RON AND CLAIRE were fighting again in their room. I could hear it as I lay in my bed, the rabbit crouching on my wall, his ears erect and trembling. Claire wanted Ron to quit his job, find something to do that didn’t involve cattle mutilations or witchcraft in the Pueblos.
It was rare to hear Ron raise his voice. But he was tired, just back from Russia, he hadn’t expected a fight. Usually it was a home-cooked meal and kisses and clean sheets.
“I’m earning a living. It’s just a job, Claire. Jesus, sometimes I just don’t know what goes on in your head.”
But I could understand him word for word. “What, you think I come off
a fourteen-hour day, jetlagged, at some spoonbending convention in Yakutsk, ready to party? Hey, wow, bring on the bimbos! Maybe you should try getting some work, and remember what it’s like to be wiped out at the end of a day.”
I felt his words burn her flesh like a lash. I tried to hear what she was saying, but her voice faded to a murmur. Claire couldn’t defend herself, she curled up like a leaf under a glass.
Now all I could hear was her crying. She cried the way children do, sobbing, hiccupping, nose running. And the soothing tones of his voice.
I could picture him, taking her in his arms, rocking her against his chest, stroking her hair, and she ‘d let him, that was the worst part of it. And they’d make love, and she’d fall asleep, thinking he was so kind, after all, he must love her. It would be all better. That was how he did it. Hurt her, and then made it all better. I hated him. He came home, upset her, when he was just going to leave her again.
A LETTER CAME in the mail, from my mother. I started to open it when I realized it wasn’t for me. It was addressed to Claire. What was my mother doing writing to Claire? I never told her about Claire. Should I give it to her? I decided I couldn’t take the chance. My mother might say anything. Might threaten her, might lie, or frighten her. I could always say I opened it by accident. I took it into my room, slitted it open.
Dear Claire,
Yes, I think it would be marvelous if you’d visit. It’s been so long since I’ve seen Astrid, I don’t know if I’d recognize her — and I’m always delighted to meet my loyal readers. I will put you on my visitors list – you’ve never been convicted of a felony, have you?
Just teasing.
Your friend, Ingrid.
The idea that they corresponded filled me with a sickening dread. Your friend, Ingrid. She must have written after I’d caught her reading in my room at Christmastime. I felt betrayed, helpless, anxious. I would have confronted her with it, but I’d have had to admit I’d opened her mail. So I tore up the letter and burned it in my wastebasket. Hopefully she would just be depressed that my mother never wrote back, and give up.
IT WAS FEBRUARY, a gray morning so overcast we couldn’t see the Hollywood Hills from our yard. We were going to visit my mother. Claire had set it up. She put on a miniskirt, turtleneck, and tights, all in mahogany brown, frowned in the mirror. “Maybe jeans would be better.”
“No denim,” I said.
The idea of this meeting was almost too much to bear. I could only lose.
My mother could hurt her. Or she could win her over. I didn’t know which was worse. Claire was mine, someone who loved me. Why did my mother have to get in the middle? But that was my mother, she always had to be the center of attention, everything had to be about her.
I looked in the mirror, imagining what my mother would think of me now. The scars on my face were just the start. I’d been through a few things since then. I wouldn’t know how to be with her now, I was too big to hide in her silences. And now I had Claire to worry about.
lIt had been more than two years since I’d last come this way, a very different girl in pink shoes.
We passed through the guard tower. Claire brought a book for my mother, Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald, Claire’s favorite, but the guards wouldn’t let her bring it in.
The jangle of keys, the slam of the gate, walkie-talkies, these were the sounds of visiting my mother.
I saw my mother, waiting while the CO opened the gate. Her hair was long again, forming a pale scarf across the front of her blue dress, down one breast. She hesitated, she was as nervous as I was. So beautiful. She always surprised me with her beauty.
Even when she had just been away for a night, I’d see her and catch my breath. She was thinner than the last time I’d seen her, all the excess flesh had been burned away. Her eyes had become even brighter, I could feel them from the gate. She was very upright, muscular, and tan. She looked less like a Lorelei now, more like an assassin from Blade Runner. She strode up, smiling, but I felt the uncertainty in her hands, stiff on my shoulders.
