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  SMALL FRY

  LISA BRENNAN-JOBS

  Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  COVER DESIGN AND ARTWORK BY ALISON FORNER

  FLOWER ILLUSTRATIONS: CHRYSANTHEMUM © NICOOLAY/GETTY; ANEMONE © TEOBRAGA/GETTY

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011, or [email protected].

  The names and identifying details of some of the people mentioned in this book have been changed.

  FIRST EDITION

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: September 2018

  This book was designed by Norman Tuttle at

  Alpha Design & Composition.

  This book was set in 12 pt. Adobe Caslon Pro

  by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2823-2

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4651-9

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for Bill

  Third Fisherman. Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.

  First Fisherman. Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones: I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale; a’ plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. Such whales have I heard on o’ th’ land, who never leave gaping till they’ve swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.

  Shakespeare, Pericles

  It was a curious experience to be the unrecognized source of this public attraction and to be standing in the sleet—it made one feel like a phantom presence.

  Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Hippies

  Lifelines

  Let’s Blast

  Small Fry

  Runaway

  Small Nation

  Marketable Skills

  Flight

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  Three months before he died, I began to steal things from my father’s house. I wandered around barefoot and slipped objects into my pockets. I took blush, toothpaste, two chipped finger bowls in celadon blue, a bottle of nail polish, a pair of worn patent leather ballet slippers, and four faded white pillowcases the color of old teeth.

  After stealing each item, I felt sated. I promised myself that this would be the last time. But soon the urge to take something else would arrive again like thirst.

  I tiptoed into my father’s room, careful to step over the creaky floorboard at the entrance. This room had been his study, when he could still climb the stairs, but he slept here now. It was cluttered with books and mail and bottles of medicine; glass apples, wooden apples; awards and magazines and stacks of papers. There were framed prints by Hasui of twilight and sunset at temples. A patch of pink light stretched out on a wall beside him.

  He was propped up in bed, wearing shorts. His legs were bare and thin as arms, bent up like a grasshopper’s.

  “Hey, Lis,” he said.

  Segyu Rinpoche stood beside him. He’d been around recently when I came to visit. A short Brazilian man with sparkling brown eyes, the Rinpoche was a Buddhist monk with a scratchy voice who wore brown robes over a round belly. We called him by his title. Tibetan holy men were sometimes born in the west now, in places like Brazil. To me he didn’t seem holy—he wasn’t distant or inscrutable. Near us, a black canvas bag of nutrients hummed with a motor and a pump, the tube disappearing somewhere under my father’s sheets.

  “It’s a good idea to touch his feet,” Rinpoche said, putting his hands around my father’s foot on the bed. “Like this.”

  I didn’t know if the foot touching was supposed to be for my father, or for me, or for both of us.

  “Okay,” I said, and took his other foot in its thick sock, even though it was strange, watching my father’s face, because when he winced in pain or anger it looked similar to when he started to smile.

  “That feels good,” my father said, closing his eyes. I glanced at the chest of drawers beside him and at the shelves on the other side of the room for objects I wanted, even though I knew I wouldn’t dare steal something right in front of him.

  While he slept, I wandered through the house, looking for I didn’t know what. A nurse sat on the couch in the living room, her hands on her lap, listening for my father to call out for help. The house was quiet, the sounds muffled, the white-painted brick walls were dimpled like cushions. The terracotta floor was cool on my feet except in the places where the sun had warmed it to the temperature of skin.

  In the cabinet of the half bath near the kitchen, where there used to be a tattered copy of the Bhagavad Gita, I found a bottle of expensive rose facial mist. With the door closed, the light out, sitting on the toilet seat, I sprayed it up into the air and closed my eyes. The mist fell around me, cool and holy, as in a forest or an old stone church.

  There was also a silver tube of lip gloss with a brush at one end and a twisting mechanism at the other that released liquid into the center of the brush. I had to have it. I stuffed the lip gloss into my pocket to take back to the one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village that I shared with my boyfriend, where I knew, as much as I have ever known anything, that this tube of lip gloss would complete my life. Between avoiding the housekeeper, my brother and sisters, and my stepmother around the house so I wouldn’t be caught stealing things or hurt when they didn’t acknowledge me or reply to my hellos, and spraying myself in the darkened bathroom to feel less like I was disappearing—because inside the falling mist I had a sense of having an outline again—making efforts to see my sick father in his room began to feel like a burden, a nuisance.

  For the past year I’d visited for a weekend every other month or so.

  I’d given up on the possibility of a grand reconciliation, the kind in the movies, but I kept coming anyway.

