Split

by Lisa Michaels

  I began to go over to see Mare and Pippy often after school. The fence wires were bent wide from my passage, and I beat a narrow track in the grass. In the stretch of ground between our woodshed and the fence was a patch of mint, whose corrugated green leaves made a pleasing rasp on the tongue. I loved that it grew wild; amid the careful plots of vegetables my mother tended, this was my secret crop. I would harvest great handfuls of leaves for a pot of tea, and days later I’d discover the wilted, lint-covered mass in my pocket.

  In the days to come, I would begin to feel that the things that lured me to play with those girls were less than wholesome, and so the taste of mint became married to a vague guilt, and the path through the grass became a visual record of habit—the proverbial rut—made deeper by a score of instances in which I fretted briefly—it wouldn’t have looked like fretting from the outside, only a girl wandering aimlessly about her yard—and then went over anyway.

  We played on a quarter-acre of dirt dominated by an old weeping willow, whose branches draped to the ground. The dusty, grassless circle under the tree was our house, furnished with two cracked kitchen chairs and top-loading washer and dryer that had been left there to rust. In that house, I was the mother; the oldest girl, Mare, was the father; and Pippy, the toddler—still in diapers, fat and placid—was our child.

  As a mother, I demanded a strict discipline. First, we swept the house with switches, pushing the minnow-shaped leaves to the edge of the yard. Then I swung the baby up to the dryer and pulled her dirty socks off. Her bare feet were so tender— puffy wedges of flesh no bigger than butter cookies, the flat bottoms netted with tiny wrinkles. I made a great show of being haggard and overworked for the baby’s benefit, brushing the bangs out of my eyes with the back of a hand, tossing the little socks into the agitator and punching the buttons on the washer with theatrical irritation. Mare played father to my mother with perfect aplomb. She came home from work, parting the willow leaves to enter the house with her arms akimbo, and demanded dinner.

  “You cook it!” I shouted, my hip cocked out to hold the baby. “I’ve been here all day cleaning and taking care of Pippy.” The baby watched this drama in silence, her sweaty hand clutching my T-shirt, her sturdy legs wrapped around my side. The cooking scene quickly lost interest, and since we had no pots and pans to rattle, we would lean against the washer and dryer and roll cigarettes out of binder paper, smoking while Pippy crawled in the dust.

  Where did we get this information? That cigarettes make grownups lazy and inattentive, their heads tipped back, their wrists cocked deftly to flick the ash. Neither of my parents smoked; I almost never watched TV. My mother had never spoken the kind of wooden lines I passed off on Mare. I was playing at a kind of iron-ruled family quite apart from my own. And under our hackneyed dialogue, the same dialogue used in back yards across the continent, we were carrying out a delicate test of loyalty and humiliation, of how much we would allow ourselves of the cruelty that lived in our small veiled hearts.

  I don’t know how the game changed; it was slowly, over a period of weeks, that we turned on the baby.

  “She has been bad,” I would tell Mare when she came home from work. “I can’t get anything done with her around.”

  We conferred calmly about her punishment. Sometimes we would carry her outside the shelter of the tree. We called this “grounding,” and pretended to go on about our chores. The baby didn’t seem to understand this business. She wandered out by the fence, stuffing acorns in her mouth, until we let her back in.

  One day when Pippy tried to eat one of our cigarette butts, I scooped her up and carried her out into the blazing sun. “Don’t put anything in your mouth that isn’t food,” I said, and plopped her down in the dust, her sandaled feet jutting out in front of her. She was naked, except for her diaper, and I remember her hands splayed out beside her watermelon stomach in a gesture of surprise, and then the long inbreath she took in preparation for a wail. That warm-up was a fearsome thing. Her mouth gaped and her eyes welled up, and for whole seconds there was no sound. I cast a worried glance at the curtained side windows of the real house, where Pippy’s mother might soon appear. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Please don’t cry.” I lifted the baby up by her armpits, leaning back to counter her weight. Her body was as heavy and limp as a sack of lead shot. She draped herself over me and made fierce little gasps. I might have given up then on the whole punishment routine, but as soon as she was calmed, I put her down in the same spot.

