Split (30 page)

When my depression didn't let up, I made my way to the psychology clinic on campus, where I was assigned to a young man named Charlie, who would meet with me once a week for three months as part of his clinical training. I didn't ask to be assigned to a man. There was some question as to whether I would be assigned to anyone at all—I wasn't an emergency case—and then this chance came up. But in hindsight it seems lucky that I went each week into a tiny room with two chairs and a desk and a box of tissues and spoke to that dewy-faced man. He restored my faith in the gender. I thought I was there to tell him the story of Bob and my broken heart, and I did talk of this now and then, but I was surprised—though surely Charlie was not—to find that I filled the bulk of those hours with stories of my father. It was as if I had lost him all over again. Out came stories of his long-ago disappearance, which was preserved in my toddler's mind with the same abruptness, the same lack of explanation. Charlie listened carefully, while pulling on his mustache, a delicate boyish fringe. I had the impression that he was afraid to say much, for fear of misstepping, but his face was the most marvelous tonic—full of curiosity and compassion—and little by little, sitting across from him, I recovered my spirits.

I remember only one thing that Charlie said in those months, and he said it hesitantly, with a brief glance at the tape deck whose reels spun silently on the desk, recording our sessions for his adviser's review.

"You know, I'm feeling angry at your father, listening to your story," he said, placing a hand on his chest as if to make clear the prejudice of this emotion. His admission shook me like a thunderclap. I had talked over those early years plenty of times, and they summoned in me a variety of feelings, but anger wasn't one of them, at least not one I could admit to myself then.

At the end of that session, I bumped into my father on campus. He had been given a fellowship by the Institute of Industrial Relations, and was taking a three-month sabbatical from the line to do research for a book on the labor movement. I left the air-conditioned lobby of the clinic, saw him walking up the path, and my first response was delight. That familiar face, that reliable enveloping hug. He asked how I was doing. There, in the face of the actual man, I couldn't bring myself to speak of resentments. I shrugged and looked down at my feet. I was wearing red Converse high-tops, borrowed from a friend, and a shirt patterned with red paisleys. I realized it had been months since I'd worn anything vivid, or taken care, for that matter, with what I wore. I felt as I were resurfacing from a dream, and in that first flush, my gripes didn't seem worth mentioning.

"I'm doing fine," I told my father, smiling.

"You look good," he said. "I mean you always look good, but you look happy." He seemed honestly glad of this—his face buoyed up—as if knowing I was content lightened something in him. I was grateful I'd held my tongue. We walked together into the campus, talking about my sisters, his relief at being granted time to think and write, until we came to a fork in the path.

"Hey, Converse," my father said, catching sight of my shoes. "You know how I love those."

 

It seemed that only a few weeks later the quarter was over and I was out on the curb, my clothes stuffed into plastic garbage bags, waiting for my father to pick me up for the summer. I could barely stomach the giddy atmosphere. The walkway was lined with piles of monogrammed luggage. Someone's dad, a man in a pink polo shirt, snapped photos and glad-handed the residence staff. Everyone around me seemed to look on the summer as a respite. They whooped and cheered, waving from car windows as they pulled away. I sat on my trash bags, indulging in bitter thoughts. They would return to neatly manicured homes in the suburbs, where their mothers kept the counters wiped and served fruit plates in the afternoons. They would take jobs lifeguarding at the local swim club, and drink beer in the evenings with their high school friends.

I seemed to be the only one who wanted to remain in the warrenlike coziness of the dormitory. I had found there the first breath of independence, the merest whisper of what it would be like to shape my life. I knew no one from my year at Fairfax High; Hana had since moved to Boston. And, truth told, I dreaded the return to my father's house, where the tensions of the previous year still hung in the air. My father and I had been jousting for so long, we didn't seem to know any other way. We were like exhausted boxers who refuse to call the fight. When the bell rang, we both came out of our corners.

That summer, in the mornings, before I reported to my evening shift at a furniture-rental store, I drove to UCLA and wandered around the campus. Perhaps I wanted to reassure myself that the scholarly life was not an illusion, and that I might still belong there. I slipped into Powell Library and read newspapers in the domed rotunda. Above me, the walls were set with Moorish tiles; below me, the stone floors polished by countless feet. I put down my paper and walked through the stacks, pulling out titles at random. I didn't read much, but I liked knowing it was all there: yellowed maps of Namibia, the complete works of Flaubert.

