Small Fry Read online

  We skated farther into the university. The asphalt was rough, full of rocks; skating over it tickled my throat and my thighs, made a tune play in my bones. We skated uphill past the fountain and the clock, to the metal tables in the courtyard of a Tresidder café, where we sat for a moment and drank apple juice. I strummed my legs with the weight of the skates and poked my fingers through the cool metal lattice of the chair. There was an oak above us on a raised part of the courtyard with silver ridges twisting up the trunk and deep grooves with black at their centers.

  On the way back through the campus, on the sloping downhill on the rough cement, I was a tuning fork for the road, flying out ahead of him. “Ah AH!” I sang, my throat vibrating with the stones.

  “You’re all right, kid,” he said. “But don’t let it go to your head.”

  “I won’t,” I said. I’d never heard the phrase before: Let It Go To Your Head.

  He pointed out the stained glass and golden tiles, the way the masons had used local sandstone, from the pillars to the big rocks that made up the exterior walls. The stone had thick granules of sand in it; the light gave it dimension, made it look faceted and rough; some areas had carvings, like the stone was embroidered.

  “Do you think these stonemasons came from other countries to do this?” he asked, touching one of the big rectangles tufted out like a pillow.

  I saw the building the way he did then, just a pile of stones that human hands had carved and placed. I began to see how inside my father there were two competing qualities: one sensitive and specific as a nerve in a tooth, the other unaware, blunt, and bland. Because he noticed the details and care of the craftsmen who built this place, the way they’d chipped at every block and arranged it, I knew he must be capable of noticing other people too. Of noticing me.

  “You know, I didn’t go to college,” he said. “Maybe you won’t go either. Better just to go out and get into the world.”

  If I didn’t go to college, I would be like him. At that moment, I felt like we were the center of the world. He carried it with him, this feeling of center.

  “They teach you how other people think, during your most productive years,” he said. “It kills creativity. Makes people into bozos.”

  It made sense to me. Still, I wondered why he always wanted to skate around Stanford, why he seemed to love it, if he didn’t believe in it.

  “He’s just got a chip on his shoulder,” my mother said, when I told her we thought college was a waste of time.

  When we crossed the street, he grabbed my hand.

  “Do you know why we hold hands?” he asked.

  “Because we’re supposed to?” I hoped he’d reply, Because I’m your father. Other than these crossings, we didn’t hold hands, and I looked forward to it.

  “Nope,” he said. “It’s so, if a car is about to hit you, I can throw you out of the street.”

  On University Avenue he pointed to a bum crouched in a nook with a cardboard sign. “That’s me in two years,” he said.

  A few minutes later, as we got into the residential streets farther away from the main street of the town and closer to my house, he farted, the sound loud and high like a balloon opening, interrupting the silence. He kept skating like nothing happened. When he did it again, I looked away. After the third time, he muttered, “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, mortified for him.

  When my father and I got back to my block, kids were out playing in the yards and on the sidewalks. Straight across from our house lived a tall, short-haired woman named Jan, whose husband worked at NeXT. Farther down the long driveway that ran beside Jan’s house was the dark wooden house of a woman who’d dated my father when my mother was pregnant with me, and who was now married and had a baby boy. It was a strange coincidence to move here and find ourselves living on a line with two people connected to my father; my mother said he attracted coincidences in an uncanny way.

  We stopped on the sidewalk across from our house, and a few men who lived nearby gathered around my father—three fathers holding three babies. They wanted his opinions, wanted to know what he thought about this or that. The mothers chased after the toddlers to give the fathers a chance to talk. I stood nearby, proud that it was my father they wanted to talk with. They discussed people I’d never heard of and companies I didn’t know.

  Soon, the babies began to fuss, squirming, letting out little cries and yelps.

