Split (4 page)

I still have a letter my father wrote me that night from his cell: "It may take a long time, but I'll try to get you a purple thing. Here's a pretend one for now." Below it is a necklace with a carefully sketched purple star.

This was the first of many letters he wrote me, each with a drawing in colored pencil. "Darling Lisa—Hello, Hello, Hello. I am very happy tonight. I got a guitar yesterday and am learning to play it. I am on a diet so I won't be fat at all—not even a little bit." Then half the page taken up by an abstract drawing: a grid filled with tangled clots of scribbling, a black anvil shape, a downward arrow, the symbol for infinity. "I call this picture, Being in Jail: JAIL. I love you darling, Your Father."

Those notes were full of rhymes and playfulness: portraits of me with green hair, or of himself with the head of a man and the body of a conga drum. In places, his loneliness leaked through. "I will try to keep writing you," said one letter, "but it's hard when you don't write me back." I was pricked by guilt when I read these pleas, then quickly forgot them. At first his absence was a plangent note, always sounding in the background, but it became muffled as the months passed. In time, I had trouble recalling his face.

 

My mother made several visits to the prison, but gradually she began to cut ties. Whatever she had said in the heat of the moment when they quarreled at the Weatherman collective, her long view of the matter was clear: my father had cut out at a crucial time. She was on her own now and felt no obligation to wait for him. We moved to a third-floor walk-up in Cambridge, and my mother took a job waitressing at a restaurant from three to midnight. In the pictures from that time she is all cheekbones and arched brows. She wore narrow skirts and tied her hair back in a chignon. I wonder if she took pleasure in her beauty, in her youthful ease, or if even back then she paid more attention to things outside herself. Her stories are of the night crew, their easy camaraderie, and in particular the cook, whom she took a special shine to.

The restaurant attracted a hip clientele, and my mother reveled in the place: tables full of young bohemians, every night a different parade of faces. One evening, Rod Steiger stopped in and took a seat at one of my mother's tables. He wore gray slacks and a Brooks Brothers shirt, open at the neck. He'd just finished
The Pawnbroker.
When my mother pulled out her pen and pad, he ordered three lamb chops, which weren't on the menu, and gave her an attentive once-over. "He was a little jowly," my mother said. "But he had character; he drew me in." Steiger asked her questions: where she was going, where she had been. When he found out she had lived in Newark, he asked where, exactly, and they discovered that she had lived only blocks from his childhood turf. She refilled his glass; he recalled the sweet parts of the old neighborhood: the cobbled streets, the rows of trees that buffered the houses.

After he'd paid the bill and stepped out, Steiger's chauffeur slipped back into the restaurant and handed my mother forty dollars and a note. She still has it, tucked in the attic somewhere, a half sheet of stationery bearing the star's breezy overture: "Buy yourself a dress and someday we'll have a quiet drink."

When my mother told the story back in the kitchen, the cook howled and slapped the metal countertop. "No shit! What'd you say?"

"I put the forty dollars down on the table and told him to tell Mr. Steiger I couldn't be bought," my mother said.

The tales that filter back from those days often feature my mother's resilience and pluck. It wasn't until I once accused her of being a stranger to sorrow that my mother acknowledged the bleakness of that time. When her waitressing shift ended at 2
A.M.
, she picked me up from the baby-sitter—a gentle black woman named Celine, who fretted over my mother—and carried me home through the darkened streets to an empty house. When we both came down with stomach flu, and vomited for two days, there was no one to make tea or tend to us. We moved from bed to couch to floor, leaving a trail of soiled sheets. My mother had invented a myth—our poor but happy time—to spare me the fact of her loneliness. Still, I have my own memories of her darker moods, which pressed on me like the heavy air before a storm. They filter back as wordless stills, which I can't be sure I haven't imagined: my mother braced at the sink on a rainy evening, her shoulders shaking. Or of me standing at the edge of her bed while she slept, stroking the cold ends of her hair.

 

Not long after we moved to Cambridge, my mother took in a foster child, Vito Deviliti, a walleyed boy with hair as stiff as straw. He was fifteen; I was four. His name in rough Latin, Mother told me once with a laugh, meant "life of the little devil." She may have given up hope of changing the national scene, but not her desire to give back—"to spit out the silver spoon," as she once phrased it. In Newark, she had thought in terms of a neighborhood; now she narrowed her efforts to this one troubled boy. Maybe, just maybe, she could set a single life to rights.

