Split

by Lisa Michaels

  I remember nothing of Boston or that visit with my father, but the flights—the coming and going—are etched in my memory. When my father bought me a ticket on the other end, he could afford only a youth fare, which required that I travel with an adult. Since he was staying on the ground in Boston, we searched the line at the boarding gate for someone who would pose as my parent. He gave me veto rights: no, not that one; no, she looks mean. I might have seemed like a little princess, weeding out the unsuitable escorts, but I felt a deep self-consciousness as the line snaked into the plane and my choices dwindled. Someone would have to take a shine to me, and in that judging light I felt scruffy and uncombed.

  We got right down to the wire. The flight attendant called out the last rows, and my father and I moved forward, scanning the crowd. A family with three kids passed by, all dressed in matching sportswear and laden with carry-on bags and stuffed animals. I would gladly have slipped in with their happy bustle, but my father didn’t bother asking if they cared to shepherd a fourth child. Next came a businessman, his garment bag slung over one shoulder, his head sunk in the paper as he inched forward. My father gave me a questioning look, but I shook my head. I knew a man like that wouldn’t have me. I might spill juice on his slacks; I would talk too much. I began a panicked dance from foot to foot, afraid of getting caught and being hauled off the plane, worried that I would never make it home to my mother. They made the final boarding call, and the two of us stood there hand in hand, momentarily paralyzed, when a woman came running for the plane, her trench coat flapping. My father nearly jumped on her—Ellen! It was someone he knew. Sure, she would sit with me. A quick kiss goodbye and we ran down the ramp, my father waving, smaller and smaller, at the gate.

  “Thank god she came along,” my father told me years later. “Your flight got grounded in Chicago by a snowstorm, and you had to spend the night in a hotel. Your mother called me in a rage when you didn’t get off on the other end. She thought I’d kidnapped you.”

  I remember nothing of this—not the storm or the grounding or the hotel. Only my father waving goodbye. I wonder if this was a blank made by banality or terror. I can imagine myself at five following that woman anywhere, curling up under the hotel bedspread and watching TV, letting her brush my teeth, say, or tuck my hair behind my ear before sleep. Or I might have been stiff with anxiety, knowing that I was stranded between parents, in a whiteout in the middle of nowhere, sleeping next to a stranger. That sense of disconnection, of floating in the free space between my mother and father, was one that would come to feel natural.

  Not long after that visit, Jim came home one day and announced that he had found a job. He’d be working for the Irrigation District, known around town as “the Ditch.” Although he had trained as an architect, Jim didn’t have high ambitions. His last drafting project, completed for a firm back in Boston, had been a multistory office building, slated for construction in the woods near Walden Pond. That job broke his heart. Jim believed in karma, instant and otherwise, so he looked around for work whose net effect on the universe seemed to be close to neutral. The ditch job fit the bill. People needed water, and the burden of maintaining the ditches needed to be shared. There was no profit involved; the fees were used to maintain the gates and sluiceways.

  Jim’s new job required some calculation of cubic feet over time, and a willingness to work at all hours of the night. The ditch boss, a gentle hulking man named Wayne, thought Jim was priceless because he wrote down the figures in tight draftsman’s numerals, never missed a day of work, and charmed the most codgerly of the town’s ranchers with his good-old-boy ways. Jim would lean on a fence post and listen to them go on about cattle blight or sugar levels in their grapes, and then he’d shake his head and offer a Southern nicety. “Well, I’ll be,” he’d say, or “Man alive!”

  Both Mother and Jim said that part of their pleasure in the country life was in the range of people around them: Mamie Watson, who had lived for eighty years in the same tin-roofed house and remembered when the Pomo Indians still lived in camps along the river; Jack Lease, an ex-NFL linebacker hobbled by old injuries, who had come back to his hometown to sell fish out of the back of his station wagon. Sprinkled among these native sons and daughters were people like themselves, back-to-the-landers who had come to the valley in search of respite from city life. One of their favorites was Alan Sarkissian, who lived in a little apartment across the street from us. Mother, who took a visceral delight in other people’s intelligence, declared Alan a genius. He designed and built a vacuum cleaner so powerful it could suck the hairs off a dog. He made his own telescopes, played Bach’s Goldberg Variations so beautifully it gave you goosebumps, and baked his own bread. When Ali Akbar Kahn’s sitar broke, he sent it to Alan for repair.

