Small Fry Read online

  By this time, my mother’s parents had divorced; her mother was mentally ill and increasingly cruel. My mother went back and forth between her parents’ homes; her father was often gone, traveling for work. Her father didn’t approve of my parents living together, but he didn’t try to stop them. My father’s father, Paul, was outraged at the plan, but his mother, Clara, was kind, the only one of the parents to come over one night for dinner. They made her Campbell’s soup, spaghetti, and salad.

  In the fall, my father left for Reed College, in Oregon, which he attended for about six months before dropping out. They broke up; they didn’t really talk about things, she said, not the relationship or the breakup, and she’d started dating someone else. When he understood she was leaving him, he was so upset he could hardly walk, she said, but sort of slouched forward. It surprised me to discover that she was the one who broke it off with him, and I wondered, later, if this breakup was part of the reason he was vindictive toward her after I was born. He was aimless then, she said, a college dropout, longing for her even when she was beside him.

  Both my parents went to India separately. He traveled for six months, she for the year after he returned. He told me later that he’d gone to India specifically to meet the guru Neem Karoli Baba, but when he arrived, the guru had just died. The ashram where the guru lived had let my father stay for a few days, putting him up in a white room with nothing in it but a bed on the floor and a copy of a book called Autobiography of a Yogi.

  Two years later, when the company my father started with Woz, Apple, was just beginning, my parents were a couple again, living in a dark brown ranch-style house in Cupertino together with a man named Daniel who, along with my parents, also worked at Apple. My mother worked in the packing department. She had recently decided to save up to leave suburbia and leave my father, who was moody, and to get a job at the Good Earth in Palo Alto, a health food restaurant on the corner of University Avenue and Emerson Street. She had an IUD inserted, but it was expelled without her knowledge, as they are in rare cases soon after insertion, and she discovered she was pregnant.

  She told my father the next day, when they were standing in the middle of a room off the kitchen. There was no furniture, just a rug. When she told him, he looked furious, clenched his jaw, and then ran out the front door and slammed it behind him. He drove off; she thought he must have gone to talk with an attorney who told him not to talk to her, because after that, he wouldn’t say a word.

  She quit her job in the packing department at Apple, too embarrassed to be pregnant with my father’s child and also working at his company, and went to stay at different friends’ houses. She went on welfare; she had no car, no income. She thought of having an abortion but decided not to after a recurring dream of a blowtorch between her legs. She considered adoption, but the one woman she trusted to help her at Planned Parenthood was transferred to another county. She got jobs cleaning houses and lived in a trailer for a while. She went to silent meditation retreats four times during her pregnancy, in part because the food was plentiful. My father continued living in the house in Cupertino until he bought the house in Monte Sereno, where we would later get the couch.

  In the spring of 1978, when my parents were twenty-three, my mother gave birth to me on their friend Robert’s farm in Oregon, with the help of two midwives. The labor and delivery took three hours, start to finish. Robert took photos. My father arrived a few days later. “It’s not my kid,” he kept telling everyone at the farm, but he’d flown there to meet me anyway. I had black hair and a big nose, and Robert said, “She sure looks like you.”

  My parents took me out into a field, laid me on a blanket, and looked through the pages of a baby-name book. He wanted to name me Claire. They went through several names but couldn’t agree. They didn’t want something derivative, a shorter version of a longer name.

  “What about Lisa?” my mother finally said.

  “Yes. That one,” he said happily.

  He left the next day.

  “Isn’t Lisa short for Elizabeth?” I asked my mother. “No. We looked it up. It’s a separate name.” “And why did you let him help name me when he was pretending he wasn’t the father?” “Because he was your father,” she said.

  On my birth certificate, my mother listed both of their names, but my last name was only hers: Brennan. She drew stars on the document around the margins, the kind that are only outlines with hollow centers.

  A few weeks later my mother and I went to live with her older sister, Kathy, in a town called Idyllwild in Southern California. My mother was still on welfare; my father didn’t visit or help with child support. We left after five months, beginning our series of moves.

