Split

by Lisa Michaels

  That conversation was still ringing in my ears as we drove. We were both stiff. That much I remember. Hurt made us brittle.

  I was waiting to make a left turn, halfway into the intersection, a stream of cars coming toward us. One thing I’d learned about L.A., you could be sure the stream would continue right through the yellow, until you were stranded in the way of the cross traffic. My father’s face, his stern pout, caught the corner of my eye, and then I saw a break in the cars and I gunned it across two lanes. It was an act of vehicular insolence. My father let out a hoarse yelp and braced himself on the dashboard.

  “Jesus Christ!” he shouted. “I told you to slow down.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Lisa, I don’t ask that much from you,” my father said.

  “Yeah, right,” I hissed. I couldn’t look at him.

  He turned toward me then, raising up his hand, and the two of us froze, the magnitude of our positions rippling before us. He looked to me furious and amazed—amazed that we had come to this. I was filled with a mixture of terror and exaltation. He was a fearsome sight, reared up like that with blood in his eyes, but part of me willed him to step over the line. I thought if he struck me he would become irredeemable, and then guilt would lift off me like coils of wet rope, and I would float up, free, into the clear air of the wronged. It wouldn’t have happened like that, of course. And as it was, my father put his hand down, suddenly weary. When I pulled up at the curb he stepped out gingerly, walking as if the sidewalk were made of paper; one false step and he’d punch through.

  We didn’t speak to each other for weeks after that—weeks of passing each other in doorways, hunching over our plates at dinner. Then one of us broke, and we put ourselves into a state of rough repair and went on.

  When my father and I quarreled, I saw two choices before me: fury or sadness. It always paid to take the second path. I used to tell myself there was something honorable in this—to say, in the middle of the fray, you hurt me. But somewhere along the way, I got stuck in that pose. Fury was his turf. He would rage until the veins stood up in his neck, and I would cry and slam the door to my room. I wept then until I lost track of what had set me weeping.

  Once in a while, when we were on better terms, my father heard my sobs and made a tentative knock on the door. “Come in,” I said. That knock held the chance of solace. I can still see the way my father leaned into my room, his head tipped forward in inquiry, one hand on the door frame as if for balance. He held back for a moment, the way you do on the lip of an icy stream, postponing the change in temperature, and in that moment I could see the fatigue in his face, the puffiness, the signs of pain and immobility. Still, he was always heartsick at my sorrow, and so he waded in, lowering himself beside my bed, his bad knee clicking. “What’s wrong?” he asked, smoothing my hair.

  It seemed then that I couldn’t begin to explain. I was awkward and had the wrong clothes and no money and blotchy skin. Adolescent sorrows cut deep, but their telling sounds plaintive and thin. I tried to begin—and quickly stopped. I could see my father’s eyes glaze over. His head was brimming with worries, and mine made him overwhelmed, because he couldn’t imagine how to fix them. I knew he felt he had failed me.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “I know it’s a hard time. I’d sit with you but I’ve got to talk to Leslie. We haven’t seen each other for a couple of days, and I promised to meet her at ten.”

  Leslie and I had our own troubles that year. The admiration I had felt for her when I was a schoolgirl had slowly given way to envy in my teens. And Leslie’s private nature, which I had broken through with my childish enthusiasms, was a bad match for a teenager’s sulkiness and inward moods. I had also had the chance to observe her up close with my sisters—the way her love for them was of a different order.

  Not long after I moved in, Leslie and I were at the beach watching my sisters dabble in the sand, and I said that I couldn’t wait to have children, that I was overtaken sometimes with cravings for them, even though I knew the time for having them was still a long way off. She looked surprised. “I didn’t have any real maternal instincts until Mia was born,” she told me in a wondering tone. Wondering, because now she is the fiercest of mothers—always thinking of her daughters, making allowances for their moods, watching the slow evolution of their characters with careful attention. I sat in my beach chair trying to keep a smooth face. I was seventeen, old enough to pass for an adult, but lacking an adult’s perspective. I didn’t hear her confidence as a fellow woman. I heard it as the rejected child, and I sat there doing the math in my head: all the years that had passed—from our meeting in Mexico until my first sister was born—without her seeing how I needed her. Of course Leslie had made all sorts of thoughtful interventions in my life, but what pained me was her confession that they didn’t come from motherly feeling. I jumped up from my beach chair, leaving her staring, and waded off into the surf.

