“Who’s that?” one asked.
“He’s famous,” I said. “He invented the personal computer. He lives in a mansion and drives a Porsche convertible. He buys a new one every time it gets a scratch.”
The story had a film of unreality to it as I said it, even to my own ears. I hadn’t hung out with him that much, only a few skates and visits. I didn’t have the clothes or the bike someone with a father like this would have. My last name was different from his.
“He even named a computer after me,” I said to them.
“What computer?” a girl named Elizabeth asked.
“The Lisa,” I said.
“A computer called the Lisa?” she said. “I never heard of it.”
“It was ahead of its time.” I used my mother’s phrase, although I wasn’t sure why it was ahead. “He invented the personal computer later. But you can’t tell anyone, because if someone finds out, I could get kidnapped.”
I brought it up when I felt I needed to, waiting as long as I could and then letting it burst forth. I don’t remember feeling at a disadvantage with my friends who had fathers, only that there was at my fingertips another magical identity, an extra thing that started to itch and tingle when I felt small, and it was like pressure building inside me, and then I had to find a way to say it.
At some point I also heard that he’d been named Playboy‘s “Sexiest Man of the Year.” I bragged about it selectively because I wasn’t sure whether it was true or exactly what it meant. I had gathered that there was a Playboy, and also a Playgirl, so I didn’t know if he was featured in a magazine of naked women meant for men, or if he was nude himself in a magazine of naked men meant for women. From this I concluded that my father might be naked in Playboy, and when I thought of it, I got a terrible shiver, and I thought part of growing up would be to take this fact in stride.
One of the girls at school, Kirsten, started following me around outside class, chanting, “Your dad is Steve Jobs, your dad is Steve Jobs.”
“Stop it,” I said.
She didn’t stop. She said it sometimes tauntingly, sometimes in a monotone like a robot. It was annoying, but the advantage to her harassment was that it advertised the very fact I wanted known. She did the brag-work for me, and I seemed innocent, even put-upon, as she did it.
“What’s wrong with that girl?” my mother said when I told her. “I bet it’s her parents—they care. I wonder how she found out?”
I told her I might have been the one to tell her, accidentally.
“You told her?”
“It slipped out.” I braced for her anger, but instead she was only confused.
“That makes even less sense,” she said. “You told her, and now she goes around telling you? Tell her to stop. What a strange girl.”
One afternoon when he came for a skate, my father brought over a stack of six stickers from his company, NeXT. These were beautiful, thick, large, made of a rigid clear plastic, printed with a black cube and brightly colored letters.
“You can give these to your friends at school,” he said. I was thrilled: when I gave them out, they would know I hadn’t made him up.
This was the same time I guessed the number of corn kernels in a jar as part of an activity Miss Johnson called Guesstimation. It was the second time in a row I’d guessed the number within a few kernels, even though I’d just written a series of numbers I couldn’t have put into words because I didn’t understand place order. When my mother came to pick me up, both she and Miss Johnson looked at me curiously, as if I was a secret prodigy. A week later, a poem I wrote was selected for publication in the weekly school newsletter: The pilgrims are so pretty, the pilgrims are so grand, they sailed here on the Mayflower, and walked upon our land. Everything was finally coming together: I was becoming the girl I wanted to be, famous like my father, and lucky.
Soon after that my father brought over a Macintosh computer. He pulled the box out of the back seat and carried it into my room and put it on the floor. “Let’s see,” he said. “How do we open it?” As if he didn’t know. This made me doubt he was the inventor.
The room had only the loft bed on the bright wooden floor. Parallelograms of light shone in from the window, lit dust twirling like sparks in midair.
He pulled the computer out of the box by a handle on the top and set it on the floor near the outlet on the wall.
“I guess we plug this in.” He held the cord loose like it was unfamiliar.
He sat on the floor in front of it with his legs crossed; I sat on my knees beside him. He looked for the on switch, found it, and the machine came alive to reveal a picture of itself in the center, smiling. He showed me how I could draw with it and save my drawings on the desktop once I was finished with them, and then he left.
He didn’t mention the other one, the Lisa. I worried that he had not really named a computer after me, that it was a mistake.
“You want to make the kids like you? Tell them you went to NASA and played with the flight simulators. That’s what’ll make them jealous,” Ron said. He worked as an engineer for NASA’s Ames Research Center, so he could get us in. On the day we finally went, after he’d talked about it for months, the sun was blazingly hot, and the white rocks outside the tinted glass door radiated heat. He took my picture beside the NASA sign, and then inside at the reception desk, and then again outside the door to the simulators. I’d recently had my hair cut straight across my chin at Supercuts, where we got a discount because my aunt Linda was a manager.
Inside, the simulator wasn’t working. “Damn,” he said. “The one day we come. What are the chances?” It didn’t look like an airplane, but like an office. There were yellow and blue levers embedded in the desks near the keyboards. The screens remained black.
“These simulators are so incredible—it’s just like flying,” he’d said. When he talked about it, I wondered, would it really feel like flying, with wind, and if I crashed the flight simulator, would I feel as if I were falling?
“Look at the screen and pretend you’re really concentrating,” he said, the camera against his eye, taking picture after picture. “And pull down the lever at the same time—that’s it. You can tell your friends at school that the screens didn’t show up because of the flash.”
He took me to lunch at a place with white tablecloths and water poured from silver pitchers into wineglasses. He apologized for how disappointing it was that the simulation hadn’t worked. I told him it was okay.
He took more pictures of me elbowing the table and taking sips of water and smiling until the food arrived and we ate.
That night I wrote in my journal that I loved my dad.
Then I clarified: not Ron. Steve Jobs.
Underneath the name Steve Jobs, I wrote, “I love him! I love him! I love him!” I felt it there inside my chest like my heart would rip apart with it.
My mother was admitted into California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco, where she would work toward her bachelor’s degree. My father offered to take me on Wednesday nights, the only night of the week she had class. I would be alone with him for the first time. We would sleep at his mansion, with its glowing white face and seven acres.