hexafu

THE DAY Ron was expected home from Nova Scotia, Claire threw out all the take-out packages, cleaned the kitchen, and did three loads of laundry.

It made me anxious. I liked the way it was, we’d settled into a routine, and now it was being thrown off by the part I didn’t yet know, the part that could change everything for me. Already I resented her husband, and I hadn’t even met him. But I vacuumed the living room, helped her make their bed with fresh sheets printed with falling roses, red and white. “Red and white are the marriage colors,” Claire explained.

She opened the French doors to the garden, blooming vibrantly in the April sun. Her hands lingered and smoothed the white quilt. I knew she wanted to be in this bed with him, making love with him. I secretly hoped he would miss his plane, get into an accident on the way to the airport. I was unnerved by her tremulous anticipation. She reminded me of a certain kind of rose she grew in the garden, called Pristine. It was white with a trace of pink around the outside, and when you picked it, the petals all fell off.

I stood uneasily on the porch as she ran to him. They kissed, and I had to look away. Didn’t she know how easily this could go bad, wasn’t she afraid?

Claire lit citronella candles, and Ron told us about the assignment he’d gone to Halifax to film, a story about a haunted bar. He was a segment producer on a show about the weird and occult.

Evidently the ghost nearly smothered a customer to death last year in the men’s room.

“It took us three hours to get him back in there. Even with the film crew, he almost chickened out. He knew it was going to try to finish him off.”

“What would you have done if it had?” Claire asked.

Ron stretched his legs out on the bench in front of him, hands clasped behind his head. “I’d have sicced the Tidy Bowl man on it.”

“Very funny.” Her face was the shape of a perfect candy-box heart, but there was a haze of mistrust over her features.

“I could try Vanish.”

We saw him lie down on the white quilt, pick at his toenails as he talked.

Claire stopped clearing the table, and her face blurred, resolved, blurred.

She stood at the picnic table fiddling with the plates, with the scraps and silverware, trying to hear what he was saying.

a jazz concert at the art museum. “Astrid’s quite an artist,” she said. “Show him what you’ve been doing.”

Claire had bought me a set of Pelikan watercolors in a big black case, a book of thick-textured paper. I’d been painting the garden, the droop of the Chinese elm, the poinsettias against the white wall. Spires of delphinium, blush of roses. Copies of the Dürer rabbit. Claire practicing ballet in the living room. Claire with a glass of white wine. Claire, her hair up in a turbaned towel. I didn’t want to show them to Ron. They were too revealing.

“Show him,” Claire said. “They’re beautiful.”

It irked me that she wanted me to show him. I thought they were something between us, from me to her. I didn’t know him. Why did she want me to? Maybe to prove they’d made the right decision in taking me.

Maybe to show what a good job she was doing with me.

I went and got the big pad, handed it to Ron, and then went out in the dark garden and kicked the heads off the stray Mexican evening primroses that crept into the lawn. I heard him turning the pages. I couldn’t watch.

“She’s embarrassed,” Claire said. “Don’t be embarrassed, Astrid. You have a gift. How many people can say that?” The only one I knew was behind bars.

Why don’t you go away, Ron? There were witch doctors waiting to be interviewed, tortilla miracles to be documented.

Thinking that tonight they would lie together in the pine bed with the rose sheets, and I would be alone again. Women always put men first. That’s how everything got so screwed up.

I had never come home to someone waiting for me before, someone looking forward to the sound of my key in the door, not even when I was a child. She wanted to know about my composition on Edgar Allan Poe and my illustrations on the chambers of the heart and the circulation of the blood. She was sympathetic when I got a D on an algebra test.

table. I was getting used to him. He didn’t try to be any friendlier than I wanted.

“How does Claire seem to you?” he asked all of a sudden. He looked at

me over the tops of his glasses like an old man.

“Fine,” I said.

But I had some idea what he was talking about. Claire paced at night, I heard her bare feet on the floorboards. She talked as if silence would crush her if she didn’t prop it up with a steady stream of sound. She cried easily.

She took me to the observatory and started crying in the star show. The April constellations.

