Split

by Lisa Michaels

  We soon got to know our neighbors, who through Floyd’s gentlemanly exit were allowed to remain in the back half of the house. Jackie Rider was full-blooded Choctaw, with unnerving composure and striking beauty that she didn’t make much of: hair as shiny as obsidian, high cheekbones, and almond eyes. She padded around the house barefoot and wore faded Levi’s that hugged her narrow hips. Jackie was in nursing school, and worked a night-shift job. Her husband, Roger—whom my parents called Roger Dodger—was blond and bearded and worked as a lumberjack. Roger often spent his evenings at the bar down by Hunter’s Store, where men stopped by during deer season to load up on beer and bullets, their four-wheel-drives spattered with mud, their gun racks full.

  The Riders had two kids, a son named Jacob and a daughter, Alison, who was my age. She and I became instant friends. In the scorching afternoons, we would walk down to Madge’s Motel and pay ten cents to swim in the pool. When Madge wasn’t upstairs sleeping off a bender, she would lean her head out of the snack door and peddle stale Fritos and orange pop. We’d spend change filched from our mothers’ purses on red licorice, splash around the shallow end, and then dry ourselves facedown on the hot concrete until our bodies were dented by pebbles. On Saturdays, Alison and I would walk farther down Spring Street and lean into the smoky bar, listening for Roger’s voice amid the clack of pool balls and high laughter. After a few beers he was a soft touch for candy money.

  Once in a while, Alison and I would get in a nasty spat and run to opposite ends of the house. It was hard, though, to hold a grudge in such close quarters. Our bathrooms were divided by a flimsy wall, and when we were on good terms we shouted conversations through the plasterboard until our mothers told us it was not allowed. Since we had to play in the same yard, we developed a ritual for mending our rifts. When boredom got the better of fury, one of us would signal to the other with a knock on the bathroom wall. Then we’d pace the narrow concrete sidewalk beside the house, stand back to back, and take turns saying we were sorry. This system worked because we each had to travel the same distance, and we didn’t have to look at each other while we ate what Jim called “humble pie.”

  Once, after we had made up and were leaning against the garden fence, Alison told me that her father had suggested a better way to finish the conflict: she should walk the path as planned, wait until I turned around, and then hit me in the side of the head with a roundhouse. Alison was a scrappy little thing, but she was smart. By ignoring his advice, she had proven her loyalty, but at the same time she put me on notice that she had official permission to clean my clock.

  I regarded Roger with a certain suspicion after that, but not long after we moved in, he lived up to his nickname and disappeared. Jackie had her nursing degree by then, and was pulling night shift in the emergency room. The kids were left mostly to their own devices. Alison found Jacob a nuisance and tried to keep him at bay, but she cooked him breakfast every morning while her mother slept in, and dinner every night after her mother left for work. I was in awe of her easy competence with the gas stove; she would stand on a chair and grill slice after slice of perfectly browned French toast. Walking in her mother’s shoes actually sustained her for a while—she had a grownup’s common sense, which I noticed and paid its due—but eventually it exhausted her. Late at night, after dinner was eaten and the dishes washed, she would curl up on the couch with her dirty flannel blanket, one hand tucked deep in her armpit, the other curled at her mouth. That thumb, wrinkled from spit, forced her front teeth out over the years into a hungry overbite.

  Jacob was molasses eyed and docile. He often wore a look that I can still see now: so full of uncomplicated faith in whatever was befalling him, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to take him under my wing or do him some senseless harm. He was stocky, but his hair was fine and curled at his neck. His little hands, when I held them, were damp in the creases. I remember thinking no one should be that sweet, and of course he didn’t stay that way. He grew to over six feet, stopped talking to us, and spent his days shooting squirrels with a BB gun. But when he was little, Jake circled us like a dark moon. Because he didn’t say much and never objected to our ministrations, he became the prized son in our daytime games of house. I would trade Alison a pack of gum for the right to be his mother, because he would actually eat small portions of the mud pies I baked. He sat on the dirt pile, a tin pan in his lap, and chewed methodically, delicately spitting pebbles into his palm and placing them at the edge of his plate like fish bones.

