Ron’s face furrowed like a pug’s. “What are you thinking, huh? Those are precounted.” He hurried back to the kitchen, took another Danish out of the box, and carried it out to the truck on a scrap of wax paper. He reminded me of a surgeon—the same white coat and brisk gestures, the pastry limp and pale as a severed ear.
When the Danish was rightfully positioned on the tray, he turned to face me. “When the order calls for one hundred, we send out one hundred. Never ninety-nine.” His eyes burned. “This is an easy job, but it takes self-control.”
I saw my mansion dissolving before me, the cost of a lousy Danish. But when I was demoted to afternoon luncheons on campus, I was surprised to find it was the van that I missed. Those drives down PCH, surveying the sea from the vantage of its high seat. The needled dials on the dash panel, the black caulking on the windows, the hollow ring of my shoe in the foot well. It was all deeply familiar, and yet I gained some novel satisfaction from being the one behind the wheel.
In the fall of my freshman year, I got a letter from my mother. She had never been much of a correspondent, so the sight of her upright cursive gave me cheer. “Maybe you should sit down before reading this,” it began. That opening, and my penchant for calamity, left me wholly unprepared for her news.
“Your mother is going to have a baby! Arriving in June. We already know it’s a boy—to be named James Branscomb the Fourth. Big Jim, as we’ll now have to call him, is deliciously happy.”
I was surprised at first. My mother was thirty-nine. My sister, her second child, was then six. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a fine idea. A brother. That would be novel. I got out my Norton Anthology of Poetry and copied out a passage from Wordsworth—“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”—and mailed it to my unborn brother, who already had a name worthy of a shipping magnate.
My mother called me a few days later. “So, do you think I’m crazy?” she asked.
“Not at all,” I told her. Easy for me to say, from four hundred miles off. I would be more maiden aunt than sister, showing up for holidays and doing rare diaper duty.
“Well, thanks for the card,” my mother said. “Big Jim thought it was for him at first, and it made his face light up.”
That spring, when I went home for Easter break, I flew to San Francisco and took a shuttle bus north from the airport. Leaning at the window as we wound up Highway 101, I saw those coastal mountains as if for the first time. The slopes were a vivid rain-fed green, set off by the darker green of the oaks. Farther north, the road hugged the river, which strained through gravel bars and rocky narrows, the ridges on either side thick with pines. We’d come around a curve and the bus window would frame a swatch of river, hill, and sky that had the suffused palette of an old oil painting. I had driven that road a hundred times, with my father, my mother, on the Greyhound buses. I knew every bridge and winery and roadside curio shop. But it took two years of living amid strip malls to see the quiet lushness that had been spread out before me all my life.
When I arrived home, my mother was in her sixth month, wearing elasticized pants and eating Rolaids by the handful. Other than that, she didn’t seem much changed. She tugged on a cardigan and spent the mornings raking the flower beds, pausing now and then to flex her back.
On the Sunday before I left, she and I made Easter eggs, popping the ends of a dozen shells with an opened paper clip and blowing the insides into a bowl. Now that I lived near enough to my father for monthly dinners, I had Easter again with my mother: the paper-light eggs we wrapped with fern fronds, the baskets of fresh grass—all those specifics whose loss had caused me consternation at eight years old.
My mother filled a few bowls with water and tore open the packets of dye. While she stirred, I studied the fullness in her face, the way her belly kept her pushed back from the table. The first time I’d seen her pregnant, I was twelve and hadn’t taken much notice. Now I could half imagine myself in her state. I wanted to ask if she ever felt like she was trapped on a runaway train. Instead, I voiced it a blander way: “What about labor, are you nervous about it?” Labor being the terminus that lent that speeding train its threat.
My mother picked an egg out of the carton and shook her head: “It’s not that bad. You can either clench up and say, I don’t like this, I don’t like the way this feels” —she whispered the phrases through her teeth—“or you can just concentrate on making the whole thing open. It’s not magic, you know, it’s a muscle.”
