A Heart Divided

W
E ARE INDEBTED
to the many people who granted us interviews in the course of our research. Thanks especially to the students, faculty, and administration of Franklin High School, Franklin, Tennessee; the Williamson County (Tennessee) Public Library; the Museum of Television and Radio, Los Angeles, and the First Amendment Center, Nashville. We gained much from Tony Horwitz’s
Confederates in the Attic
(New York: Pantheon, 1998). Anna Deavere Smith’s plays
Fires in the Mirror
(New York: Anchor Books, 1993) and
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
(New York: Anchor Books, 1994) were inspirational. We thank our editor, Wendy Loggia; our publisher, Beverly Horowitz; and their team at Random House; and our agent, Laura Peterson, at Curtis Brown Ltd. Thanks also to the teens and adults who read drafts of this novel as it progressed, especially Sarah Lodge, Juliet Berman, Maia Gottesfeld, Sofya Weitz, Kat Farmer, Julia McFerrin, and secret weapons Kate Emburg and Maketa Graves. Our years in Nashville contributed immeasurably to this novel.

that changed my life, and it nearly ruined everything.

It was the summer between fifth and sixth grade. I was turning twelve but still looked the kind of ten where old people pinch your cheeks, and if you wear a bra it’s because all your friends wear one and you don’t want to be the only girl in an undershirt. We lived in Englecliff, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City, one of those upscale suburbs where anxious parents hire tutors for their three-year-olds to make sure they get into the right preschool.

Fortunately, my parents weren’t like that. When my
mother was pregnant with my sister, Portia, she cross-stitched a pillow for me. It reads:
THE PURPOSE OF LIFE IS A LIFE OF PURPOSE.
I still keep it on my bed. The day the toilet broke, I wasn’t aware enough to understand that the articles she wrote for magazines like
Glamour
(“How to Fake the Perfect Tan”) and
Cosmopolitan
(“Sex Secrets of the Supermodels”) weren’t exactly fulfilling
her
purpose… which was one of the reasons why she was so determined that her daughters fulfill theirs.

On the day the toilet broke, my future Life of Purpose looked murky. I was not the kind of kid who’d, say, build a scale model of the Taj Mahal from Popsicle sticks (future Frank Lloyd Wright architectural genius). Or stay up all night to chart a lunar eclipse (future Carl Sagan astrophysics genius). Or paint flowers that embraced the joy of womanhood (future Georgia O’Keeffe artistic genius). However, if concocting stories about complete strangers or dreaming about what the latest teen heartthrob looked like shirtless counted in the future-genius department, I was quite the prodigy.

My mother’s theory was that if only I was exposed to enough different things, eventually my dormant Woman of Purpose would awaken. I suspected that this woman was not dormant but nonexistent, that the girl who stood in her place was a deeply ordinary person, and that the sooner my mother accepted it, the sooner she’d leave me alone and move on to my little sister.

Nothing could convince her to give up on me. She gave
me piano lessons. Ditto Russian. Photography. Ballet. We worked on a political campaign as a family. I spent successive summers at computer, astronaut, and children-of-all-nations world peace camp. All fun; all Woman of Purpose strikeouts.

My mom’s latest effort had been planned for the night of the day the toilet broke. As an early birthday present, she and my dad were taking me into Manhattan to see my first “real” play. I was very excited, because
Grrl
magazine said that real plays were hip in a way that musicals, like the revival of
Grease
I’d just seen with them, were not.

My best friend, Lillith, and I devoured
Grrl.
It was
the
magazine for cool girls who shopped in vintage stores and had piercings and looked as if they did drugs and had sex even if they didn’t; in other words, the kind of girls we longed to be.

Grrl
decreed black the must-wear color and Decadent Diva the must-wear nail polish. So I retrieved my favorite black T-shirt from Lillith, to whom I was forever lending clothes and never asking for them back. I dug out my black pants from the floor of my closet; fortunately, they passed the sniff test. Then I uncapped my purple Decadent Diva polish and sat on my bed to paint the stubs that passed for my nails.

Add nail tech genius to the list of things that were not my future calling. I splattered Decadent Diva everywhere: cuticles, fingertips, left pants leg. There was even a Day-Glo purple splotch on my white nightstand. Only when I had
finished did I recall my mom’s
Seventeen
article “Manicures: Method to the Madness.” Rule one: Always put down old newspaper before you polish.

My mom, though, was too busy getting dressed to notice the mess I’d made. As for my dad, he was doing something in the bathroom that was supposed to result in a functional toilet again. Periodically, I’d hear my mom shout for him to call a plumber—that we’d miss the curtain if he didn’t. He’d yell back, “Just five more minutes!” Meanwhile, I was attacking my nightstand with nail polish remover, trying to think of whom I could blame for this disaster. Portia, maybe. She was barely six. She’d deny it. I’d say she was lying. She’d cry. It could work.

That’s when I heard my father bellow, “Jensen!”

My mom and I both came running. Deeply disgusting flotsam gurgled out of the toilet bowl like a mini Mount Vesuvius. Already my father stood sole-deep in it. My mom couldn’t resist an “I told you so” as she stormed off to call the plumber. My dad said we needed to wait for him to arrive, but my mom said they’d promised me the theater and they were taking me to the theater.

As usual, my mother won. Dad sandbagged the bathroom door with sacks of rock salt left over from the winter and arranged for the plumber to come at midnight. It would cost double, but my mom said that for me, it was worth it.

Talk about pressure.

We drove into Manhattan. My dad put the car in a lot in
the East Village. The neighborhood was
Grrl
heaven, teeming with multiple hair colors, strange tattoos, and piercings in places that had to really, really hurt. As we walked to the theater, I was lost in my own world, making up stories about the people we passed and dreaming about what various cute guys looked like shirtless.

