“It’s okay,” I said, too fast.
“I’ll love you until the cows come home,” he said.
“Hey, Lis,” he said one day as we passed in the hallway. “Do you want to change your name?”
He was barefoot, wearing only a black shirt and white cotton underwear—his uniform around the house. He was vain about his slim legs and wore this uniform even when people came over so that it became something I teased him about.
“Change it to what?” I asked. Sunlight streamed through the bank of leaded-glass windows that made up one wall of the hallway, falling in bright rectangles on the floor, warming the tiles.
“My name,” he said.
For a moment I thought he meant Steve.
“You mean … Jobs?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
I paused. I didn’t want to offend him. When offended, he became distant and wouldn’t acknowledge me, sometimes for days. I’d been Lisa Brennan my whole life. The thought of not only deserting my mother but also replacing her name was too much—as if he’d suggested that we perform a kind of theft.
“Maybe,” I said. “I mean, my mom … let me think.”
“Let me know,” he said, and walked off.
I thought about it that night, and went to find him in his study the next evening and told him I’d like to take his name but keep hers too, and connect them with a hyphen.
A few weeks later, a lawyer arrived. All of us, including my brother, gathered in the living room around the coffee table. My brother stood and smacked his hands against the glass. There were two Eames lounge chairs, a Tiffany lamp with dragonfly wings, a large patterned rug, but no couch. We sat on the floor.
We signed the certificate, first him, then me, making official my new, joined surname. The lawyer put the papers in a briefcase. He would later replace my original birth certificate—on which my mother had drawn stars—with a more official-looking version, watermarked, yellow and blue, starless. It was the same lawyer who had argued in the California court against my father’s paternity years before, though I didn’t know it at the time.
I’d already started high school under my old name, but I began to write the new name at the top of my papers.
“Should we frame it?” my father said, getting up. “We could put it here.” He pointed to a space on the wall where the hallway met the living room. He was ebullient; I felt important, and giddy too; all this fuss over adding a line and four letters. A lawyer had even been summoned!
“What do you think, hon?” he asked Laurene.
“It might be a little strange,” she said tactfully. “To hang up a birth certificate.”
Laurene seemed to understand the division between strange and normal in a way we did not. Near her, he and I were at a disadvantage. We were ragtag. He was adopted and had dropped out of college. He didn’t seem to know what people did or didn’t do, nor did I. Unlike me, he said he didn’t care. About rules of civilization and decorum, he was usually dismissive, or even contemptuous. (But he was unpredictable. I’d worn a cardigan one day and he said, sternly, “You’re supposed to unbutton the bottom button,” and it surprised me that this once he not only knew but cared.) My mother was also apathetic about many conventions, and that’s why when I was little she’d let me dress myself. As for my bad spelling, she preferred to enjoy it rather than correct it. She didn’t try to steady and null the confusions of the world but navigated inside them, and for this I hated her now, wishing to know its precise codes.
What a relief it was to have Laurene, with her knowledge of etiquette and protocol. Who knew people did not frame birth certificates and put them up on walls.
That night, I set the table for dinner while Laurene fed my brother. They had blue-and-green-striped cloth napkins and thick French glass cups (the ones I broke) with petal-shaped indentations around the lip that caught the light.
“Where do the knives and forks go?” I asked, a bouquet of cutlery in one hand. I was determined to learn, from her, what went where. Her mother had been an English teacher; surely she knew what was done and not done, would find it easy to say, “Do it like this, not like that.”
“The fork on the left,” Laurene said, “knife and spoon on the right.”
“Which outside, which in?” I wanted to know unequivocally.
“Spoon on the outside,” she said.
My brother sat up to the table in his high chair, gumming his food, splattering it around with his open hands. Feeding my brother meant spooning mush into an O-shaped mouth, swiping what did not make it from the sides of his lips and cheeks, and spooning it in again, like spackling a hole—until he was finished and without warning released the remains in a great whirring noise from his lips.
“What about the napkin?”
“Napkin under the fork.”
Years later, I would live in Italy, where every finer point was known, and learn as much as I could—only to discover that these rules weren’t very important to me after all. Which was what my father might have been saying, and hoping for me, when he taunted me with the phrase I hated: “Lis, you’re gonna be a hippie someday.”
The next day my father and I went to Country Sun to get avocados. “I’m really good at picking them out,” he said, cradling each in the palm of his hand for a few seconds, closing his eyes.
At the register a man with long brown hair in a ponytail looked at him. “Does anyone ever tell you that you look like Steve Jobs?” he asked. I kept a straight face.
My father was looking down, getting change out of his wallet. “Yep, sometimes,” he said, handing over the change. And then we left, me following him out to the car. How cool it was that he hadn’t claimed it. Even a regular errand with my father was edged with glamour.
In the car on the way home I finally built up the courage to ask him if the Lisa computer was named after me. I’d been waiting for a moment alone with him to ask—if he said no, I wouldn’t be humiliated in front of others, who might have assumed.
“Hey, you know that computer, the Lisa?”
“Yeah?” he said.
“Was it named after me?” I asked. We were both facing forward. I didn’t look at him; I tried to sound curious, nothing more.
If he would just give me this one thing.
“Nope.” His voice was clipped, dismissive. Like I was fishing for a compliment. “Sorry, kid.”
“I thought it was,” I said. I was glad he couldn’t see my face.
I’d become fixated on the idea of going to college, and I was sure that one secret to getting in was a profusion of after-school activities. I was going to a private high school called Lick-Wilmerding in San Francisco, about an hour away, which I attended with four friends I’d known from Nueva. The school building was modern, cement and glass. In the mornings it would be encased in white fog; in the afternoons, when the fog burned off, sunlight streamed through the glass and onto the whiteboards and industrial rugs. Together with the other Nueva kids’ parents, my father arranged for a car that picked us up, one by one, at various stops along the Peninsula. The car made the return journey in the afternoons—but it wasn’t possible to do an after-school activity and still catch this ride home.