  When Jackie was home, I often read her silence as annoyance at my presence, always aware that I was the child of the rent collector. Alison once dared me to sneak us a piece of bacon from the oven, while her mother sat reading in the next room. She squatted next to me grinning encouragement while I eased open the oven door and picked out a slice, then ran and told her mother what I’d done. Jackie ordered me home, steely fury in her eyes, and I saw it like a headline as I raced around to my mother’s kitchen: Landlords’ Kid Steals the Bacon!

  My other yard mates, the Chapmans, lived in the stucco house beside ours. Like the Riders, they were another fatherless family, Mr. Chapman having run off years before. Mrs. Chapman, or Tillie, as everyone called her, was an enormous woman who lived in a housedress and thongs and never went out except to go to church. She had three kids. Daniel, the oldest, hulked about in discomfort at their diminished situation. He worked nights even while in high school, and since we all acknowledged he would not be long with us, he became a kind of vaporous presence. Tillie’s two daughters, Charlene and Jill, spent their summer afternoons out on the rickety picnic table in the yard. Charlene, the older one, was curvy and slow moving. Her hair fell like a brown pelt down her back, full of lights. Jill was wound tighter. She had catlike reflexes, buck teeth, and a quick laugh. After school I would find them side by side on the picnic bench, combing their feathered hair and pressing their eyelashes back so they stood up for a few seconds like black tiaras.

  Tillie would not let them wear mascara, but she would let them do just about anything else. On their birthdays, she banished them from the house and spent a whole day in the kitchen, emerging around sundown with her face spackled a moist rose, holding a tinfoiled board high above her head. Down on the picnic table came her creation: a cake with a bas-relief bunny rabbit fleeced with coconut, lifting one paw above a patch of candy corn. The frosting was vivid with food coloring. (She kept those tear-shaped vials lined up in her spice rack, as handy as sugar or salt.) We all sighed with admiration, and Tillie beamed and cut us each a huge slab. Beautiful as it looked, the cake left a bitter clog on the tongue.

  These creations were only an elevated version of the Chapmans’ staple fare: sugar and starch. Even though my mother plied Tillie with vegetables from her garden, I never saw a green or living thing pass through that family’s lips. The girls often took their dinners outside and ate under the shade of the old walnut tree. Dinner might be tuna casserole topped with crumbled potato chips, or one slice of bologna on a hamburger bun, held together by a deep slick of mayonnaise. I sat on the end of the picnic table, slavering over those sandwiches, until Jill said I looked like an urchin and shooed me off. The day my mother let me buy the ingredients at the corner store and make one for myself stands out as a moment of singular gustatory pleasure: the sweet tang of white bread and fat and processed meat.

  I realized then that I had been snowed by my mother, who had convinced me that powdered vitamin C mixed with water was a fitting dessert. One glass made the glands at the back of my jaw ache, but I begged for that stuff, and didn’t even ask for honey to cut the sting. That was before Charlene and Jill gave me an education of the palate. When we played house they fed me spoonfuls of “baby food” from their mother’s Tupperware cups: powdered sugar and cocoa mix, which dissolved slowly on my tongue like sweet ashes. Once they’d gotten hold of me, I couldn’t look at our home-cooked meals in the same way. Mother grew most of our food in the garden—broccoli and kale, corn and green peppers—and s
erved it up with steak and lamb chops and liver. And she made our bread—dark, of course, and studded with grains of whole wheat—and bought our milk from the local dairy. We’d take glass gallon jars down to Conway’s Farm and wade through the cow shit and into a room with a huge silver tank where the milk flowed from a tap. Back home, Mother set the jar on a chair in the kitchen for a few hours, then dipped a length of rubber tubing into the risen cream and siphoned it off into a bowl. It all seems the picture of prairie virtue now, but at the time I wished for macaroni and cheese, cabinets full of potato chips and cookies, breakfasts of Lucky Charms.

  Three

  IN THE SUMMER of 1971, when I was nearly five, my father was released from prison. (He had been given six months off his sentence for good behavior.) Friends of his were living on a commune in Oregon, and they invited him to spend some time there sorting himself out. He came west, as soon as he was free, and picked me up from my mother’s house.

