I kept her kimono against my face, her scent of violets and ash. I rubbed the silk between my fingers.
In that place under the ground lived many children, babies, teenagers, and the rooms echoed noise like a subway. Music like a train wreck, arguing, crying, the ceaseless TV. The heavy smell of cooking, thin sickly urine, pine cleaner. The woman who ran it made me get out of bed at regular intervals, sit at the table with the others before platters of beans and greens, meat. I dutifully came out, sat, ate, then returned to the cocoon of bed and sleep, plastic sheet crinkling under me. I woke up soaked to the armpits more nights than not.
I ran the belt of her kimono over my mouth, over and over, all day long, the taste of what had been lost.
Her naked body, tender breasts swaying, stomach welted red from the sheets. It was impossible, a faked photograph.
Someone had cut out these policemen and stuck them on our apartment.
They kept looking at her, a dirty magazine. Her body like moonlight.
“Astrid, they can’t keep me,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in an hour.”
She said. She said.
WHEN THEY CAME to get me, they gave me fifteen minutes to make up my mind what to take from our apartment. We never had many things. I took her four books, a box of her journals, the white kimono, her tarot cards, and her folding knife.
WHEN I WAS AWAKE, I tried to remember the things she taught me. We were the wands. We hung our gods from trees. Never let a man stay the night. Don’t forget who you are. But I couldn’t remember. I was the disability girl, stones in my mouth, lost on the battlefield, plastic sheets on the bed.
I had condemned her by my silence, condemned us both.
I taped the torn page together, taped them both back into the book. It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moon-flower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves. It was her reading copy, soft pencil notes in the margins.
PAUSE. Upward Inflect. I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.
The picture on the back. My mother in a short dress with long graceful sleeves, her hair cut in long bangs, eyes peeking out underneath. Like a cat peering out from under a bed. That beautiful girl, she was a universe, bearer of these words that rang like gongs, that tumbled like flutes made of human bones. In the picture, none of this had ever happened. I was safe then, a tiny pin-head egg buried in her right-side ovary, and we never were apart.
5.
Her name was Starr and it was dark inside her trailer. She gave us sugary Cokes we drank out of the can as the caseworker talked. When she spoke, Starr moved her whole body, throwing her head back to laugh. A small gold cross glittered between her breasts, and the caseworker couldn’t keep his eyes off that deep secret place. She and the caseworker didn’t even notice when I went outside.
I walked down the wash, wandering between boulders warmed in the sun. I leaned my cheek against one, imagining becoming so still, so quiet as this, indifferent to where the river dumped me after the last storm. The biggest boy was suddenly beside me. “Careful of the rattlesnakes. They like those rocks.”
I moved away from the rock.
“The western diamondback is the largest of the American vipers,” he said. “But they rarely strike above the ankle. Just watch where you’re going, and don’t climb on the rocks, or if you do, watch where you put your hands. Do like this.” He took a small rock and knocked it on the nearest boulder, as if knocking on a door. “They’ll avoid you if they can. Also look out for scorpions. Shake your shoes before you put them on, especially outside.”
He was a boy who should have been in front of a TV or in a library, but he could read the pale dust the way another kid would read a comic book, the way my mother read cards. I wished he could read my fortune in the dust.
She wasn’t beautiful like my mother, but you couldn’t help looking at her. I’d never seen anyone with a figure like that. Only in the back pages of the L.A. Weekly, chewing on a phone cord. But her energy was overwhelming. She never stopped talking, laughing, lecturing, smoking. I wondered what she was like on cocaine.
“I can’t wait for you to meet Reverend Thomas. Have you accepted Christ as your personal savior?”
I considered telling her that we hung our gods from trees, but thought better of it.
In the cubicle, she wriggled into a tiny striped minidress and smoothed it over her ribs, turning to the side to see what it looked like in profile. The stripes widened and tapered over her breasts and bottom like op art. I tried not to stare, but how could you not be astounded. I wondered what Reverend Thomas would think of her in a dress like that.
She frowned, pulled the dress over her head, and hung it back up. It still was stretched to fit her figure. Her body in the small dressing room was almost too much to bear. I could only look at her in the mirror, her breasts falling out of the top of her under-wired brassiere, the cross hiding between them like a snake in a rock.
“Sin’s a virus, that’s what Reverend Thomas says. Infecting the whole country, like the clap,” she told me. “They’ve got clap now you can’t get rid of. Sin’s just exactly the same. We’ve got every excuse in the book. Like what difference does it make if I shovel coke up my nose or not? What’s wrong with wanting to feel good all the time? Who does it hurt?”
She opened her eyes wide, I could see the glue on her false eyelashes.
“It hurts us and it hurts Jesus. Because it’s wrong.”