  My father continued to talk—hardware, software—the same discussions that seemed to come up over and over with all the men we saw in Palo Alto those days. All three babies began to wail. My father talked as if nothing had changed, and the men tried to listen, bouncing the babies, who wailed louder. He talked louder, faster, so his words got through the noise. His voice was high, loud, and nasal, with sharp points at the end of his phrases that hurt my ears and knifed into my sternum, and I wondered if that’s what it was like for the babies who were bawling. The fathers had to stop talking and take them away.

  Back inside, he and I stood by the radiator and took off our skates and my mother joined us. My parents liked each other, you could tell. I leaned over to make folds in the legs of my jeans, pulling the extra fabric over itself and rolling it up. This gave the impression of a thinner leg. With my jeans pegged, my proportions were right: I favored a big T-shirt that bagged around my upper body, my legs like sticks poking out.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Pegging my jeans,” I said.

  “Do you think that’s cool?” he asked. “Yes. I do.”

  “Oh,” he said. Then, in a mocking tone, he said, “Oh, Biff! Oh, Blaine! I hope you like my jeans.”

  “Steve,” my mother said. She was smiling but I could tell she didn’t like it.

  “Maybe she’ll marry Thaaad,” he said.

  Dirk, Blaine, Trent, Trav—these were his names for my imaginary future boyfriends and husbands. I was nine, the thought of marriage irrelevant to my life. I laughed, to show I knew it was a joke, but I wondered if he picked ugly, truncated names and fretted about my marriage prospects because he thought I was ugly or without promise.

  “Or maybe you’ll marry Christian,” he said.

  Christian lived across the street and was around my age, with blond hair and gold-rimmed glasses and a trace of an accent from Georgia, where he was from. He wore plaid shorts and Tshirts, and he was skinny, and he did his homework in a tiny scrawl with a mechanical pencil. He also had a single mother. I liked him, but I knew I didn’t want him to be my boyfriend. Once a month or so, another boy, named Kai, with dark hair, petal-light skin, and red lips, would visit his father, who lived in the house beside us. He poked his head up at the window that looked into my bedroom window, a surprise. He was shy and didn’t want to play, but his presence gave me such a thrill I thought I might pick him, if I was required to choose a husband, but I didn’t say it.

  “Let me see your teeth,” I said, to change the subject. “Show me how they come together like a zipper.”

  “No way,” he said, as if I might be trying to mock him, when I felt only admiration and curiosity.

  “Please,” I said.

  He leaned down and opened his mouth. No overbite, no underbite, no spaces in between: a mountain range and sky.

  “They’re amazing,” my mother said, “how they come together like that.” He closed his mouth.

  “Let me see yours, Lis,” he said. I showed him.

  “Interesting. And yours?”

  He looked into my mother’s mouth. Her bottom teeth were fine, but crowded, like too many guests mingling in a small room.

  “They don’t look so great. Might want to see about that,” he said, even though he’d been kind just a moment before. She winced and closed her mouth. It was as if the magnet changed direction suddenly and now they repulsed each other; it was not possible to know in advance when the switch would occur.

  “Maybe she’ll look like Brooke Shields,” he said, about me.

  “Who�
�s Brooke Shields?” I asked.

  “A model,” my mother said.

  “With these really great eyebrows,” my father said.

  After that, he left, saying something like may-be you wi-ll in a trailing voice across the lawn. He was in stocking feet, carrying his skates over his shoulder. When he left, it was like stepping into a dark room after being in the bright sunlight. It was dim and uniform, washed out with the afterimage of light. I played the flute, my mother ordered new tropical fish–patterned sheets for my bed, my cousin Sarah was coming to visit in a couple months. Before he’d arrived, these things were exciting, but for days after his visits they didn’t seem so important anymore. It would take time to build it all back up again.

  I saw, now, in my eyebrows, promise.

