WEEKS WENT BY, and there was no call from Susan to let me know when I would see my mother. I sat by the river’s edge, watching the white egrets and brown wading birds fish in the current. It was my graduation day over at Marshall High School, but I saw no reason to attend. Even if she were out, my mother would never have come.
Ceremonies not of her own invention didn’t interest her. I would rather just let it pass quietly, like a middle-aged woman’s birthday.
The truth was, I was scared, so scared I was afraid to even mention it, like the morning I did the acid. It was a fear that could open its mouth and swallow me whole, like a hammerhead shark in five feet of water. I didn’t know what happened now. I wasn’t headed to Yale or art school, I was going nowhere. I was painting license plate frames, I was sleeping with a thief, he said I could move in with him anytime. Maybe I’d learn to pick locks, hijack a truck. Why should my mother have a monopoly on crime?
I sat by the water, watching it flow, and the egrets preen, their button eyes, thinking about what Mr. Delgado had said in our last class. He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn’t know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.
Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother’s totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way up-river, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox. There was a swan in it, a white wooden swan with long black nares, like the swan on Claire’s frosted shower doors. I sat on the swan and made tinkle for Annie.
And Klaus, the silhouette that was my father. We are larger than biography. Where did that leave me? I wanted to know how they met, fell in love, why they split up. Their time together was a battleground full of white stones, grass grown over the trenches, a war I lost everything in and had no way to know what happened. I wanted to know about our traveling years, why we could never go home.
Not a pale, arctic morning like my mother’s eyes, this blue was tender, warm, merciful, without white, pure chroma, a Raphael sky.
I heard someone’s steps coming toward me. It was Yvonne. Her heavy tread, long hair like a sheet of water. I lay back down. She sat next to me.
“Lie down, look at this great sky.”
She lay down next to me, her hands folded across her stomach the way she did when she was pregnant, though the baby was gone. She was quiet, smaller than usual, like a leaf shrinking. A flight of pigeons raced across the rich curved surface of the sky, their wings beating white and gray in unison, like a semaphore. I wondered if they knew where they were going when they flew like that.
I squeezed her hand. It was like holding my own hand. Her lips were pouty, chapped. It was like we were floating here in the sky, cut off from future and past. Why couldn’t that be enough.
A flight of pigeons should be enough. Something without a story.
Maybe I should set aside my broken string of beads, my shoeboxes of memories. No matter how much I dug, it was only a story, and not enough.
Why couldn’t it just be a heron. No story, just a bird with long thin legs.
If I could just stop time. The river and the sky.
“You ever think of killing yourself?” Yvonne said.
“Some people say that when you come back, you pick up just where you left off.” I took Yvonne’s arm in mine. Her skin was so soft. Her T-shirt smelled of despair, like metal and rain.
“I thought it was your graduation today, ese,” she said.
“What’s the point,” I said. “Marching across the stage like ducks in a shooting gallery.”
Yvonne sighed. “If I was you, I’d be proud.”
I smiled. “If you were me, you’d be me. Whoever the hell that is.” Mrs. Luanne Davis suggested applying to City College, I could transfer anytime, but I’d already lost faith. A future wasn’t something I could forge by myself out of all these broken pieces. No mother to guide me.
“So funny, you know,” Yvonne said. “I was sure I was going to hate you. When you came, I thought, who needs this gringa, listen to her, who she thinks she is, Princess Diana? That’s what I say to Niki. This is all we need, girlfriend. But now, you know, we did. Need you.”
I squeezed her hand. I had Yvonne, I had Niki. I had this Raphael sky. I had five hundred dollars and an aquamarine from a dead woman and a future in salvage. What more could a girl want.
“Display,” was Rena’s new catchword. “We have to have display.” Our dinette set already went, striped and varnished. She got four hundred dollars for it, gave me a hundred. She said I could stay as long as I wanted, pay room and board like Niki. She meant it as a compliment, but it scared me to death.
At the Fairfax High swap meet, we had a blue plastic tarp stretched over our booth, so the ladies could come in and look at our clothes without having sunstroke. They were like fish, nibbling along the reef, and we were the morays, waiting patiently for them to come closer.
