Split (21 page)

When I arrived for the summer after eighth grade, my father pulled up at an apartment in East San Jose, a two-bedroom place on the top floor of a stucco building. (The plans for moving to Kentucky had been scrapped, never to be mentioned again.)

Since I had been expressing an interest in drama, my father enrolled me in a musical-theater program, housed in a run-down auditorium in the heart of the city. The parts were to be cast by audition, and my father helped me work on a song, the title tune from
The
Wiz, which we had seen on Broadway earlier that summer when we went to visit my Grandma Leila. I aspired to the kind of effortless verve that Lena Home displayed on the original-cast recording. I played that album over and over, taking note of where she added a trill, where she backed off. I might as well have been studying Van Gogh's brush strokes. My voice wasn't up to the rendition. I had a tendency to look up and raise my brows when I pitched for the high notes, as if they were physically out of reach; I did a growling business in the lower registers, which I tried to pass off as vibrato.

When the audition day neared, I did a run-through for my father in the living room. He sat down in a canvas butterfly chair with a cup of milky coffee and gave me his attention. "Okay, let's pretend this is the real thing. Walk on from the wings."

I got a knot in my stomach, but I launched in anyway, and by the end I was quite charmed with myself. I even affected a little finger snap to jazz it up.

"That's good," my dad said. "Your voice is strong, but I think you're pushing it a little."

"What do you mean, 'pushing it'?"

"It's okay to sound like what you are."

"What's that?" I asked.

"A twelve-year-old with a damn good voice—"

"Thirteen."

"What?"

"I'm thirteen."

"God, is that right? Okay. Thirteen. Now try it again."

 

The day of the audition, my father drove me to the theater.

"You nervous?" he asked, clapping a hand down on my leg so hard it made me wince.

I was beyond nervous; I felt damned. I looked out the window at kids stepping into strip-mall doughnut shops with their mothers and wondered if there was some way to swap fates. But the car sped on and I remained inside it: hot window glass, Lou Rawls crooning on the radio, my stomach in a burning knot. After a while, the dread took on a life of its own, and I lost track of what had caused it. Were we going to a funeral? To the hospital for some horrible operation? Then I remembered. We were headed for the theater. I was to sing my song.

A young woman was passing out numbers at the theater door, and my father and I waited in the seats while dozens of kids got up, one by one, to sing a scrap from "Somewhere over the Rainbow" (the ingénue hopefuls) or "Gary, Indiana" (little freckled boys with tumorlike knees). My father was sizing them up, but he knew better than to engage me in conversation. I was fixated on counting the number of bars the kids got through before they were dismissed by a voice from the balcony.

When my number was called, I took my place in what seemed like a half acre of worn hardwood, facing rows of jostling kids and the darkened balcony. I declined the services of the accompanist, who started everyone off in a murderous key, and sang a cappella, surprised from the first note at the voice coming out of my chest. Fear made me bellow. I cut the warbles and trills and went straight for the middle of the notes, hoping not to lose my way. When I got a gruff "Thanks" from the rafters, I bolted like a dog cut from its leash and joined my dad in the seats.

"Ooh, cat! You kicked butt," he whispered, slapping me five down low between the armrests.

 

I sang well enough that day to get called back for one of the leads in
The Music Man
, but the second audition was a minor disaster and I ended up being cast as a dancer, which suited me fine. While I was tap-dancing to "Marion the Librarian," my father and Leslie were working on the assembly line. I had only vague notions of how they passed their days. I had seen the outside of the plant once or twice, a massive building the size of several airplane hangars. Inside, I knew there were belts and conveyors, and that the cars went by at a dizzying pace. My father always spoke with gratitude of the old hands who helped him when he was a new hire, showing him time-saving tricks, picking up the slack until he got up to speed. I heard in his voice how good it was to have a friend in that place. And there were always stories about the foremen, who could make their lives difficult in small but important ways: refusing to release them for bathroom breaks, saying they couldn't find a floater, or bucking to get them transferred to a tougher part of the line.

