Split

by Lisa Michaels

  When I returned home, my mother’s failure to take interest in decor began to gall me. Our walls were hung with my sun-curled school drawings, brass Chinese platters, and hardware-store calendars. Our furniture was a mixture of chipped antiques and hand-me-downs. Soon after we had moved in, Mother and Jim had begun various construction projects: turning the garage into a split-level bedroom add-on, popping out a wall to make the kitchen larger. I didn’t know it then, but that house would be under construction for the next fifteen years. There seemed always to be a room with exposed joists or plywood flooring and piles of sawdust in the comers.

  I considered it my job to hector them about the schedule: “Why do you even bother calling it my bedroom? I’ll be grown and gone by the time it’s finished.”

  “Aww, naw, it oughta be done in another year or so,” Jim would say with a laugh.

  When my mother asked me once why I didn’t invite friends over more often, I told her it was because the house made me ashamed.

  “Hmm,” she replied, her lips drawn whitely together. “Well, what do you propose we do about that?”

  I offered to try improving things through a little strategic rearrangement.

  My mother always liked a can-do spirit: “That’s fine by me. Do whatever you like.”

  I spent the afternoon pushing furniture around, making a reading nook out of a pine bookshelf, a vinyl beanbag chair, and a black lacquer table that the former tenants had abandoned. I could never figure out what to do with a certain chair my mother had had shipped out from Boston after we got settled in California: a huge cube of mahogany lined with brown leather. (I didn’t dare suggest getting rid of it. Once a week my mother rubbed the sides with lemon oil till the wood gleamed.) It overpowered the couch. When I moved it, the thing left a square of flattened carpeting that never quite bounced back, like the jaundiced grass under a wading pool. And the carpet—the carpet was the hopeless premise that underlay it all: wall-to-wall orange and red shag, so bright it made my fingernails hurt.

  I pushed, I scooted, I made minute adjustments to the knickknacks. Then I stood back and surveyed my handiwork. It was no use: the same junk in new configurations.

  That work was an homage, of course, to Leslie’s aesthetic. Even when she worked in the auto plant, her wool shirts and headscarves were neat and well coordinated. I remember a kind of mourning in the family for her nails, which would never come clean, even with scrubbing. My father mentioned this to me once in a hushed, rueful tone. I understood that it was one of the sacrifices of their lifestyle.

  On their nights off, when they went out together, I used to lie around on the bed, watching her dress. One outfit stands out in my memory: a white silk blouse with long, pointy lapels and wide cuffs, worn over a wraparound skirt printed with green dice. Green dice. I knew this was hard to pull off, but the white dots on the faces made a crisp correspondence with her blouse, and the ankle-strap heels she put on at the end added a note of refinement—a signal that she knew the skirt was campy, but what the hell. I wasn’t overreading this. She paid that order of attention to the width of a collar, the shape of a heel.

  When her outfit was complete, Leslie dug around in her jewelry box, slipping on a heavy opal ring passed down from her mother. I loved this ring: the bold asymmetrical setting, the stone shot with black and vermilion, the way it slipped around on her finger, a rare thing casually possessed. This ring came to stand for everything Leslie had and couldn’t give me: her fine skin, the oriental rugs and family oil portraits tastefully framed, the talent for putting strangers at ease, and a personal restraint I could never muster.

  Later, she would make clear to me the cost of such refinement, the weight of things left unsaid. But back then, I only hoped that she might save my father and me from our wildness, our confusion in the world of manners. And she did apply her hand to my father’s wardrobe—weaning him over the years from polyester dress shirts and steering him toward linen and gabardine. But I think, looking back, that much as we admired her composure, Leslie was attracted to our brash ways: my father’s broad physical presence and wacky humor, the way our emotional life played out on the surface, a string of moods.

  Eight

  I HAVE SAID that I was becoming a troublemaker at school, and my mother, sensing it to be a case of limited horizons, decided I should go to high school in the neighboring town. I would leave an eighth-grade class of thirty—the same thirty students, give or take a few, that I had started with in kindergarten, our clan so starved for new blood that we pounced on newcomers with a vampirish ferocity—and join an incoming freshman class of three hundred, not one of them familiar.

