Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  “It’s mine,” he said, when I asked for a piece. “You know, she’s really smart,” he said. “She’s pretty too. She looks like that model, Claudia Schiffer.” Who was Claudia Schiffer?

  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.

  When the bomb didn’t come on Christmas, I became sure it would come just past midnight on New Year’s Eve. My migraines continued. My father and Mona had reserved a long table upstairs at Chez Panisse in Berkeley on New Year’s Eve, and my mother and I were invited to come along. At least she and I would be vaporized together.

  My father invited his new girlfriend, Laurene, who brought a friend and arrived separately. After the party, my father would drive Mona, my mother, and me back home. I didn’t notice Laurene or her friend, and I don’t remember him introducing them, but there were many people I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. We were all about to perish.

  Mona’s friends were there too, including a petite woman with short hair.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” she said, leaning down to look into my eyes. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Lisa. Mona’s niece.”

  “Ah,” she said. “That’s right. I’m so happy to meet you. And how old are you?”

  “Eleven.”

  “And that’s—what grade?”

  “Sixth.”

  “Well isn’t that wonderful,” she said. “And are you having fun?”

  Every sound startled me. I looked around for my mother, so I could beg to go home. But she loved parties; we didn’t go to many, and when she would finally agree to leave, she had to say goodbye to everyone she’d spoken with, initiating a new round of conversations, so that the leaving was sometimes longer than the party that came before.

  As I walked through the clot of mingling adults, the same petite woman found me again and asked me all the same questions. I’d never encountered a drunken adult before and didn’t understand what it was that made her forget me so soon—unless it was proof that the fabric of the world was in decay, that any minute the bomb would hit.

  At midnight there was a cacophony of noise—honking horns, paper whistles like lizard tongues—and my heart flew around in the cavity of my chest. When the noise quieted, however, the dark world was still there, intact. I shook all over but felt grateful for our survival, proud, as if my worry had held the world together.

  On the drive back, my father yelled at us. He said that we hadn’t paid attention to his new girlfriend. It was pouring rain. He put the wiper on full blast—his kind of car had only one thick wiper, bending and whipping back and forth like a reed in high wind.

  “I didn’t see her,” I said, meekly. He had been told I was anxious about a nuclear bomb, watching for the end of the world. He knew I had migraines, in an abstract way, but he was not one of the people who knew more or soothed me. He was not involved, and now that the world had not exploded I felt relieved but also foolish.

  “We were talking with everyone else, Steve,” Mona said. “We had friends there too, you know.”

  “For Christ sakes,” he said. “You guys are so damn selfish. Think about how embarrassing this is for me. I told her I had this great family. But why would she want to be with me with a family like this?”

  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.

  As if a woman would leave him because we hadn’t noticed her at a party!

  That night I stayed over at his house, as we’d originally planned. He shook me awake several times throughout the night, crouching beside my bed in the dark and shivering my shoulder. By that time I slept in a different room, in a woven-frame bed Mona had bought for me after he painted and carpeted these rooms. “I can’t get hold of her on the phone,” he said. “Maybe she’s mad. Maybe it’s over.” He was on the verge of tears. At first he seemed distant and moody with me, as if insinuating I was to blame while also wanting me to reassure him, but then he sat on the side of my bed and put his head in his hands.

  “She’s probably at a friend’s house,” I said. “I’m sure it’s okay. You can talk to her in the morning.”

  “I’m so worried she’s gone. She’s never coming back.” It had been only a few hours since we’d seen her; it was the beginning of morning by now, a frail light in the sky.

  “She’ll call tomorrow. You should sleep.”

  “I’ll try,” he said, and walked back to his room.

  For my twelfth birthday, Mona gave me a CD by Patsy Cline, with a sad song about a weeping willow and walking all alone at night. Soon after, she came to visit, and after she’d come into the house to see my mother, I followed her outside. She and I stood on the lawn. It was evening, the light was yellow, the air quiet without the lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and prop planes. Gnats bounced like the surface of carbonated water where the grass met the air.

  Mona was small, five feet two, but stood as if she belonged, as if wherever she stood became her plot of land. Her small stomach poked out like a girl’s. I thought of her as both a woman and a girl. I believed she understood me and I trusted her to help me in the future. I knew her father had also left, that she and her mother had struggled with money. Unlike my parents, she’d been to college and graduate school. When she walked, she ticked her hips back and forth. She taught at a college called Bard and used words I had to look up like “amortize” and “salubrious.” She didn’t repeat the good words but said new ones each time, in a clipped way, folded into sentences, as if she expected I knew the meanings.

  Now we stood in front of my house together, tips of grass catching the slanting light and becoming translucent, like backlit straw.

  “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.

  Once Mona, my father, and I went shopping at a vintage clothing store in Palo Alto. Mona and I found hats and jackets we liked, and he watched us try them on. “They don’t look as good as you think. When you’re shopping in vintage stores, you start to think the things look good when they don’t,” he said too loudly, and walked off down the street, when it had seemed only a moment before that he might treat us to a hat each, at least.

