THE SANTA ANAS blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon.
“Oleander time,” she said. “Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.” She held up her large hand and spread the fingers, let the desert dryness lick through. My mother was not herself in the time of the Santa Anas. I was twelve years old and I was afraid for her. I wished things were back the way they had been, that Barry was still here, that the wind would stop blowing.
“You should get some sleep,” I offered.
“I never sleep,” she said.
I sat next to her, and we stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand. The edge of her white kimono flapped open in the wind and I could see her breast, low and full. Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife.
I rested my head on her leg. She smelled like violets. “We are the wands,” she said. “We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.”
She lifted her face to the singed moon, bathing in its glowering beams.
“Raven’s-eye moon.”
“Baby-face moon,” I countered, my head on her knee.
She softly stroked my hair. “It’s a traitor’s moon.”
But she loved these readings, the way she loved evenings with her writer friends, trashing famous poets over a drink and a joint, and hated them, the way she hated the lousy job she had at Cinema Scene magazine, where she pasted up the copy of other writers, who, at fifty cents a word, bled shameless clichés, stock nouns and slack verbs, while my mother could agonize for hours over whether to write an or the.
A handful of stars appeared in the sky, but in L.A. none of the constellations were the right ones, so I connected them up in new arrangements: the Spider, the Wave, the Guitar.
When he left, I came out into the big room. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. “Never let a man stay the night,” she told me. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.”
The art room of Cinema Scene, with its ink pens and a carousel of colored pencils, table-sized paper, overlays and benday dots, border tape, and discarded headlines and photographs that I could wax and collage, was my paradise. I liked the way the adults talked around me; they forgot I was there and said the most amazing things.
She concentrated on the motion of her steel X-acto knife, slicing through the galleys. She pulled up long strips that stuck to the knife. “It’s their skins I’m peeling,” she said. “The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.”
Nobody took any note when Bob, the publisher, came in. I dropped my head and used the T square, as if I were doing something official. So far he hadn’t said anything about my coming to work with my mother, but Marlene, the art director, told me to “fly low, avoid the radar.” He never noticed me. Only my mother. That day he came and stood next to her stool, reading over her shoulder. He just wanted to stand close to her, touch her hair that was white as glacier milk, and see if he could look down her shirt.
I could see the loathing on her face as he bent over her, and then, as if to steady himself, put his hand on her thigh.
She pretended to startle, and in one spare movement, cut his bare forearm with the razor-edged X-acto.
He looked down at his arm, astonished at the thread of blood that began to appear.
“Oh, Bob!” she said. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there. Are you all right?” But the look that she gave him with her cornflower eyes showed him she could have just as easily slit his throat.
FOR LUNCH, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman’s body against the uncanny blue sky. We ate yogurt from cartons and listened to Anne Sexton reading her own poetry on the tape deck in her scary ironic American drawl. She was reading about being in a mental home, ringing the bells. My mother stopped the tape. “Tell me the next line.”
I liked it when my mother tried to teach me things, when she paid attention.
I didn’t look up. I knew the only reason we were here was because of me. If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t have to take jobs like this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a brand.
I couldn’t tell my mother I’d outgrown my shoes again. I didn’t want to remind her that I was the reason she was trapped in electric bills and kid’s shoes grown too small, the reason she was clawing at the windows like Michael’s dying tomatoes. She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress.
My mother turned away from the apology. Only peons made excuses for themselves, she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.
I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids. They took me away, spoke to me in languages that had no words for strange mothers with ice-blue eyes and apartments with ugly sparkles on the front and dead leaves in the pool.
Afterward, the audience folded its plush velvet chairs and pressed to the exits, but my mother didn’t move. She sat in her chair, her eyes closed. She liked to be the last one to leave. She despised crowds, and their opinions as they left a performance, or worse, discussed the wait for the bathroom or where do you want to eat? It spoiled her mood. She was still in that other world, she would stay there as long as she possibly could, the parallel channels twining and tunneling through her cortex like coral.
“It’s over,” Barry said.
She raised her hand for him to be quiet. He looked at me and I shrugged. I was used to it. We waited until the last sound had faded from the auditorium. Finally she opened her eyes.
“So, you want to grab a bite to eat?” he asked her.
“I never eat,” she said.
I was hungry, but once my mother took a position, she never wavered from it. We went home, where I ate tuna out of a can while she wrote a poem using the rhythms of the gamelan, about shadow puppets and the gods of chance.
2.
