she’d said often. “I also like you.”) “And he named a computer after me?” “He pretended he hadn’t, afterward.” And then she told me the story—again—of how they’d named me together in the field, how he vetoed all her choices until she thought of Lisa. “He loves you,” she said. “He just doesn’t know he loves you.” This was hard to grasp. “If he saw you, really saw you and understood what he was missing, how he wasn’t showing up for you, it would kill him. He’d be like this.”

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.” “It’s his loss,” my mother said as we skated home. “His great, great loss. He’ll get it someday. He’ll come back and it’ll rip his heart open, when he sees you, how much you’re like him, and how much he’s missed.”

A few days later, we stopped at a pet store, where she bought me two white mice and the most expensive cage they had, made of glass.

A mother tring to plamper her daughter in whatever small ways she can

“Let’s not stop at the ATM,” I said. “Please.” But she stopped anyway, on our way out of town. No money came out of the machine, just a paper slip. She grabbed the slip, walked a few feet, and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to examine it, stricken. We went home. She did not answer my questions but told me to be quiet, and she went to her room for the rest of the day.

“I want my own friends, my own life.” On the word life, she threw down three pennies. We could not both be happy at once. Her eagerness—for more life, for fun, the prickly pear—felt to me like danger. My happiness had been pulled from the reserve of hers, a limited string we had to share. If she has it, I must not; if I have it, she must wilt.

Around this time, my father threw a large and lavish thirtieth birthday party for himself. He invited my mother, and she planned to go, inviting Debbie to come along, but as the date approached, she began to waver. She couldn’t afford to buy a new dress. She would be ashamed to be there in rags, beside people in finery, celebrating him. She canceled at the last minute, leaving Debbie, who had pinned her hopes of finding a husband on the event, in the lurch. I was not aware of the party at the time, only of my mother’s shift into melancholy, and her increasing preoccupation with her wardrobe and her feeling of having lost her youth.

was afraid Debbie would think of me as if I was my mother. I imagined others did not see us as separate but as the same person in two bodies.

She was half-absent with happiness,

Later my mother said that it was the dips in his worldly success that made him come and find us. The pattern she saw was that when he failed at work, when he lost something in the public sphere, he remembered us, started dropping by, wanted a relationship with me. As if in the flurry of work he forgot me and remembered only when the flurry stopped.

A few times, I felt his eyes on me; when I looked up, he looked away.

my father asked, ‘Young man, what are you going to be when you grow up?’ And you know what he said?” “What?” “A bum. Your grandfather was not pleased. He was hoping for an upstanding man to take his daughter out, and instead he got this long-haired hippie, saying he wanted to be a bum.”

Of course the parts did not go together. He was rich but had holes in his jeans; he was successful but hardly talked; his figure was graceful, elegant, but he was clumsy and awkward; he was famous but seemed bereft and alone; he invented a computer and named it after me but didn’t seem to notice me, and didn’t mention it. Still, I could see how all these contrasting qualities could be an attribute, spun in a certain way.

That my father’s sister happened to be named Mona struck me as a great coincidence. What were the chances that she would have a name that went so well with mine as to form, in combination, the name of the most famous painting in the world?

“People write about family in fictional form,” she said. “Fiction writers use details from life.” We were at Caffe Verona, where we’d gone to talk about it. When she’d learned I was upset after reading the galleys, she flew to Palo Alto the next day from where she lived in Los Angeles to talk with me. “It’s just what writers do. I didn’t mean to upset you. Not at all.” Reading her book, I felt there would be nothing left for me to write about. I felt emptied out. Jane didn’t like sushi because it felt like a tongue on her tongue. The details she described made me disconsolate, as if, having described them so well, they belonged to her now, not to me.

She had long believed that the essential perspective of the photographer was captured in his or her photographs; flattering or interesting pictures would mean that Ron noticed her beauty and even her soul; ugly pictures would reveal that he did not see, appreciate, or love her.

It enraged me when she did this. I became more critical of her. I noticed the way she walked with her toes pointing in, and how her pinkie toes formed yellow calluses sharp as blades that ran vertically along the bottom pad where the toes had been flattened in shoes. She added flakes of brewer’s yeast to her salads and they smelled of dusty rooms. Her cakes collapsed with fault lines because she was too impatient to let them cool. Once, I had loved the way the tip of her nose bobbed up and down when she chewed, and sat in her lap to be closer to the sound, like a blade through tall grasses, but now both her nose and her chewing seemed strange and wrong. All these factors, I believed, were why she was only able to date someone like Ron, not my father. I came to believe it was her fault: she wasn’t beautiful enough, and was therefore unloved, unloveable—and might make me so, too.

Ashamed of her mother

That night I wrote in my journal that I loved my dad. Then I clarified: not Ron. Steve Jobs. Underneath the name Steve Jobs, I wrote, “I love him! I love him! I love him!” I felt it there inside my chest like my heart would rip apart with it.

realized later this was true of the people I knew who worked with my father during the years I was growing up. They were kind and gentle; often I felt more at home with them than I did with my father. They seemed soulful and modest—I think he must have admired these qualities and chosen them, even though he was not always like that himself.

swallowed air, worried that when my voice came out, it would squeak, or about the very real possibility that he would not respond. I was filled with what I might say, if he asked me a question: how I didn’t do the Pledge of Allegiance

A single car came toward us, moving down the hill. My father toggled a rod beside the steering wheel and it gave a satisfying click; the headlights dimmed. Once we passed, he did it again, this time restoring the forest to light. I’d never noticed anyone dim lights for an oncoming car, and I felt a burst of affection for him, seized with an idea of his fineness. (When I told my mother about it the next day, she said everyone did that, everyone dimmed the brights for oncoming traffic.)

