Split (11 page)

The school building was shaped like a stop sign, with the rooms fanning off a central hub. The inside walls were glass, and through them I could see kids gathered around low tables, doing art projects. It seemed like a nice enough place. But when our mothers steered us through the classroom door, Ivan took one look at the teacher and began to cry.

"I don't want to be in
his
class," he wailed, trying to scoot past Joyce toward the door. He must have recognized the teacher from his previous stint at the school.

"This is your class, Ive. You've got to settle down," Joyce said. Joyce was always reasonable. She had long, tapered fingers and never raised her voice. But Ivan was beyond reason; he was hysterical. He pushed against his mother's stomach, crying, "No, no, no!" He lost traction on the floor and slid to his knees, curled over like a supplicant. The teacher stood perfectly still, watching this display.

At last Joyce relented, shrugging an apology at the class. Ivan was led out, sniffling, and taken to another classroom. No one offered to rescue me, and I didn't have the nerve to pitch a fit myself. I took my seat and faced my new teacher, a dour man with muttonchops and slicked-back hair, who inspired fits of terror on sight.

From then on, I would see Ivan only in the lunchroom. We ate at long tables covered with waxed Formica, which caught the foggy light slipping in through the dormer windows. Montessori was supposed to be gentler than public school, but the teachers kept a strict discipline during mealtime. We bent our heads quietly, and my teacher, Mr. Frick, who I soon learned was also the school principal, walked along the center aisle with a ruler to slap the hands of chatterers. After lunch, foodservice workers passed out dishes of sliced carrots. This was dessert. In time, I came to appreciate the carrot's humble sweetness. I pressed my sliver against the roof of my mouth, savoring it, trying to see how long it would last.

In the afternoons, we studied science. Mr. Frick held up a cotton plant. "Who can tell me about the boll weevil?" he asked the class. "Lisa?"

I had never seen a cotton plant, but at this point I was becoming familiar with bewilderment—that feeling that I'd been dropped into a conversation midstream. Life seemed to be always in media res. If I was to catch up, I figured I had better start bluffing.

"The ball weaver makes the cotton into yam," I said, trying for a note of confidence.

Mr. Frick looked like he'd been slapped. He knew I was a mediocre student, but it hadn't occurred to him that I might be a smart aleck. When I saw him give me that shrewd, appraising look, I knew I had gotten it wrong, badly wrong. So much for pluck. Mr. Frick took a deep breath and assumed an expression I would come to know well:
with patience and strength I will suffer the little idiots.
He never called on me again.

Once I was pegged as a slow learner, my fortunes improved. I was sent to work with Shelly, the tutor, who became a beacon of light in my day. Shelly spoke gently, the way people talk to horses, and she put her hand on my back sometimes when I asked a question. For the hour that she went over borrowing and long division, my shoulders would slowly come down from around my ears.

 

One morning, when the autumn cloud cover broke unexpectedly, Mr. Frick told us we would hold P.E. outside. "You're all looking a touch pale," he said. It took me a moment to recognize the rictus that split his face. Mr. Frick was smiling. "How about we jump rope?"

A cheer went up in the classroom.

When the bell rang, we filed out to the damp parking lot. Mr. Frick followed, lugging a canvas sack, which he untied, pulling out a long rope. "Chuck, Peter, why don't you each take an end?"

I waited for the shorter, individual ropes to emerge from the sack, but they never appeared. The boys got the long rope swinging, and the rest of the class made a line, waiting to jump in. I had no intention of trying this game for the first time, but I got jostled into place, and the line forced me forward. The rope made a vehement thwack on the wet asphalt, which got louder and louder, and then the girl in front of me peeled off, and I was up.

"Go!" said the girl behind me. I held my hands out, mimicking the approach and retreat of the rope, while the kids behind me shouted, "Now! Now!" I was paralyzed, rooted to the spot.

"You can go ahead," I said to the girl behind me. I melted back into the line, farther and farther, and then slipped between two parked cars and squatted down, hoping Mr. Frick had missed my exit. I would have found it pleasant to daydream back there if I hadn't been worried that I'd be discovered and hauled out. For most of the hour I played with my hair in the shine of a hubcap, prepared to say, if anyone found me, that I was looking for something I'd lost.

