Small Fry Read online

  “It’s just what writers do. I didn’t mean to upset you. Not at all.”

  Reading her book, I felt there would be nothing left for me to write about. I felt emptied out. Jane didn’t like sushi because it felt like a tongue on her tongue. The details she described made me disconsolate, as if, having described them so well, they belonged to her now, not to me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me right after you read it?” she asked. “I would have changed it, or waited, or even not published at all.” But at eighteen, the idea that I could have told her what to do with her work had not felt possible.

  Now the book was almost on the shelves.

  Also, after reading half the book, I’d stopped. I didn’t even know what happened with my character in the end.

  “You haven’t finished?” she asked. “You’ll like it, what happens to Jane.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Perhaps you’ll mention my book in your book someday,” she said, surprising me with the idea that one book might refer to another like Russian dolls; and that there might be room for more than one book about the same people, and the same time.

  In the end Jane is wearing a school uniform and she rushes into a classroom with the other children. She finally belongs.

  Ron thought my private school was elitist and lacked academic rigor, and he managed to convince my mother, too, so we moved house in order to be in the Palo Alto School District so I could attend public school.

  Our new place, an apartment in the back of another house, was less than half the size of the small house we’d moved from, but with just as many rooms. It was like a playhouse. The wooden floor, newly sanded and varnished for our arrival, yellow as hay, shone like it was wet. Before this, we’d lived on a series of old wall-to-wall carpets, and my mother’s joy about this floor surprised me. She reassembled the tubular bed in my new room.

  One night, soon after we moved in, she rented Desperately Seeking Susan to watch on our new television. I wasn’t allowed to watch it. Before this, we hadn’t owned a television. After she put me to bed, I turned myself so my head was where my feet usually were, careful not to jostle the singing springs. From there I could open the door a crack and see the screen over the back of the couch.

  In the movie, a woman wore tattered black clothing, her hair in spikes, necklaces layered. The more I watched, the more I knew I wanted to look like this woman.

  My mother spun around and caught me watching.

  “I thought so,” she said. “Get to sleep.” She came over and shut the door.

  A few days later I found a picture in a magazine—it might have been an ad for Guess or Jordache jeans—in which a woman with short, tousled hair, wet maybe, was leaping. She flew above the dark asphalt, toes pointed: perfect splits in the air. She wore a T-shirt and stonewashed jeans. I wanted to be that girl too.

  Ron came over while my mother and I were standing in the kitchen. The kitchen alcove was straight across from the front door; when he stepped in, he lifted his camera to his eye.

  “Don’t move,” he said, clicking. “This is really good.” We didn’t own a camera.

  At first the shots were candid, but now he wanted us to pose. Click click click. I could feel my smile hardening.

  In his interactions with me and my mother he often insisted too much—my mother said he “went too far”—as if only by extreme repetition would he be noticed.

  I knew Ron was kind. He’d bought us matching gold necklaces, hers wider and thicker than mine, made of two rows of jointed segments that met like herringbone. It was only because he went on too long and didn’t listen that we became infuriated and pushed him away. Now, in the kitchen, it was my mother and me against his frantic urgency. We gave him insolent looks. He turned on the flash.

  “Ron, enough,” my mother said. “We’re done, okay?”

  My mother ran into the bathroom; I ducked behind the wall.

  “Guys, come back,” he said. “Let me take just a few more.”

  When Ron didn’t stay over, I slept with my mother in her bed, which I preferred to sleeping alone.

  “Why don’t you leave him?” I asked her the next day.

  “I just might,” she said.

  Ron brought over the developed photographs in a paper envelope. As soon as he stepped inside, my mother grabbed the envelope out of his hand and ran to the couch and started looking through the stack. I tried to get at the pictures, and so did he, but her back was curved against us as she flipped through them, yanking out the photos she didn’t like and hiding them in a pile beneath her leg.

