Small Fry Read online

  We went down the hallway and into a room with a large table lit up with fluorescent lights, with pages of white paper fanned out on top, messy.

  “Do you know what a serif is?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. I wished he’d give me the context. I wanted to impress him; maybe he wanted to impress me by teaching me something. He pointed to a page with black letters.

  “Look,” he said.

  “An S?”

  “No,” he said. He pointed to a T, the top right side, where the letter curved down. “See the lines around the letter?” he asked. “There’s a small line at the end of the long one—that’s a serif. Some people think you can read better with them.”

  His voice was urgent. I gathered that serifs were very important.

  “Look, here,” he said, pointing at others. “Here, and here, and here.”

  The serifs became visible, separated from the letters. Caps and tails, flips you might make with your pen at the end of the word if you didn’t lift it off the paper. Serifs had always been there, but now I could name them. Feet are like serifs of the legs, I thought later. Toes are serifs of the feet.

  Of all the details on the planet, he wanted to show me this.

  He pointed to other fonts. The serifs were different between fonts, longer, shorter, thicker, thinner. They reminded me of notched branches in the spring, tendrils that might grow out and later become letters themselves.

  “Bauer Bodoni,” he said, “and Times New Roman, and Garamond.”

  He pointed to a blunt-edged font and asked me what that was called.

  “Not … serifs?”

  “There’s a word in Latin that means ‘without,’“ he said. He paused. Was I supposed to know Latin?

  “It’s sans,” he said.

  “So they’re called sans?” I said.

  “Sans serif. Like these,” he said, pointing: another S, but: S. Letters without serifs looked naked now.

  My mother liked letters plain and fine. She liked them thin; he liked them thick. In my adult life I would work at a science lab, a bank, a study-abroad office, a restaurant, a cosmetics company, a design company. There are codes and marks for each; different languages to describe beauty and importance. I could not be a full member of every group; I would have to pick.

  “So, have you kissed anybody yet?” he asked me on the skate home. He meant French.

  “No. Yuck. When did you have your first kiss?”

  “I was around your age,” he said.

  “Who’d you kiss?”

  “Her name was Deirdre Loupaletti.” Like loopy, spaghetti, confetti. It was too perfect. “She had brown hair down to here,” he said, motioning to his butt. “We kissed in the basement at her parents’ house. Actually, she was the one who kissed me.”

  I wished for his story, not mine, and for his confidence. A story with a name like that. I was already behind—if he’d kissed by my age, I should have kissed too.

  My cousin Sarah came to visit. She was my mother’s older sister Kathy’s daughter, and our only relative around my age. Soon after I was born, we’d lived with her and her parents for a few months in Idyllwild, California.

  Now, Sarah was tall but stooped; she spoke sharply and sometimes too loud and piercingly for indoor spaces. She was the only child I knew who could be wry, as if she was already life-weary. There was something else about her, maybe wit or irony, that she possessed despite her too-bold voice and jolting movements and her seeming unawareness of her surroundings, a mature perception that meant she was both a child and, at the same time, watching from a distance.

  I’d been looking forward to the visit for months. She’d never met my father, and tonight we would all have dinner together at Bravo Fono in Stanford Shopping Center. When we’d played together as children, neither of us had a father around. Now I did, and I wanted her to see what it was like.

  He’d picked the place. He was late. He was always late. When he walked in, I could sense he was not happy—it hadn’t been a good day at work maybe. His angles were wrong; he didn’t want to be here. His mood was like black soot in the air.

  My mother ordered the Bibb lettuce salad; I ordered the linguini with shrimp. We were careful about what we ordered around him—he disapproved of meat. His dietary code didn’t have to do with animal welfare, but with aesthetics and bodily purity. Later when he looked at people with his particular disdain, I could see what made them foolish, in his eyes: their complete unconsciousness of how ignorant they were, picking at their dead food.

  There was a thin line between civility and cruelty in him, between what did and did not set him off. I knew he wouldn’t like the idea of the shrimp; I also knew it would pass. But we’d forgotten to warn Sarah. “I’ll have the hamburger,” she said, too loud. I wanted to muffle her to protect her, and to protect myself. The trick, I learned later, was to give him less surface area to knife, so he would stab someone else. Always someone, if not me.

  The food arrived. I hoped Sarah wouldn’t feel the tense static in the air, or notice that my father hadn’t said a word to her yet, and glanced at her dish with disgust. She talked too loud for the echoing, semi-empty restaurant with its wall of windows, glass bricks, and stone floor. I didn’t know how to tell her to talk more softly.

  After we’d taken a few bites, my father’s face shifted and tightened.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked Sarah.

  “What?” she said. She was chewing on a bite of meat.

  “No,” he said. “Really.”

  At first it seemed that he was asking her to answer him. What was wrong with her? Why did she miss social cues? Why did she have such a biting, high voice at the top of the register, always calling for attention, as acute as a baby crying?

  His voice became high-pitched and piercing.

  “You can’t even talk,” he said. “You can’t even eat. You’re eating shit.”

  She looked at him; I could tell she was trying not to cry.

  “Have you ever thought about how awful your voice is?” he continued. “Please stop talking in that awful voice.”