When I told my mother about the business with the jump rope, she dipped into our small savings and bought me a pair of white vinyl zip-up boots, a little cheer-me-up surprise. These boots were a special pride to me. I wore them nearly every day, with denim skirts, with shorts, until they released a ripe, sour smell when unzipped. I was even wearing them during P.E. on the day I finally learned how to jump rope. We were indoors this time. There was nowhere to hide. I came to the front of the line and the girls cried, "Now!" and before I could think, their voices jerked me forward. I leapt into the blur and caught the rhythm, amazed that my feet weren't swept out from under me. But no sooner had I got the hang of it than those treadless vanity boots shot out from under me.

That was the last thing I remembered. I came to on a cot in the nurse's office.

"What happened?" I asked the nurse, my head throbbing. She was bent over a pile of forms, a little paper hat pinned to the crown of her head.

"Minor concussion," she said, without looking up from her work. "Your mother will be here soon."

I don't remember how my mother behaved when she arrived. No doubt she was calm, as she always was about practical troubles. But the memory has disappeared—my head likely addled by the blow.

In fact, much of those months floats back in fragments: the acrid smell of Magic Markers at my classroom easel, the taste of Orange Crush, which Ivan and I drank like water. Or one vivid afternoon near the end of our stay. On the Montessori play yard were rows of ladders—fat dowels that rose up the outside of the cafeteria. I climbed one until I was under the eaves and then hung there, leaning my weight back into the air. Down below, some of the sixth-grade girls were playing charades. They made a circle around Marcia, a curvy girl with hair the color of burnt wood. She made the gesture for a song: opened her mouth and fluttered her fingers to describe the rising notes. Three words, she signaled, then sunk a fist into her gut and threw her head back in mock agony. She fell to the ground, writhing, her eyebrows sewn into a peak.

I was stunned by her conviction. I forgot the name of every song I'd ever known. Everyone around me seemed suddenly very clever, startling in their vividness, or else very natural and at ease.

The song, I learned somehow—Marcia must have spoken—was "Killing Me Softly." It played on the radio all that winter, and I can still hear the weathered richness of Roberta Flack's voice: "He was strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words." She holds back in the early bars, sure of her power, stringing it out lightly—a knowing, mournful voice, coming from far off. Whenever I heard it, I thought of my father, the soul albums he played, singing the bass line, snapping his fingers to the beat. But my father was lost somewhere, and now Jim was gone, too. We seemed to be losing men at an alarming rate, without fanfare or comment. I could see no end to our wandering.

 

But in December, we returned to 12000 Spring Street, and there was Jim, grinning in the driveway. He had built my mother a chicken coop as a homecoming gift. Charlene and Jill burst from their house and plied me with kisses, exclaiming at how I had grown.

Soon after I got back into the swing of things, a letter arrived from my father, inviting me to take a trip with him to Mexico. "How would you like to ride a burro?" he wrote. My father has odd handwriting—a lefty's back-leaning scrawl, vowels like small stones, stems of consonants sprouting up wildly. But in those early notes he printed carefully, hoping I might read them to myself. At the bottom of each letter was a starburst, where he had let the felt tip pause.

I was thrilled by the idea of Mexico, though I would have gone to Siberia if he asked. I read the letter several times, then took out a pencil and printed a careful "yes" at the end of his questions, trying, I suppose, to turn a note into a conversation.

"You're lucky you have a garden," he wrote, "cause I think if I were a plant I would rather live in a garden than in a pot—don't you?"
Yes
.

"Do you like to eat tacos?" Yes.

I don't remember the flight to Mexico. By then I was a veteran of concourses and planes; they made little impression. I remember only the streets of Mexico City, delivered as in a dream. The air was dense and burned the inside of my nose, but I was smitten by the hubbub and the old buildings. The cars looked strange; the signs made no sense; but my father was beside me, brisk with excitement, and he seemed to know what to do. Put that man on a traffic-jammed street corner and he thrums with purpose, quickened by the jostling of the crowd. He hoisted me up on his shoulders in front of the airport and hailed the only free taxi in sight.

