Split (12 page)

My father stopped in the street to deliver the punch line, palms and shoulders up, playing Vinnie as a lug from the Bronx. "He said, 'Piss in a cup.' And I said, 'Shit in my hat.' And the fight started."

I laughed for a while, then cleared my throat. "You know, Jim calls those kind of jokes
bathroom humor.
"

"Really?" My father looked at me, skeptical at first, then sober as he considered this news.

We went on for a few paces in silence, both of us circling back to the man in the joke, who got in trouble for taking things too literally. I saw a grin steal over my father's face, saw him work to conceal it, and then we both gave up and burst out laughing again.

 

It was during that trip that my father taught me to sing oldies from his high school days in Valley Stream: "In the Still of the Night," "A Casual Look." He sang bass—the
do-wahs
and
dup-de-doops
—snapped his fingers, and walked with a syncopated swoop. I tried to carry the melody, seizing up around the high notes, adding extra vibrato to match his. Now and then we hit a sweet patch and rendered up something better than our two halves. Mood had a lot to do with it. We would fill up an alley, or the back seat of a cab, feeling half famous by the time the last phrase faded.

One morning we walked into town to buy a pair of sandals at the market. It was still cool, and we were nearly alone on the cobbled street. I walked on the narrow sidewalk, brushing my hand against the stucco wall, which changed colors to signal the end of one house and the beginning of another. My father walked in the street, holding my hand, and after going on for a while in silence, he started into "Lean on Me," stairstepping notes meant to be sung over a blazing garbage can. "Some ... times in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow."

I looked at his face, becoming once again familiar to me, and my heart squeezed up. In the quiet of that strange and lovely street, in a country where no one knew us, those lines sunk deep and hit their mark. The song was about suffering, about people flying together over great distances when trouble struck. I took it as acknowledgment of all that had passed between us.

I should have let the feeling hold, but I was seven—jumpy and desperate to have everything at once. I didn't quite trust these moments of pleasure. "After this can we sing 'A Casual Look'?" I asked, interrupting his singing.

My father's face crumpled. "I'm singing
this
one now."

I had forgotten how easily he bruised. "I'm sorry," I said. "Please, start again."

He sulked a little, not wanting to look too eager.

"Come on," I said, swinging his hand from side to side. "Start again. You know I love that song."

Some might say it wasn't good for me to get such a glimpse of my father's fragility, but in a strange way I took strength from it. When he wavered, I had to hold firm, and that firmness made me feel sturdy. I could see that he wounded too easily, and because I loved him, I liked to think of myself as the custodian of his feelings.

He picked up the song again, and soon we were in the marketplace, weaving through the tables of meat and vegetables and woven belts. The blue plastic tarps overhead flexed in the breeze, bathing the stalls in a marine light. We found a woman selling sandals. Her husband, in the comer, cut the soles from scraps of truck tire.

"
Quiero zapatos para mi niña,
" my father said, putting a palm on my back. His Spanish was getting better, and with his olive skin and black hair he was sometimes taken for a local.

The woman pulled out a pair, biting through the thread that held them and slapping the soles together. They were stiff as dried meat, and none of them seemed to fit right. "Try these," my father said, picking out a different design. I have never met a man who liked to shop as much as my father. He was willing to immerse himself in the merits of that strap, that heel, and rarely showed signs of impatience. Perhaps it was the mark of a man raised by women: he believed in the importance of style.

Before long, the saleswoman was ringed by a litter of shoes, her face betraying a bit of pique. Her husband, seeing my quandary, pulled up a dusty pair from beneath his workbench and motioned for me to slip them on: the perfect sandals. I paraded around, turning my ankles to the side to admire.

"Those are great," my father told me as we walked through the maze of aisles and back out to the street. "They show off your beautiful feet."

Truth told, my feet were goofy looking—long crooked toes and no arches. They looked exactly like his. ("You'd be tall," Jim loved to tell me, "if you didn't have so much tucked under.") But that day I was convinced of their loveliness, walking home through the streets with my father. I thought everyone turned to appreciate them, their eyes drawn by the squeak of new leather.