  “You’re still grounded, Pippy,” I told her solemnly. Then I swished back through the branches and told Mare that we couldn’t get soft on her or Pippy would get spoiled and we’d have only ourselves to blame.

  Pippy didn’t understand what was the matter. She crawled over to the cascading greenery of the tree and pulled herself up on its flimsy branches. I stood in her path, with my hands on my hips. She moved left, then right, as if chance had put me in her way, then pushed through with her fat hands, leaning into my body with the leaves tangled between us.

  “No,” she said firmly, not quite mad yet.

  “That’s it,” I remember saying. (I had heard that somewhere, the thing parents said when they’d hit their limit.) I parted the branches, whirled the baby around, and swatted her on her bottom. I got grim satisfaction from the smack of my palm on her plastic diaper—satisfaction and a misplaced righteousness, since the baby hadn’t done a thing. In an instant, Mare was beside us. She elbowed me aside and took Pippy in her arms.

  “You have to go home now,” she said to me, and though there was a squeak in her voice, there was also a surprising firmness. I backed out of the yard and dipped through the fence, past the straggly patch of mint, holding in my mind the expression on Mare’s face. It looked like the face of love to me—steadfast and protective and tender.

  Years later, my mother would say, with a tightness in her voice, that I didn’t seem quite happy in those early years at 12000 Spring Street: “I wasn’t aware of how precarious our life seemed to you.” When she had looked at me, running naked across the lawn at the Manomet commune, she felt fierce about protecting my freedom. “You see, peril to me was the closing down of the world like a coffin. Living according to a script. Still, I always tried to make a cozy place for you to sleep.”

  And it’s true; my mother did her best to shield me. It may well have been my own temperament that made me alert to danger. At seven or eight, I was convinced that I would die in childhood and seized on any evidence that my body was in decline. Once, in the deep claw-foot tub in Floyd’s old house, I peered through the lapping water and saw dark streaks running up my legs—signs, I decided, in a snap diagnosis, of leukemia. I sat in the cooling bath gripped by a mixture of terror and relief—terror at the grueling treatments ahead of me, and relief that the ax had finally fallen and my illness had a name. When my mother came in and found me wide-eyed and shivering, she took a washcloth and some soap and showed the streaks to be engine grease, left over from Jim’s shower after work on the mail truck. She called me a nervous goose, and we laughed together as she wrapped me in a towel and tucked me into bed. But once she left, my dread returned. My mother swore that things always turned out for the best, and I wanted to believe her, but my life thus far hadn’t borne this out. She couldn’t promise me that I wouldn’t die; I knew no one could promise me that. And if she didn’t believe we were all at risk, then I would have to keep watch on my own.

  Everything that had blown up in my parents’ breakup, in the years on the road, was starting to fall back into place. The property at 12000 Spring Street was turning lush under my mother’s hands: she rototilled half of the scruffy lawn and planted rows of corn, mounds of zucchini and melons, tufts of silvery artichokes against the fence. She learned plumbing, how to lay insulation and hammer shingles on the steep roof, her firm mouth bristling with nails. She dug trenches to lay water line, pinned her hair under a cap and reworked the building, bone to eave.

  When I saw the zeal with w
hich she threw herself into these labors, I asked for my own plot. Mother rototilled a square of dirt next to an old shed and helped me turn the earth with a pitchfork. “You want to break down the big clods and toss out the rocks,” she said, “so the ground is rich and crumbly.” We planted the fastest-growing varieties we could find (she knew that a budding gardener needed quick rewards): radishes, carrots, curly lettuce. When the seeds were in, I fenced off my plot with stakes and string, wary of trespassers. By some feudal instinct, I claimed the shed too, since it abutted my garden, and I think I got more pleasure from that spider trap than from the plants popping up in the blistering sun. The shed had mystery. It was built of rough planks, and chinks of light shone through the cracks, casting a stenciled pattern on the packed-dirt floor. There were a couple of shelves, a stack of buckets, and a few hoes and rakes tipped into one corner. I sat there in the dusty coolness, figuring how I might get my hands on a few furnishings: an old leather armchair for the corner, a small bookcase.

