Part 2

Sunnyvale; The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family
by Jeff Goodell

(Page 2 of 2)

To me, divorce felt more like a step into the modern world than a breaking of a sacred covenant. In the late 1970s, it seemed like everybody we knew was splitting up-it was the romantic equivalent of the Pet Rock craze. My uncle Bob, who wore leather sandals from Tijuana and told jokes about traveling salesmen who got the clap, had ended his marriage with his go-go boot-wearing wife, Sheila, and taken up with a series of flashy women. My best friend's father, a building contractor who kept tightly rolled joints in the ashtray of his van, ran off with a dental hygienist. Even my uncle Dick, a straitlaced mid-level manager at Hewlett-Packard, split with his wife and took up with a succession of free-spirited female companions.

My mother did her best to make the divorce seem like a rational and sensible decision. She told us that it was no reflection of her feelings for us, that she and my father still loved us deeply, and that they would both continue to be parts of our lives.

Jill was the only one of us who showed any emotion: Her eyes welled up, and she ran out of the room. My mother followed her.

I looked over at Jerry.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

We stared at the wall for a moment.

"This is no big deal," I said.

"Yeah," he said.

"It doesn't mean anything."

"I know."

Then Jerry went into his bedroom and put on a Van Halen album and that was the end of it.

Or so I thought. At some point, as I sat there in the family room, staring at those massive hearthstones, it dawned on me that there had been only four people present for the announcement, not five: Where was our father? He prided himself on always being there for his kids, no matter what. I couldn't believe he would dodge an important moment like this.

But he had. Later, my mother explained to me that my father was too torn up to face us and thought it'd be better for everyone if he wasn't around when she broke the news. I was not sympathetic. In fact, I thought it was cowardly.

When my father turned up the next day-he just pulled into the driveway in his white Chevy El Camino as if he'd run to the store for a carton of milk-he tried to act like it was no big deal, but even I could see how busted up he was inside. For a family man like my father, a man who had put all his eggs in one basket, so to speak, and carried that basket around for twenty years, this was the worst thing that could have happened to him. So he pretended it wasn't happening. He told us that he and my mother were "separating," but that he hoped things would work out. I nodded and shrugged and avoided looking him in the eye, afraid of what I might see. I couldn't believe that the man who often held me responsible for my actions was dodging responsibility for his own.

A few weeks later, Jerry and I took off on a trip to Europe that we'd planned for months. On the flight to London, Jerry and I hardly talked about the divorce. I think he believed that when he returned home, our mother and father would have worked it out and everything would be back to normal. I knew that wouldn't be the case. I knew it was over, but I didn't care. I thought breaking up a family was like breaking up with a girlfriend: There would be a few months of mooning and heavy hearts, then we'd move on.

Jerry got homesick and flew back after about four weeks in Europe. I stayed four months, rattling around with my backpack and Eurail Pass. I'd planned to go to India, but the farthest east I got was Istanbul; overland travel across Iran was extremely dangerous for Americans at the time, and I was too poor to fly. Instead, I spent a month crawling around ancient ruins on the Turkish coast. At a café in Marmaris, I ordered a peculiar-looking dish that I thought was roasted eggplant but might well have been decomposing eggplant, contracted dysentery, and headed home.

When I returned, I was greeted with a surreal sight: The family portrait was just as it had been when I'd left-big house, big fireplace, two dogs, my mother cooking dinner, Jill and Jerry battling over the TV-except my father had been airbrushed out of the picture.

Years later, I learned that when my mother had told my father she wanted to split up, his initial reaction had been disbelief. After all, he had just finished building a new upstairs addition, including a spacious bedroom suite. (It was a typically well-intentioned but clueless gesture, as if there were no problems in their marriage that a bigger master bath wouldn't fix.) He accused my mother of sabotaging their marriage and stealing his family from him, but his anger was brief and shallow because he knew it wasn't true. They were splitting up not because she had fallen in love with someone else but because she was bored. As my mother told me years later, "I wanted to dance." She meant that literally and metaphorically, and my father knew it. At one point, he fell to his knees and promised my mother that if she stayed, he would jazz up their lives; as proof, he offered to take her to Tahiti for a week. She declined.

Finally, my father decided that the best thing to do was give my mother some space. So while Jerry and I were in Europe, he moved into a two-bedroom condo in Cupertino. He believed his departure was only temporary-a matter of a few months, maybe-before my mother came back around. The condo was bike-riding distance from our house in Sunnyvale, but it was a different world-a lonely and anonymous place with a small kitchen window that looked out over a concrete side yard, and dark bedrooms with shag carpet and flimsy doors. It had no fireplace, just forced-air heating.

I was in no rush to visit my father after I returned from my trip. A week passed, then another; finally my mother practically begged me to stop by and see him. Out of respect more for her than for him, I agreed.

When I arrived, my father's eyes lit up. He invited me in, and we sat at the small rectangular table in the kitchen and drank instant coffee. He was still a young man-he'd just turned forty-three-but he looked as if he'd aged ten years in the four months since I'd seen him last. He was a person who thrived on fresh air and sunlight; in the condo, he lived like a caged bear. His shoulders were always brushing against walls, his eyes drifting toward the window, searching for soft, green space and finding only cyclone fence, concrete, and telephone wires.

"So you had a good time in Europe?" he asked.

I nodded and gave him a quick review of my trip-the Eiffel Tower, the midnight sun in Norway, the Alps. Recounting this for my father was all the sweeter because I owed him nothing for it-I'd paid for the trip myself, out of money I'd earned doing odd jobs. My father listened, slurped coffee, nodded. He didn't care about my trip. He cared that I was there, sitting across from him at his kitchen table, telling him about it.

When I finished, my father picked at a callus on his palm. I could see he was working himself up to something. Finally, he said, "What's new with your mother?"

About the Author

Jeff Goodell came of age in a time and place defined by the technological revolution. In Sunnyvale, he describes the emergence of the digital era along with his own family's struggles to navigate the waters of social and personal change.