Free Split by Lisa Michaels Page A

armchair for the corner, a small bookcase.
    My mother was reading me fantasy then—the Namia chronicles,
A Wrinkle in Time
—and I had faith that if I focused my powers I could make walls melt, learn the language of toads, dissolve into someone else's bloodstream and travel the chutes and tunnels of their veins. The shed was to be the laboratory for these investigations. One day, I coaxed Alison from her house and convinced her to mix a potion with me. We pulled out a steel washtub from the laundry room, dragged in a hose, and filled the tub nearly to the brim. Then we mined our medicine chests: I snuck past my mother with a shirt full of pills—aspirin and antacid, some leftover antibiotics. I skipped across the linoleum, holding my shirt hem up like a cancan dancer clutches her skirts—tra la la. That should have aroused her suspicions. Alison brought out a carton of White King D, her mother's detergent, and a fistful of black walnuts from the yard. We stirred all this into a murky whirl, the walnuts bobbing up like bad omens, said a few desultory spells, and waited for transformation.
    I still remember the sickening feeling that rose in my throat when I realized we weren't going to be swept into the fourth dimension. We were stuck in that shack, which didn't even have a door we could close on our mess. Suds had sloshed out of the tub and turned the floor into creamy mud. I could hear my mother humming nearby as she shucked com for dinner. In a minute she would appear in the doorway and find the empty aspirin bottles, the two of us, frozen, our stir sticks in a few gallons of poisonous sludge. We were tight on money in those days, so my dread centered on our wastefulness. A whole bottle of aspirin! Half a box of Jackie's good detergent! The Riders were probably on welfare at the time; Roger had already split the scene. I remembered my exile over the snatched strip of bacon and winced at the thought of Jackie's cold fury.
    Alison and I moved as if we were of one mind. We threw down the sticks and dragged the bucket to the doorway, tipping the contents into my vegetable patch. I hastily hooked up the hose and sprayed the bubbles into the soil. Mother couldn't understand why my radishes sickened and died overnight: perhaps I had overwatered them, or it was too shady under the walnut tree.
    My mother tore that shed down one day: tied a rope to the side, hooked it to the fender of the mail truck, and pulled it over. By the time I came home, the wood was in the scrap pile and all that was left was a tamped square of dirt. I practically wept, as if all the misdeeds I had done in there had been disrobed in one quick yank.
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    In the fall I was enrolled in the elementary school down the street. When it came time to fill out the registration form, Mother asked me what I wanted her to put down as my middle name. I didn't have a legal one. She had left the space blank on my birth certificate, figuring that I might like to have some say in my naming—her first nod toward my freedom. Back east, at three, I had asked to be called Lisa Cheeseburger. Now I took a good look at the girls in calico dresses lined up with their mothers in the gymnasium and changed my mind. "Let's put Lisa Leigh," I whispered. I thought it had a nice ring. Later, I would change it to Lisa Marie, a name borrowed from a character on
Hee Haw.
    I was thrilled to start school, but against the backdrop of thirty other kids, I soon saw myself in a different light. What my mother loved in me—my animation and fierce will—didn't play so well in kindergarten, and so I was tamed, slowly, by the other children. They came from families as rooted as we had been footloose. Their fathers were ranchers and loggers who had lived in the valley for generations. Their mothers stayed home. They knew about 4-H, rodeo, threshers, and quilting. They hadn't heard of Biafra, tie-dye, spirulina, or the Stones.
    I went home that first day and asked my mother