NIKI TORE OFF a square of the acid and put it on my tongue, then one for her. It came on small sheets of paper printed with pink flamingos on motorcycles.
“It takes a while,” Niki said. “You’ll know when it happens. Believe me, you won’t sleep through it.”
Nothing happened for almost an hour, I was sure the stuff was no good, but then it came on, all at once, like an elevator. Niki laughed and waved her hand in front of my face, the fingers leaving trails behind them. “High enough now?”
My skin felt hot and prickly, like I’d broken out in a rash, but my skin looked the same. It was the sky that had suddenly changed. It had gone blank. Blank as a cataract, an enormous white eye. I felt anxious under that terrible empty sky. It was as if God had gone senile and blind. Maybe he did not want to see anymore. That made sense. All around us, everything was the way it usually was, only unbearably so. I tried never to think about how ugly it was here. I tried to find the one beautiful thing.
But on this drug, I found I couldn’t shut it out, focus down. It was terrifying. I was overwhelmed by the sordid and abandoned, growing like a hellish garden, the splintered step, the four dead cars in the neighbor’s weedy lot, rusting back to earth, the iron fence of the prop outlet topped with razor wire, the broken glass in the street. It occurred to me that we lived exactly at the bottom of L.A., the place where people dumped stolen cars and set them on fire. The place where everything drifting came to rest.
In the street, I noticed a dead bird, smashed flat, surrounded by its soft feathers.
I was afraid to tell Niki I was scared, it occurred to me if I named it, Imight start screaming. I might never stop.
I was afraid to tell Niki I was scared, it occurred to me if I named it, I might start screaming. I might never stop.
The whole world had been reduced to this, lifeless debris. And we were just more of the city’s detritus, like the bird, the abandoned shopping carts, the wrecked Riviera. We were at the end of civilization, where it had given up out of senility and exhaustion. And we were what was left, Niki and I, like cockroaches after the end of the world, scuttling through the ruins, fighting over scraps of the dead corpse. Like my dream of my mother’s melted face.
I was afraid to ask if my face was melting. I didn’t want to call attention to it.
“You okay?”
I shook my head, infinitesimally, I couldn’t even be sure whether I had done it or just thought I had. I was afraid to do more.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re just coming on.”
She was turning into a jack-in-the-box, a Raggedy Ann. I had to hold on to the fact that I knew her, it was only a trick of my mind. This was Niki, I kept telling myself. I knew her. Abandoned at six by her mother at a Thrifty drugstore in Alhambra, Niki always counted the house, assessed the odds, worked out percentages. I liked to watch her when she was getting ready for work, with her starched Bavarian waitress costume on, looking like Heidi in a Warhol film. Even if I did not recognize her, I knew her. I had to hang on to that.
“Can we get out of here?” I whispered, trembling, nauseated. “I hate this. I mean, really.”
“Just tell me where,” she said. Her eyes looked strange, black and buttony, like a doll’s.
IN THE COOL HUSH of the Impressionist rooms at the County Art Museum, the world was restored to me, in all its color and light and form.
How had I forgotten? Nothing could happen to me here. This was the port, the outpost of the true world, where there could still be art, and beauty, and memory. How many times had I walked here with Claire, with my mother.
Niki had never been here before.
We stopped before a painting where a woman was reading a book in a garden in the shade at the edge of a park. Her dress of white linen edged in blue rustled when she turned the pages. Such a delicious blue-green, the picture smelled like mint, the grass deep as ferns. I saw us in the picture, Niki in trailing white, myself in dotted swiss. We walked out to the woman slowly, she was ready to pour our tea. I was here in the gallery, but I was also walking through the damp grass, my hem stained with green, the breeze through the thin cloth of my dress.
The acid came on in waves, we rocked as we stood before the paintings from the force of the drug. But I wasn’t frightened anymore. I knew where I was. I was with Niki in the true world.
“This is out-fucking-rageous,” she whispered, holding my hand.
Some of the paintings opened up, like windows, like doors, while others remained just painted canvas. I could reach in to Cézanne ‘s peaches and cherries on a rich white crumpled table-cloth, pick up a peach and put it back on the plate. I understood Cézanne.
I imagined painting the picture, I could see exactly what order he did what.
I felt I could have painted all the paintings myself. The acid kept coming on and coming on, I didn’t know how much higher I could get.