It was on one of these nostalgia visits that I ran into Mike, whom I had met in a history class during spring semester. He was attractive, in a generic, hulky kind of way. He wore Bermuda shorts and thongs and seemed glad to see me, which caught me off guard. Amid the ranks of sun-kissed sorority girls, I was certainly no prize. When Mike invited me to a party at his fraternity that weekend, I agreed to go.

That Friday, at eight, I changed in the bathroom at Easy Rents and locked up the store. I had spent hours that morning fretting over my outfit, and it is a measure of my self-consciousness that I can still remember exactly what I wore: a long straight skirt with a black hieroglyphic print, a mango-colored tank top, and silver earrings. I drove down Wilshire Boulevard, parked outside the fraternity house, and had a momentary crisis of confidence. I imagined myself braving a solo entrance only to find Mike tucked in some corner, nuzzling with his early pick of the evening. The vision nearly made me turn over the engine and head home, but in the end the relative desert of my social life forced me out. I picked my way up a yellowed stairway flanked with men and headed straight for the keg.

I was in line, plastic cup in hand, when I spotted my old boyfriend Bob. He hadn't caught sight of me yet, and for a moment I considered tossing my cup in a corner and fleeing the scene, but instead I froze. Just then he turned and called my name, walking over with a smile. I don't know what attracted him—perhaps the novelty of my presence at a frat house whose members were known for their thick necks and bad motives.

"Hey, what have you been up to?" he asked, moving as if to give me a hug, then settling for an awkward open-armed gesture. He seemed drunk.

"Not much. Working." I was embarrassed to mention my job. "How about you?"

"I'm getting my real estate license. Doing an internship at Coldwell Banker." He bent his head forward and gave me a sly smile.

"What happened to the master's program?" I asked, stalling for time. I was trying to figure out how I could cut him off—a small blow for the misery he'd caused me—when I felt a warm hand on my shoulder. It was Mike, looking surprisingly sober among his sodden brethren. He barely even glanced at Bob, who underwent a sudden adjustment of scale. I had never noticed how insubstantial he was.

"I'm so glad you made it," Mike said. "Can I get you a beer?" Bob saw the lay of the land and mumbled a quick goodbye.

"Old friend?" Mike asked, after Bob had disappeared into the crowd.

"Barely know him," I said. It struck me then that this was the truth.

"We've got a few of those oldsters hanging around," Mike said as he filled my cup. "College is over and they keep coming back for the free beer."

Mike's payment for my rescue was made in the usual coin of the realm. We rode his motorcycle to his apartment in Benedict Canyon—he was an upperclassman, and moneyed; the fraternity was purely a social affiliation—and had dull, drunken sex. In the morning, he gave me a lift to my car and saw me off with a flannel-mouthed kiss.

 

Monday through Friday at the furniture-rental store, I overlapped for an hour with Laurie, the woman who worked the day shift. Laurie was blond, heavyset, with a Bo-Peep face and a slightly wounded air. She sat behind the teak desk, and I took a seat in the customers' chair, and gradually we got to know one other. Looking back, it seems to me that she took on the role of confessor or shrink, with the desk between us as bulwark. A practicing Buddhist, Laurie occasionally coaxed me into chanting with her when business was slow, and when I came in one day looking gloomy, she managed to tease out my worry: I was late for my period, and feared that my evening with Mike was the cause.

When a week had passed with no results, I found a free clinic in the yellow pages and drove out to Santa Monica for a pregnancy test. I sat in the waiting room with women eight months along, with teenage girls thumbing through fashion magazines, beside a pale young woman who clutched at her boyfriend's hand. If only my mother could have seen me then: not much wiser, for all her frankness, than the girls whose mothers told them babies came from storks.

The test was simple. I filled out some forms, turned in a urine sample, then waited to be called into the examining room. "It's positive," the nurse practitioner told me, in that marvelously flat voice health care workers use to deliver ambiguous news. "Have you decided what you want to do?"

I shook my head.