“Benito wants me to move in,” Yvonne said when Rena was busy with a customer, adjusting a hat on the woman, telling her how great it looked.
“You’re not going to,” Niki said.
Yvonne smiled dreamily.
She was in love again. I saw no reason to dissuade her. These days, I had given up trying to understand what was right or wrong, what mattered or didn’t. “He seems like a nice guy,” I said.
“How many people ask you to come share their life?” Yvonne said.
“People who want a steady screw,” Niki said. “Laundry and dishes.” I shared a mug of Russian Sports Mix with Yvonne, a weak brew of vodka and Gatorade that Rena drank all day long.
Rena brought a sunburned woman over to meet me, hoisted the striped
American Tourister hardsider onto the folding table.
“This is our artist,” Rena said, lighting one of her black Sobranies.
“Astrid Magnussen. You remember name. Someday that suitcase worth millions.”
Rena handed me a permanent marker with a flourish, and I signed my name along the bottom edge of the suitcase. Sometimes being with Rena was like doing acid. The artist. The Buddhist book I’d found on trash day said you accrued virtue just by doing a good job with whatever you were doing, completely applying yourself to the task at hand. I looked at the zebra bar and barstools, the suitcase disappearing with the sunburned woman. They looked good. I liked making them. Maybe if that was all I did my entire life, wasn’t that good enough? The Buddhists thought it shouldn’t matter whether it’s contact paper or Zen calligraphy, brain surgery or literature. In the Tao, they were of equal value, if they were done in the same spirit.
Niki finished her mug of Gatorade cocktail, made a face, poured some more while Rena had her hands full. “The things we do for a high.”
“When are you going?” I asked Yvonne.
“Tomorrow,” she whispered, half-hiding behind her curtain of smooth hair.
I stroked her hair back with my hand, tucked it behind her small, multipierced ear. She looked up at me and smiled, and I hugged her. She burst into tears. “I don’t know, Astrid, do you think I should? You always know what to do.”
I laughed, caught unaware. I squatted down by her seat on a rickety director’s chair. “Me? I know less than nothing.”
“I thought you didn’t lie,” she said, smiling, holding her hand in front of her mouth, a habit to conceal her bad teeth. Maybe Benito would marry her.
Maybe he would take her to the dentist. Maybe he would hold her in the night and love her. Who was to say he wouldn’t?
“I’m going to miss you,” I said.
She nodded, couldn’t talk, crying while she was smiling. “God, I must look like such a mess.” She swiped at her mascara that was running down her cheeks.
her cheeks.
“You look like Miss America,” I said, hugging her. It was what women
said. “You know, when they put the crown on? And she’s crying and laughing and taking her walk.”
That made her laugh. She liked Miss America. We watched it and got stoned and she took some dusty silk flowers Rena had lying around and walked up and down the living room, waving the mechanical beauty queen
“If we get married, you can be maid of honor,” she said.
I saw the cake in her eyes, the little bride and groom on top, the icing like lace, layer after layer, and a dress like the cake, white flowers glued to the car and everybody honking as they drove away.
“T’ll be there,” I said. Imagining the wedding party, not a soul over eighteen, each one planning a life along the course of the lyrics of popular songs. It made me sad to think of it.
“You’ll get back together with your boyfriend,” she said, as if to soften the blow. “Don’t worry. He’ll wait for you.”
“Sure,” I said. But I knew, nobody waited for anybody.
THE NEXT NIGHT, Yvonne packed a few clothes, her horse, and her radio, but she left the picture of the TV actor in his frame on the dresser.
Rena gave her some money, rolled up in a rubber band. We all waited on the front porch with her until Benito came by in his primer-gray Cutlass.
Then she was gone.
But in the front yard, the big oleander bloomed like a wedding bouquet, a sky full of pinwheel stars. It made me think of my mother.There was still no call from Susan. Many times, I’d wanted to call her and demand a meeting. But I knew better. This was a chess game. First the urgency, then the waiting. I would not run down the street after her, begging. I would develop my pieces and secure my defenses.
I woke up very early now, to catch a few breaths of cool air before the heat set in. I stood on the porch and gazed at the giant oleander. It was old, it had a trunk like a tree. You just had to roast a marshmallow on one twig and you were dead. She’d boiled pounds of it to make the brew of Barry’s death. I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn’t they just be bitter? They weren’t like rattlesnakes, they didn’t even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn’t want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn’t a source of poison, but just another victim.
