Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  A friend of my father’s, Joanna, came over for lunch—she’d been part of the original Apple team and had a son who was about nine months old, like Reed. Steve gave her a tour of the house. “These,” he said, pointing to the silvered wooden beams on the ceiling of a small alcove, “were used to build the Golden Gate Bridge.” I thought he meant they were part of the structure itself, but later I understood they’d been part of the scaffolding.

  “Don’t you worry about protein, Steve?” she asked while we ate. She spoke with a pleasing accent. She talked about children’s developing brains, how a vegan diet might not contain enough protein or fat. You could tell she was a worrier.

  “Nope,” my father said, with a calm authority. “You know breast milk—what a baby drinks during the time they’re developing most?”

  He began this line of reasoning with anyone who asked about our vegan diet.

  “Yes?” Joanna said.

  “Well, guess what? Breast milk is only six percent protein,” he said. “So, getting a lot of protein can’t be that important.”

  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. He’d been a little more relaxed about his diet when I was younger, occasionally even having a scoop of ice cream at the Häagen-Dazs shop at the Stanford Barn. Now he’d become even more rigid than he was before, not wanting a single animal product to pass the lips of anyone in the family, especially Reed’s.

  I noticed the way Laurene seemed confident; her face was symmetrical and serene, whereas my face was composed of uneven halves, the eyebrow, ear, and eye of one side higher than those on the other. Without my permission or knowledge, my face would fall into expressions that revealed thoughts and feelings like weather patterns. I began to imitate the way Laurene tossed her long hair. She wasn’t a hippie or bohemian. She had fended off two marriage proposals and then captured my father. Because of this I supposed she could do other great feats. My father talked about her to me in the third person when he grabbed her to kiss her, “She was a cheerleader, you know?”

  For lunch my father made pasta, and on a serving plate I arranged a TerraVera burrito—black beans, salsa, and avocado wrapped in lavash bread—sliced into sections like sushi rolls. At that moment, I liked the purity and abstemiousness of our diet, the sparse furnishings of the house exposing the beauty of its bones, beams like ribs, the entrance left unlocked, so that anyone could wander in. The gardener had planted chamomile in between the paving stones, and when you walked across, the scent drifted up. We ate our wholesome food at the round wooden table in the kitchen, my brother’s high chair pressed up against the edge, and at moments like this—with a guest over, my brother slapping his plastic tray, my father humming, serving his pasta topped with avocado cubes and drizzled with his fancy olive oil—I felt like I was part of the family.

  The only problem was my hands. Since moving here they’d become detached-feeling, conspicuous. They fluttered and lifted in an embarrassing way, as if they too, separately, wanted attention; otherwise they hung dead at the ends of my wrists in an obvious, strange way I was sure everyone noticed. I was severely conscious of them. When we sat down to meals I begged them, silently, not to betray me. Yet almost every evening at dinner I broke a glass.

  I was terrified my father and Laurene might tell me at some point how insignificant I was, what a disappointment I was, sloppy and repulsive, breaking things like a baby. They already had a baby. How little I fit into the picture of family. I could see it and feel it. They’d made a mistake in allowing me to live here; I was unsure of my position in the house, and this anxiety—combined with a feeling of immense gratitude so overwhelming I thought I might burst—caused me to talk too much, to compliment too much, to say yes to whatever they asked, hoping my servile quality would ignite compassion, pity, or love. They had taken me from a drab life and brought me into this perfect house: she was strong and intelligent, he was glinting with genius and aesthetic mastery.

  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.

  One day, after school, I rushed over to where my father and Laurene were standing beneath the Juliet balcony in the courtyard, the green-leafed wisteria vines winding up fat wooden beams. They were discussing the landscaping.

  “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.”

  That evening I broke another glass at dinner and ran to my room.

  I 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.

  “Hey, Lis,” he said one day as we passed in the hallway. “Do you want to change your name?”

  He was barefoot, wearing only a black shirt and white cotton underwear—his uniform around the house. He was vain about his slim legs and wore this uniform even when people came over so that it became something I teased him about.

  “Change it to what?” I asked. Sunlight streamed through the bank of leaded-glass windows that made up one wall of the hallway, falling in bright rectangles on the floor, warming the tiles.