We looked into each other’s eyes, and I was astonished to find that we were the same height. Her eyes were searching within me, trying to find something to recognize. They made me suddenly shy, embarrassed of my fancy clothes, even of Claire. I was ashamed of the idea that I could escape her, even of wanting to. Now she knew me. She hugged me, and held her hand out to Claire.
I tried to imagine how my mother must be feeling right then, meeting the woman I’d been living with, a woman I liked so much I hadn’t written anything about her. Now my mother could see how beautiful she was, how sensitive, the child’s mouth, the heart-shaped face, the delicacy of her neck, her freshly cut hair.
My mother sat down next to me, put her hand over mine, but it wasn’t so large anymore. Our hands were growing into the same shape. She saw that too, held her palm to mine. She looked older than the last time I saw her, lines etching into her tanned face, around the eyes and thin mouth. Or maybe it was just in comparison to Claire. She was spare, dense, sharp, steel to Claire’s wax.
“You said that in your poem.” A new poem, in Iowa Review.
About a woman turning into a bird, the pain of the new feathers coming
in. “It was exquisite.”
I winced at her old-fashioned, actressy diction. I could imagine my mother mocking her later to her cellblock sisters. But I couldn’t protect Claire now. It was too late.
My mother crossed her legs, tanned and muscular as carved oak, bare under her blue dress, white sneakers. “My daughter says you’re an actress.” She wore no sweater in the cold grayness of the morning. The fog suited her, I smelled the sea on her, although we were a hundred miles from any ocean.
Claire twisted her wedding ring, it was loose on her thin fingers. “To tell you the truth, my career’s a disaster. I botched my last job so badly, I’II probably never work again.”
Why did she always have to tell the truth? I should have told her, certain people should always be lied to.
My mother instinctively felt for the crack in Claire’s personal history, like a rock climber in fog sensing fingerholds in a cliff face. “Nerves?” she said kindly.
Claire leaned closer to my mother, eager to share confidences. “It was a nightmare,” she said, and began to describe the awful day.
Claire was afraid of so many things, she only went thigh-deep into the ocean because she was afraid of being swept under. So why couldn’t she feel the undertow?
“That’s why Astrid and I get along. Scorpio and Pisces understand one another.”
My mother didn’t like that we understood each other, Claire and I. I could tell by the way she was pulling my hair. The crows cawed and flapped their dull, glossy wings. But she smiled at Claire. “Astrid and I never understood each other. Aquarius and Scorpio. She’s so secretive, haven’t you found that? I never knew what she was thinking.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything,” I said.
“She opens up,” Claire said cheerfully. “We talk all the time. I had her chart done. It’s very well balanced. Her name is lucky too.”
“She hasn’t been very lucky so far,” my mother said, almost purring.
“But maybe her luck is changing.” Couldn’t Claire smell the oleanders cooking down, the slight bitter edge of the toxin?
“We just adore her,” Claire said, and for a moment I saw her as my mother saw her. Actressy, naive, ridiculous. No, I wanted to say, stop, don’t judge her based on this. “She’s doing wonderfully well, she’s on the honor roll this year. We’re trying to keep that old grade point average up.”
“Put a pyramid over her desk. They say it improves memory,” she said with a straight face.
“My memory’s fine,” I said.
But Claire was intrigued. Already my mother had found a weak spot, and I was sure would soon find more. And Claire didn’t realize for a moment that my mother was jerking her chain. Such innocence. “A pyramid. I hadn’t thought of that. I practice feng shui, though. You know, where you put the furniture and all.” Claire beamed, thinking my mother was a kindred soul, rearranging the furniture for good energy, talking to houseplants.
Her bright blue assassin’s eyes smiled at Claire. I knew what she was thinking.
Can’t you see what an idiot this woman is, Astrid? How could you prefer her to me?
Overhead, a crow stared down at me with its soulless gaze, squawked in a voice that was almost human, as if it was trying to tell me something. “Piss off,” I said. I was getting as bad as Claire, listening to birds.
l
Claire pressed her palm to her forehead, like she was taking her temperature. My mother took Claire’s other thin hand between her large ones. My mother was talking without stopping, low, reasonable, I’d seen her hypnotize a cat this way. Claire was upset. What was she telling her? I didn’t care what my mother’s game was. Her time was up. We were leaving, she was staying. She couldn’t screw this up for me, no matter what she said.
