Small Fry Read online

  “I wanna show you something,” he said at some point, walking up to me. “Leave your backpack.” I followed him down the stairs, into another set of closed rooms. We passed a wall with a whiteboard with names and photographs with numbers beside them.

  “At other companies they try to hide what people are earning and it’s this big secret,” he said. “We just write it here and everyone can see it. It stops all the stupid gossip.”

  I followed him down into a basement office with bunch of desks, a low ceiling, lots of computers, and a few men standing around. Most of the people must have already gone home. He introduced me as his daughter, and then they started talking to each other rapidly, and I couldn’t understand what they were talking about.

  “Look at this,” he said to me, pointing at a computer with a large screen. “And this and this. It’s like they have a blind midget on the assembly line.” He was pointing to Sun Microsystems logos on big monitors, each attached at a different place along the panel at the bottom of the screen.

  His voice was so sharp that I wondered why they bought them at all.

  “We need them to make ours,” he said. So computers make computers, I thought.

  After that we said goodbye to the men and walked back up the stairs.

  I figured we’d head out now, but he left me near my backpack and went back to his office. Soon he was back on the phone.

  “Ready to go, champ?”

  By this time it was night. Barbara had already left; before saying goodbye, she held her purse against her lap and squatted down to ask me about my drawings. I was woozy with Fanta from the stocked refrigerator.

  The thought of going with my father to his big house, alone in the dark, was unsettling. I hadn’t considered the possibility that we’d still be far away from his house—not inside it—when darkness fell.

  The town of Woodside, a twenty-minute drive from Palo Alto, was a place with forests and people who owned horses. His house was a mansion built on seven acres of land.

  This phrase, seven acres, seemed vast and grand, more grand than anything I knew.

  The house was Spanish-style, white stucco, with an old metal gate at the front with a lock strung through that had to be opened by hand, and a flagpole with no flag. The rooms were large and dark and empty, with huge windows on both sides that nevertheless did not let much light in. I knew this from the time I’d been there with him and my mother years before, in the daytime, soon after he’d bought it.

  This time he’d said to bring along my bathing suit, just in case, but remembering that dark pool in the middle of the ragged field from years before terrified me now. Would it be filled with dead bugs and dead animals?

  Along with the fear was something else, a kind of ecstatic expectation: for on this night, at some moment I couldn’t predict, he’d say, “Let’s blast,” and we’d walk down that wide staircase through the chemical smell of new textiles and out into the sweet-smelling night air, we’d get into his car and it would wheeze and rumble the way it did, and for the first time there would be no one but the two of us, heading for his mansion on the seven acres of land.

  We drove with the top down, the heat blasting through the front vents. As we set off I thought: Here I am, with my father, at the beginning. I am Lisa and I have a father and we are driving between the outlines of dark hills, inside a strong wind perfumed with dry grasses. I told the story of myself to myself. I didn’t know what the story would become, but I knew it would be something, maybe something big.

  I was too scared to talk. It was almost pitch-black inside the car except for the dashboard lights, the trembling needles and round instruments that were nicer than those in other cars I’d seen. Their movements were precise, and they gave off a whiter glow. His kind of driving felt heavy and light at the same time: the car solid, fastened to the road, but accelerating quickly, with no resistance.

  He turned on music, loud: “A Hard Day’s Night.” Ribbons of cool night air slipped in from the outside and mingled with the heat from the vents. I used the lever on the side of the seat to bring it up and forward as far as possible. My butt and thighs grew hot. The leather had small puncture holes like tiny dots—that must be where the heat came through.

  We drove over Highway 280 on Sand Hill Road, then into the dark hills where there was only the smell of the grasses and far away the jagged ridge of redwood trees that met the bright night sky. My father didn’t speak or look at me. It was hard to keep thinking of things to talk about. I wanted to be close with him all at once—to feel the way I imagined other children felt with their fathers; I wanted a conflagration of talk, of questions, of noticing. I’d been waiting for so long and now that we were here it felt too late.

  Near his busy silence I felt a new kind of dissolution. I was starting to disappear. I noticed details about him with exact focus, but had difficulty locating myself.

  I watched his hands on the steering wheel; he had smart fingers with fine black hair that grew straight on the first joint after the knuckle. His thumbs had wide fingernails. Like me, he bit his nails, and the skin on the sides. His jaw clenched on and off, making a rippling pattern in his skin, like a fish beneath the surface of a pond.

  I swallowed air, worried that when my voice came out, it would squeak, or about the very real possibility that he would not respond. I was filled with what I might say, if he asked me a question: how I didn’t do the Pledge of Allegiance at school because I said I was Buddhist; how Mrs. Keatsman twisted her ring; how my mother let me steer on the steep hills of Portola Valley when I was six; how I’d guessed the number of corn kernels in the jar; how I was practicing to do the leap like the girl in the magazine; how, when I was younger, to pass time while my mother was waiting in line at the bank, or looking at a painting at the art museum, I’d done headstands on the hard ground, painless, popping up to vertical in one motion. The moment was too fragile for these stories. I didn’t want to break it.