  We took a bus up to Eugene, and a friend from the commune gave us a lift out to the property—acres of dry grass and scrub oak. The commune members were roughing it—no running water, no electricity, just a few dilapidated houses at the end of a long dirt road.

  My father’s attempt to unwind in the woods was a disaster. The sudden move from a cell to the wilds seemed to leave him nervous and unsettled. The first day, he tried to play the hip nudist and got a terrible sunburn. Then he drank some “fresh” spring water and spent three days heaving in the outhouse. I stayed indoors with him while he recovered, making him tell me stories. “Me and nature never got along,” he said.

  But as the days drifted on, we settled into the place. My father taught me to use a BB gun in the field beside the commune’s main house. Arms around me from behind, he cheered when we shot the faded beer cans off the stump. “Sock it to me,” he said, holding out his enormous olive-colored palm. We ate homemade bread and black beans, and swam naked in the creek flowing through the property.

  One afternoon we wandered into one of the many rough-framed buildings on the property to take shelter from the heat. Cinder-block and knotty-pine bookshelves lined the walls. A sink and countertop unit pulled out of a remodeled kitchen shored up one wall. There was no running water; spider webs stretched from the tap. On the drain board sat a propane stove, and beneath it, on the floor, were jugs of cooking fuel and water.

  My father moved to the open door, raised his arms up to the door frame, and stretched like a cat. He was there in body—a body honed by hours in the weight room, on the courts playing ball with the other prisoners—but in another way he was fitfully absent. He circled the room slowly, traced a pattern in the countertop’s dust—not pent-up, but aimless, as if he had lost something and didn’t know where to search. I squatted near the sink, playing with a set of plastic measuring cups, and watched him closely. He moved through the doorway—for a moment framed by light, a dark cutout of a man—then passed out of view.

  The dry air made me thirsty, and I decided to have a tea party. I went outside to see if my father wanted to play, and found him sprawled under a large oak tree near the door. He was staring up at the leaves, his hands spread open in the air above him, and didn’t answer at first.

  “Do you want some tea?”

  He raised his head, and his eyes slowly focused, placing me. “No thanks, honey.”

  I went back into the shack and filled two of the cups from a jug on the floor. I pretended to have a partner for my tea and chatted with him awhile before drinking from my cup, thumb and forefinger on the short handle, my pinkie raised high.

  From the first sip I could tell something was wrong. The water burned my tongue, and when I opened my mouth to scream, all the air in the room was gone. I spat out what I could and yelled, feeling a white heat unfurl down my throat. My father dashed in, smelled my breath and the spilled gas, and scooped me up from the floor. He ran with me toward the spring, and over his shoulder I watched the shack jiggling smaller and smaller in the field. It seemed lonely, canted off to one side on its foundation, like a child’s drawing of a house. The dry summer hay swayed like the sea, and I heard his breathing, ragged as surf.

  When we reached the spring, a bearded man was there filling a green wine bottle. Water spilled down a rock face into a pool bounded by ferns and moss. My father gasped out the story and together they hovered over me, making me drink from the bottle again and again. “That’s good,” they said. “You’re doing really good.” My father stroked my hair. And though I was full and wanted to stop, I tipped my head back and drank for him.

  That night we stayed in the main house. My lips and throat were chapped and burning. I began to have visions. A crowd of ghosts led by a goateed figure marched with torches through the room. I told this to the grownups and they seemed alarmed. Some of the other people staying at the house lit extra kerosene lanterns to soothe me, but I could still see the figures. The leader looked furious, driven, his whole body straining forward toward some unknown mission.

  My father moved with me to a bedroom upstairs and held me in a worn corduroy armchair, talking softly, telling me stories of what we would do together when it was light. The vagueness I felt in him during the day had disappeared. He was dense, focused, his legs pressed long against the sides of the chair, his arms around me heavy and still. I sat in his lap, leaning into the rise and fall of his chest. In my last moments of delirium, I closed my eyes and saw his body supporting me like a chair, the long, still bones, and under him the real chair, fabric stretched over wood, and all of this twenty feet above the ground on the upper floor of the house, held up by the beams and foundation, and beyond that the quiet fields, silver under the moon, alive with animals, the punctured cans lying still by the stump. I saw us perched in the center of this, neither safe nor doomed, and in this unbounded space I fell asleep.