  I had expressed interest in making music, so my mother bought me a recorder. Alison went to a Waldorf school, and they had a whole classroom hour devoted to tweeting on those plastic flutes. They also spent a lot of time building birdhouses, singing along to Peter, Paul, and Mary, and making god’s eyes out of twigs and yarn. By the second grade, Alison had still barely heard of arithmetic.

  I was bucking to be transferred to Mountain Meadow, but Mother kept holding out, and I think the recorder was a consolation prize. As soon as I unwrapped it, I took it over to Alan’s house to show off, glad for an excuse to pester him. He greeted me with a gruff nod and let me lounge around his kitchen sounding out “Frère Jacques” and “Three Blind Mice.” Alan’s kitchen prefigured industrial chic. There was a table saw right next to the stove (both were kept meticulously clean, not a wood shaving or grease smear in sight), and the old coffee cans on the counter were full of cracked walnuts and raisins and washers sorted carefully by size.

  I worked my way around the room, trying to breathe into the center of each note, the way the instruction pamphlet had described. Alan looked pained. “Hey, listen to this,” he said, going quickly to his record collection and pulling an album gingerly from its sleeve. Before he set the needle down, he blew the LP clean with a tiny rubber bellows.

  I stopped my serenade. I had hoped Alan would be so bowled over by my talents that he’d let me play his sarod. It sat on a velvet cloth in the living room—a trapezoid of polished, inlaid wood with two layers of strings, which you struck with delicately balanced cherrywood hammers. I slipped the recorder casually into my back pocket, as if I had tired of it.

  Alan looked down as the record started, his head cocked to one side in anticipation. First, a few bright guitar chords, then Joni Mitchell came on, her voice swooping through the register. I sat down on his living-room floor with my nose in the liner notes. Alan smiled and went back to sanding a piece of wood, now and then sighting down its length in the light from the kitchen window.

  That December, Jackie, Alison, and Jacob moved out and took a bigger place up Spring Street. While their half of the house was vacant, Mother and Jim tore up the rickety porch and laid new two-by-fours, then got really zealous and ripped up the old water line to the street. They were out there digging a ditch on New Year’s Eve—never the types to risk their necks out on the road on such a night, or, god forbid, spend any money—when a smiling fellow with a bushy mustache walked up.

  “Looks like a piece of work there,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, we’re trying to polish this off before the holidays are over,” Jim said, leaning on his pick and sticking out his tongue in mock exhaustion.

  “Let me give it a whirl,” the man offered, and he slung the pick for a while, as they asked him this and that. His name was Grant, and he worked for Louisiana Pacific, which we should have guessed from his uniform: jeans, plaid shirt, steel-toed Redwing boots with fringe fanning out below the laces.

  “What brought you by here?” Mother finally asked him.

  “I heard you had an apartment for rent,” Grant said, “and I wanted to apply for it.”

  Apply for it. Mother and Jim chuckled at that one. The other folks who had come by to see the place h
ad pulled up on Harleys and asked if we minded them running a little bike-repair business out of the house. This, my mother said years later, really meant they would be selling dope and revving their bikes in the driveway at all hours of the night. Grant, on the other hand, had just dug a good two feet of water line by way of introduction. He moved into the apartment the next day.

  I had a bit of a crush on Grant. He had full, chipmunk cheeks and big white teeth and always treated me with polite affection. Though I was six and he was thirty-five, I held out hope that he didn’t see our age difference as insurmountable. My parents often sent me around the house to invite him over for dinner, and he would always stand on his porch for a moment, protesting gently, his hands tucked into his back pockets.

  Once he was seated with a plateful of food, I jockeyed over next to him and spent the meal watching his hands—long-fingered and clean, with oval nails—while he and my parents exchanged gossip. Grant had heard that the head of the board of supervisors, who took a hard line against sex education in the classroom, was running around with a seventeen-year-old girl from the high school. Jim mumbled something about a wealthy rancher who stole water in the middle of the night, then had the gall to stand in his wet fields in the morning and protest his innocence.

