Split (18 page)

 

That year, my father got a job at the Ford plant in Fremont, working on the assembly line. Because he was a new hire, he had to start on the night shift, punching rivets from ten in the evening until six in the morning, while the rest of the city slept. At the end of such a week, the three-hour trip to pick me up for our monthly visits was too much, and so I began to take the Greyhound bus to San Francisco to save him the drive.

Mother drove me to the station on her end, a dusty office tucked behind a drugstore in a nearby town, and waited with me until the bus pulled into the parking lot. I took a seat up front near the driver and waved until she was out of sight.

The ride took nearly four hours, and the bus stopped in a string of small towns along the way. Each station was slightly different, but there was a through line of quiet dreariness to those rooms: men waiting with vacant expressions and bags between their feet, women cleaning out their purses, toddlers digging through the sand-filled ashtrays for butts.

At the first stop, I pretended to scan the vending machines, using the glass to keep an eye on the people behind me. Once I was sure no one was approaching, I took a look at the snacks, and it was there that the first heady wind of freedom swept through me. I could buy whatever I liked—chocolate bars or Cokes or those Hostess Sno Balls that looked like electric pink wads of yarn. Whatever I ate would disappear without a trace. I was miles from home and no one would know. I selected an industrial-sized Pixy Stix, which plunked into the tray like a stick of dynamite, tore open the fat paper tube, and tipped my head back—a straight brain shot of sugar.

"Hey, can you spare some change?" A red-eyed man I'd seen slumped in a corner chair suddenly appeared beside me. He was curled in on himself: hunched back, beak nose, one leg shorter than the other so it hung, bent, beside the other in a gesture that appeared almost coy.

I started to say "Sorry," but that first sibilant shot a cloud of lavender Pixy dust into the air between us. In my palm was a handful of coins, slick with sweat. I had swallowed a nickel once, on a bet, to see if it would go through. I never caught sight of it, but it occurred to me that the thing had probably made its way through the septic tank and out the leech lines and was now lodged deep under the lawn back home. I thought,
I'm rich enough to eat money.
I opened my palm and turned over the change.

I was glad to see that the hunched man went, on heel and toe, and plunked my coins into the coffee machine. He selected extra cream and sugar, and stood rubbing his hands as the machine shot a beige stream into a cup.

"Looks like horse piss," he said. "But it's a meal."

 

Over the coming months those bus trips would train in me a canny watchfulness. Under the mask of a bored stare, I'd scan the crowd for worrisome types. I got in the habit of dividing up my snack money, putting the largest bills deep in my backpack and keeping a few dollars and change in my front pocket. Soon the vending-machine fare lost its charm, and I returned to pretzels and V-8, my mother's long arm extending all the way to Petaluma, where the celery and tomatoes on the label drew me in with their promise of nutritional virtue.

I took my tomato juice over to the pay TV—a black box attached to the arm of a molded plastic chair—and dropped a quarter in the slot. Leslie had won me over to the tawdry world of daytime soaps. The screen bloomed with light, then sharpened into a scene: two lovers hiding in some artificial bushes. For fifteen minutes I watched
All My Children,
chewing pretzels and studying the scheming heiress, the illegitimate son, then a close-up of their two wrangling mouths. When the engine revved, I ran out to claim my seat and watched out the window as the vineyards gave way to a corridor of malls and car dealerships. Thirty miles down the road, when we came to another station, I jumped out, slipped another quarter in the pay TV, and caught up with the action.

When the bus nosed into the concourse in San Francisco, the door flew open with a hiss.

"End of the line," the driver bellowed. I always hated that phrase. It made me feel ejected. I loitered in the back, unwilling to deboard. I wanted to feel that I'd arrived at my destination by choice, and not because the road had ended beneath me. But perhaps it was more than this that made me linger in the bus. Even after I had mastered my tough-girl pose, the San Francisco station was more than I could handle. Everyone looked bleary-eyed, whether from fifteen-hour journeys or cheap booze and a night on the street I couldn't tell. The walls were dingy and smelled of piss. On the one or two occasions when my father got caught in traffic and wasn't there when I arrived, I hovered near the ticket windows. I figured no one would kidnap me in full view of a person in uniform, even though the tellers, dressed in striped shirts embossed with the bus line's skinny dog, looked like they wouldn't offer you water if your clothes were on fire. When my father showed up, I rushed into his arms.

