“Hi,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Yup,” he said.
“Is work okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”
“No reason,” I said.
And then he had to get off the phone and we said goodbye, my throat still aching with what felt like desperate love.
A few months later we were going to see his NeXT presentation at Davies Symphony Hall. He’d been preparing for months and I knew he was nervous, especially about the demo, where he’d show how the computer worked in real time.
I wore a dark blue corduroy dress with a red ribbon sash that my mother and Mona said they preferred, even though I would have liked to wear something cooler. The pink light and cold wind in San Francisco that morning whipped at my face and blazed on the glass surfaces of buildings.
We were directed down the curving drive where other cars could not go. A woman in black stockings gave us laminated tags with clips and walked us to our seats near the front in the huge theater. Huge banners on the sides of the stage rippled and caught light, a NeXT logo in the center of each. In the middle of the huge stage was a desk, a computer, a bottle of water, and a chair. When I thought of how he’d feel if he failed in front of all these people, it felt like acid in my stomach. People were filing into the seats behind me, expectant, their sounds more muffled and pointed than sounds in the world, the acoustic properties of the cavernous room softened by thousands of thick velvet seats.
Barbara came over, carrying a clipboard. “Do you want to go backstage and see your dad?” My mother nodded yes. I felt as if I was about to view a great secret. People in the theater would probably notice I was walking alone toward the stage. I could feel eyes on my back; it made me walk straight, and step carefully.
Barbara held open a thick velvet curtain, the dark space inside subdivided into velvet rooms. In one was my father, standing, surrounded by other people. He was wearing a suit and looked more polished than usual. He did not seem particularly anxious. He noticed me and smiled.
“Good luck, Steve,” I said.
“Thanks, champ,” he said, and then walked back into the velvet darkness of the rooms. I followed Barbara back out through the curtain. I was terrified the demo would fail and wanted him to know it was okay with me if he failed. Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” filled the huge room. The uneven horns set my nerves on edge. Toward the front, waiting for me, were my mother, Tina, Mona, my father’s father Paul, and my father’s sister Patty. It was the only time I saw Tina wearing makeup or a dress. She seemed uncomfortable, too tall, rustling, striking. I sat beside my mother.
Our part darkened, his lit up. He walked out, seeming more at home and natural than he’d been a moment before, as if being on stage was easier than being in life. When he sat down at the desk, his small screen projected on a huge screen above, I knew it was the moment he might fail and the computer might freeze and humiliate him.
He announced that there was a whole dictionary, and the complete works of Shakespeare, inside each computer. He looked up a quote about books and brooks from As You Like It. I’d never heard him talk about dictionaries or Shakespeare before. After that he created a three-dimensional shape in a window on the screen, a cylinder or tube with a bouncing molecule inside. Below it, he added a virtual button that compressed the container to make the molecule bounce faster. He made another button that added heat. It moved faster still. All the shapes moved in a smooth way; they did not catch and stutter the way moving images did on my computer when I dragged them from one side of the screen to the other. Whatever pixels made up the image were much finer than I’d seen on a computer before; they did not granulate with motion. And then, unexpectedly, he made another button, clicked it, it was sound, and the rhythm of the dancing molecule was all around us resounding through the hall, miraculous.
“See? Look what we can do here,” he said, moving the window around the desktop that contained the tube that held the molecule that continued to bounce, and affecting nonchalance, as his voice was drowned out by thunderous applause. People stood up to clap behind me. I clapped with relief. It had worked. Soon, we were all on our feet.
He was smiling, as if he both hoped and didn’t hope the applause would stop—and stood there on the stage before us, everyone’s man.
At the start of fifth grade at my new school, I had planned to become popular. At my old school I’d noticed a few popular girls; at my new school I wanted to be one. The summer before, at the bead shop, I discovered a pair of large plastic loops that could be attached to metal hooks, making cheap, sexy earrings that would later be the cause of bitter fights between me and my mother, who found them too provocative.
In the mornings before school my new friends and I congregated in the girls’ bathroom off the hallway, leaning over Silly Putty–colored sinks to get close to the mirror, sharing mascara, hair spray, and lip gloss. With hair spray and water I sculpted my bangs into a glossy wave.
I slipped into a miniskirt meant to be a neck cowl from a shop called Units, the happy accident of repurposing I’d discovered in the changing room, and, finally, I put on the pair of dangly earrings I wasn’t allowed to wear. They swayed with alternating rhythms, reflecting light from the smooth plastic surface, elongating my round face into a more womanly shape. I snuck them to school in my backpack, along with everything else I wasn’t allowed to wear.
The part that kept me wearing clothing my mother didn’t allow and adults didn’t like was related to the smell of lipstick and hair spray and the pendant quality of earrings. It was sex—not the act, but the awareness and excitement of something new I felt around me like a force. It was a switch that had flipped, unexpected and powerful.
Adults seemed to think academic work was most important, but I figured that was because they didn’t understand the greater satisfaction of being popular, perhaps because they were too old or ugly to be popular themselves, and were jealous. I felt this way about my mother too, so her rules about clothing and earrings seemed like a bitter wish to stop me from having what she could not have.
I dressed provocatively on purpose, but when I was with any adults I admired who disapproved of me, I felt that they had seen into my soul and that there was something lascivious and wanton about me, impossible to mend. A wickedness my friends would never possess. Once I’d stayed for a night with my aunt Linda at her condo in Fremont.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.
“I’d like to,” I said. She played me her favorite song: “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car.”
“What’s your favorite?” she asked.
“I don’t know if I can tell you,” I said. “It’s by George Michael.”
“Which song?”
“‘I Want Your Sex,’“ I said. She scowled and looked away.
At Nueva we sometimes had class in the library. The library was an open room at the end of two parallel hallways, a series of low shelves with books on both sides. In the middle were three couches around a chair where we sat while Debbie, the librarian, read to us from a book about the components of toothpaste, which turned out to be mostly chalk, the chalk itself made from the bones of marine creatures that lived thousands of years ago, died, sank to the bottom of oceans, and were compressed, then ground up. Debbie was tall and handsome with short, brown pixie-cut hair and thick gold-rimmed glasses. She wore long corduroy skirts. Her skin was a waxy layer of white on top of red, and when she became angry, the red bloomed through to the surface.