Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  “I guess our timing was off,” I said, not convinced of it even as I said it. In fact, I had recently realized my luck: I got to know him before he became hugely famous, when he was healthy enough to skate. I’d imagined he’d spent a lot more time with everyone else than he had with me, but I wasn’t so sure about that anymore. He looked into my eyes and teared up. “I owe you one.” I was not sure what to make of this phrase. During that weekend, he repeated it over and over: “I owe you one, I owe you one,” he said, crying, when I went to visit him in between his naps. What I wanted, what I felt owed, was some clear place in the hierarchy of those he loved.

  He and I were alone in the house, except for the nurses who rotated every six hours. A few other people came to visit—people he’d worked with. A few people he didn’t know came to the doors wanting to see him too, wandering into the garden with packages, or empty-handed. A stranger in a sari begged to talk with him. A man came in through the gate and said he had flown in from Bulgaria just to see my father. A cluster of people gathered at the side door, talked among themselves, and then dispersed.

  “Do you remember your dreams?”

  I was lying on my side in his bed. He was drifting in and out of sleep.

  “Yup.”

  “Have you always remembered them?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “What do you dream about?”

  “Work, mostly,” he said. “Trying to convince people of things.”

  “What things?”

  “Ideas.”

  “Ideas you thought of while you were dreaming?”

  “Sometimes. But usually in my dreams I can’t convince them. Usually, they’re too much of a bozo to get it.”

  “Did you come up with a lot of ideas that way? In your dreams?”

  “Yes,” he said, then fell asleep again.

  The next day I went to the hospital with him for a blood transfusion. This took up most of the day because he was too weak to walk and had to be transported from chair, to car, to chair, to hospital, to chair, to car, to chair, and back into his bed again. The blood was thick and dark in the bag. It looked like fake syrup Dracula blood. The hospital brought him heated blankets that came out of a machine that looked like a refrigerator. He was cold and then hot and then cold.

  I sat on a chair in the room with him, hearing the mechanical whoosh of the machine. I wondered whose blood he was getting. I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to call attention to the bag. He had a transfusion every ten days or so. It took several hours. Afterward, he had more color.

  “He’s cold, I think,” I told one of the nurses toward the end of the transfusion.

  “I’m fine,” he said. I sat on the chair in the corner to wait for him.

  “I think he might be cold,” I said again, a few minutes later. I could feel gusts of cold air blowing through the vents.

  “I’m fine,” he said, and I had to leave the room for some reason, and when I was called back in, to sit on the chair in the corner, the nurse brought me a blanket.

  “He said you were cold,” she said. I hadn’t noticed I was.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t spend more time with you. I’m so sorry,” he said from the bed.

  “I guess you were working really hard, and that’s why you didn’t email me or call me back?” He’d rarely returned my emails and calls, did not mark my birthdays.

  “No,” he paused. “It wasn’t because I was busy. It was because I was mad you didn’t invite me to the Harvard weekend.”

  “What weekend?”

  “The introductory weekend. All I got was the bill,” he said, with a catch in his voice.

  Matriculation. I remembered later how when I was eighteen I’d been carefully juggling my parents, who didn’t want to come at the same time, and we’d decided, with the help of my therapist, and the agreement of both parents, that she would come that weekend, and he’d come a few weekends later. At the time he’d agreed this was best.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m not too good at communication.”

  “I wish I could take it back, or change it,” I said. It seemed unlikely, and possibly insane, that our relationship was pinned on one weekend. I didn’t believe it. I’d ascribed some sort of overarching wisdom to him, but people who are dying and trying to set things right aren’t necessarily reflective and profound. I didn’t buy the idea that one invitation, one weekend, could have justified his ten years of almost silence, and the withholding of money for college tuition in my final year.

  All through those years I’d been looking at my palm. I was meant for a good life—that was what the lines meant.

  I remembered how, a year before, my mother had come to visit me in New York. She was getting over the illness that had left her fragile and her ears clogged. We went for a walk in the late afternoon.

  West Fourth Street intersected Charles Street at a brick row house covered in light. My mother and I stopped to gaze at it together. Those days we had started to have the feeling that we had survived, we had made it through, we would be happy.

  “And the palms? Do you even know how to read palms?” I’d built up the courage to ask.

  “Sort of,” she said, a slight smile that meant she was lying.

  “I mean, do you have any expertise?” What I wanted her to say was she’d met someone in India or she’d read a rare book.

  “You needed the right stories. We needed to get to a radically different place from where we were. I didn’t know how else to get us there, besides stories. And anyway, the things I was saying—they were true.”

  That evening, back at the house, he called me in with the weak voice he used to call the nurses. “Lis.” The backpack that held the bag of TPN was whirring its motor, ticking like a toy train around a track, the milky fluid going into his veins. He was lying on the bed with his knees up, propped up on pillows. He was freakishly thin; it was hard to look at him and think of anything else besides his limbs, his gaunt face.