We walked back into the building, found the doors with the ridiculous stick figures in pants or skirt. The ridiculous way we thought male, female, as pants or skirt. Suddenly, the whole sexual universe and its conventions seemed fantastic, contrived.
“Don’t look in the mirror,” Niki said. “Look at your shoes.”
She pushed me into the handicapped toilet, closed the door behind us. She had to unzip my pants and put me on the pot like I was two years old. I couldn’t go, it was too funny.
“Shut up and go,” Niki said.
I swung my legs. It really felt like I was two. “Make tinkle for Annie,” I said. And I let go. I really had to, after all. The sound made me laugh. “T love you, Niki,” I said.
“I love you too,” she said.
But on the way out I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked very red-faced, my eyes black as a magpie’s, hair tangled. I looked feral. It scared me. Niki hurried me out.
We were in the Contemporary wing. I never went there. When I came with my mother, she would stand me in front of a Rothko, a blue-and-red square, and explain it to me for an hour. I never did get it. Now Niki and I stood in front of it, in the same space I stood when I was young, and watched the three zones of color throb, pulse, and other tones emerge, a tomato, a garnet, purple. The red advanced, the blue retreated, just like Kandinsky said. It was a door and we walked in.
Loss. That’s what was in there. Grief, sorrow, wordless and unfathomable. Not what I felt this morning, septic, panicked. This was distilled. Niki put her arm around my waist, I put mine around hers. We stood and mourned. I could imagine how Jesus felt, his pity for all of humanity, how impossible it was, how admirable. The painting was Casals, a requiem. My mother and me, Niki and Yvonne, Paul and Davey and Claire, everybody. How vast was a human being’s capacity for suffering.
a requiem. My mother and me, Niki and Yvonne, Paul and Davey and Claire, everybody. How vast was a human being’s capacity for suffering.
The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn’t a question of sur-vival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.
We walked out into the sunshine, gravely, like people after a funeral.
I had to see the goddesses now. Ripe figures dancing, making love, sleeping, sitting on lotuses, their hands in their characteristic mudras. Shiva danced in his bronze frame of fire.
IT TOOK a long time to come down. We sat with Yvonne for a while, watching TV, but it seemed incomprehensible. The room swirled with color and motion, and she was staring at tiny heads in a box. The lamps were more interesting. I drew the way the air filled with perfect six-sided snowflakes. I could make them fall and make them go back up again. Sergei came into the room, he looked just like the white cat that followed him in.
He talked to us about something, but his mind was a goldfish bowl. The skirts and pants thing.
Suddenly I couldn’t stand to be inside our cramped, ugly house, with Sergei and his goldfish, its mouth opening and closing stupidly. I took some paper and watercolors onto the porch and painted wet on wet, streaks that became Blakean figures in sunrise, and dancers under the sea. Rena was the fox woman and Natalia an Arabian horse with a dish face. They spoke Russian and we understood every word they said.
Make tinkle for Annie.
Make tinkle for Annie. Who was Annie, and why do I make tinkle for her?Annie, who are you, and where is Mommy? Yellow, was all I could get, yellow sunlight, and a white swan, a warm smell like laundry.
IN THE MORNING, I cut out words from the funny section of the paper:
WHO IS ANNIE
RENA SOAKED UP the fierce April sun in her black macramé bikini, drinking a tumbler of vodka and Fresca, she called it a Russian Margarita.
The men from the plumbing contractor next door loitered by the low chain-link fence, sucking their teeth at her. She pretended she didn’t notice, but slowly applied Tropic Tan to the tops of her breasts, stroked down her arms, while the workmen grabbed their crotches and called out suggestions in Spanish.
“You’re going to get skin cancer,” I said,
She rolled her bottom lip out. “We’re dead long time, kiddo.” She liked to say these American words, knowing how they sounded in her mouth. She lifted her Russian Margarita, drank. “Nazdaroviye.”
It meant to your health, but she didn’t care about that. She lit a black cigarette, let the smoke rise in arabesques.
I was sitting on an old lawn chair in the shade of the big oleander, sketching Rena as she soaked up the blistering UV rays. She sprayed herself with a small bottle filled with ice water, and the men watching over the chain-link fence shuddered. You could see the shape of her nipples through the knitted fabric. She smiled to herself.
