Split (20 page)

 

When I got to the station in San Francisco, my father was waiting for me, hands in his pockets, his coat buttoned against the cold. He looked worried, and clutched me in a welcoming hug slightly longer than usual.

"Are you okay?" I asked him, my thoughts of the duck farmer quickly fading.

"I'm fine," he said, shaking off whatever had him brooding. "I've got a few things on my mind. But, hey! You're here. We've got some great things planned for the weekend."

On the drive home, I watched clouds of worry pass over his face. My father was never much good at hiding his moods. For that matter, neither was I, and perhaps he caught sight of my mirrored concern. Toward nightfall, he gave up pretending.

"Honey, I need to talk to you." He clenched his lips in a way saved for nervous occasions. I followed him to the living room and sat down, but instead of launching in, he went over to the record player and picked out an album. Celia and Johnny. I thought it was strange—putting on music at a time like that. He slipped the LP gingerly from its sleeve, lowered the needle, and turned up the volume before sitting across from me.

"I'm sorry about the music." His voice was pitched low, below the jazzy blare of the horns. "I'm worried that the house might be bugged."

My stomach turned over. I had no reference point for his worries, no idea if they were well founded.

"Don't worry," my father said. "I'm just being extra cautious. The thing is, there is a chance that Leslie and I might need to move to Kentucky. There's some very important work going on there with the coal miners, and they need our help."

I stared at him in disbelief. I could barely have picked out Kentucky on a map.

"What kind of work?"

"Organizing work. The union is going up against some powerful mining companies."

"Can't the people in Kentucky take care of it themselves?" I was conscious of my petulant tone, but I had a feeling he would cut me some slack under the circumstances.

"They are having a really hard time, honey. It's a crucial fight." I could see his frustration in trying to convey the urgency in terms I could understand. In fact, he didn't have to try. He and I had once watched a film about striking coal miners. I don't remember where we saw it, but the images stuck in my head. Men standing in a muddy road, their faces smudged from a day in the mines, then the rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire, and some of them falling.

Beyond him, out the sliding glass doors, I watched the city lights wink on. I wanted to glide out over the buildings, away from our apartment, which now seemed to be locked in a set of cross hairs. More than my father ever did, I believed in a faceless governmental will. His fears were concrete. He feared phone taps; he feared inflated charges and prison, no doubt, having faced them before. My fears were more vague than that, more high-flown and Orwellian, though I hadn't read Orwell yet. I was a pure-blooded conspiracy theorist at twelve, the product of bad nerves and little information.

"Honey, what are you thinking?" my father asked.

"I'm thinking that I don't want to move to Kentucky!" I said, my voice rising above the music.

My father stiffened and raised a finger to his lips.

"Oh my god," I whispered. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay," he said, seeing my panic. "Don't worry about it."

"It's not okay. I said
Kentucky.
They probably heard me." I felt sick. Maybe I had meant to give us away.

When my father saw me rattled, he forgot caution and turned comforting. He took a seat beside me and curled me to his chest. "Look, I'm sorry if I scared you. It's gonna be all right." He murmured and shushed, and later Leslie came home and we ate around the lamp-lit table. My sister banged happily on her highchair, sucking on one of those horrid Vienna finger sausages, and I tried to forget about what we'd said.

The next day my father and I went to the neighborhood courts to play basketball, and my fears seemed to shrink in the sunlight. Still, when we dribbled back to the apartment I stopped on the street and stared at our building, the neat walkway, the number on the door. I tried to see if it looked different from outside, if someone watching from a far window, a telescope, a parked car, might find something to mark us from the rest.

 

One morning, on a weekend visit to that same apartment, Leslie called me into the bathroom. She was standing in front of the mirror, a comb in hand, bangs hanging over her eyes. "How would you like to cut my hair?" she asked, flashing me a hopeful smile.

Up till then I had used scissors only to cut paper and thread, but I shrugged and said, "Sure." As in most things, my fear of screwing up was outweighed by my hope of discovering some unknown talent. I took the scissors and sliced the air a few times for warm-up.