While I drew, I watched the tall beautiful girls coming in and out of these doors, passing from the agency to the studio and back, where they bled a bit more of their hard-earned money from waitressing and temp jobs to further their careers. It was a scam, my mother said, and I wanted to tell them so, but their beauty seemed a charm. What ill could befall girls like that, long-legged in their hip-hugger pants and diaphanous summer dresses, with their clear eyes and sculpted faces? The heat of the day never touched them, they were living in another climate.
She took us to dinner at the nearby Surf ‘n’ Turf, where Barry and I both ordered salads and steaks medium rare, baked potatoes with sour cream. My mother just had a glass of white wine. That was Ingrid Magnussen. She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they’d been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T’ang Dynasty.
BARRY ASKED US to dinner at his house, said he’d like to cook some Indonesian dishes he’d learned there. I waited until afternoon to tell her I wasn’t feeling well, that she should go without me. I hungered for Barry, I thought he might be the one, someone who could feed us and hold us and make us real.
She spent an hour trying on clothes, white Indian pajamas, the blue gauze dress, the pineapples and hula girls. I’d never seen her so indecisive.
“The blue,” I said. It had a low neck and the blue was exactly the color of her eyes. No one could resist her in her blue dress.
She chose the Indian pajamas, which covered every inch of her golden
skin.
Then she did something I would never have imagined. She invited him
in, closing the knife against her leg.
He looked around at our big room, elegantly bare. “Just move in?” She
said nothing. We had lived there over a year.
Barry had stayed the night. She was breaking her rules. They weren’t stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes.
Sunday, we went together to the Hollywood farmer’s market, where she and Barry bought spinach and green beans, tomatoes and grapes no bigger than the head of a thumbtack, papery braids of garlic, while I trailed behind them, mute with amazement at the sight of my mother examining displays of produce like it was a trip to a bookstore. My mother, for whom a meal was a carton of yogurt or a can of sardines and soda crackers. She could eat peanut butter for weeks on end without even noticing. I watched as she bypassed stands full of her favorite white flowers, lilies and chrysanthemums, and instead filled her arms with giant red poppies with black stains in the centers.
One morning at the magazine, she showed me a picture in the weekly throwaway Caligula’s Mother, taken at a party after a play’s opening night.
They both looked bombed. The caption dubbed her Barry’s new lady love.
It was exactly the kind of thing she hated the most, a woman as a man’s anything. Now it was as if she’d won a contest.
Another weekend, he took us to Catalina. I was violently seasick on the ferry, and Barry held a cold handkerchief to my forehead and got me some mints to suck. I loved his brown eyes, the way he looked so worried, as if he’d never seen a kid throw up before. I tried not to hang around with them too much once we got there, hoping he would ask her while they strolled among the sailboats, eating shrimp from a paper cone.
Finally, she flipped out the tape and replaced it with one of Barry’s, a jazz tape by Chet Baker, romantic, the kind of music she always hated before.
“Cocktail lounge music. For people to cry into their beer with,” she said. “But I don’t have any beer.”
He went out of town on assignments for different magazines. He canceled their dates. My mother couldn’t sleep, she jumped whenever the phone rang. I hated to see the look on her face when it wasn’t Barry. A tone I’d never heard crept into her voice, serrated, like the edge of a saw.
I didn’t understand how this could happen, how he could give us fireworks and Catalina, how he could hold that cold cloth to my forehead, and talk about taking us to Bali, and then forget our address.
ONE AFTERNOON, we stopped by his house unannounced.
“He’s going to be mad,” I said.
“We were just in the neighborhood. Just thought we’d stop by,” she said.
I could no more keep her from doing this than I could keep the sun from coming up through the boiled smog on an August morning, but I didn’t want to see it. I waited in the car. She knocked on the door and he answered wearing a seersucker bathrobe. I didn’t have to hear her to know what she was saying. She wore her blue gauze dress, the hot wind ruffling her hem, the sun at her back, turning it transparent.
She got in and sat behind the steering
wheel and rocked back and forth, her mouth open in a square, but there was no sound. My mother was crying. It was the final impossibility.
“He has a date,” she finally said, whispering, her voice like there were hands around her throat. “He made love with me, and then said I had to leave. Because he has a date.”
I knew we shouldn’t have come. Now I wished she’d never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.
I was afraid to let her drive like this, with her eyes wild, seeing nothing.
A few minutes later, a car pulled up in the driveway, a new-model sports car, the top down, a blond girl driving. She was very young and wore a short skirt. She leaned over to get her bag out of the backseat.
“She’s not as pretty as you,” I said.
“But she’s a simpler girl,” my mother whispered bitterly.
hexafu 