Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  “He doesn’t love you,” Kevin said to me. “Love is what you do.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said, and contemplated the idea. It was a stab at first, but after that, it felt almost like a relief to say it like it was.

  “How dare Kevin say that. He does love you,” my mother said on the phone when I told her.

  “But love is a verb,” I said. “So what does it matter?”

  “It matters,” she said.

  I thought maybe she didn’t know. I experimented with the idea as I walked around. He doesn’t love me and that’s why he’s like this.

  The plain truth.

  Kevin and Dorothy paid my tuition for my final year.

  My mother said she had tried to sell her new house to pay for it, but there wasn’t much time, and she couldn’t find a buyer. She also said she had a vision of an enormous, brilliant gold angel towering behind the neighbors. It was impossible, I knew, but the image made the gift easier to receive, if I could imagine the money came from an angel and not just from them, whom I worried I could never repay. The gift was unfathomably big.

  At times, I wished that these stable, responsible neighbors were my family instead, and if I yearned to be good enough for a family like this, they might have liked being an example to me, and delighted in how I saw them heroically. They were often cracking jokes and giving me ideas about how people lived, and how families interacted, and how I shouldn’t interrupt, and what questions were rude, and how to defend myself with my words, and how to think about the people who fawned on my father and stepmother and did not notice or care about me. I flipped back and forth between wanting to be exactly like them and wanting to be myself, with them as my doting parents. For a while, perhaps, all of us were caught up in the wish that we could be a family.

  My mother called a friend to ask him what he thought would come of all this.

  He said, “Lisa’s going to find out she can’t replace her parents, and Kevin and Dorothy are going to learn they can’t buy a daughter.”

  I had already committed to study abroad at King’s College in London for my final year of college, and Kevin and Dorothy insisted that I go.

  That year, near my dorm, the London Eye was lifted from the surface of the water.

  Toward the end of my year abroad, I dated an English lawyer with a high-standing blond ruffle of hair.

  “You should invite your father to your graduation,” he said.

  “No way,” I said. I told him everything my father had done wrong.

  “But he’s your father,” he said. He kept pressing, saying that it didn’t matter what one’s father had done; he was still one’s father, that fathers had done worse things and still should be invited to momentous events, and if I didn’t invite him, I’d regret it later when it was too late to fix. I was ambivalent, but in the end I sent my father and Laurene two tickets and a note.

  Kevin and Dorothy, whom I invited and who planned to come, were deeply hurt that I’d invited my father, after all they had done for me when he had not, and decided not to come.

  My mother was worried she wouldn’t be able to afford the trip, but at the last minute she got a consulting job with Hewlett-Packard, bought a flight, reserved a hotel room, and bought a stunning black cotton dress that was ruched up at the bottom like a parachute.

  Later, when my father talked about that day, he said, several times, “Your mother was so graceful.” He did not know what I knew—that she’d carefully rationed her words to him, giving him a maximum of twenty-five. To him she spoke deliberately and carefully, to protect this economy.

  My father and Laurene had slipped through the river gate of Winthrop House to watch me walk down the line and receive my diploma. When I came to join my mother, I found them standing beside her. “I don’t believe in genetics,” my father blurted out after we’d exchanged hellos. He sometimes made pronouncements like this. At other times he had talked about how powerful genes were. I didn’t know how to respond.

  “What are you going to do next? Do you have a job?” he asked.

  I was almost too embarrassed to say, because I knew he didn’t respect banking, or what he called “the straight and narrow,” and neither did I, and I withered under my imagination of his judgment.

  “Tell him,” my mother nudged me, and I mumbled it. I would be starting work as an analyst at a bank in London. It was the wrong kind of job for an English major, and I felt foolish to have joined the normal hubbub of the world, and for being one of the people my father sometimes mocked, but Schroder Salomon Smith Barney would get me a visa so that I could live and work in London. I would be able to support myself.

  After graduation, I would see my father once a year, if that. My younger sister, Eve, was born when I was away at college, but in a few magazines I came across in the following years and on his bio on his company website, he said he had three children, not four. Sometimes, he would be wonderful, but then he would say something unkind, so that I found myself guarded around him, happy to stay away.

  A few weeks after graduation, my mother asked Kevin and Dorothy to provide a sheet with a detailed accounting of everything they’d spent on me, including the flights, books, vacations, and clothing for school. She sent this piece of paper to my father and, shortly after, he paid them back.

  When I was twenty-seven, no longer at the bank but working at a graphic design company in London, my father invited me to join a yacht trip that he, Laurene, my siblings, and the babysitter were taking in the Mediterranean. He invited me for a weekend, but then implored me to stay for a few more days when the weekend was up. After those days were up, he asked me to stay longer again, until I had stayed as long as I could, for more than two weeks. Off the coast of the South of France my father said we were going to make a stop in the Alpes-Maritimes to meet a friend for lunch. He wouldn’t say who the friend was. We took a boat to the dock, where a van picked us up and took us to a lunch at a villa in Èze.

