Split (23 page)

"So you won't miss me," she said, a gleam in her eye.

 

When I arrived in L.A., my father enrolled me in the summer program at Crossroads, a performing-arts high school in Santa Monica. Elliott Gould's son went there, and the daughters of the man who directed
Caddyshack.
The kids were all seasoned and oddly sensible at fifteen and sixteen. They wore a kind of drab antifashion—Levi's and white T-shirts and Converse high-tops. They smoked, and went to all-night coffee shops. But as far as I could tell none of them did drugs or indulged in any other depravity. Their parents seemed to be having all the fun.

We spent the summer preparing for a performance of a collection of Bertolt Brecht's short plays, set in Germany during the Nazi period, called
The Private Life of the Master Race.
On the first day we sat around cross-legged with our scripts and did cold readings. I remember being shocked by Brecht. This was a far cry from the saccharine tones of musical theater. I had never come across language in the theater that sounded so much like real life—blunt and plain. As each scene began I felt a quickening suspense: I needed to know what would happen next, and yet I had a pleasant inability to imagine how things might end. Then, in strikingly spare language, in dialogue full of hesitation and surprise, the drama would unfold. Perhaps I was wrong—I knew nothing of fascist Germany, or these lives—but the stories had the ring of truth. I had the feeling that if I could render those lines, I might know how it felt to be human under extraordinary circumstances. At fifteen, I had never heard of Brecht, didn't know he was a Marxist. The play sent waves through me because it gave me the script by which to imagine a certain extremity of experience. Reading those scenes, I caught a glimpse of wider feelings, and with that glimpse came a sense I rarely had at that age—that things could be different.

 

While I spent my days in rehearsals, my father was working nights on the line. He came home at dawn, packed my sisters' lunches, and wrote them a note before falling asleep. The rind of time left between waking and the next shift was devoted to union organizing. For years he got by on five or six hours' sleep, refreshing himself now and then with a catnap.

"Wake me up in twenty minutes," he'd say, lying down on top of the covers, instantly dead to the world. When I called his name, he would wake with a start, make a cup of coffee, and be on his way again. His life required deep reserves.

Sometimes, when the pace let up, he voiced regrets. "Why is it I never listen to music?" I once heard him ask, sitting in front of his speakers. Marvin Gaye was on the turntable, and there was a soft bewilderment in his voice. "I love listening to music."

It exhausted me to watch his exhaustion. I felt his fatigue as a sympathetic twinge in my limbs and wanted it to stop—as much for my sake as for his. Because over time daily shortchanges in sleep added up, and when things blew up between us, they blew hard.

But if I fretted about his schedule, he would protest. He and Leslie loved their work; it fueled as much as it sapped. And there was so much to be done. That was one thing about the world: it was broken in a thousand places. Once you set your mind on righting it, there was no end to what you could give.

Hard as he worked, my father found time to be the family forager, strolling the grocery aisles and trying to remember everyone's favorite cookie and cereal. He liked to have company, and so I often went with him. While he wheeled the cart from aisle to aisle, scanning his list, I served as runner. "Shit, honey, I forgot the Dijon. Could you get me a jar? Aisle six."

In good times, it was a task he enjoyed, but with Leslie in school and the family living on one income, this ritual lost some of its pleasure: he was pinned between his natural largess and his worry over the bank balance. The shelves of expensive snacks, the coolers of cold cuts and cheese seemed to fill him with a vague unease.

When I tired of watching him fret, I veered off toward the toiletries section, located, to my embarrassment, right next to Feminine Hygiene. Even a sidelong glance at that sign made me flinch. There, in the same bold lettering as Dog Food and Canned Goods, was a reference to matters that I could barely acknowledge in private. While my father checked prices on toilet paper, I breezed past the douches and tampons, settling in front of the shrink-wrapped blusher and lipstick and thinking about what I might steal.

It seems the shame of being nabbed by Mr. Shepherd in the first grade hadn't cured me of shoplifting—it just made me more cautious. I didn't consider petty theft a vice worth resisting; I only tried to swear off getting caught. Still, I have a hard time reconstructing what tempted me to palm a vial of Visine that day. Perhaps I was nervous about the cost of the eye drops, though I have no doubt my father would have paid for them if I asked. I have to think that I simply wanted the whites of my eyes whiter, and felt somehow that I should get it for free.

