Small Fry E-Book

Lisa Brennan-Jobs

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 576

Beschreibung

Vogue's Best Books of the Year, 2018 Sunday Times' Best Memoirs of the Year, 2018 A New York Times Book of the Year New Yorker Book of the Year A frank, smart and captivating memoir by the daughter of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents - artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs - Lisa Brennan-Jobs's childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Silicon Valley. When she was young, Lisa's father was a mythical figure who was rarely present in her life. As she grew older, her father took an interest in her, ushering her into a new world of mansions, holidays and private schools. His attention was thrilling, but he could also be cold, critical and unpredictable. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa decided to move in with her father, hoping he'd become the parent she'd always wanted him to be. Small Fry is Lisa Brennan-Jobs's poignant story of a childhood spent between two imperfect but extraordinary homes. Scrappy, wise and funny, young Lisa is an unforgettable guide through her parents' fascinating and disparate worlds. Part portrait of a complex family, part love letter to California in the seventies and eighties, Small Fry is an enthralling book by an insightful new literary voice.

Leseprobe

Praise for Small Fry

‘Beautifully written . . . The sum of such memories might have been maudlin but Brennan-Jobs is rescued by unsentimental honesty, literary grace and wry humour.’

—The Times

‘Small Fry isn’t about eliciting sympathy or seeking revenge. Instead she tries to get to the bottom of a relationship mired in awkwardness and unpredictability.’

—Guardian

‘Brennan-Jobs is a deeply gifted writer . . . [Small Fry] has that defining aspect of a literary work: the stamp of a singular sensibility. In the fallen world of kiss-and-tell celebrity memoirs, this may be the most beautiful, literary and devastating one ever written.’

—New York Times Book Review

‘An intimate, richly drawn portrait . . . The reader of this exquisite memoir is left with a loving, forgiving remembrance and the lasting impression of a resilient, kindhearted and wise woman who is at peace with her past.’

—San Francisco Chronicle

‘A heartbreaking memoir, beautifully rendered . . . It’s a love story for the father that she had, flaws and all . . . A wise, thoughtful and ultimately loving portrayal of her father.’

—Seattle Times

‘Mesmerizing, discomfiting reading . . . A book of no small literary skill.’

—New Yorker

Lisa Brennan-Jobs lives in Brooklyn and Small Fry is her first book. Her articles and essays have appeared in Vogue, O Magazine, Southwest Review, Massachusetts Review, Harvard Advocate and the Los Angeles Times.

lisabrennanjobs.net

First published in the United States of America in 2018 by Grove Atlantic

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by

Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © Lisa Brennan-Jobs, 2018

The moral right of Lisa Brennan-Jobs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

The names and identifying details of some of the people mentioned in this book have been changed.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 491 6

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 926 3

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

for Bill

THIRD FISHERMAN. Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.

FIRST FISHERMAN. Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones: I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale; a’ plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. Such whales have I heard on o’ th’ land, who never leave gaping till they’ve swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.

Shakespeare, Pericles

It was a curious experience to be the unrecognized source of this public attraction and to be standing in the sleet—it made one feel like a phantom presence.

Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

Three months before he died, I began to steal things from my father’s house. I wandered around barefoot and slipped objects into my pockets. I took blush, toothpaste, two chipped finger bowls in celadon blue, a bottle of nail polish, a pair of worn patent leather ballet slippers, and four faded white pillowcases the color of old teeth.

After stealing each item, I felt sated. I promised myself that this would be the last time. But soon the urge to take something else would arrive again like thirst.

I tiptoed into my father’s room, careful to step over the creaky floorboard at the entrance. This room had been his study, when he could still climb the stairs, but he slept here now. It was cluttered with books and mail and bottles of medicine; glass apples, wooden apples; awards and magazines and stacks of papers. There were framed prints by Hasui of twilight and sunset at temples. A patch of pink light stretched out on a wall beside him.