  “What do you think about Mizz Crumb’s paint job?” Grant asked my parents with a gleam in his eye. R. Crumb, the cartoonist, had a place on a ridge above the valley. His wife, Dana, carted their kids around in a Dodge station wagon with “Mother Trucker and Sons” painted in white script over the driver’s door, and “Kiss My Ass and It’s Yours” arched over the tailgate.

  “The PTA put the screws to her while you were gone,” Mother told him. “So she covered up ‘and It’s Yours’ with primer paint.”

  After dinner, Grant coaxed Jim into pulling out his slides of Asia. “Well, jeez,” Jim said, rummaging around in the trunk at the foot of the bed for a few trays, “y’all have already seen these a few times,” unable to conceal his pleasure at being asked.

  He set up the slide projector on a bookshelf in the living room, and while it was warming up, he made himself a martini in a cracked coffee cup—nearly pure gin, only a dash of vermouth, and a few Safeway olives—a drink he had come to love in his navy days. Once the slides were loaded, he dimmed the lights and stood with one leg up on a kitchen chair, sipping his drink and clicking his way through antiquity. The geometric complexes of Angkor Wat lifted out of the jungle, the courtyards filled with grass as bright as putting greens. His photographs were crisp and plain, so that the camera and the man behind it were nearly forgotten: a gold reclining Buddha as long as a railroad car, the temples at Khajuraho, Gaudi’s Barcelona apartments.

  Jim’s narration was mostly marked by appreciative silence. I tried to get the clicker away from him, so we didn’t have to savor each one. The buildings were impressive, but I was more interested in the people: the laughing Cambodian monks, the Thai farmer zipping down a dirt road on his motorcycle with a drunken pig strapped to the handlebars. Jim clicked quickly past these shots, as if they were of anecdotal interest, then past a close-up of subway tokens and keys against a geometric backdrop, and past a blurry slide of an Asian woman caught obliquely in a mirror.

  “Now let’s go back to that one,” Mother said, laughing in the dark. “Tell us a little about her.”

  Jim smiled and kept mum, clicking forward to the next palace. “I’ve got to have a few secrets left when we’re sitting on the porch swing,” he said.

  Those nights filter back with a velvety laziness. A belly full of pie. Grant stretched out in one of Floyd’s corduroy chairs. Our windows clicking on and off against the black valley air, as we pulled those faraway streets through the wall.

  At school, I soon learned how other families spent their nights. Half the recess chatter involved recounting the previous evening’s television shows—a whole world I knew nothing about. We must have been one of the few families in the valley that didn’t own a TV. I tried to play along, but at certain points I couldn’t hide my ignorance. My schoolmate Christine once asked me about a classic Brady Bunch episode, and when I said I hadn’t seen it she refused to let the subject go: “You must have seen it. The one where Bobby gets his first kiss and rockets go off?” She pressed on, and finally I blurted out the truth: “We don’t have a TV. My mother doesn’t believe in television.” A profound hush fell over the group around us, a line of prissy girls smocked up at their easels. I watched their faces shift through pity, incomprehension, and at last a slowly hardening scorn.

  Once I realized I was out of the loop, I savored any chance to soak up some of this precious medium. When my mother was called in to substitute teach in a neighboring town, I took the bus home with Harry Peck, a boy in my class, whose mother baby-sat me for a few hours in the afternoons. I loved this arrangement, because the Pecks had a television. Unfortunately, Mrs. Peck also had a lot of rules, principal of which was “Go play outside.” Outside was the tree house, which I had fallen out of early on and refused to revisit; a patch of neatly clipped lawn; and a gravel driveway. Inside was shag carpeting, candied nuts in a bowl, and a large color TV. I spent a lot of time on the porch, pressing my face against the window screens. Sometimes Harry’s mother relented and, after making us take our shoes off so as not to soil the carpet, let us watch cartoons.

  I lay on my stomach, slack jawed, oblivious to anything but those nineteen inches of glowing screen. Harry and his little brother quit watching the TV and started counting the number of times I blinked in a minute (barely enough to keep my corneas damp) and trying to rouse me with nasty remarks, to which—they told me later, incredulous—I made no response.