They both looked up as I rejoined them. My mother glared at me, then veiled it with a smile, patted Claire’s hand. “You just remember what I told you.”
Claire said nothing. Serious now. All her giggles had vanished, her pleasure at finding another person who quoted Shakespeare.
My mother had taken all the electricity away, the liveliness, the charm. She scooped her out, the way the Chinese used to cut open the skull of a living monkey and eat its brains with a spoon.
“What did you tell her?”
My mother leaned back on the bench, folding her arms behind her head.
Yawned luxuriously, like a cat. “I hear she’s having trouble with her husband.” She smiled, sensually, rubbing the blond down on her forearms.
“It’s not you, is it? I know you have an attraction to older men.”
“No, it’s not me.” She couldn’t play with me the way she played with Claire. “You stay out of it.”
I’d never dared speak to her that way before. If she were not stuck here at Frontera, I would never have had the nerve. But I would be leaving and she would be staying, and in that fact there was a strength I would never have found if she were out.
She gave me a smile of slow irony. “Your mommy just wants to help, precious,” she said, licking her words like a cat lapping cream. “I have to do what I can for my new friend.”
“Just leave her alone.”
“Oh, but it’s fun,” my mother said, bored with the pretense. She always preferred to bring me behind the scenes. “Easy, but fun. Like drowning kittens. And in my current situation, I have to take my fun where I can.
What I want to know is, how could you stand to live with Poor Claire? Did you know there was an entire order, the Poor Claires? I would imagine it’s a terrible bore. Keeping up the old grade point average and whatnot.
Pathetic.”
“She’s a genuinely nice person,” I said, turning away from her. “You wouldn’t know about that.”
My mother snorted. “God forbid, the nice disease. I would have thought you’d outgrown fairy tales.”
I kept my back to her. “Don’t screw it up for me.”
“Who, me?” My mother was laughing at me. “What could I do? I’m a poor prisoner. A little bird with a broken wing.”
I turned around. “You don’t know what it’s been like.” I bent over her, one knee on the bench beside her. “If you love me, you’ll help me.” She smiled, slow and treacherous. “Help you, darling? I’d rather see you in the worst kind of foster hell than with a woman like that.”
She grabbed my wrist, forcing me to look at her. Now she was dead serious.
What was under the games was pure will. I was terrified to struggle. “What are you going to learn from a woman like that?” she said. “How to pine artistically? Twenty-seven names for tears?” A guard made a motion toward us, and she quickly dropped my wrist.
She stood and kissed me on the cheek, embraced me lightly. We were the same height but I could feel how strong she was, she was like the cables that held up bridges. She hissed in my ear, “All I can say is, keep your bags packed.”
CLAIRE STARED out at the road. A tear slipped from her overfilled eyes.
Twenty-seven names for tears. But no, that wasn’t my thought. I refused to be brainwashed. This was Claire.
A tear rolled down her cheek, and I brushed it away with the back of my hand. “What did she say to you?”
Claire shook her head, sighed. She started the windshield wipers, though it was only a mist, turned them off when they started squeaking on the dry glass. “She said I was right about Ron. That he was having an affair. I knew it anyway. She just confirmed it.”
“How would she know,” I said angrily. “For God’s sake, Claire, she just met you.”
“All the signs are there.” She sniffled, wiped her nose on her hand. “I just didn’t want to see them.”
I SAT AT MY DESK under the ridiculous pyramid, drawing my self-portrait, looking in a hand mirror. I was doing it in pen, not glancing down, trying not to lift the pen from the paper. One line. The squarish jaw, the fat unsmiling lips, the round reproachful eyes. Broad Danish nose, mane of pale hair. I drew myself until I could make a good likeness even with my eyes closed, until I’d memorized the pattern of the movement in my hand.
in my arm, the gesture of my face, until I could see my face on the wall. I’m not you, Mother. I’m not.
lShe was soaking in the bathtub with her lavender oil and a chunk of amethyst, trying to soothe her jagged edges. Ron was supposed to be home on Friday, but something came up.
