The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (7 page)

My mother made sure our homes were clean and beautiful. She took her job as homemaker seriously, in a conventional Midwestern fashion. This expressed itself in an insistence that we play outside every day, watch limited hours of TV, go to bed early, and attend good schools. My mother was a fabulous cook with a repertoire that embraced world cuisines. Much of her creativity expressed itself in the dinners she cooked for us. (She made mixed-seafood scampi so well I’m still searching for a restaurant that comes even halfway close to hers.) I remember my mother sitting at the supper table in the late afternoons in Ohio, Colorado, Nebraska, and California, one leg curled up under her, reading and smoking while the dinner simmered. Cooking while reading, reading while cooking. We didn’t have much in the way of literary dinner conversation, but our meals were still filled with authors like Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Melville, Stegner, and Capote.

All her life my mother read good literature. She had a huge capacity for abstract thought, and I believe her greatest joy in life came from thinking and talking about expansive ideas. She had the kind of mind for bold, tide-turning thoughts, and would say things like, “Everyone in the world is going to have to deal with the fact of Nazi Germany in themselves.” I processed this phrase for years in an attempt to understand what that meant about my own life.

She was definitely brilliant in her own way, and I think she may also have been slightly autistic. She was angry that she’d had so many children and it often seemed that her main goal was to get away from us. We bored her. In later years, as her mental illness increased, my mother gained a great deal of weight and had a defensive disquietude about her. Her laugh was all-knowing and disdainful, and she would criticize everyone and everything, exhibiting a callous and distinctly ungenerous attitude.

At our house, there were never discussions about what the rest of us thought about things; my mother concentrated on her own thoughts and judgments. It was the time of feminism and she dove into her own search for meaning and identity. As a result there were big holes in my upbringing. I never had a desk for homework or a drafting table, much less an easel and art supplies. On the contrary, in areas where I showed talent and interest, my mother would either ignore or ridicule me. My mother wasn’t tuned in to her three younger daughters. She made meals and supervised us while we cleaned the house and mowed the lawn on Saturdays, but after that she clocked out to attend to her own world. She often worked to play all four of us against each other, comparing our talents and IQ scores. In truth, my mother nurtured only my oldest sister’s education, providing her with special foods, years of violin lessons, and long conversations about literature. She detested my father by the time we had moved to California, and chose my older sister Kathy as her intellectual partner. The rest of us were left to fend for ourselves. Considering her state, this kind of benign neglect wasn’t such a bad thing.

*   *   *

Like a crosscurrent, it was when the first of her four daughters hit adolescence that my mother’s mental illness would surface without retreat. After that, one by one, as we all came of age, she fell further into abusive behaviors toward us. My mother had experienced a terrible shattering of her childhood, and I imagine that our burgeoning sexuality with its promise of womanhood triggered a great panic and a sense of loss in her. She had protected us from it until she couldn’t anymore. Then her pain moved up through the seams of our homes, starting in Colorado, and began covering everything with dark layers of unspeakable outrage and sadness.

My mother was checked out. I think the newly evolving feminist movement spoke volumes to her and provided an escape route to abandon her family. My mother exchanged her family wholesale for an inspired identity as a feminist intellectual. Aloft and deluded, she went to college, eventually earning a degree with a double major in psychology and literature. She would retreat to her bedroom for hours to write papers at a big white desk that she’d painted and antiqued for herself. She put a bumper sticker on her car that said “Another Student for Peace,” choosing it over one that said, “Another Mother for Peace.” While she didn’t value herself as a mother, she also never challenged herself outside of school by developing a professional life. The line between her mental illness and what seemed like bad character wasn’t clear to me. As a teen, I just saw her as fraudulent.

My mother had such a deeply confusing combination of traits for me to understand; I felt bad about myself around her. She hated my creativity, my blooming sexuality, my friends, and my budding philosophies. She talked about adolescence in the most derisive tone, as if I should be embarrassed and even shamed by the fact that I was going through it. Every tender thing that was good about that age brought her ridicule and hatred into sharper focus. All of this took place in the midst of cooking wonderful, well-rounded dinners that she planned for and made every day, giving us a better life than she herself had ever known.

