Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  She insisted it wasn’t a problem.

  “I want to help,” she said. “But don’t be late. I don’t like waiting in front of that house for you to come out.”

  On Saturday, all of us were in the kitchen, the windows looking out to Santa Rita, where she would park and expect me to run out. I hadn’t told my father or Laurene she was coming.

  This morning, in the kitchen, we coalesced into a family.

  “This old man, he plays one, he plays knick-knack on my thumb,” my father sang to Reed, who was sitting on his lap, slapping at his knees. My father took Reed’s hands in his and twirled them around each other. Reed had recently grown another tooth. Why, Reed asked over and over, in response to whatever one of us said. Whywhywhy? He was elbows and knees, bright blond hair, red lips, a dimpled chin, and miniature biceps. I loved his laugh with his head thrown back, his spaghetti arms twisting out of grasp. He was three, but he still did not sleep through the night. He woke me up in the early morning, running into my room and tickling me awake under the armpits.

  Laurene and I made bruschetta according to her recipe. “Good job, Lis,” she said, as I added the garlic and dripped the garlic and oil on the bread. I was filled, at that moment, with a sense of real family, the joy in the kitchen. We had reached an eminence.

  My mother was probably already parked out front, waiting for me; I knew I was supposed to be outside ready to go. I wished I’d never made the plan with her, wished I could somehow get her to go away. I hoped she would wait patiently; maybe she would understand that nothing could be more important than this.

  She leaned on the horn, a long honk like a foghorn. Wasn’t she worried about the neighbors? Wasn’t she ashamed? When she honked like this, I had to rush out of the house as fast as I could. Why did it seem these minutes of what felt like family closeness always came at the moments my mother was there to take me to an appointment?

  By the time I got out to the car, she was fuming and spoke between her teeth.

  “You promised,” she said.

  “I know, but—”

  “I don’t like waiting in front of that house like I’m your maid.”

  Not only did she drive me places, but also I’d started to stay at her house, for one week every two weeks. It was the space in between that was perilous, the walk to her car, the four blocks, the few days of adjustment—as if my parents (who had similar values, diets, and mystical beliefs) were not only separate people but operated on contrasting principles. The houses were close but their atmospheres so starkly different it reminded me of something I’d read about the surface of the moon, how if you put your hand on the line where the light meets the shadow, one side will freeze and the other will burn.

  Soon I reduced the transfers between houses, extending my stays from one week to two weeks, to a month, to two months.

  “I’d like to stay at Mom’s house more,” I said to my father at the end of the summer before my sophomore year. “Maybe half the time.” Because my parents had never been married or divorced, there was no official custody arrangement. And now that we’d fulfilled his requirement of not seeing each other for six months, I figured I was allowed to decide where I went. He didn’t seem happy about it, but he didn’t say I couldn’t. He wouldn’t give me rides between the houses, though, and when I stayed with my mother, he’d give me the cold shoulder for several days around the transfer.

  The first two days at my mother’s felt excessively warm, almost cloying, as she followed me around, tending to me, cooking with what I’d recently understood to be an excess of oil, and profligate butter. I felt superior. I knew things she didn’t know. I had aesthetic refinement she didn’t have, I thought. She touched my hair and came in to say goodnight to me, when I had already learned to do without her. I hated how needy she was, how vulnerable, wanting to be with me even when I said I was fine alone; I hated the fact I was related to her, that because of her I was unable to belong in the other house. It was messy, I noticed, her kind of love. With her affection, I felt how she wanted to please me, and I thought less of her for it.

  I wanted to be someone else, to be prettier, blonde, tall, worthy—but she seemed to love me, to like me, as I was. I doubted her taste.

  I hoped she would not notice how I judged her. I bit my tongue and spoke in a brittle, condescending voice, pitied her strangeness and her adoration of me.

  Then we would get into a fight, and she would sob, saying that she was hurt and I treated her badly, and I would see her as human again, some defense would fall, my perspective would shift, and I’d feel close with her again. We couldn’t help repeating this pattern every time, even after we became aware of it.

  “Steve doesn’t love me,” I told her. “I was born too early.” We were sitting outside on the side steps, under the wisteria vine, eating half a watermelon with spoons.

  “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.”

  I wasn’t nothing; I was something. I thought of how he asked me about Tina: he doesn’t know what he has until it’s too late, and the pattern is overlapping. He uses me to find out about her, and later he will use someone else to find out about me, and on and on—the tragedy, for him, of no two points connecting.

  “It’s better to do your own job poorly than to do someone else’s job well,” she said. It was from Hinduism. She also said, “Mama may have, papa may have, but God bless the child who’s got his own.” That wasn’t Hinduism; it was part of an old song.

  There was a stack of papers on her desk, bankruptcy paperwork. I was hardly aware it was going on. I saw a man’s sweatshirt in the back of her car. “Just a friend’s,” she said, her dating life not part of our visits. I found out later she’d dated and broken up with a mathematician and was attracted to someone in her yoga class, a software engineer from the Bronx with a black belt in karate, but she wasn’t sure if he’d noticed her. On Thursday nights, the yoga students would go out for salad and pizza at Vicolo on University Avenue.