He was propped up in bed, wearing shorts. His legs were bare and thin as arms, bent up like a grasshopper’s.

“Hey, Lis,” he said.

Segyu Rinpoche stood beside him. He’d been around recently when I came to visit. A short Brazilian man with sparkling brown eyes, the Rinpoche was a Buddhist monk with a scratchy voice who wore brown robes over a round belly. We called him by his title. Tibetan holy men were sometimes born in the west now, in places like Brazil. To me he didn’t seem holy—he wasn’t distant or inscrutable. Near us, a black canvas bag of nutrients hummed with a motor and a pump, the tube disappearing somewhere under my father’s sheets.

“It’s a good idea to touch his feet,” Rinpoche said, putting his hands around my father’s foot on the bed. “Like this.”

I didn’t know if the foot touching was supposed to be for my father, or for me, or for both of us.

“Okay,” I said, and took his other foot in its thick sock, even though it was strange, watching my father’s face, because when he winced in pain or anger it looked similar to when he started to smile.

“That feels good,” my father said, closing his eyes. I glanced at the chest of drawers beside him and at the shelves on the other side of the room for objects I wanted, even though I knew I wouldn’t dare steal something right in front of him.

While he slept, I wandered through the house, looking for I didn’t know what. A nurse sat on the couch in the living room, her hands on her lap, listening for my father to call out for help. The house was quiet, the sounds muffled, the white-painted brick walls were dimpled like cushions. The terracotta floor was cool on my feet except in the places where the sun had warmed it to the temperature of skin.

In the cabinet of the half bath near the kitchen, where there used to be a tattered copy of the Bhagavad Gita, I found a bottle of expensive rose facial mist. With the door closed, the light out, sitting on the toilet seat, I sprayed it up into the air and closed my eyes. The mist fell around me, cool and holy, as in a forest or an old stone church.

There was also a silver tube of lip gloss with a brush at one end and a twisting mechanism at the other that released liquid into the center of the brush. I had to have it. I stuffed the lip gloss into my pocket to take back to the one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village that I shared with my boyfriend, where I knew, as much as I have ever known anything, that this tube of lip gloss would complete my life. Between avoiding the housekeeper, my brother and sisters, and my stepmother around the house so I wouldn’t be caught stealing things or hurt when they didn’t acknowledge me or reply to my hellos, and spraying myself in the darkened bathroom to feel less like I was disappearing—because inside the falling mist I had a sense of having an outline again—making efforts to see my sick father in his room began to feel like a burden, a nuisance.

For the past year I’d visited for a weekend every other month or so.

I’d given up on the possibility of a grand reconciliation, the kind in the movies, but I kept coming anyway.

In between visits, I saw my father all around New York. I saw him sitting in a movie theater, the exact curve of his neck to jaw to cheekbone. I saw him as I ran along the Hudson River in winter sitting on a bench looking at the docked boats; and on my subway ride to work, walking away on the platform through the crowd. Thin men, olive-skinned, fine-fingered, slim-wristed, stubble-bearded, who, at certain angles, looked just like him. Each time I had to get closer to check, my heart in my throat, even though I knew it could not possibly be him because he was sick in bed in California.

Before this, during years in which we hardly spoke, I’d seen his picture everywhere. Seeing the pictures gave me a strange zing. The feeling was similar to catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror across a room and thinking it was someone else, then realizing it was my own face: there he was, peering out from magazines and newspapers and screens in whatever city I was in. That is my father and no one knows it but it’s true.

Before I said goodbye, I went to the bathroom to mist one more time. The spray was natural, which meant that over the course of a few minutes it no longer smelled sharp like roses, but fetid and stinky like a swamp, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

As I came into his room, he was getting into a standing position. I watched him gather both his legs in one arm, twist himself ninety degrees by pushing against the headboard with the other arm, and then use both arms to hoist his own legs over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. When we hugged, I could feel his vertebrae, his ribs. He smelled musty, like medicine sweat.