Leslie brought in a kitchen chair and sat down facing the mirror. "I can dp the front by myself," she said. "But I can't reach the back." She ran her fingers through the hair at her nape. "So, to make layers what you do is comb the hair up like this"—she scooped up a section from the side of her head and pulled it toward the ceiling—"and cut it off straight." She demonstrated with her fingers.

I thought I saw how it worked: "The pieces from the bottom have farther to go, so they end up longer?"

"Exactly," she said, looking pleased. More than once she had lit on the fact that we were visual thinkers: if you gave us directions to your house, we would map the path in our heads, a rat's maze seen from above. When Leslie described to me a dress she had seen in the store—"strapless, with a Juliet neckline, a fitted waist, and a gored skirt"—the dress would come together as she spoke, each phrase adding a detail, until it hung there, whole, in my mind.

Still, it was one thing to visualize a task, and yet another to do it. By the time I lifted the scissors to begin, my hands were damp with sweat. I had noticed, in my short life, that people were unduly sensitive about their hair. I remembered the acts of vengeance I had wanted to wreak on a certain hairdresser back home. She'd been asked for a trim and had delivered a pixie. At least she and I had gone to different homes at night.

Leslie must have sensed my jitters. "Don't worry," she said, turning away from the mirror and laying a hand on my arm. "I can't afford to get it cut in a salon. You can't do any worse than I would do myself."

Reassured, I started in back, lifting up a section as she had showed me. How short to make that first cut? For this, people went to beauty school. I took a deep breath and dove in with the blades. The scissors were loose and dull, so I had to make a couple of sawing attacks. I snipped further to make the ends straight, avoiding Leslie's eyes in the mirror, but by then the hair had slipped a little in my fingers. When I let the hank go, it fell into a jagged staircase.

"I don't know," I told her, looking at the damage. "This might not go well." I used the future tense out of delicacy.

"I don't care," Leslie said, a heartfelt dash in her voice. "It's only hair. It'll grow back. I wear a cap at the shipyards anyway."

Her mood was infectious. A haircut wasn't an epic event. Besides, the mention of the pinched family finances had struck a chord in me. I lifted another section and continued, picking up small advantages as I went along: if you pulled the scissors toward you with each snip, the hair was drawn into the blades and cut cleanly. Still, it was an awkward business. I nicked my fingers a few times. When I combed, I put the scissors in my mouth, and when I cut, I held the comb in my teeth, and soon my tongue was matted with hair. When I finished, there seemed to be more hair on the floor than Leslie had on her head. I had given her a choppy shag, the kind of cut little girls give their dolls.

"It looks pretty good," Leslie said, turning this way and that.

I stood back and chewed my lip while she dug into a drawer for a hand mirror. After some jockeying, she got a look at the back. Her eyebrows lifted. She pushed at her hairline with her free hand.

"It looks terrible," I said, the last word nearly a moan.

Leslie laughed. "Oh, well. Next time it'll be better."

"Next time? There isn't going to be a next time!"

"Why? Didn't you like doing it?"

I considered this for a moment and decided I had liked it quite a lot—the concentration it required, the pleasure when a section fell smoothly. "But look at the mess I made."

"It's not so bad, really," Leslie said, scrunching her hair in the mirror. "It just needs time to settle in."

 

Slowly, Leslie was alerting me to the subtleties of personal grooming. I had been a tomboy most of my life, and hadn't worn a dress since the first day of kindergarten, but in those years the idea of beauty, of improving ones looks in minute ways, was like a faint signal coming in.

It was a signal I must have heard one afternoon, standing in front of the living-room windows at my mother's house, looking out at the river—that familiar green canyon. I was twelve, and it was dusk, and so the view outside was fading and my reflection was beginning to sharpen in the glass. I had always disliked my profile, and now I turned to the side, studying my nose, the length and slight knob, which I found displeasing.

Earlier that year, leafing through a book on Roman history, I came across a photo of a cameo dug up from Pompeii, a young woman's head and throat carved in bas-relief. That face rang a bell. I took the book to the bathroom and held it up to the mirror, turning my face to the side so our profiles were twinned in the glass. I had to admit we weren't pretty (though she might have gone over better in her day). Our noses sloped off at an angle that seemed insufficiently acute and gave us, I thought, a doleful, insistent air.

