Split

by Lisa Michaels

  When I told my mother about the business with the jump rope, she dipped into our small savings and bought me a pair of white vinyl zip-up boots, a little cheer-me-up surprise. These boots were a special pride to me. I wore them nearly every day, with denim skirts, with shorts, until they released a ripe, sour smell when unzipped. I was even wearing them during P.E. on the day I finally learned how to jump rope. We were indoors this time. There was nowhere to hide. I came to the front of the line and the girls cried, “Now!” and before I could think, their voices jerked me forward. I leapt into the blur and caught the rhythm, amazed that my feet weren’t swept out from under me. But no sooner had I got the hang of it than those treadless vanity boots shot out from under me.

  That was the last thing I remembered. I came to on a cot in the nurse’s office.

  “What happened?” I asked the nurse, my head throbbing. She was bent over a pile of forms, a little paper hat pinned to the crown of her head.

  “Minor concussion,” she said, without looking up from her work. “Your mother will be here soon.”

  I don’t remember how my mother behaved when she arrived. No doubt she was calm, as she always was about practical troubles. But the memory has disappeared—my head likely addled by the blow.

  In fact, much of those months floats back in fragments: the acrid smell of Magic Markers at my classroom easel, the taste of Orange Crush, which Ivan and I drank like water. Or one vivid afternoon near the end of our stay. On the Montessori play yard were rows of ladders—fat dowels that rose up the outside of the cafeteria. I climbed one until I was under the eaves and then hung there, leaning my weight back into the air. Down below, some of the sixth-grade girls were playing charades. They made a circle around Marcia, a curvy girl with hair the color of burnt wood. She made the gesture for a song: opened her mouth and fluttered her fingers to describe the rising notes. Three words, she signaled, then sunk a fist into her gut and threw her head back in mock agony. She fell to the ground, writhing, her eyebrows sewn into a peak.

  I was stunned by her conviction. I forgot the name of every song I’d ever known. Everyone around me seemed suddenly very clever, startling in their vividness, or else very natural and at ease.

  The song, I learned somehow—Marcia must have spoken—was “Killing Me Softly.” It played on the radio all that winter, and I can still hear the weathered richness of Roberta Flack’s voice: “He was strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words.” She holds back in the early bars, sure of her power, stringing it out lightly—a knowing, mournful voice, coming from far off. Whenever I heard it, I thought of my father, the soul albums he played, singing the bass line, snapping his fingers to the beat. But my father was lost somewhere, and now Jim was gone, too. We seemed to be losing men at an alarming rate, without fanfare or comment. I could see no end to our wandering.

  But in December, we returned to 12000 Spring Street, and there was Jim, grinning in the driveway. He had built my mother a chicken coop as a homecoming gift. Charlene and Jill burst from their house and plied me with kisses, exclaiming at how I had grown.

  Soon after I got back into the swing of things, a letter arrived from my father, inviting me to take a trip with him to Mexico. “How would you like to ride a burro?” he wrote. My father has odd handwriting—a lefty’s back-leaning scrawl, vowels like small stones, stems of consonants sprouting up wildly. But in those early notes he printed carefully, hoping I might read them to myself. At the bottom of each letter was a starburst, where he had let the felt tip pause.

  I was thrilled by the idea of Mexico, though I would have gone to Siberia if he asked. I read the letter several times, then took out a pencil and printed a careful “yes” at the end of his questions, trying, I suppose, to turn a note into a conversation.

  “You’re lucky you have a garden,” he wrote, “cause I think if I were a plant I would rather live in a garden than in a pot—don’t you?” Yes.

  “Do you like to eat tacos?” Yes.

  I don’t remember the flight to Mexico. By then I was a veteran of concourses and planes; they made little impression. I remember only the streets of Mexico City, delivered as in a dream. The air was dense and burned the inside of my nose, but I was smitten by the hubbub and the old buildings. The cars looked strange; the signs made no sense; but my father was beside me, brisk with excitement, and he seemed to know what to do. Put that man on a traffic-jammed street corner and he thrums with purpose, quickened by the jostling of the crowd. He hoisted me up on his shoulders in front of the airport and hailed the only free taxi in sight.

