White Oleander

26

THE TRAINS ACROSS the river rolled on iron wheels, making a soothing percussion in the night. On our side, back by the bakery, a boy was playing electric guitar. He couldn’t sleep either, the sound of the trains stirred him. His guitar bore his longing up into the darkness like sparks, a music profound in its objectless desire, beautiful beyond solace or solution.

In the other bed, Yvonne was restless. The maple frame groaned under her weight when she turned. She had eight weeks to go and I couldn’t imagine her getting any larger. The swell of her belly rose above the plane of sheet in a smooth volcanic dome, a Mount Saint Helens, Popocatepetl, ready for eruption. Time was moving in the room, in the music of the trains, ratchet by ratchet, a train so vast it needed three locomotives to roll its bulk through the night. Where did the trains go, Mother? Were we there yet?

Sometimes I imagined I had a father who worked nights for the railroad. A signalman for the Southern Pacific who wore heavy fireproof gloves big as oars, and wiped sweat from his forehead with a massive forearm. If I had a father who worked nights for the railroad, I might have had a mother who would listen for the click of the door when he came home, and I would hear her quiet voice, their muffled laughter through the thin walls of the house. How soft their voices would be, and sweet, like pigeons brooding under a bridge.

If I were a poet, that’s what I’d write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle hands. Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question, “How’s it going, how’s the kids?” They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare.

Under the bed, a darker current wove itself into the night. My mother’s unread letters, fluid with lies, shifted and heaved, like the debris of an enormous shipwreck that continued to be washed ashore years after the liner went down. I would allow no more words. From now on, I only wanted things that could be touched, tasted, the scent of new houses, the buzz of wires before rain. A river flowing in moonlight, trees growing out of concrete, scraps of brocade in a fifty-cent bin, red geraniums on a sweatshop window ledge. Give me the way rooftops of stucco apartments piled up forms in the afternoon like late surf, something without a spin, not a self-portrait in water and wind. Give me the boy playing electric guitar, my foster home bed at the end of Ripple Street, and the shape of Yvonne and her baby that was coming. She was the hills of California under mustard and green, tawny as lions in summer.

Across the room, Yvonne cried out. Her pillow fell on the floor. I got it for her. It was spongy with sweat. She sweated so much at night, I sometimes had to help her change the sheets. I put the pillow behind her dark hair, pushed the soaked strands from her face. She was hot as a steaming load of wet laundry.

The guitar unraveled a song I could only occasionally recognize as “So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star.”

“Astrid,” Yvonne whispered.

“Listen,” I said. “Someone’s playing guitar.”

“I had the worst dream,” she mumbled. “People kept stealing my stuff. They took my horse.”

Her felted paper horse, white with gold paper trappings and red silk fringe, sat on the dresser, front leg raised, neck curved into an arch that echoed the frightened curve of her eyebrows.

“It’s still there,” I said, putting my hand on her cheek. I knew it would feel cool on her hot skin. My mother used to do this when I was sick, I suddenly remembered, and for a moment I could feel it distinctly, the touch of her cool hands.

Yvonne lifted her head to see the horse still prancing in the moonlight, then lay back on the pillow. “I wish this was over.”

I knew what Rena would say. The sooner the better. A few months ago, I’d have gone her one further. I would have thought, what was the difference? When she gave birth to the baby, once it had been given away, there would always be something more to lose, a boyfriend, a home, a job, sickness, more babies, days and nights rolling over each other in an ocean that was always the same. Why hurry disaster?

But now I had seen her sitting cross-legged on her bed whispering to her belly, telling it how great the world was going to be, that there were horses and birthdays, white cats and ice cream. Even if Yvonne wouldn’t be there for roller skates and the first day of school, it had to count for something. She had it now, that sweetness, that dream. “Yeah, when it’s time, you’ll think it’s too soon,” I said.

Yvonne held my hand to her hot forehead. “You’re always cool. You don’t sweat at all. Oh, the baby’s moving,” she whispered. “You want to feel it?”

She shoved up her T-shirt and I put my hand on her bare belly, round and hot as rising dough, to feel the odd distortions of the baby’s movements against my palm. Her smile was lopsided, divided, delight warring with what she knew was coming.

“I think it’s a girl,” she whispered. “The other one was a girl.”

She talked about her babies only late at night when we were alone. Rena wouldn’t let her talk about them, she told her not to think about them. But Yvonne needed to talk. The father of this one, Ezequiel, drove a pickup truck. They had met at Griffith Park, and she fell in love when he put her on the merry-go-round.

I tried to think of something to say. “She’s got a good kick. Maybe she’ll be a ballerina, ese.”

The simple melody line of the electric guitar bounced off the hills and fed in through the window, and the mound of Yvonne’s stomach danced in time, the tiny bumps of hands and feet.