  It turned out to be Bono’s villa. He met us out front wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and the same sunglasses I’d seen him wearing in pictures and on album covers. He seemed plain, and he was kind, without the awkward distance usually affected by famous people.

  He gave us an exuberant tour of his house, as if he couldn’t quite believe it was his. The windows faced the Mediterranean, and the rooms were cluttered with children’s things. In an empty, light-filled octagonal room, he said, Gandhi once slept.

  We had lunch on a large covered balcony overlooking the sea. I sat a few seats away from my father, who sat beside Bono at the head of the table. Waiters delivered food.

  Bono asked my father about the beginning of Apple. Did the team feel alive, did they sense it was something big and they were going to change the world? My father said it did feel that way as they were making the Macintosh, and Bono said it was that way for him and the band too, and wasn’t it incredible that people in such disparate fields could have the same experience? Then Bono asked, “So was the Lisa computer named after her?”

  There was a pause. I braced myself—prepared for his answer.

  My father hesitated, looked down at his plate for a long moment, and then back at Bono. “Yeah, it was,” he said.

  I sat up in my chair.

  “I thought so,” Bono said.

  “Yup,” my father said.

  I studied my father’s face. What had changed? Why had he admitted it now, after all these years? Of course it was named after me, I thought then. His lie seemed preposterous now. I felt a new power that pulled my chest up.

  “That’s the first time he’s said yes,” I told Bono. “Thank you for asking.” It was as if famous people needed other famous people around to release their secrets.

  A few years later, I was living in New York. I went to visit my father in Palo Alto, and he wanted to go out for sushi, just the two of us.

  By this point I knew he was sick with cancer. He was very thin.

  Over the past month in New York it occurred to me t
hat I should say the good things to him before it was too late, even if I had no sense of how sick he was. I believed he might soon recover.

  “You know, in many ways you were good about sex,” I told him. Sex was our easiest subject. “When you put in a diaphragm,” he’d lectured me in high school, “you have a moment all to yourself to decide again what you want to do.” He had not insisted I take the pill, or worried openly about my becoming pregnant, instead giving the sense he trusted me, and knew me to be reasonable, profound even.

  “You didn’t try to make me feel ashamed,” I said.

  “Yes. Yes!” he said. He was hardly able to contain himself, bobbing his thin legs up and down in the seat beside me. We were in the car with the engine off because we had arrived at the sushi restaurant in the mall. “That’s what I was trying for,” he said. “And do you know what? I was the first person you talked to after you lost your virginity!” he said. “It was so great. It meant so much to me.” I’d forgotten this before he mentioned it.

  “I know you better than I know the girls,” he said, as we got out of the car and walked toward the restaurant. I didn’t know what to say back; this was a shocking claim, considering I’d met him so late and they’d lived with him their whole lives. It couldn’t be true, I thought.

  That night, I walked into his bedroom upstairs when he was watching old episodes of Law & Order. He’d asked me, abruptly, from bed, “Are you going to write about me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, and turned back to face the television.

  My mother became sick, a sinus and bone infection that we couldn’t diagnose at first, leaving her unable to work and unable to pay her rent. She had sold her house on Alameda de las Pulgas a few years before, against my wishes, and had used the money to travel and live for several years until the money ran out. Desperate, I called the parents of a friend from Nueva who offered her a place to live for a few months in their extra house in San Francisco. Another set of friends loaned me money to help her pay for oral surgery that made her cheek balloon out as if it had been stung by a bee.

  A few weeks later, I went to visit my father in the hospital in Memphis after he’d had a liver transplant. He’d gone to Memphis because that’s where a liver became available, he and my stepmother flying there in his private jet late at night. Once, when he had to urinate, a nurse had tried to usher me out of the room.

  “She can stay,” he’d said, and then proceeded to pee in a plastic jar under his gown while I stood there, talking to me as he peed, as if he couldn’t be away from me for even one second. He’d had two rooms at the hospital, a room with his hospital bed and a small anteroom, and in the anteroom were a couch and chairs, like the kind at elementary schools, with melamine bodies and metal legs, and in order to visit we had to move the chairs around, pushing the extras out of the way, making them clack. At one point, sitting in the anteroom with me and my aunt and stepmother, he started gasping for breath and turning purplish, and we all panicked, trying to find out what was wrong. I glanced down surreptitiously and noticed with dismay that the leg of my chair was crimping his oxygen tube. I moved my chair as quickly as I could, and he started to breathe again.

  Less than a year after the transplant, back at the Waverley house, the cancer had spread to the top of his femur and the outside lining of his gut. “What’s it called?” I asked the nurse, Elham.

  “It’s called the superficial fascia,” she said. I imagined it, the pouch holding his intestines together, and for some reason in my imagination it was a phosphorescent skein like a jellyfish or like city lights seen at night from an airplane. Inside the glowing outlines, it was dark. He was called Johnny Eight on the papers in the hospital. Sometimes he sucked on morphine lollipops. In the bed sleeping, at certain angles, he looked like a pile of yellow bones. He couldn’t walk anymore. “He’s not in pain,” Elham reassured me. His brain, according to the MRI scan, was cancer-free.

