Split (34 page)

My mother may have heard these cries of kinship, but she didn't respond. For weeks after I sent that particular letter, I checked the mailbox for a reply. When none came, I called her, the talk on my end wooden as I waited for mention of my note.

Finally, I had to ask. "Did you get my letter?"

"Your letter?" A long pause. She was skimming back through the days. "Oh, yes, that was very nice."

I didn't have the sense to let it go at that. "Well, did you ... I mean, what did you think I was trying to say?"

"Hmm, let's see..." I heard the clattering of plates in the background. I could just see her at the sink, the windows blackened before her, the phone tucked into her shoulder. "I think it said that you liked me quite a lot."

I may have believed that I wrote out of pure emotion, but of course it was more tangled than that. I wrote for effect; I wanted to stir something in her, some reciprocal passion. What pained me most was the feeling that I had failed to find words to rouse her.

But, of course, it was a failure not of language but of subject. My mother preferred to talk of the world: "So it's a good day here. We went to Conway's and loaded up a whole truckload of manure. He's getting out of the dairy business, so we're determined to get his last barnful."

Then she told me that the birds around the house had become interested in their reflections. She noticed it, she said, because on hot spring days she left the car windows open and their droppings had slid into the interior. Soon the pattern became clear: a spreckling of white and black along the door and on the gravel below the rear-view mirrors. Then one day she caught sight of them, perched on the passenger door, peering at themselves.

"Who knows what's going to happen next?" she said. "I mean, at some point we made the leap from patterned behavior to learned behavior, and the birds might just do it too. It might happen right here in our driveway—bird consciousness." She let out a wry laugh.

 

I drove up to my mother's house the summer after my junior year and spent a week working with her in the garden. One afternoon we crouched together weeding around the swimming hole. It was easy work. The plants came out of the sand with a toothy rip, and we didn't need a rake or tarp. We threw the pigweed and hemlock into the river and let the current take them down, no doubt destined for some distant neighbor's bank.

While we worked, my brother sat naked in the shallows, scooping mud into a watering can, and the sight made my mother reel back to our days at the communal house in Manomet.

"You were that small then," she said, pointing to him, "and, boy, you had moxie. You had barely learned to walk, and you could kick your legs up waist high, like this." She demonstrated for me then, hands on her hips, making like a majorette across the sand. "I was like, 'Hot damn! Look at those motor reflexes.'"

That memory had surfaced many times over the years, and by now I was tired of the little girl in the story—that wild thing who ate butter sticks and shat in the sugar bowl—tired of the way my mother's voice turned breathy over her charms. She swept into the tale as if for the first time, and I stared down at the sand, turned up in dark mounds where the weeds had come free, feeling bored and churlish. I was twenty. Would I always be the sullen child? All winter I had missed her, and now she was here, telling me a story that had only to do with love, and I could barely meet her gaze. I forced myself to look up—at the sunbursts around her eyes, at her hair fleeced with gray. That story was more hers than mine. She was twenty-four years old then, on a grassy bluff above the sea, watching her daughter march naked across the lawn. After her lonely months in a Lower East Side apartment, she suddenly had a surfeit of company. It struck me: that story was like a much-loved time, an anthem for happiness. She liked the sound of herself singing it.

I waded out into the current and floated on my back. At the water's edge, my brother harassed the water with a stick. Higher up on the beach, Alice sat in a lawn chair reading. Something thick, I couldn't quite make out the title.

I asked her, "What are you reading?"

She closed the book and looked at the cover: "
Hawaii.
"

James Michener. Pulpy as it might have been, it was adult pulp and she was only seven.

"It's not very good," she said, "but Dahlia and I are having a contest to see who can read the book with the most pages."

