Split (8 page)

 

Everything that had blown up in my parents' breakup, in the years on the road, was starting to fall back into place. The property at 12000 Spring Street was turning lush under my mother's hands: she rototilled half of the scruffy lawn and planted rows of corn, mounds of zucchini and melons, tufts of silvery artichokes against the fence. She learned plumbing, how to lay insulation and hammer shingles on the steep roof, her firm mouth bristling with nails. She dug trenches to lay water line, pinned her hair under a cap and reworked the building, bone to eave.

When I saw the zeal with which she threw herself into these labors, I asked for my own plot. Mother rototilled a square of dirt next to an old shed and helped me turn the earth with a pitchfork. "You want to break down the big clods and toss out the rocks," she said, "so the ground is rich and crumbly." We planted the fastest-growing varieties we could find (she knew that a budding gardener needed quick rewards): radishes, carrots, curly lettuce. When the seeds were in, I fenced off my plot with stakes and string, wary of trespassers. By some feudal instinct, I claimed the shed too, since it abutted my garden, and I think I got more pleasure from that spider trap than from the plants popping up in the blistering sun. The shed had mystery. It was built of rough planks, and chinks of light shone through the cracks, casting a stenciled pattern on the packed-dirt floor. There were a couple of shelves, a stack of buckets, and a few hoes and rakes tipped into one corner. I sat there in the dusty coolness, figuring how I might get my hands on a few furnishings: an old leather armchair for the corner, a small bookcase.

My mother was reading me fantasy then—the Namia chronicles,
A Wrinkle in Time
—and I had faith that if I focused my powers I could make walls melt, learn the language of toads, dissolve into someone else's bloodstream and travel the chutes and tunnels of their veins. The shed was to be the laboratory for these investigations. One day, I coaxed Alison from her house and convinced her to mix a potion with me. We pulled out a steel washtub from the laundry room, dragged in a hose, and filled the tub nearly to the brim. Then we mined our medicine chests: I snuck past my mother with a shirt full of pills—aspirin and antacid, some leftover antibiotics. I skipped across the linoleum, holding my shirt hem up like a cancan dancer clutches her skirts—tra la la. That should have aroused her suspicions. Alison brought out a carton of White King D, her mother's detergent, and a fistful of black walnuts from the yard. We stirred all this into a murky whirl, the walnuts bobbing up like bad omens, said a few desultory spells, and waited for transformation.

I still remember the sickening feeling that rose in my throat when I realized we weren't going to be swept into the fourth dimension. We were stuck in that shack, which didn't even have a door we could close on our mess. Suds had sloshed out of the tub and turned the floor into creamy mud. I could hear my mother humming nearby as she shucked com for dinner. In a minute she would appear in the doorway and find the empty aspirin bottles, the two of us, frozen, our stir sticks in a few gallons of poisonous sludge. We were tight on money in those days, so my dread centered on our wastefulness. A whole bottle of aspirin! Half a box of Jackie's good detergent! The Riders were probably on welfare at the time; Roger had already split the scene. I remembered my exile over the snatched strip of bacon and winced at the thought of Jackie's cold fury.

Alison and I moved as if we were of one mind. We threw down the sticks and dragged the bucket to the doorway, tipping the contents into my vegetable patch. I hastily hooked up the hose and sprayed the bubbles into the soil. Mother couldn't understand why my radishes sickened and died overnight: perhaps I had overwatered them, or it was too shady under the walnut tree.

My mother tore that shed down one day: tied a rope to the side, hooked it to the fender of the mail truck, and pulled it over. By the time I came home, the wood was in the scrap pile and all that was left was a tamped square of dirt. I practically wept, as if all the misdeeds I had done in there had been disrobed in one quick yank.

 

In the fall I was enrolled in the elementary school down the street. When it came time to fill out the registration form, Mother asked me what I wanted her to put down as my middle name. I didn't have a legal one. She had left the space blank on my birth certificate, figuring that I might like to have some say in my naming—her first nod toward my freedom. Back east, at three, I had asked to be called Lisa Cheeseburger. Now I took a good look at the girls in calico dresses lined up with their mothers in the gymnasium and changed my mind. "Let's put Lisa Leigh," I whispered. I thought it had a nice ring. Later, I would change it to Lisa Marie, a name borrowed from a character on
Hee Haw.

