Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  “Anywhere,” I said. “To parent-teacher conferences. Out to dinner or lunch.” I imagined another life for her.

  “I don’t really like it,” she said.

  “Just try it on. You can’t tell on the hanger.” I’d heard someone say that in another shop. When she came out of the changing room, still ambivalent, she looked exactly right. I insisted, the saleswoman insisted, and she bought the set.

  When we were almost home, we stopped at the stop sign of the four-way intersection before the turn to our block. My mother began to make the turn, but continued to spin the car past ninety-degrees, missing our street as if by accident. “Oops,” she said, the steering wheel kinked as far as it would go.

  She made a full circle, and we came back to our starting position. But again, when the time came to turn, she missed it.

  “Oops again!” she said, laughing.

  She spun us round and round, as if we were caught in a vortex: sidewalk, lawn, tree, house; sidewalk, lawn, tree, house.

  “Turn now!” I yelled each time we approached our street.

  “I just … can’t seem … to turn!” she said. Bushes grew halfway up the houses, so they looked like faces with beards, watching us as we spun. She went round and round until we were both dizzy, and then—finally—she made the turn and took us home.

  At home that night we heated up chicken potpies in the microwave and watched Masterpiece Theatre sitting on the floor in front of the television. She wanted to read Andy Warhol’s diaries out loud to me in bed before sleep, even though I was too old to be read to, and I let her.

  “You’re a Simpleton,” I said, as a joke, a few days later when we were stopped at a gas station filling up and she said she liked the smell of gasoline. I’d never called her that before. I might have gotten the word from the Mock Turtle’s Story in Alice in Wonderland, parts of which she also liked to read aloud to me. When I said the word, I wanted her to deny it. I wanted her to get mad at me: how dare I call her Simpleton—it wasn’t true. But she only laughed.

  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’s wedding took place in Yosemite, at the Ahwahnee Hotel.

  Kobun, a Buddhist monk my parents knew, officiated. During the ceremony, Steve and Laurene stood before three large plate-glass windows through which you could see the mountains, the forest, and the falling snow.

  Laurene’s dress was ivory silk; my father wore a jacket and bow tie with jeans, as if he were one of those puzzles where each part of the body is clad in a different outfit.

  That morning Laurene had been downstairs in the hotel lobby wearing black leggings with a flower pattern and black-rimmed glasses. In my idea of weddings, brides hid before the ceremony, worried about their beauty, and I liked the way she was playful and among us.

  Kobun had asked several people to give short speeches, and I was to be one of them.

  There were only forty people invited to the wedding, and afterward we would go for a hike in the snowy forest, wearing fleece jackets they’d given out as gifts. The dinner would be in a room with rectangular tables arranged in a U-shape, a classical guitar performance, and bouquets of wheat.

  My mother wasn’t invited, but my father called her the day after the ceremony, something she didn’t tell me until years later. When she did tell me, the fact of the call surprised me because I didn’t realize they were in touch; they could be distant and then close in a pattern I didn’t understand.

  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. It was delivered to the crowd and to Laurene in a tense way, like a lecture, or an admonition. A few more speeches and then Kobun called my name, and I walked forward toward my father and Laurene, who stood in front of the windows, a thick snow falling slowly behind them that gave the scene the look of being a snow globe. I was holding the paper on which I had written something about how it was rare to get to see your parent get married (a friend suggested this idea), and as I walked toward them, reading the speech at the same time, I started to cry. My father gestured me closer, and I hugged the two of them until Laurene whispered, “Okay, Lis. C’mon.”

  I’d been looking forward to the wedding: I would get to eat the food and cake (it was shaped like Half Dome, and tasted of banana), and there might be dancing (there wasn’t). I was prepared for these details, the surfaces of the ceremony. I was unprepared for how it would feel to be this close to the buzzing wire of what I wanted. I hoped to be the very center of it, the matchstick girl who had imagined a scene into being. This wedding was for me. I would be the daughter of married people, even if Laurene wasn’t actually my mother.

  When the ceremony was over, however, I felt empty. I was not the center of the affair. I wasn’t invited into most of the wedding photos. My father seemed absorbed with Laurene and everyone else. During the dinner after the ceremony, I braided Laurene’s hair, standing behind her at the table.

  Later I wandered down to the lobby and looked around the gift shop. I found a small photo album, the cover made of a piece of cloth that looked like a tapestry of pixelated trees.

  “Would you like to pay with cash or charge it to your room?” I’d learned at some point that hotels let you charge to rooms. The woman seemed earnest, not aware of my scheme.