  “Thank you,” I said to Mona.

  She walked to her car parked under the magnolia tree, waving before she drove off. I ran inside to tell my mother. My mother said, “Did she?” as if she was pondering the significance, or didn’t believe it.

  At the end of sixth grade, my homeroom teacher, Joan, called me to her desk. I walked to where she was standing and braced for criticism. I’d been reprimanded often for how I dressed.

  “This,” Joan said, holding one of my papers, a paragraph about Harriet Tubman. “You did something quite good here.” Joan’s glasses magnified her eyes, which were already big and watery. She spoke in an earnest voice, her lips sticking to one another.

  I felt a rush of joy. It was the first time I’d been singled out for good school
work. I remembered how the night before, while I was writing the assignment, the words had come easily, even delightfully, as if they were greased; they slid out right, and I simply wrote them down.

  So I might become smart too. And writing the paragraph had not been boring. The satisfaction I got from Joan’s praise was greater than whatever pleasure I seemed to be getting from the tattered jeans that I alternated with the miniskirts and on which I’d now written the names of all the boys I’d kissed, whose names, coincidentally, all began with a T: Toby, Tom, Trip, Taylor.

  The summer before the start of seventh grade, my mother and Ilan took me to a production of A Winter’s Tale at UC Berkeley, the actors wearing modern suits. I liked Hermione, who fooled the king into thinking she was a statue. The king walked around her, speaking about her, wishing he’d been better to her. She didn’t budge until she’d heard her fill.

  For the first time, I wanted the kind of clothes my mother would not object to: simple, matter-of-fact clothes that were easy to pick out in the morning, like a uniform. I resolved that in middle school I would change completely from the girl I was into a new studious, smart girl. I needed a wardrobe that didn’t distract me with choice. Jeans and button-down shirts.

  The middle school was separate from the elementary school, housed near the upper field on a hill far above the mansion. Steve Smuin and Lee Shult, who had been my teacher in fifth grade, were the main teachers, and were rumored to be very strict.

  Seventh grade included a geography class in which we were supposed to learn every country, ocean, sea, and landmark in the world. The assignment was to create a map, with every geographical element included. We worked continent by continent and we’d just arrived at Europe. I would spend ten hours creating this map, even though it would not be graded and was only a tool to learn the placement of the countries we would later be tested on. I spent the hours because I knew that if I made it splendid, it would be praised and pinned on the wall. I didn’t care how long it took—the anticipation of praise kept me afloat.

  I was coloring in the Ionian Islands with a sea-foam green called Empire. My mother was wearing her tennis shoes, wrinkled at the toes, paint-stained cotton trousers that bagged, a sweatshirt turned inside out. Her head was cocked to one side, watching me. “You need light,” she said, and took a lamp from the painting studio she’d made by adding Sheetrock to the garage, plugged it in, and bent it over where I sat.

  I finished the map that night, turned it in the next day, and Lee pinned it up facing the classroom—the only one pinned up.

  At night, in addition to homework, I copied my notes into a large spiral notebook, sometimes ripping out pages and recopying if my handwriting was not neat enough. I stopped dotting my i‘s with circles, and added a sophisticated slant so my words drove forward toward the edge of the page.

  Mornings, we were quizzed on the information from the day before, and then we announced our scores in front of the class to Steve, who sat at a computer and entered them without looking up, unless someone scored low enough that he gave a sarcastic look. The room would grow silent. It was as if a low score was not just academically wrong, but morally depraved; as if the low score announced one’s unwillingness to participate in the grand experiment of the school. Almost every day, someone cried.

  I was afraid of Steve and this motivated me to work harder. Our poor diction and our selfishness in all its forms were what set him off. His lips were thin, his mouth was small and not fully visible through his short beard. A flash of contempt from those thin, bearded lips was enough to deflate me, sometimes for an entire day. Away from school, whenever I saw a car that looked like Steve’s blue Honda, my heart leapt into my throat, I was self-conscious and careful; I walked with a straighter spine, spoke with clearer diction, for the chance he might be watching. This continued for years, even after I’d left the school.

  The work I did was not just for grades or to become smart or to go on the much-anticipated monthlong trip the eighth-graders took to Japan, but to avoid his contempt; to feel myself, never clearly but at least possibly, in his good graces. We were quizzed one morning on the Components of Culture, and I’d memorized them with a friend and a mnemonic device we invented the night before. For the first time, I got a ten out of ten on a quiz—I’d never scored well before—and Steve did not grunt with incredulity but nodded his head in approval.

  For the first parent-teacher conference, a few weeks later, my parents arrived separately. The sight of my father walking into the classroom—bouncing on his toes, vibrant and young—gave me a pleasant jangle. The conferences would take place twice per year. At the time, I didn’t think about the similar effect the two Steves had on me.

