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A COUNTERCULTURE CHILDHOOD | PAGE 1, 2, 3
When I was four months old, my parents' marriage came apart. My mother moved to the Lower East Side and took a job teaching school in Harlem, as she had vowed to do. My father stayed in Newark. From both of their accounts, the time after their split was one of unexpected liberation. Their divorce was to be a progressive agreement, part of the new society that was to come. They passed me off with a bottle and diaper bag wherever their schedules permitted. It seems they were better friends in those years than they had been when passion clouded the air between them. "We planned things together," my mother told me once. "We had never done that before." Their separation meant that three days out of the week my father was fully in charge. He learned how to lull me to sleep, how to warm a bottle without scalding the milk. He laughs to recall how he would set out from my mother's apartment, holding me on one arm, the bag of creams and bottles on the other. "Ann would say, 'Don't forget to put the wet clothes in a plastic bag and the dry clothes in the bag marked "D" and the damp clothes in the bag next to the pacifier, which is on top of the pediatrician's phone number.' I would nod knowingly and start losing things the minute I left her apartment." Once, he showed up to meet my mother for the tradeoff, feeling snazzy in a new khaki suit, only to have her point out a giant blossom of urine on his pants. Still, my father says he was grateful for the chance to be a real parent: "In the evenings I would sit in a chair and read and you would crawl around, using me as a home base. I enjoyed being 'forced' to miss my political meetings for a while." After the Newark riots, my father went to work for Students for a Democratic Society, organizing at colleges up and down the eastern seaboard. He was based in Boston, but would always manage to end up back in New York by Friday night, where he would take me for the weekend while my mother went out. Sometimes he brought me along on the speaking circuit. We "crashed" on the floors of people's apartments, went to student meetings, and rode buses together. "We had to take a Port Authority bus from midtown Manhattan to Newark," my father wrote me once, describing that time, "and, not being able to occupy you for the whole ride, I would let you crawl around on the floor where you would proudly pick up cigarette butts and show them off to me and the passengers -- who were horrified. I think that a lot of my permissiveness was an attempt to cope. I was looking for some type of parenting 'style' that would allow me to be in charge without feeling the need to control. Out of that you developed a highly self-sufficient style of your own." While my father canvassed for SDS, my mother began to distance herself from politics. At twenty-three she had believed that if she could gain entrance to the White House, if she could get Lyndon Johnson to sit still in his grand leather chair and listen for an hour, she could make clear to him how purely wrong the whole war effort was, how cracked in its very foundation -- and, in the face of her lucidity, he couldn't help but change his mind. It was a measure of my mother's faith in her own power that she actually went to the White House in 1968 and camped on the steps with a group of her friends, insisting on a meeting with the president. They stayed for nearly two days, sleeping on the cold marble steps, with no one paying them much mind, until King Haile Selassie arrived for an official visit and the protesters linked arms across the gate. Then the Secret Service arrived and whisked them away. My mother's picture was in the New York Times, to my grandparents' mortification. Two Secret Service men are lifting her up by her arms, her crossed legs dangling in textbook civil-disobedience style, penny loafers on her feet. She looks, in fact, like the darling coed: pegged pants and cardigan and glossy hair flipped up at the ends. My father loved that picture. He described it to me once in startling detail, a wistfulness in his voice at my mother's former passion. But although my mother and father were both bent on political change, it seems to me that they worked from different sources. My father identified with the oppressed. It was fury at their conditions that spurred him on, and if one method wouldn't work, he would try another. My mother was attuned to other people's suffering, but what drove her to action was the idea that reason could win out. As a young girl, she once dreamt she was appointed to solve the world's problems, and she set about fixing them one by one, until solving the last dilemma presented the solution to the first. But in waking life, the problems were more intractable, and all her smarts and energy were dwarfed by the country's ills. Gradually, my mother lost heart for the slow, backsliding muckiness of protest politics -- all the evenings spent arguing with people who mostly shared her views. I suspect that some of her disavowal of mass movements was a reaction to her relationship with my father, but whatever its roots, she stopped going to meetings, gave up trying to change the government, and started looking around for a smaller sphere. She found the beginnings of one when a group of her friends rented an old hotel on the Massachusetts seashore and convinced her to join them. We left Manhattan in the summer of 1968, when the garbage workers were on strike and the mercury was climbing into the nineties. "Every inch of air had its own vile and particular smell," my mother said later. She let go of our apartment, packed all our belongings into our VW bug, and drove up the West Side Highway, leaving those cloying streets behind. Her fellow household members were computer programmers, psychologists -- many of them old friends. "Suddenly, I was living the Sgt. Pepper life by the seashore," she said. Everyone pitched in for food and cooked together; chores were posted on a rotating wheel on the fridge, with each person taking care of a slice of the housekeeping pie. On Sunday evenings, the housemates gathered in the living room for meetings where issues were raised and occasionally resolved. Her share of the rent was about forty dollars, and since we ate rice, beans, and vegetables, and spent our days on the beach, she didn't need to work. She got a little pin money from her grandmother, and passed the summer in a pleasant haze. We would wake up late and eat oatmeal at the big farm table with whoever else was around. In the afternoons, she and her friends would gather down at the beach and stretch out a blanket. My mother would read, marvel over my dawning consciousness, then take a nap while someone dangled my feet in the surf. When she talks about Manomet, my mother's voice goes soft and she looks out into the middle distance, conjuring the long green lawn below the house, the path through the dunes to the water. She was buoyed up by the company of her friends, by the salt breeze that slipped into our room at night, and her sense of freedom and ease seeped into me. On most days I wore nothing but sandals. Sometimes she put a diaper on me; more often I was allowed to squat where I pleased. My mother was in no hurry to potty-train me. She believed then that children were possessed of a native vitality, which would guide them toward good health and good human relations. She saw her job as one of gentle helmsmanship.
In fact, I was wild as a baby goat. I ate whole sticks of butter, bit anyone who crossed me, and pushed my mother's friend Miriam over the line one day when we sat down for breakfast together and she lifted the lid on the sugar bowl to find a turd curled up neatly inside. In the moment of shocked silence while Miriam's spoon was poised, my mother pointed out that the sugar bowl did look something like a toilet -- it was round and porcelain, even if the scale was wrong -- and then they howled together at my dainty replacement of the lid. But Miriam helped make it clear, if it hadn't been before: I was socializing myself for a society of one.
From Split: A Counterculture Childhood. ©1998 by Lisa Michaels.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All Rights Reserved.
Read Salon's review of "Split: A Counterculture Childhood"
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