  This was around the time, my mother would say later, that my father fell in love with me. “He was in awe of you,” she said, but I don’t remember it. I noticed he was around more and grabbed me and tried to pick me up even when I didn’t want to be picked up. He had opinions about my clothes and teased me more about whom I would marry. “I wish you’d been my mother,” my father said to her, strangely, one afternoon, as she was preparing lunch and I was playing. Another time he said, “You know she’s more than half me, more than half my genetic material.” The announcement caught my mother off guard. She didn’t know how to respond. Maybe he said it because he’d started feeling close to me and wanted a greater share.

  I remember an abundance of crisp sunlight, shadows like blotches swaying inside the light, as if there was more sunlight in those days than there is now.

  We looked for houses we wanted while we skated around. He liked dark wood-shingled ones, vines twisting up the dark brown or grayish face. Wood so old it silvered. Mullioned windows, small panes of glass. Gardens with plants that looked blown into heaps. If you looked in the windows of those houses, you could tell they’d be dark inside. I liked the houses that were painted white, symmetrical, with columns and plain lawns, heavy and sturdy on the land, like banks.

  “You gotta stop and smell the roses,” he said. He said it urgently, then stopped and put his nose deep in a rose and sighed. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was only an expression. But soon I got into it anyway, and we looked for the best rosebushes in the neighborhood, crisscrossing the streets. Roses were plentiful in the yards. I noticed good ones he’d missed behind fences, and we trespassed across lawns on the toes of our skates to get to them.

  Since Ron was out of the picture and my mom and I were on our own again, I figured it was clear to both of us by now that we didn’t want anyone else. We didn’t need boyfriends. We were doing pretty great: the new house, my father dropping by. So it had surprised and infuriated me when she told me about a new man named Ilan. Ilan would be the one who stuck around the longest—seven years—and change my life for the better, but first I would ignore him for six months, and smirk at him, trying to get him to leave us alone.

  He had black hair that formed tight ringlet curls around his head, a long face with a large nose, and intelligent brown eyes. He had a PhD in chemistry and founded and ran a small science toy company.

  I was interested in his stories—he had traveled around the world as a boy because his father was a world-renowned Hungarian opera tenor, and he’d played clever pranks in school—but as I listened, I still noticed with condescension how unglamorous, how nerdy, he was compared with my father. He drove an old white VW Rabbit and sometimes pretended he had a car phone, mocking the Silicon Valley types who’d recently bought car phones the size of bricks, miming at stop signs as if he were receiving an important phone call.

  He had two children: a younger son and a daughter around my age named Allegra, with whom I danced to Madonna’s “Lucky Star” at her house one afternoon when I still thought he and my mother were only friends.

  He’d had an open marriage, but had fallen in love with my mother against the rules and had separated from his wife. I didn’t like the idea. I taunted my mother, but I couldn’t irritate her much when she was in love.

  “He’s married,” I reminded her.

  “Oh, honey,” she said, like I was a fool.

  When I was with Ilan and my mother together, I felt the grumpy rage I’d felt when she started dating her last two boyfriends. “Are you all right, sweetie?” she asked. Being in love made her seem as if she was far above me, looking down, separate. She was unable to keep a slight smile off her lips.

  With the others, I had still believed my mother and I were a team against them. With Ilan, I sensed she might let go of me, not him, if she had to choose, and I was going to make her choose. I hunkered down for a long campaign.

  One weekend morning several months after they’d started dating, we walked to breakfast.

  I complained but went along. We dashed across busy Alma Street to the curb on the other side, through a hole in the fence through the bushes and onto the elevated mound of white rocks where the train tracks ran. From there, it was a straight walk north for twenty minutes along the rocks and the tracks, balancing on one iron track or stepping between wood planks.

  We watched for trains.

  “Look,” Ilan said, as a train came toward us. He placed a penny on the rail before we ran to the side and the train thundered past. Afterward, the penny was hot and had become a shiny copper disc, an uneven oval. It was an object I would have liked to keep.

  “Whatever,” I muttered when he showed me.