“I’ll be back soon,” I said.

We detached, and I started walking away. “Lis?”

“Yeah?”

“You smell like a toilet.”

Hippies

By the time I was seven, my mother and I had moved thirteen times.

We rented spaces informally, staying in a friend’s furnished bedroom here, a temporary sublet there. The last place had become unsuitable when someone had sold the refrigerator without warning. The next day, my mother called my father, asked for more money, and he increased the child support payments by two hundred dollars per month. We moved again, to an apartment on the ground floor of a small building at the back of a house on Channing Avenue in Palo Alto—the first place my mother rented with her own name on the lease. Our new place was just for us.

The house in front of our apartment was a dark brown Craftsman with dust-covered ivy where a lawn might have been, and two bent-over scrub oaks that almost touched the ground. Cobwebs stretched between the trees and the ivy, collecting pollen that lit up bright white in the sunshine. From the street you couldn’t tell there was an apartment complex behind the house.

Before this we’d lived in towns nearby—Menlo Park, Los Altos, Portola Valley—but Palo Alto is the place we would come to call home.

Here the soil was black and wet and fragrant; beneath rocks I discovered small red bugs, pink- and ash-colored worms, thin centipedes, and slate-colored woodlice that curled into armored spheres when I bothered them. The air smelled of eucalyptus and sunshine-warmed dirt, moisture, cut grass. Railroad tracks bisect the town; near them is Stanford University, with its great grassy oval and gold-rimmed chapel at the end of a palm tree–lined road.

The day we moved in, my mother parked and we carried in our things: kitchen supplies, a futon, a desk, a rocking chair, lamps, books. “This is why nomads don’t get anything done,” she said, hefting a box through the doorway, her hair disheveled, her hands flecked with white canvas primer. “They don’t stay in one place long enough to build anything that lasts.”

The living room had a sliding glass door that opened onto a small deck. Beyond the deck was a patch of dry grass and thistles, a scrub oak and a fig—both spindly—and a line of bamboo, which my mother said was difficult to get rid of once it took root.

After we finished unloading, she stood with her hands on her hips, and together we surveyed the room: with everything we owned, it still looked empty.

The next day, she called my father at his office to ask for help.

“Elaine’s coming over with the van—we’re going to your father’s house to pick up a couch,” my mother said a few days later. My father lived near Saratoga in Monte Sereno, a suburb about half an hour away. I’d never been to this house or heard of the town where he lived—I’d met him only a couple of times.

My mother said my father offered his extra couch when she called him. But if we didn’t get it soon, she knew, he’d throw it away or rescind the offer. And who knew when we’d have access to Elaine’s van again?

I was in the same first-grade class as Elaine’s twins, a boy and a girl. Elaine was older than my mother, with wavy black hair and loose strands that created a halo around her head in certain lights. My mother was young, sensitive, and luminous, without the husband, house, and family that Elaine had. Instead, she had me, and I had two jobs: first, to protect her so that she could protect me; second, to shape her and rough her up so that she could handle the world, the way you sandpaper a surface to make the paint stick.

“Left or right?” Elaine kept asking. She was in a hurry—she had a doctor’s appointment to keep. My mother is dyslexic but insisted that wasn’t the reason she eschewed maps. It was because the maps were inside her; she could find her way back to any place she’d ever been, she said, even if it took her a few turns to get her bearings. But we often got lost.

“Left,” she said. “No, right. Wait. Okay, left.”

Elaine was mildly annoyed, but my mother did not apologize. She acted as if one is equal to the people who save them.

The sun made lace on my legs. The air was wet and thick and pricked my nose with the smell of spicy bay laurel and dirt.

The hills in the towns around Palo Alto had been created by shifting under the earth, by the grinding of the plates against each other. “We must be near the fault line,” my mother said. “If there was an earthquake now, we’d be swallowed up.”