I had experienced the cozy safety and wonder of early childhood in a strong family context, but my teen years were a war zone. In my early twenties, when I was struggling with so much, Cindy, my best friend from the sixth grade, laid it on the line because she had been around our family enough to have seen everything. “I am really sorry to tell you but your mother had it out for you.” I wasn’t sentimental about a mother’s love; obviously I knew even more than she did about how awful my own mother had been. Yet what Cindy was saying with such sincerity confirmed what I knew, and I adored her for her courage to speak up with so much careful kindness. What I didn’t know then—and what she did know—was how good a mother could be.

The situation was clear to many. By the time I’d gotten together with Steve my mother’s eyes met mine with pure hatred. A friend from this time told me that she saw me as tough and sparkling, fragile and soulfully earnest. Some of my teachers at Homestead knew I had trouble at home but no one really understood mental illness then. I think they chalked it up to mother/daughter issues. After my father moved to another house and my older sister went off to college, my younger sisters and I lived a growing nightmare. Without those two at home there was no mitigating the cruelty and so my mother got worse.

My mother and Steve’s first meeting was disturbing. She began by sitting on the floor with us and acting like a teenager, flirting and competing with him over whose literary acumen was more developed, his or hers. It went downhill from there. Steve burrowed into himself and used words sparingly as he moved to hold his position. Soon after arriving, he left the house bristling with anger, and I was left dizzy and disoriented and wondering if I had lost him.

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I don’t blame my mother. As far back as I can remember my heart has been moved by the way her fragile immaturity and wobbly sense of personal identity combined with her great love of life. Prior to the availability of birth control a lot of women had children before they were ready. Ultimately, I valued the importance she always placed on truth and her exquisite, refined curiosity. I felt she was like an Olympic runner who handed us the dazzling torch of all her work before she was felled from the exhaustion of her cruelty. Yet back then, when she held the power in our home, she was brittle with brutality and self-hatred that she projected outward onto us. There was nothing we could do but escape.

I was in my mid-twenties when my mother was diagnosed with a hodgepodge of mental diseases that included paranoid schizophrenia, clinical depression, and bipolar disorder with episodes of psychosis. I don’t think anyone even knew the extent of it, and I wonder if it ever mattered what they’d called it, except that by naming such things it seems easier to have compassion. It would take me years to understand exactly how such terms might be translated into the behaviors we’d endured.

As the full cataclysm of my mother’s illness unfolded I worried that I would end up like her and this propelled my interest in all things healthy and alternative. And so it was at twenty-two that I made a plan for handling my own mental illness, should I see signs of it. Number one: I would be responsible for my own health. That became my first priority. Number two: I would not eat meat. Numbers three, four, and five: I would meditate, practice yoga, and work to stay connected to my ideals. I also thought—number six—that developing my own creativity was crucial for my health. I saw that my mother only read and critiqued, but never created anything outside of food, and even then she followed recipes. I understood that people who didn’t develop themselves through their creativity would end up redirecting that energy adversely.

These were my mantras—my self-appointed marching orders—and all that would pass for a life plan in my youth. It provided me with a curious, defiant security based on a stunning belief in my own internal resources. With this, I armed myself for destiny, come what may.

Before I left my mother’s home to live at my father’s, I remember being suspended in a recurring thought:
What if people were just good to each other? What if they only paid attention to what was needed, with deep-hearted common sense and a commitment to kindness for the common wealth?
It was a feeling from a dim radiance centered in my heart but it was without words. And because I didn’t have words for it, I developed that “love-in-community project” for years without ever understanding that such an important question was working and working in me. I didn’t know how to wrap my arms around my mother’s lovelessness, so I avoided her. But I got a second chance later, when I was faced with a similar level of unkindness in Steve, and was forced to navigate through it for our daughter’s well-being.

