Split

by Lisa Michaels

  We made our way to a hotel near the airport and were shown to a musty room, furnished with brocade bedspreads and heavy colonial furniture. The bellhop brought us glasses and a carafe of water, which my father told me not to drink. I was thirsty and worried that I would pour a glass out of instinct. My father was unusually quiet, thinking perhaps of the new turn his life had taken. I climbed into bed and watched headlights slice through the sheer curtains, the room tipped and strange, like a carnival fun house. Horns and shouts lifted from the street below. I dozed, then woke with a jolt. Were we late for the plane? It was still dark. My father slept heavily. For hours I stayed up, listening to the growling intake and release of his breath.

  Five

  SIX MONTHS after they met in Mexico, my father moved from Boston to Berkeley to set up house with Leslie. Three hours by car, instead of five by plane, now separated us. I was thankful to have him nearer, but I couldn’t help noting that it took her weight on my end of the continent to slide him over.

  The two of them found a house to rent in the Berkeley flats. My father got a job working as a hospital orderly, and once the details of his life were settled, he called my mother to arrange a more regular visiting pattern. She wasn’t having any of it. By now it had been four years since they’d parted ways on the East Coast, but my mother still had doubts about his trustworthiness.

  I always thought, in those years, that it was my father’s choice to stay away. I couldn’t think of my mother as anything but heroine, rescuer. He was the fickle one. Then, in my early twenties, I came across a folder in my father’s office labeled “Lisa Papers” and took my name as invitation. Inside, I found a letter in my mother’s blocky printing. On brown rag paper, gone fragile with age, she laid out her terms. Three weeks a year. No unnecessary phone calls. She numbered each clause, then printed her name at the bottom. This was my mother’s defense against my father: Here are my rules; don’t mess with me. I could almost hear her voice lift off the page—those bare phrases, each word enunciated. These were the terms that kept him at bay.

  It was the last rule that took my breath away, rule number four: No unnecessary letters.

  Once he was on better footing, my father challenged those terms. He wrote letters, tried for a compromise, and when that failed, he and my mother both hired lawyers and prepared for court. A social worker was sent to my father’s new home to judge its worthiness. Leslie insisted that they scrub the place in preparation. My father tried to downplay the importance of such bourgeois conventions as floor wax—pissed, I’m sure, at having to gussy himself up for inspection. To this day he praises Leslie’s instincts: the first of many such saves. They straightened and polished and scoured the place, and in her report the social worker singled out Leslie’s spotless housekeeping for special mention.

  I was out in the garden with my mother one day when she asked me, with a casualness that put me on alert, how I felt about visiting my father. How much did I want to see him? Whom did I want to live with? And would I feel comfortable telling my wishes to a judge?

  I said I wanted to live with her and see him a lot and that I would tell that to anyone. I never had to make such a declaration. On the courthouse steps, the lawyers finally convinced my mother and Jim that they would lose: though they could probably keep custody, the courts would surely grant my father visiting rights, and in the process everyone would be put through a rash of harrowing testimony. They all retired to a nearby coffee shop and hammered out an agreement.

  My mother sat me down not long after that and explained the plan. I would spend one weekend a month with my dad, as well as half the summers, alternate Christmases and Thanksgivings, and every Easter.

  I was glad at the prospect of seeing more of my father, but my first question betrayed my nerves: “You mean we’ll never have Easter together again?”

  I had never been particularly excited by Easter—we did the usual business of eggs and chocolate rabbits—but the finality made me nostalgic. The little wire hooks we used to fish the eggs out of their dye baths, my mother’s predictable hiding places—in the drainpipe, in a spray of daffodil spears—without me, without another child around, she probably wouldn’t bother. I cast this, as I often did, in terms of her loss. Easier than admitting my own. What struck me most about the new arrangement: wherever I ended up, somebody had to be disappointed.