We found the right road and then the wooded driveway with a lawn at the end. A circle of bright grass with thin shoots that looked like they’d be soft on my feet. The house was two stories tall, with a gabled roof, dark shingles on white stucco. Long windows rippled the light. This was the kind of house I drew on blank pages.

We rang the bell and waited, but no one came. My mother tried the door.

“Locked,” she said. “Damn. I bet he’s not going to show.”

She walked around the house, checking the windows, trying the back door. “Locked!” she kept calling out. I wasn’t convinced it was really his.

She came back to the front and looked up at the sash windows, too high to reach. “I’m going to try those,” she said. She stepped on a sprinkler head and then a drainpipe, grabbed a lip of windowsill, and flattened herself against the wall. She found a new place for her hands and feet, looked up, pulled herself higher.

Elaine and I watched. I was terrified she would fall.

My father was supposed to come to the door and invite us in. Maybe he would show us other furniture he didn’t want and invite us to come back.

Instead, my mother was climbing the house like a thief.

“Let’s go,” I called out. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be here.”

“I hope there’s no alarm,” she said.

She reached the ledge. I held my breath, waiting for a siren to blare, but the day was as still as before. She unlatched the window, which scraped up and open, and disappeared, leg by leg, and emerged a few seconds later through the front door into the sunshine.

“We’re in!” she said. I looked through the door: light reflected on wood floors, high ceilings. Cool, vacant spaces. I associated him that day—and later—with pools of reflected light from big windows, shade in the depths of rooms, the musty, sweet smells of mold and incense.

My mother and Elaine held the couch between them, maneuvered it through the door and down the steps. “It doesn’t weigh much,” my mother said. She asked me to step aside. A thick woven raffia frame held wide-weave linen upholstery. The cushions were a cream color spattered with bright chintz flowers in red, orange, and blue, and for years I would pick at the edges of the petals, trying to dig my fingernails under their painted tips.

Elaine and my mother moved fast and seriously, as if they might be angry, a loop of my mother’s hair falling out of its band. After they’d shoved the couch into the back of the van, they went back inside and brought out a matching chair and ottoman.

“Okay, let’s go,” my mother said.

The back was full, so I sat in the front, on her lap.

My mother and Elaine were giddy. They had their furniture and Elaine wouldn’t be late for her appointment. This was the reason for my vigilance and worry: to arrive at this moment, see my mother joyful and content.

Elaine turned out of the driveway and onto a two-lane road. A moment later two cop cars sped past us, going in the opposite direction.

“They might be coming for us!” Elaine said.

“We might have gone to jail!” my mother said, laughing.

I didn’t understand her jaunty tone. If we went to jail, we’d be separated. As far as I understood, they didn’t keep children and adults in the same cells.

The next day, my father called. “Hey, did you break in and take the couch?” he asked. He laughed. He had a silent alarm, he said. It had rung in the local police station, and four cop cars had sped to the house, arriving just after we left.

“Yes, we did,” she said, a flaunt in her voice.

For years, I was haunted by the idea of a silent alarm and how close we’d been to danger without knowing it.

My parents met at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, in the spring of 1972, when he was a senior and she was a junior.

On Wednesdays, through the night, she animated a student film in the high school quad with a group of friends. One of those nights, my father approached her in the spotlight where she stood waiting to move the Claymation characters and handed her a page of Bob Dylan lyrics he’d typed out: “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”

“I want it back when you’re done,” he said.

He came the nights she was there and held candles for her to see by while she drew in between takes.

That summer they lived together in a cabin at the end of Stevens Canyon Road, my father paying the rent by selling what they called blue boxes that he made with his friend Woz. Woz was an engineer who was a few years older than my father, shy and intense, with dark hair. They’d met at a technology club and become friends and collaborators and would later start Apple together. The blue boxes emitted tones that made phone calls go through for free, illegally. They’d found a book by the phone company in the library that explained the system and the exact series of tones. You’d hold the box to the receiver, the box would make the tones, and the phone company would connect the call to wherever in the world you wanted. At that house the neighbors owned aggressive goats, and when my parents arrived home in the car, my father would divert the goats as my mother ran to the door, or he would run to her side of the car and carry her.

