Split (16 page)

I soon attached myself to a Japanese girl who lived in the Berkeley hills, and tried to mimic her easy self-possession. Sumiko wasn't meek, but she didn't make any ripples either, and no one even thought of messing with her.

"She cool," said the same girl who slapped me, giving Su miko a nod of approval as we passed by on the way to the gym. I trailed in her wake, hoping for some coolness by proxy.

 

After day camp let out at the Y, I walked over to Edy's, an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor on Shattuck Avenue. The dining room was comfy, if a little down at the heels: carpeting tattooed with stains, booths lined in orange vinyl. As a finishing touch, someone had taken to the woodwork with a hammer, denting it like medieval armor. The only fresh note in the place was the plants, tucked into wells between the booths. My mother would have approved. Then one day I fingered the leaves of the creeping Charlie and discovered that they were made of plastic.

I wanted desperately to be known at Edy's as a regular, so that the old waitresses with their hair nets and fallen arches would see me and call out, "The usual?" They did this for the rheumy-eyed men who arrived for egg-salad sandwiches and bottomless cups of coffee in the afternoons, but after weeks of my coming in every day without fail, Rose or Vera or Bea would still amble up to my table, flip to a new page on the order pad, and ask, "What'll it be?" They never even took a good look at me.

Bea was my favorite. Prone to gentle, heaving sighs, she had a mustache and an industrial-strength bra that strained through her blouse. I found this bra oddly comforting. It closed in the back with a three-inch strip of hooks and eyes—the minimum hardware required to support her grandmotherly bosom.

I thought an eclectic order might get her attention. "V-8 and, uh, cinnamon toast, please," I said, trying to make eye contact. "Heavy on the cinnamon." Bea worked her tongue around in her mouth as she wrote down my order, slapped a napkin, fork, and knife on the table, and walked off. When my juice and toast came, I asked for chili sauce and doused my V-8 with a wink as she passed by. This failed to make an impression, so I took to leaving huge tips—a whole fifty cents on my one-dollar order. I don't know what I wanted from these women. A haven, perhaps, from the carnival outside. The dames at Edy's never took the bait.

***

One Saturday, my father took me to a rally in support of affirmative action. As he explained it to me before we went, a white man named Allan Bakke had succeeded in convincing a judge that he had been unfairly denied entrance to medical school, pushed aside in favor of inferior minority candidates. There was a gathering at the U.C. Berkeley campus to protest the decision. I went up there with my father, someone handed me a sign, and before I knew it I was chanting along with the crowd:
El pueblo ... unido ... jamas sera vencido; the people ... united ... will never be defeated.
It felt good to shout in the thicket of so many bodies. I even pumped my fist into the air a few times, until the gesture made me feel sheepish. But when we pooled into the parking lot at the march's end and sang the Internationale—
this is the final conquest, let every man stand in his place—
the gravity of that anthem stirred me. I stood on the hot asphalt, sweat running down my back, gently leaning into the people next to me—
arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise ye wretched of the earth.
The crowd was packed in tightly, our voices blending into one rough pitch, the sharps and flats of individual voices beveled off, so that in spite of each singer's meandering the melody held.

We would go to other rallies as the summer wore on. On the picket line, when passing cars honked their support, I felt a heady surge of righteousness. Even though I usually dragged my feet when my father suggested we go, and I suffered from moments of embarrassment when I was caught alone with my sign, I was full of self-congratulatory heroism when it looked like the public mood was in our favor.

But when the turnout was slim, or it rained, or the police walked the streets in riot gear, I shrank back to the girl dangling her feet in the prison waiting room. We were few and weak. They could crush us under their thumbs. I wanted to slip into the bland flow of passersby; I wanted to live a life that aroused no suspicion or trouble. After these grim events, I would lie in bed despairing over my lack of courage. I was afraid that if had lived in Nazi Germany, if I had been a Christian with an empty attic, I would have turned the Jews away, hissing and glancing down the street for spies.