  Living at close range only fueled my jealousy, and that feeling took root in a predictable way: Leslie and I fought over her closet, or rather over its contents. I was not to go in there, not to look through her things, but when she was out I went toward it with a kind of fatal headlong attentiveness. The pleasure of these expeditions was partly sensual: I was a sucker for fabric, texture, color, and found it there in the rows of silk shirts, the stacks of sweaters, bunches of belts hanging from hooks. I remember a wide swath of brown leather that crumpled in the hand like cashmere and hooked with a brass latch, gold belts, tailored black belts with silver buckles, belts of woven rope.

  Then there were the shoes: a whole wall of them, slipped into hanging shoe racks. Sandals, brogans, boots. Five species of black pumps, each with a different heel or toe. In a generous mood, Leslie would explain their various virtues. These were retro, perfect with a vintage suit. Those were stiletto dancing heels. These had a square heel and could go from office to dinner.

  I kept track of additions to her wardrobe with a caustic eye. Even at times when my father claimed we were flat broke, that he had no money to buy me clothes, new boxes appeared in her bedroom. I dug around for the receipts, helpless to stop myself, and howled when I saw the totals. Didn’t he know how much she spent? He didn’t, of course. Not because she hid it from him but because he was too absorbed in other things, and because she took care of so much—the bills, my sisters’ doctor appointments, all the loose threads of family life—that he probably wouldn’t have begrudged her these things.

  Once I brought a particularly large purchase to his attention, and for a moment he went for the bait: “Really? Are you sure it was that much?” Then he saw where this would lead him and beat a hasty retreat. “Listen, this is between Leslie and me. You shouldn’t be going into her stuff.”

  And of course he was right. It troubles me now to see how little I thought of her privacy. The pain I felt at not having the right things, not wearing the fashion of the hour, was acute, but I doubt that it justified my trespassing. What seems a shame, in retrospect, was that Leslie and I were never able to speak about any of this. But perhaps there was more to our difficulties than my inarticulateness and her native reserve. Perhaps we couldn’t speak because the struggle was, as my father might have said, “structural.” I envied her for stealing my father away, and she envied me for having come first, as no child should, and because he kept a special place for me—the lost child who stayed lost because it was her only trump.

  All this to explain how I pilfered her scarves and sweaters. She would search my drawers to find the missing items, and I had the gall to be furious at her for finding me out in such a way. So instead of conversation, we had this passing of clothing down the hall, and muffled outrage on both sides.

  One Saturday, I was sorting through old newspapers in the living room, looking for a topic for my class on current events. Leslie saved the papers in order to clip articles of political import, but the task kept looming before her, and the papers piled up in the entryway, by the fire, under t
he breakfast table. Just glancing at them made me feel defeated, as if it were my task and their rising bulk were a chide against lost time. The papers kept coming, and there was no time to sort out the gossip from the relevant news. Every now and then I dug up the oldest issues and spirited them out to the trash. Or I would ask Leslie, when we were cleaning the house for company, if I could throw them out, and she would sigh and say yes, glad once in a while to clear the decks.

  That afternoon, deep in the Los Angeles Times stack, I uncovered a pamphlet that caught my eye. On the front was a round-faced man with hollow eyes—El Salvadoran, the caption said. He had been kidnapped and locked in a trunk for two years. I opened the pamphlet. Inside were more stories, stories so gruesome they made me have doubts. But of course such things happened. People did unspeakable things to one another, and how horrible to tell of it and not be believed. I was suddenly baffled in the hazy sunlight. My life seemed trivial, weightless as air.