“You have my pager number, you know. You can always reach me.” I kept painting the way the poinsettia looked against the white wall of the house. Like a shotgun blast.

When Claire went out for an audition, I searched the house methodically. Under their bed I found a box painted red and white and decorated with pieces of broken mirror. Inside, it was also red, and full of the things that he’d been missing — an army knife, a watch, his stapler, scissors, keys, nail clippers. There was a Polaroid of them laughing, and two Polaroids glued together face-to-face, I couldn’t pry them apart. A magnet hung from the lid of the box, and a steel plate was glued to the bottom. I could feel the tug of the magnet as I replaced the lid.

She touched Ron constantly, his hair, arm, shoulder. I was jealous. I wanted her all to myself. I was aware it wasn’t normal, normal daughters didn’t get jealous of their fathers..

Ron took something from his pocket, concealed in his smooth hand.

“For a job well done,” he said.

He put it on my plate. It was a red velvet box, shaped like a heart. I opened it. Inside was a faceted lavender jewel on a gold chain. “Every girl needs a little jewelry,” he said.

Claire clipped it around my neck. “Amethyst is a great healer,” she whispered as she put it on me, kissing me on the cheek. “Only good times now.”

She worked in her garden almost every day wearing gloves and an enormous straw Chinese hat. Tending her tomatoes.

She’d planted four different kinds — yellow and red cherry, Romas for spaghetti sauce, Beefsteaks big as a baby’s head. We faithfully watched a TV show on Saturday mornings that told her how to grow things.

Sometimes I helped her, but mostly I sat under the Chinese elm and drew.

Her voice was trained, supple as leather, precise as a knife thrower’s blade. Singing or talking, it had the same graceful quality, and an accent I thought at first was English, but then realized was the old-fashioned American of a thirties movie, a person who could get away with saying “grand.” Too classic, they told her when she went out on auditions. It didn’t mean old. It meant too beautiful for the times, when anything that lasted longer than six months was considered passé. I loved to listen to her sing, or tell me stories about her childhood in suburban Connecticut, it sounded like heaven to me.

The scars had all but disappeared. I could pass for beautiful.

Around my neck, the amethyst glinted. Before, I would have hidden it in the toe of a sock crammed into a shoe in the closet. But here, we wore

our jewelry. We deserved it. “When a woman has jewelry, she wears it,” Claire had explained. I had jewelry now. I was a girl with jewelry.

I tried on Claire’s double strand of pearls in the mirror, ran the smooth, lustrous beads through my fingers, touched the coral rose of the clasp. The pearls weren’t really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn’t come apart.

Claire had a picture of me on her bureau, next to one of her and Ron, in a sterling silver frame. Nobody had ever framed a picture of me and set it on the dresser.

She only disrobed to go into the water, wading out to her thighs. She didn’t like to swim.

“I know it’s ridiculous,” she said, “but I keep thinking I’m going to be sucked out to sea.”

It wasn’t the only thing she was afraid of.

She was afraid of spiders and supermarkets and sitting with her back to the door. “Bad chi,” she said. She hated the color purple, and the numbers four and especially eight. She detested crowds and the nosy lady next door, Mrs. Kromach. I thought I was afraid of things, but Claire was way ahead of me. She joked about her fears, but it was the kind of joke where you knew people thought it was ridiculous, and you pretended you thought so too, but underneath you were completely serious. “Actors are always superstitious,” she said.

She did my numerology. I was a 50, which was the same as a 32. I had the power to sway the masses. She was a 36, which was the same as a 27, the Scepter. A number of courage and power. She used to be a 22 before she was married, a 4. Very bad. “So you see, Ron saved my life.” She laughed uneasily.

I helped her out with projects meant to boost good chi. One day we bought square mirrors and I actually climbed to the roof of the house to put them on the red tiles, facing Mrs. Kromach’s house. “So her bad chi will bounce back on her, the old bag.”

There was a rose trellis over the front path, and she didn’t like people who wouldn’t go through it. Only goodness and love can pass through a rose arch, she said. She was uneasy if someone came in the back door. She wouldn’t let me wear black. The first time I did, she told me, “Black belongs to Saturn, he’s unfriendly to children.”