  In between visits, I saw my father all around New York. I saw him sitting in a movie theater, the exact curve of his neck to jaw to cheekbone. I saw him as I ran along the Hudson River in winter sitting on a bench looking at the docked boats; and on my subway ride to work, walking away on the platform through the crowd. Thin men, olive-skinned, fine-fingered, slim-wristed, stubble-bearded, who, at certain angles, looked just like him. Each time I had to get closer to check, my heart in my throat, even though I knew it could not possibly be him because he was sick in bed in California.

  Before this, during years in which we hardly spoke, I’d seen his picture everywhere. Seeing the pictures gave me a strange zing. The feeling was similar to catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror across a room and thinking it was someone else, then realizing it was my own face: there he was, peering out from magazines and newspapers and screens in what
ever city I was in. That is my father and no one knows it but it’s true.

  Before I said goodbye, I went to the bathroom to mist one more time. The spray was natural, which meant that over the course of a few minutes it no longer smelled sharp like roses, but fetid and stinky like a swamp, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

  As I came into his room, he was getting into a standing position. I watched him gather both his legs in one arm, twist himself ninety degrees by pushing against the headboard with the other arm, and then use both arms to hoist his own legs over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. When we hugged, I could feel his vertebrae, his ribs. He smelled musty, like medicine sweat.

  “I’ll be back soon,” I said.

  We detached, and I started walking away.

  “Lis?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You smell like a toilet.”

  Hippies

  By the time I was seven, my mother and I had moved thirteen times.

  We rented spaces informally, staying in a friend’s furnished bedroom here, a temporary sublet there. The last place had become unsuitable when someone had sold the refrigerator without warning. The next day, my mother called my father, asked for more money, and he increased the child support payments by two hundred dollars per month. We moved again, to an apartment on the ground floor of a small building at the back of a house on Channing Avenue in Palo Alto—the first place my mother rented with her own name on the lease. Our new place was just for us.

  The house in front of our apartment was a dark brown Craftsman with dust-covered ivy where a lawn might have been, and two bent-over scrub oaks that almost touched the ground. Cobwebs stretched between the trees and the ivy, collecting pollen that lit up bright white in the sunshine. From the street you couldn’t tell there was an apartment complex behind the house.

  Before this we’d lived in towns nearby—Menlo Park, Los Altos, Portola Valley—but Palo Alto is the place we would come to call home.

  Here the soil was black and wet and fragrant; beneath rocks I discovered small red bugs, pink-and ash-colored worms, thin centipedes, and slate-colored woodlice that curled into armored spheres when I bothered them. The air smelled of eucalyptus and sunshine-warmed dirt, moisture, cut grass. Railroad tracks bisect the town; near them is Stanford University, with its great grassy oval and gold-rimmed chapel at the end of a palm tree–lined road.

  The day we moved in, my mother parked and we carried in our things: kitchen supplies, a futon, a desk, a rocking chair, lamps, books. “This is why nomads don’t get anything done,” she said, hefting a box through the doorway, her hair disheveled, her hands flecked with white canvas primer. “They don’t stay in one place long enough to build anything that lasts.”

  The living room had a sliding glass door that opened onto a small deck. Beyond the deck was a patch of dry grass and thistles, a scrub oak and a fig—both spindly—and a line of bamboo, which my mother said was difficult to get rid of once it took root.

  After we finished unloading, she stood with her hands on her hips, and together we surveyed the room: with everything we owned, it still looked empty.

  The next day, she called my father at his office to ask for help.

  “Elaine’s coming over with the van—we’re going to your father’s house to pick up a couch,” my mother said a few days later. My father lived near Saratoga in Monte Sereno, a suburb about half an hour away. I’d never been to this house or heard of the town where he lived—I’d met him only a couple of times.

  My mother said my father offered his extra couch when she called him. But if we didn’t get it soon, she knew, he’d throw it away or rescind the offer. And who knew when we’d have access to Elaine’s van again?

  I was in the same first-grade class as Elaine’s twins, a boy and a girl. Elaine was older than my mother, with wavy black hair and loose strands that created a halo around her head in certain lights. My mother was young, sensitive, and luminous, without the husband, house, and family that Elaine had. Instead, she had me, and I had two jobs: first, to protect her so that she could protect me; second, to shape her and rough her up so that she could handle the world, the way you sandpaper a surface to make the paint stick.

  “Left or right?” Elaine kept asking. She was in a hurry—she had a doctor’s appointment to keep. My mother is dyslexic but insisted that wasn’t the reason she eschewed maps. It was because the maps were inside her; she could find her way back to any place she’d ever been, she said, even if it took her a few turns to get her bearings. But we often got lost.

  “Left,” she said. “No, right. Wait. Okay, left.”

