Split (7 page)

The dry air made me thirsty, and I decided to have a tea party. I went outside to see if my father wanted to play, and found him sprawled under a large oak tree near the door. He was staring up at the leaves, his hands spread open in the air above him, and didn't answer at first.

"Do you want some tea?"

He raised his head, and his eyes slowly focused, placing me. "No thanks, honey."

I went back into the shack and filled two of the cups from a jug on the floor. I pretended to have a partner for my tea and chatted with him awhile before drinking from my cup, thumb and forefinger on the short handle, my pinkie raised high.

From the first sip I could tell something was wrong. The water burned my tongue, and when I opened my mouth to scream, all the air in the room was gone. I spat out what I could and yelled, feeling a white heat unfurl down my throat. My father dashed in, smelled my breath and the spilled gas, and scooped me up from the floor. He ran with me toward the spring, and over his shoulder I watched the shack jiggling smaller and smaller in the field. It seemed lonely, canted off to one side on its foundation, like a child's drawing of a house. The dry summer hay swayed like the sea, and I heard his breathing, ragged as surf.

When we reached the spring, a bearded man was there filling a green wine bottle. Water spilled down a rock face into a pool bounded by ferns and moss. My father gasped out the story and together they hovered over me, making me drink from the bottle again and again. "That's good," they said. "You're doing really good." My father stroked my hair. And though I was full and wanted to stop, I tipped my head back and drank for him.

That night we stayed in the main house. My lips and throat were chapped and burning. I began to have visions. A crowd of ghosts led by a goateed figure marched with torches through the room. I told this to the grownups and they seemed alarmed. Some of the other people staying at the house lit extra kerosene lanterns to soothe me, but I could still see the figures. The leader looked furious, driven, his whole body straining forward toward some unknown mission.

My father moved with me to a bedroom upstairs and held me in a worn corduroy armchair, talking softly, telling me stories of what we would do together when it was light. The vagueness I felt in him during the day had disappeared. He was dense, focused, his legs pressed long against the sides of the chair, his arms around me heavy and still. I sat in his lap, leaning into the rise and fall of his chest. In my last moments of delirium, I closed my eyes and saw his body supporting me like a chair, the long, still bones, and under him the real chair, fabric stretched over wood, and all of this twenty feet above the ground on the upper floor of the house, held up by the beams and foundation, and beyond that the quiet fields, silver under the moon, alive with animals, the punctured cans lying still by the stump. I saw us perched in the center of this, neither safe nor doomed, and in this unbounded space I fell asleep.

 

When he dropped me off after the commune visit, my father never mentioned the business with the gasoline—worried, I'm sure, that my mother wouldn't let him see me again. And since he didn't mention it, neither did I.

But if I felt at times undersupervised, it was this same freedom that stands out as one of the pleasures of my childhood. On the weekends, Mother let me ride my bike down Spring Street and didn't expect me back until dinnertime. The whole town knew me and would haul me home if I was in trouble. One Saturday, when Alison and I tried to shoplift from the corner store, we found out what a fishbowl we lived in. We had already succeeded in filching penny candy on a few occasions, and we were ready to try for bulkier goods. While Alison asked a question of Mr. Shepherd at the register, I pulled a package of beef jerky from a peg below the counter and tucked it under my shirt. My gait went stiff as I headed for the door, my shoulders curled forward to hide the package. Somehow, I managed to slip by unnoticed. It never occurred to me that Mr. Shepherd might follow me out. I crossed the sill and stood there in the sunlight feeling invincible, already planning my next theft, when a hand clamped down on my shoulder and wheeled me around. I'll never forget the look on his face. Not anger, but a tight-faced weariness.

"Do you have something of mine?" he asked.

His.
I had never thought of it that way. I had been stealing from the store, not Mr. Shepherd, who called me honey and smoothed the front of his immaculate butcher's apron while he talked. He had helped my mother and Jim, that first day in the valley, avoid a real-estate pratfall that would have landed me out on a dry mountainside without a friend in sight.

I pulled the jerky out from under my shirt and held the package up by one corner. The meat looked like tree bark in its shrink-wrap casing—nothing worth eating.