She kept most of her jewelry in a paper bag in the freezer, where she thought burglars wouldn’t find it. But the pearls couldn’t take being frozen, they had to stay warm.

This instinct to order and rituals was one of the things I liked best about Claire, her calendars and rules. She knew when it was time to put winter clothes away. I loved that. Her sense of order, graceful and eccentric, little secrets women knew, lingerie bags and matching underwear. She threw out my Starr underthings, full of holes, and bought me all new ones at a department store, discussing the fit of bras with the elderly saleslady. I wanted satin and lace, black and emerald green, but Claire gently overruled me. I pretended she was my mother and whined a bit before giving in.

CLAIRE HAD new photographs taken, actor’s head shots. We went to Hollywood to pick them up from a shop on Cahuenga. In photographs, she

looked different, focused, animated. In person she was thin, dreamy, as full of odd angles as a Picasso mademoiselle.

I was ready to cross, to escape this scarecrow of a man, but Claire looked over at him. She didn’t know how to ignore people.

“Can you spare some change, lady? Anything’II help.”

The light changed, but Claire wasn’t paying attention. She was digging in her purse, emptying out her change. She never learned about street people, that if you showed them the least little kindness, they’d latch onto you like castor seeds. My mother would have offered to shove him out in front of a bus, but Claire cared. She believed in the commonality of the soul.

I loved the way she smelled too. I liked to sit on her bed as she combed and French-braided my hair. I could sit there as long as she wanted, just breathing the air where she was.

CLAIRE TOOK ME to see the Kandinsky show at the art museum. I’d never liked abstract art. My mother and her friends could go wild over a canvas that was just black and white pinstripes, or a big red square. I liked art that was of something. Cézanne card players, Van Gogh’s boots. I liked tiny Mughal miniatures, and ink-brushed Japanese crows and cattails and cranes.

“Imagine the work to assemble all this in one place,” Claire said. “The years of convincing people to lend their artworks.”

I imagined Kandinsky’s mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.

We went back twice a week for the rest of the summer. Claire bought me oil pastels so I could work in color without making the guards nervous.

We would spend all day in a single room, looking at one picture. I had never done that before. A composition from 1913 presaged the First World War. “He was very sensitive. He could tell it was coming,” Claire said. The blackness, the cannons, wild, a mood so violent and dark, of course he had to invent abstraction.

The return to Russia. The exuberance of the avant-garde, but the darkening suspicion that it was coming to a close, even as it was flowering.

On to the Bauhaus in the twenties. Straight lines, geometric forms. You didn’t let yourself go in times like that. You tried to find some underlying structure. I understood him perfectly. Finally, the move to Paris. Pinks and blues and lavenders. Organic forms again, for the first time in years. What a relief Paris must have been, the color, the ability to be soft again.

Every Tuesday night, Claire brought me to the museum, went home, and then returned three hours later to pick me up. I felt guilty for her willingness to do things for me, like I was using her. I heard my mother saying, “Don’t be absurd. She wants to be used.”

Ms. Day had us experiment with color, with strokes. The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement. We painted still lifes. Flowers, books. Some of the ladies in class painted only tiny flowers. Ms. Day told them to paint bigger but they were too embarrassed. I painted flowers big as pizzas, strawberries magnified to a series of green triangles on a red ground, the patterns of the seeds. Ms. Day was spartan in her praise, blunt in her criticism. Every class there was somebody crying. My mother would have liked her. I liked her too.

MY MOTHER WROTE that she had poems in Kenyon Review and in the all-poetry issue of Zyzzyva. I asked Claire if we could get them, and she took me up to Book Soup on the Strip, bought them both for me. There was a long poem about running in prison, that was a big part of her day. When she wasn’t writing she was running the track, fifty, a hundred miles a week.

She wore out her shoes every four months, and sometimes they’d give her new ones and sometimes they wouldn’t. I had an idea.

I Xeroxed ten copies of the poem, and used them as the background for drawings. I sat at the table in the red-and-white kitchen and drew in oil pastel on top of her words, the feeling of running, of senseless, circular activity. Like her mind.