  Elaine was mildly annoyed, but my mother did not apologize. She acted as if one is equal to the people who save them.

  The sun made lace on my legs. The air was wet and thick and pricked my nose with the smell of spicy bay laurel and dirt.

  The hills in the towns around Palo Alto had been created by shifting under the earth, by the grinding of the plates against each other. “We must be near the fault line,” my mother said. “If there was an earthquake now, we’d be swallowed up.”

  We found the right road and then the wooded driveway with a lawn at the end. A circle of bright grass with thin shoots that looked like they’d be soft on my feet. The house was two stories tall, with a gabled roof, dark shingles on white stucco. Long windows rippled the light. This was the kind of house I drew on blank pages.

  We rang the bell and waited, but no one came. My mother tried the door.

  “Locked,” she said. “Damn. I bet he’s not going to show.”

  She walked around the house, checking the windows, trying the back door. “Locked!” she kept calling out. I wasn’t convinced it was really his.

  She came back to the front and looked up at the sash windows, too high to reach. “I’m going to try those,” she said. She stepped on a sprinkler head and then a drainpipe, grabbed a lip of windowsill, and flattened herself against the wall. She found a new place for her hands and feet, looked up, pulled herself higher.

  Elaine and I watched. I was terrified she would fall.

  My father was supposed to come to the door and invite us in. Maybe he would show us other furniture he didn’t want and invite us to come back.

  Instead, my mother was climbing the house like a thief.

  “Let’s go,” I called out. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be here.”

  “I hope there’s no alarm,” she said.

  She reached the ledge. I held my breath, waiting for a siren to blare, but the day was as still as before. She unlatched the window, which scraped up and open, and disappeared, leg by leg, and emerged a few seconds later through the front door into the sunshine.

  “We’re in!” she said. I looked through the door: light reflected on wood floors, high ceilings. Cool, vacant spaces. I associated him that day—and later—with pools of reflected light from big windows, shade in the depths of rooms, the musty, sweet smells of mold and incense.

  My mother and Elaine held the couch between them, maneuvered it through the door and down the steps. “It doesn’t weigh much,” my mother said. She asked me to step aside. A thick woven raffia frame held wide-weave linen upholstery. The cushions were a cream color spattered with bright chintz flowers in red, orange, and blue, and for years I would pick at the edges of the petals, trying to dig my fingernails under their painted tips.

  Elaine and my mother moved fast and seriously, as if they might be angry, a loop of my mother’s hair falling out of its band. After they’d shoved the couch into the back of the van, they went back inside and brought out a matching chair and ottoman.

  “Okay, let’s go,” my mother said.

  The back was full, so I sat in the front, on her lap.

  My mother and Elaine were giddy. They had their furniture and Elaine wouldn’t be late for her appointment. This was the reason for my vigilance and worry: to arrive at this moment, see my mother joyful and content.

  Elaine turned out of the dr
iveway and onto a two-lane road. A moment later two cop cars sped past us, going in the opposite direction.

  “They might be coming for us!” Elaine said.

  “We might have gone to jail!” my mother said, laughing.

  I didn’t understand her jaunty tone. If we went to jail, we’d be separated. As far as I understood, they didn’t keep children and adults in the same cells.

  The next day, my father called. “Hey, did you break in and take the couch?” he asked. He laughed. He had a silent alarm, he said. It had rung in the local police station, and four cop cars had sped to the house, arriving just after we left.

  “Yes, we did,” she said, a flaunt in her voice.

  For years, I was haunted by the idea of a silent alarm and how close we’d been to danger without knowing it.

  My parents met at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, in the spring of 1972, when he was a senior and she was a junior.

  On Wednesdays, through the night, she animated a student film in the high school quad with a group of friends. One of those nights, my father approached her in the spotlight where she stood waiting to move the Claymation characters and handed her a page of Bob Dylan lyrics he’d typed out: “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”

  “I want it back when you’re done,” he said.

  He came the nights she was there and held candles for her to see by while she drew in between takes.

  That summer they lived together in a cabin at the end of Stevens Canyon Road, my father paying the rent by selling what they called blue boxes that he made with his friend Woz. Woz was an engineer who was a few years older than my father, shy and intense, with dark hair. They’d met at a technology club and become friends and collaborators and would later start Apple together. The blue boxes emitted tones that made phone calls go through for free, illegally. They’d found a book by the phone company in the library that explained the system and the exact series of tones. You’d hold the box to the receiver, the box would make the tones, and the phone company would connect the call to wherever in the world you wanted. At that house the neighbors owned aggressive goats, and when my parents arrived home in the car, my father would divert the goats as my mother ran to the door, or he would run to her side of the car and carry her.