His trips home were handholds for her, so she could swing from one square on the calendar to the next. When he said he was going to come home and didn’t, she swung forward and grasped thin air, fell.
I intercepted a letter from prison from my mother to Claire. In it, my mother advised a love potion to put in his food, but everything in the formula she sent looked poisonous to me. I drew a picture over her letter, a series of serpentine curves speared by an angle, put it in a new envelope and sent it back to her.
In the living room, Claire played her Leonard Cohen. Suzanne taking her down to the place by the river.
I kept drawing my face.
Claire brought out the jewelry she kept in the freezer and dumped it onto her bed, a pirate’s treasure, deliciously icy. Freezing strands of green jade beads with jeweled clasps, a pendant of amber enclosing a fossilized fern. I pressed it, cold, to my cheek. I draped an antique crystal bracelet down the part in my hair, let it lap on my forehead like a cool tongue.
“That was my great-aunt Priscilla’s,” Claire said. “She wore it to her presentation ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, just before the Great War.” She lay on her back in her underwear, her hair dark with sweat, a smoky topaz bracelet across her forehead intersected by an intricate gold chain that came to rest on the tip of her nose. She was painfully thin, with sharp hipbones and ribs stark as a carved wooden Christ. I could see her beauty mark above the line of her panties. “She was a field nurse at Ypres. A very brave woman.”
Every bracelet, every bead, had a story. I plucked an onyx ring from the pile between us on the bed, rectangular, its black slick surface pierced by a tiny diamond. I slipped it on, but it was tiny, only fit my smallest finger, above the knuckle. “Whose was this?” I held it out so she could see it without moving her head.
“Great-grandmother Matilde. A quintessential Parisienne.”
Its owner dead a hundred years, perhaps, but still she made me feel large and ill bred. I imagined jet-black hair, curls, a sharp tongue. Her black eyes would have caught my least awkwardness. She would have disapproved of me, my gawky arms and legs, I would have been too large for her little chairs and tiny gold-rimmed porcelain cups, a moose among antelope. I gave it to Claire, who slipped it right on.
The garnet choker, icy around my neck, was a wedding present from her mill-owning Manchester great-grandfather to his wife, Beatrice. The gold jaguar with emerald eyes I balanced on my knee was brought back from Brazil in the twenties by her father’s aunt Geraldine Woods, who danced with Isadora Duncan. I was wearing Claire’s family album. Maternal grandmothers and paternal great-aunts, women in emerald taffeta, velvet and garnets. Time, place, and personality locked into stone and silver filigree.
In comparison to this, my past was smoke, a story my mother once told me and later denied.
Claire dripped a gold necklace over one closed eye socket, jade beads in the other. She spoke carefully, nothing slid off.
“They used to bury people like this. Mouths full of jewels and a gold coin over each eye. Fare for the ferryman.” She drizzled her coral necklace into the well of her navel, and her pearl double strand, between her breasts.
After a minute, she picked up the pearls, opened her mouth and let the strand drop in, closed her lips over the shiny eggs. Her mother had given her the pearls when she married, though she didn’t want her to marry a Jew.
When Claire told me, she expected me to be horrified, but I’d lived with Marvel Turlock, Amelia Ramos. Prejudice was hardly a surprise. The only thing I wondered was why would she give her pearls.
Claire lay still, pretending to be dead. A jeweled corpse in her pink lace lingerie, covered with a fine drizzle of sweat. I wasn’t sure I liked this new game. Through the French doors, in the foot of space showing under the blinds, I could see the garden, left wild this spring. Claire didn’t garden anymore, no pruning and weeding under her Chinese peaked hat.
Ron was away again, twice in one month, Out combing the world for what was most bizarre, racking up frequent flier miles. If he wanted to see something weird and uncanny, he should have just walked into his own bedroom and seen his wife lying on the bed in her pink lace panties and bra, covered in jade and pearls, pretending she was dead. Underneath the bed, the voodoo box, magnets and clippers and pens, sealed Polaroid photographs, conjured him
Suddenly, she was gagging on the pearls. She sat up, retching. The jewels fell from her body. She pulled the strand of pearls from her mouth, catching it in her hand. She was so pale, her mouth seemed unnaturally red by comparison, and she had dark circles under her eyes. She slumped over the cluster of lustrous eggs, wet with spit, on the edge of the bed with her back to me, her spine threaded like jade.