  During the first months of the new agreement, my dad and Leslie drove up from Berkeley for the appointed weekends so we wouldn’t spend most of our time together in transit. We passed those weekends in the neighboring town, and though I often spent time there with my mother, for the days of those visits, the streets looked strange. I felt disoriented, sitting in the movie theater, getting root-beer floats at the A&W drive-in. I sat in the same velvet seats, ordered the same foods, but I had different parents, so I felt like a different child.

  That November I turned eight, and my father and Leslie drove up on a Friday night and booked a room at the Sweet Dreams Motel, a fifties-style complex with a pool, just off the highway. My mother dropped me off in the parking lot, and waved to my father from the car before gunning off.

  My dad and Leslie seemed happy. They had already gone for a swim, and they gave me cool chlorine kisses and showed me our room. There was a huge package on the bed, which I begged them to let me open on the spot.

  My father laughed. “Okay, okay. You can open it now. Just do some deep breathing first.” He struck a pose out of a handbook of Hindu deities and rolled his eyes around. “Swami Pa-pananda says, ‘Relaaax.’”

  I pummeled him. “I’m plenty relaxed! Please, can I open it?”

  He gave up the guru shtick. “Go for it.”

  I had that box open before he said the last word. Inside was a new record player with two speakers. My mouth fell open. I knew they didn’t have a lot of money in those days. To express my gratitude, I fell into a theatrical swoon, sailing backward toward the bed with one hand to my brow, and cracked my head on the turntable.

  When I stood up, blood ran down the back of my shirt. It soaked through several hand towels and stained the bedspread, and finally Leslie insisted we go to the hospital.

  “It’s almost stopped. I feel fine,” I said, weaving around the room like a drunk.

  My poor father. Such accidents are staples of childhood, but he must have worried about how my mother would react when he handed me over with a new stereo and a head wound. In the emergency room, he sat at the end of the table and held my hand while the doctor sewed through my scalp.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie.” His voice cracked when I cried out. “It’s almost over.”

  That stereo felt like war booty when we went back to the motel room and played my first album: Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. My father’s finger-snapping was as loud as a wood block. I felt the bass line in the back of my skull. He and Leslie danced in front of the warped hotel mirror. But I think the three of us felt a little hollow, returning to that anonymous room with bloodied towels strewn over the floor.

  When the next visit rolled around, my father decided to drive the three hours each way so we could spend a weekend together at their house in Berkeley—a slice of normal life. Leslie had taught him to drive soon after they moved to California. In all his years on the East Coast he had never sat behind the wheel. He was full of jitters and drove slowly, hands clenched at ten and two o’clock, easing slowly into intersections. The drives were grueling. On Friday, after a week of work at the hospital, lifting patients and swabbing down the operating rooms, he would drive seven hours round-trip to pick me up.

  When I got into the car, I spent the first twenty minutes gushing, and once I’d exhausted any real news—I won the spelling bee; I wrote to Grandma Leila like you asked—I wracked my brain for something else, some yarn or accomplishment that might please him. Whatever I had to tell never felt like enough, and since I let it out in one breathless monologue, we had barely made it out of town before I was sitting in uncomfortable silence.
/>   I don’t think my father had any idea how much effort I was making. He was often lost in thought, talking out loud to him self about things he needed to do or having an argument with some imaginary opponent. As he mumbled, the car slowed imperceptibly, until something caught his attention and he hit the gas with a sudden compensatory burst. To break his reverie, I felt I had to be hilarious, not accomplished but a rising star in the elementary school galaxy. I must have come on like a freight train.

  I was in the middle of one of my rants, turned toward him on the front seat, my hand braced on the dashboard for leverage, when my excitement proved too much for him. “Shhh!” he said, making a downward motion in the air as if to settle a bucking horse.

  I slumped back in the seat, insulted. My skin was as thin as his.

  “Go on, what were you saying?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, honey, I want to hear it. Just lower your voice a little.”

  I let a few minutes go by to soothe my pride, then picked up the thread of the story and was soon up to full volume, bouncing on the seat beside him, miming the action in gestures so broad the drivers sailing past us in the fast lane must have thought he rode with an epileptic.