"Go on home," Mr. Shepherd said. Home had never sounded so good. I hopped on my bike and raced down the sidewalk, trying to rid myself of the vision of Mr. Shepherd's pinched face. But then I saw Mr. Shepherd pass by in his Bronco, headed toward my house. His arms were ramrod straight on the wheel, and he didn't so much as glance in my direction. I stood up on my pedals and rode faster, hoping to arrive in time to give my version of the story. But when I tore up the driveway and threw my bike down in the gravel, Mr. Shepherd had come and gone. My mother was waiting for me on the porch, her face unreadable. She led me out into the yard, as if the fresh air would make things easier on us.

"I don't know why I did it," I told her. My mind was a desert. Each blade of grass stood up in blank green toothiness before me. I watched an ant climb up the delicate groove in one blade, stop, turn, look down, head upward again. I forgot why we were sitting there, cross-legged, facing each other with our heads bowed like monks. Slowly, I reeled my mind in: trouble, I was in trouble, Mr. Shepherd, beef jerky, that black peppery tang.

"I was hungry," I said.

This was a lie, but it served me. My mother had been on an errand while Alison and I pulled our heist, and the idea of leaving me without snack money gnawed at her conscience.

"It's not okay to steal," my mother said. I would have to pay Mr. Shepherd for the dried meat and would be barred from the store for a month. Then my mother paused for a moment. "I'm sorry I didn't leave you something to eat." I began to believe my own lie: I was famished, my mother went off and left me without food. But then, deep in my rapture of innocence, I looked up at her face. She looked like she had a toothache: her cheeks were pulled in and her eyes narrowed. And though she tried to mask it, her guilt shriveled me. I bent forward and leaned into the hutch of her legs, breathing in dirt and the fresh scent of denim, and made a vow to give up my wickedness.

 

In the games with Charlene and Jill, I was always the baby, but after a while I tired of this and began to visit the house of our nearest neighbors, who had two girls younger than me, Mare and Pippy. On their side of the fence I was the oldest, the one in charge. I don't remember the girls' family name, though that doesn't surprise me now: surnames were the province of parents, and the mother and father in that house were too vague for names. They appeared once in a while at the porch rail to call the girls to dinner, like diplomats demanding extradition from a country they couldn't enter and in whose territories they had little sway.

I began to go over to see Mare and Pippy often after school. The fence wires were bent wide from my passage, and I beat a narrow track in the grass. In the stretch of ground between our woodshed and the fence was a patch of mint, whose corrugated green leaves made a pleasing rasp on the tongue. I loved that it grew wild; amid the careful plots of vegetables my mother tended, this was my secret crop. I would harvest great handfuls of leaves for a pot of tea, and days later I'd discover the wilted, lint-covered mass in my pocket.

In the days to come, I would begin to feel that the things that lured me to play with those girls were less than wholesome, and so the taste of mint became married to a vague guilt, and the path through the grass became a visual record of habit—the proverbial rut—made deeper by a score of instances in which I fretted briefly—it wouldn't have looked like fretting from the outside, only a girl wandering aimlessly about her yard—and then went over anyway.

We played on a quarter-acre of dirt dominated by an old weeping willow, whose branches draped to the ground. The dusty, grassless circle under the tree was our house, furnished with two cracked kitchen chairs and top-loading washer and dryer that had been left there to rust. In that house, I was the mother; the oldest girl, Mare, was the father; and Pippy, the toddler—still in diapers, fat and placid—was our child.

As a mother, I demanded a strict discipline. First, we swept the house with switches, pushing the minnow-shaped leaves to the edge of the yard. Then I swung the baby up to the dryer and pulled her dirty socks off. Her bare feet were so tender—
puffy
wedges of flesh no bigger than butter cookies, the flat bottoms netted with tiny wrinkles. I made a great show of being haggard and overworked for the baby's benefit, brushing the bangs out of my eyes with the back of a hand, tossing the little socks into the agitator and punching the buttons on the washer with theatrical irritation. Mare played father to my mother with perfect aplomb. She came home from work, parting the willow leaves to enter the house with her arms akimbo, and demanded dinner.

"You cook it!" I shouted, my hip cocked out to hold the baby. "I've been here all day cleaning and taking care of Pippy." The baby watched this drama in silence, her sweaty hand clutching my T-shirt, her sturdy legs wrapped around my side. The cooking scene quickly lost interest, and since we had no pots and pans to rattle, we would lean against the washer and dryer and roll cigarettes out of binder paper, smoking while Pippy crawled in the dust.