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-practiced 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 inconsequence, 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.

I found an elevator and went up and down it several times until Steve said, okay, enough.

The face you saw upon entering the driveway turned out to be the thin side, and on the other side, the one that faced the lawn, it was vast, huge white arches with hot-pink bougainvillea billowing off. “The house is shit,” Steve said to my mother. “The construction’s shit. I’m going to tear it down. I bought this place for the trees.” I felt a stab of shock, but they continued walking as if nothing had happened. How could he care about trees when there was such a house? Would he tear it down before I had a chance to come back?

His s’s sounded like a match doused in water. He walked tilted forward as if he were walking uphill; his knees never seemed to straighten all the way. His dark hair fell against his face, and he cast it out of his eyes by jerking his head. His face looked fresh against the dark, shiny hair. Being near him in the bright light with the smells of dirt and trees, the spaciousness of the land, was electric and magical. Once I caught him looking at me sidelong, a brown sharp eye.

He pointed to three huge oak trees at the end of the large lawn. “Those,” he said to my mother. “That’s why I bought this place.”

Was it a joke? I couldn’t tell.

“How old are they?” my mother asked.

“Two hundred years.” My arms could reach around only the smallest section of trunk.

We walked back up toward the house then down a small hill to a large pool in the middle of a field of tall, untended grasses, and we stood on the lip looking in where thousands of dead bugs webbed the surface of the water: black spiders, daddy longlegs, a dead one-wing dragonfly. You could hardly see the water for the bugs. There was a frog, white belly up, and so many dead leaves the water had turned thick and dark, the color of ink.

“Seems like you’ve got some pool cleaning to do, Steve,” my mother said.

“Or I might just take it out,” he said, and that night I dreamt the bugs and animals rose up from the pool as dragons, flapping violently into the sky, leaving the water a clear turquoise netted with white light.

A few weeks later, my father bought us a silver Honda Civic to replace our green VW. We went to pick it up at the lot.

Several months after that, my mother wanted a break and we went on an overnight trip to Harbin Hot Springs. On the way back it was night and raining, and on a freeway that wound through the hills, a couple of hours from home, she got lost. The wiper was better on her side; the one on my side was warped in the middle and left a streak. The windshield was chipped in front of my seat in the shape of a small eye where a pebble must have hit at some point and left a mark.

“There’s nothing. Nothing,” she said. I didn’t know what she meant. She started to cry. She made a high and continuous mew like a bow drawn along a string.

At twenty-eight, and newly single again, she found it much harder than she’d anticipated to raise a child. Her family was unable to offer much support; her father, Jim, who lent her small amounts of money and would soon buy me my first pair of sturdy shoes, was not present in any larger way. Her stepmother, Faye, would later babysit me sometimes, but did not like babies in her house, mussing up her furniture. Her older sister, Kathy, was also a single mother with a small baby, and her two younger sisters were starting their own lives. My mother felt deeply ashamed to be unmarried and felt herself cast out of society.

We passed the same hills we’d passed in the daytime, when they’d seemed smooth and benevolent like camel humps. Now they made desolate black curves below a dark sky. She cried harder, in round sobbing gasps. I was stoic and silent. An oncoming car approached from the other side of the freeway, and I glanced at her to see her face as the strip of light from the headlights fell on her for a moment.

“I think we missed the exit. I have no idea.” It rained harder and she turned the windshield wipers to high. The rain filled in the half-circles as soon as they were cleared.

“I don’t want this life,” she sobbed. “I want out. I’m sick of living. Fuuuuuck!” She screamed loud, a wail. A foghorn. I covered my ears. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” she screamed at the windshield. As if she were furious at the windshield.