  I couldn’t believe it was happening even as it was happening.

  “Steve, stop it right now,” my mother said.

  I could see him through Sarah’s eyes, or I thought I could: if having a father around was like this, it wasn’t so great.

  “I wish I wasn’t here with you,” he said. “I don’t want to spend another moment of my life with you. Get yourself together. Pull yourself together.”

  He talked loud enough so the people at other tables could hear him. Sarah slouched in her chair and looked at the table and began to cry.

  “Steve,” my mother said. “Stop.”

  “You should really consider what’s wrong with yourself and try to fix it,” he said.

  He got up and walked toward the bathroom.

  We leaned in and flanked Sarah so that no one else could watch. I was aware of the tables beside us and what they could hear and what they thought and how people sat beside violence and were not really a part of it. Sarah was sobbing messily, with snot and tears, wiping her nose on the back of her sleeve and telling us she was fine. I was smaller than she was, shorter, slighter. But she was small too.

  “He’s a mean person,” I said in the parking lot on the way to the car. “It has nothing to do with you.” My mother had told me that last part before when he’d hurt me.

  “I know,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she did know or she was just saying it so I would stop comforting her. But she looked at me and said it again: “I know.”

  My father’s girlfriend Tina’s hair was long and light blonde, the color of the hottest part of the flame: the same hair, the same person, I realized later, who was in his bed the night I thought the blond man had kidnapped and killed him.

  I don’t remember when I met Tina, but maybe it was one day in the kitchen at my father’s Woodside house, where my mother and I had come for lunch. The people my father hired to make
the beds and make his salads had made fresh whole wheat pasta, the machine still attached to the side of the kitchen counter, the pasta ribbons floured and long on a tray.

  My father and a few others were playing with a toy, rolling it across the kitchen island. A small silver-painted plastic robot figure with a red helmet that rolled with one wheel between its fused legs and, as it rolled, from a dark round hole in the chest cavity where its heart might have been, sparks shot out. I wanted to try it.

  Tina noticed me watching and called out to them, “Why don’t you let Lisa have it?” Her thick bangs were feathered on both sides. She had a smooth, low voice and a kind face.

  My father kept rolling it, swiping his finger in front of the sparks. But then he handed it to me and said, ceremoniously, “A gift. You have it.”

  Tina and my father had met several years before, when she was working at the philanthropic wing of Apple and my father was still living at the house in Monte Sereno where we’d taken the couch. She was a software engineer, warm, an introvert. Her beauty was something she shied away from, as if she didn’t want it, or care for it, and so it wasn’t notable to me, even years later, because she didn’t foster it or nudge it forward with affectations, makeup, or fancy clothing. She was just Tina.

  There was a group of good people that hung around Tina, family and friends, artists and scientists, who, like her, took an interest in me and my mother, so that during the years that she and my father were together, I felt there was an extra layer of protection around my mother, my father, and me.

  She told me years later that my father insisted, persuasively, when they first met, that I wasn’t really his kid. When she saw me, it was obvious that I was, but when she brought it up, he refused to discuss it.

  My father invited me to come on a vacation to Hawaii with the two of them. I was in the fourth grade, almost ten. My mother and I didn’t go on vacations, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. When we arrived on the tarmac, the sky was bright white, the airport buildings were not enclosed but outside with wide brown roofs, humidity blurring the line between my skin and the air. A man wearing a polo shirt gave us each a long necklace made of many sweet-smelling hot pink blossoms with yellow centers, and we followed him to a white van. On the drive, there were only miles of charred black land, and I worried he was taking us to a moonscape only he thought was beautiful, but then we took a left toward the ocean and a circle of green.

  The grass at the resort was mown short as baize and dotted with shade from palm trees with long, thin trunks, like strings. At breakfast, brown birds the size of my fist chirped in the high rafters and dropped down onto each just-vacant table, messy with napkins, syrup, and bitten pieces of toast. They hopped and picked at crumbs and squabbled until a waiter came to clear and they rose back up in unison to wait for another. Beside the pool I watched a peacock fan out, quivering, cawing. It stood still for a while and then strode away, still fanned out, in slow, methodical steps that made the whole semicircle of plumage sway.

  That week I walked barefoot along the sand paths, the warmth rising up through my calves to my knees. After a few days, the dark hairs on my arms became blond to the roots. In the ocean the grains of sand and the yellow fish that were strummed up in the shallow waves were bright and clear, magnified by the water. Before this trip I’d never heard of virgin piña coladas; now I had at least three a day.

  I made a friend around my age named Lauren, who also lived in California, and together we ran between lawns, meals, pools, beaches; the black-lipped fish, the one black swan, the birds and geckos. In the gift shop were cuff bracelets an inch wide, each made of a single piece of koa wood polished to a glow.

  “Let’s pick one out for your mother and Tina,” my father said. They clacked against each other on the rail.

  I wanted a bracelet too, but my hands and wrists were too small.

  He bought me a bikini made of red cotton with a flower pattern. I’d never worn a bikini before. My new friend Lauren had a similar one, also from the gift shop, but in blue.