By eight it was already too hot to be outside. I went back inside to make Tasha’s lunch. She was the new girl in Yvonne’s bed, thirteen, going to King Junior High, D track, summer term. Grave, silent, she had a vertical scar on her upper lip just healing. She flinched if people moved too fast near her.
“You’ll do great,” I said, making her celery with peanut butter in the creases and a Granny Smith apple. “I’ll be watching.”
I drove her to school in Niki’s truck, let her off in front of Thomas Starr King Junior High, watched her go in scared and small, her backpack hanging with key chains. I felt helpless to prevent her life from taking its likely direction. Could a person save another person? She turned to wave at me. I waved back. I didn’t drive off until she was inside.
Dear Astrid,
It’s been six years today. Six years since I walked through the gates of this peculiar finishing school. Like Dante: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. / Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura. / Che la diritta via era smarrita. The third day over 110. Yesterday an inmate slit another woman’s throat with a bent can. Lydia tore up a poem I wrote about a man I saw once, a snake tattoo disappearing into his jeans. I made her tape it together again, but you can’t imagine the strain. Aside from you, I think this is the longest relationship I’ve ever had. She’s sure I love her, though it’s nothing of the kind. She adores those poems of mine that refer to her, thinks it’s a public declaration.
Love. I would ban the word from the vocabulary. Such imprecision. Love, which love, what love? Sentiment, fantasy, longing, lust? Obsession, devouring need? Perhaps the only love that is accurate without qualification is the love of a very young child. Afterward, she too becomes a person, and thus compromised. “Do you love me?” you asked in the dark of your narrow bed. “Do you love me Mommy?”
Love is a bedtime story, a teddy bear, familiar, one eye missing.
“Do you love me, carita?” Lydia says, twisting my arm, forcing my face into the rough horsehair blanket, biting my neck. “Say it, you bitch.”
Love is a toy, a token, a scented handkerchief.
“Tell me you love me,” Barry said.
“I love you,” I said. “I love you, I love you.”
Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.
Lydia lies on her side on my bunk, the curve of her hip the crest of a wave in shallow water, turquoise, Playa del Carmen, Martinique. Leafing through a new Celebridades. I bought her a subscription. She says it makes her feel part of the world. I can’t see getting excited about movies I won’t see, political issues of the day fail to move me, they have nothing to say within the deep prison stillness.
Time has taken on an utterly different quality for me. What difference does a year make? In a perverse way, I pity the women who are still a part of time, trapped by it, how many months, how many days. I have been cut free, I move among centuries. Writers send me books — Joseph Brodsky, Marianne Moore, Pound. I think maybe I will study Chinese.
“You ever go to Guanajuato?” Lydia asks. “All the big stars going there now.”
Guanajuato, Astrid. Do you remember? I know you do. We went with Alejandro the painter, as distinguished from Alejandro the poet. From San Miguel. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to determine the quality of the poet’s oeuvre, but Alejandro the painter was very bad indeed. He should not have created at all.
He should have simply sat on a stool and charged one to look at him. And so shy, he could never look in my eyes until after he’d finished speaking. Instead, he’d talk to my hand, the arch of my foot, the curve of my calf. Only after he had stopped could he look into my eyes. He trembled when we made love, the faint smell of geraniums.
But he was never shy with you, was he? You had such long conversations – conspiring, head to head. I felt excluded. He was the one who taught you to draw. He would draw for you, and then you would draw after him. La mesa, la botilla, las mujeres. I tried to teach you poetry, but you were always so obstinate. Why would you never learn anything from me?
I wish we’d never left Guanajuato.
Mother.
Alejandro the painter. Watching the line flow from his fingers, the movements of his arm. Was he a bad painter? It never occurred to me, as it never occurred to me that she could have felt excluded. She was beautiful there, she wore a white dress, and the buildings were ochre and yellow, her sandals crisscrossed like a Roman’s up her leg. I traced the white X’s when she took them off.
It was a strange room, ochre, taller than it was square. She liked it, said there was room to think. And the bands of mariachis competed in the street below, the sound of concerts every night, from our beds under the netting.
