When fall arrived, I was cold in my new coat. I’d brought only a few pairs of cotton socks. I did not yet understand the importance of wool.
I worried about my mother. How would she afford to pay the rent?
“I’ll figure something out,” she said when I asked. “You don’t need to worry about me. I always make things work.”
She would be the one I’d call for hours every night during my first year in college, for her insights and care, when I found a culture far more alien than I had expected, and after I experienced my first heartbreak when Josh and I broke up, for which neither a fancy coat nor a skill at cleaning toilets had prepared me.
I was floored by grief.
About heartbreak my parents gave, separately, the same advice: “You’ve got to feel all your feelings. That way, next time, when you fall in love again, it will be just as meaningful and profound.”
“The first heartbreak brings up the pain of the past,” my father said. “The first big loss. Harness it.”
“If something is really painful, it’s the undertow of a big, beautiful wave,” my mother said.
Other people said, “Get over it,” and “Go out.”
I took only what interested me: a class on anthropology that was held in the back of a wooden building filled with bones; a film and literature class; a class about the laws protecting children; and an art class in which we had to draw one hand with the other. I joined the paper, the literary magazine, and did community service at a local school.
My father came to visit me once that year. Walking behind me up the stairs to my dorm, he’d said, “You need to lose some weight.” He told my new suitemate that her artificially flavored microwave popcorn was “shit.” Despite his temper, he’d had an air of melancholy, even offering to buy me a leather jacket at a nice clothing shop called Agnès B. I refused because it seemed too expensive, it seemed weighty, as if it really meant something else but I didn’t understand what, or what to say to him, being sad myself, lonely again without his company in this strange place I was supposed to like.
That summer, when I returned, my father treated me strangely, not talking with me unless he snapped at me with contempt. I was too thin. Laurene told her friend I was anorexic. I wanted to eat, but store-bought food tasted like cardboard, and I didn’t know how to cook. Laurene kept buying me sandwiches.
When I went to see Dr. Lake, I discovered my father had decided not to pay the bill anymore. Dr. Lake said, “No one has the right to refuse you medical care,” and reduced his fee to twenty-five dollars per session, which I paid myself.
Over the summer I worked at Hidden Villa where my mother had taught the art class years ago. I was a camp counselor for groups of children who came to learn about the animals and the farm.
Since I’d left for college, the checks from Jeff Howson that helped pay her rent had stopped coming, and my mother could not afford to stay in the house on Rinconada and would have to move.
My mother was now dating the software engineer with a black belt in karate she’d met in yoga class. She would move in with him until she could find her own place. He owned a small house in unincorporated Menlo Park. Unincorporated, as far as I could tell, meant that there were no sidewalks, just gutters, and the trees were bushy and more abundant, not planted in orderly rows. He said she could stay until she found another place, but his house didn’t have enough space for me.
She was in the midst of packing up the house on Rinconada one Saturday, with the help of some friends. I was supposed to help too. She was directing traffic, moving quickly on the path under the wisteria bush between the garage and the house through the spots of sunlight. “C’mon, Lisa,” she said. I found myself standing over boxes and stacks of books and clothing and dishes, all the things of our lives, our past together, unable to move.
“Pack,” she said, “please,” but I could no longer distinguish between items to discard or keep, or what boxes they went in, and my legs were paralyzed. Soon she gave up on me.
In the late afternoon, after the others had stopped packing, I sat at my mother’s desk as she cooked for me and I was comfortable for the first time in days. I knew I would soon eat and be nourished. I didn’t want to leave the circle of her care.
But that night my father had tickets to Cirque du Soleil. Even though he had hardly talked to me or looked at me since I returned from college, he wanted me to go to the circus, and had become fixated on my attentions to my little brother. I was thin and depressed, like a rag doll, unsure of myself, trying but unable to please him. I decided I wouldn’t go.
“I can’t go tonight,” I said to him on the phone at my mother’s house. “I’m sorry.”
“You have to go,” he said. I was not sure why my presence could be so important to him, unless it had to do with watching my brother, who might need to be walked around the circus tent.
“I need to stay, I need to eat. Mom’s cooking for me,” I said. My mother was looking at me from the kitchen with concern.
“Lis, you’re not being part of this family,” he said. “Frankly, we think you’re being really selfish.”
“I want to be part of the family,” I said.
“If you skip the circus, you’ll need to move out.”
“Fine,” I said, and hung up, because at his words I was filled with an unexpected wave of relief, as if I had stepped from a small dark room into a bright open field.
Right away I called Kevin, the neighbor.
“He told me to move out,” I said, “that if I didn’t go to the circus tonight, I was supposed to leave.” I liked the feeling of openness it gave me, the permission. “What do you think I should do?”
“Let’s move you out,” Kevin said.
“When?”
“Tonight. While they’re at the circus.” Years before, he’d also moved Dorothy out of her father’s house. He’d saved her from her own father, and they’d married young.
“And then?” He knew my mother was moving and I didn’t have a place to stay.
“You can live with us,” he said.
This was the answer I had wished for.