I was four and strapped down by two belts in my car seat, facing forward beside her (this was before children sat in the backs of cars). In the cars that passed and the ones around us, I imagined peace, and I wished to be inside one of those cars instead. If only she would be the way she was before, in the daylight. One version of her was inaccessible to the other. As she was yelling, she said later, even if she could not stop herself, she was aware that I was old enough to remember this.

“I have nothing,” she said. “This life is shit. Shiiiiit.” She struggled to catch her breath. “I don’t want to live anymore! This shitty life. I haaaate this life!” Her throat was like gravel, her voice hoarse from yelling. “This hell life.”

She pushed hard on the pedal when she yelled, so the car leapt forward, ground down along the road, rain like spit flying, like she wanted the engine to be part of her voice.

“Fucking Time magazine. Fucking fucking fucker.” Fucker was sharper than fuck, had a spark at the end. It poked my sternum. She let out a yell, no words, shook her head side to side so her hair flew, bared her teeth, slapped the dash with the flat of her hand, made me jump.

“What?” she screamed at me, because I jumped. “Whaaaat?”

I remained stiff; I became the idea of a girl stiff in her car seat.

Suddenly she veered off the freeway with such violence I thought we were driving off the road to our death, but it was a ramp.

She pulled over, jammed on the brakes, and sobbed into her folded arms. Her back shook. Her sadness enveloped me, I could not escape it, nothing I could do would stop it. In a few minutes, she started driving again, took a freeway overpass toward another road. She continued to cry, but with less violence, and at some point I asked the cracked glass eye, the nick in the windshield where the pebble had hit, to watch the road for me, a kind of prayer, and I slept.

At the height of her hopelessness and noise, I’d felt a calm presence near us, even though I knew we were alone in the watery hell, the car jerking. Some benevolent presence that cared for us but could not interfere, maybe sitting in the back seat. The presence could not stop it, could not help it, only watch and note it. I wondered later if it was a ghostly version of me now, accompanying my younger self and my mother in that car.

The next morning, the man who tended the bees wore a white crinkly suit with attached gloves and a hat with a net sewn in. The bees lived in a slatted box in the small backyard. From the side of the kitchen, an attachment at the back of the bungalow, we looked out at the yard. He called to me, motioning for me to come over and look.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said.

“She’s fairly allergic to bees,” my mother called to him. Once I’d stepped on a bee and my foot swelled up; I couldn’t walk on it for a week.

“My bees are really happy,” he said. “They’re not going to sting.” He removed his hat while he spoke so we could see his face. “These are honeybees; they’re friendly,” he said.

“But you’re wearing a suit,” my mother said. “She’s in shorts. She has no protection.”

“It’s because I have to get in there, take their honey. Otherwise, I’d be dressed like you. They don’t want to sting you,” he said to me. “Do you know what happens to them if they do? They give up their life.” He paused. “Why would they want to give up their life to hurt you when they’re happy and you’re not doing them any harm?”

“Are you sure?” my mother asked him again. The setup looked wrong, but what did we know about bees.

“Yeah,” he said, putting on his hat. I’d never seen a hive up close.

“Okay . . .” my mother said, only partially convinced. I walked over to where he stood and looked down at the teeming, velvety mass. The bees made a shimmering brown carpet. Some flew higher, bobbing above like tiny balloons on strings. One landed on my upper cheek and began to walk in a circle. I didn’t know this circling was a kind of preparatory dance. When I tried to swipe it off, it was affixed, then it stung.

I ran back to my mother, who pulled me into the kitchen. The open windows carried her voice.

“What were you thinking?” she yelled at him, opening cabinets one after the other, then grabbing the baking soda, mixing it into paste with water in a bowl. “How dare you.” She squatted beside me, pulled the stinger out with tweezers, then patted the paste on my cheek with the pads of her fingers as it began to swell.

“What an idiot,” she muttered. “In a full body suit. Telling a girl she wasn’t in danger.”