"Well, if you decide you want to terminate the pregnancy, you need to make an appointment for a follow-up exam."

Terminate, exam:
I pushed away the words the way you kick off a heavy blanket on a stifling night. "Thanks, I'll think about it." I grabbed my purse, paid the receptionist, and hurried out to the parking lot.

Once in the car, with my seat belt fastened and the keys in the ignition, I realized I had nowhere to go. There wasn't a soul I wanted to tell—not my dad or Leslie, not my mother, not any of my distant college friends, certainly not the father, whose last name, to my embarrassment, I suddenly couldn't remember. I started the car and merged into the traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway.

I was only blocks from the Pacific, at the tab end of an interstate that unfurled all the way to Jacksonville, Florida, and for a moment I considered taking that road, past the downtown high-rises that jagged up from the freeway like a deadly EKG, past the palm flats of San Bernardino, into the desert, through Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso...

Just the thought of that drive made me weep. All those lonely towns and truck-stop motels. I would never make it. I wasn't the running type. Besides, my trouble was my own, and it would come with me. Instead, I knew that I would get off at La Brea Avenue and drive to my father's house and go through my sister's room to my cubicle against the wall, trying to put on a cheerful face. Eva was only four, but she had a radar for sorrow, and thinking of her made me pull myself together. I found a tissue in the glove box and wiped my eyes and nose, and then out the side window I caught sight of a motorcycle cop, keeping a steady pace beside me. I had no idea how long he'd been there. He didn't turn on his siren, but looked my way and tipped his helmet toward the shoulder.

I pulled over and watched in the rear-view mirror as he strolled toward me. I must have been speeding. Or perhaps my registration had expired. I felt a flicker of panic at the sight of his tooled belt and holster. When he came alongside my open window, he bent over and flipped up his windscreen.

"Miss, are you all right?"

I stared at him, baffled.

"You know, at times like this, it's best to pull over and take a breather."

Nothing fans my self-pity like the kindness of strangers. I leaned into my hands and sobbed.

"You wait here till you feel better," the policeman said, putting a gloved hand on my window frame. "Then be careful pulling out into traffic."

 

All that week I went to work as usual, and when I wasn't sleeping or helping a customer, I chanted with Laurie. I didn't call the clinic. I didn't even keep track of how many days had passed. I told myself I would never go back to that place.

If you had asked me to define my character in those days, I would have said I was distractible, lazy, prone to fads of the spirit. But with fear at my back, I began to chant with an unwavering discipline. I chanted in my car, driving down Wilshire Boulevard to the showroom. I chanted in my bed at night, soundlessly, so I wouldn't keep my sister awake. Keeping my mind clear was like trying to balance on a wet log. I slipped off and found myself listening to the traffic outside or trying to remember if I'd put gas in the car. Then I'd steady myself for the task and begin again.

In my mind, I traced an image of my reproductive tract, half remembered from my high school biology text, a narrow stag's head with curving antlers. Somewhere in there was an egg, and now I hoped it would go the way of countless other eggs with bad beginnings. I hoped that it wouldn't catch hold. But how to find a way to fix on something that was no more than a complicated infolding of my own flesh? I wanted to find a way to exert my will that bore the commencing life no ill feeling. I had set this thing in motion, and now I wanted it to stop. But it seemed callow—even dangerous—to make it alien or wish it harm. The chanting, those nonsense syllables, offered a way to focus my thoughts, a path of sound on which to make this moral stepping, and as I went on I began to feel a kind of unfamiliar hope—hope that I had the power to change the course of things. After all, wasn't faith the agent by which people lifted cars, walked for days in the snow, or turned to someone who had wrecked them in some often revisited hour and said, "You are forgiven"? I walked around in the summer heat feeling alive to every shift and mutter in my blood.

 

When I came to work one Monday, Laurie had brought me a present, a small cardboard shrine with a scroll mounted inside. "It's already been blessed," she said, her eyes shining with reverence. That shrine must have been the starter model: a stippled brown box with an open front. It looked like the package for a blender or a baseball mitt. But the scroll mounted inside caught my eye. At the top and bottom were strips of Japanese paper—delicate leaf patterns highlighted with foil—and the columns of brush strokes were lovely, if inscrutable.