  We passed through a string of small towns: Cloverdale, Healdsburg, Petaluma. My dad made up a jingle for that one: you can pet a cow; you can pet a lamb; but you can’t pet a luma. That put me in a better mood. We sailed down the straight stretches, singing as we had in Mexico. He gave me tips on style, how to relax my mouth and throat for a more natural tone.

  I had hopes in those days of being a pop star, and once when we finished a particularly smooth rendition of “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” I asked him to give me an honest assessment of my talent: “Dad, if Gladys Knight is a ten, what am I?”

  He thought about for a minute, taking a few curves. “I’d say you’re a two,” he said.

  I was crushed. “What are you then?”

  “I’m probably a three,” he said, keeping his eyes glued to the road.

  Odd to see, in hindsight, how he helped himself to that extra notch. Then again, maybe he was just being brutally honest. I wasn’t much of a singer. Certainly no Gladys Knight, probably not even a Pip. Perhaps he hoped to save me years of fruitless delusion. Much as my father thrived, growing up, on my Grandma Leila’s adoration, he longed sometimes for a more tough-minded critic, one who would deliver the bald truth now and then. Having missed that, he offered it to me.

  Often we stopped at a diner that marked our halfway point. My father parked in one of the diagonal spaces out front while I jumped out and claimed a vinyl booth. In that place, smelling of bacon and fried potatoes, a slow gladness seeped through me. The cylindrical light fixtures dangling from the ceiling were punctured like colanders and cast pinpricks of light over the tables. I ordered a stack of pancakes for dinner, mixing three kinds of syrup from the metal rack at my elbow, and my father drank cups of weak coffee and chatted with the waitress. I can still recall how he sat, leaning back in the booth, his long legs stretched out under the table, his hands encircling the thick white mug. He seemed happy, and over time and distance I can imagine the sources of this gladness: having his daughter before him after a month apart—powdered sugar on her shirt, her mouth full of pancakes, waving her fork as she talked—and the smaller relief of stepping away from the wheel for a few minutes, the workweek over, the small rituals of the weekend before him.

  The house on Grant Street where we arrived for those weekend visits was spacious and sunlit, with built-in bookcases, dark molding, oak floors, and windows in every direction. The decor was classic bohemian, though of course I didn’t know that then: a platform bed in the living room covered with Marimekko pillows; books everywhere, most of them Marxist texts; plants in macramé hangers. It was all bare, simple, and functional. A top-of-the-line stereo system was the only luxury in the place. Next to the thigh-high speakers sat my father’s conga drums, perched on their black ring stands. Occasionally he pulled them into the center of the room and played along to selections from his record collection, which was heavy on the salsa, soul, and gospel: Lou Rawls, Celia and Johnny, Mighty Clouds of Joy.

  The dining room, smack in the center of the floor plan, served as an office. It seemed fitting that this was the hub of the house, for work—political work—was the hub of Leslie and my father’s life together, and in this room were the tools of the trade: leaflets (“Boycott Grapes,” “Overturn the Bakke Decision”), back issues of Beijing Today, a swivel chair, and a typewriter where my father sat at night writing.

  My father was more content in that house, and in his new life with Leslie, than I’d ever seen him. He’d lost some of his lonely edge. He muttered less and seemed to lose himself in daily pleasures—making huge salads in a teak bowl the size of a bassinet, running at a nearby park, going shopping for used albums, practicing his drums. I could see that Leslie was the source of this ease, and slowly I began to warm to her. On Saturday mornings, I would climb into their bed and we’d make plans for our weekend outing.

  Often we went for a stroll down Telegraph Avenue, which looked to me like a long amusement park. This was nothing like Spring Street, and the country girl in me was agape at the street life: Hare Krishnas with painted foreheads and monotonous finger cymbals; gusts of incense billowing from the head shop; tables of pottery and silver and leatherwork. There was a man who seemed never to leave his post at the corner of Telegraph and Dwight. He was trussed up artfully in a sheet and said he had a toothpick in his ear that could pick up transmissions from the CIA.