Once I chose the item, I scanned left and right. The aisle was nearly deserted. Halfway down the length of polished linoleum was a middle-aged man, deliberating in front of the condoms. I had passed him earlier, and he had glanced up with a stricken expression, then turned back to the packages, feigning indifference. The boxes were decorated with bighorn sheep and couples posed in skimpy underwear. I thought I understood his embarrassment, and politely averted my eyes. Here we were, two comrades in spirit, flat-footed and self-conscious in the clinical glare of the toiletries aisle. Still, I waited until his head was turned to slip the Visine into my pocket. It didn't even make a bulge. I fingered a few other items so as not to look hasty, then made a show of checking my watch and wandered toward the front of the store.

My father was in the checkout line, a look of pained concentration on his face as he watched the prices ring up. "I'll be waiting outside," I told him.

Los Angeles twilight. The sky was a dusky orange, lit up by miles of lights, and there was a pleasant crackle in the air. A little girl clambered onto a toy horse beside the door and fed a quarter into the slot, maintaining a grave expression as the machine began its hydraulic gallop.

"Can I see what you have in your pocket?" The voice behind me was quiet, intimate, and at first I thought the question was addressed to someone else. Then I turned and found a man beside me, short, sandy haired, with a small youthful paunch. My nervous friend from the condom rack lifted up his badge.

"Please give me the eye drops." His voice was firm. I handed over the goods, and he took me by the arm.

Just then my father appeared, pushing his cart, looking for me in the spare light from the store windows.

"What's going on here?" he asked, when he saw me in a stranger's grip.

"Is this your daughter?" the guard asked him

"Yes, and I want you to take your hands off her."

"She has to come with me, sir. She's stolen something from our store." He held up the Visine. "I have to take her into the back room for processing."

My father blanched at the mention of a back room. He was wary of men with rented authority.

"I think there's been a misunderstanding," he said. "I told her I would pay for that."

"Sorry," the guard said. "No go. I watched her slip it in her pocket." He assumed a posse lawman's stance: feet wide, hands perched at his waist. I saw a pair of handcuffs glint beneath his windbreaker.

When he saw that the guard wouldn't budge, my father left his cart and followed us through a set of swinging doors to a closet-sized room behind the produce section. Inside were two chairs and a battered metal desk. Polaroids of repeat offenders covered the walls. While my father paced in the narrow space, clenching his teeth, the guard penned an account of my crime.

Date, store, aisle. The guard muttered under his breath. "Total value of item?" He lifted up the bottle of eye drops. "Damn bar codes. Let's say two-fifty."

At the mention of the price, my father's eyebrows lowered like awnings. I sat in the extra chair with my arms folded, a gesture that might have looked like defiance but was in fact the mark of controlled panic. I kept imagining the patrol car cutting in between the taxis out front, the scandalized faces of the widows waiting with their sacks of tuna and milk.

But perhaps because my father lingered there, imposing and clearly concerned, the security guard stopped short of the full extent of the law. He took down my name and address, made me swear I would never set foot in the store again, and let me go. When we got into the car, I sagged against the seat and waited for my father to scold. He didn't, though—didn't even pretend to be outraged. Instead he put the keys in the ignition, sighed, and seemed at a loss for words.

"I'm sorry," I croaked, and I
was
sorry, mainly for what I had put him through. I could see that the sudden appearance of badges and handcuffs had roused old feelings in him.

When my father finally spoke, it was not in the language of morals but of unreasonable costs. "The mood is changing in this country," he told me. "They're cracking down on this kind of thing. It's not worth it anymore." Then he drove me home and never mentioned the incident again.

Some might say my father missed his chance, that he should have delivered a lecture on right and wrong. But that talk would have been lost on me. If my father had tried to speak of profit margins or the businessman's right to a fair buck, I would have laughed through my teeth. He had spent his life questioning the rights of big capital; he certainly wasn't going to take their side over a vial of eye drops. As it was, his warning went deep, because it aligned with everything he had taught me. If fascism was coming, we might notice first a time of restriction and amateur guards, and the wise would heed the signs and be cautious.