The rains had begun, they whispered outside the steamed kitchen window. Claire sat next to me with a cup of mint tea. “Tell me about her.” There was something that kept me from talking much about my mother to Claire. She was curious, like everyone else, my counselors at school, Ray, Joan Peeler, the editors of small literary journals. Poets in prison, the sheer paradox. I didn’t know what to say. She murdered a man. She was my mother. I didn’t know if I was like her or not. Mostly, I didn’t want to talk about her. I wanted Claire to be something separate from my mother, I wanted them to be on different pages, and only I could hold them up to the light together.

Claire read the running poem again. “I love this line, the back stretch, twenty years. A clock without hands. Life in prison, it’s unimaginable.

Three years gone, the beaten dirt around. She must be so brave. How can she stand it?”

“She’s never where she is,” I said. “She’s only inside her head.”

“That must be wonderful.” Claire stroked the side of the mug like the cheek of a child. “I wish I could do that.”

cheek of a child. “I wish I could do that.”

I was glad she couldn’t. Things touched Claire. Maybe too much, but at least they touched her. She couldn’t twist things around in her mind, make the ends come out right. I looked at my mother’s poem in Kenyon.

She couldn’t twist things around in her mind, make the ends come out right. I looked at my mother’s poem in Kenyon. So interesting that she was always the heroine, the outlaw, one against the rest. Never the villain.

“It’s the difference between a true artist and everybody else.” Claire sighed. “They can remake the world.”

“You’re an artist,” I said.

“An actress,” she said. “Not even that.”

I’d seen a couple of Claire’s movies now. She was transparent, heartbreaking. I would be afraid to be so vulnerable. I’d spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I wouldn’t drip with blood every time I brushed up against something. She was naked, she peeled herself daily. In one film, she played a professor’s wife, trembling, in pearls. In another, an eighteenth-century woman, a cast-off lover, in a convent. “You’re a terrific actress,” I said.

Claire shrugged, read the other poem, about a fight in prison. “I like your mother’s violence. Her strength. How I admire that.”

I dipped a small sumi brush into a bottle of ink, and in a few strokes I inked in arcs and lines, a black spot. Her violence. Claire, what did you know about violence? My mother’s strength? Well, she wasn’t strong enough to avoid being the background of my art. Just the background. Her words just my canvas.

It wasn’t a big part, but it was tricky. She played a character’s elegant but drunken wife at a dinner party, in a long gown and diamonds. A lot of drinking and eating, she had to remember when to do what, so it would all cut together. “Always somebody’s lonely wife,” she sighed. “What is this, typecasting?”

She got the part because the director was a friend of Ron’s, and the actress who was supposed to play the lonely wife, the director’s ex-wife’s sister, broke her collarbone at the last minute and they needed someone about the same height and coloring who could wear the strapless dress.

“At least I’m talking to the protagonist,” she explained. “They can’t cut the scene.”

It was a small role, just five lines, a woman who shows up dead two scenes later. I helped her rehearse it, playing the hero. The hard part, she explained, was that she had to eat and drink during the scene, while she was talking. She had it down after the second try, but insisted on doing it over and over again. She was very particular to remember which word she paused and drank the wine on, exactly when she raised her fork, with which hand and how high. “Eating scenes are the worst,” she explained.

She was very pale, and silent. Concentrating. She did a breathing exercise called Breathing Monkeys, singing Chinese syllables on both the exhale and the inhale. The exhaled tones were low and resonant, but the inhaled ones were weird, high and wailing. It was called chi gong, she said it kept her calm.

I’d never cared about someone so much that I could feel their pain before. It made me sick, that they could do something like that to Claire, and I wasn’t there, to tell her, Quit, you don’t have to do this. “I love you, Claire,” I said softly.

I found her sitting on my bed, cross-legged, reading my mother’s papers. Letters from prison, poet’s journals, personal papers, all fanned out around her. She looked pale, absorbed, biting the nail of her ring finger. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I was outraged, I was scared. She shouldn’t have been reading those things. I needed to keep them separate. I didn’t want her to have anything to do with my mother, anything I couldn’t control. And now she’d gone and opened the box. Like Pandora. Letting out all the evil. They were always so fascinated by Ingrid Magnussen. I felt myself retreating again, into her shadow. These were my things. Not even mine. I trusted her.

