MACLAREN CHILDREN’S CENTER was in a way a relief. The worst had happened. The waiting was over.
Everyone was asleep but the girls in the hall, girls who had to be watched, the suicide girls, the epileptics, the uncontrollables. It was finally quiet.
Now I found it easy to imagine my mother in her bunk at Frontera. We weren’t so different after all. The same block walls, linoleum floors, the shadows of pines against the outside lights, and the sleeping shapes of my roommates under their thin thermal blankets.
I stroked the furry ends of my short hair with one palm. I was glad I’d cut it off. A gang of girls jumped me twice, once in the Big Field, once coming back from the gym, because someone’s boyfriend thought I was looking good. I didn’t want to be pretty. I lay fingering the bruises blooming on my cheek, shading from purple to green, watching the shadows of the pines behind the curtain, dancing in the wind like Balinese shadow puppets behind a screen, moving to gamelan music.
I had gotten a call from Ron yesterday morning. He was taking her ashes back to Connecticut, and offered to pay for my ticket if I wanted to come with him. I didn’t want to see Claire delivered back to her family, more people who didn’t know her. I couldn’t stand around like a stranger through the eulogy. She kissed me on the lips, I would have told them.
“You didn’t know her at all,” I told Ron. She didn’t want to be cremated, she wanted to be buried with her pearls in her mouth, a jewel over each eye. Ron never knew what she wanted, he always thought he knew best. You were supposed to watch her. He knew she was suicidal when he took me in. That’s why I was hired. I was the suicide watch. Not the baby after all.
What difference did it make if I was here or somewhere else. I couldn’t keep her alive.
This was exactly where I belonged. For once I didn’t feel out of place. Even with my mother, I was always holding my breath, waiting for something to happen, for her not to come home, for some disaster. Ron never should have trusted me with Claire. She should have gotten a little kid, someone to stay alive for. She should have realized I was a bad luck person, she should never have thought I was someone to count on. I was more like my mother than I’d ever believed. And even that thought didn’t frighten me anymore.
THE NEXT DAY I met a boy in the art room, Paul Trout. He had lank hair and bad skin, and his hands moved without him. He was like me, he couldn’t sit without drawing something. When I passed him on my way to the sink, I looked over his shoulder. His black pen and felt-tip drawings were like something you’d see in a comic book. Women in black leather with big breasts and high heels, brandishing guns the size of fire hoses.
He stared at me all the time. I felt his eyes while I painted. But it didn’t bother me, Paul Trout’s intense, blinkless stare. It wasn’t like the boys in the senior classroom, their stares like a raid, moist, groping, more than a little hostile. This was an artist’s stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions. It was a stare that didn’t turn away when I stared back, but was startled to find itself returned.
When he came around behind me to use the wastebasket, he watched me paint. I didn’t try to cover up. Let him look. It was Claire on the bed in her mauve sweater, the dark figure of Ron in the doorway. The whole thing bathed in red ambulance lights. Lots of diagonals.
“That’s really good,” he said.
I didn’t need him to tell me it was good. I’d been making art all my life, before I could talk, and after, when I could, but didn’t choose to.
“Nobody here can paint,” he said. “I hate jungles.”
We weren’t allowed to paint the halls. Instead, they’d hired some kind of children’s book illustrator, some wallpaper designer. They probably thought our art would be too ugly, too upsetting. They didn’t know, most of the kids would have done exactly what the hall artist did. Peaceable kingdoms in which nothing bad ever happened. Soaring eagles and playful lions and African nymphs carrying water, flowers without sexual parts.
“This is the fourth time I’ve been here,” Paul Trout said.
It was why I’d never seen him except in the art room. If you came back on purpose, ran away from your placement, you lost your privileges, your coed nights. But I understood why they came back. It wasn’t that bad here at Mac. If it weren’t for the violence, the other kids, I could understand how someone could see it almost as paradise. But you couldn’t have this many damaged people in one place without it becoming like any other cell-block or psych ward.
Paul Trout wasn’t the only returnee. There were lots of them. It was safer in here, there were rules and regular meals, professional care. Mac was a floor you could not fall below. I supposed the ex-cons who kept going back to prison felt the same way.
“You cut off your hair,” he said. “Why’d you do that? It was pretty.”
“Attracted attention,” I said.
“I thought girls liked that.”
“Sometimes it hurts more than it helps,” I said.
“You’re beautiful anyway,” he said, going back to his drawing. “There’s not much you can do about that.”
“You say that like it’s nothing.”
What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.