  We sat, the five of us: Steve, Lee, my mother, my father, me. Lee spoke, her triangle eyes winking and sparkling when she blinked. “She’s doing very well. She’s challenged herself.” They commented on the map. They commented on how I’d liked the book The Forest People, how I was prepared for quizzes and early morning tai chi. I kept silent and let them talk about me. They talked about the dramatic change from the previous year’s miniskirts and makeup. Lee’s eyes flicked between me and my mother and father. Mostly my father, who seemed to carbonate the meeting with his presence, both teachers becoming giddy near him. I worried they looked at him too much, ignoring my mother. As if he and I were the show, my mother just the shadow.

  “If we expected the student we saw in sixth grade, with her emphasis on boys and clothing, we were mistaken.”

  “That’s great,” my father said. “In general, I think middle school is so awful it would be better if kids just sailed around the world instead. Just put them all on a boat. But this place is an exception.”

  “Yes,” Steve said. “We’ve been very pleased with Lisa’s progress here.” I tried to hide a smile. “As long as she keeps it up,” he said, before stepping out.

  “We’re impressed with her dedication,” Lee continued.

  I would get to go to Japan, she said, as long as I kept working at the same level.

  “I’m having some trouble getting her to do the dishes,” my mother said, sinking down in her chair. “Just because she’s doing well at school doesn’t mean she should be ignoring her chores.”

  “I agree,” Lee said. “At our house, the girls help do dishes; sometimes they make dinner. They also do laundry and some light cleaning.”

  Lee looked at me. “Lisa, if your mom comes up with a schedule for chores, would you do your best to do them?”

  “Okay,” I said. I could tell my mother was relieved. But I wanted to tell Lee that our fights weren’t really about the chores, but about the way my mother didn’t feel she had enough moral and emotional support. Even though my father was sitting there, she addressed Lee with her concerns.

  My mother had already asked my father for help—not the financial kind, but for his time and energy. She said she had begged. She’d never asked him for this kind of help before, but allowed him to come and go, watch me or not watch me, as it suited him. Now, I was becoming an adolescent, and the middle school, which was an hour away by car, began at seven, which meant she had to wake up at five. She wasn’t getting enough sleep. There were other troubles too: my father’s accountant called one day to tell her my father had decided not to pay for her therapy anymore (after paying for a year); she and Ilan were fighting; I was receiving the accolades she’d worked so hard to help me earn, and yet she felt she was being treated by the school as the inferior half of my parentage.

  My father refused, saying that if she wanted more help, I’d have to live with him full-time. Later, he said it was the school that had insisted that it would be better if I lived with him, because of our fights and her increasingly violent temper. She believed that if he’d helped more, it wouldn’t have come to that.

  After the conference, I hoped my parents would linger. I stood in the classroom for a minute, gathering papers into my backpack; they walked out of the room into the covered walkway, my mother we
aring a long skirt, boots, and a blouse, my father in a crisp white shirt and wool suit trousers. It was the kind of day with mist from the ocean hanging in the air; my mother’s hair formed ringlets, my father’s was newly cut and fell like black lacquer. From where I stood near the glass door, I could see them facing each other, talking. I didn’t care what they talked about, only that they kept talking, for the feeling of peace it gave me. I came outside to be near them, but they said they had to get back to work and, parked in different places on the school property, they left separately.

  When my mother and I got home after grocery shopping, it was almost dusk; the lowering sun made a wide gold line across the street. We got out of the car and our neighbor Margaret, an older woman who sometimes watched me after school, walked over to us.

  Around this time my father had offered to buy us the house we lived in, but the landlord refused to sell. I worried my mother wouldn’t own a house by the time I left for college. I thought we should convince the landlord, or find another house of equal value before my father changed his mind, but my mother did not seem to feel the same urgency. She must have told the neighbor Margaret that we were looking.

  “There’s a house for sale,” Margaret said. “The brick one that looks like a fairy-tale house, at the corner of Waverley and Santa Rita?” It was only four blocks away.

  “I know that house,” my mother said. “Across from the Nancy’s Quiche house?” A woman named Nancy Mueller had made a lot of money, enough to buy a huge Italian-style house, selling frozen quiche with flaky crusts we sometimes ate.

  “That’s the one. It’s not on the market yet. I thought I should tell you in case you want to check it out.” She winked.

  My mother thought we should drive over to take a look before it got dark. Up to the top of our street, past the dip, over a block, and then up again a block to the corner: a brick house built in a fanciful style, with a roof composed of overlapping slate tiles. The windows were paned, leaded glass; on the rooftop, the tip of a small spire twisted up in a corkscrew, like a pig’s tail. At one side of the house rose a high wall made out of the same weathered brick as the house, shaped in a curving pattern, surrounding a courtyard. At the part of the wall farthest from the house was a small built-in wooden door with a curved top and an iron latch, as in a storybook.