I’d also sing to her—made-up songs and musical scales—and I’d repeat words and sentences in a singsong way to keep us connected and amused. For her part, Lisa would gurgle sweet babbly baby noises that sounded to me like the equivalent of an abstract painting, having all the colors but no real form you could understand. Until, one day, to my utter astonishment, I realized that her sounds weren’t arbitrary. She was imitating every word, song, and tonal repetition with absolute precision. Suddenly her world opened up to me and I understood that she heard and repeated everything I shared with her. This mother and daughter call-and-response pulled the shades off my sadness every time. It was a wonder to me that my tiny baby could pick up so much and then turn it back around and talk to me with it. This is where the everyday mundane suddenly became magical. I had a magical child.
The one thing she didn’t repeat was this gravelly sound I made at the back of my throat when I got her out of bed or changed her diapers. I only kept making this sound because she was so amazed by it. She would look at me with laughter in her eyes, and she’d be riveted. It was as if this was the most remarkable sound in all existence and she was really impressed with me for being able to do it. I mean really impressed, as if I had insider knowledge and was passing the codes of the universe on to her. And who knows, maybe I was.
The first time Lisa smiled at me she was three months old and it broke out in thousands of rays like sunshine over a new world. Things were moving forward.
For Halloween that year I came up with costume ideas for my sister, her husband, and myself. I love to come up with costumes that express a person’s essence. While I don’t sew them, I tuck, fold, rip, cut, paste, pin, and tie materials into place. I was happy and breathless doing this, my hands moving in advance of my thinking. It was pure play. We had so much fun that day and Mark and Kathy kept saying, “Gawd, you really should be making a living at this.” I made Mark into the black and white man with the golden tear, an image I connected with Steve. They were quite alike, Mark and Steve. Both were off all charts intelligent, angst-ridden, and dramatic. Mark started with a top hat, but I did the rest by adding a cape, and painting a black-and-white checkerboard on his face. A golden tear at the corner of his eye was the finishing touch. I made my sister into a nun, a Mother Superior with massive folds of mauve and white cloth that she had around the house. She wore no makeup at all. As for me, I painted my face white and covered myself with a transparent mosquito net. I was a ghost. No kidding, right?
We drove to the party leaving our children with my sister’s babysitter, a caring, trustworthy woman who had children of her own. This was the first time I had given over my daughter’s care to anyone outside the family, having only left Lisa once with my dad and his wife for a couple of hours, and with my sister now and then to go to the store. It revived me immeasurably to be able to go out, and that Halloween I felt the blessed helium of my freedom. Shy from having been so homebound, I hesitated in finding my way into party mode, but with all the corn chips and salsa, the sangria and the music—with all the dancing and laughter—I was just starting to have fun when the babysitter arrived with Lisa beet red and splotchy from nonstop crying. The sitter had tried calming her for three hours without success. And since no one at the party was answering the phone, she eventually drove Lisa to me. Lisa bawled even harder when she was handed to me, because my face was unrecognizable covered in white paint and netting. So Kathy held her as the Mother Superior that night and Lisa finally stopped crying. Oh, the will of her, to cry for three hours straight! Up till then I’d never let her cry for over a minute or two. It broke my heart to see her in such distress, but Mark repeatedly reassured me that there had to be a history of hurtful repetitions before a child could be scarred. He kept saying, “Babies are resilient. She’s really, really, really okay.”
* * *
When you have a baby, you need resources. Since babies are physical, you need physical resources. But when I mentioned the need for money to Steve and Kobun, they both responded as if I were a nuisance, a buzzing bee bothering and below them. It’s hard to fully describe the effect they had on me because they spoke with silence—by ignoring me—more often than with language. But I remember.
I had been in Idyllwild about six weeks when Daniel Kottke called. He told me, among other things, that a number of people were asking Steve why he wasn’t just giving me any money, and Steve apparently was saying, “She doesn’t want money, she just wants me.”
I was overwhelmed when I heard this—especially because even Daniel, who should have known better, seemed willing to believe it. How could they be so wrong? The realities of nursing and caring for my small baby took all my time and attention. And the lack of every kind of resource made me depressed. In the mix of this and more, Steve was very low on the totem pole of my personal wants. I was insensible to that kind of longing then; my nervous system was so battered in response to Steve’s meanness that I was too closed down to even think about him in such terms.
Later I wondered if Steve was offended that I wasn’t pining for him. It certainly would be typical of him to make statements that ran the direct opposite of the truth. The real truth was that I didn’t want to mess up Steve’s trajectory because, despite everything, I was excited for him and his potential. I love my own creativity and I extend this kind of joy to others—Steve included, Steve especially. It wasn’t about stopping him from where he wanted to go. I just needed money. This was just another of his deluded and distracting comments.
My mind searched to understand this new injustice that was being passed around—that I only wanted Steve. While I was living in the shadows, I was being cruelly examined under the most dishonest light. Steve was somehow making himself out to seem not only desirable, but principled when, in fact, he was saying “No, I am not going to be responsible to my child or her mother.”
