Small Fry Read online

  (Many years later he would quiz me. “What do you think is the best kind of hydrangea?”

  “The blue ones. The bright blue ones.”

  “I used to think so, too, when I was young,” he said. “But it turns out the white ones, the cone-shaped ones, are actually much nicer.”)

  Before I made a move to get out he turned to face me.

  “You’re not getting anything,” he said. “You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.” Did he mean about the car, something else, bigger? I didn’t know. His voice hurt—sharp, in my chest.

  The light was cool in the car, a white light on the roof had lit up when the engine turned off. Around us was dark. I had made a terrible mistake and he’d recoiled.

  By then the idea that he’d named the failed computer after me was woven in with my sense of self, even if he did not confirm it, and I used this story to bolster myself when, near him, I felt like nothing. I didn’t care about computers—they were made of fixed metal parts and chips with glinting lines inside plastic cases. They mesmerized you when you sat in front of them, but were otherwise boring to look at, not beautiful—but I liked the idea that I was connected to him in this way. It would mean I’d been chosen and had a place, despite the fact that he was aloof or absent. It meant I was fastened to the earth and its machines. He was famous, he drove a Porsche; if the Lisa was named after me, I was a part of all that.

  I see now that we were at cross-purposes. For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite: the closer I was to him, the less I would feel ashamed; he was part of the world, and he would accelerate me into the light.

  It might all have been a big misunderstanding, a missed connection: he’d simply forgotten to mention the computer was named after me. I was shaking with the need to set it right all at once, as if waiting for a person to arrive for a surprise party—to switch on the lights and yell out what I’d held in. Once he’d admitted it—yes, I named a computer after you—everything would click into place. He would patch the holes, get furniture, say he’d been thinking of me the whole time but had been unable to get to me. Yet I also sensed that if I tried too hard to set it right, it might tip some delicate balance, and he would be gone again. And so I waited in this suspended state, in order to keep him.

  I followed him from the car into the house. We didn’t take a hot tub. We ate salads as he read the paper, we watched Flashdance. I didn’t try to sleep in his bed. At some point I awoke in the dark because I had to pee, the darkness pressing on my eyes, nothing visible. It was silent; the crickets had stopped. I wouldn’t be able to find the bathroom in the pitch-black. I couldn’t even tell what direction I was facing, or whether I was upright. I waited with my eyes open in the darkness and nothing emerged; it was as if the darkness were pressing back at my efforts to penetrate it.

  To get to the bathroom I would have to walk through his room, down a few more steps in a hallway that led to another empty room and, off that, the bathroom.

  I crawled out of the bed and found the door frame, also chalky, half-there, but now shapes emerged with more clarity, and I saw that in his bed across the room was someone with bright blond hair.

  It was a man who had come to kill my father—he’d killed him already and was now sleeping in his bed! I already knew what this new man was like with his shining white hair: phony and full of blandishments. He’d say he was my new father, but he would be nothing like my father. I couldn’t see his face, but I was terrified; the blond hair glowed in the dark. I could hear my breath. I worried for my real father. After I crept to the bathroom, I crept back through the room and the blond man was still there, in the bed. He moved in his sleep, diving down under the covers as if plunging underwater. I returned to my bed and spent what felt like hours terrified, wondering what to do, dreading the morning when it would be clear that my life would be different forever and my father would be gone. I was too afraid to get up again and confront the blond man. I decided to wait until morning, and at some point I must have fallen asleep.

  In the morning, there was no blond man and my father was alive. I thought I must have imagined it—I didn’t ask him about it. I was embarrassed for the terror I’d felt, and the protectiveness.

  The next Wednesday night, my mother drove over to visit us when her class was unexpectedly canceled. We didn’t know she was coming. She found us in the kitchen, having knocked and called out and then entered through the unlocked front door, walking through the dark house into the bright and cold kitchen where we were sitting, eating. She sat with us as he teased me in the usual ways.

  “How about that guy for your boyfriend,” he said pointing to a picture of an old man in the paper he was reading while we ate. I looked, then sneezed, and a few grains of the salad flew onto the picture. “The boys’ll love that. You’ll have that bed warmed up in no time at all,” he said, about a new bed Mona was planning to buy for me. “Who you gonna invite over?” The jokes were profoundly awkward. He was refined in other ways, but seemed unsure about how you were supposed to talk with children. I wanted to be close with him, but the jokes confused me. I didn’t know how to respond. That might have been the look she saw on my face.

  Later she said his jokes that night, his avuncular manner, and my obvious discomfort in the kitchen had surprised her. I had a look of being lost, she said, not confidant the way I usually was. She arranged for me to stay at a friend’s house on those Wednesday nights, telling me that he planned to come and take me skating instead. I thought that sounded okay.

  Small Fry

  Our next house would be the place we’d live the longest during my childhood, seven years, a Craftsman bungalow on Rinconada Avenue in Palo Alto—the only house on the lot, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a separate garage my mother would later transform into an art studio. It was a real house, painted light yellow with royal blue trim, a blue door. It was symmetrical from the front, with a cement path that bisected the lawn, and dirt patches under two front windows where my mother would plant multicolored impatiens. An arbutus tree grew on one side of the driveway, with scaly twisting bark and fruits we did not yet know would ripen and fall onto the lawn in the autumn rains and burst open, leaving a slimy orange jelly we would be forever wiping off our shoes. The side door opened to a thick bower of wisteria that smelled of soap and candy when it bloomed, and attracted bees.