  During the time my mother was pregnant, my father started work on a computer that would later be called the Lisa. It was the precursor to the Macintosh, the first mass-market computer with an external mouse—the mouse as large as a block of cheese—and included software, floppy discs labeled LisaCalc and LisaWrite. But it was too expensive for the market, a commercial failure; my father began on the team working for it, but then started working against it, competing against it, on the Mac team. The Lisa computer was discontinued, the three thousand unsold computers later buried in a landfill in Logan, Utah.

  Until I was two, my mother supplemented the welfare payments by cleaning houses and waitressing. My father didn’t help; my mother’s father and her sisters helped when they could—not much. She found babysitting at a church daycare center run by the minister’s wife. For a few months, we lived in a room in a house my mother found listed on a noticeboard meant for pregnant women considering adoption.

  “You would cry, and I would cry with you; I was so young and I didn’t know what to do and your sadness made me sad,” my mother said about those years. This seemed like the wrong thing. Too much fusion. But nonetheless I felt it had shaped me, how I felt powerfully for others sometimes, as if they were me. My father’s absence makes her choices seem more dramatic, like they happened in front of a black backdrop.

  I blamed her, later, for how hard it was to fall asleep in a room with any noise at all.

  “You should have made sure I slept in noisy places, too,” I said.

  “But there was no one else around,” she said. “What was I supposed to do—bang pots and pans?”

  When I turned one, she got a waitressing job at the Varsity Theatre, a restaurant and art house cinema in Palo Alto. She found good, inexpensive daycare nearby at the Downtown Children’s Center.

  In 1980, when I was two, the district attorney of San Mateo County, California, sued my father for child-support payments. The state wanted him to pay child support and also to reimburse the state for the welfare payments already made. The lawsuit, initiated by the State of California, was made on my mother’s behalf. My father responded by denying paternity, swearing in a deposition that he was sterile and naming another man he said was my father. After this man’s dental and medical records were subpoenaed and didn’t match, his lawyers claimed that “between August, 1977, and the beginning of January, 1978, plaintiff engaged in acts of sexual intercourse with a certain person or persons, the names of whom the defendant is ignorant, but plaintiff well knows.”

  I was required to take a DNA test. The tests were new, done with blood instead of buccal cells, and my mother said that the nurse could not find a vein and instead kept jabbing at my arm as I wailed. My father was there too because the court had ordered us all to arrive at the hospital at the same time. She and my father were polite to each other in the waiting room. The results came back: the chance we were related came to the highest the instruments could measure then, 94.4 percent. The court required my father to cover welfare back payments of about $6,000, child-support payments of $385 per month, which he increased to $500, and medical insurance until I was eighteen.

  It is case 239948, filed on microfiche at the Superior Court, County of San Mateo, plaintiff vs. my father, defendant. My father signed it in lowercase, a less-p
racticed version of the way he signed later. My mother’s signature is pinched and wobbly; she signed twice, once below and once on the line. A third start is crossed out—had she finished that signature, too, it would have hovered above the others.

  The case was finalized on December 8, 1980, with my father’s lawyers insistent to close, and my mother unaware of why the case that had dragged on for months was now being rushed to a conclusion. Four days later Apple went public and overnight my father was worth more than two hundred million dollars.

  But before that, just after the court case was finalized, my father came to visit me once at our house on Oak Grove Avenue in Menlo Park, where we rented a detached studio. I don’t remember the visit, but it was the first time I’d seen him since I’d been a newborn in Oregon.

  “You know who I am?” he asked. He flipped his hair out of his eyes.

  I was two and a half. I didn’t.

  “I’m your father.“ (“Like he was Darth Vader,” my mother said later, when she told me the story.)

  “I’m one of the most important people you will ever know,” he said.