  “About what we said earlier—” he said. It struck me how he referenced a previous conversation about emotions, something he’d never done with me before. “I want to say something: You were not to blame.” He started to cry. “If only we’d had a manual. If only I’d been wiser. But you were not to blame. I want you to know, you were not to blame for any of it.” He’d waited to apologize until there was hardly anything left of him. This was what I’d been waiting to hear. It felt like cool water on a burn.

  “I’m so sorry, Lis,” he cried and shook his head side to side. He was sitting up, cradling his head in his hands, and because he had shrunk and lost fat, his hands looked disproportionately large, and his neck too thin to hold his skull, like one of the Rodin sculptures of the burghers of Calais. “I wish I could go back. I wish I could change it. But it’s too late. What can I do now? It’s just too late.” He cried and his body shook. His breath caught on his sobs and I wished he’d stop. After that he said again, “I owe you one.” I didn’t know what to say. I kept sitting beside him on his bed. Even now I didn’t quite trust it: if by some miracle he recovered, I imagined he’d snap back to his old self, forget this happened, go back to treating me as he had before.

  “Well, I’m here now,” I said. “Maybe, if there is a next time, we could be friends?” It was also a gentle jab: just friends. But in fact, in the weeks following this visit and after he died, it was our missed chance at friendship I grieved about.

  “Okay,” he said. “But I’m so sorry. I owe you one.”

  Since returning the stolen objects, I hadn’t taken anything else, but I’d still noticed other things I wanted. Now the wanting dried up. I never felt like stealing again.

  The family returned and the house was bustling. In the evening after dinner, Laurene and I were alone at the kitchen table together. On other visits I would have hopped up to wash the dishes, but this time I stayed where I was. “He talked to me,” I said. “We exchanged important words. Momentous words. I feel better.”
I thought she would ask me about it, but instead she got up to wash a dish at the sink.

  “I don’t believe in deathbed revelations,” she said.

  My younger sister Eve was having a birthday party. I wandered out into the garden that smelled of succulents, geraniums, and water. A cluster of girls stood on the darkening lawn, with some light still in the sky, like a Magritte painting.

  My sister had tied low strings like trip wires over the surface of the large outdoor trampoline to imitate horse jumps, and she and her friends did jumps on arms and legs across the surface. Birds flew into the eaves of the house, and the pug grunted and rooted around beside the trampoline legs.

  “Who are you?” one girl asked me. She was a few inches taller than my sister, up to my nose, hair like straw. My sister climbed off the trampoline and stood nearby.

  “I’m the sister of the birthday girl,” I said. The friend looked confused, maybe because we are twenty-one years apart. “I’m much older because we have different mothers,” I said, to explain.

  “Oh,” the girl said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “She was daddy’s mistake,” my sister announced.

  I grabbed her shoulders for a minute to steady myself, her back against my chest. “You shouldn’t say that,” I whispered in her ear, and then walked back into the house through the dark.

  Inside, there was a honey jar on the kitchen table, and I leaned closer to inspect the label. On it were five illustrations of bees with the names of the family members written underneath each: Steve, Laurene, Reed, Erin, and Eve. Above them was the title “Jobs Family Farm.”

  The next day, in a drawer below the napkins, I found a cluster of many of these labels, each with an adhesive back. They were for gifts, I figured. There were so many labels that they clung together and fanned out like the fall leaves raked into tight piles on the streets around here. I kept looking at the labels, searching for my name among the bees, as if it might appear there. In the dining hall in college, a girl had said, half-joking, “The trick must be to marry rich. How do we marry rich?” and I’d felt the same heaviness of being outside the circle of fun.

  In the past couple of years, I’d moved to New York, finished an MFA at Bennington College, started a consulting job at a graphic design firm editing and designing a section of the MoMA website, and moved in with a man I loved and hoped to marry. I had grown up, I had moved on, so it surprised me, returning to see my father when he was sick, how painful it still was not to be included in his life.

  Visiting reminded me that while I’d lived at this house, I’d wished to be someone else. But around this time—during one of these visits during these strange years flying here to visit my father every month or so—I had a moment of revelation, a moment of lightness, as if a huge burden I’d been carrying around had been lifted all at once as I was standing under the frill of jasmine around the front door: It was irrelevant that I wasn’t named on the honey-pots. I had not been a mistake. I was not the useless part of something meaningful. I heard from someone that the pattern of our breath isn’t supposed to be even, regular. Humans are not metronomes. It goes long and short, deep and shallow, and that’s how it’s supposed to go, depending at each moment on what you need, and what you can get, and how filled up you are. I wouldn’t trade any part of my experience for someone else’s life, I felt then, even the moments where I’d wished I didn’t exist, not because my life was right or perfect or best, but because the accumulation of choices made had carved a path that was characteristic and distinct, down to the serif, and I felt the texture of it all around me for just a moment, familiar, like my own skin, and it was good enough.

