Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  If I won, I could show him the trophy. I’d never won a trophy before, and it began to seem necessary to get it.

  Day turned to night, the number of competitors who remained on the white sheet of paper pinned onto the wall after each round dwindled to very few, and when I walked into a room for what I heard were the semifinals (it wasn’t clear), there were three judges instead of one.

  I don’t remember the look of any of the contestants I debated except the first, but I do remember the feeling in the room, during the final round, when I knew I was winning. It didn’t take long. By that time I didn’t care which side I got, my opinion papers were wrinkled from use. Any arguments could be overcome; I knew them all. We shook hands at the end. I felt a great magnanimous love for my opponent as well as for all the competitors who had come before.

  Twenty minutes later, we gathered for the awards ceremony. “We have two winners in the Lincoln-Douglas category,” the man said. He was holding only one trophy in his hand. I started up from my seat. “Unfortunately, we only seem to have one trophy, so I’m afraid it’ll go to whoever gets up here first.”

  I was already scrambling up the steps to the stage, trying to look graceful and nonchalant. The other winner, I saw now, was the boy I’d debated first, who had probably won the first round, meaning that his opponents had been more difficult after that. But he had not been quick, and as I neared the podium, the man reached out with the trophy. I grabbed it, transferring it to my left hand as the boy arrived behind me. We shook hands, and smiled.

  The next day, in the car with my father, I mentioned the tournament.

  “I won the whole thing!” I lied. I’d pulled out the trophy that morning, but he hadn’t seemed sufficiently impressed, so I’d brought it up again.

  “I know, Lis. Maybe that’s all you need,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’re done. You proved it,” he said.

  “But that was just one. There are others. It might help me get into college.”

  “Better to debate in real life,” he said. “Better to save it for when you need it. The club’s kind of lame.”

  Off Highway 101 was a squat building set at an angle to the road. The marquee said Ruby’s, with an image of tipping martini glasses.

  “That’s where Lis is going to work,” my father said, pointing to it as we sped past, all of us in the car, me and my brother in the back. He’d made the joke before. Now I understood the place was a strip club. I pictured women in scenes from movies, women writhing naked on countertops inside. There were hardly any cars in the parking lot.

  “Ha,” I said, trying to play along.

  When we got home, he played a CD in the living room. He’d been saying he wanted to play something for me for a while. “Listen,” he said, chuckling, “This one’s for you, Lis.”

  The song was “Short People,” by the composer Randy Newman, who was writing the music for Pixar’s Toy Story.

  Toy Story would be the first fully computer-animated feature film, he said, bringing home tapes every week as work on the movie progressed. The tapes included drawn sketches interspersed with computer-animated segments and blank spots. There were various voices for the characters, some rough, some polished, some movie stars and some people filling in for movie stars—a patchwork movie in progress.

  The lyrics to “Short People” made me laugh in spite of myself: I was five-two and wouldn’t get any taller. As it played, he bobbed on his heels and looked at me and tried to sing along with the lyrics. He knew some of them. He tried to grab me to dance to it. My father was six feet, Laurene was five-seven. They’d measured my brother’s height and doubled it, a trick Laurene knew, and it seemed he’d be tall as well. Height seemed to matter so much to them, as a sign of worldly promise.

  One day, when I got home from school, a computer was set up on my desk. It was matte black, with a pleated side vent and huge screen.

  “I thought you might want one,” he said, coming into my room. I’d been asking for a NeXT computer since I’d moved into his house; he and Laurene each had one. But he’d said no. It was too expensive, too nice, for a kid.

  “Wow,” I said. “Thanks.” Why had he decided to give it to me now, without an occasion? I flipped the switch in the back; the computer didn’t respond. “How do I turn it on?” I asked.

  “Like this,” he said, reaching around and ruffling the same switch. Still no response. I clicked a letter on the keyboard, clicked the mouse. Nothing. He took the screen by the corner and tipped it a few inches on the desk, toggled the on-off switch again. I crouched down under the desk, pulled the plug out, and pushed it back. He checked my desk light to make sure the outlet was working. It was.