One afternoon, I was playing with blocks in the kitchen when Vito padded in and fixed on me for the first time. "Hey, kid," he said, standing with arms akimbo. "C'mere." When I went to him, he hoisted me up above him until his head loomed above his feet. I shrieked with delight. I knew this game. Vito grinned and tossed me into the air. I laughed on the way up, then choked a little on the way down. When he caught me, his fingers dug into my ribs. I think Vito liked the look on my face—the mixture of terror and glee. The next time he threw me up higher, and waited a little longer to catch me under the arms. The sun cast a wedge of glare over his face, so his eyes narrowed and his teeth lit up. Another toss, still higher. My hair lifted away from my scalp like a delicate wig, then I fell and my stomach vaulted into my throat.

"Want me to do it again?" he asked. His voice had a menacing edge and yet it fascinated me, like a strange dog or the cool blue flame of the stove.

"Yes," I said.

He held me out at arm's length.

"Do it again."

Vito flashed a jagged smile and threw me toward the ceiling. His arms were folded by the time I hit the linoleum.

My wailing woke Mother, who had been sleeping in the next room. She came out, still groggy, and tried to sort out our stories. I was on the floor, gasping. "He—dropped—me."

Vito gave me a withering look. "She was laughing," he said. "She liked it."

On days like that, I watched my mother's whole body go slack. It's no wonder that, living alone with a toddler and a ward of the state, she became tenacious about order. The apartment floors would disappear under toys and clothes and mildewed towels, and then suddenly she'd spring into motion. A look of gentle determination stole over her face as she emptied the cabinets of spices and oils and wiped them down with an ammonia-soaked sponge. She got grave pleasure from a translucent windowpane, and would go from room to room rubbing the glass with balled-up newspapers dipped in vinegar. Bach's Magnificat in D was her housekeeping anthem, and those dazzling voices are forever married in my mind with a manic sweep toward order, with the vision of my mother as she scrubbed the fronts of drawers, brushed cobwebs from the ceiling, scoured the black scum from the bathtub tiles and rinsed it away.

I followed her around, happy as long as she was in my sight, seized with dread if I looked up to find her missing. I hadn't always clung to her so. When I was ten months old, Mother set me down on the grass in Central Park and I crawled off without a backward glance, past couples lounging on blankets, through the middle of a Frisbee game. She followed me, curious to see how far I would venture, but in those days my tether was longer than hers. I reached a walkway full of dogs and roller skaters, and she had to scoop me up. My mother loves to tell that story—the little mensch, the fearless one. But sometime after my father left, I lost the faith. I began to watch her, as if watching had the power to keep someone near.

My mother says I needn't have worried: "You were inextricably tied up with me by then. Our fates were linked." When the apartment was clean and she had room to think, she sat down to spin out her plans. We would move to Mexico and buy a house: stucco with tile floors and a cactus garden. She would become a potter, maybe teach English. I would run around in embroidered dresses, turning brown in the tropical sun.

Back then, the journey was the thing. We wouldn't fly to Oaxaca. We would meander our way into a new life. Mother heard about a postal-service auction, the last stop for the government's fleet, and went down to bid on a used mail truck. For two hundred dollars, she drove off with a standard blue-and-white van, stripped of its red stripe and insignia so she couldn't impersonate a mail carrier. Mother parked it outside of our walk-up and gave me a tour. With a little tune-up, she said, it would get us south of the border. The cab had one high leather seat, a side-view mirror the size of a dinner plate, and a button gearshift, which looked fairly space-age at the time. A sliding door led back into a cold metal vault, bare but for a few mail shelves. "This is going to be our cozy rolling home," she said, her voice pinging off the walls.

 

When she wasn't at the restaurant, Mother worked to make the mail truck roadworthy. She was worried about a few rust spots on the side panel, so she spent a weekend driving around Cambridge in search of something to patch them with. On a narrow side street she spotted a promising sign: "Earth Guild. We Have Everything."

The store was a kind of counterculture supermarket, stocked with incense, bolts of cotton, paraffin, books on homesteading, yarn and looms. My mother made her way to the counter and asked the cashier if they had any sheet metal.