  At the memorial service and in the years since, people want me to know how close they were with my father.

  “He liked giving special advice to my son,” someone said. “They were very close.”

  “They had such a tight relationship,” another said of her son and my father.

  “He was like a father to me,” said a man, tearing up.

  These conversations have a particular quality in which I feel I am supposed to be, more than a participant, a witness. These people do not ask about my father, but talk fervently at me, as if my listening is the missing ingredient, the yeast, that gives their stories life. They recite anecdotes like speeches, and walk away.

  Do they want me to feel deferential? He’d been like a father to them too. They’re asserting a claim and I’m supposed to confirm him as the ur-father. His great greatness.

  When people speak and write about my father’s meanness, they sometimes assume that meanness is linked to genius. That to have one is to get closer to the other. But the way I saw him create was the best part of him: sensitive, collaborative, fun. The friends he worked with got to see this more than I did. Maybe the meanness protected the part that created—so that acting mean to approximate genius is as foolish as trying to be successful by copying his lisp or his walk or the way he turned around and wagged his hands around his back and moaned to pretend he was making out.

  “Look at those clouds,” he’d said once when he was sick but could still walk, in a sweet mood, pointing up out of the window on a sunny day. “Those clouds are approximately ten thousand feet up. That’s about two miles. If we wanted, you and I, we could walk—let’s see, a twenty-minute mile.

  “We could be there in forty minutes,” he said.

  Rinpoche, the Brazilian monk, said to my mother that if he’d had two more months, just two months, he could have achieved a better resolution between my parents.

  But who knows?

  When I see my mother now, the more time we spend together, the more I feel attached. When I have to pee, I leave the door open, so we can keep talking. We are like suction cups: once together it’s difficult to pry us apart. Sometimes we fight. When we’re apart—she on her coast and me on mine—I forget how it is to be together, how it’s exhilarating, and up and down. When she visits New York, we go see art. At the Agnes Martin exhibition at the Guggenheim, we start at the top and corkscrew to the bottom, against the traffic of people walking up, looking at stripes. For us, Agnes gets younger and younger. After that, we walk out into the day. We cross Fifth Avenue to Central Park and she says, “Look!” and points to the thick white lines against the dark asphalt. “There’s another one!”

  There was one picture of my parents together before I was born. They are standing at the train station one morning when my father left to return to Reed College. My mother’s cheeks are round and full. She’s wearing jeans. My father’s face is pale and sweet. They look incredibly young. I thought it was my mother who lost things—houses, objects, my father. But she had kept this picture for many years, and she gave it to me, and I moved, and I left it somewhere. Recently she gave me a painting she’d made in high school for which she’d won a prize.

  “He’s following you around, your father,” she said, when she came to visit me after he died.

  “A ghost?”

  “Him. I don’t know how else to say it. I can feel him here. And you know what? He’s overjoyed to be with you. He wants to be with you so much he’s padding around behind you. I mean, he’s delighted just watching you butter a piece of toast.”

  I didn’t believe it, but I liked thinking it anyway.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Grove Atlantic: to my excellent editor Elisabeth Schmitz, and to Katie Raissian, Deb Seager, Julia Berner-Tobin, Sal Destro, Judy Hottensen, and Morgan Entrekin. Also to Bettina Abarbanell and Eva-Marie von Hippel at Berlin Verlag. Thank you to my honest, smart agent David McCormick, who thought I might give up, and to Susan Hobson and the rest of the team at McCormick Literary.

  I wrote for two extended, productive periods at the residency at Art OMI: Writers. Before that, I am grateful to have attended the low-residency MFA program at Bennington College.

  Thank you to Caterina Fake, Bryan Burk, Claire Sarti, David Boaretto, Stefanie Kubanek, and DW Gibson for encouraging me to write. Thank you to
Ann Godoff and Ginny Smith-Younce at Penguin Press, and to Uschi Weissmueller, and to readers Ellen Graf, Hannah Blumenthal, and Mona Simpson. Thanks to Finn Taylor, Christina Redse, Linda Brennan, Jamie Brennan, Ron, Ilan, Debbie, and David for stories and thoughts about the past.

  I am grateful to Lawrence and Hillary Levy, who helped with everything at every stage. And to Phillip Lopate, Susan Cheever, Kai Barry, and my mother—all of whom offered many years of support as I wrote this. I am also profoundly grateful to Jamie Quatro, who expertly and sensitively helped extract this book from a very long draft, and then found me my publisher.

  Finally, thank you to Bill for his joy, optimism and care, and to wonderful Bodie and Julie, and to little Thomas for providing a deadline and even more joy.