  In those first weeks, before I made any friends, I walked the school during lunch like a cop on the beat. To sit alone was to die a small death; walking gave me the illusion of purpose. I made tours of all the bathrooms on campus—checking my hair, washing my hands needlessly—then looped around the shop building, where a few boys lingered on their lunch hour making slingshots and bongs. From there I circled down to the pool, checking my watch now and then as if I were pressed, maintaining a constant pace until the bell called me to class again. On these tours, I made a minute study of the company I might keep.

  There was the cowboy contingent, dubbed “goat ropers,” who sat along a narrow wall, their tooled boots dangling, the concrete below them stained with chew; and the athletes, marked by their mesh jerseys and bristle cuts. The smokers were required to puff in a sand pit abutting the dumpsters of kitchen trash; their bell-bottoms and Jethro Tull Tshirts seemed to maroon them in the seventies. I felt some affection for the drama freaks, doing dance routines on the lawn in jeans and leotards. And I slowly inched my way into the fringes of the cool crowd—who filled out the college-prep courses and seemed to spend the weekends hosting keggers on BLM land and having sex in their parents’ Astrovans. To join them, it seemed I would need some new clothes: pinwale corduroys, pegged at the ankle; heavy wedge-heeled sandals; and sweaters embroidered with snowflakes or roses.

  When my mother picked me up at the end of the day, I was exhausted. We said little during the winding ride back to the valley. Sometimes I leaned the seat back and slept. My mother seemed to understand the strain I was under. When we arrived home, she sent me out to the back porch with a bowl of apples, a cutting board, and a knife. Late in the summer, Jim had built a fruit dryer out of plywood, a box fitted with a rack of screens and a hot fan. (He had quit his job at “the Ditch” to set up an architecture business out of the guesthouse, but things were slow at first and he had time for such projects.) Each day after school, I hunched over the knife, slicing apples and pears so thin you could read through them. It was a relief to give up the ruthless shepherding of my image, to devote myself to a simple task and sit still without guilt. All day at school I was painfully aware of how I stood, how I held my arms, what I said to the girl beside me in the lunch line and how it might reflect on me. I knew very well that those first days were crucial—that they would determine my position for years to come. But on our back porch, tucked down in the canyon, I could chew my lip, let my face go slack and my hair slip into my eyes. When the cutting board was mounded with fruit, I filled the screens and slid them onto their waxed runners. While the fan cycled up to a high whine, I would stare out at the live oaks, thinking of how I would remake myself.

  I dried jars and jars of fruit that fall, until I made a friend in my drama class and began to spend the evenings curled up with the phone. Michelle was a senior, a languid beauty with sloe eyes and a sweetly wicked air. She lived with her father at a Buddhist monastery at the edge of town. Before the Buddhists bought the property, it had been a mental institution. Along a curving drive at the edge of the compound was a row of large clapboard houses, which must have once been the psychiatrists’ quarters. Too lavish for the monks, most of them were let to nonreligious folk.

  Michelle invited me over after school one day, and I was quick to accept. It beat slicing pears. We sat out on her wraparound po
rch, looking out at the leafy grounds, where now and then I caught sight of an orange-robed figure through the trees. “You’re an alto, aren’t you?” Michelle asked, propping her feet on the porch rail. “Want me to teach you some harmonies?” Somewhere far off, a gong sounded.

  She and I would practice our perfect thirds on many porch-lit evenings at that house, testing, no doubt, the monks’ vows. That fall, we entered ourselves in the school talent show. We were to sing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and waited backstage before the event in vintage suits and netted hats.

  I leaned against the wall, dizzy with nerves, covering one ear and practicing my part, not the melody but a whole other path through the song, clear if you stayed on it but easy to lose. At the other end of the hall, Clyde Summers, the lead singer for the Coyote Cowboys—four local boys who had mastered enough cover tunes to give themselves a name—was tuning his guitar. He had unusual composure at eighteen and a narrow, gentle face, and I’d admired him from a distance even though he showed no signs of leaving the backwater in which we lived. His dad was a rancher, I think, and he seemed bound to work at a winery, have kids, and play baseball on the weekends with his old high school friends. It was a testament to Clyde’s charm that he made the idea of settling in that town seem briefly appealing. Just then he loped toward us, fumbling in his shirt for a pick, and when he saw Michelle he stopped and smiled.