She reached back for my hand, her nails dirty, tips small and sensitive as a child’s, the rings incongruous as gumball machine prizes. I took her hand.
She brought my hand around to her face, pressing its back against her wet cheek. “Ron’ll be back soon,” I tried to reassure her.
She nodded, head heavy on her slender neck, like one of her drooping tulips, the knobs of her spine like a diamondback’s rattle.
She was all skin and nerves, no substance, no weight. She was her own skin kite, stretched before dry violent winds.
Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren’t worth as much. It was the emerald that didn’t break that was the really valuable thing.
I handed her the ice-blue stone, the color of my mother’s eyes. She put it on her forefinger, where it hung like a doorknob on a rope. She gazed into it. “This belonged to my mother. My father got it for her to celebrate an around-the-world cruise.” She took it off. “It was too big for her too.”
Claire lay down on her back so she could look at me, one hand behind her head. She was very beautiful, even now, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, wet at the hairline, her dark eyebrows arched and glossy, her small breasts curved in pink lace.
“If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” she asked.
I thought of my suicides, the way I would run my death through my fingers like jet beads. “I wouldn’t.” She laced an Indian silver necklace onto her flat stomach, strands of hairlike tubes making metal into a fluid like mercury. “Well, say you wanted to.”
“It’s against my religion.” Sweat trickled down between my breasts, pooled in my navel.
“What religion is that?”
“I’m a survivalist.”
“Just say you did. Say you were very old and had a horrible incurable cancer.”
“I’d get lots of Demerol and wait it out.” I was not going to discuss suicide with Claire. It was on my mother’s list of antisocial acts. I wasn’t going to tell her the surest way, the bone cancer boy’s plan, injecting an air bubble into your vein and letting it move through your blood like a pearl. I was sure her aunt Priscilla used that once or twice on the battlefield when the morphine ran out. Then there was a load of cyanide at the back of the tongue, the way they did it to cats. It was very fast. When you committed suicide, you didn’t want something slow. Some-one could walk in, someone could save you.
“You know how I’d do it?”
She was pulling me down that road and I wasn’t going to go there.
“Let’s go to the beach, okay? It’s so hot, it’s making us crazy.”
She didn’t even hear me. Her eyes looked dreamy, like someone in love.
“I’d gas myself. That’s the way. They say it’s just like going to sleep.” She reminded me of a woman lying down in snow. Just lying down for a little while, she was so tired. She’d been walking so long, she just wanted to rest, and it wasn’t as cold as she thought. She was so sleepy. It was the surrender she wanted. To stop fighting the storm and the enveloping night, to lie down in whiteness and sleep. I understood.
I had to wake her up. Slap her face, march her around, feed her black coffee. I told her about the Japanese sailor adrift for four days when he killed himself. “They found him twenty minutes later. He was still warm.”
l”But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?” What answer could I give her? I’d been doing it for years. She was my life raft, my turtle. I lay down, put my head on her shoulder. She smelled of sweat and L’Air du Temps, but now dusty blue, as if her melancholy had stained the perfume.
“Anything can happen,” I said.
She kissed me on the mouth. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and I was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. I was confused, but not unwilling. I would have let her do anything to me.
“I feel so unreal,” she said.
“If only I had a child,” she said.
I felt a twang on a rarely played string. I was well aware I was the instead-baby, a stand-in for what she really wanted. If she had a baby, she wouldn’t need me. But a baby was out of the question. She was so thin, she was starving herself. I’d caught her vomiting after we ate.
“I was pregnant once, at Yale. It never occurred to me that was the only baby I’d ever have.”
I plucked the heart off her back. Her thinness belied her spoken desire. She’d lost so much weight she could wear my clothes now. She did when I was at school.
I came home sometimes and certain outfits were warm, smelling of L’Air du Temps.