 

The next day I went to rehearsal as usual, still feeling ashamed of myself. The play was coming along badly. "I just don't feel any urgency," said Elizabeth, our director, after a wooden run-through. "I know it sounds like they're making small talk, but this is big stuff, this is
How much do you love me?,
this is life and death."

For a moment, here and there, I forgot myself, and the sadness of the lines swung through me. The menace of the state looming outside, the ripped-up, roots-in-the-air feeling of parting—I thought that I understood a little of these things. But I was fifteen and had no real grasp of the play.

To give us an inkling of the times, Elizabeth suggested we stage mock interrogations. Darren, one of the more gifted kids in the group, was to play an SS officer. I was to sit in a chair and answer his questions. To make things more theatrical, he would pose them in gibberish, one of those peculiar drama exercises that I found quite stirring at the time. We were meant to focus on the gist and not the particulars, to hear how much emotion carried through tone. I was lousy at gibberish. I sounded as if my mouth were full of dental tools.

"Lisa, all right, okay—" Elizabeth interrupted, dragging a hand through her hair. "Why don't you answer in English?"

Darren turned out to be a gibbering pro. He had a cap of blond curls and a body coiled like a spring. When he became the SS man, his whole posture changed. I felt sure I knew precisely what he was saying. A few years ago, I learned that he died in a freak accident at twenty-one. In London, where he was studying theater, the gas heater failed while he was sleeping, and he never woke up. When I think of him, I remember how he paced around that flea-bitten rehearsal room, muttering softly, then letting spittle fly in my face.

"I don't know," I said, in answer to a particularly harsh outburst. "I am Polish." (I must have gotten this from
Sophie's Choice.
)

Elizabeth sighed audibly from her chair.

 

The night after our first (and last) performance, my father took us all out to Benihana to celebrate. The Japanese-food chain had opened up not long before that, and it was still something of a cult phenomenon: you sat around an open grill while a man with a chef's hat and two cleavers riddled your vegetables into origami, then tossed his knives like a majorette. I was very impressed with the show, and touched that my father had splurged on such a fancy place, but I hadn't checked my actorly self-consciousness at the door. I wanted to make sure everyone knew I was amazed, so I kept my hands braced on the countertop, my eyes glued on the chef, my mouth slightly ajar. At one point Leslie got up to take a snapshot and captured that bit of business for posterity. I look like a sham hypnotist's accomplice. Everyone else was too awed by the flying shrimp to pay me much mind.

The next night I went off to the cast party, held at the home of one of the students. Another boon of the Hollywood life: they all seemed to have absentee parents. It wasn't hard to find a mansion with no one in charge.

My father pulled up front and eyed the Tudor façade and spotlit shrubbery. "Okay, so what time should I pick you up?"

"Well, I don't know when it's going to end. We might go out to Ships for dessert when it's over." I was hedging. Only a handful of these kids seemed to have heard of the word
curfew.
Though none of them had offered, I was hoping I might be invited to sleep over at someone's house.

I could see my father considering this. He was big on what he called "closure," the wrapping up of a long experience with the proper reflection and ceremony. "All right," he said, patting me on the leg. "Call me by eleven and let me know what your plans are."

The cast party was a fairly dull affair. David Bowie on the stereo, clumps of kids here and there. No one seemed to care that the summer was over; they would all advance together into the fall term. I was like a sailor about to be shipped overseas, full of sentiment and extravagant mood. I knew where I was headed: a winter of rainy Saturday nights in a Northern California town, cars circled in the Lucky's parking lot or cruising up and down Second Street hoping for directions to a keg out some dirt road. In social terms, those parties were the best one could hope for: to drink a cup of warm sudsy beer while huddled around a pile of burning tires—the oily black smear visible for miles—perhaps do a bit of necking in the shadows, and then barrel home down a set of switchbacks clinging to the edge of a cliff. We would lose some of our number, needless to say.