That night, I met Kevin at his house at dusk and we drove a block to my father’s house to gather my things. I took most of my clothing and shoes, my toiletries, some of my personal letters, left my CDs. Even though I knew my father must be at the circus, which was at least a thirty-minute drive away, I kept on feeling he could come back at any second and catch us. Kevin was also not in a mood to dawdle, more serious than usual. I threw my things into a bag.
What would it be like when my father returned and found me gone? It seemed incredibly sad, then, in a way it hadn’t been when I imagined how it would be from the conversation before: the shock. It was possible that he did not want me to leave, that he helped cause the very losses he didn’t want, that he wasn’t able to keep in his life the kind of people who might explain this pattern to him. Had he kept them, he wouldn’t have listened to them anyway.
It was only much later that I had the audacious idea that with my departure for my mother’s house for the second six months before I left home, and then for college far away, he had felt abandoned, and even betrayed. It wasn’t fair, but may have been true nonetheless: he had been negligent about spending time with me and caring for me, but now that it was time for me to go, he was angry at my departure. At the time, I would have told you that he hated me and that he must have hardly noticed my presence, that it could not possibly be missing me that had stirred him to such a fury. I was not enough to miss. It wasn’t until my early thirties that I realized that the loss of me might be what he was mad about. Many parents spent time with their children for years, and had learned to abide loss in smaller increments—but he was new at it.
My father had come to visit me in London when I was in my mid-twenties, and we had walked to Green Park, found a bench, and sat side by side. “If I was an old man, I’d be out here all the time, sitting on one of these benches,” he said, looking around, b
ut there were no old men out that morning and the other benches were empty.
“You know,” he’d said then, “those years you lived with us—those were the best years, for me.” This was news—I didn’t know what to say—for me they’d been difficult, and I’d thought for him they were some of the worst.
“Take just what you need,” Kevin said. “And leave a note.”
I wrote, “Dear Steve, I’ve moved out, as you said I should if I didn’t go to the circus. I hope you will call me tomorrow.” Write where you’re staying, Kevin said. “I’m staying at Kevin and Dorothy’s house,” and I wrote their phone number, and “I love you.” It seemed less real now that we were doing it than it had seemed talking about it this afternoon. I kept on hoping to relax, but not to relax so much that I gave Kevin the notion I was accustomed to my salvation.
Why did the neighbors choose to help me? For years they were aware of how my father treated me and they were profoundly uncomfortable with it. Dorothy’s father, also a prominent, charismatic man, had been cruel to her. They had enough money to help me. They didn’t like the idea that because my father had money and was surrounded by people who pandered to him, he could get away with being cruel to a child. When I asked many times over the next few years how I could possibly repay them, they said I should pay it forward, when I could. Help some other kid.
“Let’s keep it moving,” Kevin said.
On my bed at their house that night, Dorothy had left a tray with Russian tea cookies dusted in sugar and wrapped in plastic, a thermos of herbal tea, and a welcome note. In the morning, before work at the farm, I cracked my neck, pulling the tendon across the bone, and gave myself a crick. I couldn’t move out of the contorted position all day.
My father did not call or return my calls.
The rest of the summer continued in a similar way, living with the neighbors, working at the farm, seeing my mother, speculating about my father and what he was thinking. Dorothy cooked for me. I decided not to take drugs for depression, as my therapist had recommended at the beginning of the summer, but kept telling myself positive things for all the negative ones that seemed to pop into my mind, at first very frequently and then less frequently, and by the end of the summer most of the cruel and knifing voices had gone away, and I was not depressed anymore, or too thin.
“I’m going to ask Steve to buy me a house,” my mother said on the phone, during my sophomore year of college.
She was still living with her boyfriend; I stayed with the neighbors during school breaks. “He’ll never do it,” I said.
“I’m going to keep on asking until he does.”
She had never owned a house. In all the years I was growing up, he had not bought us a house; we had never lived in a house we owned. Surely, if he had been willing, he would have done it then. I wondered why she thought she could get it now, especially now that I had already left home—and he wasn’t even talking with me—and why, if she could convince him to do things, she hadn’t done it sooner.
The idea that it was possible, that it might have even been possible before, enraged me, even if I wanted her to have it.
In fact, several months later, he agreed. She found a house for sale in Menlo Park that met his criteria: within a certain radius of his house, and less than four hundred thousand dollars. It was a thin-walled, two-bedroom wooden house on the busy Alameda de las Pulgas, with a nice back garden. He’d said it had to be close to his house so that he could see it before buying it, but in the end he didn’t even come to look before he bought the house in her name.
The summer after my sophomore year at Harvard, I got a job working at the Stanford Genetics lab, as I had done during high school. This would be the last time I lived in Palo Alto.
My mother made us salads with fresh tarragon leaves mixed in with the lettuces. She made curtains with French seams. She grew tomato plants in the garden in the back, forgetting to water them until the leaves wilted and browned, her neglect making the fruit the sweetest.
That summer, my father would not talk with me but insisted that I babysit my brother, who had been missing me. I’d been over to his house several times to babysit, hoping to talk with him, but he had ignored me. After that, I told my father I would need to talk with him first, and that I wouldn’t babysit unless he agreed to talk with me, but he refused, and said I had abandoned my brother.