“Someone like you, you wouldn’t let me touch you, would you.”
“I don’t let anyone touch me,” I finally said.
I painted in the pharmacy jar of butabarbitol sodium on the rag rug by
her bed, the tiny pills spilling out. Bright pink against the dark rug.
“Why not?”
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn’t come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve.
Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds.
Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs.
Because I could still see a woman in a red bathrobe crawling in the street. A woman on a roof in the wind, mute and strange. Women with pills, with knives, women dyeing their hair. Women painting doorknobs with poison for love, making dinners too large to eat, firing into a child’s room at close range. It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn’t want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette.
I painted a mirror on the wall opposite Claire’s dresser where there was no mirror, and in the red-tinted darkness, my own staring image, with long pale hair, in the crimson velvet Christmas dress I never got a chance to wear. The me that died with her. I painted a crimson ribbon around my neck. It made my neck look slashed.
“Doesn’t anything matter to you?”
“Survival,” I said, but even that sounded untrue now.
Paul Trout was the only person I’d met there I could talk to. He wanted to see me on the outside, asked for an address, a phone number, someplace he could reach me, but I didn’t know where I’d be, and I couldn’t trust my mother to forward anything. He gave me the name of a comic book shop in Hollywood, said he’d check there, wherever he was. “Just mark the letters Hold for Paul Trout.”
I was sorry when he got his placement, to a group home in Pomona. We were just getting to know each other, and now he was gone. I had to get used to that. Everybody left you eventually. He gave me one of his drawings to remember him by. It was me as a superhero, in a tight white T-shirt and ragged shorts, my body clearly the subject of much observation and thought. I’d just vanquished a biker archvillain, my Doc Marten bootheel planted on his bloody bare chest, a smoking gun in my hand. I shot him through the heart. I don’t let anyone touch me was printed over my head.
I sat at an orange picnic table, waiting for my interview. I wasn’t worried. I didn’t want to get placed. I’d rather stay here until I was eighteen. Paul was right, there was lots worse than Mac. I didn’t want to get involved with anybody ever again. But nobody got to stay.
At a table under the big pines, another interview was taking place, a sibling set. They were always the worst. The cute little brother in the woman’s lap, the older brother, past cute, pubescent, downy-lipped, standing off to the right, hands in his pockets. They only wanted the little one. Big brother was trying to convince them how responsible he was, how he’d help take care of the little guy, carry the trash, mow the lawn. I could barely watch it.
I had my first interview on Tuesday. Bill and Ann Greenway from Downey. They’d been foster parents for years. They just had one go back to her birth parents. They’d had her three years.
I didn’t say much. I didn’t even want to look at them. I could get to like them. I liked them already. It would be easy to let them take me home. I could see their house, bright and comfortable, on a street of tract houses but nice, maybe two-story.
I could have gone with them, Ann and Bill Greenway of Downey. But with them, I might forget things. All the butterflies might fly away. Pressed wildflowers and Bach in the morning, dark hair on the pillow, pearls. Aida and Leonard Cohen, Mrs. Kromach and picnics in the living room, pâté and caviar. In Downey, it wouldn’t matter that I knew about Kandinsky and Ypres and the French names for the turns in ballet. I might forget black thread through skin, a .38 bullet crashing through bone, the smell of new houses and the way my mother looked when they handcuffed her, the odd tenderness with which the burly cop held his hand over her head so she wouldn’t hit it getting into the squad car. With Ann and Bill Greenway of Downey, they would dim, fade away. Amsterdam and Eduardo’s hotel, tea at the Beverly Wilshire and the way Claire stood trembling when that bum smelled her hair. I would never again look at homeless kids in doorways off Sunset and see my own face staring back.
“You’ll like it with us, Astrid,” Ann said, her clean white hand on my
arm.
She smelled of Jergens hand lotion, a pallid pink sweetness, not L’Air du Temps or Ma Griffe or my mother’s secretive violets, a scent which for chemical reasons could only be smelled for a moment at a time.
I should have been grabbing it. But I found myself pulling away from her hand.
But I recalled a morning years ago in a boxy church in Tujunga, the fluorescent lights, chipped folding chairs. Starr charmed as a snake while Reverend Thomas explained damnation. The damned could be saved, he said, anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love.
I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life. It wasn’t like I didn’t know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and ever-present loss. I had already seen more of the world, its beauty and misery and sheer surprise, than they could hope or fear to perceive.
I’d given up something I could never get back.
Not Ann and Bill Greenway, but some illusion I’d had, that I could be saved, start again.
hexafu 