I must have looked unconvinced. I was fairly sure I’d be one of those clenching types.
“I remember there was this woman in the labor room when I was in with your sister. Boy was that a scene. She was howling. The whole family gathered round like a Greek chorus.” I could hear my mother’s impatience with this spectacle. “It gets hard to listen to.” She must have seen how I blanched. “Maybe you should come watch the birth,” she said, one eyebrow raised.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I think I’d be too nervous.”
“Well, if you want to be there, you’re welcome,” she said, bending the wire dipping tool and scrolling the eggs in their baths.
The next morning my mother dropped me off at the municipal airport, where I waited for the shuttle bus. Tiny planes droned in and landed. Two men left the main office and stared over the airstrip as they each fingered in a lipful of chew.
“Take a look at the goddamn hippie,” one of them muttered as he passed out to the parking lot. His truck, vaulted like a toy above its oversize wheels, had a bumper sticker on the back window: If You Don’t Like Hank Williams Jr., You Can Eat Shit.
I flashed them the peace sign, but after they drove off, I looked myself over with a stranger’s eye. I was wearing a long Indian print dress with black work boots. My extra clothes were jammed into a stuff sack, and draped over one shoulder was my mother’s old army bag, to which I had affixed an enamel pin of Chairman Mao. I don’t know when I had become a caricature of a Woodstock refugee. It had happened gradually. I picked up one item and then another when it caught my eye—the turquoise jewelry, the thermal underwear, the ankh—and when I wasn’t out in the sticks, I thought I looked pretty good.
Not long after that visit, my mother had a vivid dream about Franny London, her leatherworking friend from the woods near Santa Cruz, whom she hadn’t seen much since our mail-truck days. In the dream, Franny had an undiscovered tumor, and my mother woke in a cold sweat, full of fear for her friend. This was an odd thing coming from my mother, who didn’t toss salt or knock wood or put much faith in omens. But the dream struck her as a warning, and she wrote Franny a card and made an effort to track down her whereabouts. After a while, the dream’s urgency faded and the letter was tucked in a drawer.
I found the envelope in a box of old mementos a few years ago and was stopped short by its hopeful address: “Please deliver to Franny London, who used to sell Light Force Spirulina in Santa Cruz.” My mother had faith that a reasonable request, plainly phrased, would be honored out of some basic Tightness in the universe. She imagined that note passed on by one helpful soul and another, until it reached the hands of her missing friend.
But inside the card were darker thoughts: “Are you out there, Franny? I just had an intensely vivid dream about you. I hope you are in real life 100% well.” Somewhere along the way, my mother had begun to worry about bad outcomes. At the bottom of the letter, she added a postscript that made me smile. “You wouldn’t believe it,” my mother wrote. “Lisa is nineteen and a sixties hippie lady come back to life.”
Back at UCLA, still outfitted in my retro garb, I once passed a man in fatigues in the narrow breezeway behind Pauley Pavilion.
“Chairman Mao,” he said, giving me a piercing look. He had a grizzled beard and chapped skin, and for a moment I thought he was unhinged. Then I remembered the pin on my bag.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, glancing down at the red and gold button. “A relic of my youth.”
The man looked surprised�
��I could see him trying to calculate my age—and then a memory clouded his face. “I haven’t seen one of those in a long time,” he said.
Some tone in his voice made me wince—familiarity, laced with bitterness and regret. Wearing Mao’s bust on an army bag suddenly seemed like a stunning presumption. I wore that pin because it conjured the spill of fuchsia in the back yard of our Berkeley house, afternoons nibbling cinnamon toast at Edy’s Ice Cream or lying in the window seat while my father pelted his conga drums. I had plucked Mao from a drawer in my father’s house out of nostalgia and as a nose-thumbing at the right-wing squares on campus. But I could see from this man’s pained glance that it meant more than that. When he turned the corner, I unhooked the pin and tucked it into my bag.