  We headed for the railroad station to catch a train to Cuernavaca, where my father planned to take a Spanish course. There were ragged children playing outside the ticket windows, and vendors selling fruit spiced with chili, salt, and lime. I made him buy me a cucumber, peeled and salted in a cone of newsprint. While the train rocked us out of the city, I sat on our berth, eating the salty slivers and watching him. Over the years we spent apart, my father had become reduced to an icon. I had run my few vivid memories over and over in my mind until I had worn away the details, the grit. This real father, squarely across from me, was twice as potent as my memories. He looked like a man from a Camel cigarette ad—tan, with a full head of black curly hair and a mustache, a silver hoop glinting in one ear. It was safe to say I was starstruck.

  Our train came to a stop in Cuernavaca, and I took an instant liking to the city: the grid of cobbled streets and narrow sidewalks; the tile-capped walls spilling bougainvillea. We carried our bags past whitewashed churches and a shady plaza, and within hours my father found us a room, rented from a family in a quiet neighborhood at the edge of town. The house was on a peaceful, tree-lined street. We passed through a scrolled gate and rang the bell. A stocky, smiling woman swung open the door and introduced herself as Señora Gonzalez, ushering us into an airy entryway. Our room faced the street and had high narrow windows. There were fresh sheets on the bed. For a few extra pesos, we would be welcome to eat with the family. I heard children playing and followed the sounds through a dining room, past a table set with embroidered place mats, tiny bowls of sugar and salt. In the back yard was a girl my age, swinging a toddler by his arms. Beyond them was a swimming pool, dry and filled with dead leaves. When the girl saw me, she dropped the baby and ran over, chattering in Spanish. Yalili, her name was Yalili, she made me understand, slinging an arm around my shoulder. I was already drafting a letter to my mother: “Mexico is a very friendly country. I have made a new friend.” As Yalili talked, I slipped into a babyish swoon, borne along by the rills of meaningless sound and her cool, tending hands.

  In the mornings, we gathered for eggs and tortillas at the long table, while the señora bustled in and out of the kitchen with steaming plates. Then I would play in the back yard with the Gonzalez kids while my father went to language class. He had bought me an Instamatic camera for the trip, and I spent an afternoon wandering around the house composing arty photos: a close-up of a mucky sewage grate, a blurry shot of the empty corridor of trees outside the front gate. I even asked the gardener to take my picture, and after miming the shutter action, I posed in front of the house. That photo is at odds with the waif I felt myself to be: a snapshot of a wiry tomboy in a horizontal-striped shirt, legs planted wide, arms akimbo.

  My father and I quickly slipped into our old groove. We were easy together, quick to laugh. He told bad jokes, held my hands while I walked up the planks of his legs and flipped over. But I soon found he was more fragile than he looked, full of moodiness and childhood terrors. In the afternoon, we walked into town to the public pool, and I discovered he was afraid of the water. My mother had taught me to swim at her parents’ house on Long Island. I dove for rings, did somersaults until I burst up gasping, practiced walking on the bottom, and stayed in until my fingers were pickled. I was startled to see how ill at ease my father looked when wet: dark hair plastered down on his forehead, his eyes red from chlorine. He mowed down the lane with a
thrashing stroke, hit the wall, and popped up looking bewildered. When someone splashed him, he flinched. “My daughter the otter,” he said, a surprising wistfulness in his voice. The next time we went to the pool, his trick knee acted up and he retired to a nearby lawn chair, where he basked in the sun.

  On our way home from the pool one day we passed a health clinic. A line of women waited outside with babies and bundles. Older kids spun tops in the gutter.

  “Hey, I have a joke for you,” my father said. He pursed his lips and paused for effect. “A guy has to go to a doctor’s appointment; he’s got something wrong with his stomach. He kisses his wife, and as he’s going out the door, she says, ‘Listen, honey, don’t get into any fights, okay?’ because she knows he has a little problem with his temper, which is probably why his stomach hurts—he probably has an ulcer.”