  “Well, Lis,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  When I returned from school the following day, the computer was gone, and it was never replaced.

  For the entire year after my sixteenth birthday, whenever we were together, my father sang me the song about being sixteen and turning seventeen from The Sound of Music. He sang as he ascended the stairs, in his usual black shirt, white underwear, bare feet uniform, flinging his hand out over the banister like he was performing in a Broadway revue: “Innocent as a ro-o-o-se.” I rolled my eyes, standing at the bottom of the stairs in the middle of the afternoon. But I loved it.

  One Saturday my father, my brother, and I went for a walk, my father pushing my brother in his stroller. The air smelled of the overgrown rosemary in yards, and the asphalt, hot and cracked. “Wouldn’t it be terrible to be impaled on that steeple?” he said when we passed the church with its high cement point. He made a farting sound with his cheeks: a steeple piercing the intestines.

  The light and air seemed to have a golden presence, alive with many lit particles. Pollen, maybe. We passed a park with pine trees and suede-leaved magnolias. “You know, Lis,” he said, “people from the East Coast don’t really understand the West Coast. They try, but they just can’t. It’s not inside them.” On the East Coast, he said, people wore khakis to be casual. People there were nothing like us, he said; they were phony and too formal, without the quality of holy surrender we had because of these fragrant hills that smelled of pepper and eucalyptus, all this watery sunlight. We wore jeans with holes, he and I, and Birkenstocks.

  I bobbed between different ideas of myself: on a weekend morning I was my father’s confidante, the one like him, true like jeans, the Stanford hills, Bob Dylan.

  His cheek sometimes pulled up into a dimple at the top; I could make the same dimple appear in my cheek. I avoided meat, butter, cream, the foods he avoided. I’d started to walk like him, in admiration, falling forward at each step, and saying “sort of” this or that, like him, because I thought it sounded sophisticated. My impression of ways in which we were Californian and the ways in which we were similar blended together.

  We ended up at the corner of Cowper Street and North California Avenue, in front of a house with a split-rail fence. A rosebush filled in the fence so it wasn’t possible to see the house from the sidewalk. The bright green stems with bright green thorns grew straight out like spokes. The roses, not large, were every color of sherbet and sunset: white, orange, baby pink, hot pink, magenta, red. Each rose contained a variety of these colors different from those of the rose beside it, and because of some trick of light or hue, they seemed lit from within.

  “These are so beautiful,” my father said.

  “I know,” I said.

  Neither one of us moved. We gazed at them, my brother asleep in the stroller. He and I see these the same way, I thought. We have the same vision. A great relief, to have someone besides my mother—and different from my mother—who saw things the way I did.

  A few minutes later, a man walked out the front door of the house.

  “What are these roses called?” my father asked.

  “Joseph’s coat,” he said. “I guess because they’re all different colors.”

  When we were back at the house, sitting at the table
, I suggested that we switch eyeglasses. I was wearing the ones he’d bought for me—dark rimmed, by Oliver Peoples. They were large and bold on my face, with oxidized metal flourishes. His were rimless, two thin metal lines to the ears.

  He removed his glasses slowly, using both hands.

  “Careful,” he said. “If you torque them, it ruins the lens.” In my hands his glasses were thin-boned and alive, like an insect. Still warm from his face.

  We put them on, looked at each other, and, at the same moment, we both chuckled. Our prescriptions were almost identical—nearsighted with an equivalent astigmatism in the left eye.

  “Never pluck your eyebrows, especially not the middle part,” he said. My brows grew in an uneven wave, one side rising up to the crest, the other crashing down. The edge of one reached toward the other. “If you pluck them, the hairs stop growing back, and then at some point you have to draw them in with a pencil.” He contorted his face in disapproval or contempt. “You’ll see,” he said, reaching out to touch the middle where they met. “Those eyebrows are your best feature.”

