Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  I didn’t know what she meant. As far as I knew, Kobun didn’t have much to do with us. He was just a Zen Buddhist monk my parents had once known, who’d officiated at the wedding, and who hardly spoke.

  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.

  The next evening, we had the same fight.

  “Oh, poor me, poor me,” she said in the mimicking baby voice. And then, yelling, “You have no idea what I’ve done for you.”

  “I promise I’ll do a better job,” I said. “I’ll do the dishes and I won’t complain at all. And I’ll do the counters right.” She wanted me to wipe hard, and hold my hand underneath the spot the sponge swiped to catch the crumbs.

  “It’s not the counters, you ignorant little shit. It’s this fucking life.” She began to sob, taking in big breaths like gusts of wind.

  I stood very still and tall and kept my face the same. I couldn’t feel anything below my head. I was standing like a house I saw in Barron Park, knocked down with the exception of the facade: viewed from any angle other than straight-on, there was nothing to it. No rooms, walls, substance.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said again. “I mean it.”

  “Sorry means nothing!” she screamed. “You have to prove it. You have to change the behavior now.”

  She hit her flat palm against the kitchen cupboards, against the counter—slap, slap. She took another long, deep breath through a closed throat as if she had asthma, as if she could hardly breathe.

  “You know what I am?” she screamed. “I’m the black sheep. I’m the one who has done everything for you. But nobody gives a shit.” She extended the “shit,” at full volume, for a long time, gravelly, so I was sure the neighbors, the whole quiet street, would hear.

  “I’m the Nothing,” she yelled, starting to cry. “First with my family, now with you and Steve. That’s what I am. The Nothing.”

  She turned on a lamp in the kitchen, a gesture remarkable for how ordinary it was in the midst of this. On nights we weren’t fighting we turned on lights in other rooms, and the house glowed on the dark street beside other glowing houses.

  “No you aren’t,” I said, deadpan. My feet hurt.

  “Fuck you, universe. Fuck you, world.” She stuck out her middle fingers on both hands, pointed at the ceiling.

  She went and stood by the screen door, her back up against it, sliding down it so that she was squatting with her head in her arms, the way she did when the fight was nearing an end.

  “I don’t want to go on,” she said, crying softly.

  She made it sound like it could just happen, not going on, the way my ankle sometimes gave out and curled under when I was walking and I fell.

  Without her I would cease to exist; there would be only emptiness.

  I crouched down beside her and put my hand on her arm. “What do you mean, you don’t want to go on?” I asked.

  “This life,” she sobbed. “I can’t do it any longer. You have no idea what I’ve been through. You have no idea how it’s been, raising you, with no help from anybody. I’m trying so much, but I don’t have enough support. It’s too hard.”

  Every denouement felt like the end of a long, tiring journey, disorienting, gravityless. Sounds around us returned. Smells. By that time I could no longer feel the outline of my body.

  She stayed on the floor in front of the screen. The fight was over. She wasn’t angry anymore, only sad, and I couldn’t imagine, now that the storm had raged through and left her weak and defeated, how I had ever wanted anything but good for her.

  As my mother foundered, I fantasized about living at my father’s house. To traipse around the clean white rooms—still with hardly any furniture—and to sample from the bowls of unlimited fruit. Laurene was starting a business called TerraVera with a petite man from business school, making vegan wrap sandwiches on whole wheat lavash bread. She was chipper when I asked how her day was when she walked in before dinner, with the mane of blonde hair, a leather satchel she carried with papers. Her jeans were cut unevenly on each side, a frayed line at different heights above her ankles, which stuck out below, like the tongues of bells.

  Around that time I also began to walk with my toes facing out. My feet, on their own, pointed straight. I was different when I walked this way, more in charge, more promising, more deliberate.

  The fights continued for months, becoming more frequent, so that soon they happened almost every night for several hours. When we were together but not fighting, I watched her face for when her mood might turn.

  I would tell my teachers, Lee and Steve, of particularly bad fights. This worried my mother, who was mortified if others were talking poorly about her, and who then started bringing Lee up in our fights, mocking me for running, always, to complain to Lee.

  She hit the wall, hurt her hand, yelled so that blood vessels rose around her face, her neck turned into sinews. Doors slamming, charcoal half-moons below her eyes. A couple of times she grabbed the top of my arm and shook it hard.

  “I shouldn’t have had you,” she said one Saturday afternoon, toward the end of a fight. “It was a mistake to have a child.” She wept, not looking at me, then got up, went to her room, and shut the door.

  I knew other parents didn’t say such things to their children. If I’m ruining her life, I thought, why does she often follow me around from room to room, as if we’re chained together?

  I tiptoed quickly to the front of the house, went out the front door, down the steps, across the lawn, onto Rinconada toward Emerson.