“So?” Rena said. “Is she getting out?””No,” I said. Driving up from San Miguel de Allende in his toy-sized Citroën car, his shirt very white against his copper skin. Was she admitting she made a mistake? If only she could admit it. Confess. I might lie for her then, talk to her lawyer, take the stand and swear beyond a shadow of a doubt that she never. Perhaps this was as close as she would get to admitting a thing.
I wished we had stayed in Guanajuato too.
THEN NIKI moved out. She was joining a Toronto band, it was one of Werner’s. “Come with me,” she said as she loaded her pickup. I handed her a suitcase, zebra-striped. We both smiled, checked each other for tears. She left me some addresses and phone numbers, but I knew I wouldn’t be using them. I had to face this, that people left and you didn’t see them again.
Within a week, Rena moved two new girls into Niki’s room, Shana and Raquel, twelve and fourteen. Shana had epilepsy, and Raquel couldn’t read, it was her second time in seventh grade. More broken children for Rena Grushenka’s discount salvage yard.
SEPTEMBER came with its skirts of fire. Fire up on the Angeles Crest.
Fire in Malibu, Altadena. Fire all along the San Gabriels, in the San Gorgonio wilderness, fire was a flaming hoop the city would have to jump through to reach the blues of October. In Frogtown, we had three shootings in one week — a holdup at the ARCO station, a lost motorist caught on a dead-end street in a Van Gogh midnight, a woman shot by her out-of-work electrician husband during a domestic dispute.
It was in the furnace of oleander time that Susan finally called. “I had a trial,” she explained. “But we’re back on track. I’ve scheduled you a visit, day after tomorrow.”
In the visitors yard, we sat at an orange picnic table under the shade structure, drinking cold cans of soda from the pop machine, wiping them across our foreheads, pressing them to our cheeks. Waiting for my mother. Sweat dripped between my breasts, down my back.
My mother waited for the CO to unlock the gate. She still looked wonderful, thin and wiry, her pale hair twisted up in the back with a pencil stuck in it. A year and a half. I stood up. She walked over to us, warily, squinting in the sun, wisps of her hair blowing in the wind like smoke. Her tanned skin was more lined since I’d seen her last. She was getting that leathery look, like a white settler in Kenya. But she hadn’t changed as much as I had.
She stopped when she got under the overhang, and I didn’t move, I wanted her to see who I was now. My acid green shirt with the industrial zipper, my eyes ringed in heavy black shadow and liner, my ears with their octave of earrings. My woman’s legs in a swap meet skirt, that Sergei loved to put over his shoulders, my hips, my full breasts. High wedgie shoes borrowed from Rena for the occasion. Not the pink girl with the prom shoes, not the rich orphan. I was Rena’s girl now. I could pass for any girl heading to just where my mother was. But not the soft girl, the check kiter.
She would not take anything from me. Not anymore.
For the first time when I visited, she didn’t smile. I could see shock on her face, and I was glad of it. Her lawyer’s assistant looked between the two of us, uninterested, then got up and went inside the cooler concrete of the visitors shelter, leaving us alone.
My mother reached out and took my hand. I let her. “When I get out, I’ll make it up to you,” she said. “Even in two or three years, you’ll still need a mother, won’t you?”
She was holding my hand, she was a foot away from me. I stared at her.
It was as if some alien was speaking through her. What kind of a routine was this?
“Who said you’re getting out?” I said.
My mother dropped my hand, stepped back a pace. The look in her eyes faded the aquamarine to robin’s egg.
“I just said I’d talk to you. I didn’t say I’d do it. I’ve got a deal to make.”
Now robin’s egg turned to ash.
“What deal?” she asked, leaning against a post, her arms folded across the front of her denim dress, the very same dress she wore when I saw her last, now two shades lighter blue.
“A trade,” I said.
She sat gracefully, her legs to one side, like a girl in a meadow. I was larger than her now, but not as graceful, not beautiful, but present, solid as a hunk of marble before it’s been carved.
“Here’s the deal,” I said. “There are certain things I want to know. You tell me, and I’ll do what you want me to do.”
“Or what.”
“Or I tell the truth and you can rot in here till you die,”
“Susan can discredit your testimony any number of ways.”