But she was trying on the wrong person’s clothes. I wasn’t anyone she’d want to be. She was too fragile to be me, it would crush her, like the pressure of a deep wall dive.
Mostly she lay here like this, thinking about Ron, when would he come home, was there another woman? Worrying about luck and evil influences, while wearing talismans of her family past, women who did something with their lives, made something of themselves, or at least got dressed every day, women who never kissed a sixteen-year-old foster daughter because they felt unreal.
If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away. I didn’t need to put mirrors on the roof to know that.
Early one morning, when Claire was still sleeping, I heard him on the phone in the living room. He was talking to a woman, I sensed it immediately when I came in, the way he smiled as he talked in his striped pajama bottoms — wrapping the phone cord around his smooth fingers. He laughed at something she said. “Flounder. Whatever. Cod.”
He started when he saw me in the doorway. The blood bleached out of his rosy cheeks, then returned, deeper. He ran his hand through his hair so that the paler strips sprang back under his touch. He talked a bit more, arrangements, flights, hotels, he scribbled on a scrap of paper in his open briefcase. I didn’t move. He hung up the phone.
“Take Claire with you,” I said.
“I’d be working all the time. You know Claire. She’d sit in the hotel and cook herself into some morbid fantasy. It’d be a nightmare.”
It would be a disaster to bring Claire along if he couldn’t spend time with her. She couldn’t just wander around by herself, see the sights. She’d sit in the hotel and wonder what he was doing, which woman it was. Torturing herself.
His duty was here. “She told me how she would kill herself if she wanted to.”
He brushed back his hair, playing for time. “What did she say?”
“She said she’d gas herself.”
He sat down, closed his eyes, put his hands over them, the smooth fingertips meeting over his nose. Suddenly I felt sorry for him too. I only wanted to get his attention, make him realize he couldn’t simply fly off and pretend everything was normal around her. He couldn’t leave her all to me.
“Do you think she’s just talking?” he asked, fear in his hazel eyes.
He was asking me? He was the one with the answers. I stared at him helplessly, horrified that he didn’t know whether or not Claire would kill herself. He was her husband. Who was I, some kid they’d taken in.
I couldn’t help but picture Claire lying on the bed, clad in her jewels, pearls welled in her mouth. What she had given up to be with Ron. The way she cried at night, arms pressed tight around her, bent almost double, like a person with stomach cramps.
“I know it hasn’t been easy for you.” He put his hand on my shoulder.
Smooth. There was heat in his hand, it warmed my whole shoulder. For a moment I wondered what it would feel like to make love to Ron. His bare chest so close I could stroke it, the gray hairs, the quarter-sized nipples. He smelled good, Monsieur Givenchy. His voice, not too deep, sandy and calming. But then I remembered, this was the man who was causing all the problems, who didn’t know how to love Claire. He was cheating on her, I could feel it in his body. He had the world, all Claire had was him. But I couldn’t help liking his hand on my shoulder, the look in his eyes. Trying not to react to his masculine presence, solidity in his blue pajama bottoms.
She’s a young woman, he told Claire. It was just part of his act, the appreciation thing.
IN JUNE, true to his promise, Ron rented a cabin in Oregon. No phone, no electricity, he even left his computer at home. In the forests of the Cascades, we fished in high green rubber boots to our waists.
Claire pored over bird books, wildflower guides, intent on naming, as if the names gave life to the forms.
When she identified one, she was as proud as if she herself created the meadowlark, the maidenhair fern.
I saw how he looked at me when I sketched by the riverbank, but did nothing to encourage it. I could live without Ron, but not without Claire.
When it rained, he and Claire walked together down the trails cushioned in pine needles, the ferns smelling like licorice. At night we played Monopoly and Scrabble, three-handed blackjack, charades. I could see what it was like when they were first together. His admiration for her. That’s what she needed to remember, how he was the one who wanted her.
I’d never spent so much time with Ron before. It started to irritate me, how he was always the one running the show. When he got up, he woke me and Claire up. But when we got up first, we crept around, because Ron was still sleeping. A man’s world. I’d never had a father and now I didn’t want one.