"What to do you want it for?" the woman asked. It was a slow day in the store. Had there been a line of customers, impatient for beeswax and clay, our lives might have taken a different turn.

"I need to patch a hole in the side of my mail truck," my mother said.

"Well," the woman offered, "we don't have sheet metal, but we have Jim, and he has a mail truck, too." She yelled toward the back room, and out loped a lanky man in square-toed Frye boots, smiling an easy smile.

Jim went out to the curb and looked over the rust spots. He and Mother talked about their vans, how much they'd paid at auction, where they were headed. Jim also had his eyes on Mexico. And at the very moment my mother dropped by, he had been building a kiln in the back of the store for the Earth Guild's pottery studio. It seems she had stumbled on a man who could help her turn her schemes into brick and wood. By the time they finished talking, the sun was low in the sky and they had a date to change their oil together.

Jim wore hand-painted ties, listened to the Stones, and collected op art, but he still had the good manners of the Auburn fraternity boy he had once been. He had joined the ROTC in college, which helped pay his way through school, and when he graduated he owed two years to the navy. After basic training, they offered him two choices: he could be a pilot, or use his B.A. in architecture for a noncombat position. Jim loved planes and had always dreamed of learning to fly, but he saw where Vietnam was headed and opted out of flight school. The navy stationed him in Taiwan, where he maintained the cooling system on a communications way station. When he was discharged, he hopped jets home, taking over two years to reach the States. He stopped in Cambodia, Thailand, and India, read Krishnamurti, dabbled in meditation, bought Persian rugs. His route was marked by palaces and ruins, and he took pictures of nearly every architectural detail in his path, from onion dome to Roman arch. When he arrived home, the naval lieutenant j.g. moved into a commune in Harvard Square, whose members dubbed themselves the Grateful Union.

 

Not long after Jim and my mom hooked up, Vito took our mail truck on a wild-haired ride—his legs were barely long enough to work the pedals—and crashed it into a pole. He fled on foot and was missing for days. The truck had to be sold for scrap metal. When Vito turned up, Mother told him she considered their social contract broken, and the boy was sent back to the foster agency. With only one mail truck between them, Mother and Jim made plans to head across the country together.

Jim's truck was considerably cozier than my mother's. A platform bed stretched across the width of the van, and a hinged half-moon table folded down from one wall. We ate sitting cross-legged on the mattress. The walls were lined with bookshelves, fitted with bungee cords to hold the volumes in place. On a shelf just behind the cab was our kitchen: a two-burner propane cooking stove, a tiny cutting board, and a ten gallon water jug. Jim covered the metal floor with Persian rugs and hung a few ornaments on the walls: a plaque with the Chinese characters for peace, prosperity, and happiness; a yellow wicker sun.

Before we set out, Jim bought a small wood stove and bolted it to the floor near the back. The smokestack jutted out the side of the truck, the hole weather-sealed with the fringe from a tin pie plate. One of Jim's friends from the Grateful Union wired a stereo system into the van, and Mother sewed heavy denim curtains that attached to the front windows with Velcro, so we could have privacy at night. Most of the cab was taken up by the engine, which was housed by a flat-topped metal shell. Jim cut a piece of foam in the shape of the engine cover and had me lie down to try out my new bed. A perfect fit. I was about the size, in those days, of a sack of mail.

In the spring of 1970, we packed up our essential belongings and set out toward Key West, stopping at every fruit stand and roadside attraction. When the road was smooth, Jim would put an LP on the record player—Richie Havens's
Mixed Bag
or Fred Neil—and those soulful voices carried us down the highway: "I want to go where the sun keeps shining, through the pouring rain. I want to go where the weather suits my clothes."

We were on traveling time, lazy and slow. We had no schedule or destination, no errands or household chores; certainly no one was expecting us. When the sun beat against the windshield, Mother peeled back the curtains with a toothy rip and drove to the nearest beach. She sat on a blanket and practiced her guitar, leaning over her fretting hand and singing in a reedy, off-key voice. Jim and I fished from the pier with our bamboo poles, and while he trailed his line in the water, he talked to me about the virtues of patience. Jim was a man who, if you bought him his favorite candy bar, would thank you and tuck it into his shirt pocket for a while. "Anticipation is the biggest part of pleasure," he used to say. To him, fishing was something of a spiritual exercise.