  “Hey, I drew you a bath,” he said, a few days later, in the evening.

  I went into the bathroom and saw he’d lit candles and placed them on the shelf above the sink and along the rim of the tub. Rose petals floated on the surface of the water, which glowed yellow-gold from the candles. He must have torn petals off the roses outside.

  One morning around then I walked into the kitchen. He was reading the paper; Laurene was looking through the mail. When I stepped into the room, he lowered the paper and looked at me.

  “Lis?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you masturbate?” The question hung in the air. The answer was that I didn’t. I’d never tried it. I knew what the word meant, but wasn’t sure how to do it myself. Once in dance class years before in the middle of a series of moves, a gust or wind of pleasure had overtaken me, unbidden, and I ran out of the dance studio into the changing room, flushed and confused.

  I didn’t say anything and stood very still.

  “Well, you should,” he said, and lifted the paper back up again.

  In the fall of junior year, when the pressure to get the grades to get into college was at its peak, my father asked me to go to Hawaii with the family. Mona would be coming too.

  “I don’t think I can get out of class,” I said.

  We were sitting together in the hallway, on a dark wooden bench with wide planks, one of the only pieces of furniture in that part of the house.

  “If you can’t manage to go on this trip,” he said, “you shouldn’t consider yourself part of this family. Lis …” He paused, as if about to say more, then pinched his lips and shook his head.

  “Okay, I’ll go,” I said, quickly, to stop him from elaborating.

  The following day I lied to my teachers, who were required to sign a form for my absence, saying I was going on an extended trip to visit colleges. The chemistry teacher, Ms. Lawrence, shook her head, but signed. The history teacher, Mrs. Warren, looked at me with surprise, but signed nonetheless. How would I be able to visit colleges, I wondered, now they thought I’d already been? How would I report on towns I had never seen, when they asked? How would I hide freckles and suntan?

  I’d have to figure out how to spin it once I got back. Maybe I’d stay inside.

  The day we arrived in Hawaii, I followed my father down to the beach, the sand flecked with lava crumbs and hot under my bare feet. Beneath a few palms was an open structure with a thatched roof called the Beach Shack, where you could borrow equipment and sign up on a clipboard for activities: snorkeling, catamaran rides, scuba lessons.

  Here the sand was cool. In the shade beside the shack, standing on a pole between two beams, was a bright green macaw with a black tongue. My father had saved a piece of a roll from lunch, and now he held it out to the parrot. The bird leaned forward, jutting out its neck and chest, black-skinned talons gripping the pole. It arced forward as if on a hinge, stepping and clutching the pole and opening its black beak to reveal a stub of tongue shaped like the topmost joint of a pinkie. The tongue lifted in anticipation, and then—my father pulled the bread away. The parrot swung back and stood straight on the pole, closed its beak.

  “Hey,” I said. “Let him have it.”

  “Wait a sec,” he said.

  Again, my father presented the bread, just out of reach; the parrot leaned forward, slowly opening its hinged beak, the black space inside large as a pillbox. Again, my father pulled the bread away before the parrot could reach it.

  “This is boring,” I said.

  He kept going, developing a rhythm. The parrot leaned, he withdrew, the parrot straightened again, ruffling his green feathers. Each time, I worried the bird would tip and spin down around the pole—its wings were clipped.

  “It’s not nice. You’re torturing him.”

  “It’s an experiment,” he said. “To see if he’ll learn.”

  I waited to see if my father would listen and stop or get tired of the game, or if the parrot would wise up. Neither thing happened so I left.

  I saw him later, smiling and looking refreshed. “Isn’t it wonderful here?” he said. All around us the birdsong was continuous and varied, the trill patterns overlapping.

  Dinner took place in the same hall where breakfast was served. We were seated at one of the round tables at the front of the hall near the door and the big windows that were mirrors in the dark. Hawaiian music was piped in from a small band of three outside, sad-happy harmonies. Our waiter, a petite woman with long, dark hair flecked with gray, came to take our order. I’d seen her earlier, walking with a little boy I thought must be her son.

