Split (29 page)

 

I was grappling in those days with ideas of separateness and cohesion. Sometimes it seemed that the things that drove my life—my desire to be a good student, daughter, friend; to distinguish myself in the world; to take comfort in clubs and schools and academic allegiances—were made of smoke. We were big-brained animals, smart enough to want life to have purpose and form, so we made up ways to pass our days here —hoops to jump through, invisible rules. I could mind them and be convinced I had distinguished myself among men, or I could tear my clothes and rave in the street: in the end it didn't seem to matter. I was a speck in the vastness, in the risings and migrations and extinctions, a bottle on the waves. I loved that thought. It made me feel free.

I spent a lot of time, at twenty-one, peering into the unbridgeable gaps between people, looking at what got lost, even between those bent on communion, rather than what got through. I think I hated to be alone, but hated worse the idea that no one could comfort me. Better to mask a need than ask for solace and have it go unmet. Clarity was a sham, a false god. If no one really understood the movings of another heart, then why bother trying to be lucid?

These days, I pay more attention to what strains through, despite the limits. What we can say, one to another, even if we can't say everything. But even back then, secretly, I longed to be wrong. And when I first came across some writings about Taoism, it was the calm refutation of our separateness that washed over me like a tonic. I thought I had been sharp-eyed to have noted man's solitary fate, but now I was convinced this view was a delusion, a false stopping place. We weren't linked by some flimsy web of social relations, but we weren't distinct either. We were joined on the essential struts of linked matter.

Of course, the Buddhist doctrine of nonattachment seemed to appeal most to those who didn't have much, or who suffered more than they were glad, so that giving up the cycles of happiness and sorrow was in fact a winning proposition. I suppose it said something about me in those days that I kindled to the words of Thich Nhat Hanh and Shunryu Suzuki. I owned a few clothes, a futon, some boards and cement bricks, and I often felt quite gloomy. Buddhist practice seemed to offer relief.

 

After my mother's invitation over Easter to witness my brother's delivery, she and I didn't speak about the subject for a while. I got swept into final exams and the topic was forgotten. But when the quarter drew to a close and I thought about my visit home, I turned again to the idea. I would arrive a week before her due date. If I was there for the event, why not see it firsthand? Maybe she was right; maybe it would dispel some of my morbid fears.

My brother's due date came and went, and my mother's doctor finally agreed to induce labor. It certainly made things orderly. We got up early, dropped my little sister off with a family friend, and drove to the hospital. After my mother's waters were broken, Jim and I kept her company while she walked the halls, trying to get things going. The birthing room was done up to look homey, with chintz wallpaper and a window looking out on a bank of grass and shrubs. Jim stayed at my mother's side, stroking her hand and changing the tape in the tape deck. They were listening to the Brandenburg Concertos, which is cheering stuff, but maybe somebody forgot how long the business was. There was no other tape. As the day wore on and the opening concerto began for the sixth or seventh time, I retreated to a deserted waiting room to read back issues of
Good Housekeeping
and pick at my face in the bathroom mirror. Around nine in the evening Jim burst in the door.

"It's happening!" he said, breathless and already sprinting back down the hall. "This is it!"

I was given a gown and a mask and ushered into the room. The bottom half of the bed had pulled away, and the doctor was there, guiding things along.

True to her word, my mother didn't howl. Her face torqued with each contraction, but between them she was composed.

"Okay, push, Ann," the doctor said, radiating calm. He was from the Philippines and had a silky, coaxing voice. "Lisa, do you want to come closer?" he asked when the contraction had passed, motioning to a space behind his back.

A front-row seat. I felt cold and wobbly in the head, but I moved to the spot. Another contraction came; my mother threw herself into pushing, then stopped when the doctor ordered, and our eyes met. Uncomfortable as I was, I tried for a game grin beneath my mask.

"Oh, good," my mother said, beaming at me. "You're smiling.

Then another contraction, and she flushed and turned inward.

"Boy, that's a big one!" Jim said, looking at the monitor.