  On our street, pepper tree seeds in pink casings dangled down from tree limbs low enough to touch, crackling apart when I rubbed them between my fingers. The leaves, shaped like fish bones, swayed in breezes. Mourning doves made calls like out-of-tune woodwinds. The sidewalk around some tree trunks was cracked and warped.

  “It’s the tree roots,” my mother said. “They’re strong enough to push up the cement.”

  In the shower with my mother, the droplets made their way down the wall. Droplets were like animals: they jerked and took winding paths, slower and faster, leaving a trail. The shower was dark and closed, tiled and curtained. When my mother turned the water to hot, we yelled, “Open pores!” and when it was cold, we yelled, “Closed … pores!” She explained that pores were holes in the skin that opened with heat and closed with cold.

  She held me in the shower and I nestled against her and it wasn’t clear to me where she ended and I began.

  My mother’s goal was to be a good mother and a successful artist, and every time we moved, she brought two large books with us: an album of photographs of my birth and a book of art she called her portfolio. The first I wished she’d throw away because it contained nudity, and the second I worried she might lose.

  Her portfolio contained a series of her drawings encased in plastic. That it was called a portfolio gave it dignity. I would flip through the pages, enjoying the weight of them in my hand. In one pencil drawing, a woman sat behind a desk in a windowed office, a gust of wind lifting her hair up into the shape of a fan and scattering sheets of white paper all around her, like a storm of moths.

  “I like her hair,” I said. “I like her skirt.” I couldn’t get enough of this woman; I wanted to be her, or for my mother to be her.

  She’d made this drawing sitting at a table, using a mechanical pencil, an eraser, and the heel of her hand, blowing graphite and eraser leavings off the page. I loved the low murmur the pencil made on paper, and how her breath got even and slow when she worked. She seemed to consider her art with curiosity, not ownership, as if she weren’t really the one making the marks.

  It was the drawing’s realism that impressed me. Every detail was precise like a photograph. But the scene was also fantastical. I loved how the woman sat in her pencil skirt and buttoned blouse, poised and dignified amid the chaos of the flying papers.

  “It’s just an illustration, not art,” she said dismissively, when I asked her why she didn’t make more like it. (It was a commercial piece, and less impressive than her paintings; I didn’t know the difference between the two.) She’d been commissioned to illustrate a book called Taipan, and this was one of the pieces.

  We didn’t have a car, so I rode in a plastic seat on the back of her bicycle over sidewalks under the trees. Once, another rider came toward us on the sidewalk on his bicycle; my mother steered away, the other rider did the same, and they collided. We flew onto the sidewalk, skinning our hands and knees. We recovered on a lawn nearby. My mother sat and sobbed, her knees up and her shorts hanging down, one of her knees scraped and bloody. The man tried to help. She sobbed for too long in a way that I knew must be about more than the fall.

  One evening soon after, I wanted to take a walk. She was depressed and didn’t want to go, but I begged and pulled at her arm until she relented. Down the street, we saw a leaf-green VW hatchback with a sign: “For Sale by Owner, $700.” She walked around it, looking in the windows.

  “What do you think, Lisa? This might be just what we need.”

  She wrote down the name of the owner and his telephone number. Later, her father brought her to his company’s loan department and cosigned a loan. My mother talked about my dragging her out for a walk that night as if I’d performed a heroic feat.

  As we drove, she sang. Depending on her mood she would sing Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” or “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” or “Tom Dooley.” She sang one about asking God for a car and a television. She sang “Rocky Raccoon” when she was feeling happy, feisty; it had a part where she went up and down the scales without real words, like scat, making me laugh, making me embarrassed. I was sure she’d invented it—it was too strange to be a real song—and I was shocked years later when I heard the Beatles’ version playing on the radio.

  These were the Reagan years, and Reagan had denigrated single mothers and welfare mothers—calling single mothers welfare queens taking government handouts so they could drive Cadillacs—and later she talked about how Reagan was an idiot and a crook and had designated ketchup a vegetable in school lunches.