  When he dropped me off after the commune visit, my father never mentioned the business with the gasoline—worried, I’m sure, that my mother wouldn’t let him see me again. And since he didn’t mention it, neither did I.

  But if I felt at times undersupervised, it was this same freedom that stands out as one of the pleasures of my childhood. On the weekends, Mother let me ride my bike down Spring Street and didn’t expect me back until dinnertime. The whole town knew me and would haul me home if I was in trouble. One Saturday, when Alison and I tried to shoplift from the corner store, we found out what a fishbowl we lived in. We had already succeeded in filching penny candy on a few occasions, and we were ready to try for bulkier goods. While Alison asked a question of Mr. Shepherd at the register, I pulled a package of beef jerky from a peg below the counter and tucked it under my shirt. My gait went stiff as I headed for the door, my shoulders curled forward to hide the package. Somehow, I managed to slip by unnoticed. It never occurred to me that Mr. Shepherd might follow me out. I crossed the sill and stood there in the sunlight feeling invincible, already planning my next theft, when a hand clamped down on my shoulder and wheeled me around. I’ll never forget the look on his face. Not anger, but a tight-faced weariness.

  “Do you have something of mine?” he asked.

  His. I had never thought of it that way. I had been stealing from the store, not Mr. Shepherd, who called me honey and smoothed the front of his immaculate butcher’s apron while he talked. He had helped my mother and Jim, that first day in the valley, avoid a real-estate pratfall that would have landed me out on a dry mountainside without a friend in sight.

  I pulled the jerky out from under my shirt and held the package up by one corner. The meat looked like tree bark in its shrink-wrap casing—nothing worth eating.

  “Go on home,” Mr. Shepherd said. Home had never sounded so good. I hopped on my bike and raced down the sidewalk, trying to rid myself of the vision of Mr. Shepherd’s pinched face. But then I saw Mr. Shepherd pass by in his Bronco, headed toward my house. His arms were ramrod straight on the wheel, and he didn’t so much as glance in my direction. I stood up on my pedals and rode faster, hoping to ar
rive in time to give my version of the story. But when I tore up the driveway and threw my bike down in the gravel, Mr. Shepherd had come and gone. My mother was waiting for me on the porch, her face unreadable. She led me out into the yard, as if the fresh air would make things easier on us.

  “I don’t know why I did it,” I told her. My mind was a desert. Each blade of grass stood up in blank green toothiness before me. I watched an ant climb up the delicate groove in one blade, stop, turn, look down, head upward again. I forgot why we were sitting there, cross-legged, facing each other with our heads bowed like monks. Slowly, I reeled my mind in: trouble, I was in trouble, Mr. Shepherd, beef jerky, that black peppery tang.

  “I was hungry,” I said.

  This was a lie, but it served me. My mother had been on an errand while Alison and I pulled our heist, and the idea of leaving me without snack money gnawed at her conscience.

  “It’s not okay to steal,” my mother said. I would have to pay Mr. Shepherd for the dried meat and would be barred from the store for a month. Then my mother paused for a moment. “I’m sorry I didn’t leave you something to eat.” I began to believe my own lie: I was famished, my mother went off and left me without food. But then, deep in my rapture of innocence, I looked up at her face. She looked like she had a toothache: her cheeks were pulled in and her eyes narrowed. And though she tried to mask it, her guilt shriveled me. I bent forward and leaned into the hutch of her legs, breathing in dirt and the fresh scent of denim, and made a vow to give up my wickedness.

  In the games with Charlene and Jill, I was always the baby, but after a while I tired of this and began to visit the house of our nearest neighbors, who had two girls younger than me, Mare and Pippy. On their side of the fence I was the oldest, the one in charge. I don’t remember the girls’ family name, though that doesn’t surprise me now: surnames were the province of parents, and the mother and father in that house were too vague for names. They appeared once in a while at the porch rail to call the girls to dinner, like diplomats demanding extradition from a country they couldn’t enter and in whose territories they had little sway.