“You need me,” I said. “You know it. Whatever she says.”
“I hate this look, by the way,” she said. “You’re a Sunset Boulevard motel, a fifteen-dollar blow job in a parked car.”
“I’m the one who can tell them it was Barry’s paranoid fixation. That he hounded you. I can say he had threatened to commit suicide, fake it to look like you did it, to punish you for leaving him.” Her blurred features behind the chicken-wire glass. “T’m the one who knows how fucked up you were at Sybil Brand. When I came to see you that day, you didn’t even recognize me.” It still made me sick to think of it.
She kicked off her two-hole tennis shoes and ran her feet through the grass. She stretched her legs out in front of her and propped herself on her elbows, like she was at the beach.
“You used to have a certain delicacy about you. A transparency. You’ve become heavy, opaque.”
“Who was my father?” I asked.
“A man.”
“Klaus Anders, no middle name,” I said, picking at a scab on the web of my hand. “Painter. Age forty. Born, Copenhagen, Denmark. How did you meet?”
“In Venice Beach.” She was still watching her feet. “At one of those parties that last all summer long. He had the drugs.”
“You looked just like brother and sister,” I said.
“He was much older than I,” she said. She rolled over onto her belly.
“He was forty, a painter of biomorphic abstractions. It was already passé by that time. He was always passé. His ideas, his enthusiasms. Mediocre. I don’t know what I saw in him.”
“Don’t say you don’t know, that’s crap,” I said.
She sighed. I was making her tired. So what. “It was a long time ago, Astrid. Several lifetimes at least. I’m not the same person.”
“Liar,” I said. “You’re exactly the same.”
She was silent. I had never called her a name before.
“You’re still such a child, aren’t you,” she said. I could tell she was struggling for composure. Another person wouldn’t have been able to see it, but I could tell in the way the skin around her eyes seemed to grow thinner, her nose a millimeter more sharp. “You’ve taken my propaganda for truth.”
“So set me straight,” I said. “What was it you saw in him.”
“Comfort probably. He was easy. Very physical. He made friends easily.
He called everybody ‘pal.’” She smiled slightly, still looking down at the grass she was parting, like going through a file. “Big and easy. He asked nothing of me.”
Yes, I believed that. A man who wanted something from her would never have been attractive. It had to be her desire, her fire. “Then what?” She plucked a handful of grass, threw it away. “Do we have to do this? It’s such an old newsreel.”
“I want to see it,” I said.
“He painted, he got loaded more than he painted. He went to the beach. He was mediocre. There’s just not much to say. It’s not that he was going nowhere, it’s that he’d already arrived.”
“And then you got pregnant.”
She cut me a killing look. “I didn’t ‘get pregnant,’ I’ll leave that for your illiterate friends. I decided I would have you. ‘Decision’ being the operative word.” She let her hair down, shook the grass out of it. It was raw silk in the filtered light. “Whatever fantasy you might have spun for yourself, an accident you were not. A mistake, maybe, but not an accident.”
A woman’s mistakes… “Why him? Why then?”
“I needed someone, didn’t I? He was handsome, good-natured. He wasn’t averse to the idea. Voilà.”
“Did you love him?”
“I don’t want to talk about love, that semantic rat’s nest.” She unbent her long, slim legs and stood, brushing her skirt off. She leaned against the tree trunk, one foot up on the white flesh, crossed her arms to steady herself. “We had a rather heated sexual relationship. One overlooks many things.”
I looked up at her, my mother, this woman I had known and never really knew, this woman always on the verge of disappearance. I would not let her get away from me now. “You worshipped him. I read it in your journal.”
“‘Worship’ is not quite the word we’re looking for here,” she said, watching the road. “Worship assumes a spiritual dimension. I’m looking for a term with an earthier connotation.”
“Then I was born.”
“Then you were born.”
I imagined him and her, the blonds, him with that wide laughing mouth, probably stoned out of his mind, her, comfortable, in the curve of his heavy arm. “Did he love me?”