 

Halfway through our two-week trip, my father met a woman at language school, and they fell in love. Even I had to admit that Leslie was beautiful. She had wheat-gold hair and even features and square teeth that turned slightly in front. Her bearing hinted at a world of refinement that she had since renounced. She spoke in whole, tailored sentences and moved with an easy poise.

What drew the two of them together, besides passion, was politics. Leslie was a lefty, too—a feminist, a Marxist—and she lived in Berkeley, the West Coast pole of the student movement. Soon more details emerged: like my stepfather, Jim, she was trained as an architect, and, like him, she had grown up in the South. Later, we would learn that Jim had studied architecture in college under Leslie's father. Silly, one might say. Mere coincidence. But these connections made my mother and father seem more like each other, for even then I understood, though I could never have put it into words, that people craved their opposites. My parents had been of a piece and then cleft apart, and now it seemed that they needed these other types—more reserved, more ordered and steady—to make them whole.

We went with Leslie to the pool for our afternoon swim, and while she and my father talked on the lawn I treaded water in the shallow end, taking note of every gesture between them. She laughed and fingered his earring. He rubbed sunscreen on her shoulders.

A few days after they met, my father took her on a date and left me for the evening with Yalili and baby Arturo. Señora Gonzalez made me a pile of hot tortillas, and I sat on the floor in their living room watching cartoons, chewing relentlessly, and growing crankier by the minute. I hated the Spanish voice-over, the attention it required to decipher the goings-on. Arturo danced in front of the TV screen, singing along with some ditty for laundry soap, bouncing on his sturdy toddler's legs. I wanted to clobber him.

When my father and Leslie finally came in, late at night, they lingered for a moment in the entryway. I heard their laughter and rushed out to meet them, hoping to hurry her out the door. But when I turned the corner and saw them together, I stopped in my tracks. They were holding hands, looking into each other's eyes, a palpable crackle in the air around them. In an instant I knew what this meant: there would be no getting rid of her.

Once I saw where my father's loyalties lay, I clung to Leslie like a desperate flunky—fingering the thick lapis lazuli necklace my father had bought her that night, fingering her fine-textured skin. We sat in the bedroom and they told me about their evening—the margaritas and mariachi band—so caught up in their happiness they didn't notice my envy. My father had the two of us pose for a photo, and when Leslie put her arm around me and smoothed a hand through my hair, I gave in to her a little. Being alone with my father was like walking a tightrope—thrilling but exhausting. She had broken up our act, but maybe she would temper us. When my father said, "Cheese!" I sagged against her and smiled for the camera.

 

When the date on our return tickets neared, my father told me he had decided to stay on with Leslie in Mexico. I would have to travel home to California by myself. Looking back, I can't blame them. They were at the beginning of a twenty-year love affair, and soon they'd return home to opposite coasts. At the time, I felt banished.

My father escorted me back to the capital, a trip that survives in my memory with the shadowy lighting of a nervous dream. We took a night bus, and I stayed awake as we rumbled along rutted highways, above dark canyons, and around hairpin turns. My father was beside me, but I took no comfort from his presence. Someone might have looked at my cinched-up face and seen the anxiety of a girl losing her father to another woman. Most of us get it over with early. But my father, though he dated some, had been single from the beginning of memory. Now, for the first time, I had to share his affections. I had no idea of the depths of what unnerved me.

When the bus pulled into Mexico City in the middle of the night, I didn't recognize the streets I had loved in the daytime. Boys swigged gasoline from gallon jugs and blew fire for the cars stopped at the light. Bags of oranges, which I mistook at first for bundled infants, were pushed up to the grimy bus windows.