 

During that school year, my father and Leslie moved to Oakland to be closer to the Fremont plant. When I came to visit for the following summer, they had found a new way to occupy my days: a summer program at Jarvis Gann Elementary School. My father had met with the principal before I arrived and asked her about the activities. Students took classes in the traditional subjects and spent a little extra time outside doing P.E. The school was set against the Oakland foothills, the buildings gray and unforgiving, but it was near our apartment and wouldn't require a lot of driving to and fro. My father inquired about the cultural mix.

"Oh, it's a very peaceful campus," the woman assured him. "The students are motivated and hard working. We don't have any racial tension, if that's what you mean."

I found out, on my first day, that she told the literal truth. There was no racial tension. I was the only white kid on campus. It actually took me a little while to absorb this. Looking out, I didn't see my incongruity. I took my seat in the classroom, and the teacher began her lesson, and it wasn't until I noticed that she refused to call on me that I began to wonder what was wrong.

"Who can tell us about the Magna Carta?" the teacher asked.

I waved my arm like I was drowning. The teacher called on a quiet girl to my left who had her head bent over her book. I looked around to see what set me apart, and suddenly it was plain as day. Then I remembered Yolanda, the only black student back at my elementary school in the valley. She came to class for six months, and in those six months no one befriended her. She often fell asleep at her desk (we somehow were made to understand that she didn't get much sleep at home); when the bell rang she would rub her eyes and wander the playground alone. I didn't dislike Yolanda, but I had never offered her any kindness. Now I caught a glimpse of the strange world in which she had traveled.

I came home at the end of that first day looking anxious.

"How was it?" my father asked.

"It was okay," I said.

"Not great?"

"It was okay." I was worried I'd get scolded for being so color conscious. I figured my father would say it was good for me to see the flip side of oppression. But when I finally confessed—"I was the only white kid"—my father was surprised and a little pissed.

"No racial tension! Well, no shit." He let out a rueful laugh, remembering his interview with the principal: "She was like, 'We are all so happy here at Yada Yada School.'" He pursed his lips and steepled his fingers across his chest. Then his face relaxed. "Look, I'm real sorry. We'll find another program. I mean, I want you to be in a mixed school, but this doesn't sound good."

And true to his word, he did find a better program. Caliente, it was called: a day camp run by the Oakland Parks Service. There, in a heavy-beamed building on the hillside, I learned Filipino stick dancing, played congas, and made batik prints. The other kids were good-natured—the happy mix my father had hoped for. We ate our lunches out under the eucalyptus trees, then set up our steel drums and played rounds, the Caribbean rhythms floating down over the cityscape below.

 

Our new apartment was set up high on the hill, with a deck and a view of the Bay Bridge, but the neighborhood was a bit rougher than the one we had left. Grandma Leila came for a visit and was mugged a few blocks from the house, and my father thought I ought to take a class in self-defense. He had been a black belt in karate back in his Boston days, and so at his behest I went to a dojo for the summer. There was one other girl in my class, a good five years older than me, with legs as thick as tree trunks. She was already a green belt. The rest were boys.

At first I was taken by the rituals of the dojo—the posing and bowing—and the forms reminded me of dance: the slow-motion sequence of leans and kicks and weight shifts that required softness in the limbs and fierce concentration. For the half-hour that the sensei would go over them, I was lost in the mirror, trying to follow his swift limbs.

