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.”