  She had long believed that the essential perspective of the photographer was captured in his or her photographs; flattering or interesting pictures would mean that Ron noticed her beauty and even her soul; ugly pictures would reveal that he did not see, appreciate, or love her.

  “Let me see,” I said, reaching around her, trying to grab them, but it was too late: she ripped the photographs beneath her leg in half.

  She turned and shrugged, tilted her head, lifted her eyebrows—acknowledging our anger and frustration, but smug, the way she always was when she ripped up photographs of herself.

  It enraged me when she did this. I became more critical of her. I noticed the way she walked with her toes pointing in, and how her pinkie toes formed yellow calluses sharp as blades that ran vertically along the bottom pad where the toes had been flattened in shoes. She added flakes of brewer’s yeast to her salads and they smelled of dusty rooms. Her cakes collapsed with fault lines because she was too impatient to let them cool. Once, I had loved the way the tip of her nose bobbed up and down when she chewed, and sat in her lap to be closer to the sound, like a blade through tall grasses, but now both her nose and her chewing seemed strange and wrong. All these factors, I believed, were why she was only able to date someone like Ron, not my father. I came to believe it was her fault: she wasn’t beautiful enough, and was therefore unloved, unloveable—and might make me so, too.

  At my new school, the buildings were single-story and Spanish-style with dirty stucco walls, arches, and courtyards. The hallways between classrooms were open to the elements, covered by porticoes, and paved with shiny cement squares. On rainy days, the water poured into the courtyards and over the fenced field at the back of the school. My teacher, Miss Johnson, was young—it was her first year teaching. Her hair fell in a perfect blonde curtain around her face, and her bangs were curled in toward her forehead. When she smiled, cushioned circles formed in her lower cheeks, as if she were holding something delicious in her mouth.

  I didn’t know the Pledge of Allegiance; the first time the class stood to recite it, I tried to mouth the words. Only one girl stayed seated. She sat as if she meant to sit, not as if she’d forgotten to stand.

  “I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,” she said.

  After that, I stayed seated too.

  “Why aren’t you standing for the Pledge?” Miss Johnson asked.

  “I’m a Buddhist,” I said. That was the religion my mother said she and my father had practiced.

  “Oh,” she said, and didn’t ask me about it again.

  “It’s not just parents who decide to have children,” my mother said. I was pretty sure this came from Buddhism. “Some say children choose the parents too. Before they’re born.” I tried to take stock of what I’d chosen: my father far away, glinting like a shard of mirror; my mother so close and urgent. If it was true that I chose my parents, I would choose them again, I thought.

  At school, I wasn’t supposed to mention my father.

  “You could be kidnapped,” Ron said.

  In high school, my mother knew of a girl abducted in a windowless white van, her hands and legs tied up. After they’d driven her outside the town, they’d stopped at a gas station and the girl had managed to open the door and get free. I understood in some vague way that I could be kidnapped because of my father; but because he wasn’t part of my life in a daily way, the idea seemed far-fetched and glamorous.
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  At Ron’s urging, my mother and I went to the police station, where they took my fingerprints. A man dipped my finger in thick black liquid, pressed it down on paper from one side of the nail bed to the other, hurting me a little each time as he tried to grip my small fingers and roll them, leaving a pattern of lines on the paper my mother said were unique to me. Whorls, she said they were called. She showed me how hers resolved in a perfect circle, like a topographic map of a hill.

  “I have a secret,” I said to my new friends at school. I whispered it so that they would see I was reluctant to mention it. The key, I felt, was to underplay. “My father is Steve Jobs.”

  “Who’s that?” one asked.

  “He’s famous,” I said. “He invented the personal computer. He lives in a mansion and drives a Porsche convertible. He buys a new one every time it gets a scratch.”

  The story had a film of unreality to it as I said it, even to my own ears. I hadn’t hung out with him that much, only a few skates and visits. I didn’t have the clothes or the bike someone with a father like this would have. My last name was different from his.

