Split

by Lisa Michaels

  “This country is really falling apart, Lisa,” my father would tell me. He would sigh then—an enormous outbreath—pull on his mustache hairs, and stare off into the distance. “It’s really frightening.”

  I shrank from the news of apocalypse and from the dread that lifted from him like a sweat. I wondered sometimes how far down we could sink, how completely our world would unravel, since it had started bad and seemed always to be worsening.

  Around that time, my father and Leslie were married quietly at city hall. They didn’t tell even their closest friends, as marriage was quite outré among their comrades, but shortly after they were legally wed the three of us held a private ceremony sitting cross-legged on the grass in MacArthur Park. They let me serve as officiant, reading a selection they had chosen from Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung —a passage, I believe, on the relations between men and women in revolutionary society. Both of them wore their work clothes—plaid shirts and jeans—and they were, as I remember, radiantly happy. We laughed together at the ad hoc sweetness of the moment: no carnations or banquets, and in place of a minister, a scrappy eight-year-old, elated by her vestment. I opened the book to the slender page-marking ribbon, and read carefully out loud. If I didn’t catch the meaning, I at least grasped the privilege they had granted me, and I tried to pronounce clearly the words they set their course by.

  Back at the Grant Street house, on a window where the sun would shine through it, sat a stained-glass panel: on the left side, two birds facing each other; on the right, the same birds in a row. A caption ran across the frame: “Love is not looking into each other’s eyes, but looking outward in the same direction.” A little sentimental, but it got at one of the truths of their marriage: they were bound together by a common purpose. They considered themselves comrades, and when other things in that partnership were shaken, this shared commitment held fast. It boiled down to respect, I think. They respected each other’s thinking, and at a time when many of their radical friends were moving to the suburbs and giving up organizing, neither one of them had lost their sense of urgency.

  My father loved that piece of stained glass. Now and then he picked it up and got moist around the eyes, then placed it gently back on the sill, winging the panels open so the thing would stand firm.

  Mao’s little red book, which served as their marriage text, went with me everywhere, though I have few memories of reading it. My father had bought me a hand-tooled leather purse from one of the crafts tables on Telegraph Avenue, and when I sat at a booth in Edy’s and performed my feminine-fluster routine of arranging its contents, I pulled out cherry lip balm, a pack of Kleenex (never opened), a vial of apricot-scented oil, and the vinyl-covered book from the People’s Republic of China.

  I opened to the small sepia-toned portrait of Mao, protected by a rice-paper overlay. He looked to me gentle and good-humored, with a healthy shine to his cheeks and a precise rind of shirt collar peeking above his jacket. The mole on his chin, so large it cast a shadow, made him comfortingly homely. Leslie had a mole that I admired very much. It was on her wrist, just over a vein, with two or three fine hairs sprouting out of it, and I thought it made her hands look strong and capable. I draped one arm over the edge of the table so the veins would stand up, and with the other hand I paged through chapters called “Self-Reliance and Arduous Struggle” and “Correcting Mistaken Ideas.”

  Halfway around the world, the Cultural Revolution was winding down, but I was insensible to this, lost in the tissue-thin pages. I imagine a few people must have passed me that day, a skinny kid eating cinnamon toast with her head bent over Mao’s little red book, and shaken their heads in disbelief. Little did they know that I was thinking of weddings, and of the strange attraction of moles, or that I turned those delicate pages of theory because they let loose the smell of apricots.

  At my father’s house, it was hard to keep up with all the political factions I heard mentioned in the living room. I asked him once about Phil and Nancy, two former friends of his whom I had heard spoken of lately in tones of disgust.

  “They’re Trotskyites,” my father said. “They’ve got bad politics.” I saw him grapple with a way to articulate the terms of their desertion, their essential wrong-headedness, then give up. He settled for saying that he “disagreed with them on a lot of things.” Still, the seriousness of his tone, the creases between his brows as he pronounced this, said everything. The name Trotskyites was forever married in my mind with a kind of shameful cleaving from the flock; it was the sound of bearded men in black coats cantering off, legs clenched to hold their loosening bowels.