Where did we get this information? That cigarettes make grownups lazy and inattentive, their heads tipped back, their wrists cocked deftly to flick the ash. Neither of my parents smoked; I almost never watched TV. My mother had never spoken the kind of wooden lines I passed off on Mare. I was playing at a kind of iron-ruled family quite apart from my own. And under our hackneyed dialogue, the same dialogue used in back yards across the continent, we were carrying out a delicate test of loyalty and humiliation, of how much we would allow ourselves of the cruelty that lived in our small veiled hearts.

I don't know how the game changed; it was slowly, over a period of weeks, that we turned on the baby.

"She has been bad," I would tell Mare when she came home from work. "I can't get anything done with her around."

We conferred calmly about her punishment. Sometimes we would carry her outside the shelter of the tree. We called this "grounding," and pretended to go on about our chores. The baby didn't seem to understand this business. She wandered out by the fence, stuffing acorns in her mouth, until we let her back in.

One day when Pippy tried to eat one of our cigarette butts, I scooped her up and carried her out into the blazing sun. "Don't put anything in your mouth that isn't food," I said, and plopped her down in the dust, her sandaled feet jutting out in front of her. She was naked, except for her diaper, and I remember her hands splayed out beside her watermelon stomach in a gesture of surprise, and then the long inbreath she took in preparation for a wail. That warm-up was a fearsome thing. Her mouth gaped and her eyes welled up, and for whole seconds there was no sound. I cast a worried glance at the curtained side windows of the real house, where Pippy's mother might soon appear. "It's okay, it's okay, it's okay. Please don't cry." I lifted the baby up by her armpits, leaning back to counter her weight. Her body was as heavy and limp as a sack of lead shot. She draped herself over me and made fierce little gasps. I might have given up then on the whole punishment routine, but as soon as she was calmed, I put her down in the same spot.

"You're still grounded, Pippy," I told her solemnly. Then I swished back through the branches and told Mare that we couldn't get soft on her or Pippy would get spoiled and we'd have only ourselves to blame.

Pippy didn't understand what was the matter. She crawled over to the cascading greenery of the tree and pulled herself up on its flimsy branches. I stood in her path, with my hands on my hips. She moved left, then right, as if chance had put me in her way, then pushed through with her fat hands, leaning into my body with the leaves tangled between us.

"No," she said firmly, not quite mad yet.

"That's it," I remember saying. (I had heard that somewhere, the thing parents said when they'd hit their limit.) I parted the branches, whirled the baby around, and swatted her on her bottom. I got grim satisfaction from the smack of my palm on her plastic diaper—satisfaction and a misplaced righteousness, since the baby hadn't done a thing. In an instant, Mare was beside us. She elbowed me aside and took Pippy in her arms.

"You have to go home now," she said to me, and though there was a squeak in her voice, there was also a surprising firmness. I backed out of the yard and dipped through the fence, past the straggly patch of mint, holding in my mind the expression on Mare's face. It looked like the face of love to me—steadfast and protective and tender.

 

Years later, my mother would say, with a tightness in her voice, that I didn't seem quite happy in those early years at 12000 Spring Street: "I wasn't aware of how precarious our life seemed to you." When she had looked at me, running naked across the lawn at the Manomet commune, she felt fierce about protecting my freedom. "You see, peril to me was the closing down of the world like a coffin. Living according to a script. Still, I always tried to make a cozy place for you to sleep."

And it's true; my mother did her best to shield me. It may well have been my own temperament that made me alert to danger. At seven or eight, I was convinced that I would die in childhood and seized on any evidence that my body was in decline. Once, in the deep claw-foot tub in Floyd's old house, I peered through the lapping water and saw dark streaks running up my legs—signs, I decided, in a snap diagnosis, of leukemia. I sat in the cooling bath gripped by a mixture of terror and relief—terror at the grueling treatments ahead of me, and relief that the ax had finally fallen and my illness had a name. When my mother came in and found me wide-eyed and shivering, she took a washcloth and some soap and showed the streaks to be engine grease, left over from Jim's shower after work on the mail truck. She called me a nervous goose, and we laughed together as she wrapped me in a towel and tucked me into bed. But once she left, my dread returned. My mother swore that things always turned out for the best, and I wanted to believe her, but my life thus far hadn't borne this out. She couldn't promise me that I wouldn't die; I knew no one could promise me that. And if she didn't believe we were all at risk, then I would have to keep watch on my own.