  My father ordered a carrot salad. “I’d like it shredded into pieces this size”—he held his fingers an inch apart—”with half a lemon on the side. Can I also have a large glass of orange juice, fresh squeezed? Not those little glasses. The big one.” He gestured the shape of the glass, the top and bottom. He lisped when he enunciated carefully.

  “We’ll do the best we can with that, sir.” She’d said it kindly, dismissively, looking down and writing on her notepad. My father leaned his chair so far back that his chin was almost level with his knees. I sensed danger.

  She looked up at Mona, ready for the next order.

  “I’d like a white fish,” Mona said. “What would you suggest?” Mona was polite, her voice small and sweet.

  “There’s the ono, a white fish like snapper,” the waitress said. “Or the ahi, also fresh today, although that’s a denser fish.”

  “I’d like the ono please. Could I have it poached, with no butter and just a tiny bit of olive oil? And a few steamed vegetables on the side?”

  Fish and vegetables, no butter? It was as if she’d peeled off from my contingent to become one of the adults; as if she would be less my friend on this trip, more theirs. Laurene ordered simply too, a salad. I ordered the fettuccini Alfredo.

  “I did a little experiment on the parrot,” my father said. “The one on the beach. It turns out they are just so dumb.”

  “He tortured it,” I said.

  “They can’t really learn,” he said. “They just have this set pattern. It’s fascinating.”

  The waitress returned with the food, his salad a pile of matchstick carrots cut by machine and set on a side-salad plate like a sloppy garnish. The carrots were oxidized, raspy white at the edges. The surface of the lemon—a wedge, not a half—pulled in at the rind and would crack when squeezed. The waitress handed out the rest of the dishes. I showed my contentment more than I might have at another time, as compensation for whatever had changed in the air.

  My father was looking at the carrots. He touched one of them, then pulled his hand away as if repelled. “Wait,” he said, as the waitress walked off. “This isn’t what I want.”

  “But you said—”

  This woman with her kind face and her tired eyes—she should not have argued back. She wouldn’t see the difference betwe
en what he wanted and what she’d brought; you could tell she found his request tiresome and extravagant. I knew she’d have to appear interested in what might please him. Walk away, woman, I thought at her.

  “I can try to change it, sir,” she said, too formally.

  She pulled the plate away, and while she was still within earshot, my father said, “It’s too bad the dinner is crap here. Everything else is so great. And then this shit.”

  “Steve, try the fish,” Mona said. “There’s no butter.” She pushed her plate toward him. He looked but didn’t taste. I could tell, by his tight half smile, that he was preparing for an attack.

  Near him was the safest place to be when he attacked someone else.

  I wanted to move permanently across the invisible line between being in danger and being safe, from the outer to the inner circle—and the price of the possibility of safety was having to watch him attack this woman. Suffering did not diminish or grow but was allocated, redistributed from person to person. If I leapt out to defend her, he might turn on me. An attack on one person had the effect of lifting the others up; for me, the relief of being safe in the midst of danger created a floating sensation.

  On the first trip to Hawaii with Laurene, he’d pointed to my bathing suit and said, “Why don’t you get one like hers?” comparing us, and I’d felt, despite myself, like the best person for having the right thing.

  Later I thought of how each of us at the table had, at some point when we were young, lost our father. He was the patriarch, and he’d paid for all of us to be here. The mood was tense.

  The waitress returned with a bowl, more carrots—fresh and old, combined. She brought a new lemon wedge and the orange juice.

  “Is this what you were looking for?” she asked, as if she thought it might be right.

  “Actually, no,” he said. “This isn’t at all what I was looking for. Does anyone know how to do their job here?” he said. “Seriously. You don’t. I asked for fresh carrots.”

  “Sir, I’ve asked the kitchen to do the carr—”

  “No. No. You obviously haven’t asked. This is the same shit you brought me last time.”