“What are you doing?”

She jumped, throwing the notebook she was reading into the air. Her mouth opened to explain, then closed. Opened again. No sound came.

When she was upset, she couldn’t say a thing.

“Don’t hate me,” she said.

“Why, Claire? I would have shown you if you had asked.” I started to collect the notebooks, rice paper bound in string, Italian marbleized notebooks, Amsterdam school copybooks, smooth-bound, leather-bound, tied with shoelaces. My mother’s journals, my absence written in the margins. None of this was about me. Even the letters. Only her.

“I was depressed. You were gone. She seemed so strong.” She was looking for a role model? I almost had to laugh. Claire admiring my mother made me want to slap her. Wake up! I wanted to scream. Ingrid Magnussen could damage you just passing by on the way to the bathroom.

And now she’d read the letters. She knew that I’d refused to discuss her with my mother. I imagined how it must have hurt her. Now I wished I’d thrown them out, not lugged them around like a curse. Ingrid Magnussen.

How could I explain? I didn’t want my mother to know about you, Claire.

You’re the one good thing that ever happened to me. I didn’t want to take any chances. How my mother would hate you.

scream, mgnd Magnussen coud camage you just passing by on the way to the bathroom.

And now she’d read the letters. She knew that I’d refused to discuss her

with my mother. I imagined how it must have hurt her. Now I wished I’d thrown them out, not lugged them around like a curse. Ingrid Magnussen.

How could I explain? I didn’t want my mother to know about you, Claire.

You’re the one good thing that ever happened to me. I didn’t want to take any chances. How my mother would hate you. She doesn’t want me to be happy, Claire. She liked it that I hated Marvel. It made her feel close to me.

An artist doesn’t need to be happy, she said. If I were happy, I wouldn’t need her, she meant. I might forget her. And she was right. I just might.

She scolded me in those letters. What do I care about a 98 on a spelling test? Your flower garden. You’re so boring, I don’t even recognize you. Who are these people you’re living with now? What are you really thinking? But I never told her a thing.

“You want to know about my mother?” I took a gray ribboned notebook, opened it, and handed it to Claire. “Here. Read it.”

She took her hands down, her eyes puffy and red, her nose running. She hiccupped and took it from me. I didn’t have to look over her shoulder. I knew what it said.

Spread a malicious rumor.

Let a beloved old person’s dog out of the yard.

Suggest suicide to a severely depressed person.

“What is this?” she asked.

Tell a child it isn’t very attractive or bright.

Put Drano in glassine folded papers and leave them on streetcorners

Throw handfuls of useless foreign coins into a beggar’s cup, and make sure they thank you profusely. “God bless you, miss.”

“It’s not real, though,” Claire said. “It’s not like she actually does these things.”

I only shrugged. How could Claire understand a woman like my mother? She would write these lists for hours, laughing until tears flowed.

Claire looked at me hungrily, pleading. How could I stay angry with her? My mother had no idea what my favorite food was, where I’d live if I could live anywhere in the world. Claire was the one who discovered me.

She knew I’d want to live in Big Sur, in a cabin with a woodstove and a spring, that I liked green apple soap, that Boris Godunov was my favorite opera, that I was afraid of milk. She helped me pack the papers back into the box, shut it, and put it under the bed.

The caseworker, Ms. Cardoza, scolded me all the way back into town, down the Ventura Freeway. “Mrs. Turlock told me everything. That you was doing drugs, running around. With little kids in the house. I’m taking you somewhere you’ll learn to act right.” She was an ugly young woman with a broad, rough-skinned face and a set look about the jowls. I didn’t bother to argue with her. I would never speak to anyone ever again.

little boy. “This is my son, Cesar, and my husband.”

I wondered what had happened in Argentina, if it was so great there, what was she doing here in Hollywood? What had happened to her husband, and her little boy? I was about to ask when she turned the page and pointed a lacquered nail at a picture of two girls in tan uniforms kneeling on a lawn. “My maids,” she said, smiling nostalgically. “They were sitting around on their fat culos, so I made them pull weeds out of the lawn.”

