* * *
After returning to the Bay Area, Lisa and I moved five times in two and a half years. I worked increment by increment to get Steve to give me money so that Lisa and I could live with strength and decency. There was every reason for Steve and me to join forces for the greatest outcome for our daughter. And though sometimes he gave as easily as fruit falling into the hand, more often he was harsh, demeaning, and unconscionably stingy. But still I returned to work with him to improve all our lives: Lisa and my material well-being, and Steve’s heart and soul. I didn’t know what else to do.
Each house we lived in was an upgrade, due to Steve’s providing small but increasing payments, until we came to live on Rinconada Avenue in Palo Alto, where we would live for ten years. At last Steve was coming closer to covering our real expenses. I am quite sure that it was his failure at Apple that brought him around to reflecting on doing better for Lisa and me … for a while.
* * *
Within the first four months after returning from Tahoe City, Lisa and I moved three times as I tried to establish a safe and happy environment for us both. We moved from Los Trancos Woods to Menlo Park to East Palo Alto. I used a friend’s address so I could place Lisa into the Palo Alto school district midyear; I chose the alternative public school called Ohlone. It was well known that the Palo Alto school district was one of the best in the nation, yet I soon found myself alarmed by the school’s approach to early childhood education. Until this time, I’d had no idea that I had such strong feelings about education.
Ultimately it came to this: I never questioned my child’s intelligence and ability to learn, but I did question the emotional tone in the classroom and the school as a whole. And I didn’t like what I saw. So, at the end of Lisa’s kindergarten year, I placed her in a Waldorf school for her first grade. I always felt it was important to choose a school that reflected my value system, so I chose Waldorf because its stated goal is the protection of the emotional life of the child.
After a week at the Waldorf school all the toughness that Lisa had built up to protect herself from the hurt at “the best kindergarten in Palo Alto” dropped off of her. At her previous school, the “best kindergarten teacher” was paying kids with bright shiny toys to get them to read, and this was creating competition. Lisa, who by nature is extremely competitive, wasn’t ready to read and so had started to become mean to the weaker kids in the class because she felt so bad about herself. I saw Steve in this behavior and it alarmed me: they were both so good at competing. However, once Lisa was at the Waldorf school, she became the sweetest, softest, happiest little first grader. This was the school that promoted awareness for the integrity of the whole child, where love and respect was fostered in the classroom and on the playground. It was such a good environment that Lisa and her friends didn’t like breaking for vacations because they didn’t want to be apart from each other.
Within a few months of Lisa’s entering the Waldorf school, Steve had finally increased the monthly money so that we were able to move into a nice apartment in Palo Alto. It was so solidly built and well laid out that it felt like a home. My spirits were uplifted and I had a new sense of safety and overall well-being for us. Still, I often didn’t have enough money for food, rent, and Lisa’s private school, much less furniture and new clothing.
When I returned to the Bay Area from Tahoe I found freelance work illustrating for a magazine and also on a book about the English colonization of China. We had moved around so much that getting a full-time job was problematic, because I never wanted to leave Lisa for forty hours plus commute. I considered Lisa to be my job and added outside contract work doing illustration when I could find it. I also cleaned houses so I could bring in extra money, control my hours, and be there to pick her up after school.
One day Steve had his secretary call to ask if I would be willing and able to bring Lisa to an Apple event. It cannot be overstated that when a man puts money into his family, he starts to take an interest on a number of important levels. The invitation told me that Steve wanted Lisa to be a part of his life. I wanted to respond to his efforts so that he also felt respected and connected to Lisa. I took her out of school for the day and we went and sat near the front of a ridiculously large auditorium filled with Apple devotees to watch the opening. The presentation was overwhelming for Lisa, seeing her father on stage like that. And a new experience for me, too. Steve spoke so rapid fire that it felt as if I’d have to unfold my ears into two big dish antennas to capture it all to match his mind’s extraordinary acceleration. There wasn’t a wasted syllable or a missing beat in service to the logic of his presentation. It was an exhilarating river of pure content. No wonder people were so excited about him! Later when Lisa was older she told me how disturbing that day was for her. She felt it was too magnificent for a little girl to see her father like that. I would not have known better then. In many ways over the years I took actions to connect them to each other with the best intentions, though things didn’t always turn out the way I’d hoped.
It was a wonderful feeling to have the Waldorf community to return to after the Apple event. These were lovely people and many were very thoughtful, old-soul types who wanted to hear how it went. I remember being happy that Lisa was being so thoroughly cared for, that we had a community, and that I was no longer alone with my situation. I could share things, and these people were interested and interesting.
* * *
Soon after, Steve called and invited us for breakfast at his Saratoga house. It was a Saturday morning and I picked up berries on the way. Walking into his house, I was overwhelmed by the beauty and spaciousness. Beauty feeds me, but Lisa and I had been living so close to the stressful line of barely making it that my insides seemed to expand to acclimate to the beauty I had not experienced in a long time. This was the house I had seen in the pictures in Time. In Steve’s mind, it was very simple: he was entitled to all wealth. We were not. I numbed myself to keep my rage in check. It was easier to push down than to confront him. Standing in his kitchen, I pointed to his espresso machine and made a distracting comment to help me stuff my sorrow. He said, “I am never going to use that again!” Indicating that Steve on espresso was a very bad idea. Whew, I could imagine! He then showed us the rest of his expansive two-story house. He’d had a sauna put in and talked about how very important it was for him to relax. His casual indifference to our needs made me feel like we were the orphans.
