Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

“Nope,” he said. “It’s so, if a car is about to hit you, I can throw you out of the street.”

A few minutes later, as we got into the residential streets farther away from the main street of the town and closer to my house, he farted, the sound loud and high like a balloon opening, interrupting the silence. He kept skating like nothing happened. When he did it again, I looked away. After the third time, he muttered, “Sorry.” “It’s okay,” I said, mortified for him.

“They don’t look so great. Might want to see about that,” he said, even though he’d been kind just a moment before. She winced and closed her mouth. It was as if the magnet changed direction suddenly and now they repulsed each other; it was not possible to know in advance when the switch would occur.

This was around the time, my mother would say later, that my father fell in love with me. “He was in awe of you,” she said, but I don’t remember it. I noticed he was around more and grabbed me and tried to pick me up even when I didn’t want to be picked up. He had opinions about my clothes and teased me more about whom I would marry. “I wish you’d been my mother,” my father said to her, strangely, one afternoon, as she was preparing lunch and I was playing. Another time he said, “You know she’s more than half me, more than half my genetic material.” The announcement caught my mother off guard. She didn’t know how to respond. Maybe he said it because he’d started feeling close to me and wanted a greater share.

was Ilan who, after staying home several nights to help me with my math and science homework, sitting beside me on the couch, patient, even though he had planned to go back to work in the evening because his company was struggling, gave me the first taste of what it felt like to arrive prepared for class, to understand the lesson and have a homework sheet filled out right. After several nights of his help, I wanted to arrive prepared, and to feel the calm and get the attention that came with it, and so it would be Ilan, later, who was part of the reason I would start to do well in school.

There was a thin line between civility and cruelty in him, between what did and did not set him off. I knew he wouldn’t like the idea of the shrimp; I also knew it would pass. But we’d forgotten to warn Sarah. “I’ll have the hamburger,” she said, too loud. I wanted to muffle her to protect her, and to protect myself. The trick, I learned later, was to give him less surface area to knife, so he would stab someone else. Always someone, if not me.

so that during the years that she and my father were together, I felt there was an extra layer of protection around my mother, my father, and me. She told me years later that my father insisted, persuasively, when they first met, that I wasn’t really his kid. When she saw me, it was obvious that I was, but when she brought it up, he refused to discuss it.

Tina had a happy-sad quality and dry, self-deprecating humor. She was delighted by me, she liked me, I could tell. To me, she seemed like she was a woman but also a little girl, or could remember so clearly what it was like to be my age that there wasn’t such a distance between us. When we were back in Palo Alto and we went somewhere all together in my father’s Porsche, she would squeeze her tall body in the back so I could sit up front with him.

She was a strange combination with my father, I could tell even then; he would often become grandiose about himself, leaving behind the part of him that matched with her. “She could wear a sack, a brown sack,” I heard my father say. As if beauty was measured by how strong an obstacle it had to overcome. It was the same way he spoke about Ingrid Bergman. I watched for it, in Tina, because I didn’t think of her as particularly beautiful. Her eyelashes were as blonde as her hair. She didn’t try, and the trying was beauty to me then. But a few times when she tossed her bangs out of her face, her eyes shone in the sunlight, the color of the swimming pool, and her face opened up, beautiful, until she looked down and adjusted her bangs and looked ordinary to me again.

On the way to dinner on the white sand path that wound through the forest, Tina and I flanking him, he put an arm around us both. A hand around my ribs, under my armpit. “These Are the Women of My Life.” He said it in a slow, meas...

“Why did you two make out in front of me?” I asked Tina at some point much later. “It’s what he did when he was uncomfortable,” she said. “He was uncomfortable around you because he didn’t know how to relate to you,” she said. “The charm that worked on adults didn’t work on you, a child. You saw through it.