  I put the flier down and lay on the rug, no sound outside but the wind and the rubber tree, tapping the window. Then a scrap of song came into my head, a Leadbelly tune my father used to sing. “Let the midnight special/shine her light on me.” It was a prison song, written when the bluesman was doing time for murder. I had never quite heard how mournful it was, since the melody was so rough and strong. When I was a girl and my father sang it, I always imagined the same scene: a view from a barred window, looking out on a set of tracks and the verge of a dark wood. When he got to the chorus, an engine came slowly round the bend, carving light over the trees.

  “What does it mean?” I remember asking my father once. I must have been eight.

  “What does what mean?”

  “The song.”

  Most times, my father loved to talk, loved to lean back into the past and call up details: his apartment overlooking Harvard Square, where he threw open his windows and played his stereo loud; the way he and I once laughed so hard in front of the La Brea Tar Pits, over some riff that has since sunk into the muck of memory, that we both fell down on the pavement, shocking the passersby. But his time in prison was a blot. Whatever had happened to him there, it still had the power to chill.

  “It’s about hope, I guess,” he said at last. “Hoping that the train would come and carry you away.” I watched a shudder pass through him.

  That memory made me sick with regret, as much for the time he had lost behind bars as for the tenderness we had lost between us. Back then, at eight, I could still go to him and put my arms around his neck, as if it were weight he needed, weight to hold him here.

  Ten

  I ARRIVED AT UCLA in the midst of a Greek-system revival; sorority and fraternity membership was up in 1984, after a big decline in the seventies, and the Young Republicans’ table on Bruin Walk attracted a constant eddy of men in Top-Siders and polo shirts. There was a small protest movement on campus, an island of counterculture amid the sea of lettered sweatshirts. In a quad near the center of campus, some students had set up an encampment to protest apartheid—a cluster of tents and teepees called “Tent City.” I knew of people who lived there for an entire school year, showering at the gym, reading on the lawn under the overarching trees, and blocking the doors to the conference rooms when the U.C. regents met at the campus. Until the regents agreed to divest the university of its South African stocks, the protesters vowed to remain perched in the middle of the lawn that fronted the administration building, bringing a bit of the shantytowns home.

  I walked past Tent City nearly every day and never stopped to talk to the people who lived there. If someone had asked me what I thought of their cause, I would have said that I thought they were right, and that I wished them well. But I was attached to my creature comforts and more worried about my grade point average than the school’s investment portfolio. Though I wouldn’t have admitted this then, I think I skirted that cluster of tents because the whole thing seemed depressingly small-time. If I had caught a whiff of victory, I would have been quick to join the cause.

  As it was, an eerie somnolence hung over the campus. The more I looked around at the ranks of groomed and tanned students, the more I wanted to do something wild. But then, my wildness was purely a matter of style. I moved from stonewashed stretch jeans and torn Flashdance Tshirts to long skirts and ethnic jewelry, which slowly gave way to tie-dye and Birkenstocks and worn batik dresses with bells on the hems.

  It was just as well I favored thrift-store clothes. My money was tight, a cobbled-together mix of family help and financial aid. Two weeks into the fall quarter, I took a job with the university catering company, run out of the cafeteria in my dorm. The good news: it paid $5.50 an hour, a handsome wage in my estimation, and the events were held in conference rooms across campus; I would be saved from wearing a hair net in front of my fellow students. The bad news: female servers were required to wear black frocks with aprons and frilled collars, outfits that seemed to have been bought off a studio back lot, the leftover costumes from a chorus of maids. After I did some abject begging, Ron, the manager, agreed to let me wear the men’s version—black slacks, a tuxedo shirt, and bow tie—but he insisted I finish this with a scalloped apron, so the patrons, immersed in cocktail chatter, knew whether “sir” or “miss” would best hail an hors d’oeuvre.

  Perhaps because I wore pants and wasn’t afraid to jockey the vans around in the cramped parking lot, Ron gave me a shift that looked grim at first to a late sleeper. I was to report at 5:30, three mornings a week, for coffee service at some far-flung site.