  Around this time, my aunt Linda—my mother’s younger sister—came to visit. Linda worked at Supercuts and was saving for a condo. We were out of money, and Linda said she drove an hour to give my mother twenty dollars for food and diapers; my mother used it to buy food and diapers, and also a bouquet of daisies and a small pack of patterned origami paper. Money, when we had it, was quick-burning, bright, like kindling. We had just a little or not enough. My mother was not good at saving or making money, but she loved beauty.

  Linda remembers walking in as my mother was sitting on the futon and sobbing on the phone, saying, “Look, Steve, we just need money. Please send us some money.” I was three, which seems too young, but Linda remembers that I’d grabbed the phone out of my mother’s hand. “She just needs some money. Okay?” I’d said into the receiver, and hung up.

  “How much money does he have?” I asked my mother a couple years later.

  “See that?” My mother pointed to a ripped bit of white paper the size of a pencil eraser. “That’s what we have. And see that?” she said, pointing to a whole roll of white kraft paper. “That’s what he has.”

  This was after we’d moved back from Lake Tahoe, having driven there in the green VW to live with my mother’s boyfriend, who had once been a renowned rock climber before a tendon injury and a botched operation in his right ring finger meant he could no longer climb. He’d started a company making outdoor gear, and my mother made illustrations of gaiters and other sports equipment for his company, and also worked as a waitress in a diner. Later, after they broke up, he would become a successful vacuum cleaner salesman and a born-again Christian, but those days he was still sometimes featured in magazine articles about rock climbing. One day, in the grocery store, my mother pointed to the cover of a magazine, a picture of someone hanging from a cliff. “That’s him,” she said. “He was a world-class rock climber.” A tiny speck on the mountain—I could hardly make him out. I doubted it was the same man who took me on walks through the cedar forest in Skylandia Park that led to the beach.

  “And this,” she said, opening another magazine, “is your father.” Now here was a face I could see. My father was handsome, with dark hair, red lips, a good smile. The rock climber was indeterminate, while my father was significant. Even though the rock climber was the one who took care of me, I pitied him now for his inconse
quence, and also felt bad to pity him, because he was the one who was around.

  We’d lived in Tahoe for almost two years when my mother wanted to leave the rock climber and move back to the Bay Area. This was around the time the story came out, the “Machine of the Year,” about my father and computers in Time magazine, in January 1983, when I was four, in which he’d hinted that my mother had slept with many men and lied. In it, he talked about me, saying, “Twenty-eight percent of the male population of the United States could be the father”—probably based on a manipulation of the DNA test result.

  After she read the article, my mother moved in slow motion, the muscles on her face slack. She cooked dinner with the kitchen lights off, except for a dim light shining from under one cabinet. But in a few days she’d recovered herself and her sense of humor, and she sent my father a picture of me sitting naked on a chair in our house, wearing only those Groucho Marx joke glasses with the big plastic nose and fake mustache.

  “I think it’s your kid!” she wrote on the back of the picture. He had a mustache then, and wore glasses and had a big nose.

  In response, he sent her a check for five hundred dollars, and that was the money she used to move us back to the Bay Area, where we would sublet a room for a month in Menlo Park in a house on Avy Avenue with a hippie who kept bees.

  The day after we returned from Tahoe, my father wanted to show us his new house. I hadn’t seen him for years, and I wouldn’t see him for years after that. The memory of this day, the outlandish house and my strange father, seemed surreal when I thought of it later, as if it hadn’t really happened.

  He came to pick us up in his Porsche.

  The house had no furniture, only many cavernous rooms. My mother and I found a church organ set up on a raised part of floor in a huge, dank room somewhere, a wooden shell of foot pedals arrayed below and two whole rooms with latticed walls filled with hundreds of metal pipes, some so large I could fit inside them, some smaller than the nail on my pinkie finger, and every size in between. Each was held vertically in a wooden socket made specifically to hold it.