She gazed admiringly at the picture of the girls pulling weeds. It gave me the creeps. It was one thing to have somebody pull weeds, but why would anybody take a picture of it? I decided I was better off not knowing.

While I made the white sauce for the macaroni and cheese, I hid a stick of margarine behind a stack of plates. The girls told me right off that whoever had kitchen duty stole food for everybody, and if I didn’t, they could make life hell for me. After the dishes, I carried it up to my room inside my shirt. Once we could hear Amelia in her room talking on the phone to a friend, they all came into our room and we ate the whole stick. I divided it into cubes with my knife. We ate it slowly, licking it, like candy. I could feel the calories enter my bloodstream, undiluted, making me high.

WHAT CAN I tell you about that time in my life? Hunger dominated every moment, hunger and its silent twin, the constant urge to sleep. School passed in a dream. I couldn’t think. Logic fled, and memory drained away like motor oil. My stomach ached, my period stopped. I rose above the sidewalks, I was smoke. The rains came and I was sick and after school I had nowhere to go.

I drifted the streets of Hollywood. Everywhere were homeless kids, huddled in doorways, asking for dope, change, a cigarette, a kiss. I looked into their faces and saw my own.

I picked an orange from somebody’s tree, it was sour as vinegar, but I needed the vitamin C.

It was not until I emerged onto Hollywood Boulevard that I realized where I was going. I stood in front of our old apartment

But no McMillan, no Magnussen.

I knew by my disappointment what I had really expected. That we would still be here. That I could go in and find my mother writing a poem, and I could wrap myself in her quilt and this would just be a dream I could tell her about. I was not really a girl one step from homeless, eating scraps off Amelia’s plates. In that apartment, my mother had never met Barry Kolker, and prison was something she’d read about in the papers. I would brush her hair, smelling of violets, and swim again in the hot nights. We would rename the stars.

I drew a picture of myself eating out of the garbage, furtive, with both hands, like a squirrel, and sent it to my mother. I got a letter back from her cellmate.

Dere Asrid,

You dont know me, I am your mamas roomayt. Your letters make her too sad. Send more chereful things, how youre getten strate A’s, homecome queen. Shes here for life. Why make it hardr.

youre frend

Lydia Guzman

Why make it harder, Lydia? Because it was her fault I was there. I

would spare her nothing.

My mother’s reply was more practical. She ordered me to call Children’s Services every day and yell my head off until they changed my placement. Her writing was big and dark and emphatic. I could feel her rage, I warmed myself by it. I needed her strength, her fire. “Don’t you let them forget about you,” she said.

But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe.

cost.

AMELIA FOUND OUT I’d been asking for a new placement. I cringed on the uncomfortable wooden-edged sofa in the sitting room as she paced back and forth, ranting, her hands cutting the air. “How dare you tell such outrageous lies about my house! I treat you like my own daughter, and this is how you repay me? With these lies?” The whites of her eyes showed all around the black irises, and spittle accumulated in the corners of her thin lips. “You don’t like my house? I send you to Mac. See how well you eat there. You’re lucky I allow you to sit at the table with the other girls, with that hideous face. In Argentina you would not be allowed to walk through the front door.” My face. I felt my scars throb along my jaw.

“What do you know about a noble home? Just a common piece of street garbage. Mother in prison. You know, you stink like garbage. When you come into a room, the girls hold their breath. You soil my home. Your presence insults me. I don’t want to look at you.” She turned away, pointed to the polished stairway. “Go to your room and stay there.”

And I could remember my mother’s voice, her irritation when the roar of the cappuccino machine interrupted her reading, her books stacked on the table where I drew and took the money when someone bought one.

I wanted her back. I was overwhelmed with a need to hear her low, expressive voice. I wanted her to say something funny and cruel about the art, or tell a story about one of the other poets. I wanted to feel her hand on my hair, stroking me while she spoke.