  “How was your day?” I finally asked, my fingers shaking, in my stomach a nausea creeping up toward my throat. (What would we have for dinner? What did he eat?)

  “Okay, thanks,” he said. It didn’t make him look. He lapsed back into silence and didn’t look at me for the rest of the drive.

  It was not enough.

  It was not enough!

  The canopy of gnarled oak branches over the road flared into view and then went dark as we passed.

  A single car came toward us, moving down the hill. My father toggled a rod beside the steering wheel and it gave a satisfying click; the headlights dimmed. Once we passed, he did it again, this time restoring the forest to light. I’d never noticed anyone dim lights for an oncoming car, and I felt a burst of affection for him, seized with an idea of his fineness. (When I told my mother about it the next day, she said everyone did that, everyone dimmed the brights for oncoming traffic.)

  We turned onto Mountain Home Road, then onto a road with white pillars on either side, cracked and leaning, silvery in the darkness. And then we were approaching it, the face of the house: the flagpole, the gate, the house glowing white.

  In the open courtyard two crates the size of small cars held giant trees shaped like bonsai, with clouds of spongy-looking foliage suspended off trunks that grew at an angle. I followed him to the front door under a high curving arch made of other rooms and suites that connected to more of the house on the other side. The front door was made of a rough wood that would give me a splinter if I ran my palm along its surface, much larger and heavier than I remembered from when I’d visited before.

  Inside he flicked on a switch; the flick sound echoed against the tile floor. In the dim light I saw the grand staircase with its twisting banister disappearing upward and a motorcycle leaning against the wall in the huge entryway, the body black leather and bright chrome, double-lobed, like a wasp.

  “Is that yours?” I asked. It hinted at a different life.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I stopped riding it. Wanna take a hot tub later?�
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  So that’s what the suit was for. When I asked, he showed me to a high-ceilinged bathroom I’d never seen before that would, in future years, come to define my idea of luxury: a disconnected cistern mounted far above the toilet; a hanging lamp in the shape of a three-dimensional star; Moorish tiles around the sink patterned in thick and colorful geometries, and bronze faucet handles shaped like wings. The room was dim and echoey, the ceiling so high you could hardly see it. I looked around for the flush and found a chain with a white ceramic knob, and when I pulled, the water came rushing down fiercely into the toilet.

  I followed him into the ballroom, the ceiling ribbed with dark beams. In the center of the room was a glossy black piano with its lid lifted, a lamp, and a black leather couch. The furniture was large but looked small in this room. In the next room was a fireplace with a high arch, beneath which I could walk without stooping; beyond that, a pantry with empty white shelves that went all the way to the ceiling. Through a swinging door, we stepped into the huge white kitchen. I remembered the progression of vast rooms, the smell of mold and decay, from the time I’d visited before, but that time there had been no motorcycle or piano.

  My father reached into the fridge and pulled out two wooden bowls containing salads and a bottle of juice murky with brown silt. There was nothing else inside but clean white shelves. He poured us each a glass to the brim, far more than I could drink, then filled a huge plate with the salads, piling them side by side, one shredded carrots with currants, the other bulgur wheat with parsley.

  “I’m going to give you some of both, all right?” I nodded. No one had ever put so much food in front of me. Did he expect me to eat all of it?

  “Now this,” he said, holding up a rectangular bottle of green glass, “is the best olive oil in the world.” I didn’t usually like olive oil, but I let him draw a green line on the salads.

  He handed me an enormous fork. The salads were cold and tasted of nothing, just their own rough textures. We sat side by side on stools at the island, facing the stove; he read a newspaper while he ate. After a while he asked if I was done, and when I said yes, he took my plate and glass—both still mostly full—and put them in the sink. He didn’t say anything about how much I’d eaten.

  “Let’s change into our swimsuits,” he said.

  We went through a different door to a hallway and another whole set of empty rooms and a staircase with steps painted white, the paint wearing off in places.

  “We’re going to have to make a run for it,” he said. There was no way to turn off the light from the top of the stairs. He flicked off the switch and we were plunged into darkness. The stairs creaked. I hugged the wall, feeling my way up. “Boo!” my father said. Then, ghostlike, “Woooooh, ooooooooooh!”

  At the top I followed him to a door that led to a spindly covered wooden balcony that overlooked the courtyard with the boxed trees. The balcony trembled with the weight of our steps. “This thing’s falling apart,” he said. We walked along it to a screen door that creaked when he opened it. “The in-law suite,” he said.

  “What’s an in-law?” I asked.

  “A person you want to put somewhere far away.” It was a whole apartment.

  It smelled like the rest of the house—old carpet and mold and wood and paint. I followed him up some steps and down a small hallway into a big, empty room, his room. There was a mattress on the floor and a huge television on a metal rack.

  “And this is your bed,” he said, showing me to a room off his. There was a red shag carpet, and a futon on the floor made up with sheets tucked into its sides, and a pillow.

  The small, somewhat furnished apartment somewhere inside the cavernous, echoing, and empty house gave the feeling of camping.

  He left me alone to change. When I came out, he was waiting, barefoot, in shorts and a T-shirt. He handed me a big black towel—much bigger and plusher than other towels. Everything he owned was big: the trees in their crates, the front door, the fireplace, refrigerator, forks, and television.