  “You ladies look great,” he said, putting the pick in his teeth while he buttoned his pocket flap. Ladies. I searched his face for wile, but didn’t see any. “So I guess we’re going to put on a show here,” he said, turning to me with a smile. “I’m Clyde.” He held out his hand.

  I was so twitchy, from stage fright and his attentions, that I tossed my hat into the air. It was an absurd gesture, something fitting a military graduation. We all stood still while it completed its wild arc and hit the floor.

  Clyde picked it up and handed it to me with a look that broke my heart, the bemused affection you show a girl who’s sweet but young, far too young.

  “Break a leg,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. Then he went onstage to sing an Eagles tune, “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” his voice drifting back to us in the hallway.

  It was under that kind of adolescent swoon that I developed a weakness for country music, for bland harmonies and twangy guitar. We are at the mercy of things we come to young. The next day I bought Hotel California and played it on Jim’s warped turntable until the needle got dull and the music became married to a batch of fretful afternoons by the river: Mother reading or asleep, Jim drafting in his office. It was cool there under the live oaks, tucked in a cleft in the hills, but beyond us were acres of dry grass, empty and heat stunned. I could picture what little went on out there—cattle kneeling in dollops of shade, a man changing his spark plugs in front of the corner store, a Little League game at the ball field, where boys in dusty uniforms clung to the backstop. The world seemed emptied of interest. Flies buzzed against the window screens, Don Henley sang “Desperado,” and I lay down on the red and orange shag rug, letting out huge involuntary sighs.

  When Jim came in for his lunch—salad and bits of cold steak—he asked why I was hyperventilating. Then he put on Sticky Fingers and did Mick Jagger imitations in the living room, one foot up on the hearth, hands perched at the small of his back, mouthing the words. “Yeah, you got—satin shoes.” This triggered a wave of nostalgia. “You know, the first time I heard the Rolling Stones I was in a bar in Cambodia…” Jim had seen Hendrix in a tiny club in Manhattan, back when he was a maverick unknown. Now he closed his eyes as Mick Taylor went into the extended guitar solo on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” and I dragged myself up from the rug, slid open the screen door, and let that frayed guitar tumble into the garden.

  To this day, my musical taste runs toward the bands my par ents weaned me on: Richie Havens, Van Morrison, the Stones. If asked why, I’d confess an almost codgerly conviction: nothing much good has come out since then. Still, it sometimes strikes me as odd that I tune my radio to songs nearly thirty years old, singing and tapping the steering wheel; my parents certainly aren’t listening to Benny Goodman.

  In 1982, during my sophomore year in high school, Leslie and my father moved again, this time to Los Angeles. Her mother and father lived there, and the GM plant in Van Nuys was hiring. My father got a job working nights on the assembly line, and Leslie decided to leave work in the auto plants and go back to school for a Ph.D. in architecture, following in her father’s footsteps.

  I made my first visit over Thanksgiving, pleased to have given up Greyhound buses for airplanes. We gathered for dinner at Leslie’s mother’s apartment—a place that impressed me mightily. It was four floors up in a tall building off Wilshire, with a wall of windows on each side, but what distinguished the place was Carolyn’s furnishings: abstract paintings and Chinese screens, Turkish carpets and mahogany breakfronts and leather trunks covered with thick glass. Carolyn borrowed a little from this continent, that century, and managed to make it all come together. There were family pieces mixed with antique-store finds, and almost everything was blue. This color scheme sounds overmuch, but it was not. The place had panache. I mooned around, fingering the knickknacks and trying to figure out how it all went together. Good taste: I was hoping it could be broken down and carried out of the place like contraband.