Starr handed me a pair of pink high heels that would match my dress. I tried them on. They made my feet look like Daisy Duck’s, but Starr loved them and pressed them on me.
“She could really use some goddamn sneakers or something,” Carolee
said. “All she’s got are those thongs.”
I decided on a pair of hiking boots, hoping they weren’t too expensive.
Starr looked pained when I showed them to her. “They’re not very… flattering.”
But snakes rarely struck above the ankle.
“You’re going to be prettier,” he said.
My mother was a woman people stopped in the market to wonder at. Not like Starr, but just at the sheer beauty. They seemed startled she had to shop and eat like anyone else. I couldn’t imagine owning beauty like my mother’s. I wouldn’t dare. It would be too scary. “No way.”
“Hey, way. You’re just a different type. You’re the sweetheart type.
Your mother looks like she could take a bite out of ya — not that I’d mind, I can take it rough too, but you know what I mean. For you, they’ll just fall down like flies.”
He flipped through some of the pages, reading. “Look, this one’s about you.”
I snatched it away, my face flaming. I knew the poem.
Shhh
Astrid’s sleeping
Pink well of her wordless mouth
One long leg trails off the bed
Like an unfinished sentence Fine freckles hold a constellation of second chances
Her cowrie shell
Where the unopened woman whispers…
She used to recite it at poetry readings. I would sit drawing at my table as if I didn’t hear her, as if it weren’t me she was talking about, my body, my childish girl parts. I hated that poem. What did she think, I didn’t know what she was talking about? I didn’t care who she read it to? No, she thought because I was her daughter that I belonged to her, that she could do anything she wanted with me. Make me into poetry, expose my chicken bones and my cowrie shell, my unopened woman.
What if she was still like that, a zombie? I couldn’t stand that. And I was afraid of the prison, the bars and hands snaking between them. Clanging their cups. How could my mother live there, my mother who arranged white flowers in a crackle-glass vase, who could argue for hours about whether Frost was an important poet?
I couldn’t imagine my mother in prison. She didn’t smoke or chew on toothpicks. She didn’t say “bitch” or “fuck.” She spoke four languages, quoted T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, drank Lapsang souchong out of a porcelain cup. She had never even been inside a McDonald’s. She had lived in Paris and Amsterdam. Freiburg and Martinique. How could she be in prison?
She wore a plain denim dress, button front, but on her the blue was a color, like a song. Her white blond hair had been hacked off at the neck by someone who had no feeling for the work, but her blue eyes were as clear as a high note on a violin. She had never looked more beautiful. I stood up and then I couldn’t move, I waited trembling as she came over and hugged me to her.
“You’re so beautiful,” I said, touching her hair, her collar, her cheek.
Not pliable at all.
“Prison agrees with me,” she said. “There’s no hypocrisy here. Kill or
be killed, and everybody knows it.”
“Is it terrible here? Do they hurt you?”
“Not as much as I hurt them,” she said, and I knew she was smiling, though all I could see was the denim of her sleeve and her arm, still lightly tanned.
“They assigned me to office work. I told them I’d rather clean toilets than type their bureaucratic vomit. Oh, they don’t much care for me. I’m on grounds crew. I sweep, pull weeds, though of course only inside the wire.
I’m considered a poor security risk. Imagine. I won’t tutor their illiterates, teach writing classes, or otherwise feed the machine. I will not serve.”
“You must send me drawings,” she said. “You always drew better than you wrote. I can’t think of any other reason you haven’t written.”
“You haven’t been getting my letters?” she said. And her smile was gone, her face deflated, masklike, like the women behind the fence. “Give me your address. I’ll write you directly. And you write to me, don’t go through your social worker. My mistake. Oh, we’ll learn.” And the vigor returned to her eyes. “We’re smarter than they are, ma petite.”
“Wherever you go, write to me. Write at least once a week. Or send drawings, God knows the visual stimulation in this place leaves something to be desired. I especially want to see the ex— topless dancer and Uncle Ernie, the clumsy carpenter.”
It hurt my feelings. Uncle Ray had been there when I needed him. She didn’t even know him. “It’s Ray, and he’s nice.”
“Oh,” she said. “You stay away from Uncle Ray, especially if he ‘s oh so nice.”
But she was in here, and I was out there. I had a friend. She wasn’t going to take him away from me.
I had felt her, I had. I’d heard her call. Astrid? Are you awake? “Late at night. You never could sleep.”
She kissed the top of my head, right in the part. “Neither could you.
Now, tell me more about yourself. I want to know everything about you.” It was a strange idea. She never wanted to know about me before. But the long days of sameness had led her back to me, to remembering she had a daughter tied up somewhere.
hexafu 