SIX

EDEN

Steve and I found our way into love that spring. We would kiss for hours, at the park and in his car, and we’d try very hard to name exactly what it was that made it so much fun. It was ineffable and we never did figure it out, and soon other things between us needed names, too.

When Steve visited my house he’d come directly to my bedroom so as to avoid my mother. I’d look up to see his sweet glowing face at my window and have to catch my breath. I can still see his eyes from that time—they were the kindest, softest eyes I had ever known. Steve was my sublime haven and I was happy in my skin when we were together.

As spring moved into summer, the four trellised columns on my front porch grew thick with star jasmine and filled the air with a humming fragrance. It was then that Steve and I decided to live together for the summer. This was 1972. I can’t recall who suggested it first, but I have a feeling it had to have been coconspiratorial, one idea shimmying its way into the air until we both said, “That’s it.” Neither of us had any ambivalence about the decision. We were determined and clear-eyed about the whole idea. The seventies gave us some permission and the rest we gave ourselves.

Soon after we’d made our decision I rode my bike to the local junior college where I found an ad on a bulletin board—one room in a cabin in the hills. It sounded perfect, but when I called the landlord he told me that he didn’t have space for a couple. I was really disappointed, but figured there was nothing to be done. Later, when I mentioned the missed opportunity to Steve, he surprised me by asking for the guy’s number.
Oh, really,
I thought, rifling through my purse for the scrap I had written it on. Long story short—Steve got us an interview, and this alerted me to something remarkable in him. This was a guy who could make things happen. And because of the way he’d asked for the number, I knew he knew it, too.

That weekend we drove in Steve’s orange Fiat to what was literally the last house on Stevens Canyon Road in Cupertino. We drove past Stevens Creek dam until the road narrowed into twisting two lanes that carried us deep into the woodsy mountains. We passed a lot of small cabins and a local tavern until finally we got to the last turnoff, a hundred feet before the road dead-ended at a footpath. Turning left, we found ourselves on a flat clearing, deep in a valley between some very high hills. Here stood four little cabins, hunkered down in the delicate sunlight. We drove slowly to the farthest cabin, passing an enormous pig in a muddy pen and lots of free-roaming chickens that clucked as they scattered out of our way. Four wild-eyed goats tiptoed in close on their hooves and eyed us as we got out of the car. It looked like some Appalachian back world of stillness and old things.

Alfonso Tatono greeted us with a mischievous smile, and beckoned us in. His house smelled musty. The first thing I noticed was a big white parachute draped from the ceiling down over the dark wooden walls to increase the lighting in a film project he was working on. We were awed. This was the home of a bona fide hippy. Al showed us around the cabin. The spaces were small and dark and well swept. He had furniture from the forties and fifties, and the accoutrement of the sixties and seventies, including found objects from nature. It was tidy with the kind of care that a man instills on his environment and very far from the ranch-style houses of the stultifying monoculture of the American suburbs we’d just left. I found it exciting and sort of awful all at the same time.

Al was in his mid-twenties and seemed worlds older than we were. He was studying film at San Jose State and working on a film about his Italian immigrant father. When Steve found out that Al had access to the university’s film library, he was very interested. As they chatted, I wandered around, wondering what it would be like to live there and sleep in the same bed as Steve. We must have done something right, because Al offered to take the roll-out couch in the living room so that we could have his bedroom for the summer.

It would be two weeks before we’d move to the cabin, two weeks in which I’d lay low and quietly observe the changes in my house. My mother peered at me from behind the scenes during this time, copping an attitude of indifference that seemed to me to betray the depths of her insecurity. I had stayed in her home without being wanted, buried at the bottom of a well of self-doubt, trying to survive her cruelty and cope with her mental illness. She had asked me to leave many times before, and had terrified me by saying she would drop me off at Haight-Ashbury. But now that I was finally going, she was oddly soft and disoriented. There was no wind in her for the hatred. No breath. No force.