I laughed out loud, pulled up my sweater to show her my ribs. The men across the aisle looked too, a writer with a portable computer, a student making notes on a legal pad. Seeing if I’d pull it up any higher. Not that it mattered, I didn’t have much on top anymore. “We’re starving,” I said, covering myself again.

Joan put her strainer down. “If what you say is true and we can prove it,

she can have her license revoked.”

I imagined how it would really play. Joan started her investigation, got transferred to the San Gabriel Valley, and I lost my chance to have a young caseworker who still got excited about her clients. “That could take a long time. I need out now.”

JOAN PEELER said she had never come across a kid like me, she wanted to have me tested. I spent a couple of days filling out forms with a fat black pencil. Sheep is to horse as ostrich is to what. I’d been through this before, when we came back from Europe and they thought I was retarded. I wasn’t tempted to draw Pictures on the computer cards this time. Joan said the results were significant. I should be going to a special school, I should be challenged, I was beyond tenth grade, I should be in college already.

It was a game. She wanted me to strip myself bare, I lifted my long sleeve to the elbow, let her see a few of my dogbite scars. I hated her and needed her. Joan Peeler never ate a stick of margarine. She never begged for quarters in a liquor store parking lot to make a phone call. I felt like I was trading pieces of myself for hamburgers. Strips of my thigh to bait the hook.

While we talked, I sketched naked Carnival dancers wearing elaborate masks.

“You’ll like these people, Astrid,” she said as we drove west on Melrose, past body shops and pupuserias. “Ron and Claire Richards. She’s an actress and he does something with television.”

“Do they have kids?” I asked. Hoping they didn’t. No more babysitting, or 99-cent gifts when the two-year-old gets a ride-in Barbie car.

“No. In fact, they’re looking to adopt.”

That was a new one, something I never considered. Adoption. The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box. I didn’t know what to think.

We passed Paramount Studios, the big triple-arched gate, parking kiosk, people riding around on fattired bicycles. The longing in her eyes. “Next year, I’ll be in there,” Joan said. Sometimes I didn’t know who was younger, her or me.

The woman who answered the door reminded me of Audrey Hepburn.

Dark hair, long neck, wide radiant smile, about thirty. Her cheeks were flushed as she waved us in. “I’m Claire. We’ve been waiting for you.”

Art, something painted by hand. I couldn’t believe it. Someone bought a piece of art. And a wall of books with worn spines, CDs, records, and tapes. The free-form couch along two walls looked comfortable, a blue, red, and purple woven design, reading lamp in the center. I was afraid to breathe. This couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be for me. She was going to change her mind.

She sat down with Joan, who opened my file, but she kept smiling at me, too much, like she was worried what I’d think of her and her home. I wished I could tell her she had nothing to worry about.

Kitsch, I heard my mother’s voice in my ear. But it wasn’t, it was charming.

Claire Richards was charming, with her wide love-me smile.

The bathroom would be my favorite room, I could tell that already.

Tiled aqua and rose, the original twenties ceramic, a frosted glass enclosure on the tub, a swan swimming between cattails. There was something deeply familiar about the swan. Had we lived somewhere with swan-etched glass like this? Bottles and soaps and candles nestled on the bath tray that stretched between the two sides of the tub. I opened containers and smelled and rubbed things on my arms. Luckily the scars were fading, Claire Richards wouldn’t have to see the glaring red weals, she seemed the sensitive type.

I sat down on the bed. I couldn’t picture myself filling this room, inhabiting it, imposing my personality here.

I NEVER SPENT more time with anyone than I spent with Claire Richards the week that followed. I could tell she’d never been around kids. She took me with her to the dry cleaner’s, the bank, like she was afraid to leave me alone for a moment, as if I were five and not fifteen.

For a week, we ate out of paper cartons and jars with foreign writing on the labels from the Chalet Gourmet. Soft runny wedges of cheese, crusty baguettes, wrinkly Greek olives. Dark red proscuitto and honeydew melon, rose-scented diamonds of baklava. She didn’t eat much, but urged me to finish the roast beef, the grapefruit sweet as an orange. After three months with Cruella, I didn’t need urging.

