Split

by Lisa Michaels

  “Probably not,” he said.

  No one near me spoke for the three-hour ride into Kathmandu. The bus jolted over deep ruts, and at first I would glance over to see how the baby was faring, but her expression never changed, and after a while I couldn’t look. When the bus stopped at the terminal, I asked the man how much a doctor would cost. He shrugged and named an amount. On the concourse, I found the mother and pushed a wad of rupees into her hand. She looked blank, and turned to the man for an explanation. “For the baby,” I said, pointing to the child’s head.

  I looked at this woman, her face drawn tight with pain and now softened by confusion, and felt ridiculous. I wanted to rescue this child, as I had wished to be rescued from the snow, but she was already in competent hands. This mother had walked two days to Sundarijal, probably leaving other children behind. I remembered her courtesy, the way she paused in the foot well to give a word of thanks to the driver.

  The businessman tapped my arm. “She says many thanks,” he said. And then he was gone, and the baby was gone, and I walked toward Durbar Square in search of a room.

  I spent the next week wandering through the streets of Kathmandu, not caring whom I spoke to or if I spoke at all, browsing through the bookstores, drinking hot chocolate in the sunlit cafes. I can’t remember when I felt so content over simple things. In the afternoon, I went back to my single room—narrow, with a narrow bed—and washed my clothes in the concrete bathroom. The days were warm, and I went through everything in my backpack, welcoming the chill of cotton, the heft of soaked shirts. From the window came the sullen clop of cattle, whistles and laughter of schoolchildren let out for the day. I stripped down and piled the clothes against the wall, soaped and rinsed them under the rusty tap, then strung a line across my room and hung them under the ceiling fan. At the end of the week, I booked a flight to Bangkok, and from there I would go to Hong Kong, but in my mind I had reached the farthest point of my travels. I was already turning toward home.

  On my last morning in Nepal, I woke at first light, put on earphones, and rode off on a rented bike—a rickety one-speed with bent rims—toward a temple on the outskirts of town. The sun broke across the peaks, and in the cobbled streets and down the short alleys a gray predawn mist still held, pale as tufts of cotton wool. A few elderly women walked at the edges of the road, swinging prayer wheels. I came clattering up behind them, sounding my bell in warning as the bike-rental boy had instructed, and none of them turned or flinched. The tape hissed in my ear, then a song began. It was the opening cut from Joni Mitchell’s Blue, borrowed from a man in my hotel, and from the first bars her voice conjured up Alan Sarkissian’s living room, in that valley were I grew up, the smell of gear oil and the polished wood of his sarod. But this was a song I had never heard. “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling…” The words made my blood ring. There was the unmistakable presence of a person in those lines—in the bell-clear soprano, the strumming, the wit. I swooped downhill in my skirt and sandals, dodging potholes.

  In a trough at the bottom of the hill, a catch basin for the last bit of moonlight, I passed two boys carrying sacks of saffron on their backs. They were bent double by the heavy loads, stepping quickly over the wet cobblestones, hands braced on their head straps. Who knows how far they had come? Far enough that the spice had sifted through the burlap and over their arms and shoulders so their bodies glowed yellow in the phosphorescent light. Perhaps it was coarse to see such beauty in their labor, but I couldn’t help it. I was glad I had lived until then.

  Epilogue

  MAU FOUND A COPY of my letter in Bolivia, and when I made it home from India we moved into an apartment together. He enrolled in a Ph.D. program in zoology at U.C. Berkeley, which he stuck with until he tired of studying a rare epiphyte that only thirty people in the country could call by name and went into medicine. I wrote a letter to Michigan (the only school that accepted me) saying thanks but no thanks, and spent a few years doing scut work at a software company and trying to write poetry. And in time the swami’s prophecy came true, in a manner of speaking. But that’s another story.

  This one seems to have arced down a few years ago, when Mau and I decided that ten years was a sufficient test drive and set a date to be married. We gathered for that event at an old hall in the Berkeley hills, where nine of our parents walked down the aisle, mothers and stepmothers and ex-stepmothers, the accumulation of seven marriages, my ring having been handed down from a union that petered out in Mexico City circa 1974. Hope springs eternal.