After a breakfast of berries, nuts, and homemade bread with jam and fresh-squeezed orange juice, we all went for a walk and Steve began excitedly to tell me that he had found his mother. And once he had found her, he discovered that he had a wild red-haired younger sister who was a writer living in New York. He put his hands up around his head to show how big the sister’s hair was and I pictured something like a deep red Afro.
I got so caught up in what he was saying that we stopped walking. The conversation required all focus. Since we were standing still, Lisa tried her hand at climbing up the twelve-foot embankment that rose up from one side of the paved road. We were in the shade, and the embankment led up to someone’s backyard in the wealthy Saratoga area. The sun behind the leaves up on the embankment made it look like a stained glass window of nature. I could see why she wanted to get up there. Lisa herself was only about forty-five inches high and could only get up four or five feet, before she’d peel back off to try it again. It was a noble effort. I held my arms out to guard against a possible tumble as Steve continued with his story. He told me that his sister’s name was Mona. I thought it was a beautiful old-fashioned name, and it told me that their mother had poetry in her. But to me it was also like “mono,” as in one child. I’ve wondered since what she would have named her son had she kept him. Surely not “Steve” with all those electrified es.
Steve told me that his parents had married after he’d been adopted. As he kept on with his story, I hardly had time to consider what that must have meant to him. The forward movement of a narrative has a
way of minimizing the deeper realities. In recounting this conversation now, the grievousness of his loss nearly immobilizes me. How can he find a way to live with such knowledge and the particular sense of abandonment it must have generated in him? There were journalists writing articles at that time about how the hyperactivity in Silicon Valley was connected to the avoidance of the feelings around death. I think, in Steve’s case, it was more like the avoidance of the feelings around birth and the mother. Maybe it all comes down to the same thing.
Steve was smiling and turning his hands in the air as he related his tale because now he had relationships with these two people, the mother and the daughter. I was incredulous. “How did you find your mother in the first place?” I asked. For as long as I had known Steve it had been such a giant issue. Now that he stood on the other side of it he told me that he had just called the doctor on his birth certificate. It was simple and straightforward. I wondered why he had not done it before.
When he called the doctor, who was by then retired, Steve told him he was Steve Jobs and asked if he could tell him who his mother was. After he had explained everything, the doctor apologized, saying, “I’m sorry, son, I have delivered hundreds of babies, I just don’t remember you.” And then, just like Steve, Steve said, “Look, I’ll give you my contact information. Please take it and if you remember anything, anything at all, just write or call me.” The doctor agreed to do so and took it all down and they said good-bye. (This was all before e-mail!)
Steve was animated and he spoke as if opening presents, the next more fantastic than the last. And all the time we were talking, Lisa was making runs for the top of the embankment with a confident little smile on her face at each try. Her attempts were worthy and reflected well on my former mountain climber boyfriend, who had taught her how to do it the right way, because not only was Lisa charging for it, she was applying skill, too. She aimed high, trying to get to where it was bright and beautiful; it dazzled me, too.
He went on to explain that the doctor had written him a letter the moment they got off the phone: “To Steve Jobs in the event of my death…” it began. In it, the doctor explained that he did know who Steve was and that his mother had lived with him and his wife during the last months of her pregnancy through to the delivery. The doctor revealed the mother’s name and signed and addressed the letter and put it in his top desk drawer. That night the doctor had a massive stroke or heart attack (I don’t remember which), and died. And Steve got the truth of his history.
Whoa! My mind jammed with so many thoughts we just stared at each other silently. Eventually I asked point-blank, “What did you do, kill him?!”
A little part of me wondered if he was lying about it all because how would I ever know? I couldn’t quite get a read on his expression, but it didn’t seem as if he was lying. Maybe the doctor was only waiting for Steve’s call, I reasoned silently, so that he could move on. In general, things like this did happened around Steve, and honestly, they happened a lot. Certainly his fast rise onto the world stage had some shenanigans behind it, but this was going too dark and too far. I was left with the disturbing question of what it might be to even innocently interfere with his trajectory.
Steve was always clear that he never intended to meet his biological father. He was afraid the man had weaknesses and would try to use him for his money. It was like Steve to have hunches and even pure clairvoyance about people and circumstances. But his comments about his biological father also had the quality of a bugaboo to my tired ear. Steve had a precious sense of himself and it was exhausting. The word “untouchable” comes to my mind: Steve as the golden boy who thought his own father was unworthy of him. It’s well known that Steve’s birth mother put him up for adoption because her father didn’t like Steve’s biological father. Steve’s biological grandfather didn’t want his grandson, either. Funny how that kind of pattern replicates itself.