Too soon, we traded in this wonderland for Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. The performance space was puny compared to the big Broadway theaters where we’d seen so many musicals. There was no orchestra pit. In fact, there was no curtain—just a bare stage, painted black and sloping upward.

By the time we reached our seats, it was nearly eight o’clock. I looked around. Three rows in front of me, a girl who embodied hip whispered in the ear of her hot, black-clad boyfriend. First, I pictured him without his shirt. Then I invented their story. He was her best friend’s boyfriend. The friend was deathly ill; the couple had come together to care for the best friend and had fallen in love. They didn’t want to tell the dying friend. But their passion couldn’t be denied. In fact, she’d just told him how at
that very minute
she wasn’t wearing any panties.

Her eyes flicked to mine. My face burned as I ducked into my open program.
The Crucible
, by Arthur Miller. Place: Salem, Massachusetts. Time: 1692.
This production will be performed without an intermission.
I couldn’t believe it. I had to sit through a play set in 1692 without an intermission? That would be fine for the gorgeous girl—she’d be in
the dark with the hot guy and she wasn’t wearing any panties. But for me, how boring was
that
going to be?

“I know I had mints.” My mother was fishing in her overstuffed purse. “So Kate. About this play. Your father explained it to you, didn’t he?”

At that moment, I spied a drop of Decadent Diva on my pants leg. I edged my program over it. “No,” I said.

“Pete.” Her voice was tinged with irritation. “You said you’d—”

“An unplanned plumbing problem intervened,” he said good-naturedly.

My parents are an interesting couple. He’s Mr. Low-Key She’s Ms. Intense. He thinks she rocks the Casbah. She thinks so, too. Even now, when I’m with her, I feel like there’s something I should be doing that I’m not doing, whereas with my dad, I can just
be.

He draped an arm around me. “It’s like this, Kit-Kat. The play is about the Salem witch-hunts—when people accused of being witches were burned at the stake. But Arthur Miller meant the play as a parable about the McCarthy hearings.”

Dad’s the only one I still let call me Kit-Kat. “What’s that?”

“A parable is… let’s see… well, it’s a story about one thing told to illustrate another.”

“I know that, we had it in English. I meant the Mc-whatever you just said.”

“McCarthy hearings,” my mom said, still rummaging
in her purse. “Anti-Communist hearings conducted in the 1950s by Senator Joseph McCarthy. During the Cold War, people were so scared of— Found ′em!” She snagged a lint-covered box of Altoids, wiped it off, and popped one in her mouth.

My dad picked up where my mom left off. “If McCarthy accused you of being a Communist, even without proof, your life could be ruined. It was called blacklisting. No one would hire you. Some people committed suicide.”

I was shocked. “Wait, you mean someone could just lie about you and ruin your life? But that’s not fair!”

My mom nodded. “Of course it’s not. A witch-hunt makes no distinction between innocence and guilt. And history just repeats itself. Some group is targeted because it’s different; the accusers always believe that God is on their side. I wrote an amazing op-ed piece for the
New York Times
comparing the McCarthy era to what Arab Americans are experiencing today.”

I was impressed. “I didn’t know you wrote for the
Times.”

“Well, they didn’t print it, but they should have. Anyway, when—”

An older woman sitting in front of us turned around. “Excuse me. I don’t want to offend you, but maybe your article didn’t run because it was inaccurate.”

My mother got that superior look on her face that I hate. “I’m a professional journalist.”

The woman shrugged. “You’re not the first one to get it wrong. The Arabs are the ones vilifying
us.”

“Do you have any concept of how endemic prejudice and racism are in this country?” my mother asked coolly.

I winced. It was nothing new for my mom to engage in an ideological debate with a stranger. I’d seen it happen at the grocery checkout line, at the dry cleaner, at a dance recital. It never got any less excruciating. To distance myself from her, I focused again on my program and realized that no one I had ever seen on TV or in the movies was in this play. It was going to be a really long night.

“Kate, what did you do to your nails?”

I looked up. The dispute over, my mother was staring at my hands.

A flash of brilliance hit. “It’s Lillith’s,” I fibbed. “She got kind of messy. Some polish spilled on my nightstand, but—”

“Shhh,” a man behind us hissed, because the house-lights were dimming. Saved by the fade. My mom leaned forward, my nails temporarily forgotten, and
The Crucible
started.

Here’s the gist: Abigail, a teenage girl, has an affair with John, a married man. He breaks up with her. Out of spite, she accuses his wife of being a witch. Abigail’s friends get in on it and accuse other people of being witches. In the end, lots of innocent people die, and John is hanged.

Within five minutes of watching Abigail slink around the stage, I was hooked. Forget the seventeenth century.

The play felt just like today. Abigail could have been the cutest girl at Englecliff High, the one other girls imitate. Watching the story unfold live, right in front of me, gave it a kind of heat I’d never experienced watching TV or at the movies. It felt real.

At that moment, something clicked in the brain of purple-polished, underachieving, almost-twelve-year-old me. At long last, the fuse of my inner Woman of Purpose was lit. I knew instantly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a playwright. I already loved to make up stories. But instead of playing them out in my head, I would play them out on the stage. Audiences would sit, rapt, in darkened theaters. And afterward, maybe they’d see the world a little differently, with something essential forever changed in them, just as Arthur Miller’s play was changing me.

When I get impossibly mad at my mother—which still happens a lot—I try to remember how insistent she was that we go to the theater that night. Here’s the truth: I didn’t understand what my parents said about witch-hunts and McCarthyism and racism any more than I knew how a day that began with something as mundane as a broken toilet would end with something so profound it would change my life. Any more than I knew the terrible things that would happen to my family just a few years down the road. Or what
The Crucible
and those things could possibly have to do with each other.

But they did. They do. And this is the story.