We sat over our living room picnics and I told her stories about my mother, about the homes, avoiding anything too ugly, too extreme. I knew how to do this. I told her about my mother, but only the good things. I wasn’t a complainer, I wouldn’t end up saying bad things about you, Claire Richards.

She didn’t act much anymore. She slid her garnet heart pendant along its chain, tucked it under her ripe lower lip. “I get so tired of it. You spend hours getting ready, drag yourself to the call, where they look at you for two seconds and decide you’re too ethnic. Too classic. Too something.”

“Too ethnic?” Her wide pale forehead, her glossy hair.

“It means brunette.” She smiled. One front tooth was crooked, it crossed just slightly over the other one. “Too small means breasts. Classic means old. It’s not a very nice business, I’m afraid. I still go out, but it’s an exercise in futility.”

I wiped the last of the Boursin cheese out of the container with my

finger. “Why do it then?”

“What, and give up show business?” She laughed so easily, when she was happy, but also when she was sad.

THE NEW Beverly Cinema was right around the corner from her house.

They were playing King of Hearts and Children of Paradise, and we bought a giant popcorn and laughed and cried and laughed at each other crying. I used to go there all the time with my mother, but the movies were different.

She didn’t like weepy films. She liked to quote D. H. Lawrence:

really got.” Hers were grim European films — Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bergman — films where everybody died or wished they had. Claire’s

movies were lovely dreams. I wanted to crawl inside them, live in them, a pretty mad girl in a tutu. Gluttonous, we went back and saw them again the next night. My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.

At night I lay awake in my bed with the white eyelet ruffle, looking at the Dürer rabbit. It was bound to turn wrong. Joan Peeler was going to tell me it was just a mistake, that they’d changed their minds, they wanted a three-year-old. They’d decided to wait another couple of years. I worried about Claire’s husband. I didn’t want him to come home, take her away from me. I wanted it to always be like it was, the two of us in the living room eating pâté de foie gras and strawberries for dinner and listening to Debussy records, talking about our lives. She wanted to know all about me, what I was like, who I was. I worried, there wasn’t really much to tell. I had no preferences. I ate anything, wore anything, sat where you told me, slept where you said. I was infinitely adaptable. Claire wanted to know things like, did I like coconut soap or green apple? I didn’t know. “No, you have to decide,” she said.

So I became a user of green apple soap, of chamomile shampoo. I preferred to have the window open when I slept. I liked my meat rare. I had a favorite color, ultramarine blue, a favorite number, nine. But sometimes I suspected Claire was looking for more than there was to me.

“What was the best day of your life?” she asked me one afternoon as we lay on the free-form couch, her head on one armrest, mine on the other.

Judy Garland sang on the stereo, “My Funny Valentine.”

“Today,” I said.

“No.” She laughed, throwing her napkin at me. “From before.” I tried to remember, but it was like looking for buried coins in the sand.

I kept turning things over, cutting myself on rusty cans, broken beer bottles hidden there, but eventually I found an old coin, brushed it off. I could read the date, the country of origin.

“It was when we were living in Amsterdam. A tall thin house by the canal. There was a steep twisted staircase, and I was always afraid of falling.” Dark green canal water and rijsttafel. Water rats as big as opossums. The thick smell of hashish in the coffeehouses. My mother always stoned.

“I remember, it was a sunny day, and we ate sandwiches of raw hamburger and onions, standing up at a corner café, and my mother sang this cowboy song: ‘Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies.’” It was the only memory I had of Amsterdam being sunny.

Claire laughed, a sound like bells, drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them, gazing at me in a way I could have bottled and stored like a great wine.

“We sat in the sun overlooking the canal, and she said, ‘Look, Astrid, watch this.’ And she waved at the people passing by on a glass sightseeing boat. And all the passengers waved back. They thought we were Dutch, see, welcoming them to our city. That was my best day.” The sun and the herring gulls and all those people waving, thinking we were from there, that we belonged.

At the other end of the couch, Claire sighed, unfolding her legs, smiling nostalgically. She didn’t see who I had been then, a thin, lonely child, warmed by the mistaken thought that I belonged. She saw only the childish fun.

“You’ve been everywhere, haven’t you.” I had, but it hadn’t done me much good.