This is what she loved, to make a few plumber’s grunts come in their pants. A sale, a Russian Margarita, a quickie in the bathroom with Sergei, that was as far into the future as she cared to look. I admired her confidence. Skin cancer, lung cancer, men, furniture, junk, something would always come along. It was good for me to be around her now. I could not afford to think about the future.
I had only two months until graduation, and then a short fall off the edge of the world. At night, I dreamed of my mother, she was always leaving.
I gazed down at my drawing of Rena, dotted with water from the sprinkler. Really, I didn’t even like drawings. When I went to the museum, I looked at paintings, sculptures, anything but lines on a piece of paper. It was just that my hand needed something to do, my eye needed a reason to shape the space between Rena and the sprinkler she had running and her wobbly-legged table of rusted white diamond mesh that held one drink and an ashtray. I liked the way the tabletop echoed the black diamonds of her bikini and the chain-link fence, how the curve of her tumbler was the same as the curve of her raised thigh and the taller man’s arm draped over the fence, and leaves on the banana tree at the Casados’ house across the street.
If I didn’t draw, what reason would there be for the way the light fell on the scallop of tiles on the Casados’ roof, and the lumpy tufts of lawn, the delicate braids of green foxtails soon to go brown, and the way the sky seemed to squash everything flat to the earth like an enormous foot? I’d have to get pregnant, or drink, to blur it all out, except for myself very large in the foreground.
I was going to graduate, for all that meant. Niki thought I was an idiot. Who would know if I went or not, who would care? But it was still something to do. I went and drew the chair legs, the way they looked like the legs of water striders.
“Rena, you ever wonder why people get out of bed in the morning? Why do they bother? Why not just drink turpentine?”
Rena turned her head to the side, shaded her eyes with her hand, glanced at me, then went back to sunny-side up. “You are Russian I think. A Russian always ask, what is meaning of life.” She pulled a long, depressed face. “What is meaning of life, maya liubov? Is our bad weather. Here is California, Astrid darling. You don’t ask meaning. Too bad Akhmatova, but we got beach volleyball, sports car, tummy tuck. Don’t worry, be happy. Buy something.”
Buy something.”
She smiled to herself, arms down at her sides, eyes closed, glistening on her chaise lounge like bacon frying in a pan. Small beads of water clung to the tiny hairs of her upper lip, pooled between her breasts. Maybe she was the lucky one, I thought, a woman who had divested herself of both future and past. No dreams, no standards, a woman who smoked and drank and slept with men like Sergei, men who were spiritually what came up out of the sewers when it rained. I could learn from her. Rena Grushenka didn’t worry about her teeth, didn’t take vitamin C.
She ate salt on everything and was always drunk by three. She certainly didn’t feel sick because she wasn’t going to college and making something of her life. She lay in the sun and gave the workmen hard-ons while she could.
“You get boyfriend, you stop worry,” she said.
I didn’t want to tell her I had a boyfriend. Hers.
THE DARK GREEN Jaguar sedan parked in front of the plumbing contractor should have tipped me off, but I didn’t put it together until I saw her in the living room, the explosion of black curls, her bright red lipstick I recognized from the news. She wore a white-trimmed navy blue Chanel suit that might even have been real. She was sitting on the green couch, writing a check. Rena was talking to her, smoking, laughing, her gold inlays glinting in her mouth. I wanted to run out the door. Only a morbid interest kept me in the room. What could she possibly have to say to me?
“She like the salad set.” Rena looked at me. “She buy for friend collect Tiki everything.”
“It’s the latest,” said the woman, handing the yellow check to Rena.
Her voice was higher than you’d think, girlish for a lawyer’s.
She stood and held out her hand to me, short red nails garish against her white skin.
Her teeth were unnaturally white. “Susan D. Valeris.”
I shook her hand. It was very small and dry.
To my surprise, she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her Hermès Kelly bag, which I recognized from my Olivia days to be strictly genuine. “Mind if I smoke?”
I shook my head. She lit up with a gold lighter. Cartier — the gold pleats. “Cigarette?” she offered. I shook my head. She put the pack and the lighter down on the cluttered table, exhaled into the afternoon light. “I don’t know why I never got around to quitting,” she said.