I found out later through written accounts that Steve shook his biological father’s hand, while both were unaware of the truth of who they were to each other. It was in the father’s restaurant, which Steve frequented, that respect between them was formed. He’d just found his way to him. I like to think that Steve and his father recovered some of the missing peace through that handshake.
That day in Saratoga, Steve shone when he talked about his biological mother, “My mother is like a grad student!” He must have told me this about fifteen times, which made me suspicious. I find that when people repeat messages they’re trying to numb the real truth of what they’re facing by overwhelming the mind with the verbal repetition. Or they are trying to give their own self a message they can’t or don’t want to hear yet. I didn’t quite know what it all meant to him, but as I had always considered the Jobses more like grandparents, I can imagine that the contrasting liveliness of this intellectually youthful woman must have been terrifically impressive to Steve. Continuing brightly, he told us that his sister Mona Simpson’s book, Anywhere But Here, had been on the bestseller list for twelve weeks.
This truly was a fractured fairy tale of magnificent proportion.
Later that week, as soon as we had a spare moment, I took Lisa with me to Printers Inc. Bookstore in Palo Alto to find Mona’s book. I couldn’t afford to purchase one, so we sat on the floor poring over Mona’s black-and-white author photograph. A connection had been made to the lost family. I don’t know what it meant to Lisa, who was by then six. She was just getting to know about this thing called her own father. But we sat excitedly together and I narrated my thoughts as I worked to find Steve in Mona’s face. Lisa was so cute as she pointed things out with me. We talked about the fact that Mona didn’t have an Afro as Steve had implied. Because of Mona’s freckles and her big bright crystalline spider-lashed eyes I could not see any resemblance. “They don’t really look alike,” I shared with Lisa. But a few years later Mona, Lisa, and I took a trip to Montana and there, talking late into the night with her, after Lisa was asleep, I finally did recognize her jaw and the upside-down look of Middle Eastern lips to be exactly like Steve’s. It took a darker room for me to look past the coloring and into their shared bone structure and lip contour and finally see their resemblances.
* * *
Lisa was going to the Waldorf school when the story of Steve’s firing from Apple hit the newspapers. I remember that the parents at the school were so sympathetic and scandalized by the raw facts of Steve being ousted from the company he’d started. “Poor man,” they exclaimed. “This is just not right! It’s just not fair!”
I had two thoughts on the matter: that Steve has always been remarkable in his capacity to capture people’s hearts (not the least of which was my own), and that if he was as terrible to the people at Apple as he was to Lisa and me, he probably deserved what happened to him. I was impressed with Sculley for managing to do it. But I kept these thoughts to myself during that time. I wouldn’t have known how to speak the whole complex truth of who he was, and no one was listening anyway. I knew even then that I was dealing with a huge cultural bias. This is a man’s world and the Waldorf school was no different than anywhere else. And so it was with the Waldorf parent body that I was learning to listen without comment. Compassion is such a refreshing and wonderful thing, and since nobody could possibly have imagined how awful Steve was, I would just nod to the lovely sense of care directed toward him. This school was at heart a wisdom society and these people had taught me to listen and so when I was at my best, I stayed silent and held dual realities in appreciation of kindness for its own sake.
* * *
Not long after he left Apple, Steve sold the Saratoga house and moved permanently into his Woodside home. This brought him closer to us, and with more free time, he spent more of it with us and as a result saw where he could help out more.
Steve confided to me, “It was terrible going to work every day right before I got kicked out because everyone hated me.” He then told me that Sculley had gone around talking to people to get a consensus against h
im. Hearing him speak like this made me empathetic toward him; he was honest and I could feel how hurt he felt. I silently pictured all the work Sculley had to do to sow the seeds, group by group, to get the people on board to agree to get rid of Steve. Yet this is what Steve had done to me, except far, far worse and when I was pregnant with our child. I wondered how he could be so stupid as to assume blind loyalty from me when he had none for me.
Over the next year, I observed that Steve wore his failure with so much grace that my memory floated back to the poem he had hammered to the side of the door when we were living together in the summer of ’72. He wrote something about pain causing our senses to rise, and for years I would return to those words. I didn’t really understand what he meant because I had been dulled by everything Steve had put me through, but I think for him, pain was transcendent. This was the imbalance between us. He took too much and I should have taken more.
* * *
It was a little past a year since we heard of Mona’s existence that Steve brought her over to meet us. After that began a very long relationship where Mona worked to do well by me for Lisa in many ways. But there were little betrayals that didn’t so much diminish my affection as sharpen my curiosity: what did these two brilliant sibs have going on that was so problematic for me?
Both Steve and Mona had public lives, and when they spoke, they sometimes created impressions that weren’t true. When Mona wrote about the mother in her novel based on Steve called A Regular Guy, people believed it was me. The mother images in Mona’s books tend to be horrendous, and because she’d captured Steve so well, people assumed that under the thin guise of fiction, she had also captured me. Many of Mona’s books play out the theme of abandonment, particularly by the mother. It’s tricky, because a writer has to be able to write her fiction, but that book has shadowed me and my daughter with a false overlay.
The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs Page 27