  My mother was reading me fantasy then—the Namia chronicles, A Wrinkle in Time —and I had faith that if I focused my powers I could make walls melt, learn the language of toads, dissolve into someone else’s bloodstream and travel the chutes and tunnels of their veins. The shed was to be the laboratory for these investigations. One day, I coaxed Alison from her house and convinced her to mix a potion with me. We pulled out a steel washtub from the laundry room, dragged in a hose, and filled the tub nearly to the brim. Then we mined our medicine chests: I snuck past my mother with a shirt full of pills—aspirin and antacid, some leftover antibiotics. I skipped across the linoleum, holding my shirt hem up like a cancan dancer clutches her skirts—tra la la. That should have aroused her suspicions. Alison brought out a carton of White King D, her mother’s detergent, and a fistful of black walnuts from the yard. We stirred all this into a murky whirl, the walnuts bobbing up like bad omens, said a few desultory spells, and waited for transformation.

  I still remember the sickening feeling that rose in my throat when I realized we weren’t going to be swept into the fourth dimension. We were stuck in that shack, which didn’t even have a door we could close on our mess. Suds had sloshed out of the tub and turned the floor into creamy mud. I could hear my mother humming nearby as she shucked com for dinner. In a minute she would appear in the doorway and find the empty aspirin bottles, the two of us, frozen, our stir sticks in a few gallons of poisonous sludge. We were tight on money in those days, so my dread centered on our wastefulness. A whole bottle of aspirin! Half a box of Jackie’s good detergent! The Riders were probably on welfare at the time; Roger had already split the scene. I remembered my exile over the snatched strip of bacon and winced at the thought of Jackie’s cold fury.

  Alison and I moved as if we were of one mind. We threw down the sticks and dragged the bucket to the doorway, tipping the contents into my vegetable patch. I hastily hooked up the hose and sprayed the bubbles into the soil. Mother couldn’t understand why my radishes sickened and died overnight: perhaps I had overwatered them, or it was too shady under the walnut tree.

  My mother tore that shed down one day: tied a rope to the side, hooked it to the fender of the mail truck, and pulled it over. By the time I came home, the wood was in the scrap pile and all that was left was a tamped square of dirt. I practically wept, as if all the misdeeds I had done in there had been disrobed in one quick yank.

  In the fall I was enrolled in the elementary school down the street. When it came time to fill out the registration form, Mother asked me what I wanted her to put down as my middle name. I didn’t have a legal one. She had left the space blank on my birth certificate, figuring that I might like to have some say in my naming—her first nod toward my freedom. Back east, at three, I had asked to be called Lisa Cheeseburger. Now I took a good look at the girls in calico dresses lined up with their mothers in the gymnasium and changed my mind. “Let’s put Lisa Leigh,” I whispered. I thought it had a nice ring. Later, I would change it to Lisa Marie, a name borrowed from a character on Hee Haw.

  I was thrilled to start school, but against the backdrop of thirty other kids, I soon saw myself in a different light. What my mother loved in me—my animation and fierce will—didn’t play so well in kindergarten, and so I was tamed, slowly, by the other children. They came from families as rooted as we had been footloose. Their fathers were ranchers and loggers who had lived in the valley for generations. Their mothers stayed home. They knew about 4-H, rodeo, threshers, and quilting. They hadn’t heard of Biafra, tie-dye, spirulina, or the Stones.

  I went home that first day and asked my mother not to pick me up from school in the mail truck; I would rather walk the mile down Spring Street.

  In the first days of school, I worked hard to befriend a cute little girl named Christine, trying to woo her with stories of our life on the road. “My mother used to let me run beside the mail truck all day,” I told her. “I’d go off into the woods and explore while they were driving, and then at night I’d meet them at a campsite.”

  Christine gave me a dubious look. I was either a liar or a very strange girl. “What did you eat all day?” she asked.