  “He even named a computer after me,” I said to them.

  “What computer?” a girl named Elizabeth asked.

  “The Lisa,” I said.

  “A computer called the Lisa?” she said. “I never heard of it.”

  “It was ahead of its time.” I used my mother’s phrase, although I wasn’t sure why it was ahead. “He invented the personal computer later. But you can’t tell anyone, because if someone finds out, I could get kidnapped.”

  I brought it up when I felt I needed to, waiting as long as I could and then letting it burst forth. I don’t remember feeling at a disadvantage with my friends who had fathers, only that there was at my fingertips another magical identity, an extra thing that started to itch and tingle when I felt small, and it was like pressure building inside me, and then I had to find a way to say it.

  At some point I also heard that he’d been named Playboy‘s “Sexiest Man of the Year.” I bragged about it selectively because I wasn’t sure whether it was true or exactly what it meant. I had gathered that there was a Playboy, and also a Playgirl, so I didn’t know if he was featured in a magazine of naked women meant for men, or if he was nude himself in a magazine of naked men meant for women. From this I concluded that my father might be naked in Playboy, and when I thought of it, I got a terrible shiver, and I thought part of growing up would be to take this fact in stride.

  One of the girls at school, Kirsten, started following me around outside class, chanting, “Your dad is Steve Jobs, your dad is Steve Jobs.”

  “Stop it,” I said.

  She didn’t stop. She said it sometimes tauntingly, sometimes in a monotone like a robot. It was annoying, but the advantage to her harassment was that it advertised the very fact I wanted known. She did the brag-work for me, and I seemed innocent, even put-upon, as she did it.

  “What’s wrong with that girl?” my mother said when I told her. “I bet it’s her parents—they care. I wonder how she found out?”

  I told her I might have been the one to tell her, accidentally.

  “You told her?”

  “It slipped out.” I braced for her anger, but instead she was only confused.

  “That makes even less sense,” she said. “You told her, and now she goes around telling you? Tell her to stop. What a strange girl.”

  One afternoon when he came for a skate, my father brought over a stack of six stickers from his company, NeXT. These were beautiful, thick, large, made of a rigid clear plastic, printed with a black cube and brightly colored letters.

  “You can give these to your friends at school,” he said. I was thrilled: when I gave them out, they would know I hadn’t made him up.

  This was the same time I guessed the number of corn kernels in a jar as part of an activity Miss Johnson called Guesstimation. It was the second time in a row I’d guessed the number within a few kernels, even though I’d just written a series of numbers I couldn’t have put into words because I didn’t understand place order. When my mother came to pick me up, both she and Miss Johnson looked at me curiously, as if I was a secret prodigy. A week later, a poem I wrote was selected for publication in the weekly school newsletter: The pilgrims are so pretty, the pilgrims are so grand, they sailed here on the Mayflower, and walked upon our land. Everything was finally coming together: I was becoming the girl I wanted to be, famous like my father, and lucky.

  Soon after that my father brought over a Macintosh computer. He pulled the box out of the back seat and carried it into my room and put it on the floor. “Let’s see,” he said. “How do we open it?” As if he didn’t know. This made me doubt he was the inventor.

  The room had only the loft bed on the bright wooden floor. Parallelograms of light shone in from the window, lit dust twirling like sparks in midair.

  He pulled the computer out of the box by a handle on the top and set it on the floor near the outlet on the wall.

  “I guess we plug this in.” He held the cord loose like it was unfamiliar.

  He sat on the floor in front of it with his legs crossed; I sat on my knees beside him. He looked for the on switch, found it, and the machine came alive to reveal a picture of itself in the center, smiling. He showed me how I could draw with it and save my drawings on the desktop once I was finished with them, and then he left.

  He didn’t mention the other one, the Lisa. I worried that he had not really named a computer after me, that it was a mistake.