My friends and I almost never talked of social issues—a funny thing, considering that I spent a good deal of my life in a household in which politics was the primary subject. I mentioned this once to my friend Wendy, whom I’d met the first day in the dorms, and she shrugged: “There’s nothing to say.”
I pressed on, but gently: “It seems odd, though. We aren’t bloodless people.”
“Well, it’s just totally depressing,” she said, lifting her hand and then letting it drop. “I read about this Iran-Contra thing, I can barely understand all the doublespeak. And soon it will all be swept under the rug.” She was sitting forward now, an edge in her voice.
We went on, in a rambling way, because once you pulled a thread, whole swatches of history unraveled—and suddenly we came to a conclusion that exhausted us both: it would take a global effort to clean up the mess. Still, as my friend spoke, I felt a flush of gratitude toward her, for her lucidity and her weariness. She confirmed something I suspected: we didn’t know where to start.
Some might say that the hubris of youth is to believe in one’s own absolute power, and that growing up is about the waning of grandiose dreams and an increase in concrete abilities. I seem to have missed that early phase. I never imagined I could affect the national scene. What I felt, at nineteen—I am embarrassed to admit—was discouraged. Our president was a senile ex-actor, we were up to our ears in debt, and I was convinced that before long I would be snuffed out by a stray ICBM.
I thought more than I should have about those missiles. Who could dream up a better recipe for dread? They stood ready in their silos. There was no blood, no battle. No one was dying, and maybe no one would—or maybe all of us would die at once.
Leslie was working with a group on nuclear disarmament at the time, and since I had latched on to this specific terror and lost sleep over it, I went with her to occasional meetings and spent a weekend canvassing for SANE/FREEZE in Brentwood. This was thought to be friendly territory: white liberals, movie-industry people with bushels of money who’d be a soft touch for donations.
I walked with my clipboard and literature, and rang the first doorbell.
“Hi, I’m with SANE/FREEZE. Are you in favor of cutting defense spending?”
“No, and I’m on the phone right now.”
“Hi, I’m with SANE/FREEZE. Are you worried about nuclear proliferation?”
“What?”
“Hi, I’m going door to door to gather support for a freeze on nuclear weapons.”
“Not here, you’re not. I’m ready to blow the Russkies to kingdom come.”
Every now and then I’d find a person willing to haggle over the issues (on which I was embarrassingly ill informed); here and there I’d get a signature; and at two or three houses that weekend, a pacifist forked over a check for fifteen dollars. I began to read the houses from the outside. A bird feeder was a good sign. No point knocking at a house with a bald eagle on the mailbox. Wood shingle seemed to be better than clapboard. But after one weekend, I gave up. I never had much heart for fighting the tide. Instead I went to the library and found a map that showed the few likely safe regions in the country—places far from hard targets and out of the range of prevailing winds—and plotted when I might move there.
Much as I felt out of sync with the mood at my new school, I was in love with the campus and amazed by the small privileges of student life. At the edge of Bruin Walk was a women’s gymnasium, a brick building with a small yellowed locker room where you flashed your I.D. and a woman doled out clean towels from behind a wire cage. The locker room gave onto a small brick courtyard that housed a vintage lap pool. Outside the walls, students streamed by with their books, but the pool was sheltered, a throwback to the days when a woman might like to take a dip in privacy. Nearby was the new rec center, named for John Wooden, whose famous pyramid of success was engraved on a plaque near the door: an ascending pile of abstract virtues that apparently brought home the NCAA pennant ten years running: faith, patience, honesty, poise. The talk might have rung old-fashioned, but the building was not: a pile of glass and steel with racquetball courts, a two-story gymnastics arena, and aerobics offered on the half-hour. The house the boom years built.