  At some point I noticed that shared politics was the base requirement for my father’s friendships. He and Leslie would meet a new couple, and if the match was good, my father’s assessment would nearly always begin, “You know, their politics are pretty good.” There was always a note of wonder in his voice as he said this, as if he knew how rare were the folk who met this requirement and stumbling on them was an unexpected boon. I never knew my father to sustain a friendship that began out of, say, a mutual love of basketball or a shared taste in films. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t grant himself the pleasure of such associations, it was rather that they were, in the end, not a pleasure. For him, talk always circled back to political themes, and if he didn’t feel safe tracking through that territory, then other topics couldn’t hold his interest. Of course, he often talked sports or art or love with his comrades, but a sense of common political perspective was the root from which his friendships grew.

  As I grew older, the world outside my family came into sharper focus. I remember one afternoon lying back on the pillows in the living room while one of my father’s friends talked about the farm workers in the Central Valley. This was at the beginning of the grape boycott, when Cesar Chavez was letting the public know how they came by their cheap lettuce. My father’s friend shook his head at the plight of the migrant workers: “The whole family’s out there—kids, grandmothers. If the growers don’t offer housing, they live in cardboard boxes by the side of the fields.”

  Those boxes stuck in my mind. Back at 12000 Spring Street, Charlene and Jill and I played house in an old refrigerator box. In the beginning the walls were smooth and stiff, but after a night left out in the dew, the cardboard warped and sagged inward. We hurled ourselves around inside, breaking the walls, rolling the box along the grass with someone balled up inside it. This was a pleasant diversion—but to live in a box? A chill spread over me, there in the sunny window seat. My comforts, rather than making me grateful, made me afraid. I did nothing to deserve them; I had come to them by chance, and chance might take them away.

  “How come the people don’t just say no and go work somewhere else?” I asked, suddenly furious at the men (it was always “the men”) who made people work like oxen.

  I could see that my father was excited by my interest: “They are saying no. That’s what the boycott’s about. That’s what we’re working for.”

  Our main form of bourgeois entertainment in those days was the movies. To my delight, there was little that Leslie and my father considered off-limits. It seemed to me that early on they decided I could judge for myself life’s lights and mysteries. So we went to see Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men, both of which I loved, though at ten I had trouble with the byzantine plots.

  As soon as the opening titles rolled, I started asking questions. “Dad?” He didn’t answer, so I whispered louder. “Dad, who is that guy?”

  “Shhh, honey. Just watch.”

  I chewed my popcorn for a while in silence, trying to pay attention. “But why did he shoot the lady?”

  “I don’t know! I’m seeing it for the first time, too.”

  We would spend the ride home analyzing the plot. Leslie could put it all together, the dropped hint in the early frames that gave away the ending, the one line of dialogue that sewed up the theme. Suddenly the whole film would make sense to me, and I’d want to go see it again. />
  “You’re amazing, Leslie,” my dad would say. “You could write one of those scripts.” He was often that way—drop-jawed at her smarts.

  We gave every film a rating, one to ten. Leslie was the toughest critic, rarely doling out anything higher than seven. My father was more lenient. He loved any kind of movie—comedy, period piece, romance, cliffhanger. Only horror and action films were out. His scores frequently rose into the eights and nines. I was right there with him, a complete sucker for cinema, glad for any excuse to sit in the dark with a box of red licorice and watch a story unfold.

