Split

by Lisa Michaels

  Late in her second year at Sarah Lawrence, my mother took a poetry course with Muriel Rukeyser. The class met in a cottage set in a nook of the campus, surrounded by a flowering garden. Inside, the students sat in a circle, with the doors thrown open to the greenery, and talked about poetry and politics and daily life.

  My mother thought of Muriel as a mentor and went to speak with her often, but one afternoon in particular frequents her stories. She had just found out she was pregnant, and at twenty-one, with a war on and her marriage under strain, the prospect of motherhood made her worry.

  “I don’t know if this is a good time to bring a person into the world,” she said.

  Muriel looked her in the eye. “Don’t worry about the baby,” she said. “Babies are powerful. They look helpless, but you’ll see: the world will turn around it.”

  That summer, my mother graduated from Sarah Lawrence and she and my father moved to Newark to work on the Newark Community Union Project, part of a wave of student activists moving to the ghettos. NCUP ran a storefront office headquarters and held meetings that stretched into the early morning hours. My father went around ringing doorbells, visiting with people in the neighborhood, working with them to file complaints against the slumlords.

  Around that time, my mother’s uncle took her aside and offered her a job at his bond brokerage firm. She was a bright girl; he needed people like her. She could rent a place in Manhattan, get a nanny for the baby, and start socking it away for a house on Long Island. My mother smiled and said thanks but no thanks. She had set her sights on another career: she wanted to teach school in Harlem.

  It would be a while before she fulfilled that goal, but in the meantime she and my father lived in a world her uncle would have found unfathomable. They rented a dingy one-bedroom apartment in a section of Newark that had cobblestone streets and erratic garbage collection. They didn’t drink or smoke, never did drugs, never ate out, never went to the movies. Instead, they spent their days organizing rent strikes, trying to get the trash collected, and, in late 1966, backing a black liberal Republican, Earl Harris, in a bid for a council seat against a white Democrat.

  In a profile of Tom Hayden in New York magazine (another clipping Grandma Leila saved) the writer has this to say about NCUP: “Newark Community Union Project: Romance drips all over it; the young radicals love it out there across the land.” In a photo that went with the article, a group of these vanguard youth are gathered on a Newark street corner, dressed in what would now be called casual business clothes. Midway through the piece, my mother makes a cameo appearance, as “the Lost Daughter of Goldwater Parents.” In the writer’s description, Ann, “pretty, long hair falling to her shoulders, closes the door, heading for Earl Harris’ headquarters. ‘If Harris loses we’re going to have a fight here. Some of the community people are carrying guns.’ Her eyes are flashing. It is prom night all over again.”

  I read these lines to my mother not long ago, thinking she’d laugh at the patronizing tone, but instead some of that flashing resurfaced: “Prom night! Yeah, and Newark fucking exploded.” She was almost hissing with the memory of those riots, which would convulse the city six months later.

  But the writer, despite his glib style, did manage to capture my parents’ shared conviction for political work. In the private realm, they shared less. My mother, who was tending to a newborn and keeping the house polished, was becoming disillusioned with the division of labor in the new society. My father wrote the speeches and she typed them; he was to speak at a meeting and she was to give him a ride. This had as much to do with the times as it did with the depth of my father’s needs, but it seemed to my mother that even amid the radical movement some aspects of the old order remained the same. When they argued, my father went off to the headquarters and she stayed up into the middle of the night scrubbing the kitchen floor with a rag and brush.

  When I was four months old, my parents’ marriage came apart. My mother moved to the Lower East Side and took a job teaching school in Harlem, as she had vowed to do. My father stayed in Newark. From both of their accounts, the time after their split was one of unexpected liberation. Their divorce was to be a progressive agreement, part of the new society that was to come. They passed me off with a bottle and diaper bag wherever their schedules permitted. It seems they were better friends in those years than they had been when passion clouded the air between them. “We planned things together,” my mother told me once. “We had never done that before.”