  Once we made it out to the huppah, and the rabbi had ascertained that, pale as he looked, Mau was in fact not going to faint, our parents got up and made a series of speeches. Mau had gone through a brief but passionate return to his Jewish roots in the months before the wedding, and so the speeches were supposed to correspond loosely to the seven blessings of the Jewish marriage ceremony. We could have used the origi nais, which were lines of general praise and hosanna—except “Thank you, God, for making the barren woman fruitful” stuck in my throat.

  My mother got up that day and talked about particle physics. “In the search for a unified field theory which would explain the mysteries of the universe, we’ve learned that tiny subatomic particles behave in unison across vast distances, in the absence of time, sharing their state and maintaining their relationship.” She was holding a slip of paper, her voice shaking, but her face was as calm as it had been on those days when she stood at the head of a classroom. “I am Ann. My blessing today is for the field that structured the lives of Fanny and Bush and Carl and me, bringing us together for a while to send these good sweet children, Lisa and Mau, out of the void and into the future, drawing them together and toward this moment, from their births at almost the same time, a continent apart.”

  The blessers were offered a sip of ceremonial wine at the close of their speeches, but Jim made a show of taking a slug before he began, doing a vaudeville tremble to cover his nerves. Then he read a poem that I had recited to my mother during our mail-truck days.

  Leslie was next, and she—who often took a role behind the scenes—surprised everyone by telling a story. “With the phrase ‘Dare to struggle, dare to win,’ little Lisa, in 1975, read the words of the Chinese communist Chairman Mao Tse-tung to bond her father and new stepmother in marriage.” She looked elegant in a long black dress, a hat and high heels, and grasped my hand as she talked. “Little did we know then, another Mau would come on the scene…”

  Leslie had been my consultant on the wedding dress—a long sheath with appliqué straps—which turned out to be an easy buy, compared to what went underneath it. She and I drove all over Los Angeles in search of the right bra, which was finally unearthed at Olga’s Corsetorium, a dusty shop off Fairfax where the mustachioed Olga presided and the bras stood up by themselves.

  My father got up and spoke of ethics, the closest he came to religion. “In the best tradition of ethical Judaism, of the laying on of hands and the laying down of words, I wish you happiness and love.” My father’s brevity was a measure of the ease between us. He had thrown himself into the wedding with sentiment and gusto, hosting the rehearsal dinner, handpicking the wines, flying up to Berkeley to plan the menu, the flowers, the music. By the time he stood up under the huppah, nothing much more needed to be said.

  Then Mau’s mother and stepfather said words of good luck, and his father sang a blessing in Hebrew and dissolved into tears. I wept. Mau wept. The rabbi wept. My sisters, who held the huppah poles, were—in the words of one of my friends—“wrecked,” makeup moving down their faces in streams.

  The night before, after hours of tossing and turning, I had risen to stare out the hotel window. The city glittered away below me, and beyond it I could see headlights moving over the Bay Bridge. Those lights calmed me. I was getting married in the morning. Someone else was headed for the night shift. Life went on.

  I pried a banana from the fruit basket, went into the bathroom, plunked down on a ne
st of towels, and wrote my vows. In the other room, Mau was sleeping soundly, but he’d already passed through his own moment of anxiety. The day before, I’d gone down to the pool to nap under an umbrella, and when I came back to the room he was frantic.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said, pulling me into the room and shutting the door. His face was wild. “I was watching this nature show, it was about rats, and they were writhing around in their little dens, squeaking and squeaking.”

  Normally Mau loved a nature show. But this time it failed to have its usual calming effect. He was pacing around the hotel room.

  “So, what happened?” I asked, following him back and forth.

  “I don’t know, I just lost it.”

  During the year the wedding was in the works, Mau had behaved as if he would be a guest at the party, albeit a special guest with special privileges. When I was trying to pick a caterer and decide between seven fixed menus—each one pre-planned from hors d’oeuvre to entrée—I asked him if he wanted input. “Look, I can either explain all the choices,” I said, the menus in a jumble before me, “or I can just make a decision without you.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “I want to have input.”

  I had to admit I was relieved.

  “I’d like a green salad to start,” he said, cocking his head to the side as he imagined the plate, “with a vinaigrette, a simple pasta, maybe pasta primavera, a fruit salad (fresh, no syrup), nice bread.” He waved a hand in the air, animated by his order, then caught sight of my face. “What? What’s that look?”

  That look—blanched, slack jawed—was: my god, I’m going to live with this man for the rest of my life.