I had no one in my corner, so I worked hard on being in my own corner. Listless at first, enlisting much later, because it is nearly impossible to do well without a tribe. It would have made a huge difference to Lisa and my happiness and to Steve’s well-being had he been held accountable to his humanity. But nobody I ever heard of questioned it. Well, perhaps there was someone. I don’t know if it’s true, but I was told after the fact that Mike Scott at Apple repeatedly said that Steve should just give me money, while nearly all other top executives advised him to ignore me or fight if I tried to go after a paternity settlement. (Curiously, years later when I painted murals at the Ronald McDonald House in Palo Alto, Mike Scott was the only person from Apple whose name I recognized on the donor tiles.)
It was very hard to imagine and accept that, at a time when I had no voice, Steve was using his against me to silence me further. He even told me and others that, “If I could just help Lisa without helping Chrisann, I would be happy to supply money.” This was the beginning of his working to split apart my daughter and me. I think Steve villainized me because, in his twisted logic, he unconsciously believed that if he couldn’t have a loving committed mother then he didn’t want Lisa to have hers. He wanted Lisa in his club.
Years later, after Steve got kicked out of Apple, he apologized many times over for this behavior. He said that he never took responsibility when he should have, and that he was sorry. He even told me, “It wasn’t Kobun’s fault. It was all mine.” (Hmmm, I always become suspicious when people in positions of power claim to take all responsibility. What does it really mean to say such a thing?) But then Steve also said that he loved how I parented so much, he wished I had been his mother. He was in my kitchen and I had my back to him when he said this, and I thought Whoa, that’s a piece of information. That day I could see why I was impressive to him. It wasn’t that I was a perfect parent. I’m a human being with plenty of foibles. But I learned as Lisa grew to pay close attention to good parenting and teaching, to make sure she was thriving, delighted with life, and truly happy every day.
But Steve’s contrition didn’t last. He may have appreciated m
y mothering Lisa eventually, but after he returned to Apple in the nineties, he went on to reenact the same hateful odd behaviors toward me.
* * *
Through the years I’ve watched how Daniel has alternately admired Steve, and felt scandalized by him. I’ve come to recognize that Daniel and I shared some of the same dynamics as we watched Steve become more impressive. And the most interesting thing to me about Daniel is that he sometimes had the most revelatory insight into Steve’s changes.
When I was pregnant and still living at the Presidio house, Daniel came home one day after work and told me, “Steve is winning at work even though he’s going against everything I’ve ever been taught was right and good.” Daniel doesn’t remember saying this, but I do. In fact, I bet that over the years I’ve had about ten important exchanges with Daniel, of which he has no memory. Daniel’s memory seems to slip between insight and being overly sentimental when it comes to Steve. That particular statement at the Presidio house made a big impact on me, because it was the first time I saw Daniel really trying to figure out what was going on with Steve. Also he repeated it several times.
I listened deeply to Daniel each time he said it, because I could feel his incredulity. Yes, like everyone, Daniel seemed to doubt what he was actually seeing. But then I observed how carefully worded and worked out it was. And I also saw that Daniel had to think down to his core to understand what laws of humanity were being so profoundly trespassed.
He said something about how the ideals of human behavior and good character that his parents and professors at Columbia taught him, and that all great classic art exemplifies, were opposite to the values that are advancing Steve. Daniel was dismayed, and I was impressed because I knew that what he was saying was true and perfectly discerned.
He also said, shaking his head, “It’s shocking because the worse he becomes, the more success he achieves.” Daniel was watching how Steve operated at work. I, of course, didn’t see this part of Steve’s life, only how he was behaving toward me. I was always trying to understand Steve, and to that end looked for whatever wisdom about him others had. I had no words or logic for how horrible he was increasingly becoming. All I knew was that Steve wasn’t acting the way people were supposed to act.
I later understood that Apple’s marketing agency had promoted the concept of a massive genius figurehead for the company. Big wink to Regis McKenna. Steve was their boy, when in truth there were many people who built Apple. One of them, Jeff Raskin, was quoted at the time saying that what was happening to Steve was sad because “Steve believed his own press.” I was always looking for foundational wisdom on Steve and this statement by Raskin seemed right.
Daniel also told me that people at Apple had started talking about Steve’s “reality distortion field.” When I heard this, I knew immediately that the phrase was perfect. I could hardly believe someone had been able to identify such an amorphous quality with absolute accuracy. And I marveled that three simple words of such scientific and poetic brevity could get it completely handled. The term “reality distortion field” contained the notion of wizardry, and the idea that Steve had some kind of dubious talent that suggested something of an alien power.
So I wasn’t alone in noticing it.
My own experience was that Steve had a recontextualizing force field around him, like a conceptual miasma that bent meaning whenever you got within a few feet of him. The reality distortion field may have been invisible, but it left an impression on your actual senses. And it was so new and so distinctive that someone—I don’t know who—was compelled to give it a name as a way of dealing with it.
* * *
Various publications have said that Steve wasn’t ready to be a father. The truth was that neither of us was ready to be a parent, but Lisa came into the world anyway. Still, people evaluated our roles—and the significance of those roles—quite differently. It was that old double standard, a worldly distortion that says a mother has primary responsibility for the child when it’s blatantly obvious that children need both parents, in whatever way they can show up well.