  By the end of each visit with my mother, I felt some other part of me rise out of a shell—maybe my soul—the texture of it all around me again, some calm, warm authority. When she had errands to do that didn’t concern me—going to the art store, grocery shopping—I rode along in the car with her, just to be close.

  When I was staying with my father, I babysat for the neighbors’ son, age three. They lived on Waverley, a block down. The family had a two-story wood-shingled house painted light blue, with a white picket fence and a backyard littered with trucks and robots. The parents, Kevin and Dorothy, were both lawyers. I looked forward to eating crackers, soy cheese, and cookies—foods we didn’t have at my father’s house—and reading in a chair under a lamp.

  We’d met in the neighborhood one weekend on a walk with my father and my sleeping brother. From the sidewalk my father called out to Kevin, who worked on his car in the open garage, visible from the street. This reminded my father of his father, Paul. Kevin looked and seemed like someone from a lineage of more upstanding, straightforward men. My father and Kevin became friends, going on walks around the neighborhood. Sometimes on weekends we’d drop by their house and sit in the backyard. The car was a Morgan, with a long, vented muzzle, black lacquer paint, glistening chrome exhaust pipes, and a fine red stripe.

  Kevin and Dorothy seemed to like me, and overpaid me for babysitting. They invited me to join them one Saturday afternoon on a drive to the ocean, and we wound up the curving road through flecks of light to the clearing at Skyline, passing a restaurant called Alice’s, where swarms of motorcyclists also stopped to eat. Then farther, toward the beach, the landscape changed to hills.

  Dorothy lent me a scarf to wear over my hair, Kevin lent me a windbreaker.

  “How’s it g
oing over there?” he shouted over the roar of the wind and the engine. He meant my dad’s house.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Maybe a little cold.”

  “Cold?” he shouted.

  “There’s no heat downstairs,” I yelled over the wind.

  “What?”

  “He won’t fix it.” We’d reached a stop sign at the crest of a hill. “I have to do the dishes every night and they don’t have heat down there. Or a dishwasher. I mean, it’s broken.”

  “Why don’t they get a new one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  This would change during my last year of high school, when, tired of doing the dishes by hand, I thought to call a dishwasher repairman. He fixed the machine in ten minutes for forty dollars—it was only a rubber gasket, decayed into lace. When I told my father that the old brown machine was working again, he frowned, and the next week, after years without a working dishwasher, a new Miele dishwasher was installed.

  “Like Cinderella,” Kevin said. This was the kind of sympathy I was going for, and what I believed about myself sometimes, looking through the photos late at night.

  “And they make me babysit a lot,” I said.

  “Oh,” Kevin said. He seemed to sympathize, but it was clear this was a lesser offense, and diluted the rest.

  “And they won’t get a couch,” I said. Later, I would learn which complaints worked, and which ones, however strongly I felt aggrieved, didn’t trigger much sympathy in others.

  He won’t even get a couch, I said, to anyone who would listen.

  The fact was, there were other places to sit—the Eames chairs with ottomans, a grand oriental rug, the kitchen table, my desk—so that my insistence on getting a couch, and my strong feelings about the lack of one, confused even me. But I didn’t stop insisting. Whatever we’d lost before would be regained, we could catch up—if only he’d get a couch.

  “The worst thing is,” I said, “I get really lonely at night. I just wish my father would say goodnight sometimes. Like, even once a week.”

  Kevin shook his head and smiled. He smiled like this, not saying anything and shaking his head, when something made him angry, I would learn later. He had long eyelashes, sparkling eyes, a cleft in his chin, and seemed like a real adult to me then, another species of person from my father, who was more boyish—even though they were around the same age.

  Much later, after I’d spent a lot more time with them and even lived at their house, Kevin and Dorothy would go against my father’s wishes and pay for me to finish college. I think they did it for their own reasons—connected to their own history and sense of justice. It made them furious that my father might get away with cutting my college tuition payments, just because he had more power.

  “I wish there was someone in that house who was thinking of you,” Dorothy said. “Someone thinking, What does Lisa need?”

  Complaining to them, about the heat, the goodnight, the couch, was a relief, and gave me a dual role: I was not only in this pitiable situation, but watching it; I was both the one hurt and the narrator of the hurt. I was meek, wishing someone would make my father do the two or three things I could not get him to do myself; telling others about it—and receiving their sympathy—gave me a power I didn’t have inside it.

  We got back after the drive, windswept, and they made tea.

  “I’m so lonely,” I told Mona on the phone. “He doesn’t come to say goodnight.”

  I relied on Mona to be an intermediary, a role that continued past high school into my adult life, when she would carry bits of information between us. Her place in the middle seemed like a mercy; he might listen to his sister.