  Near the stairwell I noticed the same elevator I’d seen before. It looked like a plain doorway, except for the two black buttons beside it. I asked him if we could take it; he said yes, we could. It wouldn’t move until the outer door was closed and the latch was closed on the inner accordion door, the diamond-shaped bars traveling with us, a buzzing sound coming from somewhere inside the cage. The wall slipped by, as if it were the thing moving and not us. It was like a little prison that held you and released you somewhere else. When it stopped and he reached over to unfasten the metal latch, his arm brushed mine. I pushed open the door and leapt out into the hallway.

  Past the asphalt, down the hill to the pool, the sharp, stiff curls of dry oak leaves dug into my feet. The wind ruffled the leaves of huge trees around us. The path on the lawn sloped down to the pool and, beside it, the hot tub. In the moonlight I could see the hot tub was clean but the pool was filled with leaves.

  My father took off his T-shirt and slipped into the hot tub. “Ah,” he said, closing his eyes.

  I got in and said it too: “Ah.” I was sitting on the bench across from him. I leaned my head back: above me the whole vast sky was covered in stars. They ripped at my heart. I felt the cold wind on my face and listened to the crickets, the creaking of the trees. It was like being in the car with the top down and the heater on—the cold air, the hot water—two temperatures at once.

  We sat in silence, the bubbles and mist on the surface of the water. I dipped my head underwater. I thought about doing a handstand, but with the current from the jets and the cement benches and the possibility of hitting his legs, I decided not to.

  “All right, champ,” he said. “Ready to get out?”

  “Okay,” I said. My fingers were wrinkled into hills. We wrapped our towels around us and walked back on the prickly ground. I felt that I was with him and also alone. On the asphalt where the car was parked, he pointed up to the second floor on the corner. “We should build a slide from the bedroom to the pool. What do you think?”

  “Yes. I think we should, definitely,” I said. I wondered if it was just a joke. I hoped it was real.

  His house was crumbling in places and tended to in others, a configuration of attention and neglect I didn’t understand. The toilets had rust-colored rings in the basins, and water dripped into the corner of a distant wing, while outside raspberries were trellised meticulously in the garden. He left the whole place empty, as if he didn’t own it but was a visitor or a squatter. When I asked him how many rooms there were, he said he didn’t know, he hadn’t set foot in most of them.

  Later, I explored. Rooms and suites and dusty doors swung open to more empty dusty rooms, more tiled sinks and showers. Toward the back of the property was a huge building that looked to me like a church. It was meant to house a water tower, but inside it was missing the cistern, had only circles cut out of wood at every story, empty in the center where the tank would have been. These outlines of circles were covered in leaves and bird poop and cobwebs, silvering with age, like the abandoned bones of a huge animal. The whole time he lived there I don’t think I visited every last room—a kind of magic, to have unconquered space, to be past a frontier. I found a tennis court beyond the pool, with vines clogging the surrounding fence. Roots warped and cracked through the court’s green surface; in places the color had faded or worn away. The net was dirty and sagged between the poles all the way to the ground.

  “Is the tennis court yours?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Do you know how to play?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “I don’t know how either,” I said.

  After the hot tub, we watched The Red Balloon and then we watched Harold and Maude, lying on our sides in his bed, him closer to the screen. I didn’t like The Red Balloon, because it seemed too young and immature for me; also, I had a feeling I was supposed to like it because he’d chosen it beforehand, the First Movie, and this made me
self-conscious. Harold and Maude I loved. He paused the movie when I got up to pee. “That’s the church in Palo Alto,” he said, about the church where they meet.

  Both movies were on laser discs, which looked like bright silver records. He held the disc from the center and edge, not touching the surface, and when the player closed, it made a series of mechanical sounds: four notes.

  The laser disc insertion, the hydraulic thump of the car doors, the click of the lever that controlled the headlights—the noises surrounding him were different. Beside his bed was a lamp with a cloth shade and gold-colored base. You only had to touch the base to turn the lamp on and off. I tried it a few times. Ingenious. Why didn’t everyone have one? Why did we bother with switches and serrated knobs?

  “Time to go to bed,” he said after the movie ended.

  Was it late? I couldn’t tell. We existed outside regular time. The mornings with him, too, would have a timeless quality, more empty space and white light and silence—unlike the mornings with my mother, when we raced to dress in front of the heaters and ate toast in the car on the way to school, the windshield mostly white, waiting for the heat to work. Here there was no rush, no breathlessness.

  At night the crickets made a roar I hadn’t noticed before lying in the bed. The sound would advance toward me over the dark land, the dark lawn, the big dark house, and press against my ears, but just when I thought I’d be swallowed up, it would stop, empty. It was terrible and lonely, I felt then, to be in this cavernous house with this man I hardly knew.

  My mother had a string of lentil-sized bells on a ribbon she’d brought back from India, meant to be tied around the ankles of Indian dancers, and the crickets sounded like these bells—thousands of dancers moving vigorously almost in unison faster and faster until they all stopped at once.