  During my previous visit, he was still eating a little. (He remained picky; if one type of mango touched another type of mango in the bowl, he turned away and would not eat.) This time he took only liquid food, called TPN, intravenously at night, never long enough to gain weight; the process gave him 150 calories per hour.

  Only a few months after the visit when he’d said I smelled like a toilet, I was still stealing small objects from around the house. I called my mother to tell her about what I was doing. I wanted her to absolve me. I wanted her to make an exception to the no-stealing rule just for me, just this time. I wanted her to say, Honey, you can keep everything.

  But she said, “You’ve got to return their things. It’s important. You must not steal—it’s like Persephone.” It was like her to make this mythical. “You know, the one who ate the pomegranate seeds?”

  I remembered she’d gone to the underworld, where she wasn’t supposed to touch anything, but she couldn’t resist and she ate the seeds. Then as a punishment she had to stay down there for part of the year. That was supposed to be why we have winter. I tried to remember how many seeds she took.

  “It doesn’t matter how many,” my mother said. “The point is, because she took the seeds she was stuck there. She stole from the underworld, she partook of it, and then she was bound to it.”

  “And?”

  “If you keep those things, you’re bound to that house. It doesn’t free you; it ties you to it.” Of course the story of Persephone was also a story of a mother and daughter, a mother making the land barren because of her grief during the months her daughter was gone.

  I took the stolen items back in shifts because there were too many to take all at once. I wrapped the bowls in the pillowcases so they wouldn’t clink. I put the lip gloss back on the shelf in the bathroom, the cream in the cabinet upstairs, the shoes in the closet. It turns out that to return stolen things and not get caught is just as difficult as stealing them in the first place.

  During this visit my father did not seem particularly interested in seeing me; he asked me to leave the room so he could watch a movie with my brother. He could no longer walk, or eat, but I believed in a delusional way that he’d live for a long time yet. He’d been sick for such a long time that I didn’t notice when this changed into dying. I avoided his room, only forcing myself to go in sometimes and hoping that he’d be asleep when I did. At the end of the visit I thought I might not return to see him again because it felt hollow and unsatisfying.

  But a month later he texted—he didn’t usually text me—asking me to visit during a weekend when Laurene and my siblings would be away. I took a train to Palo Alto from the San Francisco airport.

  The air was crisp and the light was sharp on the platform pilings. In New York the air was flat; it rarely smelled of anything, or it smelled of one thing: garbage or rain or perfume or smog. Here, the wind was cool; it carried water in it. Fog curled over the hills like other, softer hills. The air smelled of eucalyptus and grasses, spice cake and menthol. Wet dirt, dry dirt.

  I was skeptical that this trip would be different from the others. Mona had named me Ye of Little Faith a long time ago, and my mother called me that still, to tease me.

  I got off at the California Avenue stop. The town had the look of nothing going on, the road straight like a runway to the deep green hills. I took the underpass below Alma Street that emerged in the golden light on the other side, and walked past the park and the pine trees. The houses around here hugged the ground.

  For the previous six months, I’d been taking a small dose of clonazepam, an antianxiety drug that allegedly reduces the amygdala’s fight-or-flight response, 0.25 milligram per day. It was despite, or perhaps because of, my father’s insistence I try weed or LSD that drugs had seemed unappealing before—I’d never done any—but flying back and forth to see him every month, finishing graduate school, my mother sick and low on money, I had found myself unable to focus. Instead, I moved and talked faster and faster. I had a frantic quality, hoping to distract others and not expos
e myself. I was jittery and defensive and self-conscious, terrified my father would say something awful and then he would die and nothing would be resolved.

  In movies, there is the scene when the dying person apologizes—but this was life.

  I walked through the house and paused at the threshold of my father’s study that had become his bedroom. There was a photograph by Harold Edgerton of an apple being shot through by a bullet, the skin fraying around the edges of the hole.

  I rounded the corner to his room. He was propped up on pillows, his legs pale and thin, like knitting needles. There were framed photographs covering the surface of the chest of drawers, each tilted to face his bed. The chest had drawers of equal widths, and later I would see that inside he’d organized the art and photographs in each one. He was alone, awake, and seemed to be waiting for me. He smiled.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said. His warmth was disarming. Tears fell down his face. Before he was sick I’d seen him cry only twice, once at his father’s funeral, and once in a movie theater at the end of Cinema Paradiso, when I’d thought he was shivering. “This is the last time you’re going to see me,” he said. “You’re gonna need to let me go.”

  “Okay,” I said. But I didn’t quite believe him, and I wouldn’t have believed he’d die about a month later. I had fuzzy, indeterminate thoughts about how long he’d live. I sat on the bed beside him.

  “I didn’t spend enough time with you when you were little,” he said. “I wish we’d had more time.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. He was so weak and fragile. I lay down on my side in his bed, facing him.

  “No, it’s not okay. I didn’t spend enough time with you,” he said. “I should have spent the time. Now it’s too late.”