  Before we moved in, a man who worked for my father at NeXT as facilities manager helped renovate the rental house. He was a kind, beanpole-tall man who stooped down to talk to me, telling me that I was allowed to pick out the shape of the bathroom sink and the linoleum for the floor. He had a high laugh and a large, sharp Adam’s apple that bobbed alarmingly up and down his neck. Under his direction, the house was repainted on the inside, the wood floors were refinished and stained blond, linoleum was laid in the bathrooms and kitchen, metal venetian blinds were attached to the windows. In the bathroom, the sink I’d chosen belled out, regally, at the top.

  My mother bought a set of encyclopedias with pictures of a gold thistle on the spines, and when there was a question about something, she would rush over and pull one off the bookshelf, dividing the gold-painted seal across the pages to read the relevant section aloud.

  She had a walk-in closet. It wasn’t big, and maybe it wasn’t big enough to fit the definition of the phrase “walk-in closet,” but because it was large enough to get inside, and turn around, that’s what we called it. There were bars for hangers and wire shelves for clothes. She also had her own small bathroom, with a skylight.

  One day, standing in her bathroom, she showed me her new wallet.

  “It’s from Neiman Marcus,” she said. I examined it under the skylight: shades of taupe skin made of strips sewn together vertically, darker in the middle than at the edge, wrinkled at the center of each strip as if a thread was yanked to form tucks.
It was the softest leather I’d felt, and waxy.

  “It’s eel skin,” she said. “Isn’t that terrible? Eels!”

  “It’s like silk,” I said. “Or butter.”

  “I know. And look at this.” She showed me the metal snap, the size of a dime. I could feel it was a magnet: it found itself, and pulled shut.

  As far as I knew, she’d never owned a wallet before. These luxuries—the wallet, skylight, closet; a new microwave that spun the food as it cooked; a cordless phone—suggested that some great change was brewing, that we were entering a new, more exquisite realm. It turned out that my father had increased the child-support payments to include a larger amount of rent and maintenance. Soon, he would also agree to pay for her therapy once per week. She couldn’t afford to replace the couch, but she got it recovered in more muted flowers.

  My father stopped by a few times, just after the renovations. He and my mother seemed easy with each other, joking and admiring the house, both of them liking the shade of paint inside, the new industrial light fixtures, two white metal bars over a ridged frosted-glass shade, fixtures that were meant for outdoors but looked good inside too. When my parents were together, I felt something inside me click into place, like the magnet clasp.

  A few times, during that first year in the house, when it was still new and perfect around us, she would walk in the front door and stop and gasp, putting her hand on her heart, at the beauty of a gold parallelogram made of light glowing on the wall above the heater vent.

  Over the years in that house my mother told stories about my father and her family when they occurred to her, or I asked about them. She said my father was so shy and awkward in high school that when he would talk or tell a joke, no one would listen. He had made my mother a kite and a pair of sandals. When they lived together that summer at the end of Stevens Canyon Road in the house with the goats, they slept under quilts my mother’s grandmother from Ohio had made, and for a treat, they ate those cheap, miniature hot dogs out of jars.

  At some point that summer, my mother said, they were down to their last three dollars, and they drove to the beach, where my father threw the money into the ocean.

  “I was terrified,” she said. “But then he sold more of the blue boxes, and we had money again.”

  The story of my parents is not complete without a picture of my mother’s disintegrating family life, of how, after the family arrived in California when she was twelve, her mother became mentally ill. Her parents, Jim and Virginia, had moved the family west when my grandfather’s employer, the Department of Defense, transferred him from Dayton, Ohio, where she was born and both her grandmothers lived, to Colorado Springs, then to Omaha, Nebraska, and finally to California. In California, Virginia was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and my mother’s parents divorced.

  My mother spoke of Ohio like a lost paradise: in Ohio her grandmothers had made quilts and doted on her, let her play with the skin on the back of their hands. One of them had a farm and a chicken coop, where my mother ran to collect eggs in the morning. The time before her mother went crazy. Anytime my mother pointed out some beauty around us that looked established and grand—gold dusk light stretched across brick buildings with pillars, great trees—she named the beauty Ohio.

  In California, Virginia would sit in the darkened living room drunk, smoking, the only visible thing the lit tip of her cigarette, waiting for her daughters to get home from school. My mother was only a little older then than I was now when Virginia aimed much of her spite and contempt at her—maybe because my mother, sensitive, artistic, and bright, reminded her most of herself. When my mother was twelve, Virginia accused her of playing the recorder only because it reminded her of a penis, and Virginia told the neighbors that my mother had sex with dogs.

  When my mother met my father in high school, what impressed her most were his kind eyes, compared with her own mother’s eyes, which by then were hateful, dark sparks.