But how did we know beauty when we saw it? Leslie had told me about Greek theorems for the ideal proportions of a building, the relationship of column height to roof slope. They were based on human proportion. What we liked in a body, a face, was what we liked. It couldn't be explained.

Now I stared into the plate-glass window and tried to imagine a nose that would suit me better—something narrower, I thought, perhaps an upturned nubbin. But when I tried to envision this new nose, I got confused: all the parts had to work in tandem. You couldn't just cut and paste. Then, suddenly, in a flash, it came to me: God made my nose. It must have been the best nose for me.

For whole precious moments I swung in the hammock of faith, and I wonder if what I felt, for those moments of suspended judgment, was as much about God as it was some version of my mother's native optimism. It was a brief stoppage, at least, of the adolescent's endless second-guessing. Just then—alone in a quiet house—it was a relief to think that nothing more could be done, that there was nothing to strive for. To be powerless was to have no regrets.

Then a dreary thought pulled me up short: I had seen a lovely baby in the supermarket just that week—caramel eyes and a mobile face—and then she turned and revealed a port-wine stain from forehead to cheek. Beauty wasn't fair, or parceled out with any logic. I left the window, more bitter than when I began.

 

My mother got her share of my scouring gaze. On the weekends, she danced around the kitchen, flat-footed, singing songs from Casey Kasem's Top 40 while I sighed and cringed. That age might have been called the End of Mercy. It shames me now to remember how ruthless I was with my mother's pride. She was looking less and less the earthy hippie: she dressed in plaid skirts and flats, wore her hair short and permed. To look at her, no one would have guessed she once lived out of a truck. Still, I began a campaign against her scrubbed face and simple outfits, and out of some supreme restraint, she didn't react to my barbs. Instead, she let them hang out in the air, hoping, perhaps, that I might recognize my tone and relent.

I didn't. At all costs, I wanted her varnished, like my schoolmates' mothers—ranchers' wives who leaned toward peroxide and blue eyeshadow. Early in junior high, I managed to coax my mother into the bathroom for a makeover.

"See, you just need a little bit of color," I said, guiding her to the toilet seat and fingering the hair away from her face. I swirled pink blusher on the apples of her cheeks, then stood back to survey my work: "You look better already!" My mother stared up at me, skeptical, brows lifted, head tilted to the side—the look we wear when we ask someone to be our mirror. I gave her a coat of thick, clotted mascara, my hand braced on her cheekbone, and pronounced her improved.

My mother wore that makeup dutifully for months, though she disliked the effect and the primping added time to her usual morning routine: shower, black coffee, a quick brush through her hair. I'm sure now that she would rather have spent those minutes staring out the window at the river. Instead, she went into our tiny bathroom—damp, with northern exposure—and leaned toward the mirror, an expression of mild bafflement on her face as she worked with the applicators and brushes.

My mother's confusion filled me with a sense of expertise and pride at my influence. I was accustomed to her competence. When she dreamed of a stone pathway leading from the house to the river, it wasn't long until she had selected the slate, found the quarry, and started hauling and setting the thick stones. So I took a certain satisfaction from watching her squint at the foggy mirror, chin tipped down to survey her lashes, the way she glanced up now and then to see if I approved. I even convinced myself that she liked the results, but years later, when I no longer considered her my hostage in the wars of adolescence and when her makeup had grown dusty in a bathroom drawer, I asked my mother something that had been nagging me. "Why did you wear it? That makeup. You never liked it."

She cocked her head and considered me for a moment: "Oh, to make you feel powerful."

 

During the school year, while I was living with Mother and Jim, my dad and Leslie often moved from one city to another. They never pulled up stakes during the summers, mindful of my need to land somewhere for the two months of my visit, but their courtesy gave these shifts of city an unreal edge. I would leave one apartment, its arrangements fixed in my mind, and, upon arrival months later, discover we had a new address—the same watercolor prints, stereo, and director's chairs arranged neatly in strange rooms. Until I tried it myself, during my college years, I thought moving a household was mainly a feat of imagination, an airy process by which the beloved objects floated across cities, up stairs, and into new positions.