Later that night, after we had rinsed the sand from our feet and eaten dinner, I tucked my brother in, lying beside him on the short bed that had once been mine, my heels pressed against the footboard. One wall of his room had windows from floor to ceiling, which looked out onto a slate patio and the lacy branches of a dogwood tree. My mother had laid the patio herself, and she liked the activity so much—the pleasure of fitting the slabs together like a jigsaw puzzle—that the slate soon spread, taking over the lawn and part of the flower beds, running up the retaining wall that extended off my brother's room. Hung on this wall was an enormous mask that Mau's parents had brought back from Mexico, which passed through him to my mother. It was cut from weathered wood, a rough-hewn jackal's face, the brow and chin curving forward, a brute nose jutting from the center. The evening clouds shifted, and a beam of moonlight fell against the wall.

"Look at the light on the mask," I said to little Jim.

"Yes," he said, in a sleepy, offhand way. "It's dancing light."

We were quiet for a while, then he piped up again: "Last night I dreamed there was a raccoon."

"Was it a good dream?" I asked.

"It was trying to get in."

"Maybe that's because of the raccoon that was on the porch the other night. You saw the real raccoon and then you dreamed about one." What hollow comfort—to try to knit fast the worlds of sleep and wakefulness. I tried again. "Dreams are strange, aren't they?"

"Yes," he said, tucking one hand behind his head. "Dreams tell you what's in your heart coming now."

 

My dreams in those days were of what I could become. At UCLA once, in the student health clinic for a flu shot, I noticed a Goethe quote taped to the wall: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." I was about to pass out from the injection—the needle slid in and my palms turned wet—but I happened to see those words, and they provoked in me a momentary swell of courage. I took deep gulps of air and didn't faint, full of momentary resolve to learn fencing, go to Spain, make the dean's list. Soon this courage dissolved, but those lines stayed with me: an enticement and a goad. I knew fear held me back.
From what?
someone might have asked me. If I sifted through possible answers I might have said,
Fear kept me from happiness.
I had bought my mother's line: action lived apart from feeling. It had its own engine.

I drove back to Los Angeles at the end of that summer, down Interstate 5 in my old Honda with all the windows rolled down. That highway was straight as a ruler. You needed only one finger on the wheel, one toe on the gas to make progress. The heat hemmed me in—my hair flew up in strings around my face, my lips were chapped—but after a few hours a pleasant stillness set in, and my mind would run. I drove down the dry belly of the state, past Coalinga, through the methane-reeking hills near Los Banos, where the cows stood in pens of bare dirt, past Chowchilla, a town that would forever recall a busload of kids buried by kidnappers and miraculously freed after a week in the dark.

I didn't like to pull over. Those towns made me lonely. I'd stare at the girl behind the checkout counter, her thick mascara and chewed nails, and imagine myself stranded like that, miles from nowhere, ringing up drinks and gum for luckier people, people in motion, speeding away toward better things. It was best not to stop. I packed food and water and pissed in a juice jar while driving, capped it, and threw it under the seat. I even read part of a novel on one trip, holding the book in the dip of the steering wheel and glancing up every sentence or two. None of this seemed strange to me. If a cop had stopped me and pointed out that I had an open book in my lap and a jar of urine at my feet, I'd have been nearly as astonished as he was. When I came as close to forgetting myself as was possible at that age, I slipped back to the lawlessness of my youth.

My car was like a private universe, and as such I thought it should reflect me. I hung bells from the rear-view mirror, burned incense in the ashtray, and deliberated long and hard about a bumper sticker. What did I want to say to the thousands of strangers who would tail me on the freeway? For years I could think of nothing I felt comfortable trumpeting. There were plenty of causes I believed in, but no single one I favored over the others, and I worried about plastering over my whole trunk and back window. "You've got to pick your shots," my father used to say about organizing work.

I can't remember him ever putting a political sticker on his car. His back bumper was smooth chrome, broken only by an AAA logo. You couldn't pick him out of a line of traffic as someone whose life was devoted to—I want to say social change (but that says everything and nothing), fighting monopoly capitalism (not sure that's right), rebuilding the left (rings vaguely rhapsodic). Difficult to sum up my father's work in a phrase, but easy to say he didn't wear his commitment on his sleeve. Now and then he wore political T-shirts, but only about causes to which he had already devoted countless hours, so that the T-shirt was a matter of gruff pride, the badge of the home team.