  I looked at my father to see what he made of this. His loose stride, the smoothness of his forehead, said it all: he reveled in the place. “Bezerkeley,” he called it, shaking his head and laughing. He may have had more serious work to do, but the carnivalesque mood in the streets seemed to suit him. Often my father sang as he walked—not loudly, but not sotto voce either: a frank, full-throated singing, as if he were alone in the square yard of space through which his voice carried. I flushed a little, but no one around us seemed to bat an eye. They passed by, lost in conversation, or gave him a smile. I couldn’t help noticing my own stiffness. Now and then the truth would steal over me: you could sing in public and no one cared.

  My father’s lower back gave him trouble, but he had discovered that yoga helped ease the pain. He did triangle poses in the living room, Downward Facing Dog when we went to the nearby track to run laps. Once, when we were out shopping for jeans, he felt a spasm coming on, and before I knew it he had dropped to the carpet in the department store. He splayed out his arms and flipped his legs over his head. The Plow pose: it was accompanied by deep inspirations through the nose, followed by fierce outbreaths.

  Mortified, I tried to melt into the nearest rack of clothes. I backed in so hard I broke through the wall of tweed and fell into the empty oval in the center of the rack. It was peaceful in there, so I stayed. I could see feet passing by below the hems, then a ruffle in the skirts as someone sampled the fabric. Sitting on a silver crossbar with Muzak tinkling down from above, I listened to the sound of my father’s breath. When he was through, I stuck my head out to see if he had drawn a crowd. A few people milled nearby, none of them giving him a second glance. In 1974, stranger things were happening on the streets.

  After a full weekend, the drive home was grim. It was Sunday afternoon when we set out. The route began on a four-lane highway and narrowed into a winding two-lane road, skirting boulders and following the sinuous curve of the Russian River. My father went white-knuckled when eighteen-wheelers blasted by in the opposing lane. I was aware of his hesitancy, the vulnerable look on his face as darkness fell and he squinted into the oncoming headlights. “Watch the white line, over on the side,” I told him. “Don’t look into the lights.”

  When he dropped me off at the motel (my mother met us in town, partly to save him the extra twenty minutes, partly, I imagine, to keep him as far from her real life as possible), my shoulder
s slid down in relief. Riding with my mother, I didn’t need to be vigilant. But then I remembered that my father had to make the return trip on his own.

  “Make sure to stop for some coffee along the way,” I told him, leaning across the seat for a kiss, in case it was my last.

  He laughed at my concern, but I could see his face soften. “Don’t worry about me, honey. I’ll be fine.”

  When the visiting pattern was still new, I thought I belonged in the ether: space junk from a marriage that barely was. If you asked me to construct my family tree, I’d build it like a model of a molecule—tiny atoms held together by valences. On one end, Mother and Jim; on the other, Dad and Leslie. I was the free electron, bouncing back and forth between clusters.

  One weekend, early on, Mother and Jim drove me down to my father’s house in Berkeley for the Friday night drop-off. I assumed this was for my sake—they wanted me to ease into the new arrangements—but I imagine now that they made the trip in order to take in a few city pleasures. Mainly, rural life seemed to suit them. Still, they must have missed Cambridge now and then: the bookstores and art-house movies and good coffee.

  They saw me to my father’s door and said terse goodbyes under the glare of the porch light. I was embarrassed to touch my mother, to be affectionate with her in front of my father. She told me to be good and to “think about the other guy,” her traditional sendoff. It was a fitting reminder, I suppose, for an only child. I had to be reminded that there was another guy. It sounded odd, though, coming to her lips in front of my father and Leslie.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, looking down, feigning impatience—perhaps even feeling it. But the minute she was gone, my throat ached and it was all I could do not to run after the truck.

  My dad and Leslie understood that I was raw for the first few hours. They took me on a tour of the apartment, pointing out a new fern my father was tending (he loved plants, but had trouble figuring out what they wanted from him), a new clothes hamper in the bathroom. In preparation for my visit, my dad had stocked up on the foods I liked—orange juice, Shredded Wheat, Fig Newtons. He was touchingly earnest about this, flinging open the cabinet on enough cookies to feed a day camp.