Small Fry

My father gave a speech in which he said that it wasn’t love that brought people together and kept them together, but values—shared values.

having stolen her youth and energy, having driven her to a state of perpetual anxiety, without support or resources, now that I was flourishing in school and beloved by my teachers, I cast her out and picked him, the one who’d left.

There was a futon on a frame, a desk, a chest of drawers; an adjoining bathroom in green tile. It didn’t feel like my room. I didn’t want to touch any of the surfaces, or sleep in the bed, or use the shower. I’d chosen the room for its proximity to the kitchen. The kitchen was where they spent time together, feeding my brother. I wanted to be as near to my father and Laurene and my brother as possible.

Without my permission or knowledge, my face would fall into expressions that revealed thoughts and feelings like weather patterns.

We signed the certificate, first him, then me, making official my new, joined surname. The lawyer put the papers in a briefcase. He would later replace my original birth certificate—on which my mother had drawn stars—with a more official-looking version, watermarked, yellow and blue, starless. It was the same lawyer who had argued in the California court against my father’s paternity years before, though I didn’t know it at the time.

It seemed strange that he could insist on my continuous presence, having been absent for so long himself.

if you walk a lot, over the course of time, you get to see the seasons change.”

The requests that had seemed oppressive and Sisyphean at my mother’s house—to make the bed, set the table, clean the counters, write thank-you notes—I did now, mostly, without anyone bugging me.

“You have a real problem, Lisa,” she continued, growling through her clenched teeth. “You know what’s wrong with you? You want to be like them so much that you have no idea what’s important in life.”

My father had already left me when I was little; now he made me care for the next one as he walked out the door.

I paced back and forth with him in my arms, in front of the windows that became mirrors at night, wondering if this is what it had been like for my mother, alone with me.

I was some grainy old photograph from before he’d “lost himself,” as my mother had said. The photograph got dusty, and he’d return sometimes to look at it, to wipe away the dust and look, but then he’d leave again and forget.

It was hard to understand why someone who had enough money would create a sense of scarcity, why he wouldn’t lavish us with it.

I’d wanted a professional photograph for years—I saw them framed on walls at friends’ houses; now it was happening, but without my mother. Wearing her dress was a way to have her there too. Who cared if the dress was old and unfashionable.

The houses were close but their atmospheres so starkly different it reminded me of something I’d read about the surface of the moon, how if you put your hand on the line where the light meets the shadow, one side will freeze and the other will burn.

It left an impression on me for the idea of cell memory—that whatever we undergo is stored within the physical body, even when conscious memory of the event has disappeared.

Laurene finally spoke. “We’re just cold people,” she said. She said it dryly, like a clarification. You’re allowed to say that? I thought. How incredible; that’s what struck me later: that she had dared to say it. How good it would be to know one’s limitations and say them with unapologetic conviction. Her tone was deadpan. I had thought I could shame them for being cold and absent. Now I was the one who was ashamed, for ignoring the simple truth.

If you still desire a thing, its time has not yet come. And when you have what you desired, you will have no more desire, instead you will have time. Weak desires protect you from disappointment. But nothing keeps you safer than being a visible ruin. —Fanny Howe, Indivisible

She would be the one I’d call for hours every night during my first year in college, for her insights and care, when I found a culture far more alien than I had expected, and after I experienced my first heartbreak when Josh and I broke up, for which neither a fancy coat nor a skill at cleaning toilets had prepared me.

About heartbreak my parents gave, separately, the same advice: “You’ve got to feel all your feelings. That way, next time, when you fall in love again, it will be just as meaningful and profound.”

“The first heartbreak brings up the pain of the past,” my father said. “The first big loss. Harness it.” “If something is really painful, it’s the undertow of a big, beautiful wave,” my mother said. Other people said, “Get over it,” and “Go out.”

“You know,” he’d said then, “those years you lived with us—those were the best years, for me.” This was news—I didn’t know what to say—for me they’d been difficult, and I’d thought for him they were some of the worst.

“It makes Troilus seem so pathetic,” I said confidently during the seminar, “that he can’t get over her.” “No,” the professor said, looking at me with a kind gaze. “His strength is that he can hold on.”

“He’ll go away,” she said, a sad note in her voice, “and then maybe someday he’ll realize that he did the same thing to you that was done to him.” I was surprised that she could make such a quick summary, and I assumed something so quick and short must be wrong. But later, when I thought about it, it seemed true.

my father had started working at Apple again. I read about it in the papers, and before I left to study abroad in London during my senior year, the first advertisements of the colorful new iMacs appeared, shrink-wrapped around the buses in Harvard Yard.

“Lisa’s going to find out she can’t replace her parents, and Kevin and Dorothy are going to learn they can’t buy a daughter.”

Toward the end of my year abroad, I dated an English lawyer with a high-standing blond ruffle of hair. “You should invite your father to your graduation,” he said. “No way,” I said. I told him everything my father had done wrong. “But he’s your father,” he said. He kept pressing, saying that it didn’t matter what one’s father had done; he was still one’s father, that fathers had done worse things and still should be invited to momentous events, and if I didn’t invite him, I’d regret it later when it was too late to fix. I was ambivalent, but in the end I sent my father and Laurene two tickets and a note.

For the previous six months, I’d been taking a small dose of clonazepam, an antianxiety drug that allegedly reduces the amygdala’s fight-or-flight response, 0.25 milligram per day. It was despite, or perhaps because of, my father’s insistence I try weed or LSD that drugs had seemed unappealing before—I’d never done any—but flying back and forth to see him every month, finishing graduate school, my mother sick and low on money, I had found myself unable to focus. Instead, I moved and talked faster and faster.

In fact, I had recently realized my luck: I got to know him before he became hugely famous, when he was healthy enough to skate. I’d imagined he’d spent a lot more time with everyone else than he had with me, but I wasn’t so sure about that anymore. He looked into my eyes and teared up.

“I guess you were working really hard, and that’s why you didn’t email me or call me back?” He’d rarely returned my emails and calls, did not mark my birthdays. “No,” he paused. “It wasn’t because I was busy. It was because I was mad you didn’t invite me to the Harvard weekend.” “What weekend?” “The introductory weekend. All I got was the bill,” he said, with a catch in his voice.

people who are dying and trying to set things right aren’t necessarily reflective and profound.

“You needed the right stories. We needed to get to a radically different place from where we were. I didn’t know how else to get us there, besides stories. And anyway, the things I was saying—they were true.”

“Well, I’m here now,” I said. “Maybe, if there is a next time, we could be friends?” It was also a gentle jab: just friends. But in fact, in the weeks following this visit and after he died, it was our missed chance at friendship I grieved about.

I had grown up, I had moved on, so it surprised me, returning to see my father when he was sick, how painful it still was not to be included in his life.

It was irrelevant that I wasn’t named on the honeypots. I had not been a mistake. I was not the useless part of something meaningful. I heard from someone that the pattern of our breath isn’t supposed to be even, regular. Humans are not metronomes. It goes long and short, deep and shallow, and that’s how it’s supposed to go, depending at each moment on what you need, and what you can get, and how filled up you are. I wouldn’t trade any part of my experience for someone else’s life, I felt then, even the moments where I’d wished I didn’t exist, not because my life was right or perfect or best, but because the accumulation of choices made had carved a path that was characteristic and distinct, down to the serif, and I felt the texture of it all around me for just a moment, familiar, like my own skin, and it was good enough.