He had no idea that I’d driven, too, sitting on my mother’s lap when I was six. For him, maybe I had no past; I was simply here now beside him.

After I was in bed, I waited as many minutes as possible, building up my courage in the cricket-jangling darkness, then emerged from my bedroom and walked to the end of his bed, fake-crying. Maybe I got the idea from Annie, a girl ingratiating herself with a gruff man. Standing over my father in my sleep T-shirt, looking down at him in his bed on the floor, I was aware of being small and using what I had, as a girl. Inspiring love, I thought, had to do with being defenseless. For him to be close with me, like other fathers with their daughters, he needed to love me. Also, his bed was more comfortable than mine. He removed his headphones and looked at me. He watched movies with a big pair of headphones after I went to bed. “I had a nightmare,” I said. “Can I sleep in your bed?” “I guess so,” he said, and pointed to the side farther away from the television. I jumped in and the pillow dissolved under the weight of my head, as if it were made of nothing. My request seemed to annoy, rather than charm him. I hoped this might change over time. He was not the father I’d imagined from the skeleton of facts I’d known. Yes, there was an elevator and a piano and an organ, he was rich and famous and handsome, but none of this satisfied completely; it was tempered by an unmistakable emptiness I felt near him, a feeling of a vast loneliness—the stair behind the kitchen with no light, the wind coming through from the rickety balcony. It was supposed to be what I wanted, but it was not po...

My request seemed to annoy, rather than charm him. I hoped this might change over time. He was not the father I’d imagined from the skeleton of facts I’d known. Yes, there was an elevator and a piano and an organ, he was rich and famous and handsome, but none of this satisfied completely; it was tempered by an unmistakable emptiness I felt near him, a feeling of a vast loneliness—the stair behind the kitchen with no light, the wind coming through from the rickety balcony. It was supposed to be what I wanted, but it was not possible to enjoy as I’d hoped, as if it were a sumptuous feast frozen solid.

liked her lips, how they were flat and full and formed a ledge where they met her cheeks; I liked her accent, and the way she swayed gently as she walked. It seemed my father’s idea of beauty demanded no artifice, it simply was, although, looking back, I think she must have been wearing mascara, at least.

I would be truly loved by him only if I was tall, blonde, and large-breasted, I would gather later. I had a fantastic notion that it might happen, despite the evidence.

He repeated this story several times over many years, each time telling me he’d heard a great story, and a huge secret, forgetting he’d told me before.

My mother felt color acutely; it was one of the ways we communicated, her driving around the town, pointing out colors. She’d broken up with Ron, and although I was initially relieved to be rid of him and have my mother to myself again, now I wasn’t so sure. I’d found him annoying, but once he was gone I missed him. Ron had been variety, someone else besides my mother and me. When he walked into our house, he disturbed the air. Men brought life. You couldn’t take the measure of it until they were gone and left everything flat, without zest or surprise.

I’d had no idea she was feeling insecure. I was impressed she knew that word, and jealous that she could say something like this to her father. It was an adult word. I wouldn’t have thought to say it, ever.

He was not generous with money, food, or words; the idea of the Porsches had seemed like one glorious exception.

“You’re not getting anything,” he said. “You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.” Did he mean about the car, something else, bigger? I didn’t know. His voice hurt—sharp, in my chest.

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.

It might all have been a big misunderstanding, a missed connection: he’d simply forgotten to mention the computer was named after me. I was shaking with the need to set it right all at once, as if waiting for a person to arrive for a surprise party—to switch on the lights and yell out what I’d held in. Once he’d admitted it—yes, I named a computer after you—everything would click into place. He would patch the holes, get furniture, say he’d been thinking of me the whole time but had been unable to get to me. Yet I also sensed that if I tried too hard to set it right, it might tip some delicate balance, and he would be gone again. And so I waited in this suspended state, in order to keep him. I followed him from the car into the house.

The jokes were profoundly awkward. He was refined in other ways, but seemed unsure about how you were supposed to talk with children. I wanted to be close with him, but the jokes confused me. I didn’t know how to respond. That might have been the look she saw on my face. Later she said his jokes that night, his avuncular manner, and my obvious discomfort in the kitchen had surprised her. I had a look of being lost, she said, not confidant the way I usually was. She arranged for me to stay at a friend’s house on those Wednesday nights, telling me that he planned to come and take me skating instead. I thought that sounded okay.

assumed small fry meant the kind of french fries left at the bottom of the bag, cold and crusty; I thought he was calling me a runt, or misbegotten. Later, I learned fry is an old word for young fishes sometimes thrown back into the sea to give them more time to grow.

On the way down I worried for myself, for my face and my knees, the parts of me that might hit the pavement. Over time I learned he would always fall. Still, I let him carry me because it seemed important to him. I felt this like a change of pressure in the air: this was part of his notion of what it meant to be a father and daughter. If I said no, he would retract.

I began to see how inside my father there were two competing qualities: one sensitive and specific as a nerve in a tooth, the other unaware, blunt, and bland.

If I didn’t go to college, I would be like him. At that moment, I felt like we were the center of the world. He carried it with him, this feeling of center.