It was not clear when I reached the highest point of up, because inside it was the fall, the pulling feeling of down.
Twice we found ourselves coming down to land at the same moment. I prayed we wouldn’t touch; it would be too intimate. I was conscious of scrabbling away from accidental closeness in front of strangers. In midair he looked at me, smiled.
My drop, his bounce; his drop, my bounce. From below, someone took a photograph. We kept bouncing until he said, “All right, kid. Should we call it a day?” I’d never heard the expression before: Call It A Day.
My mother told me a story she’d heard about my father that went something like this:
My father was adopted and at some point in his twenties went to look for his birth parents. The search had been fruitless for a while, but finally he found the doctor who had delivered him. Because he’d been looking for so long, he decided this would be his last attempt; if it didn’t work, he wasn’t meant to find them.
He went to meet with the doctor and asked for the name of his mother. The doctor said he didn’t know, but even if he did, he couldn’t tell him, because it would be a breach of confidentiality.
When my father walked out the door of the doctor’s office, he decided to stop looking. At the same time, back in the office, the doctor sat down and wrote on a piece of paper: “Upon my death, please tell Steve Jobs I do know his mother, and her name is Joanne.” He had her contact information, and wrote it out.
Four hours later the doctor died of a massive coronary attack. My father got the letter, found his mother, and learned that he had a younger sister, Mona.
It was easy to get the timing right when you told a story like this, pausing after he stopped looking, lowering your voice to start in on the doomed doctor writing the fateful note.
Around the time I turned eight we moved again and my father started dropping by our house once or twice a month. By this time he’d been kicked out of his company, Apple, an event I heard later was deeply hurtful to him, but even then I could feel that he was profoundly sad in some way that made him walk funny and act aloof. He was in the process of starting a new company called NeXT that would make computer hardware and software. I knew he also owned a computer animation company called Pixar that made a short film about two lamps, a parent and child, but this seemed minor compared with Apple or NeXT.
Later my mother said that it was the dips in his worldly success that made him come and find us. The pattern she saw was that when he failed at work, when he lost something in the public sphere, he remembered us, started dropping by, wanted a relationship with me. As if in the flurry of work he forgot me and remembered only when the flurry stopped.
When he came over, we all went roller skating around the neighborhood. My mother came along because I hardly knew him and would have felt strange being alone with him. His visits materialized out of ordinary afternoons, an engine shuddered into our driveway to the bottlebrush tree, echoing off our house and the wooden fence on the other side, thickening the air with excitement. He drove a black Porsche convertible. When he stopped, the sound turned into a whine and then was extinguished, leaving the quiet more quiet, the pinpoint sounds of birds.
“Hi, Steve!” I said.
“Hey,” he said.
I liked the way he walked on the balls of his toes, tilted forward, falling into each step. His outlines were crisp.
I anticipated his arrival, wondering when it would happen, and thought about him afterward—but in his presence, for the hour or so we were all together, there was a strange blankness like the air after his engine switched off. He didn’t talk much. He and my mother talked some, but there were long pauses, the thunk and whirr of roller skates on pavement, the birds and a few cars and leaf blowers.
We skated the neighborhood streets. Trees overhead made patterns of the light. Fuchsia dangled from bushes in yards, stamens below a bell of petals, like women in ball gowns with purple shoes. Some streets wound around huge oak trees. Some had been cracked by roots and earthquakes, the curvy fissures filled in with shiny black tar.
“Look how the tar lines reflect the sky,” my mother said to both of us. It was true—they were light blue rivers.
During the skates with my father, I was not voluble the way I was when it was just my mother and me.
Steve had the same skates as my mother, a beige nubuck body with red laces crisscrossed over a double line of metal fasts. I skated behind or ahead. She talked about the college she wanted to attend in San Francisco; he tripped on cracks in the sidewalk and the roads. To me skating was easy, like running or swimming. My mother’s back brake pad was worn away, and her front brake, the one that looked like a pencil eraser, was down to a slant. She knit the pavement, ankle over ankle, and slowed to a stop in one long line like Fred Astaire. His brakes looked new.
“Can you use your brakes?” I asked, as we approached a stop sign.
“I don’t need brakes,” he said. He aimed for the pole, hit it straight on with his chest, hugged it with both arms, and twirled around it, indecorously, stepping and stumbling until he stopped.
As we passed bushes in other people’s yards, he pulled clumps of leaves off the stems, then dropped the fragments as we skated, making a line of ripped leaves behind us on the pavement like Hansel and Gretel.
A few times, I felt his eyes on me; when I looked up, he looked away.
After he left, we talked about him.
“Why do his jeans have holes all over?” I asked. He might have sewn them up. I knew he was supposed to have millions of dollars. We didn’t just say “millionaire” but “multimillionaire” when we spoke of him, because it was accurate, and because knowing the granular details made us part of it.
“In high school, he sometimes had more hole than jean,” she said. “It’s just his way. On our first date, when he came to pick me up, my father asked, ‘Young man, what are you going to be when you grow up?’ And you know what he said?”
“What?”
“A bum. Your grandfather was not pleased. He was hoping for an upstanding man to take his daughter out, and instead he got this long-haired hippie, saying he wanted to be a bum.”
She said my father had a lisp. “It’s something to do with his teeth,” she said. She said most people have an underbite or an overbite. “But his teeth hit each other exactly straight on, and over the years they cracked and chipped where they hit, so the top and bottom teeth meet, with no spaces. It looks like a zigzag, or a zipper.”
When they were dating in high school, even before they started selling the blue boxes that let you call anywhere in the world for free, he predicted that he would become famous.
“How did he know?”
“He just did,” she said. “He also said he’d die young, in his early forties.”
I was pretty sure that since the first prediction was right, the second one would be right too. I began to think of him as a kind of prophet, with loneliness and tragedy at the edges. (Only we knew how lonely, how tragic!) All light and dark, nothing in between.
“And he has these strangely flat palms,” she said.
Every element about him that was different from others meant some sort of divinity, I thought. I assigned mystical qualities to his slouching, falling walk, his zipper teeth, his tattered jeans, his flat palms, as if these were not only different from other fathers’ but better, and now that he was in my life, even if it was only once a month, I had not waited in vain. I would be better off than children who’d had fathers all along.