When we had a little money to spare, we drove to Draeger’s Market, where a wall of rotisserie ovens behind the deli counter held rows of slowly turning meat. It smelled of sweet dirt and steam. You could tell the uncooked chickens because they were bright white with orange powder dusted on the surface; the cooked ones were brown and taut. She pulled a number.

“One half rotisserie chicken, please,” she said when our number came up. A man used what looked like garden shears to cut the bird in half, the ribs making a satisfying crunch. He slipped the half into a white bag lined with silver.

Back in the car she put the bag between us on the emergency brake and ripped the bag open and we ate the chicken with our fingers as the windows steamed up around us.

When we finished, she crumpled the bag around the bones and wiped my oily fingers with a napkin, then examined my palm. The place where my hand folds made grooves across the surface like a dry riverbed seen from a great height. No two people have the same lines, she’d explained to me, but everyone has a similar pattern.

She tilted the plane of my palm to make the indentations catch the light.

“Oh, God,” she said, wincing.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s just . . . not so good. The lines tatter.” Her face looked stricken. She went distant, quiet. We went over this same routine many times in different variations, accruing details as I got older, each time my mother making the same mistakes, as if it was new.

“What does that mean?” Panic in my chest, stomach.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. The lifeline, the curved one, this one—holes, bubbles.”

“What’s wrong with bubbles?”

“They mean trauma, fracturing,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” I knew she wasn’t apologizing for the hand, but for my life. The start of my life that I didn’t remember. For how hard things were. She might have assumed I didn’t know what a family was supposed to look like, but once, around this time, as I’d chased a boy in a playground wearing a pair of too-big shoes, she overheard me say to him, scornfully, “You don’t even have a father.”

“What’s that line?” I asked, pointing to the one that ran from below the pinkie finger.

“Your heart line,” she said. “Also difficult.” I was swept up in what felt like grief, even though we’d been happy a moment before.

“And this one?” The last one, straight through the middle of my palm, branching off the lifeline. Crisper than the others at first—oh, hope!—but then it drooped, then thinned and split, like a twig.

“Wait,” she said, brightening. “This hand’s your left hand?” She was dyslexic and had gotten them mixed up.

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay, good. The left tells me the circumstances you were given. Let me see your right one.”

I gave her my other hand and she held it carefully, tracing the lines, turning it to see. The residual grease from the chicken made the skin reflect. “This hand tells me what you’ll make of your life,” she said. “It’s much better on this side.”

How did she know? I wondered if she learned to read palms in India.

In India, people didn’t use their left hand in public, she said. In social situations, the right was used exclusively. This was because they didn’t use toilet paper, but used their left hand instead, washing it afterward. This horrified me.

“If I go to India,” I said, whenever India came up, “I’ll carry my own roll.”

She told a story about India, how she went to a festival in Allahabad called the Kumbha Mela that happened only once every twelve years, this one located at the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna Rivers. There was a huge crowd. In the distance, a very holy man, sitting up on a parapet, was blessing oranges and throwing them into the crowd.

“He was so far that he seemed like he was only an inch tall,” she said.

The other oranges didn’t land close to her, she said, but then he threw this one orange and she could tell it was coming toward her and—bam—it hit her right in the chest, right in the heart, took the wind out of her.

It bounced off and a group of men jumped after it, she said, so she didn’t get to keep it. But I knew it meant something special about her, about us, that the holy orange thrown from so far away had hit her in the heart.

“You know,” she said, “when you were born you came shooting out like some sort of rocket.” She’d told me this many times before, but I let her say it again, as if I’d forgotten. “I went to these birth classes and all of them said I’d have to push and then there I was and you were coming out so fast I couldn’t stop you.” I loved this story—how, unlike other babies, I had not made her force me into the air and this had saved her something, and meant something about me.

All of this—the palm, the orange, the birth—meant I was going to be just fine, as an adult.

“When I’m an adult, you’ll be old,” I said. I imagined myself progressing down the lifeline; getting older would mean I was further down the line.