Steve wasn’t ready to raise a child and neither was I. I needed my own free life and lots of time to grow up. I was a very young twenty-four-year-old when Lisa was born and it was way beyond me to deal with the limitations that her tiny existence imposed on mine. Still, it was in Idyllwild that I arrived at a form of logic that I could rely on, a logic that led me to the conclusion that I would keep and raise my child.
At that time it was hard for me to think anything through clearly, but once I did, I never got lost in the crazy cycles of worry and indecision again. It went as follows: I accepted that I was nowhere near having the experience or wisdom to know if I should keep my daughter or give her up for adoption to a couple more financially fit and emotionally ready. So my backdoor logic ran that if I couldn’t understand whether adoption was right or wrong until way down the road, then I had better not risk letting my own child go. I thought that holding her close—as terribly difficult as the circumstances were—was better than understanding, years later, that losing her was too profound a loss to bear. Or worse, never even understanding how profound a loss it was because such an act would have amounted to killing something in me, and in Lisa, too.
It was a fragile kind of logic but it was a starting point. Though there would be times within the first years of her life that were so hard that I would briefly consider adoption again, acknowledging how much I didn’t know saved me from losing her until I was able to gain the knowledge of her true value to me, and mine to her. Beyond this and bigger than all the rainy and sunny days, between my unhappiness and the times when things got easier, my mind might not have always understood, but always my arms knew to hold on.
She was mine.
I was hers.
Years later, when Lisa was in her thirties (about ten years older than I was at the time of my decision to keep her), we talked about it. I told her that while the situation had felt impossible, I’d decided to keep her, even before I could see what it meant. Given how hard it was, I had worried through the years about whether or not I had done the right thing. Lisa listened deeply, and a week after that, I felt the delight that all parents come to know when my daughter called of her own volition and told me she was really glad I’d kept her. She told me that she had thought it through and she knew it would have been very hard on her if I had let her go.
With that I felt as if Lisa had some kind of self-knowledge that I knew nothing about; not in her or in me. I wondered how she could arrive at such a conclusion. I didn’t understand it. But I believed her. We both knew how difficult it had been to endure Steve’s many faces, so having this discussion helped us see that we had more than survived it. We really love, like, and enjoy each other. And sometimes I think that Steve’s absence was a very good thing given his Tourette’s-like cruelty. Still, back then when Lisa was just a baby, the situation was pretty much unbearable on a daily basis and for years my child had a sad and unfulfilled mother—the one thing Steve could have taken care of.
Kathy and Mark’s generosity had saved the day. They gave me wonderful memories and the stability to take the steps I needed to keep my daughter. When Lisa was seven months old the winds of change blew through Idyllwild and I knew it was time to move on. With my car stuffed and my sweet little darling in her bucket car seat strapped in next to me, we hit the road and I drove up Highway 1, the scenic route, next to the Pacific Ocean and returned to the Bay Area where I knew people and would live for the next few years.
NINETEEN
DARK TIMES, BRIGHT MOMENTS
I was proud of my sweet happy little baby and I wanted to show her to Steve’s parents. Paul and Clara loved their son and so, I reasoned, they would want to see his daughter. So when Lisa was still only one month old and we were staying at Bert and Betty Wilder’s house on my way down to Idyllwild, I drove over to the Jobses’ house. Paul was doing some yard work when I arrived, and he stepped out of the garage with a rake
just as I was walking up onto their lawn.
Hello!” I said, holding Lisa in her baby blanket. “I’ve brought your granddaughter for you to see.”
Paul was gruff. “She’s not my granddaughter.”
He was such an idiot. So I flipped it. “Well, of course Steve was adopted … still, as this is his child I thought you would consider her your granddaughter. But I understand.”
Paul grumbled something that I couldn’t make out. It wouldn’t have mattered what he said. Nothing could have excused his poverty of spirit. I went in the house and sat with Clara as she held Lisa. She was distant and polite. The whole thing was awkward.
Later, after Clara died and Paul had recovered from her death, he became the most sought-after bachelor in his community of senior citizens. It was Betty Wilder who told me this. (She was the mother of some friends of mine, and I had actually lived at her house a number of times.) Betty also told me that Paul had told anyone who would listen that the day I had brought Lisa over he’d run me off with a rake. Such a deceitful boast. And so dreadful.
Then when I returned from Idyllwild I was staying at my father’s house for a month as I looked for a place to live. Knowing I was there Steve came over to my parents’ to get the painting I had made for him that long-ago summer when we were seventeen. My father and his wife had already left for work and I had slipped into the bathtub with Lisa, so I didn’t hear the doorbell. It was my sister Linda who answered the door. And it was Linda who told him he couldn’t have the painting. She was outraged when she told me about it and, really, outrage was the best and only response. “How dare he come over here and ask for anything!” she exclaimed, adding, “Chris, I told him if I gave it to him, it would have been over his head. And then I told him how dare he come here and ask for anything!”
Hearing the way Linda responded to Steve’s slouching self-interest reminded me of who I was long before I had collapsed under the weight of everything. It did my heart good.
The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs Page 24
