by Janet Fitch
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?”
“Of course,” I told you. “Now go to sleep.”
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. The hotel with screens and scrollwork around the door, the rooms open to the tiled walkway. You could hear what everybody was saying. When she smoked a joint she had to blow it out the balcony doors. 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.”
I was tempted to balk, tell her I wasn’t available, make things difficult, but in the end I agreed. I was as ready as I would ever be.
So on a morning already surrendered to the scourging wind and punishing heat, Camille Barron, Susan’s assistant, came for me, and we took the long drive out to Corona. 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. Camille looked wilted but stoic in her beige sheath, her fashionable short haircut limp and sweaty around the edges. She didn’t bother to talk to me, she was only the errand girl. “Here she comes,” Camille said.
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 li
ghter blue.
“A trade,” I said. “Do you want to sit here or under the trees?”
She turned and led me to her favorite place in the visitors yard, under the white-trunked ficus trees looking out at the road, her back to Reception, the farthest point from the first lookout tower. We sat on the dry, summer-battered grass, it scored my bare legs.
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. I let her watch me in profile. I couldn’t look at her while I spoke. I was not hard enough, I knew I would be thrown by her bitter surprise.
“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.”
My mother picked one of the dandelions out of the grass, blew the tufts from the head. “Or what.”
“Or I tell the truth and you can rot in here till you die,” I said.
I heard the grass rustle as she changed her position. When I looked, she was lying on her back, examining the stem from which the plumes had been blown. “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 can look however you want,” I said. “I’ll wear kneesocks if you like.” She was twirling the dandelion between her palms. “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. “I’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.
“If I submit to this examination.” She flicked the dandelion stem away.
“Yes.”
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. She gazed at her feet, tapping them together at the ball. “You used to have a certain delicacy about you. A transparency. You’ve become heavy, opaque.”
“Who was my father?” I asked.
“A man.” Watching her bare toes, clicking together.
“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.” She parted the grass like short hair. “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.” Over her head, a woman had scratched Mona ’76 in the white wood.
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 t
he 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.