But most of the time politics seeped into my family life in ways I barely understood. When I misbehaved at my father's house, I was never spanked or grounded. Instead we all sat down in the living room—my father, Leslie, and I—and discussed my lapses. It was all very reasonable: they didn't believe in corporal punishment; they just wanted to make me think. I had locked myself out of the house for the third day in a row, and once rescued, I had turned a tidy room into a shit storm and gone off to buy candy with stolen change. But this news of my bad behavior meant nothing to me. I sat with my arms crossed, sullen and confused by their arguments, starting to feel nostalgic about the swiftness of spankings. Now and then I would blurt out my version of things, amazed at how I lost my way in the telling, sounding peevish and unreasonable even to myself.

"We are trying to struggle with you on these things," my father said. "You need to work on taking constructive criticism." I was getting the hang of the lingo. "Struggle" was like medicine. It tasted bad going down, but was meant for your own betterment.

 

Dad and Leslie and I were driving through Oakland one night, all three of us in the front seat, when we passed by a porno theater. I saw my father glance over the flashing marquee, and I followed his gaze. "Live Girls!" was plastered on bills across the entrance. Underneath this banner were photos of naked women with blackout bands across their breasts. I was thinking about that title: Did other places have dead girls, or was it some kind of exhortation, encouraging the girls to get the most out of life?

My father saw me craning backward at the signs. He was quiet for a moment, then he cleared his throat: "Do you think Leslie and I would ever go to one of those places?"

I thought about this carefully. I knew it was a leading question, and I wanted to get the answer right. It seemed a little seedy around that part of town. But they were tolerant people, unashamed of their bodies. "Well, I guess you probably would." I saw my father's face fall, and so I quickly amended, "Maybe only once in a while, if someone else invited you?"

Leslie was quiet beside me.

My father's voice turned calm and instructive: "Leslie and I would never go into a place like that, honey. We don't agree with that kind of thing. It's very exploitative of women."

I think he often felt he had to make up for lost opportunities, that what a full-time parent could pass on by slow degrees, he had to compress into our brief visits. The result: these little moral lessons, which struck me mostly for their earnest tone.

"Dare to struggle, Dare to win," Leslie once wrote to me in the flyleaf of a book on Chinese revolutionary youth. It was a birthday gift (one of several, the others more traditional), a story about a girl who joins the brigades, who was stalwart and unselfish, ever noble in her aims. There were days when I didn't want to dare anything, when I chafed at the language of struggle and the moral weight hanging over our lives.

"This country is really falling apart, Lisa," my father would tell me. He would sigh then—an enormous outbreath—pull on his mustache hairs, and stare off into the distance. "It's really frightening."

I shrank from the news of apocalypse and from the dread that lifted from him like a sweat. I wondered sometimes how far down we could sink, how completely our world would unravel, since it had started bad and seemed always to be worsening.

 

Around that time, my father and Leslie were married quietly at city hall. They didn't tell even their closest friends, as marriage was quite outré among their comrades, but shortly after they were legally wed the three of us held a private ceremony sitting cross-legged on the grass in MacArthur Park. They let me serve as officiant, reading a selection they had chosen from
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung
—a passage, I believe, on the relations between men and women in revolutionary society. Both of them wore their work clothes—plaid shirts and jeans—and they were, as I remember, radiantly happy. We laughed together at the ad hoc sweetness of the moment: no carnations or banquets, and in place of a minister, a scrappy eight-year-old, elated by her vestment. I opened the book to the slender page-marking ribbon, and read carefully out loud. If I didn't catch the meaning, I at least grasped the privilege they had granted me, and I tried to pronounce clearly the words they set their course by.

Back at the Grant Street house, on a window where the sun would shine through it, sat a stained-glass panel: on the left side, two birds facing each other; on the right, the same birds in a row. A caption ran across the frame: "Love is not looking into each other's eyes, but looking outward in the same direction." A little sentimental, but it got at one of the truths of their marriage: they were bound together by a common purpose. They considered themselves comrades, and when other things in that partnership were shaken, this shared commitment held fast. It boiled down to respect, I think. They respected each other's thinking, and at a time when many of their radical friends were moving to the suburbs and giving up organizing, neither one of them had lost their sense of urgency.