“A woman here.” I imagined him crumpled over, needing us as we blithely passed our days where he couldn’t reach us. We were all he had—I was all he had—and I’d left him. Remorse felt like suction in my stomach. I hoped she wouldn’t

It had been only a month or two since the last break with Tina. I figured the attraction would blow over, so I wasn’t very interested. It was too much to keep track of. But I’d never heard him talk about smart before. I hadn’t known to want both: pretty, smart. I felt as if I’d been duped, trying for pretty when pretty was not enough. “You know, at the end of things, you forget how easy and great the beginnings are,” he said.

We didn’t look like a family; I hadn’t thought of us that way except for the few times I’d been together with my two parents, but I was surprised he’d admit it. It was nice to hear him say it, even in anger. He seemed to think of himself as undesirable, as if he didn’t notice his own allure, how people hung around him.

“If Steve doesn’t pay for your college, I will,” Mona said, apropos of nothing. College was a long way off, but it worried me in a way I had not been able to articulate to anyone, and I wondered how she knew. When he talked about college, it was often with contempt; he didn’t need it, so why would I? Also, sometimes he decided not to pay for things at the very last minute, walking out of restaurants without paying the bill, refusing to buy things other people bought as a matter of course, like furniture. Everyone in his life had been treated to his whimsy about money, offering and rescinding payments for small and large things.

It was hard to tell how a person could possibly be comfortable in such a place. It was hard-edged like rich people’s apartments in movies. It was opulent, the opposite of the counterculture ideals he talked about, a showcase made to impress. Yes, he had the Porsche and the nice suits, but I’d believed he thought the best things were simple things, so that looking at this apartment felt like a shock. Maybe his ideals were only for me, an excuse not to be generous with me. Maybe he was bifurcated, and couldn’t help trying to impress other people in the obvious ways rich people do, even as I’d thought, with his holey jeans, his strange diet, his emphasis on simplicity, his crumbling house, he didn’t care.

A couple months later, the new couch, chair, and ottoman arrived upholstered in the dun-colored linen with down-filled cushions and pillows. She gave the old ones away. She wore the skirt and sweater together a few times, for me, and then she must have given those away too. I called her Simpleton when she made mistakes—forgetting directions, insisting that Italian ice cream wasn’t different from or better than the American variety. It made her laugh. I’d been spending more time with my father and Laurene, absorbing their ideas, their sophistication. I’d been to New York, I understood the importance of low-fat, watched Laurene add oil carefully and sparingly to salad dressings. I’d learned that gelato was different from, and better than, ice cream. One day, driving somewhere, I noticed a speck of paint on her jeans she hadn’t noticed to wash off and said it again: “You’re a Simpleton.” This time she burst into tears, pulled over, and leaned on the steering wheel, surprising us both, and I never said it again.

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.

I’m ashamed to see that I just wanted her to act neat and quiet—to preserve the semblance of friendship and normalcy that had been established between them. I didn’t want my father to think I was anything like her. If he did, he might not want me. She seemed too dramatic. Crazy, even. I wanted her to feel less, express less. I was embarrassed by the ways her feet kicked and her face contorted.

He’d kissed her on the lips like he was Mr. Passion when he came in the door; she had to bend back awkwardly and steady herself on the island. It looked painful for her neck. I said so afterward, and he laughed. He said that he was a good kisser, and lots of women told him so. “It looked more like suction than a kiss,” I said. Laurene raised her eyebrows and nodded at me, in agreement, behind his back.

“They’re having a baby,” I told her the next day in the car, both of us looking forward so she couldn’t see my face. I’d kept it to myself, the night before, crying in bed after she said goodnight. When I was with her now, I felt as if I was too much like her, the part of the family that was set aside. “Good for them,” she said. “But I didn’t think they’d want—they never mentioned having a baby,” I said. “That’s why people get married,” she said. “To have babies.”

Ouch

Only later would I learn that because her own mother was mentally ill and my father was unresponsive, it had been Kobun my mother had turned to when she got pregnant, asking him what he thought she should do. “Have the child,” Kobun had advised. “If you need help, I’ll help you.” But in the intervening years he had not offered any help. No one had promised as much as Kobun or had seemed, to my mother at the time, as trustworthy. At the time, my young father had also trusted Kobun, who told him that if I turned out to be a boy, I would be part of a spiritual patrimony, and in that case my father should claim me and support me. When it turned out I was a girl, my mother later found out from others in the community, Kobun had told my father he had no obligation to care for my mother and me.