  Tina wore jeans and Tshirts and china flats. She had wide wrists and large breasts and crouched down on her heels when she was speaking with me so we were closer to the same height. She laughed in a full way, and it made her whole face pretty. Her nose was like my mother’s, straight and small, with a pointed end that veered slightly to one side. She cut her own bangs.

  Tina had a happy-sad quality and dry, self-deprecating humor. She was delighted by me, she liked me, I could tell. To me, she seemed like she was a woman but also a little girl, or could remember so clearly what it was like to be my age that there wasn’t such a distance between us. When we were back in Palo Alto and we went somewhere all together in my father’s Porsche, she would squeeze her tall body in the back so I could sit up front with him. She was a strange combination with my father, I could tell even then; he would often become grandiose about himself, leaving behind the part of him that matched with her.

  “She could wear a sack, a brown sack,” I heard my father say. As if beauty was measured by how strong an obstacle it had to overcome. It was the same way he spoke about Ingrid Bergman. I watched for it, in Tina, because I didn’t think of her as particularly beautiful. Her eyelashes were as blonde as her hair. She didn’t try, and the trying was beauty to me then. But a few times when she tossed her bangs out of her face, her eyes shone in the sunlight, the color of the swimming pool, and her face opened up, beautiful, until she looked down and adjusted her bangs and looked ordinary to me again.

  On the way to dinner on the white sand path that wound through the forest, Tina and I flanking him, he put an arm around us both. A hand around my ribs, under my armpit. “These Are the Women of My Life.” He said it in a slow, measured, nasal voice, like he was announcing a new act at a show. He looked up and out as he said it, addressing the statement to the forest.

  I was one of his women! It filled me up with such a surge of joy I had to look away, look down at the path, at my bare feet, so he wouldn’t see I was smiling.

  He leaned toward Tina to kiss her, and the arm he had around me yanked up as he leaned, so that he clawed under my armpit, fingers jerking with his steps. I wanted to stay within his grasp, to be one of his women.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” he said at dinner, when Tina got up to go to the bathroom. Whenever he and I were alone for a moment, he talked to me about her beauty, sighing as if she were far away, or it was out of reach.

  When she returned, he leaned forward and kissed her, murmuring and whispering in her ear. She demurred; he grabbed the back of her head, his chair balanced on one leg. As they kissed, he pressed his palm against her breast, wrinkling the fabric of her T-shirt. “Mmm,” he said.

  I was simultaneously repulsed and intrigued. I guessed my role was to watch and note how much he adored her, even though it gave me a strange feeling to be near them when they did this. The act was exaggerated like a performance; it did not seem natural or real.

  Why didn’t she stop him? Maybe because she was very young, and in love.

  “Why did you two make out in front of me?” I asked Tina at some point much later.

  “It’s what he did when he was uncomfortable,” she said. “He was uncomfortable around you because he didn’t know how to relate to you,” she said. “The charm that worked on adults didn’t work on you, a child. You saw through it. So he would lunge toward me to ease his own discomfort.” The idea that my presence was the very thing that made him seem to be unaware of me was almost inconceivable, because in those moments I felt like nothing, a speck, not worth a look. It was so extreme, Tina said, that when we returned from Hawaii, she decided not to come over when I was around so that he might learn how to be with me on his own.

  Mona and my mother had also noticed the way my father made out with Tina, sometimes for minutes at a time, moaning—it wasn’t just me, he did it in front of adults too. But I was a child, and this behavior was inappropriate. My mother and Mona were concerned about his jokes and
public displays, and this had been, in part, the impetus for Mona’s insistence, not long after we returned from Hawaii, that as the child of a single mother without a continuous fatherly presence, it would be a good idea if I saw a male psychiatrist, in order to have the experience of forming a close relationship with a good and stable man.

  My mother agreed it was a good idea, and my father agreed to pay. My mother drove me to meet Dr. Lake, a therapist, recommended by Mona’s in New York, whom I would continue to see once per week, starting at age nine, for many years. My memory became clearer after I started seeing him, perhaps because I was older, or because during our weekly sessions I tried to put my life into words.

  When he was done kissing Tina, my father righted his chair, sighed, and ate.

  “You know,” he said, “Tina was on television once. In a commercial. When she was a girl. Younger than you.”

  I was impressed. Later my father played it for me, a blonde girl standing beside a boy who opens his fist onto the counter of a beach shop, releasing pocket change and a marble to pay for a box of Cracker Jack.

  After dessert, he took Tina’s hand and looked at her palm.

  “I don’t know what the lines are supposed to mean,” he said.

  “I’m not sure either,” Tina said. “If only we could tell our futures.”

  “I know how to read them,” I said to my father, “Give me your right hand.”

  “How about the left,” he said, because it was closer.

  “No. That’s the destiny you were given. I want to see the right one: what you will make of it.”

  “Okay,” he said, and stretched it across his body.

  His palms were flat, without the knuckle hills that poked up around the finger joints, a quality my mother and I had talked about along with others, like the zipper teeth. The inside of his palms glowed pale yellow, the lines deep orange; he ate and drank carrot salad and carrot juice the color of wet clay on the hillsides in such great quantities they tinted him from the inside out.