  Their separation meant that three days out of the week my father was fully in charge. He learned how to lull me to sleep, how to warm a bottle without scalding the milk. He laughs to recall how he would set out from my mother’s apartment, holding me on one arm, the bag of creams and bottles on the other. “Ann would say, ‘Don’t forget to put the wet clothes in a plastic bag and the dry clothes in the bag marked “D” and the damp clothes in the bag next to the pacifier, which is on top of the pediatrician’s phone number.’ I would nod knowingly and start losing things the minute I left her apartment.” Once, he showed up to meet my mother for the tradeoff, feeling snazzy in a new khaki suit, only to have her point out a giant blossom of urine on his pants. Still, my father says he was grateful for the chance to be a real parent: “In the evenings I would sit in a chair and read and you would crawl around, using me as a home base. I enjoyed being ‘forced’ to miss my political meetings for a while.”

  After the Newark riots, my father went to work for Students for a Democratic Society, organizing at colleges up and down the eastern seaboard. He was based in Boston, but would always manage to end up back in New York by Friday night, where he would take me for the weekend while my mother went out.

  Sometimes he brought me along on the speaking circuit. We “crashed” on the floors of people’s apartments, went to student meetings, and rode buses together. “We had to take a Port Authority bus from midtown Manhattan to Newark,” my father wrote me once, describing that time, “and, not being able to occupy you for the whole ride, I would let you crawl around on the floor where you would proudly pick up cigarette butts and show them off to me and the passengers—who were horrified. I think that a lot of my permissiveness was an attempt to cope. I was looking for some type of parenting ‘style’ that would allow me to be in charge without feeling the need to control. Out of that you developed a highly self-sufficient style of your own.”

  While my father canvassed for SDS, my mother began to distance herself from politics. At twenty-three she had believed that if she could gain entrance to the White House, if she could get Lyndon Johnson to sit still in his grand leather chair and listen for an hour, she could make clear to him how purely wrong the whole war effort was, how cracked in its very foundation—and, in the face of her lucidity, he couldn’t help but change his mind.

  It was a measure of my mother’s faith in her own power that she actually went to the White House in 1968 and camped on the steps with a group of her friends, insisting on a meeting with the president. They stayed for nearly two days, sleeping on the cold marble steps, with no one paying them much mind, until King Haile Selassie arrived for an official visit and the protesters linked arms across the gate. Then the Secret Service arrived and whisked them away. My mother’s picture was in the New York Times, to my grandparents’ mortification. Two Secret Service men are lifting her up by her arms, her crossed legs dangling in textbook civil-disobedience style, penny loafers on her feet. She looks, in fact, like the darling coed: pegged pants and cardigan and glossy hair flipped up at the ends. My father loved that picture. He described it to me once in startling detail, a wistfulness in his voice at my mother’s former passion.

  But although my mother and father were both bent on political change, it seems to me that they worked from different sources. My father identified with the oppressed. It was fury at their conditions that spurred him on, and if one method wouldn’t work, he would try another. My mother was attuned to other people’s suffering, but what drove her to a
ction was the idea that reason could win out. As a young girl, she once dreamt she was appointed to solve the world’s problems, and she set about fixing them one by one, until solving the last dilemma presented the solution to the first. But in waking life, the problems were more intractable, and all her smarts and energy were dwarfed by the country’s ills. Gradually, my mother lost heart for the slow, backsliding muckiness of protest politics—all the evenings spent arguing with people who mostly shared her views. I suspect that some of her disavowal of mass movements was a reaction to her relationship with my father, but whatever its roots, she stopped going to meetings, gave up trying to change the government, and started looking around for a smaller sphere.

  She found the beginnings of one when a group of her friends rented an old hotel on the Massachusetts seashore and convinced her to join them. We left Manhattan in the summer of 1968, when the garbage workers were on strike and the mercury was climbing into the nineties. “Every inch of air had its own vile and particular smell,” my mother said later. She let go of our apartment, packed all our belongings into our VW bug, and drove up the West Side Highway, leaving those cloying streets behind.