  “The Norton Simon Conference Center. Where’s that?” I asked him.

  “Malibu,” Ron said. He was a circumspect man, wiry and small, with pocked skin and scuffed shoes worn off at an angle. He seemed to love food service. More than once I would marvel at the way he swung around a corner with a heavy tray balanced on each palm or slipped together the blade and housing of a giant meat slicer—swift and mindful and efficient. “Simon donated a spare mansion to the university,” he said, handing me a penciled map. “It’s down PCH.”

  The next morning I rose in the dark and took the elevator down to the empty cafeteria. Ron had already laid out the pastries—waxy Danishes spiraled on a tin tray—the percolators, and wheel-sized filters filled with ground coffee. I loaded it all into the back of the truck and rolled down the metal door, then pulled out onto Sunset Boulevard with the map in my teeth.

  It was only then that I recognized my good fortune. The sun was crowning above the Bel-Air hills, and I was half amazed to be awake at dawn, in a shirt and tie no less, silverware rattling brightly behind me, the steering wheel shimmying in my hands as I took the turns. I had been a licensed driver for three years, but I was still at times startled to find myself behind the wheel—as if someone should have caught my bluff. I followed the road until the hills opened up and then forked onto San Vicente —a wide boulevard split by a ribbon of grass and coral trees—and down a steep incline to Pacific Coast Highway, threading along the sea.

  That rattling truck was my passage to freedom. I had left my roommate sleeping in her bed, shrugged off my worry over a looming Spanish exam and reams of back-reading, the whole insular life of the campus. Driving along the hem of the continent, I recovered my perspective—the papers, the grades, someday none of it would matter—and that bulky van, which threatened to drop some essential part at high speed, comforted me with its swaying, a reminder of our old mail-truck days.

  I cut across traffic and into the driveway of the conference center, a narrow slot in a long stucco wall. Inside was a Mediterranean-style villa, with wings and porticoes and nooks of tended greenery. I found the conference area, laid out the pastries in a tiled alcove, set the coffee to brew, and made sure plenty of cups and napkins were on hand. Then I took my book and went down a pathway to the beach. The sand was bright white, only a short spill to the sea. Here and there a few Adirondack chairs sat empty. I longed to sit out there, facing the water, but my uniform gave me pause. I might have been taken for a re
negade housekeeper, and surely the locals already groused about uppity help. Instead, I banked up a chair out of sand near the house and unhooked my bow tie. I was reading the letters of Zelda Fitzgerald—I can’t remember why—and while the coffee brewed and women in tracksuits walked their poodles by the shore, I skimmed through her manic prose.

  I worked that shift three times a week, and once in a while, after checking the coffee level in the urns, I would wander through the main house, two stories and thousands of square feet of disinhabited space. Mr. Simon had left behind a marvel of minimalism: stucco walls lit by the sea, wood floors and paper lanterns, here and there a Japanese tansu chest, a polished sideboard without a visible hinge, a pair of couches upholstered in wheat and cream. There were no pens in the drawers, no photographs or mementos on the shelves. It was all gorgeous and impersonal, and I walked the rooms pretending they were mine, imagining the flowers I would place just there, over the mantelpiece, the teacups and books that would collect on the low tables. I lived then in a dorm room the size of Norton Simon’s pantry, and I had been lucky to get it, but dreaming like that left me bitter and dry. I drove home grumpy, my shirt stale with sweat, and spent the last hour of my shift sorting silverware and rinsing coffee dregs from the urns.

  But, oh, how I loved my little pantry of a room when the alarm clock rang at five in the morning. Leaving my bed was like being evicted from a womb. One morning, blurry eyed and hungry, I backed the van up to the loading dock so hard I cracked one of the taillights. When the coffeepots were wedged in and the cans of creamer counted, I slipped a cheese Danish from the tray and headed back for the silverware. I was just finishing the last bite of pastry when I wheeled around a corner, nearly colliding with Ron. There was glaze at the corners of my mouth and crumbs in the pleats of my tuxedo shirt.