Split

by Lisa Michaels

  “I think there are different Gods for different people,” she said finally.

  I tried to figure out what she meant by this—if she was hedging—and as I pondered I stared at a conical straw hat that hung over the refrigerator. Jim had brought it back from China; he said the people there wore them when harvesting rice. I used to wear the hat around the yard, playing peasant. The brim was so low it blocked out the horizon, leaving you with a view of the shady circle at your feet. Now, in the kitchen, trying to plumb my mother’s silence, I stared at its perfect cone, and in the odd way that an object becomes tied to some scrap of feeling, that hat became linked to my notion of God—a thing that sheltered you and at the same time fettered your vision.

  Suddenly I knew that my mother didn’t believe in the God of my leather-clad Bible, but that she was searching for a gentle way to say this, a way that still left me room to choose.

  “I’m wondering,” she said, wringing out the sponge and turning toward me. “What do you believe?”

  I don’t remember my answer, but I remember some of what God meant to me for those brief months of my conversion. He was more than anything a tentacle extending from myself. God was a distant colony of my spirit, a cumbersome and soothing arrangement of my thoughts. I worked to make him real. That’s what prayer was.

  God was also a taking up of the pronoun he within my self-regard. He was good. This I intoned before each meal, as I had been taught, and just the naming of his goodness called up an attending wave of awe, for I was very clearly not good —full of laziness and vanity and rage. As Jim had pointed out, I took stock of myself in every mirror and sunlit windowpane (never mind that I didn’t much like what I saw). And there was the matter of my occasional spankings and my plan to brain Mother with the skillet. I talked too much, and bossed kids when they would rather be left alone. Every winter I lost my coat before the first frost.

  I knew little of goodness because my best behavior came about in a state of self-forgetfulness. One day I walked home from school and found Mother stacking wood against the west end of the house. Drawn nearer by the sunlit wall, the shining tarp, the satisfying clunk of the logs, I dropped my bag and started in beside her, adjusting the wedges here and there so the pile would hold firm. Then, suddenly, her hand was brushing my hair: “Well, you’re sure nice to have around.”

  I stared at her then—pulled out of myself, blinking and confused as to what had earned the remark. It seemed I was good only when I didn’t try to be.

  ***

  Prayer seemed to offer a clearer road to virtue. At night I lay back in my bed—bears and dolls arranged around me so I couldn’t stir—and thought of Jesus, his liquid eyes and un-lined brow. Inspired by his visage, I sent a beam of earnest feeling toward the people I loved. My mother, reading in the next room, who played Scrabble with me when I asked—I had been neglecting her, spending too much time playing kickball and reading Scripture; I resolved to give her more attention. Cathy, the girl who had brought me to Bible-study class—suddenly I felt I could see her clearly: her awkward sweetness, the way she curled a hand over her braces when she laughed. I went on like that, through lists of friends and relations, feeling half swollen with love. Then I closed my eyes and laid my palms down on the comforter like a child in a picture book, waiting for sleep.

  There was, however, a small kink in this plan, an itch beneath my piety. Before I found Jesus, I had rocked myself to sleep by a means as old as Methuselah, and without the Bible ever saying anything nearly to the point, I knew that God had a problem with self-satisfaction.

  I didn’t sleep well in those days. I would pray and arrange the animals around me like disciples, call on God for help, and settle back into my Corpse pose. If I were going to accept Jesus as my personal savior, I knew I would have to give up the sins of the flesh.

  On one of those nights I lay in bed staring, as I often did, at the whorls and knots in the wood above me, waiting for my mother to kiss me good night. She was in the kitchen making a batch of lasagna, filling up enough tinfoil pans to feed us for a week. She’d been at it so long, all the windows in the house were laced with steam. I could hear her singing over the boiling noodles. Finally she came in and lay down beside me. “Your hands smell good,” I said, holding them to my cheek to breathe in the garlic and basil.

  She leaned her head next to mine. “So do yours.”

