Small Fry - Lisa Brennan-Jobs Page 0,144

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.

Visiting reminded me that while I’d lived at this house, I’d wished to be someone else. But around this time—during one of these visits during these strange years flying here to visit my father every month or so—I had a moment of revelation, a moment of lightness, as if a huge burden I’d been carrying around had been lifted all at once as I was standing under the frill of jasmine around the front door: It was irrelevant that I wasn’t named on the honey-pots. 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.

At the memorial service and in the years since, people want me to know how close they were with my father.

“He liked giving special advice to my son,” someone said. “They were very close.”

“They had such a tight relationship,” another said of her son and my father.

“He was like a father to me,” said a man, tearing up.

These conversations have a particular quality in which I feel I am supposed to be, more than a participant, a witness. These people do not ask about my father, but talk fervently at me, as if my listening is the missing ingredient, the yeast, that gives their stories life. They recite anecdotes like speeches, and walk away.

Do they want me to feel deferential? He’d been like a father to them too. They’re asserting a claim and I’m supposed to confirm him as the ur-father. His great greatness.

When people speak and write about my father’s meanness, they sometimes assume that meanness is linked to genius. That to have one is to get closer to the other. But the way I saw him create was the best part of him: sensitive, collaborative, fun. The friends he worked with got to see this more than I did. Maybe the meanness protected the part that created—so that acting mean to approximate genius is as foolish as trying to be successful by copying his lisp or his walk or the way he turned around and wagged his hands around his back and moaned to pretend he was making out.

“Look at those clouds,” he’d said once when he was sick but could still walk, in a sweet mood, pointing up out of the window on a sunny day. “Those clouds are approximately ten thousand feet up. That’s about two miles. If we wanted, you and I, we could walk—let’s see, a twenty-minute mile.

“We could be there in forty minutes,” he said.

Rinpoche, the Brazilian monk, said to my mother that if he’d had two more months, just two months, he could have achieved a better resolution between my parents.

But who knows?

When I see my mother now, the more time we spend together, the more I feel attached. When I have to pee, I leave the door open, so we can keep talking. We are like suction cups: once together it’s difficult to pry us apart. Sometimes we fight. When we’re apart—she on her coast and me on mine—I forget how it is to be together, how it’s exhilarating, and up and down. When she visits New York, we go see art. At the Agnes Martin exhibition at the Guggenheim, we start at the top and corkscrew to the bottom, against the traffic of people walking up, looking at stripes. For us, Agnes gets younger and younger. After that, we walk out into the day. We cross Fifth Avenue to Central Park and she says, “Look!” and points to the thick white lines against the dark asphalt. “There’s another one!”

There was one picture of my parents together before I was born. They are standing at the train station one morning when my father left to return to Reed College. My mother’s cheeks are round and full. She’s wearing jeans. My father’s face is pale and sweet. They look incredibly young. I thought it was my mother who lost things—houses, objects, my father. But she had kept this picture for many years, and she gave it to me, and I moved, and I left it somewhere. Recently she gave me a painting she’d made in high school for which she’d won a prize.

“He’s following you around, your father,” she said, when she came to visit me after he died.

“A ghost?”

“Him. I don’t know how else to say it. I can feel him here. And you know what? He’s overjoyed to be with you. He wants to be with you so much he’s padding around behind you. I mean, he’s delighted just watching you butter a piece of toast.”

I didn’t believe it, but I liked thinking it anyway.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Grove Atlantic: to my excellent editor Elisabeth Schmitz, and to Katie Raissian, Deb Seager, Julia Berner-Tobin, Sal Destro, Judy Hottensen, and Morgan Entrekin. Also to Bettina Abarbanell and Eva-Marie von Hippel at Berlin Verlag. Thank you to my honest, smart agent David McCormick, who thought I might give up, and to Susan Hobson and the rest of the team at McCormick Literary.

I wrote for two extended, productive periods at the residency at Art OMI: Writers. Before that, I am grateful to have attended the low-residency MFA program at Bennington College.

Thank you to Caterina Fake, Bryan Burk, Claire Sarti, David Boaretto, Stefanie Kubanek, and DW Gibson for encouraging me to write. Thank you to Ann Godoff and Ginny Smith-Younce at Penguin Press, and to Uschi Weissmueller, and to readers Ellen Graf, Hannah Blumenthal, and Mona Simpson. Thanks to Finn Taylor, Christina Redse, Linda Brennan, Jamie Brennan, Ron, Ilan, Debbie, and David for stories and thoughts about the past.

I am grateful to Lawrence and Hillary Levy, who helped with everything at every stage. And to Phillip Lopate, Susan Cheever, Kai Barry, and my mother—all of whom offered many years of support as I wrote this. I am also profoundly grateful to Jamie Quatro, who expertly and sensitively helped extract this book from a very long draft, and then found me my publisher.

Finally, thank you to Bill for his joy, optimism and care, and to wonderful Bodie and Julie, and to little Thomas for providing a deadline and even more joy.