But karate was an art of self-defense, and soon we would have to bring these elegant movements to bear on someone's body. I remember the day I realized this. My dad dropped me off early for class, and I paced around the lobby, gazing at dusty photographs of the studio's graduates in competition: a boy frozen midleap, his
gi
rippling with effort, his flexed heel just grazing another boy's cheek. In another shot: two boys with arms extended like pistons, both of them wincing: one thousandth of a second in a flurry of blows, only their Afros undisturbed.

"You'll get to that soon," the sensei said, interrupting my study. He had come in noiselessly, a middle-aged black man, serious but kind.

"You mean people are going to hit me?"

"It's all about control," he said. Then he laughed. "Or it should be. A match is won on points and not bruises."

My father was deeply invested in my karate career. He took pictures of me in my white outfit, having me kick for the camera, and what he took for combat readiness was really a scowl of irritation. I had a growing list of gripes about the sport. When it came time to pay for the next block of classes, I begged my father not to send me back, literally clinging to his pant leg: "Please, please, don't make me go. I hate it there." My father seemed shocked at my aversion, which I apparently had never mentioned before. I remember his apologetic tone when he called the sensei to tell him I wouldn't be returning. "No, no, you're doing a great job," he said, tugging on his mustache. "I guess this was more my thing than hers."

 

It was at that Oakland apartment that Leslie and I got it into our heads one day to give my father a facial. I don't know what possessed us. We must have been reading beauty magazines, a shared luxury we discovered early on, both of us entranced by the stories of everyday girls made glamorous by an ingenious haircut, the perfect lipstick and scarf. When my father came home from work, we made him sit in the kitchen on a plastic chair while we prepared hot washcloths and stirred up a paste of oatmeal and honey in a metal bowl. He was unmanned by our suggestion, and sat in the chair with his arms loose at his sides while we laid compresses across his forehead and smoothed tonics across his cheeks.

"This is amazing," he said, when we were finished and his skin was gleaming. We gave him a hand mirror, and he tipped his chin down and examined himself from every angle. "Why don't we do this all the time?"

Leslie and I laughed. She combed his hair back with her fingers and wiped the cream from around his ears, and I remember the expression on his face, a look of transportation and trust on this man with size-twelve feet and grease under his nails. He was basking, his face turned up the way a leaf tracks the sun.

 

That summer I was flipping through some old political posters I found in a box in my bedroom when I came across one of my favorites: a group of campesinos in fatigues against a rich red ground. They held hoes and rifles; flares of orange lifted behind them—the signs of distant battle. The text was set in narrow lines: "It is better to die on my feet ... than to go on living on my knees." It seems strange to me now that I thrilled to those sentiments, for they were the kind of sentiments that had separated my father from me years before. The men in that poster, were they to come to life, would most likely have told of children they had left behind in the villages of their country. They would have spoken in the language of sacrifice.

My father and I sometimes talked about our early years together—or rather he talked, telling me stories of our travels together back east. How I leapt into his arms at a rally and babbled into the microphone, unfazed by the sea of heads before me. How I squelched a bully at our Boston play group by threatening to bite him till he bled. But we rarely spoke about his time in prison or the absence that followed. We each had our reasons for leaving the past behind us. He wanted to be a different father now—more grown-up, steadier, more in control. I think I was afraid to cross the river of hurt behind me. Still, the defiance of those words stirred my blood. I sat on my bed studying the men's rugged faces and wished for something worth laying down my life for.

Soon I would have someone on whom I could heap such extravagant emotions. In early spring I came for a weekend visit, and soon after I arrived, Leslie and my father sat me down in the living room.

"We have some very good news," my father said. Leslie was beside him, beaming. I wracked my brain, trying to think what it could be.

"You are going to have a baby sister," my father said.

I looked back and forth between them, speechless. They were holding hands, leaning forward on the couch in anticipation. Tears welled up in my eyes. I tried to say something, but my throat was stuck.

"Aren't you happy?" my father asked, his face starting to fall.

Happy?
Happy
suddenly seemed like a flimsy little word, paper-thin, trivial, unequal to the waves of joy and relief and gratitude that flooded me. I was going to have a
sister.