Small Fry Read online

  I was supposed to be in bed before she returned.

  “I guess we might come back,” she said.

  I made her promise they wouldn’t go into her room, and for some reason she agreed.

  Since she’d become interested in Ron, she no longer paid attention to me as astutely, I thought. She no longer consulted the I Ching. She was half-absent with happiness, the same slight smile on her lips as when she ran up the hill to get the prickly pear.

  It was between boyfriends—between the loneliness and despair that followed one and the lift that began at the next—where I hoped to stay forever, she and I the only team, the real couple.

  On the night of the date, Ron arrived on time. She was leaning over the bathroom sink doing her makeup when he knocked.

  I ran to open the door. I saw right away that Ron wasn’t a hippie. He was bald, with hair tufted on the sides like a clown’s, and had wide bushy eyebrows, glasses rimmed with gold, and large, swollen lips like a fish. He looked clean, and smelled of soap and detergent.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Lisa. My mom’s getting ready.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he said, holding out his hand.

  He followed me into the living room; I noticed that, as he walked, his feet splayed out dramatically to either side.

  My mother called from the bathroom, “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  As we passed the bookshelf, I reached for the album of photographs of my birth—this was unplanned, it surprised even me, one arm jutting out as if I didn’t have control of my limbs—and pulled it out of its socket in the shelf.

  I’d asked her to get rid of this album many times and she refused, bringing it with us as we moved from house to house. The cover was made of brown woven grasses, and because it was old, the grasses had started to fray at the edges. To me, too, this hinted at the shame of the contents. I suspected other children didn’t have shameful books like this around their houses.

  He and I sat down on the flowered couch beside each other.

  “I want to show you something,” I said. “Just some photos of my mother and me.”

  I opened the book across my lap where he could see it. My mother, younger, lying on a bed with long hair like dark water pooling around her face. These were the pictures of my birth, in black and white, with rounded corners. She had what looked like a man’s shirt buttoned around her chest and she was naked from the waist down, with her legs bent and open in the foreground of the photo. I turned the page: there I was, emerging from between her glowing, white legs like a turtle rising up from a pond.

  In the following pictures, once I was out, you could see my body wrinkled, my face wax-white, asymmetrical, and squished.

  I felt revulsion and disgust and yet I continued to turn the pages. I would not have known how to articulate it: I wanted to disgust him the way I was disgusted, to scare him away. To show him who we were, so that he might leave now, rather than wait.

  “And here’s more,” I said in my sweetest voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “I see.” He made no motion to rise and run. He sat, glancing at the pages and then looking away, as if distracted. When my mother came out of the bathroom and saw us, she snatched the album from my hands and stuck it back in its place on the shelf, giving me a furious look.

  Let’s Blast

  One of the first memories I have of my father is at a birthday party someone threw for him at a house in Russian Hill. He was in his early thirties.

  The light was different in San Francisco—we called it The City—slanting and yellow and more watery than it was in Palo Alto. The house, too, was beautiful, tall with soft wool carpets that tucked into the walls and the largest television I’d ever seen. The grass backyard was almost entirely taken up by a trampoline, the large, round kind, high up on metal legs.

  My father was on the trampoline, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt.

  “Hey there. Wanna come bounce?” he called out to me.

  I walked over and someone, not my mother, hoisted me, brought me high enough to lift my leg and grasp the fabric lip, my toes curling like a marsupial’s. The surface was the size of a small pool and caught light like an oil slick. I assumed my father and I would bounce the way I’d learned in my gymnastics lessons, but with two people it was different, the cadence irregular and jostling. Despite my efforts to stay on separate but complementary trajectories, we almost hit each other in midair. He wasn’t coordinated, didn’t have a clear sense of how to fall and rise. Nor did the trampoline have netted walls; we might fly off into the lawn where people were standing, or over the fence. I was lighter, I would be the one to fly. Worse, I might land on top of him. My yellow shorts belled out in the updraft and I worried that he and everyone on the lawn beneath us would see my underwear. But if I held my shorts down I’d lose the small measure of control I had over my movements.

  It was not clear when I reached the highest point of up, because inside it was the fall, the pulling feeling of down.

  Twice we found ourselves coming down to land at the same moment. I prayed we wouldn’t touch; it would be too intimate. I was conscious of scrabbling away from accidental closeness in front of strangers. In midair he looked at me, smiled.

  My drop, his bounce; his drop, my bounce. From below, someone took a photograph. We kept bouncing until he said, “All right, kid. Should we call it a day?” I’d never heard the expression before: Call It A Day.

  My mother told me a story she’d heard about my father that went something like this:

  My father was adopted and at some point in his twenties went to look for his birth parents. The search had been fruitless for a while, but finally he found the doctor who had delivered him. Because he’d been looking for so long, he decided this would be his last attempt; if it didn’t work, he wasn’t meant to find them.

  He went to meet with the doctor and asked for the name of his mother. The doctor said he didn’t know, but even if he did, he couldn’t tell him, because it would be a breach of confidentiality.