  “Really?” Mona said. “Have you asked him to?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you ask?” I hadn’t asked because I knew there was something wrong with needing it. I needed too much. There was a difference between the way I knew I should be feeling and the way I actually felt.

  “The thing is,” I said, looking out into the emerald garden through the small window—at the cup-shaped roses, their centers densely stuffed with petals like pages in a waterlogged book—”the thing I don’t understand is …”

  “What?”

  “It looks so good here,” I said.

  “It’s a nice house,” she said. When you looked into the windows of other houses, beautiful ones, the people inside the light, you imagined happiness for them. Now I was inside it.

  “How can it look so good but feel bad?” I asked. It must be me that was wrong, I thought. Not it.

  “What else is money for,” Mona answered, “if not to make it look good?”

  “Hey, would you guys come say goodnight to me sometimes?” I asked my father, standing in the kitchen. I’d built up the courage, after talking with Mona.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Just a couple nights a week,” I said. “Because I’m lonely.”

  “Nope, sorry,” he said, without pausing to think. He was bouncing my brother in his lap, sitting in the rocking chair in the kitchen.

  A few days later, I asked Laurene, separately.

  “Sure,” she said.

  I was flooded with gratitude and relief, the same feeling as when she pulled me into photographs, the same feeling that made me shower her with rose petals and lantana blossoms when she walked through the gate after work, so grateful it made me shiver as if from cold.

  That night she came down first, sat on my bed, and stretched out her legs. When she stretched her legs, her almost pointed feet looked like a mannequin’s feet, shaped to fit into a high heel. I put my own feet out, imitated the shape. “He’ll be coming down in a minute,” she said.

  “So how was your day?” I asked. I’d turned the overhead lamp on, although I usually kept it off at this time of night. I wanted to make things pleasant, so they wouldn’t think of it as a burden to come down, more like a treat. I wouldn’t have minded if they simply tucked their head around the door—I only cared about the fact of the goodnight, not its duration.

  “Great, Lis. Tell me about what you’re reading.” She eyed the stack of books beside my bed, all of them partially finished. She was a reader too. I was reading Franny and Zooey again, and the last book in the Cairo Trilogy. Also a book called When Nietzsche Wept, with fictionalized accounts of psychological revelation, including one about an overweight girl who seeks therapy during the process of weight loss and who, with each successive pound lost, relives the difficulties she faced at that exact weight. It left an impression on me for the idea of cell memory—that whatever we undergo is stored within the physical body, even when conscious memory of the event has disappeared.

  My father came down and sat beside Laurene on my bed. The joy and relief of this event made it hard to relax, like trying to breathe in a high wind.

  “All right, well—goodnight, Lis,” my father said grandly as he got up, as if to underscore it. We hugged.

  After that, they didn’t come down again. I asked one more time, my father said no, and I stopped mentioning it.

  Marketable Skills

  I joined the debate team. It was one more thing I might do to get into college, and like the other activities I did for that purpose, it consumed me until I’d forgotten why I started to do it in the first place. The type of debate I chose was called Lincoln-Douglas, named for the famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. The debate topic was printed on a long, thin sheet of paper: “Majority rule versus minority rights.” What did it mean, exactly? And how would we make questions about a statement? I didn’t know.

  After we had prepared our arguments for both sides, done many practice rounds, and gone to one small competition at Stanford, which I’d lost, a small group of us left for another debate competition at a school called Lincoln, an hour away. Debates were held in empty classrooms, moderated by volunteers, parents, and teachers. After each round, paper assignments were posted on the wall with the next classroom assignment. In between we found eac
h other, the four people from our school; we bought snacks, sat on the lips of concrete planters, this school much larger than ours, with charts on classroom walls that seemed more sophisticated and difficult than our charts. We whispered stories about the inanity of our opponents’ arguments.

  When I argued, my cheeks got red. When that happened, I felt as if I were floating and sparking. Ideas seemed to be delivered to me, the right series of words in the right time allotments. While my opponents spoke, I had ideas for how to crush them rhetorically. The issue of minority rights or majority rule felt personally important to me. The only debate I was pretty sure I’d lost was against a boy in the first round.

  That night, we returned home. The following day, Sunday, was the second and last day of the tournament. We left early, in the same van.

  “We’ll return home as soon as we’ve all lost or, otherwise, we’ll wait as long as someone is still being placed in tournaments,” the coach said. I’d told my father I’d be gone for another day; he seemed wary, as if I’d made up the debate team. “I should be back by dinnertime,” I said.

  But I kept winning. My cheeks continued to burn, so hot that as I formulated my counterarguments, I put a hand on my cheek, alternating between left and right, to cool them down.

  I called home in between rounds, letting Laurene know that I would be later than I thought. I could tell from her flat voice that my father wasn’t pleased.

  “You can talk to the debate coach, if you’d like,” I said. “To verify.”

  “No, thanks,” she said. “We’ll just see you when you get back. We might be asleep.”