  “The room,” I said. I zinged with excitement, my palms got clammy, at the prospect of having a photo album. But my father might see it on the bill. I hoped he would be too busy to notice, or that he had too much money to notice money.

  I was sharing a hotel room with my father’s sister, Patty, the sister he grew up with who was also adopted. My father wasn’t very close with Patty—he’d become closer to Mona in the years since they’d found each other in adulthood. I felt upset to be rooming with her, as if it meant she and I were in the same category.

  Most of the guests left on the Sunday after the wedding, except for Mona and her boyfriend, Richie, who would stay for a week with my father and Laurene, sharing a honeymoon. Richie and Mona would marry the next year at a ceremony at Bard College, and also share a honeymoon with Steve and Laurene, but then it seemed to me that there was no reason, if Mona stayed, that I could not stay too. Kobun and his girlfriend, Stephanie, were also still around, but would be leaving that afternoon.

  “If you’re staying, I want to stay,” I told my father.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Let me think about it.” He seemed conflicted, the way he rarely seemed when he said no to me.

  But a couple of hours later he said I had to ride home that afternoon with Kobun and Stephanie.

  Before I left, he requested the bill for the room I’d shared with Patty at the main desk in the lobby. I stood near him. I didn’t want to be anywhere but at his side.

  He looked through the bill and frowned.

  “Is this yours?” he asked, pointing at the charge.

  “It was Patty,” I lied. I was afraid of him, deeply sad to leave, and terrified of what he would say to me if he found out it was me. “I told her not to get it, but she did.”


  Shortly after the wedding, a fight that had been simmering between my parents on and off for more than a year exploded. Before this I had hardly been aware they were fighting, only that the rapport had cooled between our house and theirs. I attributed this to the fact that my mother was having a hard time with her own life. A few years before, my father had hired a man to do gardening at the Woodside house. The same man had recently started to do some work as an assistant gardener at the Waverley house too, and my mother had found out. My mother heard through acquaintances that this man had been accused by his children of sexually molesting them, and the issue of my proximity to him became a catalyst for a larger disagreement between my parents. They had become friendly again over several years without resolving or discussing how my father had neglected us years before, how he had not protected me when I was little. And now he was not protecting me again, and it must have reminded her of his other abandonments and neglect and made her enraged. When they discussed it, she lost her temper and she could hardly speak. She had asked him several times already to fire the man, but he refused.

  The final argument happened one evening when I went over to the Waverley house for dinner on my own. My mother knocked on the door, white with rage. It seemed to me completely out of the blue. I watched as the two of them argued, both standing outside the gate on the sidewalk on Santa Rita near her car. I understood the fight was about the man, but it didn’t make sense to me why she should be so upset, why she should be almost incapacitated with anger over what seemed to me to be such a small issue. I remember wishing she would go away, stop humiliating herself.

  “How dare you. How dare you,” she repeated, crying. “Promise me you’ll fire him.”

  “Nope,” he said. He stood tall, impassive. He looked good, a new black T-shirt, jeans that had not yet sprouted holes. She was wearing shorts and tennis shoes.

  Next to him she looked ragged and disheveled. When she spoke, sobbing, she was hardly intelligible. Looking back, 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.

  At some point she got into her car, slammed the door, and drove off. He shrugged, walked back into the house. I followed, pretending along with them, for the rest of dinner, that nothing had happened.

  After that night, my father no longer stopped by our house on Rinconada, and my mother wasn’t invited for dinner at Waverley again. The gardener continued to work for my father, and my parents stopped interacting.

  The news that Laurene was pregnant hit me like a slap. I thought they’d wait to conceive—for several years, at least. Although I could not have articulated it, I thought I was what they wanted. A house, a woman, a man, and a daughter: now, finally, with the wedding ceremony over, we might enjoy it.

  They invited me for dinner. We ate the same food as on other days: vegan food. On this night, vegetable sushi with brown rice. 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.

  Now we were in the den, and they had become serious. I wondered if I was in trouble.

  I sat on a chair. Laurene sat on an ottoman, my father on the floor.

  “We’re having a baby,” he said. I looked at Laurene to see if it was true. She nodded.

  The light was dim in that room at dusk—only the lamp on his desk and a weak one overhead and royal blue in the windows.

  “That’s great,” I said. I felt the muscles in my face melt and twitch so that I wasn’t sure anymore what the resting position of a face was supposed to be and how to get back to it.

  “We’re very excited,” he said, and put his arm around her.

  I walked home. The lights were on, two yellow eyes. The house was small now, and far away. It was nothing, my mother was nothing. She was not part of the family and new baby and she couldn’t stop it.