  At the end of each summer, my father and Leslie and I sat down and evaluated my visit. This was a thorough exercise, a little of Mao’s “criticism, self-criticism” applied to the domestic sphere. My father got out a piece of paper and ran categories across the top: Excellent, Good, Blah, Yech. I got to weigh in on everything, while he took notes: the summer program, my relationship with Leslie, Grandma Leila’s visit, even my own behavior. I took to my task with relish, trying to judge reliably the highs and lows. “Daddy did best job as a father,” I wrote in one review. (I don’t know who could have been his competitor.) “Main weakness was being too critical. Almost never yells.” Four blouses that Leslie bought me were rated Excellent. When it came time to examine her mothering, my father took up the pen. Leslie and I were growing closer, it seemed, “more like mother and daughter. But Leslie holds Lisa responsible for being older than she is.” In hindsight, it seems brave of them to have asked a ten-year-old for so many opinions.

  Six

  WHEN SCHOOL STARTED—fourth grade—I was still a live wire in the classroom. I lived for those moments of chaos, when some fracas began in a corner and a general simmering started up: a spitball flew, someone flipped the bird at the teacher’s back, a staccato of slammed desk lids built to a crescendo. I wanted things hectic, wanted disorder, all of us wheeling around the room, whooping and calling. It wasn’t malicious. I would have been sobered to see anyone hurt. I only loved the way things gathered momentum. Wildness created a kind of static in the air about us, made us feel anonymous and thrilled. Each, as a culpable being, felt shielded by the flurry and noise. Under the cover of my neighbors’ howls, I did a little guttural yodeling. (I’d been listening to The Sound of Music.) I tipped my head down under the general rumble and trilled, trying to throw my voice toward someone already tagged as a miscreant.

  At the height of one of these brushfires, Harry Peck’s face got red and he jumped up from his seat. “Flush Nixon down the toilet!” he yelled. We all stopped yammering and looked at him. None of the rest of us paid much attention to politics; most of the things I understood about national events were passed down whole from my father, and he had greeted the Watergate hearings that past summer with a headshake and shrug: more of the predictable corrosion of the right. He had no faith to be shattered, so the whole thing was just a lucky fluke, a curtain briefly pulled aside on the sham of national politics. But Harry seemed genuinely worked up about Nixon’s tumble. His parents, like most of the Republican ranchers in the valley, had voted for the man, and no doubt they were scalded by the news of lies and corruption from an office they still held sacrosanct. Fresh from my summer in Berkeley, I noticed how far I had been from the mainstream. Harry’s father and my father weren’t even remotely on the same page. If they sat down for dinner, it might end in blows. I reminded myself never to drop a word about Mao Tse-tung.

  Despite his bad politics, Harry was a lovely boy: blond, with nearly olive skin and a scattering of moles. I would have loved to be his girlfriend, and he was, over the course of that year, always considering me as a possible consort, and always, in the end, rejecting me. I was helpless to control this undulation in his attentions, but I took note of every minute shift in his voice, of whether he pulled his chair close to mine in class or shirked my stare. When he said something kind, or walked with me out of class and sat talking on the curb while we waited for the bus, a flutter of hope lifted in my throat, and I’d set about trying to be winning. This produced a spatter of stupid remarks and wild gestures. I grabbed his notebook, and took up kicking and chasing, which put a quick end to his interest. It was as if he forgot at times how rough I was, how boyish and hardheaded. Once he remembered, he gave me a wide berth, and when I noted his cooling interest, I went through a small rage of disappointment, and soon forgot I’d ever had a chance.

  Then, on some day when I felt ugly, when I couldn’t tame my cowlick and I came to school in a pair of old floods, my bare ankles throbbing, and sat in the back of class, quieted by shame—it was on those days that I’d look up on my way to gym and see that he had fallen in with me.

  Once, on a day like this, he offered me a stick of gum, and we stopped together under the high bars while he pulled the pack from his windbreaker and slid the stick out carefully, so the paper sleeve stayed put. It was the slowness of this business that stunned me. At our age, boys and girls never held still beside each other, except under duress. We were constantly moving, jostling, bumping against one another like restless electrons, in the line for lunch, out on the blacktop playing foursquare, prowling the yard in groups of threes and twos, shifting and dividing, then gathering up at the door when the bell rang with a harangue of motion still in our limbs, leaning out of line to see if the door had opened, dipping to tie a shoe, pushing at the nearest body. But here he was, standing alone with me on the empty playground with nothing between us but a stream of wind.

