Split

by Lisa Michaels

  In early September, when I arrived back at my mother’s house, my father wrote me a letter about the summer. It began with news about his work in the union—“I am enclosing a leaflet we put out to the membership. I wrote it—it’s pretty radical for a union leaflet, especially one with the approval of the President (of the union—not the U.S.)”—and told sweet stories about my sisters. Then he turned to a sore subject.

  “I feel very badly about the summer. I think it’s really important that you correctly understand the experience—because the tension and unhappiness for all of us will be worth it if it translates into a positive learning experience.

  “In thinking about it, the situation was so potentially positive, and we set such reasonable limits on your behavior—and yet you pushed those limits, didn’t respect our authority, and manipulated so many situations from such a narrow, short-term, and self-destructive perspective.”

  The letter went on in this vein. “Next summer, let’s leave more time and space to take stock and have greater self-control. OK? It should help.”

  Then he picked up an old thread: “Lisa, I don’t know if you ever read the Biography of Paul Robeson I sent you. Please make time to read it. I think you’ll really get a lot out of it.”

  When I read that letter I felt a mixture of guilt and fury that I couldn’t sort out. I wasn’t sure what kind of guidance Paul Robeson’s story might offer to wayward youth, but I made a note to give him a miss.

  There was a full month left until school started, and so I applied for a job at the pear-packing sheds. The land around town was thick with orchards, and in autumn the harvest created a glut of temporary work. Jim gave me a lift to a cluster of sheet-metal buildings at the edge of town. The main shed was enormous, a clanging vault of vats and conveyor belts that trapped the late-summer heat. Just inside the main door was the manager’s office, and I waited on a bench until I was called in to file an application. The manager, a fortyish woman with a gray streak at the front of her head, told me the sorting lines were full, but that I should come each afternoon a half-hour before the swing shift and wait.

  After three days of waiting on the bench with a few other high school girls, I was hired on as a sorter. Juana, a Mexican woman in her twenties, gave me a pair of yellow plastic gloves and an apron and took me up to the sorting belts, row after row of wide conveyors set on scaffolding above the shop floor. On either side of the belts were rows of sorters, rolling the pears over and checking them for flaws.

  “You stand here,” Juana said, pointing between two chutes, one yellow and one green. “This one is for juice and this one for can.” She explained the various flaws, then held up a pear with a brown stippled pattern on its skin and a tiny hole near the stem. “Juice or can?” she asked.

  “Probably can,” I guessed.

  “Right. But don’t think too much,” she said. “Just look quick and keep rolling.”

  Most of the time, Juana sat on a raised chair at the end of the belt and watched us work. When one of the high school girls began to daydream, rolling the pears absently under her gloves and dropping random pieces down the chutes, Juana grabbed a plastic bucket and headed down to the lower belts. If I bent sideways I could see her yellow bucket swinging beneath us. She followed the line until she recognized the legs of the lazy sorter, then stuck her bucket under one of the chutes, catching what tumbled down. Then she returned to the upper level, stopping on the way to chat with Marta, the forewoman from the next line over, who often passed by on the catwalks on her way to have a smoke in the parking lot. Marta dipped into the bucket, pulling out a perfect produce pear, and the two of them laughed.

  Juana walked down the aisle to the girl and tapped her on the shoulder. Over the clang and whir, I could just make out her voice, explaining the sorting rules. Juana was never rude. She shamed us with her exaggerated patience, as if we were troublesome children, slow to learn.

  I kept my hands moving, asked for a bathroom break only once a night, and tried to sort as if Juana were under me, checking my chutes. Still, the work was grim. I was assigned to a position facing the main door, through which I could see a row of pear trees and a rectangle of sky. When I started work at six it was a chiding blue, the color of summer evenings at home, when the heat broke and the crickets started up and the blue herons flapped up the canyon. Slowly it deepened to rose, then crimson, then black. That slat of dark made me tired. To the left of the door, I could just make out the manager through the window of the payroll office, her gray-streaked head bent over the books. I often envied her, sealed off from the racket of machinery, adding up figures on the ten-key with long, polished nails, feeding stray paper clips into a magnetic dispenser. But above her office was the worst view of all: a large clock, whose works seemed to be gummed with glue.

  The belt chugged past, the pears changed in their minute features, but the shapes were the same, round bottoms, narrow stems—an endless, tumbling yellow bolt. Without the sky and the clock, one hour was indistinguishable from the next. That was the most haunting thing about work on the line: whole nights stretched out unbroken, nothing to distinguish them but the skein of thought played out while the machines shook around us. Above that racket, while our hands flew and our lips stayed still, we were all thinking—the sorters, the packers, Juana and Marta, and the gray-haired woman in the office. I imagined it sometimes as a tangle rising toward the ceiling: stories of mood and memory—some of them dull, some of them elegant, I’m sure, all of them bearing the fascinating hitches and knots of the personal. And all of them lost when the clock hands swung together at midnight and we filed out to our cars. I can no more recall a single daydream from those shifts than I could pick out one of the thousands of pears that tumbled past me. Thoughts take root in events; they get snagged in the debris of action. Work on the line was certainly action, but it was small action, repeated with little variance, until it felt like no action at all.