  On a low table in the living room was a salmon ringed with sliced lemons. I sat on the carpet, nibbling at the fish and trying to look as if I belonged. That morning, I had spent an hour in front of Carolyn’s bulb-framed vanity mirror, curling my hair in a fashion that would have offended the Pilgrims. Now I held my head carefully, favoring my ringlets, and watched the guests arrive.

  Leslie had manned a post at the door, greeting people and guiding them toward the hors d’oeuvres. “Kate, you look wonderful,” I heard her say to an older woman, draped in gray cashmere, who had just stepped in. In fact, she did look wonderful. Well groomed was the phrase that came to mind. The kind of grandmother who collected sculpture and took boat trips down the Nile.

  “This is Lisa, Carl’s daughter,” Leslie said, as I stood up to shake the woman’s hand.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lisa,” the woman said, a soft rattle of silver coming from her extended wrist. She looked at me, waiting for a reply, but my mind was elsewhere. I was stuck on that construction: “Carl’s daughter,” the lack of a personal possessive. There were plenty of times when I was glad for that distinction. I played up the gap when it served me. But just then, in the midst of that rarefied company, I wanted Leslie to claim me as her own.

  Later that night, when the guests had gone and we were in the kitchen washing up, Leslie noticed my sulkiness: “Did you have a nice time tonight?”

  I shrugged. I had had a very good time, tipsy on a few sips of champagne and the pleasant demands of grownup conversation, but now I was nursing my grudge of the early evening.

  “Why couldn’t you say ‘our daughter’?” I blurted out, appalled to hear my voice crack. I had planned to be peeved.

  “What do you mean?” Leslie was at a loss.

  “When that woman came in. You said I was Carl’s daughter.”

  Leslie put down her towel. “I’m sorry if that hurt your feelings. But these are old family friends. They’ve known me—they know I couldn’t have a child your age. To introduce you that way would have been awkward.”

  I could see she was stirred by my request. “I’m crazy about you,” she said, leaning her head toward me. “And I’m glad that we’re becoming a family”—but there must have been some unreasonable bruising in my face, because she didn’t reach out to touch me. She was saying we had our circumstances; we had come together by chance, and that couldn’t be willed away. It takes a certain rigor to live with these odd unions, to trust their bonds all the while knowing that they aren’t equal to the bonds of blood. At fifteen, I didn’t have that discipline. I couldn’t reconcile the two truths in my mind: she was not my mot
her, and yet she mothered me. Over the years I would dream of her, take up certain of her gestures and phrases, mimic her handwriting — but I never grew careless of her love.

  Years after that Thanksgiving, when I was dressing for a graduation ceremony, half frantic in curlers, pantyhose, and one shoe, I wheeled into a room to find Leslie ironing the panels of my skirt. The sight took my breath away. I stood there on the sill, watching her drive a wedge of smoothness over the fabric — the rhythmic slosh and hiss of the steam, her careful attention to the pleats and darts. It set my scalp tingling with a pleasure only distance could make.

  The summer after my sophomore year would be my first in L.A., and my mother and I walked around in the weeks before I left feeling sentimental about the four hundred miles that would stretch between us. My mother expressed that sentiment by giving me lots of yard work.

  On one of those June mornings, after spending hours digging blackberries out of a bank, we took a break to cut flowers for the house. Each of us composed for her favorite vase—mine carved out of black marble; my mother’s a heart-sized globe her great-aunt had made, glazed the color of wine and milk. I knew nothing of this great-aunt, but her handiwork had ended up in our house: a beautiful vase, almost Japanese in its perfection, that symbolized, in my mind, a world filled with elegant trifles, the world my mother had been raised in.

  She was walking along the edge of the lawn, clippers tucked in her jeans pocket, talking nearly to herself: “See, over here, how the ground cover is taking hold. If we just spray that down all summer, it’ll really go.”

  I would be gone in a few weeks, and wouldn’t be doing the spraying, but half my mother’s satisfaction in these projects was in speaking of them out loud. She looked around, her bouquet forgotten, and assessed the state of the flower beds, the skirt of rotten blossoms under the camellias that made her itch to pick up the rake. That would mean I’d be hauling the tarp, for which I felt no itch. I’d rather be a house girl, reading and arranging flowers.