Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

“He does love you,” she said. “He just doesn’t know it. You, you are what is important to him.” Her words produced a great bloom inside me. “He knows it,” she said, “he’s always known it, but he’s disconnected from himself. He doesn’t know his own heart, because he lost it.”

Off Highway 101 was a squat building set at an angle to the road. The marquee said Ruby’s, with an image of tipping martini glasses. “That’s where Lis is going to work,” my father said, pointing to it as we sped past, all of us in the car, me and my brother in the back. He’d made the joke before. Now I understood the place was a strip club. I pictured women in scenes from movies, women writhing naked on countertops inside. There were hardly any cars in the parking lot. “Ha,” I said, trying to play along.

One morning around then I walked into the kitchen. He was reading the paper; Laurene was looking through the mail. When I stepped into the room, he lowered the paper and looked at me. “Lis?” “Yes?” “Do you masturbate?” The question hung in the air. The answer was that I didn’t. I’d never tried it. I knew what the word meant, but wasn’t sure how to do it myself. Once in dance class years before in the middle of a series of moves, a gust or wind of pleasure had overtaken me, unbidden, and I ran out of the dance studio into the changing room, flushed and confused. I didn’t say anything and stood very still. “Well, you should,” he said, and lifted the paper back up again.

The tongue lifted in anticipation, and then—my father pulled the bread away. The parrot swung back and stood straight on the pole, closed its beak. “Hey,” I said. “Let him have it.” “Wait a sec,” he said. Again, my father presented the bread, just out of reach; the parrot leaned forward, slowly opening its hinged beak, the black space inside large as a pillbox. Again, my father pulled the bread away before the parrot could reach it. “This is boring,” I said. He kept going, developing a rhythm. The parrot leaned, he withdrew, the parrot straightened again, ruffling his green feathers. Each time, I worried the bird would tip and spin down around the pole—its wings were clipped.

“It’s not nice. You’re torturing him.” “It’s an experiment,” he said. “To see if he’ll learn.” I waited to see if my father would listen and stop or get tired of the game, or if the parrot would wise up. Neither thing happened so I left. I saw him later, smiling and looking refreshed. “Isn’t it wonderful here?” he said. All around us the birdsong was continuous and varied, the trill patterns overlapping.

He sometimes pointed out how she came from New Jersey and had wide feet, and how she liked the wrong kind of trees. The cauldron pot might symbolize a whole realm of aesthetics he felt she didn’t have. (“She doesn’t have taste,” he’d said to dinner guests, after she left the room.) When he saw the burnt pot, he might be unkind to her for it, as if here was further evidence that she would lay ruin to his refinement.

After asking for several months, I finally persuaded my father and Laurene to come along with me for a session. I had a crazy idea that Dr. Lake would say something to them, or he would be silent when they said something, and they would just get it. Then they’d agree to all my (reasonable, I thought) ideas, like getting a couch, saying goodnight, and heat. His presence would make them unable to deny how reasonable I was. My father and Laurene had dressed for the occasion—how coupled and taut they looked, walking in—she smelling of soap and pressed linen, wearing a crisp white shirt and the small, gold-rimmed glasses my father had bought for her. My father had put on a new black shirt, and jeans without holes. It looked as if he’d just gotten a haircut. Dr. Lake had arranged four wooden chairs with black foam-covered arms around a wooden desk. They sat down, backs straight. I had long since abandoned formality around Dr. Lake, and I hoped they would find him comforting too, with his teddy-bear nature, his corduroy trousers, his messy but thoughtfully designed office. “We’re here to talk about Lisa,” Dr. Lake said. Silence. I knew Dr. Lake was good at allowing long silences, and sometimes, in order to get him to speak, I would have to let time pass, an uncomfortable pause beyond what seemed reasonable. 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 fa...

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?

The silence between us would grow over the next years. Soon he would no longer write or call back;

It was only much later that I had the audacious idea that with my departure for my mother’s house for the second six months before I left home, and then for college far away, he had felt abandoned, and even betrayed. It wasn’t fair, but may have been true nonetheless: he had been negligent about spending time with me and caring for me, but now that it was time for me to go, he was angry at my departure. At the time, I would have told you that he hated me and that he must have hardly noticed my presence, that it could not possibly be missing me that had stirred him to such a fury. I was not enough to miss. It wasn’t until my early thirties that I realized that the loss of me might be what he was mad about. Many parents spent time with their children for years, and had learned to abide loss in smaller increments—but he was new at it.

“You know,” he’d said then, “those years you lived with us—those were the best years, for me.” This was news—I didn’t know what to say—for me they’d been difficult, and I’d thought for him they were some of the worst.

At Harvard, I decided to major in English. During my junior year, I took a seminar on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, taught by a Chaucer scholar from England with charming, uneven teeth and tufts of white hair in his ears. At some point, Criseyde has left Troilus, but Troilus can’t seem to forget her. “It makes Troilus seem so pathetic,” I said confidently during the seminar, “that he can’t get over her.” “No,” the professor said, looking at me with a kind gaze. “His strength is that he can hold on.”

“Harvard financial aid is need-based,” he said. My father’s status rendered me ineligible for any aid. “So I just have to drop out? There’s nothing Harvard will do to help me stay?” “That’s correct,” he said. “Absolutely nothing.”

“He doesn’t love you,” Kevin said to me. “Love is what you do.” “Maybe you’re right,” I said, and contemplated the idea. It was a stab at first, but after that, it felt almost like a relief to say it like it was. “How dare Kevin say that. He does love you,” my mother said on the phone when I told her. “But love is a verb,” I said. “So what does it matter?” “It matters,” she said. I thought maybe she didn’t know. I experimented with the idea as I walked around. He doesn’t love me and that’s why he’s like this. The plain truth.

After graduation, I would see my father once a year, if that. My younger sister, Eve, was born when I was away at college, but in a few magazines I came across in the following years and on his bio on his company website, he said he had three children, not four. Sometimes, he would be wonderful, but then he would say something unkind, so that I found myself guarded around him, happy to stay away.

“Yes. Yes!” he said. He was hardly able to contain himself, bobbing his thin legs up and down in the seat beside me. We were in the car with the engine off because we had arrived at the sushi restaurant in the mall. “That’s what I was trying for,” he said. “And do you know what? I was the first person you talked to after you lost your virginity!” he said. “It was so great. It meant so much to me.” I’d forgotten this before he mentioned it.

guess our timing was off,” I said, not convinced of it even as I said it. In fact, I had recently realized my luck: I got to know him before he became hugely famous, when he was healthy enough to skate. I’d imagined he’d spent a lot more time with everyone else than he had with me, but I wasn’t so sure about that anymore. He looked into my eyes and teared up. “I owe you one.” I was not sure what to make of this phrase. 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.

When people speak and write about my father’s meanness, they sometimes assume that meanness is linked to genius. That to have one is to get closer to the other. But the way I saw him create was the best part of him: sensitive, collaborative, fun. The friends he worked with got to see this more than I did. 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. “Look at those clouds,” he’d said

“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.”