  “The third time I visited Steve’s house in high school, his mother took me aside. She told me that in his first six months she was afraid she might lose him because his birth mother wanted him back, and she couldn’t allow herself to get close to him. At the time, I had no idea why she was telling me this,” my mother said. “I was just a high school student. It wasn’t like I thought I’d know him that long.”

  She told the story as if it meant something, but I wasn’t sure what it meant.

  They fell in love. My father wrote long notes to Virginia and left them on her front door, telling Virginia she was cruel, imploring her to stop being cruel to my mother. My father was my mother’s savior then, noticing her talent, beauty, and sensitivity, caring for her when her own mother was violent and insane. “You’re the most creative person I’ve ever met,” he told her.

  My parents took LSD together. His first time, not hers. The drug took a while to kick in, she said, so you just waited around and then at some point you realized the world wasn’t normal anymore and the trip had started. The idea of my mother doing drugs made me squirm, but she said, “Don’t worry, Lisa. It was just a time—a different era.” She said he was terrified of making a fool of himself on drugs, and made her promise to tell him to snap out of it, in case he got weird. That was around the time my father told my mother he’d get famous and rich one day and lose himself in the world.

  “What do you mean, ‘lose himself’?” I asked her. I pictured him confused in the middle of a crowd.

  “I mean, lose his moral compass,” she said. “Trade his character, his soul, for power, for money, for worldly gain. Contort himself. Lose the connection to his soul.”

  Beside the house where they lived together over the summer before he left for college was another bungalow with a couple of kids in their twenties from a rich family. They did a lot of drugs and sat around waiting for their parents to die so they could get their inheritance. This left a big impression on both of my parents, how people could waste their lives.

  Years later she would tell me this story as a way to explain why my father wouldn’t help me with money, repeating the story of those lazy, lost children he’d seen and didn’t want me to become.

  “When were your parents divorced?” other kids would ask me.

  “They were never married,” I said. I liked saying it: it was usually a surprise, disarming the questioner. It gave me distinction. Instead of a dad who was around and then left, mine was a story in reverse: parents who spent more time together now than they’d spent when I was born.

  Now on weekends when he was around, my father came over to take me skating on my own, my mother staying home to paint, waving goodbye to us as we set off. He called me Small Fry. “Hey, Small Fry, let’s blast. We’re livin’ on borrowed time.”

  I assumed small fry meant the kind of french fries left at the bottom of the bag, cold and crusty; I thought he was calling me a runt, or misbegotten. Later, I learned fry is an old word for young fishes sometimes thrown back into the sea to give them more time to grow.

  “Okay, Fat Fry, let’s go,” I said, once my skates were on. Sometimes he worried he was getting too thin. “They say I need to gain weight,” he said. “Who?” I asked. “People at work,” he said, standing in the middle of the room with his skates on. “What do you guys think?” Other times he worried he was getting a paunch, and asked us about that too.

  We would head for Stanford University. On this day the pavement was still wet from rain.

  The palm trees that gave Palm Drive its name grew in the dirt between the sidewalk and the road, their roots winding beneath the old cement path so the cement was ridged severely, and layered over several times in messy uneven layers, but these hadn’t worked to hold down the roots, each layer buckling up. We bounced our knees to absorb the shock. Fronds had fallen from the trees, sometimes blocking the path, so we had to step around them into the dirt on our skates. The missing fronds left a pattern on the trunks like fishes, stacked.

  “I wish I’d been a Native American Indian,
” he said, looking up at the hills beyond the university—from far away they appeared smooth and unblemished. The neon-green blades shot up through the dirt clods two or three days after the first heavy rain and remained through winter.

  “They walked barefoot, you know,” he said. “On those hills. Before all this was even here.” I knew from school they left traces where they had ground acorns into flour on slabs of rock. “I love the green hills,” he said, “but I like them best when they’re yellow, dry.”

  “I like them green,” I said, not understanding how anyone could like them when they were dead.

  We reached the Oval and then the Stanford quadrangle with its covered, shaded pathways made of diamonds of cement in alternating earth-toned colors like a faded harlequin costume.

  “Want to get on my shoulders?”

  He leaned down and grasped me under my armpits—I was nine and small for my age—and hoisted me up. His weight tilted and bobbed. We did a loop around the square, under the arches, past the gold numbers on the glass doors. He held my shins in his hands, but let go when he started to lose his balance. He tripped, tripped again, struggling to stay upright—I swayed, terrifyingly high up. And then he fell. On the way down I worried for myself, for my face and my knees, the parts of me that might hit the pavement. Over time I learned he would always fall. Still, I let him carry me because it seemed important to him. I felt this like a change of pressure in the air: this was part of his notion of what it meant to be a father and daughter. If I said no, he would retract.

  We got up and brushed ourselves off—he wound up with a bruise on his butt and a scrape on his hand; I got a skinned knee—and headed for the drinking fountain at the side of the quadrangle. It was built into a wall of patterned tiles. From there I could see the green leaves in another, smaller courtyard beyond us, like stained glass. I liked looking at sunlight from the shade, the way it didn’t wash all around and blind you, but was a separate, glowing thing.