  It came to me then: he liked me because I was humble. When I was humble, I was a better self. It was a relief, in some ways, to be rewarded for being unrehearsed. But my gratitude was mingled with confusion, because I knew I could never glimpse this version of myself. I could do nothing to help or enhance its appeal. It was the way I looked and seemed when I had no idea how I looked and seemed. The moment it was acknowledged, this seamlessness was broken.

  My life at 12000 Spring Street didn’t change much. That was the beauty of it. Still, my mother continued to find things to improve around the home front, and she made a point of enlisting my energies. “You’ve got to help the family wheel,” she used to say. I had been reading a book of simplified Greek mythology, and when she invoked this phrase, I imagined us, clad in togas, pushing a two-ton granite disk uphill. One of my chores was to load up a wheelbarrow full of walnuts. The homesteaders who planted two black walnut trees in the front yard had left me a curse: the nuts were inedible, and the tough shells chipped the lawnmower blades.

  On a Saturday, I would place the wheelbarrow under the tree and work in a circle around the trunk, ruffling my fingers through the grass until I struck one of the nuts, which were covered in a sticky black rind. They made a satisfying tink in the bottom of the wheelbarrow when I began, but I was impatient to hear the softer thud that came once I had lined the bottom, the sound of one walnut striking the clotted mass, the sound of progress.

  I spent those hours musing on luck and fate. Would I want to trade places with, say, Iris Sledge, the class tyrant? Her mother was a kind enough woman, heavyset, a nurse, with a perpetually weary air that made her well suited to child rearing: she let all but the worst offenses slide in order to conserve energy. It was Iris’s father who struck fear in my heart. He was gaunt and sallow, with narrow, curved shoulders and a headlong stride. I tried not to stand in Mr. Sledge’s path. That man always looked like he was in a hurry to work someone over. I never saw him without a cigarette glued to his lower lip, which flipped up and down as he talked, a little ember burning at the end of his sentences. His wallet was secured to a belt loop by a length of chain, and more than once I had pitied the thief who would get caught at the end of that leash.

  For some reason, Mr. Sledge didn’t allow Iris to have friends over after school—I don’t remember the reason for this, or if there even was one—but he didn’t often return home until nightfall, so it was a rule that begged to be broken. One day Iris and I took turns kicking a rock down Spring Street while we exchanged unchari
table assessments of girls we considered friends. When we looked up, we were standing at the end of her driveway.

  “I better go home,” I said, casting a glance down the road.

  “Oh, come on. He won’t get here for hours.” Iris was like a force of nature. She had jet-black curls and buck teeth and was the queen of the playground retort. All the devastating phrases that occurred to me hours after a fight came to her lips in the heat of an argument as easily as her name and address. She had been known to leave girls weeping on the pavement. In fact, more than once I had been one of those girls and probably would be again, but when Iris took the occasional shine to me I couldn’t resist her.

  That day, I followed her out to the back of the house and watched her offer a salt lick to her horse through the fence. She never got to ride this horse, and it was probably just as well. The one time her brother saddled it up, the mare lit out at a full gallop and scraped him off on a low-hanging branch.

  “I dare you to touch it,” Iris said.

  “Does it bite?” I asked, eyeing the mare’s big hatchet teeth.

  “Not the horse, dummy—the fence.”

  I glanced down the wires and noticed ceramic conductors strung along at regular intervals. “Is it on?”

  Iris got an unnatural glint in her eye. “I don’t know. Why don’t you find out?”

  “No way, José.” I tried to sound cool, but my voice quavered and I took a step backward. “I’ll still be hanging there when your dad gets home.”

  Iris gave me a look of unqualified scorn, as if she were seriously pissed that I wouldn’t fry myself on her orders.