But Claire looked healthy again. She didn’t throw up anymore. Her coloring grew vivid.
“It’s so alive,” Claire said. “Throw it back, Astrid.”
“Are you kidding? Her first fish? Bop him,” he said, handing me a hammer. “On the head.”
The fish flopped on the grass, trying to jump back into the water.
“Quick, or we’ll lose him.”
“Astrid, don’t.” Claire looked at me with her tenderest wildflower expression.
I took the hammer and whacked the fish in the head. Claire turned away.
I knew what she was thinking, that I was siding with Ron, with the world and its harshness. But I wanted that fish. I took out the hook and held it up, and Ron took a picture of me like that. Claire wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the afternoon, but I felt like a real kid, and I didn’t want to feel guilty about it.
Ron’s friends didn’t know how to talk to me. The women ignored me and the men were too interested, they stood too close, they leaned in doorways and told me I was beautiful, was I thinking of acting?
I stayed close to Claire, but it made me nervous to watch her wait on these people. Ron said not to bother, they could order pizza, bring in El Pollo Loco, but Claire said she could never serve guests out of cardboard containers. She didn’t get it. They didn’t see themselves as her guests. To them she was just a wife, an out-of-work actress, a drudge. There were so many pretty women that summer, in sundresses and bikini tops, sarongs, I knew she was trying to figure out which one was Ron’s Circe.
Finally, she went on Prozac, but it gave her too much energy. She couldn’t sit down, and she started to drink to even out the effects. Ron didn’t like it because she said things that she thought were funny but nobody else laughed. She was like a woman in a film that was badly dubbed, either too fast or too slow. She bungled the punch lines.
“I hate pointed noses. Your mother has Garbo’s nose, did you ever notice that? If I had mine done, I’d want one like that.”
She wasn’t talking about noses. Claire was just tired of seeing her own face in the mirror, it was a code of her failings. There was something missing, but it wasn’t what she thought.
“Small teeth mean bad luck,” she said, showing them to me in the mirror. “Short life.” Her teeth were barley beads, pearllike and gleaming.
As we got into December, Claire cheered up. She loved the holidays.
She wanted to do everything. “Let’s have a perfect Christmas,” she said.
She bought me a red velvet dress with a white lace collar and cuffs at Jessica McClintock in Beverly Hills. Perfect, she said.
It scared me when she said perfect. Perfect was always too much to ask.
My present was small compared with the ones Ron bought her. “Here, open something.”
“I don’t want anything,” she said from under her washcloth soaked in vinegar.
“I made it for you.”
She pushed aside the washcloth, and despite the pain in her temples, slipped off the raffia ties, and opened the marbled paper wrapping I had made.
Inside was a portrait of her, in a round wooden frame. She started to cry, then ran to the bathroom and threw up. I could hear her gagging. I picked up the picture, in charcoal, traced her high rounded forehead, the slope of fine bones, the sharp chin, arched brows.
“Claire?” I said through the bathroom door.
I heard water running and tried the door. It wasn’t locked.
She sat on the edge of the tub in her red plaid bathrobe, pale as winter, hand over her mouth, eyes turned toward the windows. She was blinking back tears and wouldn’t look at me. She seemed to be collapsing at the center, one arm wrapped around her waist, as if keeping herself from breaking in two.
I didn’t know what to do when she was like this.
“I should never drink.” She washed her mouth out in the sink, cupping water in her palm. “It just makes things worse.” She wiped her hands and face on a towel, took my hand. “Now I’ve ruined your Christmas.”
The woman on the radio sang “Ave Maria.” “What does Ave mean?”
“Bird,” she said.
The woman’s voice was a bird, flying in a hot wind, battered by the effort. I painted it in the fire, black.
WHEN RON came home from New Orleans, Claire didn’t get up from the couch. She didn’t clean up, shop, cook, change the sheets, put on lipstick, or try to make it better. She lay in her red bathrobe on the couch, sherry bottle right by her hand, she’d been sipping steadily all day long, eating cinnamon toast and leaving the crusts, listening to opera. That’s what she craved.
Hysterical loves and inevitable betrayals. The women all ended up stabbing themselves, drinking poison, bitten by snakes.
hexafu 