  Nobody was out in the quiet afternoon, the houses like blank faces, cars gone or in driveways. I walked quickly to the corner, self-conscious of how I was walking, wearing a skirt and flat shoes, looking back in case my mother was coming. She probably hadn’t left her room or even noticed I was gone.

  I turned east, south, east, toward Embarcadero, toward Highway 101. Once past the corner, where I might have gone straight, or turned, where she would not have been able to find me easily, I began to breathe. I felt elation and freedom I hadn’t expected, an exciting shiver in my knees. More than escape: relief.

  I was light, becoming myself again, feeling the lines around my body where it met the still air.

  I looked at my palms. It was true: my left palm was like a thicket of sticks with no clear path. The lines on my right palm were not clearly defined either, but the lifeline was better. I knew the bubbles weren’t good, but how was it possible to tell when one would happen, how far along I was on the line? I kept her vision of my future, even as I cast her off.

  At some point, I had to pee. There was a round front window as tall as a person, with rosebushes planted close together on the front lawn of a putty-colored Spanish-style house. I looked both ways—no one around—and peed quickly on the dirt underneath the rosebushes.

  I walked around until dusk. I’d been gone for hours, it seemed; there was nothing to do now but go home.

  A block away, I saw people on our lawn and heard a sound like insects: walkie-talkies, chattering and static. Lights in our front windows, the porch light, a police car.

  A woman in uniform saw me half a block away and started walking toward me. My mother stood with her legs apart on the lawn, her arms crossed.

  “You’re back,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.


  She approached me cautiously.

  The female officer spoke to my mother. A male officer, also buzzing with a walkie-talkie, stood farther off, talking into the handset, looking away.

  “Thank you,” my mother said, nodding to the policewoman, who nodded back and walked toward the car.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said, after the cops were gone. “You can’t just run away.”

  “You shouldn’t have yelled at me.” I stood strong, with my legs apart, like her. Some new power I wouldn’t have guessed I had.

  “I’m sorry I yelled,” she said.

  That night, before I went to sleep, she came into my room. She’d washed her face, and when she leaned over me and said, “I’m sorry,” she smelled like soap. “Are you hungry?”

  “A little,” I said.

  She cut apples and cheese in the kitchen and brought them back to my bed on a plate and we ate them together propped up against pillows with our legs under the covers. “You’ll tell everyone,” she said. “You’ll make me out to be an ogre. You’ll tell Lee.”

  “No I won’t,” I said emphatically.

  The next morning, I found Lee. She was behind a partition in the big classroom.

  “Look,” I said, pointing to a bruise on my upper arm like a smudge of dirt. “And she told me I shouldn’t have been born.”

  “She shouldn’t have said that,” Lee said. “She doesn’t mean it.”

  “The fights take hours,” I said. “By the time they’re finished it’s late and I can’t focus on homework. I ran away. But then I went back.”

  Recently, my mother had started to have some wine with dinner.

  “And she’s been drinking,” I said.

  “Really? How much?”

  “A glass of wine, some nights,” I said darkly.

  Lee’s face changed; I understood this detail was not as compelling as the rest.

  “That’s not a lot,” Lee said. “But we do want you to consider where you might stay during finals—the trip to Japan is right around the corner.” The next week, I stayed at Kate’s house in Burlingame. My mother drove me to school on Monday with an overnight bag, saying she also needed a break. Kate’s mother picked us up after school. She was large and tall; her glasses hung from a long beaded necklace that rustled pleasingly when she walked. “Good things come in small packages,” she said when we reached the house and she examined me, looking down at me in the white tiled kitchen.

  “Thank you,” I said, all at once aware of how small I was compared with them.

  We flew into Kyoto and stayed in rooms in a gated temple, the girls in one room, the boys in another, the teachers in a third. We slept on futons on tatami mats, folding the futons and storing them behind shoji-screen closets in the morning, and pulling them out again at night.

  In the mornings we ate breakfast on our knees at a low table in the courtyard surrounded by trees. On the third day, we discovered microscopic silver fishes mixed in with the morning rice.

  We were supposed to keep track of our spending in the same journals in which we wrote about our experiences. I wrote expenses scattered around the pages as they arose, in a disorganized way, including, on the first day, three hundred yen to make a wish at a temple at the top of Mount Hiei, so that toward the end of the trip, when it would have been useful to count up what I’d spent, it was difficult to find the numbers hidden around the pages.

  At the temples, Japanese girls came up to us, giggled, asked to take photos with us. When they laughed, they covered their mouths. They held out bunny ears behind one another’s backs before the click. I paid to write wishes on slips of paper, pushed them through an opening in a granite stone to be burned later by praying monks.

  We traveled to Ikeda, where we stayed for a week, and one evening we went to a bathhouse. We brought towels into the baths for modesty, but I found I wasn’t uncomfortable. It seemed like nothing to be naked here.