“All the prisoners smoke,” I said. “You can offer them a cigarette.” She nodded. “Your mother said you were bright. I think it was an underestimation.” She looked around the crowded living room, the bentwood hatrack and the hi-fi and the records, the beaded lamp and the fringed lamp and the poodle lamp with the milk glass shade, the peasant woman with the orange scarf, and the rest of the artifacts in Rena’s thrift shop. A white cat jumped into her lap and she quickly stood up, brushed off her navy suit. “Nice place you got here,” she said, and sat back down, glancing for the location of the hairy interloper. “Looking forward to graduation? Making your plans for the future?”
“Thought I might become a criminal lawyer,” I said. “That or a hooker. Maybe a garbage collector.”
Now I was scared. The two of them could really pull this off. I saw how easily this bouquet of oleander and nightshade could be twisted around into a laurel wreath. “But I do blame her, Susan.”
“Tell me,” she said, holding the cigarette in the left hand, making some notes on the yellow pad with the right.
“My mother did everything she could do to get Claire out of my life,” I said. “Claire was fragile and my mother knew exactly where to push.”
Susan took a drag, squinted against the smoke. “And why would she do that?”
“Because Claire loved me.”
“You felt she was jealous,” Susan said in a motherly way, spewing smoke into the air, an octopus spraying ink.
“She was extremely jealous. Claire was nice to me, and I loved her. She couldn’t stand that. Not that she ever paid attention to me when she had the chance, but when someone else did, she couldn’t take it.”
“She was denied due process. It’s in the record. The public defender didn’t even raise a sweat in her defense.” The accusing finger, red-tipped. “She was drugged, my God, she could barely speak. It’s in the file, the dose and everything. Nobody said a word. The prosecution’s case was completely circumstantial.”
“So what’s in it for you?” I interrupted, in as dry and unimpressed a voice as I could register.
“Justice has not been served,” she said firmly. I could see her on the steps of the courthouse, performing for the TV crews.
“But it has,” I said. “Blindly, and maybe even by mistake, but it has been served. Rare, I know. A modern miracle.”
Suddenly the weariness disappeared like the courthouse righteousness before it. Now I was looking at a cold and clever strategist, not so very unlike Ingrid Magnussen herself. “Barry Kolker could have died of heart failure,” Susan said calmly. “The autopsy was not conclusive. He was overweight, and a drug user, was he not?”
“Whatever you say.” The truth is whatever I say it is. “Look, you want me to lie for her. Let’s go on from there and see if we have anything to talk about.”
“Let’s go for a drive,” she said.
BEHIND the tinted windows of her Jaguar, I nestled into the smell of leather and money. It wrapped around me like fur. We rose out of Ripple Street, past the unlicensed day care and the bakery and the trompe l’oeil of Clearwater in silence, made the left on Fletcher, left on Glendale, right onto Silverlake Boulevard, and drove around the lake for a while. Gulls bobbed on the blue-green water.
I closed my eyes and imagined I was with Olivia and not my mother’s lawyer. Her bare arms, her profile, scarf tied Kelly-style around her head and throat. That precious moment. All the more so for being unreal, gone in an instant, something to savor like perfume on the wind, piano played in a passing house in the afternoon.
341 Of 411icturesque hillside beyond. She turned the music down, but you
ear Nelson’s trumpet.
“I want you to ask yourself, what’s she guilty of?” Susan asked, turning toward me from the driver’s seat. “I mean, in your mind. Really. Murder, or being a lousy mother? Of not being there for you when you needed her.” I looked at the little woman, her black curls maybe one shade too black, her eyes a little mascara-smudged from the heat. The weariness was an act, but also the truth. Like so many things, the words hopelessly imprecise. I wished I had something to draw her with. She was in the process of becoming a caricature of herself. Not yet, now she was merely recognizable. But in five years, ten, she would only look like herself at a distance. Up close she would be drawn and frightened. “Honestly, aren’t you just trying to punish her for being a crappy parent, and not for the alleged murder? What was Barry Kolker to you anyway, some boyfriend of your mother’s. She had a number of boyfriends. You couldn’t have been that attached.”
“He’s dead,” I said. “You’re accusing me of being cynical?”
“No, it’s not Kolker. You’re angry with her for abandoning you. Naturally.
You’ve led six difficult years, and like a child, you point to the almighty mother. It’s her fault. The idea that she too is a victim would never occur to you.”