  He looked over at me to see if I was following. “Two hours later, he comes back with a broken nose. ‘Vinnie, what happened?’ his wife says, running up to him. ‘Did you get mugged?’ ‘No, the doctor was a jerk,’ Vinnie says. ‘He was messing with me, and we starting duking.’ ‘Whaddaya mean?’ she says. ‘What’d he say to you?’ “

  My father stopped in the street to deliver the punch line, palms and shoulders up, playing Vinnie as a lug from the Bronx. “He said, ‘Piss in a cup.’ And I said, ‘Shit in my hat.’ And the fight started.”

  I laughed for a while, then cleared my throat. “You know, Jim calls those kind of jokes bathroom humor.”

  “Really?” My father looked at me, skeptical at first, then sober as he considered this news.

  We went on for a few paces in silence, both of us circling back to the man in the joke, who got in trouble for taking things too literally. I saw a grin steal over my father’s face, saw him work to conceal it, and then we both gave up and burst out laughing again.

  It was during that trip that my father taught me to sing oldies from his high school days in Valley Stream: “In the Still of the Night,” “A Casual Look.” He sang bass—the do-wahs and dup-de-doops —snapped his fingers, and walked with a syncopated swoop. I tried to carry the melody, seizing up around the high notes, adding extra vibrato to match his. Now and then we hit a sweet patch and rendered up something better than our two halves. Mood had a lot to do with it. We would fill up an alley, or the back seat of a cab, feeling half famous by the time the last phrase faded.

  One morning we walked into town to buy a pair of sandals at the market. It was still cool, and we were nearly alone on the cobbled street. I walked on the narrow sidewalk, brushing my hand against the stucco wall, which changed colors to signal the end of one house and the beginning of another. My father walked in the street, holding my hand, and after going on for a while in silence, he started into “Lean on Me,” stairstepping notes meant to be sung over a blazing garbage can. “Some … times in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow.”

  I looked at his face, becoming once again familiar to me, and my heart squeezed up. In the quiet of that strange and lovely street, in a country where no one knew us, those lines sunk deep and hit their mark. The song was about suffering, about people flying together over great distances when trouble struck. I took it as acknowledgment of all that had passed between us.

  I should have let the feeling hold, but I was seven—jumpy and desperate to have everything at once. I didn’t quite trust these moments of pleasure. “After this can we sing ‘A Casual Look’?” I asked, interrupting his singing.

  My father’s face crumpled. “I’m singing this one now.”

  I had forgotten how easily he bruised. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Please, start again.”

  He sulked a little, not wanting to look too eager.

  “Come on,” I said, swinging his hand from side to side. “Start again. You know I love that song.”

  Some might say it wasn’t good for me to get such a glimpse of my father’s fragility, but in a strange way I took strength from it. When he wavered, I had to hold firm, and that firmness made me feel sturdy. I could see that he wounded too easily, and because I loved him, I liked to think of myself as the custodian of his feelings.

  He picked up the song again, and soon we were in the marketplace, weaving through the tables of meat and vegetables and woven belts. The blue plastic tarps overhead flexed in the breeze, bathing the stalls in a marine light. We found a woman selling sandals. Her husband, in the comer, cut the soles from scraps of truck tire.

  “Quiero zapatos para mi niña,” my father said, putting a palm on my back. His Spanish was getting better, and with his olive skin and black hair he was sometimes taken for a local.

  The woman pulled out a pair, biting through the thread that held them and slapping the soles together. They were stiff as dried meat, and none of them seemed to fit right. “Try these,” my father said, picking out a different design. I have never met a man who liked to shop as much as my father. He was willing to immerse himself in the merits of that strap, that heel, and rarely showed signs of impatience. Perhaps it was the mark of a man raised by women: he believed in the importance of style.

  Before long, the saleswoman was ringed by a litter of shoes, her face betraying a bit of pique. Her husband, seeing my quandary, pulled up a dusty pair from beneath his workbench and motioned for me to slip them on: the perfect sandals. I paraded around, turning my ankles to the side to admire.