  I tucked my hands deep into the covers, stricken with shame.

  “It’s all right,” my mother said, looking me in the eye with a steady expression. “It’s a good thing.”

  ***

  My father never talked about God; he talked about power and about material conditions. Some people had their eye on the everlasting. He had his eye on justice, the reckoning of the here and now.

  I asked him once what capitalism was, and he broke it down to basics. The companies make products as cheaply as they can and sell them for as much as the market will bear. They buy their raw materials from faraway countries where the people are poor and will sell them for a song, and they pay the workers the lowest wages they can get away with. What’s left is called the profit margin, and they keep that for themselves.

  There it was, the brutish truth of how one man makes his living off another. At one time, I might have asked the question of innocents: “Why can’t the rich people share some of what they have so everyone can eat?” But I didn’t ask those questions anymore. I knew the world was full of cruelty, and that in the lottery of birth I had come up with an exceedingly lucky card. I was already on to other questions. Couldn’t the poor people be helped in some anesthetic way? Some way that didn’t threaten my comfort?

  “When the people build a movement, when they really threaten the power structure, capital throws out a few crumbs,” my father said, warming to his subject. “They’re like, ‘Holy shit! These people are in the streets. We’ve got to do something.’ That’s how we got Social Security, the WPA, welfare—just enough to make sure people don’t completely drop out the bottom.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So capitalism isn’t fair. But I don’t see anything that looks better.” I looked at him carefully, then looked down, nervous to tell the truth. “I wouldn’t want to trade with some girl in Russia.”

  I was prepared for a lecture: The people in Russia have more equality. But my father nodded. “I know,” he said. “I don’t have the answers either. I’m still looking.”

  His candor caught me off guard. We sat for a few moments in that hollow, where the way wasn’t clear. Things weren’t good the way they were, but change might bring something worse. “I’m scared of a revolution,” I said.

  My father took my hand. His hands amazed me. No matter how much I grew, they were always bigger than mine, and they never seemed to sweat. “I know,” he said. “I get scared, too.”

  Over the longer visit that first summer, I got a better feel for my dad’s and Leslie’s daily lives. My dad worked at the hospital, and Leslie had a job at the shipyards in Alameda, but the bulk of their free time was spent doing political work. Gradually, I understood that they were labor organizers, a term that struck me as odd. Labor, in my mind, was simple work—picking walnuts out of the lawn or hauling manure. It didn’t require planning so much as stamina. Organization was another thing altogether. It was lack of organization that made me forget my homework or lose my train of thought. The work of the mind was slippery, elusive, and somehow, in the end, more of a strain. Now these two ideas collided and coupled. How did you organize labor?

  “We are trying to work for better conditions,” my father explained. “More pay, safer factories.” Mainly, as far as I could see, they went to work like everybody else. Sometimes, my father went to the plant early to pass out leaflets before his shift. But it was at night, at home, that they did most of their organizing work. My father sat in the dining room typing articles. And there were meetings, endless meetings. Comrades came over and sat around on the floor, writing on legal pads and discussing strategy. I was fre
e to come and go as I pleased, but I found the gatherings dull, full of talk I couldn’t understand.

  I remember a girl I played with around that time who had communist coloring books: the fat factory bosses wore three-piece suits with watch chains; the workers were lean and muscled and clad in overalls. While our fathers had a meeting, we sat on the floor with her perfectly sharpened Crayolas and she told me what to do. The Capitalist Running Dogs were to be filled in with heavy black strokes. I was allowed to use only red and blue crayons for the “proletariat.”

  Since Leslie and my father were working full-time, I went to day camp at the YMCA about ten blocks from our house. When they had escorted me a few times and were sure I knew the route, I made the daily trip to and fro by myself. A bit nervous to be trusted with my own stewardship, I walked up University Avenue, hailing people on street corners with a bluff “Howdy,” which seemed to work well for Jim, and giving out change to every panhandler I passed.