  Her fellow household members were computer programmers, psychologists—many of them old friends. “Suddenly, I was living the Sgt. Pepper life by the seashore,” she said. Everyone pitched in for food and cooked together; chores were posted on a rotating wheel on the fridge, with each person taking care of a slice of the housekeeping pie. On Sunday evenings, the housemates gathered in the living room for meetings where issues were raised and occasionally resolved. Her share of the rent was about forty dollars, and since we ate rice, beans, and vegetables, and spent our days on the beach, she didn’t need to work. She got a little pin money from her grandmother, and passed the summer in a pleasant haze. We would wake up late and eat oatmeal at the big farm table with whoever else was around. In the afternoons, she and her friends would gather down at the beach and stretch out a blanket. My mother would read, marvel over my dawning consciousness, then take a nap while someone dangled my feet in the surf.

  When she talks about Manomet, my mother’s voice goes soft and she looks out into the middle distance, conjuring the long green lawn below the house, the path through the dunes to the water. She was buoyed up by the company of her friends, by the salt breeze that slipped into our room at night, and her sense of freedom and ease seeped into me. On most days I wore nothing but sandals. Sometimes she put a diaper on me; more often I was allowed to squat where I pleased. My mother was in no hurry to potty-train me. She believed then that children were possessed of a native vitality, which would guide them toward good health and good human relations. She saw her job as one of gentle helmsmanship.

  In fact, I was wild as a baby goat. I ate whole sticks of butter, bit anyone who crossed me, and pushed my mother’s friend Miriam over the line one day when we sat down for breakfast together and she lifted the lid on the sugar bowl to find a turd curled up neatly inside. In the moment of shocked silence while Miriam’s spoon was poised, my mother pointed out that the sugar bowl did look something like a toilet—it was round and porcelain, even if the scale was wrong—and then they howled together at my dainty replacement of the lid. But Miriam helped make it clear, if it hadn’t been before: I was socializing myself for a society of one.

  My mother’s laissez-faire parenting style was a conscious overturning of the prim thinking of the time, and a rebellion against the conventions of her own childhood. Once or twice during that summer, we drove down to visit my grandparents on Long Island, and slipped back into the manicured world she had come from. Grandma Kate and Grandpa Bob’s brick-fronted home was set on an acre of grass and maples, with a pool and cabana out back. I moved into the luxury of that world without question, jumping out of the car and running down the brick walk to the den: my grandfather’s kingdom.

  I remember my grandfather in the long slide of his retirement. He spent his days sunk in a La-Z-Boy recliner, holding the remote controls to two massive console TVs set side by side at the far end of the room. He would watch two sports games at once, muting one then blaring another as the action waxed and waned. He had been laid up by a wound in his foot the size of a golf ball, which began as a small nick from a piece of glass out by the pool and, because of his diabetes, never healed. That wound stayed open for the last years of his life, gathering infections and eventually gangrene, growing wider under the surgeon’s knife.

  On the table beside him was a spinning pipe rack topped with a brass statue of a boy and his hound, a well-thumbed TV guide, and a box of dog biscuits, which he would dole out to his beloved Yorkshire terrier. I would sit on his lap, lean against his drum-taut belly, and breath in his scent—tobacco and Vitalis and fresh gauze. Grandma brought him drinks from the bar at the back of the room—a fully stocked arsenal, with a slate floor, a chrome top-loading fridge, and a rack of shakers and stir sticks. While Grandpa sipped his Scotch, I sat on one of the barstools and downed glass after glass of Tropicana orange juice, a treasure that never appeared in the commune fridge. On the glass shelves above the bar were rows of matte black steins with handles in the shape of naked ladies. They touched their toes to the base of the mugs, then arched backward to grab the rim with dainty hands. When you lifted a mug, your thumb fit perfectly into their cleavage.