She laughed, the commas of irony framing her mouth. “He was rather a child himself, I’m afraid. He loved you the way a boy loves a pet turtle, or a road race set. He could take you to the beach and play with you for hours, lifting you up and down in the surf. Or he could stick you in the playpen and leave the house to go out drinking with his friends, when he was supposed to be baby-sitting. One day I came home and there had been a fire. His turpentine-soaked rags and brushes had caught fire, the house went up in about five minutes. He was nowhere around. Evidently your crib sheet had already scorched. It was a miracle you weren’t burned alive. A neighbor heard you screaming.”
I tried to remember, the playpen, the fire. I could distinctly remember the smell of turpentine, a smell I’d always loved. But the smell of fire, that pervasive odor of danger, I’d always associated with my mother.
“That was the end of our idyll de Venice Beach. I was tired of his mediocrity, his excuses. I was making what little money we had, he was living off me, we had no home anymore. I told him it was over. He was ready, believe me, there were no tears on that score. And so ends the saga of Ingrid and Klaus.”
But all I could think of was the big man lifting me in and out of the surf.
I could almost remember it. The feeling of the waves on my feet, bubbling like laughter. The smell of the sea, and the roar. “Did he ever try to see me, as I grew up?”
“Why do you want to know all this useless history?” she snapped, pushing away from the tree. She squatted so she could look me in the eye.
Sweat beaded her forehead. “It’s just going to hurt you, Astrid. I wanted to protect you from all this. For twelve years, I stood between you and these senseless artifacts of someone else’s past.”
“My past,” I said.
“My God, you were a baby,” she said, standing up again, smoothing the line of her denim dress over her hips. “Don’t project.”
“Did he?”
“No. Does that make you feel any better?” She walked to the fence, to look out at the road, the dirt and trash blowing in the wind, trash stuck in the weeds on the other side of the road. “Maybe once or twice, he came by to see if you were all right. But I let him know in no uncertain terms that his presence was no longer appreciated. And that was that.”
I thought of him, his sheepish face, the long blond hair. He hadn’t meant to hurt me. She could have given him another chance. “You never thought maybe I’d like a father.”
“In ancient times there were no fathers. Women copulated with men in the fields, and their babies came nine months later. Fatherhood is a sentimental myth, like Valentine’s Day.” She turned back to me, her aquamarine eyes pale behind her tanned face, like a crime in a lit room behind curtains. “Have I answered enough, or is there more?”
“He never came back?” I asked quietly, praying it wasn’t true, that there was more, just a scrap more. “Never called you, later on, wanting to see me?”
She squatted down again, put her arm around me, propped her head against mine. We sat like that for a while.
“He called once when you were, I don’t know. Seven or eight?” She ran her fingers through my hair. “He was visiting from Denmark with his wife and his two small children. He wanted us to meet at a park, that I should sit on the park bench and play with you, so he could see you.”
“Did we go?” I just wanted her to hold me.
“It sounded like the plot of a bad movie,” she said. “I told him to go to hell.”
He had called, he had wanted to see me, and she said no. Without asking me, without mentioning it. It struck me across the throat like a blow with a pipe.
“You wanted to know. Don’t turn over rocks if you don’t want to see the pale creatures who live under them.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“Last I heard he bought a farm somewhere on one of the Danish islands. Aero, I think. Picturesque, but unless his wife knows something about farming, I’m sure they’ve lost it by now.” She looked up just in time to catch my glance, and smiled her knowing half-smile, not my father’s wide-open smile, but the one that said she had read your mind, knew what you were thinking. “Why, are you planning to descend upon your long-lost father and his family? Don’t be surprised if they don’t kill the fatted calf.”
“Better than you and your new children,” I said.
“Ah,” she said and lay back on the grass, her arms folded underneath her head, her legs crossed at the ankle. “I told them you wouldn’t necessarily greet them with open arms. But they’re a tender lot. Idealistic. They thought they’d give you a try. They were so proud of the article. Did you like it, by the way?”
“Threw it out.”
“Pity.”
A truck went by on the frontage road, a club cab with dual back wheels, trailing ranchero music, absurdly cheerful.
Like Guanajuato, I thought, and knew my mother was thinking the same.
“Tell me about Annie.”
“Why do you have to hold on to the past?” She sat up, twisted her hair back, skewered it with the pencil. Her voice was sharp, irritated. “What’s the past, just a pile of moldy newspapers in some old man’s garage.”