My father's involvement in union politics made his position delicate. There were plenty of fervent anticommunists on the line. I was conscious that he had to play his hand carefully. He spoke sometimes of his "enemies," and that word took on an ominous ring in the context of massive machinery. Now and then, cars slid off into the pits, their wheels having been locked in protest against line speed-ups or forced overtime. I imagined my father picking his way amid the conveyor belts, pressurized hoses, and bins of parts. It seemed like an easy place to have an accident.

For a long time I imagined Leslie and my father working side by side, but then I learned that she was assigned to a different part of the plant. By my father's report, she learned quickly the very tasks that had given him trouble. He always spoke fondly of this, her skill with a rivet gun. I think those were good years in their lives. He and Leslie seemed very much in love, and they were comrades—doing common work, making equal pay. Together they were able to buy their first house, the old industrial worker's dream, made real now by two salaries instead of one.

That San Jose house didn't have a lot of character, but it had high ceilings and good light, three small bedrooms, and a kitchen, dining, and living room, all without walls. Leslie applied her considerable design talents to maximizing the space. She had a few pieces of nice furniture, handed down from her mother, and she would stand in the center of the living room with her hands on her hips, trying to decide how to "reconfigure things." This task was approached with a kind of theoretical rigor. Rather than trying to change the way we used the house, she would change the house to fit our habits. If the laundry was piling up beside the tub, she would search for a hamper that fit in the bathroom. The television would be moved from bedroom to living room and back, following the family's viewing trends. She favored geometric prints, abstract art, uncluttered surfaces. I had the feeling, watching her over the years, that there was a perfect arrangement for the furniture, and that one day we would find it. I say we, because I was quickly brought into the game, asked to help her shove the couch around or offer my opinions on wallpaper. I relished the sense of possibility she inspired: with a keen eye and good judgment, we could make the house into a place of function and style.

That mattered a lot to me. Though I was happily surprised that Leslie and my father had managed to rise into the ranks of homeowners and the house was nicer than I could have hoped for, the neighborhood was a bit of a disappointment. On the corner next to us was a run-down timber-frame house set back under a fringe of pines, which might have been a holdover from the days when San Jose was all orchard land. At night, shouts rang from the open windows, the man's voice rising in pitch until he drowned the woman out. I once caught sight of what I thought were pot plants rising out of the back yard, but when I put my eye to a slat in the fence a pit bull roared up, all teeth and spittle, and I kept my distance after that. The houses across the street were neat but faded: white lava rock in place of lawns, plaster-of-Paris lions lifting their paws beside the doorways, the windows covered with scrolled wrought iron.

The neighborhood was on the border between an upscale development and a hodgepodge of modest homes. Driving to our house from the freeway, you could take two routes: one that took you through blocks of matching ranch houses, another through streets marked by graffiti and corner liquor stores. When I invited a friend home from rehearsal, I was torn as to which was the preferable approach. The first route led to false expectations, but gave our place a certain respectability by association. Taking the second resulted in a pleasant surprise when we finally pulled into our driveway, but I feared that by then our passenger might have jumped to irrevocable conclusions. Which was better: to be seen as a modest dinger to the hem of affluence or as the crowning jewel on a run-down block? These were the questions that occupied my thoughts. Somewhere along the way, I had become a great materialist. Neither of my two families, at that time, was much concerned with image. My mother put her stock in bettering the quality of human relations, and my father into the bettering of human conditions. I had a fixation with status that made up for the both of them.

 

When I returned home, my mother's failure to take interest in decor began to gall me. Our walls were hung with my sun-curled school drawings, brass Chinese platters, and hardware-store calendars. Our furniture was a mixture of chipped antiques and hand-me-downs. Soon after we had moved in, Mother and Jim had begun various construction projects: turning the garage into a split-level bedroom add-on, popping out a wall to make the kitchen larger. I didn't know it then, but that house would be under construction for the next fifteen years. There seemed always to be a room with exposed joists or plywood flooring and piles of sawdust in the comers.