"I
know
it's a big one," my mother hissed through her teeth. It was the only brusque word she uttered through the whole thing.

"That's good, Ann," the doctor said, his voice rising. "Here's the head."

And then he was there, my brother, little pulpy man, his face furrowed with puzzlement. The doctor cut the cord and laid him on my mother's chest. Jim leaned over his son, grinning from ear to ear. I had never seen the man so blissed in all my life. "Well, neat-o-rooties," he kept saying, over and over, peering at his tiny namesake. "Man alive!"

My mother slumped back on her pillows in ruddy contentment, smiling at everyone.

"How do you feel?" I asked her.

"Oh, I feel great," she said. "How about you?"

"I'm fine," I said, and I nearly was by then.

My brother was given a warm bath in the room, and I put in a call to the family friend, who brought my sister by. Mother had bought her a new Cabbage Patch doll, meant to quell envy, but my sister didn't seem to have any. "Oh," she said, in a mild voice, when the doll was presented. "Thank you." Then she sat cross-legged on the floor while Jim brought the baby down to eye level, and gave her brother a placid, welcoming smile.

"You know what I'd really love right now?" my mother said, looking down on the scene.

"What?" I asked her. I couldn't imagine.

She closed her eyes and tipped her head back. "A roast-beef sandwich with onions."

 

As soon as I got back to school, I made a beeline for the medical bookstore. It took me a while to locate a text on obstetrics, and the language was a bit technical, but it offered clear descriptions of the various methods of anesthesia. The pelvic block had a few disadvantages: it could be used only late in the game, by which time I might be beyond repair, and it required a needle as long as a drinking straw. I paged right past the section on I.V. narcotics. I had sampled Demerol at eight when I shattered my elbow in a fall from the monkey bars, and knew I wanted nothing more to do with it. It left me woozy and cotton mouthed and made me confuse my mother with a boy from my third-grade class. I finally settled on an epidural, which carried a small risk of paralysis, but which had made certain women report that they barely knew they had a lower half. I was slightly calmer once I had my anesthetic selected, a good decade or more in advance of the event. My mother's bravery and grit had impressed me, but I didn't think they were qualities that I shared.

 

My investigations into sex and its outcomes weren't purely by proxy. In the final quarter of my freshman year, I started dating Bob, a residence assistant, a liaison in direct violation of the dormitory bylaws. For a number of months it seemed we were both happy. We pretended to study together (he was enrolled in a master's program), met for trays of casserole in the cafeteria, ran into each other in the elevators and kissed from floor to floor. As an R.A., he had a room to himself, with a sleeping loft and an enormous paper collage covering one wall, which an old girlfriend had made. I spent a lot of time staring at that collage. If you squinted, a jester emerged from the layered triangles and squares, balanced, arms akimbo, on top of a harlequin ball.

"She got too caught up in surfaces," Bob told me once, when he saw me staring. I wasn't quite sure what he meant by this, but there were other hints that his ex-girlfriend was slightly pitiful, and that finally he'd been forced to give her up. I always imagined this woman hunched amid a confetti of colored paper, trimming doggedly and pining for Bob. In time, I'd come to think of her as a kindred spirit.

In the meantime, Bob and I took long drives out to Malibu in his 280Z, listening to Al Jarreau and letting the city haze unravel behind us. I had rarely been off campus since I left the catering job, and Bob became my escort to the wider world. I was particularly grateful for this one night, when a prankster pulled the fire alarm at 3
A.M.
This happened quite often, and each time we had to wait out on the curb, sometimes for an hour, while the fire department checked each floor for the phantom blaze. But that night Bob and I slipped off to his car, rolled out the back end of the parking lot with the headlights off, and drove down to Ships café, where we sat for hours, still in our pajamas, drinking coffee and crisping English muffins in the tableside toasters.

It all came to an end one afternoon when we were lounging around on the couch in Bob's dorm room, talking of nothing in particular. Suddenly he jumped up and announced that he had to go running. He seemed nervous, and paced around the little room, stretching his quads. "I've got to get a regimen going," he said.