  Up a flight of stairs from the den was the formal living room, with yellow brocade slipcovers on the couches, and on the coffee table a crystal paperweight with a sword-shaped letter opener thrust into its center, a mini Excalibur. The other day, I saw an ad for this very item, a Steuben it seems, priced now at thirty-one hundred dollars. “Timeless. Elegant. American,” the copy read. Back then I was warned never to touch it, as I moved fast and left a trail of small calamities in my wake.

  That Huntington house, down to the last detail, gave off a feeling of plenty. And it was this smugness that my mother was fleeing: the casual presumption of wealth; my grandparents’ marriage, held together through rough times by decorum; the glistening dinners of roast beef and potatoes served in front of the television; the chemically enhanced lawns. It looked like the American Dream—two TVs, one pool, twelve black beer steins with naked ladies on the side—but it was full of holes.

  Once, my mother told me of the life she had imagined making with my father once they married. They would buy a house in Harlem, adopt six or seven kids, plant a garden in an abandoned lot, and teach in the public schools. A fine dream, except she never once asked my father if he shared her vision. She says she knew he would have objected, but she figured she could talk him into it.

  My parents’ new life—separate but congenial—seemed to be working, but it was not to last. In June 1969, at the ninth and final national convention of SDS, a splinter group put out a pamphlet calling for, among other things, the creation of a revolutionary party. My father went to the convention and heeded that call, joining the two or three hundred people across the country who dubbed themselves Weatherman, after a line from Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” They believed that a revolution was imminent, but that it required a spark, some kind of violent action, to catalyze a mass uprising. In Boston, my father joined the local action project, whose members shared an apartment and spent their days training with weights and planning protests.

  I don’t know what attracted my father to this movement, such a long way from his early days in Newark. I know it is a period about which he has his own misgivings, although he is quick to defend the choices he made when they are criticized from afar. I believe that he joined the Weathermen out of a conviction that revolution was required—to end poverty and racial inequality, to end the war. But it’s hard to imagine the context in which he came to such a conclusion, and easy, in hindsight, to see how badly he misjudged the national mood.

  After he became a Weatherman, my father began to spend less and less time looking after me. As the summer wore on, my mother became exasperated, and finally she went to the Weathermen collective to confront
him. It was an apocryphal moment, and they still don’t agree on what was said. It is a measure of how far apart they had drifted that their memories refuse to match up.

  My mother says she pounded on the door until they let her in. My father’s comrades were gathered round, and in front of them she said her piece. What about the model childcare arrangement? What about his responsibilities? He told her that he had bigger responsibilities and urged her to leave me with Grandma Kate and join him in the struggle. She remembers looking at my father then and feeling that she barely knew him. “I can’t believe you would give up your own kid,” she said. And in her memory he replied with a line that would haunt her in the years to come: I was no more his child than were all the children in Vietnam. My mother screamed at him then, told him that political righteousness was no excuse for shitty behavior, her voice full of fury and fear, I’m sure, at what this meant to her—that she would have no help in caring for me, no one to consult with, no air.

  My father told me, years later, that part of him knew she was right, but he was already on a path and couldn’t turn back. He remembered their conversation as one between people who agreed on a goal, if not the means: the war had to be stopped. He said my mother might just as easily have been in his shoes, ready to make such a sacrifice. In his memory, they spoke that day of her resentment—that he got to be in the vanguard; that she was stuck in the traditional role. One thing they both agreed upon: they loved me, and any choice that made me suffer was a difficult one. In a letter, my father once described it this way: “The watchwords of the time were urgency, militancy, combativeness, commitment, and sacrifice. I looked at you and loved you so much, and then I looked at children dying of napalm and rifle bullets inflicted by our soldiers. As a Jew I had heard so many times, ‘What did the goyim do when Hitler was killing the Jews? Why didn’t they stand up?’ And then I heard stories of Christians who had hidden Jews at the risk of their lives, whites who had risked their lives on the Underground Railroad sheltering slaves, and it was that tradition that I felt a part of.”