hexafu

“He met a guru who taught him to look for the truth within himself.” The preacher paused and smiled, as if the idea of truth within yourself was absurd, ridiculous, the red light warning of doom. “You are the judge of what is true.” He smiled again, and I began to see that he always paused to smile when he said something he disapproved of. He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he was smashing them.

“There is an answer to this deadly epidemic laying waste our vital substance,” Reverend Thomas was saying, lifting his arms, like an embrace.

“A powerful vaccine for the devastating infection within the human heart.

But we have to recognize the danger we are in. We have to accept the grave diagnosis, that by acting upon our own desires instead of following God’s plan, we have become infected by this terrible plague. We have to receive the knowledge of our responsibility to the heavenly power, and our own vulnerability.”

Suddenly, a scene that I had kept at bay all these months came flooding in. The day I’d phoned Barry to warn him, and then hung up. I could feel the weight of the receiver as I put it on the cradle. My responsibility. My infection.

“We need Christ’s antibodies, to overcome this contagion within our souls. And those who choose to serve themselves instead of the Heavenly Father will experience the deadly consequences.”

I had contracted the virus. I had been infected all the while. There was blood on my hands. I thought of my beautiful mother, sitting in her tiny cell, her life at full stop.

She didn’t believe in anything but herself, no higher law, no morality. She thought she could justify anything, even murder, just because it was what she wanted.

She didn’t even use the excuse of who was she hurting. She had no conscience. I will not serve. That’s what Stephen Dedalus said in Portrait of the Artist, but it meant Satan. That’s what the Fall was. Satan would not serve.

We were dying inside, my mother and I. If only we had God, Jesus, something larger than ourselves to believe in, we could be healed. We could still have a new life.

IN JULY, I was baptized into the Truth Assembly of Christ. It didn’t even matter that it was Reverend Thomas, how fake he was, how he looked down Starr’s dress, the way his eyes fondled her when she walked up the stairs in front of him. I closed my eyes as he laid me back in the square pool behind the Assembly building, my nose filling with chlorine. I wanted the spirit to enter me, to wash me clean. I wanted to follow God’s plan for me. I knew where following my own would get me.

Afterward, we went out to Church’s Fried Chicken to celebrate.Nobody had ever given me a party before. Starr gave me a white leatherette Bible with passages highlighted in red. From Carolee and the boys I got a box of stationery with a dove in the corner, trailing a banner in its beak that said,

“Praise the Lord,” but I knew Starr must have picked it out. Uncle Ray gave me a tiny gold cross on a chain. Even though he thought I was nuts to be baptized.

“You can’t really believe in this crap,” he whispered in my ear as he helped me put the necklace on.

I held up my hair so he could fasten it. “I’ve got to believe in something,” I said, low.

His hand rested on my neck, warm, heavy. His good plain face, sad eyes. And I realized he wanted to kiss me. I felt it inside me. And when he saw that I felt it, he reddened and looked Away.

Dear Astrid,

ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?? You may not 1) be baptized, 2) call yourself a Christian, and 3) write to me on that ridiculous stationery. You will not sign your letters “born again in Christ”!

Don’t you dare ask me to accept Jesus as my savior, wash my soul in the Blood of the Lamb. Don’t even think of trying to redeem me. I regret NOTHING. No woman with any self-respect would have done less.

The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy’s most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. I’m not quarreling with your choice of issues, only with your intellectually diminished approach. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers.

To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind’s destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race.

Three cheers for Eve.

Mother.

Uncle Ray waited for my move, looking at me in a way that made my heart open like a moonflower — his eyes on my face, my throat, my hair over my shoulders, changing color in the TV lights. I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.

“What does your mother have to say about that?” he asked.

“She says, ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ “

“My kind of woman.”

I didn’t say that she called him Uncle Ernie. Through the screen door, the summer crickets sang. I flicked my hair behind my shoulders, moved my bishop to queen’s knight 3, threatening his knight. I sensed how he looked at my bare arm, the shoulder, my lips. To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful. I had never been beautiful before. I didn’t think it went against Christ. Everybody needed to feel love.

We heard the crunch of Starr’s Torino turning into the yard, car tires in the gravel, earlier than she normally came home. I was disappointed. Ray paid attention to me when she was gone, but when she came home I went back to being just one of the kids.