  Two weeks into the job at the sheds, I called my father to tell him about my routine on the line, my boredom and sore feet.

  “That’s why they call it alienated labor,” he said with a laugh. I could tell it pleased him that I shared his familiars—the shift work, the foremen, the rashes and odd pains.

  “Yeah, well, I call it ‘How I Learned to Hate a Pear.’”

  Leslie picked up the phone. “You know, some kids work summers at the GM plant while they’re in college.” She said it lightly, but I could hear the pride in her voice. I thought of all their compatriots on the line, working overtime to get their kids into college, out of blue-collar jobs. Leslie and my father wanted this for me too—they never expected that I would go to work in a factory—but the line work didn’t carry a stigma for them. They had chosen it. And I could tell they thought it was good for me to see how the other half lived. Or more than that: to get a glimmer of how they had passed the workweek, for the last seven years of their lives.

  My season’s wages at the pear sheds, added to the sum of my savings account—every birthday check I’d received since kindergarten, plus some stock my great-grandmother had taken out in her neighborhood bank when I was born, which when cashed out was worth one-tenth what she had invested—gave me enough to buy a lemon yellow 1976 Honda Civic. The car was six years old, and lemon would prove descriptive of more than the paint job, but when I first bought the thing, it purred and I was ecstatic. I still had only a learner’s permit, so Jim picked me up from school in my car and let me practice on the drive home. The Civic was a stick shift, and for a month or so I would pitch and buck through the high school parking lot, trying to ease it out of first gear while my high school friends howled on the curb.

  “Easy now, slow and easy,” Jim said over and over, miming the action of the pedals with his hands. On those afternoons, I got the true measure of his patience. He never raised his voice or braced himself on the dash. By the end of the month I could hold the car on a steep grade without touching the brake, balancing the clutch and gas at the precise poin
t of engagement. He had me rotate the tires, so I could change a flat in a pinch, and made me a tire-changing kit, with a piece of denim to lay out on the ground so I wouldn’t soil my clothes and a length of pipe to give me extra leverage on the tire iron. He slid the pipe over one arm of the iron and bore down to tighten the nuts. “They call this a cheater. And you never know, it might come in handy for self-defense.”

  Jim made sure I was prepared for roadside emergencies; my mother wanted to prepare me for more momentous things. She said to me once, “When you get ready to have sex, I don’t want you to end up in the back seat of some car. You and your boyfriend can come to us and tell us you’re ready to make love, and we’ll make sure you get some birth control and some privacy.”

  This offer made me feel terribly old. “Well thanks, Mom,” I said. I had to be a little wry, to save my dignity. “If I get any offers, you’ll be the first to know.”

  I couldn’t wait to pass this bit of news on to my friend Michelle. “Can you imagine?” I stood before her in mock sobriety, pretending to be my lust-stricken date. “Sir, Ma’am”—a respectful pause—“your daughter and I would like to make love.” I tried to imagine Jim’s face should this announcement ever be made. Stupefaction. A deep flush. “I bet that man would go straight for his granddaddy’s shotgun.” (Years later, I discovered that I wasn’t far off the mark. Jim pulled up short when my mother explained her love-at-home offer; it was too much of a stretch for a Baptist boy. My mother said it was one of the few pitched battles they ever had over how to raise me.)

  At the time, I told myself that my mother wasn’t serious. She was granting me a license she knew I wouldn’t take; it was a symbolic invitation, her way of saying: The flesh is good. You have my blessing. Some years before, when I hadn’t yet reached puberty and sex wasn’t such a fraught subject, I had asked her what it was like. She thought for a moment, then went to the bookshelf and pulled down a battered copy of Ulysses, cracked the book open to the last page, and bade me read.

  “…he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

  That didn’t much illuminate things. But looking back, in light of this literary offering, I have to think my mother’s invitation was sincere. She wasn’t by nature indirect. She didn’t make false offers or speak in code. I think she believed that I would come to her, date at my side, to announce my interest in sexual congress. And that idea strikes me as heartbreakingly naive—

  that she didn’t see the thicket between us, behind which I had to make my private way.

  Against my mother’s earnest wishes, I drove my car to a run-down neighborhood on the edge of town, where Billy—a boy from my high school, somehow emancipated at the ripe age of eighteen—rented an apartment. It was swampy land, near the river, the houses set back from the road and fronted by snarls of weeds. There were deep puddles in Billy’s driveway that never drained, even in summer. His place, a claptrap house built out of plasterboard and plywood, had only the barest furnishings: an old plaid couch and a TV, a neon Hamm’s sign on one wall. Billy worked at a nearby ranch. On any given day, his fridge might contain a half-eaten package of franks, a few vials of cattle vaccine, and a six-pack of Oly. When I came over, he’d offer me a beer and we’d small-talk our way into the bedroom, taken up almost entirely by his waterbed, a king-size ocean with vinyl sides.