  When my father walked out the door of the doctor’s office, he decided to stop looking. At the same time, back in the office, the doctor sat down and wrote on a piece of paper: “Upon my death, please tell Steve Jobs I do know his mother, and her name is Joanne.” He had her contact information, and wrote it out.

  Four hours later the doctor died of a massive coronary attack. My father got the letter, found his mother, and learned that he had a younger sister, Mona.

  It was easy to get the timing right when you told a story like this, pausing after he stopped looking, lowering your voice to start in on the doomed doctor writing the fateful note.

  Around the time I turned eight we moved again and my father started dropping by our house once or twice a month. By this time he’d been kicked out of his company, Apple, an event I heard later was deeply hurtful to him, but even then I could feel that he was profoundly sad in some way that made him walk funny and act aloof. He was in the process of starting a new company called NeXT that would make computer hardware and software. I knew he also owned a computer animation company called Pixar that made a short film about two lamps, a parent and child, but this seemed minor compared with Apple or NeXT.

  Later my mother said that it was the dips in his worldly success that made him come and find us. The pattern she saw was that when he failed at work, when he lost something in the public sphere, he remembered us, started dropping by, wanted a relationship with me. As if in the flurry of work he forgot me and remembered only when the flurry stopped.

  When he came over, we all went roller skating around the neighborhood. My mother came along because I hardly knew him and would have felt strange being alone with him. His visits materialized out of ordinary afternoons, an engine shuddered into our driveway to the bottlebrush tree, echoing off our house and the wooden fence on the other side, thickening the air with excitement. He drove a black Porsche convertible. When he stopped, the sound turned into a whine and then was extinguished, leaving the
quiet more quiet, the pinpoint sounds of birds.

  “Hi, Steve!” I said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I liked the way he walked on the balls of his toes, tilted forward, falling into each step. His outlines were crisp.

  I anticipated his arrival, wondering when it would happen, and thought about him afterward—but in his presence, for the hour or so we were all together, there was a strange blankness like the air after his engine switched off. He didn’t talk much. He and my mother talked some, but there were long pauses, the thunk and whirr of roller skates on pavement, the birds and a few cars and leaf blowers.

  We skated the neighborhood streets. Trees overhead made patterns of the light. Fuchsia dangled from bushes in yards, stamens below a bell of petals, like women in ball gowns with purple shoes. Some streets wound around huge oak trees. Some had been cracked by roots and earthquakes, the curvy fissures filled in with shiny black tar.

  “Look how the tar lines reflect the sky,” my mother said to both of us. It was true—they were light blue rivers.

  During the skates with my father, I was not voluble the way I was when it was just my mother and me.

  Steve had the same skates as my mother, a beige nubuck body with red laces crisscrossed over a double line of metal fasts. I skated behind or ahead. She talked about the college she wanted to attend in San Francisco; he tripped on cracks in the sidewalk and the roads. To me skating was easy, like running or swimming. My mother’s back brake pad was worn away, and her front brake, the one that looked like a pencil eraser, was down to a slant. She knit the pavement, ankle over ankle, and slowed to a stop in one long line like Fred Astaire. His brakes looked new.

  “Can you use your brakes?” I asked, as we approached a stop sign.

  “I don’t need brakes,” he said. He aimed for the pole, hit it straight on with his chest, hugged it with both arms, and twirled around it, indecorously, stepping and stumbling until he stopped.

  As we passed bushes in other people’s yards, he pulled clumps of leaves off the stems, then dropped the fragments as we skated, making a line of ripped leaves behind us on the pavement like Hansel and Gretel.

  A few times, I felt his eyes on me; when I looked up, he looked away.

  After he left, we talked about him.

  “Why do his jeans have holes all over?” I asked. He might have sewn them up. I knew he was supposed to have millions of dollars. We didn’t just say “millionaire” but “multimillionaire” when we spoke of him, because it was accurate, and because knowing the granular details made us part of it.

  “In high school, he sometimes had more hole than jean,” she said. “It’s just his way. On our first date, when he came to pick me up, my father asked, ‘Young man, what are you going to be when you grow up?’ And you know what he said?”

  “What?”

  “A bum. Your grandfather was not pleased. He was hoping for an upstanding man to take his daughter out, and instead he got this long-haired hippie, saying he wanted to be a bum.”

  She said my father had a lisp. “It’s something to do with his teeth,” she said. She said most people have an underbite or an overbite. “But his teeth hit each other exactly straight on, and over the years they cracked and chipped where they hit, so the top and bottom teeth meet, with no spaces. It looks like a zigzag, or a zipper.”

  When they were dating in high school, even before they started selling the blue boxes that let you call anywhere in the world for free, he predicted that he would become famous.

  “How did he know?”

  “He just did,” she said. “He also said he’d die young, in his early forties.”

  I was pretty sure that since the first prediction was right, the second one would be right too. I began to think of him as a kind of prophet, with loneliness and tragedy at the edges. (Only we knew how lonely, how tragic!) All light and dark, nothing in between.

  “And he has these strangely flat palms,” she said.