We walked to Peet’s Coffee around the corner, where the man gave her a free coffee, and then we sat on the bench outside, where it was warm in the sunlight. The double line of sycamore trees around the square across from the coffee shop had been pruned down to their stems almost and looked like playing jacks, short branches with fat balls at the ends. The air smelled like raw trees.

“Like this?” She pretended to walk like an old lady with a cane, slumped over with no teeth. She straightened. “But sweetie, I’m only twenty-four years older than you are. I’ll still be young when you’re grown up.”

I said, “Oh,” as if I agreed. But it didn’t matter what she said, or how she explained. I saw us as a seesaw: when one of us had power or happiness or substantiality, the other must fade. When I was still young, she’d be old. She would smell like old people, like used flower water. I would be new and green and smell of freshly cut branches.

Halfway through the school year I joined a kindergarten class in a public school in Palo Alto. Before this I’d gone to another school, but my mother thought the class there had too many boys, so I’d transferred here. On my first day, one of the teaching assistants led me out to the side of the building and took a Polaroid, which she tacked on the board near the photographs of other students, and wrote my name underneath. I had foolishly wrapped my hand around the top of my head because I thought it would look good, while the other students were seated in front of a blue backdrop. The image was light-saturated, makeshift. I felt it revealed not only that I had started late but also that I was insubstantial, washed out by light.

The teacher, Pat, tall and plump, had a singsong voice and wore jean skirts down to her ankles, sandals with socks, T-shirts that hung over her large bosom, and reading glasses on a string. During recess, we played behind the classroom on a wooden jungle gym with a series of planks connecting the parts. A rope net between two wooden platforms was called the humping pit. Humping, the way I imagined it, demanded an undulation and a catch, an undulation and a catch. There was something sickly about it. Soon after I started at the school, I fell inside the netted part, and others yelled, “Hump-ing! Hump-ing!” as I scrambled out.

This kindergarten put an emphasis on reading, but I couldn’t read. For each book completed, students received a small teddy bear.

I memorized a book to trick one of the teaching assistants into handing over a bear.

“I’m ready,” I said. We sat down on the floor with our backs against the bookshelf in the reading section, the book on my lap. I spoke the words I believed to be on each page, based on what I’d memorized and the corresponding pictures. Two pages in, her face hardened and her lips thinned.

“You turned the page at the wrong place,” she said. “And you missed a word.”

“Just one bear,” I said. “Please.”

“Not yet,” she said.

Daniela had amassed twenty-two; I asked her if I could have one.

“You have to read a book to get one,” Daniela said.

I began to feel there was something gross and shameful about me, and also to know that it was too late to change it, that nothing could be done. I was different from other girls my age, and anyone good and pure could immediately sense this and would be repulsed. One indication was the photograph. Another was that I could not read. The last was that I was meticulous and self-conscious in a way I could tell the other girls were not. My desires were too strong and furious. I was wormy inside, as if I’d caught whatever diseases or larvae were passed through raw eggs and flour when I snuck raw cookie dough. I felt this quality in myself, and I was sure it must show when people saw me, so whenever I passed a mirror, caught my reflection by accident, and saw that I was not as dirty or repulsive as I pictured myself, it gave me a start.

During the free reading period, Shannon and I snuck around the back of the kindergarten classroom, past the jungle gym, to a hidden area paved with rocks between thick bushes and elementary school classrooms. Shannon had white blonde hair, white whiskery eyebrows and lashes; she also could not read. Her trousers were twisted so the seam did not line up with the middle of her legs. We threw rocks at the classroom windows and then clutched each other as though we were humping and writhed around on the rocks together.

Pat had told us that a new boy was coming to join our class.

“Let’s spit water on him,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “From the fountain.”

I had a feeling it was going to be funny, that even he would find it funny.

On the morning the new boy arrived, we waited near the water fountain. He wore shorts and had dark hair and looked confident; I’d imagined him to be fragile and small.