  But under the huppah, I managed to remember the things I’d scribbled on hotel stationery during the night, and I held on to his hand and said them to him.

  Then the glass was stomped, and we went into the hall to dance, limp with relief and amazed to see all the people that we loved, together for a night under one roof. Mau’s mother and stepfather pushed aside their plates and did a tango in a corner before the dinner was finished. My father was roused to some vintage disco moves by the Commodores’ “Brick House,” and when I joined him the guests opened into a ring. At first I felt embarrassed, but my father, who never disappointed a crowd, got some superhuman burst of energy and started doing floor taps and scraps of the hustle. His shirt was soaked through. He was ecstatic. I tried to keep up, laughing so hard I could scarcely breathe, and as I spun I caught flashes of my friends’ faces. Wendy, in particular, was hysterical with delight to see those gestures, which I had tried to render during our college days, performed by the true original.

  My little brother, by then ten, had been assigned to videotape the occasion, based on a piece of roving video reportage he made for fourth-grade show-and-tell. In the end he was too discouraged to bring it to class, but I thought it was a hoot: a cinéma vérité tour of the family medicine chest and the graffiti on my sister’s bedroom wall, complete with doleful voice-over. But as a wedding videographer, he was a disaster. The tape, when we watched it later, was mostly black, as Little Jim, soured by the party for which there had been so much buildup and which turned out to be a loud occasion for grownups, toured the patio and the far reaches of the lawn, beyond the reach of the lights.

  “I really can’t see much out here,” you could hear him mumbling. “There are some people out by the trees. There—if I press Backlight I can kinda get a bead on them.” Once in a while he would make a quick pass through the party. There was a blurred glimpse of Jim Senior against a wall, smiling and mum. Mia and me dancing to some tinny Caribbean music—“I know how to make ‘em dance,” the DJ said—filmed before my father gave the man guidance.

  At one point my cousin thrust his face into the frame, baring his teeth and flipping his eyelids inside out. “Hey, Danny,” my brother said, snickering from behind the lens. “We can watch this when we get back to the hotel.”

  When I first saw my brother’s tape, I wanted to throttle him. But after a while it seemed just as well. I had wanted to fix that day down to its particulars, wanted to revisit the whirl from a fresh angle, but it couldn’t be fixed. That was the poignancy of arriving at a moment of such completed feeling; half our delight came from the knowledge that we couldn’t linger, that time would keep carrying us away.

  Toward the end of the evening, I went to the bathroom to cool off and dry my face, and when I returned I caught sight of my mother and father across the room. They were lost in conversation, seated at a table with their heads bent together, my Grandma Leila between them. Someone spoke—I was too far off to make it out—and they all threw their heads back and laughed.

  Over the years, my mother and father had held terse phone conversations, brief exchanges in motel parking lots, and shared five stiff minutes on the sidewalk at my college graduation, but I had never seen them together like this. I could tell from across the room it was an exchange of another order.

  When I walked over, my mother turned toward me and smiled, a smile that seemed to reach through me, to some ap preciation of a glad hour. My father leaned back in his chair, surveying the room—my sisters bent over a table of my college friends, Leslie talking to Mau’s great-grandmother, and finding out, we would later learn, that she hailed from a Polish village much like the one my great-grandmother had left a century before. My father has a nose for social phoniness, but I could see from his expression that it came up real. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me then. I don’t know why I should be any authority on them, these people who raised me. I come to them with such expectations.

  “Look, here’s the bride,” my grandmother said, waving me to a chair. “I was just telling your mother she should write a book. You know, I still remember her letters?” She twirled the stem of her water glass. “She could take a casual day and make it interesting.”

  I smiled at her. I had heard this before, enough times to wonder how far the thread traveled. “What about you, Grandma, did you ever want to write?”

  “Who, me?” She squinted slightly and looked away. “I was never any good at writing.”

  My father leaned forward and covered his mother’s hand. “How could you have been a writer, Ma? No one encouraged you.”

  We sat for a moment in silence, the party whirling around us: my mother, my father, my grandmother, and me. Sometimes, we are peopled by our gratitude. Just then it seemed that I’d become what they—that sleek couple from the Grand Central photo booth, posed here together after thirty years—had given me, a girl with enough wild days to fill a story, and the faith to think I could tell it.