  Every element about him that was different from others meant some sort of divinity, I thought. I assigned mystical qualities to his slouching, falling walk, his zipper teeth, his tattered jeans, his flat palms, as if these were not only different from other fathers’ but better, and now that he was in my life, even if it was only once a month, I had not waited in vain. I would be better off than children who’d had fathers all along.

  “He continued to grow through his twenties, when most people have stopped growing,” she said. “I saw it.”

  Of course the parts did not go together. He was rich but had holes in his jeans; he was successful but hardly talked; his figure was graceful, elegant, but he was clumsy and awkward; he was famous but seemed bereft and alone; he invented a computer and named it after me but didn’t seem to notice me, and didn’t mention it. Still, I could see how all these contrasting qualities could be an attribute, spun in a certain way.

  “I heard when it gets a scratch, he buys a new one,” I overheard my mother say to Ron.

  “A new what?” I asked.

  “Porsche.”

  “Couldn’t he just paint over the scratch?” I asked.

  “Car paint doesn’t work like that,” Ron said. “You can’t just paint over black with black; it wouldn’t blend. There are thousands of different blacks. They’d have to repaint the whole thing.”

  The next time he came over, I wondered if it was the same car he’d been driving the last time, or if it was a new one that just looked the same.

  One day he came over and brought someone with him. She was petite and pretty, wore jeans, had red hair that fell in a line below her jaw, large dark-blue eyes, and a wide mouth that took over her face in a pleasing way when she smiled.

  “This is my sister,” he said. She was an author, Mona Simpson. After giving my father up for adoption, his biological parents got married, had a daughter a few years later, and kept her. She and my father were soon close, kindred spirits, alike even though they’d just met. She had just published her first novel, Anywhere but Here, a book that would be on the bestseller list for many weeks and would become a movie starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman. I read it when I was twelve: it was brilliant. Steve and Mona looked different—tall and petite, dark and light, man and woman—you couldn’t tell they were brother and sister until they both smiled and their faces opened and folded in the same way. They had similar lips, and wide teeth.

  That my father’s sister happened to be named Mona struck me as a great coincidence. What were the chances that she would have a name that went so well with mine as to form, in combination, the name of the most famous painting in the world?

  They’d both been successful on their own, neither knowing of the other’s existence. They shared an aesthetic sensibility, my father buying expensive lamps, carpets, and books while Mona patrolled flea markets for vintage mercury bulbs, wooden figures, magnolia-patterned plates, glasses with a stripe of silver painted on the rim.

  Later, it was Mona who insisted that he rent us a nicer house than our tiny one on Melville; who insisted that he re-carpet and paint the small apartment within the Woodside house where he slept and I slept when I stayed with him, and that he change my bedroom from the one with the red shag rug, which required me to walk through his room to get to the bathroom, to one beside the bathroom. She who bought me a bed, and later argued that he should buy my mother and me a house. She was supportive of my mother’s artwork and took intense interest in the details of my life in a way that seemed to elevate them. When Mona visited, she brought with her excitement about food, jewelry, clothing. She would find the good restaurants, the places that served the best pie. She wore the same pair of earrings, always, that looked like a long drip of gold on each ear, the front and back sides hitting below her jawline.

  Mona had also grown up with a single mother, after her father left. It seemed to me that her mother was unhinged, from stories I insisted she tell me later—one Christmas her mother had bought gifts for her boyfriend’s children but not
for Mona; once she’d made her order the steak at a restaurant when they didn’t have the money for it. Mona’s stories gave me a thrill like looking down a steep cliff face, close to danger but safe at the same time. Mona took an interest in me: she noticed and commented on my tastes, judged me wise, gave me a first gift, the Arabian Nights.

  Mona gazed at me as if she was particularly interested in my face; she watched me sometimes even when she was conversing with the adults. At a restaurant, I doodled on a paper placemat and she pronounced it great, took it, framed it, and put it up in her apartment in New York.

  I would grow to be the same height as Mona, and also petite; I would also study English literature in college, and write.

  One year she wrote me long letters every week on thick paper in sepia ink. She gave me adult gifts: silver pointed dangly earrings, a set of collected Chekhov stories in pastel-colored paperbacks, a gold Tiffany ring with an amethyst eye.

  These gifts were windows into a more sophisticated world to which I hoped I’d belong, later. She had survived her own childhood, and now was successful; the gifts were proof of that.

  When I was a senior in high school, she would publish a new book. Before it was published, she sent me the bound galleys and asked me what I thought of the novel, if there was anything I would change. I was honored, but when I started reading I was surprised to find characters like my father, my mother, and myself in the pages. My character was named Jane. I’d had no idea she was writing about us. Mona had collected details of my life and put them into her book—an antique Chinese enameled pillbox she bought for me, with chrysanthemums and multicolored birds painted on a blue background. Other parts were made up—it was fiction—and the combination was confusing. At first I’d felt hurt to find my things on the pages, as if she’d taken the gifts back. Still, when I read Mona’s books, they made me want to write my own sentences.

  “People write about family in fictional form,” she said. “Fiction writers use details from life.” We were at Caffe Verona, where we’d gone to talk about it. When she’d learned I was upset after reading the galleys, she flew to Palo Alto the next day from where she lived in Los Angeles to talk with me.