I was thrilled to start school, but against the backdrop of thirty other kids, I soon saw myself in a different light. What my mother loved in me—my animation and fierce will—didn't play so well in kindergarten, and so I was tamed, slowly, by the other children. They came from families as rooted as we had been footloose. Their fathers were ranchers and loggers who had lived in the valley for generations. Their mothers stayed home. They knew about 4-H, rodeo, threshers, and quilting. They hadn't heard of Biafra, tie-dye, spirulina, or the Stones.

I went home that first day and asked my mother not to pick me up from school in the mail truck; I would rather walk the mile down Spring Street.

In the first days of school, I worked hard to befriend a cute little girl named Christine, trying to woo her with stories of our life on the road. "My mother used to let me run beside the mail truck all day," I told her. "I'd go off into the woods and explore while they were driving, and then at night I'd meet them at a campsite."

Christine gave me a dubious look. I was either a liar or a very strange girl. "What did you eat all day?" she asked.

"Oh, we had drop points where my mother brought me lunch," I told her, trying to sound offhand.

I had so few clues as to what was worth bragging about that I ended up adding to my reputation for oddity. But I took it as a good sign that Christine let me sit beside her on the rag-coil rug while Mrs. Dillard read
See Spot Run.
I wanted to be as good and clean as the fictional Jane, who wore a triangular dress and spoke in short declarative sentences. I wanted it so badly my mouth began to water. I swallowed, and swallowed again, then looked over at Christine in a moment of queasy confusion and projected a stream of vomit into her lap. The day had a feeling of ruin about it. I didn't quibble when my mother pulled up in the mail truck and drove me home.

At times like that, my mother didn't fawn over me. When she felt downhearted, she went through the motions of happiness—smiled, took up some vigorous activity—until her mood caught up with her actions. Sickness, second cousin to melancholy, got the same brusque treatment. That afternoon, she pulled a lawn chair into the garden and talked to me while she hoed between rows of asparagus. I was limp with relief to be taken away from the classroom, from the wearing work of fitting into a group of kids who'd played together since they could toddle. The sun was strong on the blanket over my lap. Mother shook dirt from the roots of stubborn crabgrass, and didn't stop for me. She kept working, as if to say, These hard days are common as garden weeds; you take the sun to your back and till them under.

 

My father was a ghost presence in those days. After the commune visit, I didn't see him for nearly a year. I kept him alive by telling stories—to Alison, to Charlene and Jill. It was all mythology: tales of what he let me do, tales of what he gave me. He would give me a dollar—all I had to do was ask. We pretty much ate pizza every day. I could go to bed as late as I liked.

"If he's so crazy about you, how come he never comes around?" Alison asked me once, her voice like a rusty razor blade. She never bothered to tell stories about Roger. I think she knew he wasn't coming back.

It would be years before I would understand how much my father had wanted to be the figure from my fantasies—showing up to sweep me away. But after he was released from prison, my mother kept him at bay. She worried about his judgment, and after years of our quiet family life with Jim, it made her nervous to let me go again.

Once, during that time of infrequent visits, I caught a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired man in the grocery store, and a longing so fierce rushed through my body that I was halfway to his side before I caught my mistake. In that half-second or so, I had invented the story of his appearance: he had come to take me on an impromptu picnic and had stopped in to pick up some food. Then the stranger turned and revealed a face that was thicker, paler, older than the one I had searched for. I stood among the pyramids of peppers and potatoes, watching the mist machines kick up a white froth over the produce bins, until my mother came and found me.

When we had been in California for a year, my mother let me fly back to Boston to visit my father. On the day of my departure, she and I piled into the mail truck and drove down to San Francisco. As we rumbled through the city streets, Mother sighed over the Victorian houses, their gingerbread trim, but I sat up front on my old bed and watched for a chink of light between the façades. I had become used to the wide sky in the valley. This looked to me like a place with no breathing room.