  When my mother came to pick me up I could barely hide my annoyance. I perfected a glacial donning of my socks and shoes—“All right, I’m hurrying!”—which I could make last for most of a Tom and Jerry episode, while my mother was forced to make polite conversation with Mrs. Peck.

  The hours that other families spent curled up in front of the TV, my family spent reading. At home, we often wouldn’t say a word all through dinner, each of us engrossed in a book or magazine tucked under the edge of our plate. I never thought this strange, until Christine, in a moment of rare generosity, invited me over to her house for dinner. No one, I noticed, was reading, but the family displayed a host of other odd customs. My friend kept one hand limp in her lap during the meal, as if it were useless, and she chewed with her lips sealed, breathing through her nose. From the saying of grace to Christine’s polite request to be excused at the meal’s end, I studied the goings-on with the curiosity of a traveler in a strange land. When I got home, I asked Mother and Jim to put the books away and teach me some table manners. “How about one night a week we do it the fancy way?” I asked them. They thought this was a hoot, but they obliged me. Jim pulled my chair out with elaborate courtesy, snapping a napkin open and laying it in my lap with a flourish. I made them talk me through the use of multiple utensils, and both of them dredged up a few arcane rules from their childhood dining rooms, laughing at being asked to remember petty matters of etiquette they had been so glad to shuck off.

  ***

  When I was in my teens, I looked back at our surroundings in those early years and thought they seemed deprived. But at the time everything served. The living room was furnished with Floyd’s old armchairs. Cigarette burns dotted the arms; I stuck my fingers through the brocade and pulled the stuffing out. Our bookshelves were slapped together out of two-by-tens; we drank out of old Mason jars and cracked coffee cups. My mother saved a ledger from those years, with our expenses tallied in her schoolteacher’s open hand. In one month: nine dollars spent on frivolity, which included postage stamps.

  If my mother remembers only our sunlit afternoons, I have returned with a similar selectivity to the difficult times. Loneliness was a kind of self-consciousness. Perhaps the etched quality of my darker childhood memories was produced by this sharper attention, and by my return to these periods over tim
e, setting the mind’s needle in the same groove and letting it run. I had cause, not long ago, to question my grim vision, when Grandma Leila gave me a box of old family photographs. Some my mother had entrusted to her before we set out west, others had been posted from the valley before they lost touch. In square after white-bordered square I am smiling, antic, at times that I remember as full of disruption.

  In one snapshot from our first months at the house, Alison and I stand on the half-dead lawn under the walnut trees. I am wearing a pink wool A-line dress, which I loved for its one remarkable accent: three sets of brass buttons descending down the front, with a length of cheap gold chain strung between each pair. I am coy for the camera, one hand cocked on my hip. Alison is bent forward, both hands on her knees, trying to look winning, her overbite clamped down on her lower lip. Behind us is my bed, a metal frame, which Mother had dragged into the yard and spray-painted pink to match the new pink comforter she had ordered from Sears. In the background: dried-up hedge, the cagework of the bare bed, piles of scrap lumber, and a mangy dog gnawing its leg. When I was in high school, and mooning for a suburban tract home, I could barely stand to look at that picture. The yard seemed pitiful. And the sight of my five-year-old self, happy with so little, filled me with shame. But if I scrape down through the teenage heartbreak, I see that I was delighted then by a coat of paint and a cheap comforter, by my mother’s transformative powers. The pity in thinking we lived in scarcity is laid over this memory like a fake veneer. That bed made me feel lucky. I danced around the yard, watching as the dull metal turned rose.

  Four

  I WAS GETTING my footing it seems, newly dubbed Lisa Marie, making a few friends at school, and mooning over my second-grade teacher, Miss Shelpie, who wore her raven’s-wing hair in a bouffant and who turned up one Monday with a ruddy glow and the announcement that from now on we were to call her Mrs. Kelber. Mrs. K. was doing a fairly good Jackie Kennedy imitation, out there in a drab schoolroom in the middle of a lazy farming town. She wore capri pants and kept her desk immaculate—paper clips laid neatly in their well, pencils needle-sharp—and didn’t so much teach as she did model, in front of the freshly swabbed blackboard, the form and bearing of a proper grownup person.