“The past is still happening. It never stopped. Who was Annie?” The wind shook the dense glossy foliage of the ficus, there was no other sound. She ran her fingers over her hair, pulling tight, like she was climbing out of a pool. “She was a neighbor. She took in kids, did people’s laundry.” The smell of laundry. The laundry basket, sitting in the laundry basket with other children, playing we were in a boat. The little squares. It was yellow. We scooted it across the kitchen floor. “What did she look like?”
“Small. Talkative.” She shaded her eyes with one hand. “She wore those Dr. Scholl’s sandals.”
“Dark or fair?”
“Dark. Straight hair with little bangs.”
I couldn’t get the hair. Just the legs. And the way she sang all day long to the radio.
“And where were you?”
“How could you possibly have remembered this.”
Everything she knew about me, everything she walked around with in that thin skull case like a vault. I wanted to crack her open, eat her brain like a soft-boiled egg.
“Imagine my life, for a moment,” she said, quietly, cupping her long fingers like a boat, like she was holding her life in a shell. “Imagine how unprepared I was to be the mother of a small child. The demand for the enactment of the archetype. The selfless eternal feminine. It couldn’t have been more foreign. I was a woman accustomed to following a line of inquiry or inclination until it led to its logical conclusion. I was used to having time to think, freedom. I felt like a hostage. Can you understand how desperate I was?”
I didn’t want to understand, but I remembered Caitlin, tugging, always tugging, Assi, juice! Juice! Her imperiousness. On the other side of the fence, past my mother’s head, the young women in Reception watched one of them sweeping the concrete courtyard, sweeping, sweeping, like it was a penance. “That’s what babies are like. What were you thinking, that I would amuse you? That you and I could exchange thoughts on Joseph Brodsky?”
“I thought Klaus and I were going to live happily ever after. Adam and Eve in a vine-covered shack. I was walking the archetypes. I was out of my fucking mind.”
“You were in love with him.”
“Yes, I was in love with him, all right?” she yelled at me. “I was in love with him and baby makes three and all that jazz, and then we had you and I woke up one morning married to a weak, selfish man, and I couldn’t stand him. And you, you just wanted, wanted, wanted. Mommy Mommy Mommy until I thought I would throw you against the wall.”
I felt sick. I had no trouble believing it, seeing it. I saw it all too clearly.
And I understood why she never told me about this, had simply, kindly, refrained.
“So you left me there.”
“I hadn’t really intended to. I dropped you at her house just for the afternoon, to go to the beach with some friends, and one thing led to another, they had some friends down in Ensenada, and I went, and it felt wonderful, Astrid. To be free! You can’t imagine. To go to the bathroom by myself. To take a nap in the afternoon. To make love all day long if I wanted, and walk on the beach, and not to have to think, where’s Astrid? What’s Astrid doing? What’s she going to get into? And not having you on me all the time, Mommy Mommy Mommy, clinging to me, like a spider…” She shuddered. She still remembered my touch with revulsion. It made me dizzy with hatred. This was my mother. The woman who raised me.
What chance could I ever have had.
“How long were you gone?” My voice sounded flat and dead in my own ears.
“A year,” she said quietly. “Give or take a few months.”
And I believed it. Everything in my body told me that was right. All those nights, waiting for her to come home, listening for her key in the lock.
No wonder. No wonder they had to tear me away from her when I started school. No wonder I always worried she was going to leave me one night.
She already had.
“But you’re asking the wrong question,” she said. “Don’t ask me why I left. Ask me why I came back.”
“You should have been sterilized.”
Suddenly she was up, pinning me by my shoulders to the tree trunk. Her eyes were a sea in fog. “I could have left you there, but I didn’t. Don’t you understand? For once, I did the right thing. For you.”
I was supposed to forgive her now, but it was too late. I would not say my line. “Bully. For. You,” I replied dryly.
She wanted to slap me, but she couldn’t. They’d end the visit right now.
She dropped her grip on my arms. “You were never like this before,” she said. “You’re so hard. Susan told me, but I thought it was just a pose. You’ve lost yourself, your dreaminess, that tender quality.”