  The room was large, with three different baths, a sauna in the back, a warm, hot smell of sandalwood and steam. There was a hot pool, a cold pool, a dark sauna that made a ringing sound from an electric grate. There were young women and thin old women, with skin dripping down, bones showing through. Women with towels around their chests leaned back in the hot pool with closed eyes.

  A few hours later, when we left through the metal turnstile into the night, the heat of the pools clung to me, insulating me against the night air. We all gave off steam.

  Toward the end of the trip, we arrived in Hiroshima.

  Inside the dark hallway of the museum were lit cases containing fingernails, hair in boxes, burned pieces of kimonos, black-and-white photographs of children abandoned and crying. Some children had been vaporized immediately; others survived but then lost their hair in large tufts, lost their fingernails, even their fingers, in the following weeks. The bomb created tornado-like effects. Radiation was carried by the wind in irregular patterns.

  For school, I’d read a book about a mother and daughter on a bridge. When the bomb hit, the daughter had become a soot smear on the ground, while the mother was left naked, her skin charred with the shapes of the dark flowers on her kimono. The image haunted me.

  That afternoon a few of us went to look at the epicenter of the bomb, a fenced-off area with an old building that remained standing. There were cement benches surrounded by planters looking into this fenced-off area, and sycamore trees with mottled trunks dropping leaves that curled like hands on the asphalt around the benches.

  I bought a tray of unagi on rice from a mini-mart nearby and sat on one of the benches. Inside was a plot of land covered in scrub grasses. The land around the building was more expansive than other plots of land I’d seen in Japan, except at the temples. It reminded me of the empty lots between buildings around Palo Alto off El Camino Real, weeds sticking up in the dirt.

  In the middle was an old see-through structure, a curved dome made of only panels of steel, like scaffolding, or a dressmaker’s form. This was a building standing on the morning the bomb was dropped that had been reduced to its skeletal structure below paint and plaster, like a dry leaf worn away to a system of brown veins. It remained because, given the physics of the bomb, the place at the epicenter of where the nuclear bomb was dropped was not destroyed.

  We left Hiroshima and went to a town in the countryside where we stayed in a low, flat building with a meeting room in the middle. We’d already been to many temples in the mountains, green and smelling of peat and rain. We’d been on the bullet train, so smooth it hardly felt like we were moving.

  I’d been thinking about my mother and our fights. It was a relief to be away from her. I knew that when I returned the fights would continue.

  On the second day in the countryside, near the end of our trip, a man walked through the door and into the meeting room. It took me a moment to realize who it was: my father, barefoot, flipping the hair out of his face.

  “Steve?” I said.

  “Hey, Lis,” he said, smiling. The whole class looked. “I was nearby on a business trip. I thought I’d come find you.”

  “But how did you know I was here?” We were far from Tokyo and Kyoto, where he went on business trips.

  “I have my ways,” he said.

  I looked at Lee, who winked.

  How young and handsome he was. I felt the same zing I would feel when I saw his face on the cover of magazines.

  That afternoon, I was not required to participate in regular activities. We were left alone in a room with a rice paper screen, a window, and pillows on the tatami floor. I drew my hands across the shiny reeds woven in a herringbone pattern with cloth seams. Being with him was awkward at first, the way it was with boys, when it was clear we liked each other and yet there was nothing to say.

  “I’m so glad you came,” I said.

  “Me, too, Lis. I wanted to spend some time with you.”

  At some point I was sitting on his lap. I was too old to sit on laps—I’d just turned fourte
en—but I was small for my age and sometimes sat on my mother’s lap too. When I sat on my mother’s lap, I accidentally dug my ischial bones into her thigh, but I didn’t want to do that to him, I didn’t know him well enough, so I sat as carefully as possible, curving my spine.

  I was shaking a little. Was it fear? Excitement? I couldn’t tell. I was afraid of him and, at the same time, I felt a quaking, electric love. I hoped he didn’t notice how red and hot my cheeks were: to have a father now, the way I’d hoped for so long. Having a father, as far as I understood, felt not like being ordinary but like being singled out. Our time together was not fluid but stuttered forward like a flip book.

  How close are you supposed to be with your father? I wanted to collapse into him, to be inseparable. In his presence I wasn’t sure how to hold my hands, how to arrange my limbs. Other daughters would have known this by now.

  In the cool, quiet enclosures of the temples, I’d felt as if I were more than just myself, part of some larger and benevolent system or plan. I wondered what I would do when the trip was over and life resumed with my mother. Would my father say I could live with him?

  “Do you believe in God?” I asked now, to find out if he’d had the same feeling I’d had at the temples. I was too scared to ask about living with him, in case he said no. I would impress and distract him with grand curiosity unlikely to come from a young girl.

  “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.”