  “My name,” he said.

  For a moment I thought he meant Steve.

  “You mean … Jobs?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  I paused. I didn’t want to offend him. When offended, he became distant and wouldn’t acknowledge me, sometimes for days. I’d been Lisa Brennan my whole life. The thought of not only deserting my mother but also replacing her name was too much—as if he’d suggested that we perform a kind of theft.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I mean, my mom … let me think.”

  “Let me know,” he said, and walked off.

  I thought about it that night, and went to find him in his study the next evening and told him I’d like to take his name but keep hers too, and connect them with a hyphen.

  A few weeks later, a lawyer arrived. All of us, including my brother, gathered in the living room around the coffee table. My brother stood and smacked his hands against the glass. There were two Eames lounge chairs, a Tiffany lamp with dragonfly wings, a large patterned rug, but no couch. We sat on the floor.

  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.

  I’d already started high school under my old name, but
I began to write the new name at the top of my papers.

  “Should we frame it?” my father said, getting up. “We could put it here.” He pointed to a space on the wall where the hallway met the living room. He was ebullient; I felt important, and giddy too; all this fuss over adding a line and four letters. A lawyer had even been summoned!

  “What do you think, hon?” he asked Laurene.

  “It might be a little strange,” she said tactfully. “To hang up a birth certificate.”

  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.

  That night, I set the table for dinner while Laurene fed my brother. They had blue-and-green-striped cloth napkins and thick French glass cups (the ones I broke) with petal-shaped indentations around the lip that caught the light.

  “Where do the knives and forks go?” I asked, a bouquet of cutlery in one hand. I was determined to learn, from her, what went where. Her mother had been an English teacher; surely she knew what was done and not done, would find it easy to say, “Do it like this, not like that.”

  “The fork on the left,” Laurene said, “knife and spoon on the right.”

  “Which outside, which in?” I wanted to know unequivocally.

  “Spoon on the outside,” she said.

  My brother sat up to the table in his high chair, gumming his food, splattering it around with his open hands. Feeding my brother meant spooning mush into an O-shaped mouth, swiping what did not make it from the sides of his lips and cheeks, and spooning it in again, like spackling a hole—until he was finished and without warning released the remains in a great whirring noise from his lips.

  “What about the napkin?”

  “Napkin under the fork.”

  Years later, I would live in Italy, where every finer point was known, and learn as much as I could—only to discover that these rules weren’t very important to me after all. Which was what my father might have been saying, and hoping for me, when he taunted me with the phrase I hated: “Lis, you’re gonna be a hippie someday.”

  The next day my father and I went to Country Sun to get avocados. “I’m really good at picking them out,” he said, cradling each in the palm of his hand for a few seconds, closing his eyes.

  At the register a man with long brown hair in a ponytail looked at him. “Does anyone ever tell you that you look like Steve Jobs?” he asked. I kept a straight face.

  My father was looking down, getting change out of his wallet. “Yep, sometimes,” he said, handing over the change. And then we left, me following him out to the car. How cool it was that he hadn’t claimed it. Even a regular errand with my father was edged with glamour.

  In the car on the way home I finally built up the courage to ask him if the Lisa computer was named after me. I’d been waiting for a moment alone with him to ask—if he said no, I wouldn’t be humiliated in front of others, who might have assumed.

  “Hey, you know that computer, the Lisa?”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Was it named after me?” I asked. We were both facing forward. I didn’t look at him; I tried to sound curious, nothing more.

  If he would just give me this one thing.

  “Nope.” His voice was clipped, dismissive. Like I was fishing for a compliment. “Sorry, kid.”

  “I thought it was,” I said. I was glad he couldn’t see my face.

  I’d become fixated on the idea of going to college, and I was sure that one secret to getting in was a profusion of after-school activities. I was going to a private high school called Lick-Wilmerding in San Francisco, about an hour away, which I attended with four friends I’d known from Nueva. The school building was modern, cement and glass. In the mornings it would be encased in white fog; in the afternoons, when the fog burned off, sunlight streamed through the glass and onto the whiteboards and industrial rugs. Together with the other Nueva kids’ parents, my father arranged for a car that picked us up, one by one, at various stops along the Peninsula. The car made the return journey in the afternoons—but it wasn’t possible to do an after-school activity and still catch this ride home.