  The day camp had been Leslie’s idea. Months before I arrived for my first summer, she began pressing my father to find a place for me to pass my days. This was to be their lifelong division of labor. Leslie would plan our lives on the grand scale, always looking ahead. She made a calendar of the year on a yard of tagboard and posted it in the kitchen. Rallies and political deadlines would be marked in one color. My comings and goings would be mapped in another. She often looked out for me in behind-the-scenes, practical ways I took for granted.

  My father often got lost in the swamp of their hectic life, but he always kept a handle on the daily things: keeping food in the fridge, packing lunches, making sure I had money for the bus or snacks—the kind of things that got Leslie down. They made good partners; their strengths and weaknesses slotted together like tongue and groove.

  The two of them picked the YMCA because it was cheap and close by, and because the kids came from all over town—a mix of races and incomes. It was important to them that as a family we walked the walk. My days there were pleasant enough. We swam in the ancient tiled pool or hung around in the rec room playing Ping-Pong. If the goal was for me to make black friends, it didn’t quite work. I got slapped across the face early on by a girl whose cornrows hung to the middle of her back. There wasn’t much to the encounter. One minute I was looking at her, then the next minute my cheek was stinging. “Don’t ever let me catch you looking my way again,” she said, her voice nearly clinical. I got the feeling it was mainly a formality, a way to make clear who was boss.

  I soon attached myself to a Japanese girl who lived in the Berkeley hills, and tried to mimic her easy self-possession. Sumiko wasn’t meek, but she didn’t make any ripples either, and no one even thought of messing with her.

  “She cool,” said the same girl who slapped me, giving Su miko a nod of approval as we passed by on the way to the gym. I trailed in her wake, hoping for some coolness by proxy.

  After day camp let out at the Y, I walked over to Edy’s, an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor on Shattuck Avenue. The dining room was comfy, if a little down at the heels: carpeting tattooed with stains, booths lined in orange vinyl. As a finishing touch, someone had taken to the woodwork with a hammer, denting it like medieval armor. The only fresh note in the place was the plants, tucked into wells between the booths. My mother would have approved. Then one day I fingered the leaves of the creeping Charlie and discovered that they were made of plastic.

  I wanted desperately to be known at Edy’s as a regular, so that the old waitresses with their hair nets and fallen arches would see me and call out, “The usual?” They did this for the rheumy-eyed men who arrived for egg-salad sandwiches and bottomless cups of coffee in the afternoons, but after weeks of my coming in every day without fail, Rose or Vera or Bea would still amble up to my table, flip to a new page on the order pad, and ask, “What’ll it be?” They never even took a good look at me.

  Bea was my favorite. Prone to gentle, heaving sighs, she had a mustache and an industrial-strength bra that strained through her blouse. I found this bra oddly comforting. It closed in the back with a three-inch strip of hooks and eyes—the minimum hardware required to support her grandmotherly bosom.

  I thought an eclectic order might get her attention. “V-8 and, uh, cinnamon toast, please,” I said, trying to make eye contact. “Heavy on the cinnamon.” Bea worked her tongue around in her mouth as she wrote down my order, slapped a napkin, fork, and knife on the table, and walked off. When my juice and toast came, I asked for chili sauce and doused my V-8 with a wink as she passed by. This failed to make an impression, so I took to leaving huge tips—a whole fifty cents on my one-dollar order. I don’t know what I wanted from these women. A haven, perhaps, from the carnival outside. The dames at Edy’s never took the bait.