  “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.”

  This baby would have my father from the start, and the right mother. It was born into luck. The baby was not to blame; this made it worse, somehow. I wished that I were that baby instead, and that Laurene was my mother. Soon Laurene’s stomach became round and tight as a drum. Her belly button poked out like a doll’s ear.

  I went over to the house, into my father’s study, and saw my father had typed out the name—Reed Paul Jobs, three names, three syllables—in many typefaces, fonts, sizes, filling his computer screen. Garamond, Caslon, Bauer Bodoni. He wanted to make sure the name would be good enough for a whole life of use.

  My brother was born with long fingers and curling fern hands that grasped my finger, miniature fingernails with white tips. How I loved him! It was involuntary; I couldn’t help it. The way he smelled, his proportions—his perfect heels and loose-skin knees. I went over to visit him after school and on weekends. I changed his diapers. I wondered who he would become. Curled on his stomach, I noticed the downy hairs on his back, his abdomen flaring out under his ribs like a roasting chicken. Dark straight hair grew around a soupy area on his skull that pressed in like the center of a pie. His lips were pink and made of a different kind of skin, like a clean pink worm that contracted. His tiny diapers made him seem even smaller, spindly thighs and tiny feet shooting out of a big white casing. He had an old, dreamy look in his gray eyes, like he came from a wiser place.

  Sometimes, in the evenings, creditors called. “What’s your name,” my mother said, when she picked up the phone, frowning into it. “I want to get your name. You’re not allowed to call at this hour. I’ll report you.”

  “Who was it?” I asked when she’d hung up. At the time I believed they were people calling to sell us things. Later I learned it had been the purchase of the couch, chair, and ottoman at Ralph Lauren that day that led to the debt she could not pay, then to the stress of creditors calling; and later, when I was in high school, unable to pay off the cards, she went through bankruptcy.

  I heard her complain about the carnations Ilan sometimes brought—he might have sprung for better flowers. Later she told me that one night when he said he had to work late, she bought a ticket to an opera at Stanford, went alone, and saw him there with another woman. Over the course of the next couple of years they were off and on, sometimes fighting, sometimes separated or back together, broken up for the last time before I started high school. When they weren’t getting along, she and I fought more too.

  “You know Ilan’s pinkies? How they twist inward?” she asked me one day in the car. The second joint of both his pinkie fingers bent in at a thirty-degree angle. “It’s a sign that someone isn’t faithful.”

  I felt myself above the menial tasks she wanted me to do. I felt humiliated and bored taking out the trash or doing the dishes, and so I would perform these tasks with lethargy and carelessness, doing a sloppy job and then rushing back to my room to work at the earliest opportunity, lazy about anything that didn’t result in academic praise. One night she was still in the kitchen when I came back from drag
ging the trash to the canister at the side of the house, waiting for me with an air of expectancy.

  “Look at the counter,” she said.

  I looked for the sponge, but she’d already grabbed it and wrung it out, and was furiously wiping crumbs on the countertop into her cupped hand.

  “All I’m asking,” she said, “is that you do the dishes and wipe the counter. Dishes, counter. Get it?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll do it next time.”

  “No, you’ll do it this time,” she said.

  “But it’s already done,” I said.

  “You need to change the behavior.”

  “I will,” I said. “I promise. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, mimicking me in a high baby voice. “Little Miss Princess,” she spat.

  At the beginning of these mounting arguments, I would try to reason with her, in case I could calm her down. Later, when it was clear she wouldn’t stop, when it was clear that the fight would go on and on, I stood very still and stopped speaking.

  A few times before, the phone had rung at the beginning of a fight, interrupting it; she took the call in her room, where I could hear muffled noises. Her friend Michael or Terry had called. Later, when she came to say goodnight, she was no longer upset. I was innocent, I thought, her unhappiness nothing to do with me—she was lonely. This is what I believed and told myself when she started screaming, and it was one of my excuses for being lazy with the dishes, and unhelpful around the house, and contemptuous of her.

  “Do you think I’m your maid?” She said it through her teeth, snarling.

  “Mom, call a friend,” I said. “Please.”

  Besides me, the people my mother yelled about during our fights were Jeff Howson, my father’s accountant, who sent the monthly child-support checks that I was acutely aware were lifelines and, increasingly those days, Kobun. (Compared with how much she mentioned these two men, she rarely brought up my father.)

  “Kobun said he’d take care of us, then left me to rot.” Her voice was almost gone. “That crook,” she said, wrinkling up her face.