  “Those are great,” my father told me as we walked through the maze of aisles and back out to the street. “They show off your beautiful feet.”

  Truth told, my feet were goofy looking—long crooked toes and no arches. They looked exactly like his. (“You’d be tall,” Jim loved to tell me, “if you didn’t have so much tucked under.”) But that day I was convinced of their loveliness, walking home through the streets with my father. I thought everyone turned to appreciate them, their eyes drawn by the squeak of new leather.

  Halfway through our two-week trip, my father met a woman at language school, and they fell in love. Even I had to admit that Leslie was beautiful. She had wheat-gold hair and even features and square teeth that turned slightly in front. Her bearing hinted at a world of refinement that she had since renounced. She spoke in whole, tailored sentences and moved with an easy poise.

  What drew the two of them together, besides passion, was politics. Leslie was a lefty, too—a feminist, a Marxist—and she lived in Berkeley, the West Coast pole of the student movement. Soon more details emerged: like my stepfather, Jim, she was trained as an architect, and, like him, she had grown up in the South. Later, we would learn that Jim had studied architecture in college under Leslie’s father. Silly, one might say. Mere coincidence. But these connections made my mother and father seem more like each other, for even then I understood, though I could never have put it into words, that people craved their opposites. My parents had been of a piece and then cleft apart, and now it seemed that they needed these other types—more reserved, more ordered and steady—to make them whole.

  We went with Leslie to the pool for our afternoon swim, and while she and my father talked on the lawn I treaded water in the shallow end, taking note of every gesture between them. She laughed and fingered his earring. He rubbed sunscreen on her shoulders.

  A few days after they met, my father took her on a date and left me for the evening with Yalili and baby Arturo. Señora Gonzalez made me a pile of hot tortillas, and I sat on the floor in their living room watching cartoons, chewing relentlessly, and growing crankier by the minute. I hated the Spanish voice-over, the attention it required to decipher the goings-on. Arturo danced in front of the TV screen, singing along with some ditty for laundry soap, bouncing on his sturdy toddler’s legs. I wanted to clobber him.

  When my father and Leslie finally came in, late at night, they lingered for a moment in the entryway. I heard their laughter and rushed out to meet them, hoping to hurry her out the door. But when I turned the corner and saw them together, I stopped in my tracks. They were holding hands, looking into each o
ther’s eyes, a palpable crackle in the air around them. In an instant I knew what this meant: there would be no getting rid of her.

  Once I saw where my father’s loyalties lay, I clung to Leslie like a desperate flunky—fingering the thick lapis lazuli necklace my father had bought her that night, fingering her fine-textured skin. We sat in the bedroom and they told me about their evening—the margaritas and mariachi band—so caught up in their happiness they didn’t notice my envy. My father had the two of us pose for a photo, and when Leslie put her arm around me and smoothed a hand through my hair, I gave in to her a little. Being alone with my father was like walking a tightrope—thrilling but exhausting. She had broken up our act, but maybe she would temper us. When my father said, “Cheese!” I sagged against her and smiled for the camera.

  When the date on our return tickets neared, my father told me he had decided to stay on with Leslie in Mexico. I would have to travel home to California by myself. Looking back, I can’t blame them. They were at the beginning of a twenty-year love affair, and soon they’d return home to opposite coasts. At the time, I felt banished.

  My father escorted me back to the capital, a trip that survives in my memory with the shadowy lighting of a nervous dream. We took a night bus, and I stayed awake as we rumbled along rutted highways, above dark canyons, and around hairpin turns. My father was beside me, but I took no comfort from his presence. Someone might have looked at my cinched-up face and seen the anxiety of a girl losing her father to another woman. Most of us get it over with early. But my father, though he dated some, had been single from the beginning of memory. Now, for the first time, I had to share his affections. I had no idea of the depths of what unnerved me.

  When the bus pulled into Mexico City in the middle of the night, I didn’t recognize the streets I had loved in the daytime. Boys swigged gasoline from gallon jugs and blew fire for the cars stopped at the light. Bags of oranges, which I mistook at first for bundled infants, were pushed up to the grimy bus windows.