We headed for the railroad station to catch a train to Cuernavaca, where my father planned to take a Spanish course. There were ragged children playing outside the ticket windows, and vendors selling fruit spiced with chili, salt, and lime. I made him buy me a cucumber, peeled and salted in a cone of newsprint. While the train rocked us out of the city, I sat on our berth, eating the salty slivers and watching him. Over the years we spent apart, my father had become reduced to an icon. I had run my few vivid memories over and over in my mind until I had worn away the details, the grit. This real father, squarely across from me, was twice as potent as my memories. He looked like a man from a Camel cigarette ad—tan, with a full head of black curly hair and a mustache, a silver hoop glinting in one ear. It was safe to say I was starstruck.

Our train came to a stop in Cuernavaca, and I took an instant liking to the city: the grid of cobbled streets and narrow sidewalks; the tile-capped walls spilling bougainvillea. We carried our bags past whitewashed churches and a shady plaza, and within hours my father found us a room, rented from a family in a quiet neighborhood at the edge of town. The house was on a peaceful, tree-lined street. We passed through a scrolled gate and rang the bell. A stocky, smiling woman swung open the door and introduced herself as Señora Gonzalez, ushering us into an airy entryway. Our room faced the street and had high narrow windows. There were fresh sheets on the bed. For a few extra pesos, we would be welcome to eat with the family. I heard children playing and followed the sounds through a dining room, past a table set with embroidered place mats, tiny bowls of sugar and salt. In the back yard was a girl my age, swinging a toddler by his arms. Beyond them was a swimming pool, dry and filled with dead leaves. When the girl saw me, she dropped the baby and ran over, chattering in Spanish. Yalili, her name was Yalili, she made me understand, slinging an arm around my shoulder. I was already drafting a letter to my mother: "Mexico is a very friendly country. I have made a new friend." As Yalili talked, I slipped into a babyish swoon, borne along by the rills of meaningless sound and her cool, tending hands.

 

In the mornings, we gathered for eggs and tortillas at the long table, while the señora bustled in and out of the kitchen with steaming plates. Then I would play in the back yard with the Gonzalez kids while my father went to language class. He had bought me an Instamatic camera for the trip, and I spent an afternoon wandering around the house composing arty photos: a close-up of a mucky sewage grate, a blurry shot of the empty corridor of trees outside the front gate. I even asked the gardener to take my picture, and after miming the shutter action, I posed in front of the house. That photo is at odds with the waif I felt myself to be: a snapshot of a wiry tomboy in a horizontal-striped shirt, legs planted wide, arms akimbo.

My father and I quickly slipped into our old groove. We were easy together, quick to laugh. He told bad jokes, held my hands while I walked up the planks of his legs and flipped over. But I soon found he was more fragile than he looked, full of moodiness and childhood terrors. In the afternoon, we walked into town to the public pool, and I discovered he was afraid of the water. My mother had taught me to swim at her parents' house on Long Island. I dove for rings, did somersaults until I burst up gasping, practiced walking on the bottom, and stayed in until my fingers were pickled. I was startled to see how ill at ease my father looked when wet: dark hair plastered down on his forehead, his eyes red from chlorine. He mowed down the lane with a thrashing stroke, hit the wall, and popped up looking bewildered. When someone splashed him, he flinched. "My daughter the otter," he said, a surprising wistfulness in his voice. The next time we went to the pool, his trick knee acted up and he retired to a nearby lawn chair, where he basked in the sun.

On our way home from the pool one day we passed a health clinic. A line of women waited outside with babies and bundles. Older kids spun tops in the gutter.

"Hey, I have a joke for you," my father said. He pursed his lips and paused for effect. "A guy has to go to a doctor's appointment; he's got something wrong with his stomach. He kisses his wife, and as he's going out the door, she says, 'Listen, honey, don't get into any fights, okay?' because she knows he has a little problem with his temper, which is probably why his stomach hurts—he probably has an ulcer."

He looked over at me to see if I was following. "Two hours later, he comes back with a broken nose. 'Vinnie, what happened?' his wife says, running up to him. 'Did you get mugged?' 'No, the doctor was a jerk,' Vinnie says. 'He was messing with me, and we starting duking.' 'Whaddaya mean?' she says. 'What'd he say to you?' "