  There is no word that does justice to the sustained conjoining of mouths that went on there. It was more than kissing, less than sex. As the night wore on, shirts and jeans were peeled off, but it seems sweet, in hindsight, that we felt constrained by those last layers of cotton underwear. At one point, I remember him saying, “Your skin is so soft,” with a kind of twangy complaint in his voice that I found amusing. I wasn’t soft; it was only his hands—chapped from cold and salt and bridle leather.

  At some hour of my own determining it was “time to go,” and I retrieved my outer clothing and, after some gentle pleading on his part, tiptoed through the living room, past his roommate asleep on the foldout couch with a girl who had allowed him more mature satisfactions. Out in my car, I turned the ignition and sat idling in the dark, running a finger over my chapped lips and waiting for the frost to melt from the windshield.

  Nine

  FOR YEARS MY FATHER had been asking me to move in with him. It was difficult to be a holiday dad. He wanted to do the kind of parenting that dailiness allowed. The issue came up every year through elementary school and junior high, and always I put him off. It wasn’t easy to say no. I loved him and I could see how much he wanted this chance; I even played sometimes at sharing his wishes: I want to come, but not this year, maybe next. In my heart, the choice was always clear. I was comfortable with my mother. Things were easy between us. I had my friends, and my routine, and I feared change. By the time I was a junior in high school, the topic of swapping households had ceased to come up.

  Then Leslie remembered a program from her days at L.A. High. Bright students who had fulfilled most of their college requirements could enroll early at UCLA. You spent the mornings in high school, finishing up the last units of English and P.E., and in the afternoons took a class or two at the university. Leslie seemed under the illusion, along with my high school counselor, that I was an accomplished student, but my bad habits at the high school were starting to show. One morning at a time, playing hooky down at the doughnut shop, I had made a record for myself, and the record wasn’t looking too good. My grades weren’t shameful. Plenty of people would have been happy with them, but the gates of the best schools weren’t going to swing wide for me, and the financing would be strictly pay-as-you-go.

  The best perk of the high school scholars’ program was that you didn’t have to apply for undergraduate admission. You were automatically enrolled in the freshman class, and the courses you took during high school counted toward your degree. It was a recruiting program for the kind of students who might otherwise go to Stanford or Harvard. Leslie felt sure I could get in.

  Flattered by her encouragement, I filled out an application. It was a small program, and it seemed to have fallen into some obscurity. All applicants who met the minimum standards were called in for an interview. (Some odd formula was applied to your SAT scores; I was lucky the equation favored verbal ability.)

  When it came time to fly to L.A. for the appointment, my mother came to my room to help me pack. “How do you feel about the idea of moving?” she asked, trying to keep her voice light.

  I shrugged. “I’m throwing myself at the mercy of fate. If I get in, I’ll go.” Easy to sound carefree: I was sure I wouldn’t be accepted. I would be right there, in my same bedroom, in my same house by the river, when September rolled around, so why worry?

  The interview was held in the Letters and Sciences Division in Murphy Hall. While I waited in the outer office, students came in to check class schedules and talk to the counselors. There was a friendly mood in the office. A woman came out and offered me a cup of tea, and I took it. “You can bring it back with you,” she said, smiling and starting down the hall.

  I thought she was the receptionist, but when I followed her into a small office filled with books and dried-out spider plants, she pulled up two chairs and shut the door. “I’m Janice. I run the high school scholars’ program,” she said, holding out her hand. I gave her mine, still warm from the teacup, grateful that I hadn’t had time to get sweaty palms.

  Janice sat back in her chair and propped a foot on one knee. “So, tell me a little about your interests,” she began. She had a pleasant, open face, the face of someone who was used to being told the truth.

  I didn’t have the good sense to disguise myself. I told her I liked English quite a lot and Spanish less so. I didn’t care much for math.

  “I can see that,” she said, glancing at my transcript.

  I racked my brain. My interests. �
�I like to dance,” I told her.

  Janice glanced up from my grades. “As in disco?”

  “No—well, yes, that too,” I told her, feeling things weren’t going well. “But I was thinking more of soft-shoe.”

  Janice’s face lit up. “No kidding? I just started tap lessons last month.” The foot came down off her knee and she leaned toward me. “How long have you been at it?”

  “Oh, off and on since junior high. I’ve been in some musicals, so I get practice there.”

  “Can you do a time step?” she asked. “I have a problem with time steps.”

  “Sure,” I said, suddenly flush. “Doubles, triples.”

  “It’s that first part that throws me off.”

  I stood up and did a single in front of my chair. “It helps to mark the beat out loud.”

  Janice got up beside me, tucking the hair behind her ears. “Okay. Shuffle, hop—this is where I get stuck, on the weight change.”

  We went through a few time steps together, the tile floor clicking brightly under our heels. “This floor is perfect,” I told her. “You could practice in here on your lunch hour.”

  Janice laughed a little, and then seemed to remember the purpose of our visit and returned to her chair. “So,” she said, picking up my transcript. She didn’t seem to be reading it, but rather musing as she stared at my uninspiring grades. “Goodness, I’m still out of breath,” she said conspiratorially, putting a hand on her chest. She slipped a finger under a gold chain at her throat and slid it back and forth, then spread the transcripts out on the edge of her desk, as if they might improve with rearrangement.