I stared at her, not letting her look away. We were the same height, eye to eye, but I was bigger-boned, I probably could have beaten her in a fair fight. “I would have thought you’d approve. Wasn’t that the thing you hated about Claire? Her tenderness? Be strong, you said. I despise weakness.”
“I wanted you to be strong, but intact,” she said. “Not this devastation. You’re like a bomb site. You frighten me.”
I smiled. I liked the idea that I frightened her. The tables were truly turned. “You, the great Ingrid Magnussen, goddess of September fires, Saint Santa Ana, ruler over life and death?”
She reached out her hand, as if to touch my face, like a blind woman, but she couldn’t reach me. I would burn her if she touched me. The hand stayed in the air, hovering in front of my face. I saw, she was afraid. “You were the one thing that was entirely good in my life, Astrid. Since I came back for you, we’ve never been apart, not until this.”
“The murder, you mean.”
“No, this. You, now.” The gesture, the attempt to reach me, faded like sunset. “You know, when I came back, you knew me. You were sitting there by the door when I came in. You looked up, and you smiled and reached for me to pick you up. As if you were waiting for me.”
I wanted to cut through this moment with the blue flame of an acetylene torch. I wanted to burn it to ash and scatter it into the wind, so the pieces would never come back together again. “I was always waiting for you, Mother. It’s the constant in my life. Waiting for you. Will you come back, will you forget that you’ve tied me up in front of a store, left me on the bus?”
The hand came out again. Tentatively, but this time it lightly touched my hair. “Are you still?”
“No,” I said, brushing her hand away. “I stopped when Claire showed me what it felt like to be loved.”
Now she looked tired, every day of forty-nine years. She picked up her shoes. “Is there anything else you want? Have I fulfilled my end of the bargain?”
“Do you ever regret what you’ve done?”
The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. “You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I’ve given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.”
I never thought I’d hear the day my mother, Ingrid Magnussen, would admit to regret. Now that she stood in front of me, shaking with it, I couldn’t think of anything to say. It was like watching a river run backwards.
We stood there staring out at the empty road.
“What are you going to do when you get out?” I asked her. “Where are you going to go?”
When they saw me with my mother, they drew closer together, talking among themselves. She was already a celebrity, I could see it. We watched them start up their cars.
I knew she imagined herself with those keys in her hand, accelerator, gas tank marked Full.
She sighed. “By the time Susan is done, I’ll be a household icon, like Aunt Jemima, the Pillsbury Doughboy. I’ll have my choice of teaching positions. Where would you like to go, Astrid?”
“That’s years away,” I said.
“You can’t make it alone,” she said. “You need an environment, a context. People invested in your success. God knows, look at me. I had to go to prison to get noticed.”
I wanted her to hurt the way I did. I wanted it very much.
“So, how does it feel, knowing I don’t give a damn anymore?” I said.
“That I’ll do anything to get what I want. Even lie for you, I won’t blink an eye. I’m like you now, aren’t I? I look at the world and ask what’s in it for me.”
“If I could take it all back, I would, Astrid.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “You’ve got to believe me.” Her eyes, glinting in the sun, were exactly the color of the pool we swam in together the summer she was arrested. I wanted to swim there again, to submerge myself in them.
“Then tell me you don’t want me to testify,” I said. “Tell me you don’t want me like this. Tell me you would sacrifice the rest of your life to have me back the way I was.”
She turned her blue gaze toward the road, that road, the beautiful road, the road women in prison dreamed about. The road she had already left me for once. Her hair like smoke in the wind. I watched her staring out at the road. She seemed lost there, sealed in longing, searching for an exit, a hidden door.
And suddenly I felt panic. I’d made a mistake, like when I’d played chess with Ray and knew a second too late I’d made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn’t afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn’t want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn’t need to see it, the hideous eyeless albino creature that lived underneath. “Listen, forget it. A deal’s a deal. Let’s leave it at that.”
“I’ll tell Susan,” she said quietly. “To leave you alone.”
I knew I had heard her but I didn’t believe it. I waited for something, to make me believe it was true.
My mother came back to me then, put her arms around me, rested her cheek against my hair. Although I knew it was impossible, I could smell her violets. “If you could go back, even part-way, I would give anything,” she said into my ear.
Her large hands gently stroked my hair. It was all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.
hexafu 