Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

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...