"Isn't it terrific?" he said about one, plucking at the hem to pull the silkscreen straight: a crowd marching with signs, the photo trimmed around their heads, so their placards carried the message against the white space: Keep GM Van Nuys Open. "Leslie designed it. She's got an amazing eye."

Perhaps my father's blank bumper was also a matter of caution. Once, years before, as he drove me home from one of my visits to San Jose, he noticed a patrol car following him over several miles. He cut his speed and pulled into the slow lane, but the squad car stayed glued to our tail. After a while the sun went down, and behind us a pair of square headlights flipped on.

"What does this guy want? I'm not speeding." My father checked the speedometer again.

"None of your taillights are out?" I asked.

"I don't think so. And if that's the problem, he would have pulled me over by now."

We were quiet for a mile or so, both of us willing the cop to tire of this cat-and-mouse game. It did feel as if he were waiting for us to make a mistake.

After half an hour in the cop's high beams, I started grasping at straws. "Do you have any bumper stickers on your car?" I asked my father. "You know, something..."

My father gave me a quick glance. "No, but that's a good point, honey." I didn't see him breathe easy until the cop swung around us and sped away.

Four years after I bought my car, I finally came across a bumper sticker I thought I could live with: Think Good Thoughts. The phrase was printed in serif capitals, the type small against the white background, and I was taken with its modest, uplifting tone. Now it strikes me as a ridiculously tiny suggestion, pared away from all action, the smallest unit of good-deedery imaginable. But the dusty back window of my Civic bore that appeal for years, until I cut someone off—on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, no less, bastion of the lefty bumper sticker—and the offended driver leaned out his window in disgust. "Think good driving!" he yelled.

I was out the next day with a straight-edged razor blade, scraping that thing off.

 

Sometimes, when I was driving, a phrase would pop into my head, and I'd fumble in the glove box for a pen. "A peppering of crows over the hills." I wrote slowly, with a white-knuckled grip. After years of unsatisfactory grades in penmanship I tried, even in private jottings, to be legible. What I really needed, I was convinced, was a mini cassette recorder. I had the idea that it would make composition effortless (an idea that should have worried me). You'd press Record, open your lips, and great runnels of prose would spill forth. I coaxed my mother into buying me one such little gadget and returned home from Christmas break with a fist-sized Panasonic.

How my friends tolerated me then, I'll never know. At a party, when I had an important thought, I would run to my room and spend a few minutes muttering into the microphone. What was laid down on those tapes? Drunken rambling about the streetlights, a moment-to-moment catalog of my feelings—some of the most self-conscious utterances of a self-conscious age. When I played them years later, it took strength not to wince with shame. My pretensions were so plain, and had been so hidden from me then, that I could listen to them only when I was driving on the open highway. Even there, sealed behind glass with the road noise as cover, I pressed on the accelerator during the most ridiculous patches, as if a witness were tailing me.

Wendy used to beg to listen to those tapes; it was a guaranteed dose of hysterics. After carefully cueing up a tape to avoid the most humiliating swatches, I'd press Play and watch her dissolve on the floor. I figured I owed her this much, since she had to live with me when the document was made. One day, after she'd wiped the tears from her face, she sobered up and put a gentle point on it: "It was like you wanted to record your existence, but you always had this thing in your hand, so your existence was totally contrived."

 

I remember Wendy telling me one day to write something. I say "telling" me, because it was like that. "Write something," she said, in the tone you'd use to tell a bear to dance. Her boyfriend, Tommy, was over, and Wendy probably hoped the dare and the appeal to my vanity might keep me occupied for a while.

Bearlike, I went for the bait. "About what?"

"I don't care," she said, slumped on the couch.

Tommy was glam, with a crest of chemically treated hair and a face perfected by white pancake. After they made out, he'd look up with the foundation wiped away around his mouth, so an oval of reddened skin showed through. It made him look undone—crazy with appetite.