  The next weekend, Laurene took me clothes shopping.

  “We’ll have to go quick,” she said. “Just one store.” We had an hour. With my mother there was time but no money; with Laurene it was the opposite, and I figured I could keep as much as we found, like a game show my mother told me about, frantic contestants grabbing from shelves and throwing as much as they could into a shopping cart before a buzzer went off.

  As we backed out of the driveway in the white BMW convertible my father had bought for her, Laurene slid on sunglasses that were small and rectangular, made of a brushed brown resin with greenish lenses.

  “I like those,” I said.

  “Oh, they’re silly,” she said, which seemed incredible, to dismiss the glamorous while inhabiting it.

  When we got to the mall, a car backed out of a space directly in front of Gap Kids. “Providence!” she said. We went inside and I selected clothes from the circular racks and hung them on the pegs in a dressing room. I modeled a ridged yellow shirt that hugged my chest and black cotton slacks.

  “Those are great on you,” she said. “Let’s get them.”

  I found yellow socks to match the yellow shirt, a gray shirt, a blue T-shirt, a pair of jeans. She liked everything I liked. I was shy at first, but she didn’t seem to mind when clothes were tight or possibly sexy.

  By the time I finished, the changing room was a shambles: shirts draped on hooks, pants on the floor. I’d leave it—assert my entitlement along with her. She and I were queens of this realm; other people would pick up the clothes and hang them. Anyway, we were in a rush.

  When I pulled open the curtain, she frowned.

  “What a mess,” she said. “You can’t leave it like that.”

  She came in and started pulling shirts over hangers and squeezing pants into metal clips. Her movements were forceful and quick. I hurried to join her.

  I’d failed to get a part in the fall production of Guys and Dolls and had been assigned the role of assistant stage manager instead. My friend Tess was stage manager. We carried black binders, each scene annotated with props, stage directions, and lighting cues.

  “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.”

  A couple weeks later, it was opening night. In the lead-up to the play, I was probably gone for a night a week, and would have loved to stay late at school more often but did not because if I missed the car, I couldn’t get a ride. On rehearsal nights, I stayed overnight with a friend. Sometimes, when I was at home, my father didn’t talk with me or look at me during din
ner, and even Laurene seemed distant and displeased. They did not explain themselves, so I thought they might have just been upset for other reasons. But then my father began to complain that I wasn’t around enough.

  For the opening night of the play, I planned to spend the night at Tess’s house. Laurene let me borrow her black leather shoes: Joan & David oxfords with a buckled-over strap. We both wore size six and a half.

  The girl playing Miss Adelaide had a long neck, a nasal voice, and black hair cut like Louise Brooks’s that glistened under the lights. I’d developed a burning crush on the star, David, who had an English accent and played Sky Masterson, and who did not seem to notice me as I rushed around with props and papers.

  After the play, a group of stagehands and actors and I ran outside. The lawn was dark, damp from sprinklers or dew or fog. We played capture the flag with two sweaters for flags. It was the first time, at the new school, that I was happy and unguarded. I didn’t think about the shoes on the wet grass. In the morning, I noticed they were scraped in the heel with vertical grooves, as if a blade had cut stripes into the leather, and the leather had swelled, soaked in water. How could blades of grass be strong enough to cut leather? I put the shoes back into Laurene’s closet when I got home, hoping she wouldn’t notice. If she did notice, I figured she could certainly afford to buy another pair. She noticed the scratches a few days later, asked what had happened, upset, but then didn’t mention them again.

  I left my things in piles around the house, the way I had when I lived with my mother: shoes, sweatshirts, mango skins on cutting boards, papers, crumpled socks like droppings. Maybe I thought they’d find it endearing, or that I’d claim some of the attention allocated to my brother. When Laurene came into the living room one evening shortly after I’d ruined her shoes, and saw the socks and sweatshirt I’d left on the rug, she said, “Lis, I’m going to need you to pick up all your things from now on.” She said it coolly.