“Yes, but not in the ordinary sense,” he said. “I believe there’s something. Some presence. Consciousness. It’s like a wheel.” He moved to stand, and I got off his lap. He crouched on the ground and drew a circle on the tatami with his finger, and then a smaller wheel within that. I crouched down too, my heart beating fast. This was closeness! I wanted more of this! For him to talk to me as if he was interested, to say what he thought, knowing I could understand because I was his daughter. “The wheel has nodes at different points, something greater on the outside, the outside and the inside connected.” He drew two spokes between the smaller circle and the larger one. “I don’t know if that makes any sense.”

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. My mother already loved me. Even when she screamed at me, I knew it. I wasn’t so sure about them.

together. I wished she would hurry. At the same time I didn’t want her to leave. I needed her to stay close and protect me.

“All right,” she said. She was standing in the doorway of my room, her eyes watery. “I’m going to miss you. I hope this is for the best.” We hugged. “Don’t worry about me, I’m going to be fine.” “You’ll go to Greece,” I said. “Yeah. I’m not looking forward to it right now,” she said. Her skin became luminous when she was sad, like it was backlit. “It’ll be great,” I said.

Later she would tell me how lonely she’d been, how she cried the night she’d arrived in Venice—absurd, foolish, all that water instead of streets!—but how the next morning she’d flung open the layers of curtains, then the shutters, then the windows, and there it was before her, shimmering in the morning light, the coruscating Grand Canal.

But over the next months when we weren’t talking for the first time in my life and I didn’t know how she was doing, guilt would be heavy on my chest, like a large animal hunched down. Some crime I’d committed but couldn’t quite remember. Leaving my mother? Dropping Reed? Sometimes I would be unable to speak, terrified to say the wrong thing and wound others with the slightest mistake. I followed her out of the house and stood near the door. At the gate she turned and waved: the flap of a bird’s wing in the sharp white light.

My mother and I had agreed to his conditions. I sensed it was a drastic rule for two people who’d hardly missed a few days together for thirteen years—and that the formation of a new family needn’t hinge on the eradication of the existing one. Secretly, I also felt relief. It gave me the perfect excuse: I would not have to see my mother for six months, my mother who was angry at me, and yet...

Also, I figured that if I demonstrated such loyalty to my father, it would impress him, and make him love me more. In fact, I was so convinced that he would understand the extent of the sacrifice he’d required, that when, later, he did not seem to understand bu...

When I saw her, I was filled with simultaneous feelings of longing and dread. I tried to get away as fast as possible, so I wouldn’t be caught. I was afraid of someone seeing us together and reporting it to my father, afraid of going against the rules, and also afraid of her anger.

I did not want to admit how much it had been a mistake, how horribly lonely I was already, how I needed her again. And I didn’t see a way to get out of it.

I pulled the box of the landline phone as far as it would go on the wire, and then pulled the looped cord behind the dish rack and wedged the headset between my head and shoulder. We talked as I washed the plates. I worried she would say I had betrayed her, but she didn’t. These nights on the phone, her curiosity and warmth lifted me up. We did not talk about the fact that we weren’t supposed to see each other. We didn’t argue. She didn’t let on, but later she told me that she was worried about me, and that she began to stay at home in the evenings so she’d be there to pick up the phone in case I called.

“Don’t you worry about protein, Steve?” she asked while we ate. She spoke with a pleasing accent.

He delivered his conclusions so convincingly that I didn’t question them for years. He believed dairy products were mucus forming; mucus blocked spiritual clarity the way it blocked a nose. It was diet, most of all, that he used to differentiate himself from other people.

I fawned over Laurene, pulling lantana blossoms off stems in the garden and throwing them at her, making a shower of blossoms around her when she came home from work. 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.