My father loved that piece of stained glass. Now and then he picked it up and got moist around the eyes, then placed it gently back on the sill, winging the panels open so the thing would stand firm.

Mao's little red book, which served as their marriage text, went with me everywhere, though I have few memories of reading it. My father had bought me a hand-tooled leather purse from one of the crafts tables on Telegraph Avenue, and when I sat at a booth in Edy's and performed my feminine-fluster routine of arranging its contents, I pulled out cherry lip balm, a pack of Kleenex (never opened), a vial of apricot-scented oil, and the vinyl-covered book from the People's Republic of China.

I opened to the small sepia-toned portrait of Mao, protected by a rice-paper overlay. He looked to me gentle and good-humored, with a healthy shine to his cheeks and a precise rind of shirt collar peeking above his jacket. The mole on his chin, so large it cast a shadow, made him comfortingly homely. Leslie had a mole that I admired very much. It was on her wrist, just over a vein, with two or three fine hairs sprouting out of it, and I thought it made her hands look strong and capable. I draped one arm over the edge of the table so the veins would stand up, and with the other hand I paged through chapters called "Self-Reliance and Arduous Struggle" and "Correcting Mistaken Ideas."

Halfway around the world, the Cultural Revolution was winding down, but I was insensible to this, lost in the tissue-thin pages. I imagine a few people must have passed me that day, a skinny kid eating cinnamon toast with her head bent over Mao's little red book, and shaken their heads in disbelief. Little did they know that I was thinking of weddings, and of the strange attraction of moles, or that I turned those delicate pages of theory because they let loose the smell of apricots.

 

At my father's house, it was hard to keep up with all the political factions I heard mentioned in the living room. I asked him once about Phil and Nancy, two former friends of his whom I had heard spoken of lately in tones of disgust.

"They're Trotskyites," my father said. "They've got bad politics." I saw him grapple with a way to articulate the terms of their desertion, their essential wrong-headedness, then give up. He settled for saying that he "disagreed with them on a lot of things." Still, the seriousness of his tone, the creases between his brows as he pronounced this, said everything. The name Trotskyites was forever married in my mind with a kind of shameful cleaving from the flock; it was the sound of bearded men in black coats cantering off, legs clenched to hold their loosening bowels.

At some point I noticed that shared politics was the base requirement for my father's friendships. He and Leslie would meet a new couple, and if the match was good, my father's assessment would nearly always begin, "You know, their politics are pretty good." There was always a note of wonder in his voice as he said this, as if he knew how rare were the folk who met this requirement and stumbling on them was an unexpected boon. I never knew my father to sustain a friendship that began out of, say, a mutual love of basketball or a shared taste in films. It wasn't that he wouldn't grant himself the pleasure of such associations, it was rather that they were, in the end, not a pleasure. For him, talk always circled back to political themes, and if he didn't feel safe tracking through that territory, then other topics couldn't hold his interest. Of course, he often talked sports or art or love with his comrades, but a sense of common political perspective was the root from which his friendships grew.

 

As I grew older, the world outside my family came into sharper focus. I remember one afternoon lying back on the pillows in the living room while one of my father's friends talked about the farm workers in the Central Valley. This was at the beginning of the grape boycott, when Cesar Chavez was letting the public know how they came by their cheap lettuce. My father's friend shook his head at the plight of the migrant workers: "The whole family's out there—kids, grandmothers. If the growers don't offer housing, they live in cardboard boxes by the side of the fields."

Those boxes stuck in my mind. Back at 12000 Spring Street, Charlene and Jill and I played house in an old refrigerator box. In the beginning the walls were smooth and stiff, but after a night left out in the dew, the cardboard warped and sagged inward. We hurled ourselves around inside, breaking the walls, rolling the box along the grass with someone balled up inside it. This was a pleasant diversion—but to live in a box? A chill spread over me, there in the sunny window seat. My comforts, rather than making me grateful, made me afraid. I did nothing to deserve them; I had come to them by chance, and chance might take them away.