  ***

  One Saturday, my father took me to a rally in support of affirmative action. As he explained it to me before we went, a white man named Allan Bakke had succeeded in convincing a judge that he had been unfairly denied entrance to medical school, pushed aside in favor of inferior minority candidates. There was a gathering at the U.C. Berkeley campus to protest the decision. I went up there with my father, someone handed me a sign, and before I knew it I was chanting along with the crowd: El pueblo … unido … jamas sera vencido; the people … united … will never be defeated. It felt good to shout in the thicket of so many bodies. I even pumped my fist into the air a few times, until the gesture made me feel sheepish. But when we pooled into the parking lot at the march’s end and sang the Internationale— this is the final conquest, let every man stand in his place— the gravity of that anthem stirred me. I stood on the hot asphalt, sweat running down my back, gently leaning into the people next to me— arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise ye wretched of the earth. The crowd was packed in tightly, our voices blending into one rough pitch, the sharps and flats of individual voices beveled off, so that in spite of each singer’s meandering the melody held.

  We would go to other rallies as the summer wore on. On the picket line, when passing cars honked their support, I felt a heady surge of righteousness. Even though I usually dragged my feet when my father suggested we go, and I suffered from moments of embarrassment when I was caught alone with my sign, I was full of self-congratulatory heroism when it looked like the public mood was in our favor.

  But when the turnout was slim, or it rained, or the police walked the streets in riot gear, I shrank back to the girl dangling her feet in the prison waiting room. We were few and weak. They could crush us under their thumbs. I wanted to slip into the bland flow of passersby; I wanted to live a life that aroused no suspicion or trouble. After these grim events, I would lie in bed despairing over my lack of courage. I was afraid that if had lived in Nazi Germany, if I had been a Christian with an empty attic, I would have turned the Jews away, hissing and glancing down the street for spies.

  But most of the time politics seeped into my family life in ways I barely understood. When I misbehaved at my father’s house, I was never spanked or grounded. Instead we all sat down in the living room—my father, Leslie, and I—and discussed my lapses. It was all very reasonable: they didn’t believe in corporal punishment; they just wanted to make me think. I had locked myself out of the house for the third day in a row, and once rescued, I had turned a tidy room into a shit storm and gone off to buy candy with stolen change. But this news of my bad behavior meant nothing to me. I sat with my arms crossed, sullen and confused by their arguments, starting to feel nostalgic about the swiftness of spankings. Now and then I would blurt out my version of things, amazed at how I lost my way in the telling, sounding peevish and unreasonable even to myself.

  “We are trying to struggle with you on these things,” my father said. “You need to work on taking constructive criticism.” I was getting the hang of the lingo. “Struggle” was like medicine. It tasted bad going down, but was meant for your own betterment.

  Dad and Leslie and I were driving through Oakland one night, all three of us in the front seat, when w
e passed by a porno theater. I saw my father glance over the flashing marquee, and I followed his gaze. “Live Girls!” was plastered on bills across the entrance. Underneath this banner were photos of naked women with blackout bands across their breasts. I was thinking about that title: Did other places have dead girls, or was it some kind of exhortation, encouraging the girls to get the most out of life?

  My father saw me craning backward at the signs. He was quiet for a moment, then he cleared his throat: “Do you think Leslie and I would ever go to one of those places?”

  I thought about this carefully. I knew it was a leading question, and I wanted to get the answer right. It seemed a little seedy around that part of town. But they were tolerant people, unashamed of their bodies. “Well, I guess you probably would.” I saw my father’s face fall, and so I quickly amended, “Maybe only once in a while, if someone else invited you?”

  Leslie was quiet beside me.

  My father’s voice turned calm and instructive: “Leslie and I would never go into a place like that, honey. We don’t agree with that kind of thing. It’s very exploitative of women.”

  I think he often felt he had to make up for lost opportunities, that what a full-time parent could pass on by slow degrees, he had to compress into our brief visits. The result: these little moral lessons, which struck me mostly for their earnest tone.

  “Dare to struggle, Dare to win,” Leslie once wrote to me in the flyleaf of a book on Chinese revolutionary youth. It was a birthday gift (one of several, the others more traditional), a story about a girl who joins the brigades, who was stalwart and unselfish, ever noble in her aims. There were days when I didn’t want to dare anything, when I chafed at the language of struggle and the moral weight hanging over our lives.