  “You want to make the kids like you? Tell them you went to NASA and played with the flight simulators. That’s what’ll make them jealous,” Ron said. He worked as an engineer for NASA’s Ames Research Center, so he could get us in. On the day we finally went, after he’d talked about it for months, the sun was blazingly hot, and the white rocks outside the tinted glass door radiated heat. He took my picture beside the NASA sign, and then inside at the reception desk, and then again outside the door to the simulators. I’d recently had my hair cut straight across my chin at Supercuts, where we got a discount because my aunt Linda was a manager.

  Inside, the simulator wasn’t working. “Damn,” he said. “The one day we come. What are the chances?” It didn’t look like an airplane, but like an office. There were yellow and blue levers embedded in the desks near the keyboards. The screens remained black.

  “These simulators are so incredible—it’s just like flying,” he’d said. When he talked about it, I wondered, would it really feel like flying, with wind, and if I crashed the flight simulator, would I feel as if I were falling?

  “Look at the screen and pretend you’re really concentrating,” he said, the camera against his eye, taking picture after picture. “And pull down the lever at the same time—that’s it. You can tell your friends at school that the screens didn’t show up because of the flash.”

  He took me to lunch at a place with white tablecloths and water poured from silver pitchers into wineglasses. He apologized for how disappointing it was that the simulation hadn’t worked. I told him it was okay.

  He took more pictures of me elbowing the table and taking sips of water and smiling until the food arrived and we ate.

  That night I wrote in my journal that I loved my dad.

  Then I clarified: not Ron. Steve Jobs.

  Underneath the name Steve Jobs, I wrote, “I love him! I love him! I love him!” I felt it there inside my chest like my heart would rip apart with it.

  My mother was admitted into California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco, where she would work toward her bachelor’s degree. My father offered to take me on Wednesday nights, the only night of the week she had class. I would be alone with him for the first time. We would sleep at his mansion, with its glowing white face and seven acres.

  It gave me a shiver of excitement and disbelief, sitting in school that first Wednesday. My new fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Keatsman, sat at the front of the class and twiste
d a snug gold ring around and around her finger when she was upset with us for being unruly, the flesh tugging near the band. At the end of the day I ran outside at the bell, the first one, and looked for the white Honda Civic I’d been told to watch for—Barbara, my father’s secretary, would pick me up.

  She was parked against the curb in front of the school. She leaned over and rolled down the window.

  “Lisa?”

  “Barbara?”

  “That’s me,” she said, opening the latch of the passenger side door.

  She drove us to my father’s office. Her fingernails on the stick shift were painted red and she wore a long skirt and a blouse with two sections of cloth at the collar that tied in a bow. Her brown hair fell straight in a glossy line that almost hit her shoulders. She wore glasses. I liked being near her; I realized later this was true of the people I knew who worked with my father during the years I was growing up. They were kind and gentle; often I felt more at home with them than I did with my father. They seemed soulful and modest—I think he must have admired these qualities and chosen them, even though he was not always like that himself. Barbara had a matronly presence, calm and mature, although she couldn’t have been much older than my mother.

  I sat on the carpeted floor in the middle of a huge room with a few low couches, large cement pillars painted white, a plant, and offices around the outside windowed wall of the building. The room smelled like new paint and carpet. Barbara brought me paper and an assortment of pens. From the place where I sat, I could see my father’s office across the expanse of floor, the same size as all the offices around him, the door open. I could hear him talking on the phone. People would walk into his office, talk with him for a while, and then stop and say hello to me and ask if I was all set and look at my drawings. I couldn’t see him behind his desk because there was a venetian blind, mostly closed, on the window that faced into the central room, but I could hear him, and sometimes he would walk out of his office, waving and smiling at me, and I’d think that maybe we were leaving, but then he’d return to his office again. All the offices had whiteboards. When he was speaking with someone else, he spoke very fast and loud. His office began to glow brightly along with several other offices along the same wall, lighter as it grew dark outside.