"Well, I guess I'll see you later then," I said, confused by this rush to fitness. He had never mentioned running before.

Bob left in a brand-new running suit, and I don't think we spoke for more than five minutes after that. He began a series of elaborate evasions, acting as if there were nothing worth discussing about the fact that we had gone from lovers to strangers in the span of an uneventful half-hour. Of course, it hadn't happened like that. It must have been brewing for some time. Certainly I had been oblivious to the signs and no doubt had played my part, but the question was, In precisely what manner had I made him disappear?

Hoping for an answer, I knocked on his door one night, when I was too drunk to be ashamed. The long hallway was buffed to a shine. I stared down its length, swaying slightly, waiting for the man in the cheerful I.D. photo taped to the door to appear in the flesh. "Hi, I'm Bob," said a little dialogue bubble rising from his mouth. The hallway smelled of laundry soap and stale beer, and from an open door somewhere issued the hoarse strains of Sade. "Smooth operator," she crooned. "You're a smooth operator." I thought I heard voices murmuring from behind the door, and the peephole darkened, but Bob never answered my knock.

Once I was away from Bob and had time to think, I realized that I knew almost nothing about him. Time has not improved my perspective. I would like to say
Bob was looking for
—But there the sentence ends. I was blindly in love with him, and I hadn't the faintest idea what he wanted from life or why he was living in a dormitory at twenty-three, supervising a floor of late adolescents.

After Bob made his exit, I began to sleep sixteen hours a day, pulling myself up like some sluggish swamp creature just in time to make it to class. At one point I called my mother to tell her the sad tale.

"Well, my goodness," she said. "This must be the first time in your life anyone's ever rejected you." It wasn't true, but she meant it as a compliment.

"Is that how you see me?" I asked her.

"Well, you just seemed from the start to be whole unto yourself. Everything you ever really went for, you got. Even your father—you had power over him. You were the first person he changed his life for."

I was quiet, taking this in.

"What you need to do now is expand your options," my mother said. "Check out the bulletin boards around campus. Take a dance class. Join the spelunkers' club."

What could I say? The last thing I wanted was to go tramping around in a cave with a bunch of headlamped troglodytes. I already felt like I was underground. I didn't hazard this, though. I said sure, I'd make an effort, and mumbled my way off the phone.

My mother would have liked to give me strength. And in odd ways she did. On the path from the dorms to the campus I had to pass a hedge of
Daphne odera,
a shrub with clusters of citrusy flowers that grew around my mother's house. I wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but I plucked a sprig and held it to my nose, and that scent was restorative; it led me down the path. As I walked, an old Latin hymn she used to sing drifted into my head.
Dona nobis pacem.
A simple phrase, carried on a changing rivulet of melody. I sang it over and over until I reached the doors of the classroom, unaware of what the Latin meant: grant us peace.

I barely remember studying that quarter. When my midterms arrived with As and Bs, it seemed to be the work of some other girl. In the mornings, after rising from my narrow bed, I would slide the window open and sit with my feet out on the ledge, staring at the banked greenery of the rec center and the shimmering blue rectangle of the pool. From down on the pool deck, the residence hall loomed above the trees like an enormous waffle iron, its windows framed with concrete squares. When I had been in better spirits and spent my afternoons down there sunning on the grass, I used to count up and over from the edge of the building to find my particular box, and I remember thinking of the oddity of this arrangement, the way we were housed like rabbits in a hutch, pacing within feet of each other, walled up with our private worries and wishes. Walking down the hall to the communal shower with my towel cinched modestly around me, I was aware that I lived in a hive of other girls, but once I returned to my room and shut the door, the world dropped away around me. The walls jutting out from the window frames seemed designed to prevent us from catching sight of one another, or perhaps they were meant to prevent drunken rabblers from dropping bottles on each other's heads. Either way, when I sat at the window, feeling virtuous for getting myself a little sunshine and air (it wasn't spelunking, but it was a start), I could see only my allotted square of the view. There might have been another girl, one window over, leaning out beside me with a similar expression, but I would never have known she was there.