We made our way to a hotel near the airport and were shown to a musty room, furnished with brocade bedspreads and heavy colonial furniture. The bellhop brought us glasses and a carafe of water, which my father told me not to drink. I was thirsty and worried that I would pour a glass out of instinct. My father was unusually quiet, thinking perhaps of the new turn his life had taken. I climbed into bed and watched headlights slice through the sheer curtains, the room tipped and strange, like a carnival fun house. Horns and shouts lifted from the street below. I dozed, then woke with a jolt. Were we late for the plane? It was still dark. My father slept heavily. For hours I stayed up, listening to the growling intake and release of his breath.

S
IX MONTHS
after they met in Mexico, my father moved from Boston to Berkeley to set up house with Leslie. Three hours by car, instead of five by plane, now separated us. I was thankful to have him nearer, but I couldn't help noting that it took her weight on my end of the continent to slide him over.

The two of them found a house to rent in the Berkeley flats. My father got a job working as a hospital orderly, and once the details of his life were settled, he called my mother to arrange a more regular visiting pattern. She wasn't having any of it. By now it had been four years since they'd parted ways on the East Coast, but my mother still had doubts about his trustworthiness.

I always thought, in those years, that it was my father's choice to stay away. I couldn't think of my mother as anything but heroine, rescuer. He was the fickle one. Then, in my early twenties, I came across a folder in my father's office labeled "Lisa Papers" and took my name as invitation. Inside, I found a letter in my mother's blocky printing. On brown rag paper, gone fragile with age, she laid out her terms.
Three weeks a year. No unnecessary phone calls.
She numbered each clause, then printed her name at the bottom. This was my mother's defense against my father: Here are my rules; don't mess with me. I could almost hear her voice lift off the page—those bare phrases, each word enunciated. These were the terms that kept him at bay.

It was the last rule that took my breath away, rule number four:
No unnecessary letters.

Once he was on better footing, my father challenged those terms. He wrote letters, tried for a compromise, and when that failed, he and my mother both hired lawyers and prepared for court. A social worker was sent to my father's new home to judge its worthiness. Leslie insisted that they scrub the place in preparation. My father tried to downplay the importance of such bourgeois conventions as floor wax—pissed, I'm sure, at having to gussy himself up for inspection. To this day he praises Leslie's instincts: the first of many such saves. They straightened and polished and scoured the place, and in her report the social worker singled out Leslie's spotless housekeeping for special mention.

I was out in the garden with my mother one day when she asked me, with a casualness that put me on alert, how I felt about visiting my father. How much did I want to see him? Whom did I want to live with? And would I feel comfortable telling my wishes to a judge?

I said I wanted to live with her and see him a lot and that I would tell that to anyone. I never had to make such a declaration. On the courthouse steps, the lawyers finally convinced my mother and Jim that they would lose: though they could probably keep custody, the courts would surely grant my father visiting rights, and in the process everyone would be put through a rash of harrowing testimony. They all retired to a nearby coffee shop and hammered out an agreement.

My mother sat me down not long after that and explained the plan. I would spend one weekend a month with my dad, as well as half the summers, alternate Christmases and Thanksgivings, and every Easter.

I was glad at the prospect of seeing more of my father, but my first question betrayed my nerves: "You mean we'll never have Easter together again?"

I had never been particularly excited by Easter—we did the usual business of eggs and chocolate rabbits—but the finality made me nostalgic. The little wire hooks we used to fish the eggs out of their dye baths, my mother's predictable hiding places—in the drainpipe, in a spray of daffodil spears—without me, without another child around, she probably wouldn't bother. I cast this, as I often did, in terms of her loss. Easier than admitting my own. What struck me most about the new arrangement: wherever I ended up, somebody had to be disappointed.

 

During the first months of the new agreement, my dad and Leslie drove up from Berkeley for the appointed weekends so we wouldn't spend most of our time together in transit. We passed those weekends in the neighboring town, and though I often spent time there with my mother, for the days of those visits, the streets looked strange. I felt disoriented, sitting in the movie theater, getting root-beer floats at the A&W drive-in. I sat in the same velvet seats, ordered the same foods, but I had different parents, so I felt like a different child.