“Is that what you’ll say if I tell the truth at her trial?”
“Something like that,” she said, the first honest thing I’d heard her say since I’d shaken her small hand.
“Astrid. She may not have been some TV mom, Barbara Billingsley with her apron and pearls, but she loves you. More than you can imagine. Right now she really needs your faith in her. You should hear her, talking about you, how she worries about you, how much she wants to be with you again.”
I thought again about my imaginary trip with her, the sight of her, the magic of her speech. Now I was not so sure, maybe it was true. I wanted to ask this woman what my mother said about me. I wanted to hear her tell me what my mother thought about me, but I didn’t dare leave her that opening.
Bobby Fischer had taught me better than that. “She’d say anything to get out.”
out.”
“Talk to her. I can set it up. Just listen to what she has to say, Astrid,”
Susan urged. “Six years is a long time. People do change.”I knew exactly how far Ingrid Magnussen had changed. I had her letters. I’d read them, page by page, swimming across the red tide. I knew all about her tenderness and motherly concern. Me and the white cat. But now there was something that had changed. What had changed was that for the first time in my life, my mother needed something from me, something I had the power to give or withhold, and not the other way around.
My mother needed me. It sank in, what that meant, how incredible it was. If I went on the stand and said she did it, told about our trip to Tijuana, about the pounds of oleander and jimson weed and belladonna she’d boiled down in the kitchen, she’d never get out. And if I lied, said Barry was superparanoid, he’d developed a complex about her, he was crazy, about how she’d been so drugged when I saw her at Sybil Brand she hadn’t even recognized me, she might win an appeal, get a new trial, she could be out walking around before I was twenty-one.
Reverend Thomas would not have approved of the emotion that filled me now, its sweetness was irresistible. I had her own knife to her throat. I could ask for something, I could make demands. What’s in it for me, that’s what l’d learned to ask, unapologetically, in my time with Rena. What’s my cut. I could put a price tag on my soul. Now I just had to figure out what I could sell it for.
“Okay,” I said. “Set it up.”
Now she was all business. “Anything you want in the meantime, some spending money?”
I hated this woman. What I had been through the last six years meant nothing to her. I was simply one more brick in the structure she was erecting, I had just slipped into place. She didn’t believe my mother was innocent. She only cared that there would be cameras on the courthouse steps. And her name, Susan D. Valeris, under her moving red lips. The publicity would be worth plenty. “I’ll take a couple hundred,” I said.
I WALKED ALONG the river in the last afternoon light, my hands in my pockets, Baldy all pink in the east with reflected sunset, Susan’s money crumpled in my fist. I strolled north, past the contractor’s lot and the bakery loading bays, the sculptor’s yard at the end of Clearwater Street, painted trompe l’oeil like a little French village. A dog rushed the fence and the wide planks jerked as the animal struck it, barking and growling. Over the fence through the razor wire, shapes in bronze, balanced inside big metal hoops like Shiva, turned slowly in the wind. I found a chunk of concrete broken loose from the embankment and threw it into the river. It fell among the willows, and a flurry of whistling wings rose from cover, brown wading birds. It was happening again. I was being drawn back into her world, into her shadow, just when I was starting to feel free.
I coughed the dry hacking cough I’d had all spring, from smoking pot and the perennial mold at Rena’s. I dashed down the slope to the water, squatted and touched the current with my fingertips. Cold, real. Water from mountains. I put it between my eyes, the third eye spot. Help me, River.
And what if she did get out? If she came walking up to the house on Ripple Street, if she said, “I’m back. Pack up, Astrid, we’re leaving.” Could I resist her? I pictured her, in the white shirt and jeans they let her change into when they arrested her. “Let’s go,” she said. I saw us standing on the porch at Rena’s, staring at each other, but nothing beyond that.
Was she still in my bones, in my every thought?
I squatted by the water as it flowed over the tumbled rocks, thought how far must they have come to have settled in this con-crete channel, the stream clear and melodious, the smell of fresh water. I didn’t want to think about my mother anymore. It made me tired. I’d rather think about the way the willows and the cottonwoods and palms broke their way through the concrete, growing right out of the flood control channel, how the river struggled to reestablish itself. A little silt was carried down, settled. A seed dropped into it, sprouted. Little roots shot downward. The next thing you had trees, shrubs, birds.