I began to take yoga twice a week in one of the lofty second-floor studios. The class was taught by a long-legged Englishman named Christopher Reed. He didn’t look like my idea of a yogi—thin and stringy and lithe. In fact, he resembled a doughy Alexander Gudonov. Christopher was a proud man, with a low melodic voice, and he didn’t go in for mumbo jumbo. He never once mentioned his third eye or asked us to imagine we were floating on a puffy white cloud. Instead he described the poses in a precise and plain fashion, walking around the room to straighten an elbow here, turn a foot out there. After an hour, the sap of worry over school leached out of me, and by the end of the class, when we were in Corpse pose —splayed out on our backs—I was limp from toe to jowl. It was then that I thought of my father, flipped heels over head in the department store, not giving a fuck-all what anybody thought, because he was human and it felt good to twist this way and that. And how I hid in the clothes rack, ready to disown him. It seemed that I always measured his life as it bore on me.
I was grappling in those days with ideas of separateness and cohesion. Sometimes it seemed that the things that drove my life—my desire to be a good student, daughter, friend; to distinguish myself in the world; to take comfort in clubs and schools and academic allegiances—were made of smoke. We were big-brained animals, smart enough to want life to have purpose and form, so we made up ways to pass our days here —hoops to jump through, invisible rules. I could mind them and be convinced I had distinguished myself among men, or I could tear my clothes and rave in the street: in the end it didn’t seem to matter. I was a speck in the vastness, in the risings and migrations and extinctions, a bottle on the waves. I loved that thought. It made me feel free.
I spent a lot of time, at twenty-one, peering into the unbridgeable gaps between people, looking at what got lost, even between those bent on communion, rather than what got through. I think I hated to be alone, but hated worse the idea that no one could comfort me. Better to mask a need than ask for solace and have it go unmet. Clarity was a sham, a false god. If no one really understood the movings of another heart, then why bother trying to be lucid?
These days, I pay more attention to what strains through, despite the limits. What we can say, one to another, even if we can’t say everything. But even back then, secretly, I longed to be wrong. And when I first came across some writings about Taoism, it was the calm refutation of our separateness that washed over me like a tonic. I thought I had been sharp-eyed to have noted man’s solitary fate, but now I was convinced this view was a delusion, a false stopping place. We weren’t linked by some flimsy web of social relations, but we weren’t distinct either. We were joined on the essential struts of linked matter.
Of course, the Buddhist doctrine of nonattachment seemed to appeal most to those who didn’t have much, or who suffered more than they were glad, so that giving up the cycles of happiness and sorrow was in fact a winning proposition. I suppose it said something about me in those days that I kindled to the words of Thich Nhat Hanh and Shunryu Suzuki. I owned a few clothes, a f
uton, some boards and cement bricks, and I often felt quite gloomy. Buddhist practice seemed to offer relief.
After my mother’s invitation over Easter to witness my brother’s delivery, she and I didn’t speak about the subject for a while. I got swept into final exams and the topic was forgotten. But when the quarter drew to a close and I thought about my visit home, I turned again to the idea. I would arrive a week before her due date. If I was there for the event, why not see it firsthand? Maybe she was right; maybe it would dispel some of my morbid fears.
My brother’s due date came and went, and my mother’s doctor finally agreed to induce labor. It certainly made things orderly. We got up early, dropped my little sister off with a family friend, and drove to the hospital. After my mother’s waters were broken, Jim and I kept her company while she walked the halls, trying to get things going. The birthing room was done up to look homey, with chintz wallpaper and a window looking out on a bank of grass and shrubs. Jim stayed at my mother’s side, stroking her hand and changing the tape in the tape deck. They were listening to the Brandenburg Concertos, which is cheering stuff, but maybe somebody forgot how long the business was. There was no other tape. As the day wore on and the opening concerto began for the sixth or seventh time, I retreated to a deserted waiting room to read back issues of Good Housekeeping and pick at my face in the bathroom mirror. Around nine in the evening Jim burst in the door.
“It’s happening!” he said, breathless and already sprinting back down the hall. “This is it!”
I was given a gown and a mask and ushered into the room. The bottom half of the bed had pulled away, and the doctor was there, guiding things along.
True to her word, my mother didn’t howl. Her face torqued with each contraction, but between them she was composed.
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