  “Oh, we had drop points where my mother brought me lunch,” I told her, trying to sound offhand.

  I had so few clues as to what was worth bragging about that I ended up adding to my reputation for oddity. But I took it as a good sign that Christine let me sit beside her on the rag-coil rug while Mrs. Dillard read See Spot Run. I wanted to be as good and clean as the fictional Jane, who wore a triangular dress and spoke in short declarative sentences. I wanted it so badly my mouth began to water. I swallowed, and swallowed again, then looked over at Christine in a moment of queasy confusion and projected a stream of vomit into her lap. The day had a feeling of ruin about it. I didn’t quibble when my mother pulled up in the mail truck and drove me home.

  At times like that, my mother didn’t fawn over me. When she felt downhearted, she went through the motions of happiness—smiled, took up some vigorous activity—until her mood caught up with her actions. Sickness, second cousin to melancholy, got the same brusque treatment. That afternoon, she pulled a lawn chair into the garden and talked to me while she hoed between rows of asparagus. I was limp with relief to be taken away from the classroom, from the wearing work of fitting into a group of kids who’d played together since they could toddle. The sun was strong on the blanket over my lap. Mother shook dirt from the roots of stubborn crabgrass, and didn’t stop for me. She kept working, as if to say, These hard days are common as garden weeds; you take the sun to your back and till them under.

  My father was a ghost presence in those days. After the commune visit, I didn’t see him for nearly a year. I kept him alive by telling stories—to Alison, to Charlene and Jill. It was all mythology: tales of what he let me do, tales of what he gave me. He would give me a dollar—all I had to do was ask. We pretty much ate pizza every day. I could go to bed as late as I liked.

  “If he’s so crazy about you, how come he never comes around?” Alison asked me once, her voice like a rusty razor blade. She never bothered to tell stories about Roger. I think she knew he wasn’t coming back.

  It would be years before I would understand how much my father had wanted to be the figure from my fantasies—showing up to sweep me away. But after he was released from prison, my mother kept him at bay. She worried about his judgment, and after years of our quiet family life with Jim, it made her nervous to let me go again.

  Once, during that time of infrequent visits, I caught a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired man in the grocery store, and a longing so fierce rushed through my body that I was halfway to his side before I caught my mistake. In that half-second or so, I had invented the story of his appearance: he had come to take me on an impromptu picnic and had stopped in to pick up some food. Then the stranger turned and revealed a face that was thicker, paler, older than the one I had searched for. I stood among the pyramids of peppers and potatoes, watching the mist machines ki
ck up a white froth over the produce bins, until my mother came and found me.

  When we had been in California for a year, my mother let me fly back to Boston to visit my father. On the day of my departure, she and I piled into the mail truck and drove down to San Francisco. As we rumbled through the city streets, Mother sighed over the Victorian houses, their gingerbread trim, but I sat up front on my old bed and watched for a chink of light between the façades. I had become used to the wide sky in the valley. This looked to me like a place with no breathing room.

  I know it tested my mother’s nerve to see me off alone, but she didn’t show her fear, and so I had none. Once I was on board, the stewardesses treated me like a queen. They took me on a tour of the cockpit, then sat me up front and gave me playing cards and plastic wings. I thought stewardesses were paragons of womanliness, with their fixed hairdos, long frosted nails, and diamond rings. My mother wore Levi’s and flannel shirts, brushed her long chestnut hair and tied it back in a bandanna. Our medicine cabinet held soap and hydrogen peroxide, dental floss and razors, but not a single tube of lipstick or bottle of perfume. When the stewardess leaned over to buckle my seat belt before takeoff, I was bewitched by the floral scent wafting out of her polyester uniform.

  This was in the fatted-calf days of the airlines, when the upper deck of a 747 was a cocktail lounge. After the seat-belt sign went off, I wandered up to the bar and twirled in one of the modular lounge chairs while the bartender plied me with Shirley Temples. I was taking a real liking to airline travel. I had shown up in a hippie van and had been lifted into the sanitized world of prepackaged meals and tiny resilient pillows.