“How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?” I asked. I didn’t usually tell jokes, but I’d heard this one at school and thought it might impress them. The joke hadn’t seemed particularly funny, but the other students had laughed. They looked at me, expectantly. “How many?” my father asked. “They don’t screw in light bulbs,” I said. “They screw in hot tubs.” The moment I said it, I understood for the first time the double meaning of screw, and something in my face changed even though I willed it not to. Neither of them laughed. “I don’t think she gets it,” my father said. “Oh, I think she does,” Laurene said, studying me. “I think she definitely does.”

hid in the closet with the light out, crouched on the floor. My father followed me and found me there, like I hoped he would. “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.

We signed the certificate, first him, then me, making official my new, joined surname. The lawyer put the papers in a briefcase. He would later replace my original birth certificate—on which my mother had drawn stars—with a more official-looking version, watermarked, yellow and blue, starless. It was the same lawyer who had argued in the California court against my father’s paternity years before, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Laurene seemed to understand the division between strange and normal in a way we did not. Near her, he and I were at a disadvantage. We were ragtag. He was adopted and had dropped out of college. He didn’t seem to know what people did or didn’t do, nor did I. Unlike me, he said he didn’t care. About rules of civilization and decorum, he was usually dismissive, or even contemptuous. (But he was unpredictable. I’d worn a cardigan one day and he said, sternly, “You’re supposed to unbutton the bottom button,” and it surprised me that this once he not only knew but cared.) My mother was also apathetic about many conventions, and that’s why when I was little she’d let me dress myself. As for my bad spelling, she preferred to enjoy it rather than correct it. She didn’t try to steady and null the confusions of the world but navigated inside them, and for this I hated her now, wishing to know its precise codes. What a relief it was to have Laurene, with her knowledge of etiquette and protocol. Who knew people did not frame birth certificates and put them up on walls.

“Can you give me a ride home?” I asked my father, assuming he could pick me up on his way home from work at Pixar, where he went on Fridays instead of NeXT. I’d hardly noticed, living with my mother, how easy it was to get from here to there; I just arrived at place to place as if by magic. Despite our fights, there was never any question that she would drive me to and from friends’ houses, doctor appointments, dance classes, and school. “Nope,” he said. “You’re going to have to figure it out.”

I laughed, watching him. “I guess you have to get it just right,” I said. “If it’s not just right,” he said, in a high falsetto, rolling the r, “I will perish.” When he was happy, he became goofy, able to laugh at himself and his fastidiousness.

too narrow for her feet. He gave me only the pair of shoes, the same ones he’d bought for her—slim black loafers, also from Armani. They fit me perfectly. He was cold toward Laurene after noticing the shoes didn’t fit, as if her wider feet were an indication of some deeper offense. I was jealous of the ball gown, which was diaphanous, long, and unfolded out of the box. I felt superior about my feet, though, for a little while, as if their slim shape was an indication of something noble and pure.

The algebra lessons at the new school were different from the ones at Lick-Wilmerding, based on formulas I didn’t know, more difficult. Most evenings for a couple of months I asked Laurene to help, and she would get up with a sigh, we’d go downstairs, she’d work out the problem in a businesslike way, and then tell me the procedure to follow to get the answer.

Also—although I couldn’t articulate this—I had a feeling he owed me. I thought he and Laurene would come to understand that, and try to make it up to me; that he would pity me, eventually, and it would hit him.

“You have a real problem, Lisa,” she continued, growling through her clenched teeth. “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.”

“Lis can come in, Steve,” Laurene said. She held her hand out to me. “C’mon, Lis.” I went to stand beside her. I was so grateful to her it made me shake.

It was hard to understand why someone who had enough money would create a sense of scarcity, why he wouldn’t lavish us with it.

My mother was probably already parked out front, waiting for me; I knew I was supposed to be outside ready to go. I wished I’d never made the plan with her, wished I could somehow get her to go away. I hoped she would wait patiently; maybe she would understand that nothing could be more important than this.

With her affection, I felt how she wanted to please me, and I thought less of her for it. I wanted