I considered it my job to hector them about the schedule: "Why do you even bother calling it my bedroom? I'll be grown and gone by the time it's finished."

"Aww, naw, it oughta be done in another year or so," Jim would say with a laugh.

When my mother asked me once why I didn't invite friends over more often, I told her it was because the house made me ashamed.

"Hmm," she replied, her lips drawn whitely together. "Well, what do you propose we do about that?"

I offered to try improving things through a little strategic rearrangement.

My mother always liked a can-do spirit: "That's fine by me. Do whatever you like."

I spent the afternoon pushing furniture around, making a reading nook out of a pine bookshelf, a vinyl beanbag chair, and a black lacquer table that the former tenants had abandoned. I could never figure out what to do with a certain chair my mother had had shipped out from Boston after we got settled in California: a huge cube of mahogany lined with brown leather. (I didn't dare suggest getting rid of it. Once a week my mother rubbed the sides with lemon oil till the wood gleamed.) It overpowered the couch. When I moved it, the thing left a square of flattened carpeting that never quite bounced back, like the jaundiced grass under a wading pool. And the carpet—the carpet was the hopeless premise that underlay it all: wall-to-wall orange and red shag, so bright it made my fingernails hurt.

I pushed, I scooted, I made minute adjustments to the knickknacks. Then I stood back and surveyed my handiwork. It was no use: the same junk in new configurations.

 

That work was an homage, of course, to Leslie's aesthetic. Even when she worked in the auto plant, her wool shirts and headscarves were neat and well coordinated. I remember a kind of mourning in the family for her nails, which would never come clean, even with scrubbing. My father mentioned this to me once in a hushed, rueful tone. I understood that it was one of the sacrifices of their lifestyle.

On their nights off, when they went out together, I used to lie around on the bed, watching her dress. One outfit stands out in my memory: a white silk blouse with long, pointy lapels and wide cuffs, worn over a wraparound skirt printed with green dice. Green dice. I knew this was hard to pull off, but the white dots on the faces made a crisp correspondence with her blouse, and the ankle-strap heels she put on at the end added a note of refinement—a signal that she knew the skirt was campy, but what the hell. I wasn't overreading this. She paid that order of attention to the width of a collar, the shape of a heel.

When her outfit was complete, Leslie dug around in her jewelry box, slipping on a heavy opal ring passed down from her mother. I loved this ring: the bold asymmetrical setting, the stone shot with black and vermilion, the way it slipped around on her finger, a rare thing casually possessed. This ring came to stand for everything Leslie had and couldn't give me: her fine skin, the oriental rugs and family oil portraits tastefully framed, the talent for putting strangers at ease, and a personal restraint I could never muster.

Later, she would make clear to me the cost of such refinement, the weight of things left unsaid. But back then, I only hoped that she might save my father and me from our wildness, our confusion in the world of manners. And she did apply her hand to my father's wardrobe—weaning him over the years from polyester dress shirts and steering him toward linen and gabardine. But I think, looking back, that much as we admired her composure, Leslie was attracted to our brash ways: my father's broad physical presence and wacky humor, the way our emotional life played out on the surface, a string of moods.

I
HAVE SAID
that I was becoming a troublemaker at school, and my mother, sensing it to be a case of limited horizons, decided I should go to high school in the neighboring town. I would leave an eighth-grade class of thirty—the same thirty students, give or take a few, that I had started with in kindergarten, our clan so starved for new blood that we pounced on newcomers with a vampirish ferocity—and join an incoming freshman class of three hundred, not one of them familiar.

In those first weeks, before I made any friends, I walked the school during lunch like a cop on the beat. To sit alone was to die a small death; walking gave me the illusion of purpose. I made tours of all the bathrooms on campus—checking my hair, washing my hands needlessly—then looped around the shop building, where a few boys lingered on their lunch hour making slingshots and bongs. From there I circled down to the pool, checking my watch now and then as if I were pressed, maintaining a constant pace until the bell called me to class again. On these tours, I made a minute study of the company I might keep.