I heard their headboard smacking the wall, their laughter. And I wondered whether real daughters were jealous of their mothers and fathers, if it made them sick to see their fathers kiss their mothers, squeeze their breasts. I squeezed my own small breast, hot from the sleeping bag, and imagined how it might feel to another hand, imagined having a body like Starr’s. She was almost a different species with her narrow waist, her breasts round as grapefruit, her bottom round like that too. I imagined taking off my clothes and having a man like Uncle Ray look at me the way he looked at her.

I wanted someone to want me that way, touch me the way Uncle Ray did her, like Barry and my mother.

I stroked my hands under my nightgown and felt the different skins against my fingertips — the hair on my legs, the smoothness between my highs, and the slippery, fragrant skin of my private parts. I felt the folds he peak, and thought of rough hands with missing fingers tracing all the secret places.

MY MOTHER sent me a reading list that summer with four hundred books on it, Colette and Chinua Achebe and Mishima, Dostoyevsky and Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. I imagined her lying in bed reciting their names like a rosary, running her tongue over them, round as beads. Sometimes Starr took us to the library. She waited in the car and gave us ten minutes to get our books or she’d leave without us. “I’ve got the only book I need, missy,” she said.

Davey and I grabbed our books like Supermarket Sweep while Peter and Owen wistfully hovered near the library grandpa who read stories to kids. It had been better when Ray was home — he would drop us off, go have a few beers, and pick us up an hour or two later. Then the little boys would listen to the grandpa’s stories as long as he held out.

But now Ray had a job doing finish carpentry in a new subdevelopment.

So I was stuck at the height of summer in the trailer watching Starr knit a gigantic afghan that looked like a rainbow threw up on it. I read, drew. Ray bought me some kid’s watercolors from the drugstore and I started painting.

I stopped trying to persuade my mother to accept Jesus. It was hopeless, she would have to come to it herself. It was God’s will, like Dmitry in The Brothers Karamazov, one of the books from her reading list.

Instead of letters, I sent her drawings and watercolors: Starr in shorts and high heels, watering the geraniums with a hose. Ray drinking a beer, watching the sun set from the porch. The boys wandering the wash in the warm tender nights with flashlights, surprising a horned owl. Ray’s chess set. The way he studied the board, fist under chin. The paloverde trees in the cool of early morning, a rattlesnake lying across a rock at full length.

Each gun had a purpose, like a hammer or a screwdriver. The rifle was for hunting, the Beretta for potentially touchy situations — a bar, a meeting with the ex, a date, what Ray called close-in work. The shotgun was for home protection. “Get behind me, kids!” he’d say in a grandmothery voice, and we’d all run behind him as he demonstrated, spraying the oleanders with buckshot.

And the .38? “Only one reason for a thirty-eight. And that’s to kill your

man.”

I felt like an Israeli girl soldier, in shorts and the hot wind, sighting down the barrel of the rifle, holding the .38 with both hands. It was a strange feeling, him looking at me as I aimed. I found I couldn’t quite lose myself in the target. His eyes split my attention between the C in Coke and my awareness of him watching me.

And I thought, this was what it was like to be beautiful. What my mother felt. The tug of eyes, pulling you back from your flight to the target.

I was in two places at once, not only in my thought, my aim, but my bare feet on the dusty yard, my legs growing stronger, my breasts in the new bra, my long tanned arms, my hair flowing white in the hot wind. He was taking my silence but giving me something in return, a fullness of being recognized. I felt beautiful, but also interrupted. I wasn’t used to being so complicated.

7.

IN NOVEMBER, when the air held blue in the afternoons and the sunlight washed the boulders in gold, I turned fourteen.

There was a cake from Ralph’s Market with a hula girl in a grass skirt and my name written in blue, and they all sang

“Happy Birthday.” The cake had a trick candle that wouldn’t go out, so I didn’t get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.

The last gift was from Ray. I carefully opened the paper, and saw the wood, carved and inlaid in the pattern of an art nouveau moonflower, the cover motif of my mother’s first book. I held my breath and took it out of the paper, a wooden jewelry box. It smelled of new wood. I ran my fingers over the moonflower, thought of Ray cutting the pieces, the sinuous edges, fitting them so perfectly you couldn’t feel the transitions in the woods. He must have done it late at night, when I was asleep. I was afraid to show how much I loved it. So I just said, “Thanks.” But I hoped he could tell.

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.