My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers.
Then they were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat and serviceable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally, they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamp that met the sea.
But this river was none of these things. It flowed serene and ignored past fences spray-painted 18th Street, Roscos, Frogtown, alive despite everything, guarding the secrets of survival. This river was a girl like me.
Wild mustard flowered on the cracked banks, and I picked a bouquet for Yvonne. What was a weed, anyway. A plant nobody planted? A seed escaped from a traveler’s coat, something that didn’t belong? Was it something that grew better than what should have been there? Wasn’t it just a word, weed, trailing its judgments. Useless, without value. Unwanted.
Well, anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon’s charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was?
BUT THAT NIGHT I dreamed the old dream again, of gray Paris streets and the maze of stone, the bricked blind windows. This time there were doors of glass with curved art nouveau handles, they were all locked. I knew I had to find my mother. It was getting dark, dark figures lurked in the cellar entrances. I rang all the buzzers to the apartments. Women came to the door, looking like her, smiling, some even called my name. But none of them was her.
I knew she was in there, I banged on the door, screamed for her to let me in. The door buzzed to admit me, but just as I pushed it in, I saw her leaving from the courtyard gate, a passenger in a small red car, wearing her curly Afghan coat and big sun-glasses over her blind eyes, she was leaning back in the seat and laughing. I ran after her, crying, begging.
Yvonne shook me awake. She took my head in her lap, and her long brown hair draped over us like a shawl. Her belly was warm and firm as a bolster. Through the strands of her hair wove the colored strands of light I still saw, cast by a kid’s carousel bedside lamp I’d scavenged on trash day.
“We get all the bad dreams, ese,” she said, stroking my wet cheek with the palm of her hand. “We got to leave some for somebody else.”
I brought all the things we’d learned to use in baby class, the tennis balls, the rolled-up towels, the watch, but Yvonne didn’t want to do it, puff and count, lie on the tennis balls. All she wanted was to suck on the white terry cloth and let me wipe her face with ice, sing to her in my tuneless voice. I sang songs from musicals I used to watch with Michael — Camelot, My Fair Lady. I sang to her, “Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you,” that Claire had once sung on the banks of the McKenzie. While all around us, through the curtains, women screamed in their narrow labor beds, cursing, groaning, and calling for their mothers in ten languages.
Rena didn’t stay long. She drove us there, dropped us off, signed the papers. Whenever I started liking her, something like this happened.
“Mama,” Yvonne whimpered, tears rolling down her face. She squeezed my arm as another contraction came. We’d been here for nine hours, through two shifts of nurses. My arm was bruised from hand to shoulder.
“Don’t leave me,” she said.
“I won’t.” I fed her some of the ice chips they let her have.
Yvonne looked huge in the tiny bed. The fetal monitor was strapped to her belly, but I refused to look at the TV screen. I watched her face. She reminded me of a Francis Bacon painting, fading in and out of her resemblance to anything human, struggling to resist disappearing into an undifferentiated world of pain.
The pain came in waves, in sheets, starting in her belly and extending outward, a flower of pain blooming through her body, a jagged steel lotus.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was. That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He’d have had to change his whole philosophy.
Gasping on the bed, Yvonne bordered on the unrecognizable, dis-integrating into a ripe collection of nerves, fibers, sacs, and waters and the ancient clock in the blood.
But this one, Melinda Meek, snapped at Yvonne for whining. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “You’ve done this before.” She scared me with her efficiency, her bony fingers. I could tell she knew we were foster children, that Yvonne wouldn’t keep the baby. She’d already decided we were irresponsible and deserved every bit of our suffering. I could see her as a correctional officer. Now I wished my mother were here. She would know how to get rid of Melinda Meek. Even in transition she would spit in Melinda’s stingy face, threaten to strangle her in the cord of the fetal monitor.
“It hurts,” Yvonne said.
“Nobody said it was a picnic,” Melinda said. “You’ ve got to breathe.” Yvonne tried, gasped and blew, she wanted everyone to like her, even this sour-faced nurse.
“Can’t you just give her something?” I said.
“She’s doing fine,” Melinda said crisply, her triangular eyes a veiled threat.
“Cheap-ass motherfuckers,” the woman said on the other side of the white shower curtains. “Don’t give poor people no damn drugs.”