One afternoon, Kevin and Dorothy came over to my mother’s house when my mother and I happened to be in a panic. My father had just called me, yelling that I had to babysit my brother, and then sent my mother an angry email. I was horrible and selfish, he wrote, shirking my responsibilities toward my brother. My mother and I were upset, not knowing how to respond. I suspected that, in some way, I must be wrong. I kept repeating to my father, on the phone and then over email, that I would love to see my brother, but would simply need to talk with him first.
“I don’t want to talk to you or see you,” he said to me on the phone. “You won’t see Reed, and I love Reed, and I don’t want to spend time with people who won’t spend time with the people I love,” he said.
Dorothy stood over my mother and dictated a response that began, “Cut the sanctimonious bullshit, Steve.” My mother typed it out. Dorothy spelled out sanctimonious. I was thrilled about Dorothy’s response, and the new word.
At Harvard, I decided to major in English. During my junior year, I took a seminar on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, taught by a Chaucer scholar from England with charming, uneven teeth and tufts of white hair in his ears. At some point, Criseyde has left Troilus, but Troilus can’t seem to forget her.
“It makes Troilus seem so pathetic,” I said confidently during the seminar, “that he can’t get over her.”
“No,” the professor said, looking at me with a kind gaze. “His strength is that he can hold on.”
That spring, soon after I wrote what I took to be a rather poignant villanelle about my eyebrows and entered it for submission in the college literary magazine, I went to see a free campus therapist, writing my name on a sign-up sheet to reserve an hour. She was a thin woman with a thin voice, and thin hair, a thin face, and a thin nose, like a Modigliani woman, with a peaceful expression and a sense of calm around her.
I went to see her a few times over the course of the next few weeks, and before the last session, at the end of the year, I told her about a dream I’d had the night before: I was sitting on a cliff, looking out over the vast ocean, where my father was sitting at his desk under a cone of light. The desk was like a raft, and the whole work raft was drifting out to sea as he concentrated on the screen.
“He’ll go away,” she said, a sad note in her voice, “and then maybe someday he’ll realize that he did the same thing to you that was done to him.” I was surprised that she could make such a quick summary, and I assumed something so quick and short must be wrong. But later, when I thought about it, it seemed true. I thought of my family as unique, but it must not have been, and I was surprised that it could be so obvious.
This was around the time my father had started working at Apple again. I read about it in the papers, and before I left to study abroad in London during my senior year, the first advertisements of the colorful new iMacs appeared, shrink-wrapped around the buses in Harvard Yard.
Over the next summer, I stayed in Cambridge to work at the Harvard travel-guide company, Let’s Go, as an assistant editor for the Southeast Asia guidebook. Halfway through the summer I received a notice from Harvard in the mail saying that my tuition for the following year hadn’t been paid.
After I moved out on the night of the circus two years before, my father had stopped paying for other expenditures besides tuition—flights to and from college, books, and spending money. I’d been paying for these with money from work and help from Kevin and Dorothy.
The next day, I wound my way down a dark basement corridor for a meeting with a Harvard financial aid officer. The man sat at a desk facing the door. Behind him, in the corner of the
room, a ceiling tile was missing and piece of insulation had started to come loose.
I explained that my father had decided not to pay my tuition, even though he could afford to do so.
“You’ll have to drop out until the age of majority,” he said.
“What’s the age of majority?” I asked, hoping it was twenty-one.
“Twenty-five,” he said. I deflated.
In college, I had two jobs, one as an ESL teacher and one in the University Development Office, where the word “development” meant raising money for the college through fundraisers and advertising.
I had assumed the financial aid office would look something like the development office—money in, money out. In fact, this office, and this man, seemed beleaguered, as if to communicate that Harvard didn’t have the money one might think it had. I was furious at this man for his no-nonsense talk; there must be a way to make it work. Surely Harvard would want to help me, to keep me, I thought, when, in fact, it was this man’s job to inform me that it did not.
“Harvard financial aid is need-based,” he said. My father’s status rendered me ineligible for any aid.
“So I just have to drop out? There’s nothing Harvard will do to help me stay?”
“That’s correct,” he said. “Absolutely nothing.”
When he came to Boston for business, Kevin took me for dinner. I liked these dinners because they made college less lonely, and made me feel like other people who sometimes went to dinner with their fathers, even if he wasn’t my father. Sometimes he seemed competitive with my father—”He might have nice cars,” Kevin said, at dinner, “but he doesn’t really know how to drive.” Good driving, as Kevin defined it, involved making the passenger comfortable, unaware of the speed and acceleration of the car. If this was true, my father did not have that skill; his driving was like a wire in my stomach. He fishtailed through curves. Before my father’s success at Pixar and his new job at Apple, Kevin talked about my father’s poor business acumen, how NeXT was doing poorly, worse than other people might know, which you could tell because he had stopped buying things, Kevin said. I listened and nodded. But my father had rarely bought much, compared with other rich people, and none of these attributes made me care about him less, or diminished his importance to me. He could have been the worst executive and the worst driver in the world.
Small Fry Page 31