I know it tested my mother's nerve to see me off alone, but she didn't show her fear, and so I had none. Once I was on board, the stewardesses treated me like a queen. They took me on a tour of the cockpit, then sat me up front and gave me playing cards and plastic wings. I thought stewardesses were paragons of womanliness, with their fixed hairdos, long frosted nails, and diamond rings. My mother wore Levi's and flannel shirts, brushed her long chestnut hair and tied it back in a bandanna. Our medicine cabinet held soap and hydrogen peroxide, dental floss and razors, but not a single tube of lipstick or bottle of perfume. When the stewardess leaned over to buckle my seat belt before takeoff, I was bewitched by the floral scent wafting out of her polyester uniform.

This was in the fatted-calf days of the airlines, when the upper deck of a 747 was a cocktail lounge. After the seat-belt sign went off, I wandered up to the bar and twirled in one of the modular lounge chairs while the bartender plied me with Shirley Temples. I was taking a real liking to airline travel. I had shown up in a hippie van and had been lifted into the sanitized world of prepackaged meals and tiny resilient pillows.

I remember nothing of Boston or that visit with my father, but the flights—the coming and going—are etched in my memory. When my father bought me a ticket on the other end, he could afford only a youth fare, which required that I travel with an adult. Since he was staying on the ground in Boston, we searched the line at the boarding gate for someone who would pose as my parent. He gave me veto rights: no, not that one; no, she looks mean. I might have seemed like a little princess, weeding out the unsuitable escorts, but I felt a deep self-consciousness as the line snaked into the plane and my choices dwindled. Someone would have to take a shine to me, and in that judging light I felt scruffy and uncombed.

We got right down to the wire. The flight attendant called out the last rows, and my father and I moved forward, scanning the crowd. A family with three kids passed by, all dressed in matching sportswear and laden with carry-on bags and stuffed animals. I would gladly have slipped in with their happy bustle, but my father didn't bother asking if they cared to shepherd a fourth child. Next came a businessman, his garment bag slung over one shoulder, his head sunk in the paper as he inched forward. My father gave me a questioning look, but I shook my head. I knew a man like that wouldn't have me. I might spill juice on his slacks; I would talk too much. I began a panicked dance from foot to foot, afraid of getting caught and being hauled off the plane, worried that I would never make it home to my mother. They made the final boarding call, and the two of us stood there hand in hand, momentarily paralyzed, when a woman came running for the plane, her trench coat flapping. My father nearly jumped on her—Ellen! It was someone he knew. Sure, she would sit with me. A quick kiss goodbye and we ran down the ramp, my father waving, smaller and smaller, at the gate.

"Thank god she came along," my father told me years later. "Your flight got grounded in Chicago by a snowstorm, and you had to spend the night in a hotel. Your mother called me in a rage when you didn't get off on the other end. She thought I'd kidnapped you."

I remember nothing of this—not the storm or the grounding or the hotel. Only my father waving goodbye. I wonder if this was a blank made by banality or terror. I can imagine myself at five following that woman anywhere, curling up under the hotel bedspread and watching TV, letting her brush my teeth, say, or tuck my hair behind my ear before sleep. Or I might have been stiff with anxiety, knowing that I was stranded between parents, in a whiteout in the middle of nowhere, sleeping next to a stranger. That sense of disconnection, of floating in the free space between my mother and father, was one that would come to feel natural.

 

Not long after that visit, Jim came home one day and announced that he had found a job. He'd be working for the Irrigation District, known around town as "the Ditch." Although he had trained as an architect, Jim didn't have high ambitions. His last drafting project, completed for a firm back in Boston, had been a multistory office building, slated for construction in the woods near Walden Pond. That job broke his heart. Jim believed in karma, instant and otherwise, so he looked around for work whose net effect on the universe seemed to be close to neutral. The ditch job fit the bill. People needed water, and the burden of maintaining the ditches needed to be shared. There was no profit involved; the fees were used to maintain the gates and sluiceways.

Jim's new job required some calculation of cubic feet over time, and a willingness to work at all hours of the night. The ditch boss, a gentle hulking man named Wayne, thought Jim was priceless because he wrote down the figures in tight draftsman's numerals, never missed a day of work, and charmed the most codgerly of the town's ranchers with his good-old-boy ways. Jim would lean on a fence post and listen to them go on about cattle blight or sugar levels in their grapes, and then he'd shake his head and offer a Southern nicety. "Well, I'll be," he'd say, or "Man alive!"