“Please,” Yvonne said, clutching at Melinda’s white jacket. “I beg of you.”
The nurse efficiently peeled back Yvonne ‘s hand, patted it firmly onto her belly. “You’re already eight centimeters. It’s almost over.”
Yvonne sobbed softly, rhythmically, hopelessly, too tired to even cry. I rubbed her stomach.
Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women used to die in childbirth. They didn’t catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up. They stopped caring whether or not the baby came. They knew if they didn’t die, they’d be going through it again the next year, and the next. I could understand how a woman might just stop trying, like a tired swimmer, let her head go under, the water fill her lungs. I slowly massaged Yvonne’s neck, her shoulders, I wouldn’t let her go under. She sucked ice through threadbare white terry. If my mother were here, she’d have made Melinda Meek cough up the drugs, sure enough.
“Mamacita, ay,” Yvonne wailed.
I didn’t know why she would call for her mother. She hated her mother.
It wasn’t just Yvonne. All down the ward, they called for their mothers.
I didn’t know why she would call for her mother. She hated her mother.
She hadn’t seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brother and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. I didn’t even know what that meant. Gang bang, she said. And still she called out, Mama.
It wasn’t just Yvonne. All down the ward, they called for their mothers.Nine hours ago, when we came in, a woman with a voice like a lye bath alternately screamed at her husband and called for her mother. A grown woman sobbing like a child. Mommy… I was embarrassed for her.
Now I knew better.
I held on to Yvonne ‘s hands, and I imagined my mother, seventeen years ago, giving birth to me. Did she call for her mother? I imagined her screaming at my father, calling him worthless, a liar, useless, until he went out for a beer, leaving her alone with the landlady on a cold November morning. She had me at home, she’d never liked doctors. I could imagine how her screams and curses must have pierced the quiet of the walk street in Venice Beach, startling a kid going by on a skateboard, while the landlady smoked hash and rifled her purse. But did she call out, Mami, help me?
I thought of her mother, the one picture I had, the little I knew. Karin Thorvald, who may or may not have been a distant relation of King Olaf of Norway, classical actress and drunk, who could recite Shakespeare by heart while feeding the chickens and who drowned in the cow pond when my mother was thirteen. I couldn’t imagine her calling out for anyone.
But then I realized, they didn’t mean their own mothers. Not those weak
women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn’t mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what’s in it for me? Not the women watching TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn’t mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they’d never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.
They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.
“Breathe,” I said in her ear. “Please, Yvonne, try.”
She tried to breathe, a couple of shallow inhalations, but it hurt too much. She flopped back down on the narrow bed, too tired to go on. All she could do was grip my hand and cry. And I thought of the way the baby was linked to her, as she was linked to her mother, and her mother, all the way back, inside and inside, knit into a chain of disaster that brought her to this bed, this day.
“I wish I was dead,” Yvonne said into the pillowcase with the flowers I’d brought from home.
THE BABY CAME four hours later. A girl, born 5:32 p.m. A Gemini. We went home the next day. Rena picked us up at the hospital’s front loop. She refused to come in. We stopped at the observation window in Neonatal, but the baby was already gone. Rena wouldn’t let Yvonne take the baby home even for a few weeks.
“Better just walk away,” Rena had said. “You get attach, a loser game.” She was right, I thought, as I pushed Yvonne’s wheelchair to the exit, though her motives cared nothing for Yvonne, she just didn’t want to become a foster grandma. She never had any kids, never wanted any.
What’s in it for me? “Babies make me sick,” she was always telling Yvonne.
“Eat, shit, cry. You think you keep, think again.”
In the hospital driveway, Niki got out of the van, gave Yvonne a bunch of balloons, hugged her. We helped her into the back. She was still tired, she could barely walk. There was a pinched nerve in her left leg, and stitches where the doctor cut her. She smelled sour, like old blood. She looked like she just got hit by a car. Rena didn’t even look at her.
I sat with her in the back on the ripped-out carseat. Yvonne leaned against me, her head on my shoulder. “Sing ‘Michelle,’” she whispered.
I held her hand, pressed my other hand against her forehead the way she liked, and sang softly in my tuneless voice as we bounced and clattered along, heading for home. “Michelle, ma belle.” The song seemed to soothe her. She rested her head against my shoulder and quietly sucked her thumb.
hexafu 