  It took a lot of energy to despise Ilan and my mother continuously, the way I did for months. Around them I was lethargic, smirked, and was pointedly silent when either of them made a joke. When we had dinner with others, I noticed how Ilan would find a way to bend the conversation toward his father without quite mentioning him, so that someone else would become curious and ask, Who was your father? My cruelty and unhappiness around him felt like a fierce tamping down of myself. It was exhausting and hadn’t worked so far to break them up, although it had made them both cautious around me. If I broke out of character for a moment with one thread of happiness, I knew my mother would take it as permission. I refused to give her that. It was as if she’d forgotten what we went through during each breakup, and I hated her for how she was misty-eyed and foolish.

  The restaurant, MacArthur Park, was in a converted barn and served a fancy buffet brunch with bowls of strawberries, bowls of fresh whipped cream, waffles and eggs in nickel domes, and fresh juice. Usually we went to simpler places.

  That morning something changed as I stood at the buffet and looked back at my mother and Ilan, who were sitting at a round table facing me, smiling. Looking at them, past the piles of fruit and the billows of cream, I felt too weary, and too content, to stay enraged. And they looked like parents. I surrendered. I felt safe here under the vaulted ceiling, with the clinks of silver-plated serving implements. However awful I had been, they would take me even now, and I could let them if I wished to, and it wasn’t too late to have it—a family.

  When I talked with him much later, when I was an adult, Ilan told me how he’d taken several walks with my father when they happened to see each other at the Rinconada house, encouraging him to spend more time with me, framing parenthood and time spent in terms of personal advantage—it’s for you, Steve, he’d said. Think of it that way. He’d noticed my father was opportunistic. He went for whatever was most appealing in the moment, ignoring me if someone else arrived. Ilan encouraged my father, praising him for even small gestures toward fatherhood. He praised him, for example, when my father took me for a skate. Ilan’s work, too, was entrepreneurial and consuming, but my mother said he had the ability to transition from work mode to family mode with ease and speed, so that when he was with us, or with me, having dinner with us as he did most nights before going back to the office, he was focused, not halfway listening, the way a lot of businessmen were.

  It was Ilan who, after staying home several nights to help me with my math and science homework, sitting beside me on the couch, pa
tient, even though he had planned to go back to work in the evening because his company was struggling, gave me the first taste of what it felt like to arrive prepared for class, to understand the lesson and have a homework sheet filled out right. After several nights of his help, I wanted to arrive prepared, and to feel the calm and get the attention that came with it, and so it would be Ilan, later, who was part of the reason I would start to do well in school.

  That summer, Ilan’s daughter, Allegra, and I went to my father’s house in Woodside to go swimming, and afterward we explored the house. She found a room I’d never seen before near the front door, empty bookshelves covering the walls up to the ceiling, a couple of books and magazines here and there. In the middle of the room was a crude model of the property, with the land made of the crumbly green material used to hold stems in flower arrangements.

  “Do you think he’s ever been in this room?” she asked.

  “Probably not,” I said. We rummaged through the things, which I thought looked as though they might have been left by the people who’d lived here before.

  High up on a shelf, I found several copies of a Playboy magazine.

  “Look.”

  We flipped through it sitting on the floor. That rumor about my father in Playboy might not have been true—but there, on the next page, was his face. A postage stamp–sized black-and-white photo above some text. He looked innocent in a white shirt and a bow tie. Fully dressed.

  “I knew it!” I said. “I’ve heard about this.” I was so relieved he was not nude or leering, and I wanted Allegra to notice him.

  I felt lucky to have a father like that. We turned the page. A naked woman was sprawled out across two pages, a brunette with big hair, bedroom eyes, red lipstick.

  On one of our skating outings that year, my father and I stopped at a low building nestled in trees near downtown. We each had one mildly skinned knee from another fall.

  “I know some people here,” he said. “It’s a design company.” We didn’t remove our skates; inside it was carpeted, so we could walk almost normally.