“I want her to do Girl Scouts. You’re gonna do Girl Scouts, mija,” she said to the mound. She looked back up at me. “Did you ever do it?”

I shook my head.

“I always wanted to,” she said, tracing figure eights on the damp sheet. “But I couldn’t ask. My mom would’ve laughed her head off. ‘Your big ass in the damn Girl Scouts?’ ”

We sat there for the longest time, not saying anything. Hoping her daughter would have all the good things. The guitarist had quieted down, he was playing “Michelle.” My mother loved that song. She could sing it in French.

Yvonne dozed off, and I went back to bed, thinking of my mother’s cool hands on my face in the heat of a fever, the way she would wrap me in sheets soaked in ice water, eucalyptus, and cloves. I am your home, she’d once said, and it was still true.

I crawled under the bed, pulled out the sack of her letters, some packets thin as a promise, others fat like white koi. The bag was heavy, it exhaled the scent of her violets. I got up silently, not to wake Yvonne, and slipped out of the room, shutting the door tightly behind me.

In the living room, on the green couch, I turned on the beaded lamp that made everything look like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. I lifted handfuls of letters onto the coffee table. I hated my mother but I craved her. I wanted to understand how she could fill my world with such beauty, and could also say, that woman was born to OD.

The battered tomcat stalked along the back of the couch, cautiously climbed onto me. I let it curl up under my heart, heavy and warm and purring like a truck in low gear.

They could lock her up, but they couldn’t prevent the transformation of the world in her mind. This was what Claire never understood. The act by which my mother put her face on the world. There were crimes that were too subtle to be effectively prosecuted.

I sat up and the white cat flowed off me like milk. I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, threw it onto the crowded coffee table. She didn’t fool me. I was the soft girl in Reception. She’d rob me of everything I had left to take. I would not be seduced by the music of her words. I could always tell the ragged truth from an elegant lie.

Nobody took me away, Mother. My hand never slipped from your grasp. That wasn’t how it went down. I was more like a car you’d parked while drunk, then couldn’t remember where you’d left it. You looked away for seventeen years and when you looked back, I was a woman you didn’t recognize. So now I was supposed to feel pity for you and those other women who’d lost their own children during a holdup, a murder, a fiesta of greed? Save your poet’s sympathy and find some better believer. Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good. Someday I’d read it all in a poem for the New Yorker.

Yes, I was tattooed, just as she’d said. Every inch of my skin was penetrated and stained. I was the original painted lady, a Japanese gangster, a walking art gallery. Hold me up to the light, read my bright wounds. If I had warned Barry I might have stopped her. But she had already claimed me. I wiped my tears, dried my hands on the white cat, and reached for another handful of glass to rub on my skin. Another letter full of agitated goings-on, dramas, and fantasies. I skimmed down the page.

Yes, I was crying. These words like bombs she sealed up and had delivered, leaving me ragged and bloody weeks later. You imagine you can see me, Mother? All you could ever see was your own face in a mirror.

You always said I knew nothing, but that was the place to begin. I would never claim to know what women in prison dreamed about, or the rights of beauty, or what the night’s magic held. If I thought for a second I did, I’d never have the chance to find out, to see it whole, to watch it emerge and reveal itself. I don’t have to put my face on every cloud, be the protagonist of every random event.

Who am I, Mother? I’m not you. That’s why you wish I were dead. You can’t shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act, I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don’t know. I am nothing like you. My nose is different, flat at the bridge, not sharp as a fold in rice paper. My eyes aren’t ice blue, tinted with your peculiar mix of beauty and cruelty. They are dark as bruises on the inside of an arm, they never smile. You forbid me to cry? I’m no longer yours to command. You used to say I had no imagination. If by that you meant I could feel shame, and remorse, you were right. I can’t remake the world just by willing it so. I don’t know how to believe my own lies. It takes a certain kind of genius.

I went out on the front porch, the splintered boards under my bare feet. The wind carried the steady noise of traffic on the 5 and barking dogs, the pop of gunfire a block or two off in a night tinged red from the sodium vapor streetlights, it was bleeding. We were the ones who sacked Rome, she said on that long-ago night on the rooftop under the raven’s-eye moon. Don’t forget who you are.

How could I ever forget. I was her ghost daughter, sitting at empty tables with crayons and pens while she worked on a poem, a girl malleable as white clay. Someone to shape, instruct in the ways of being her. She was always shaping me. She showed me an orange, a cluster of pine needles, a faceted quartz, and made me describe them to her. I couldn’t have been more than three or four. My words, that’s what she wanted. “What’s this?” she kept asking. “What’s this?” But how could I tell her? She’d taken all the words.

The smell of vanilla wafers saturated the night air, and the wind clicked through the palms like thoughts through my sleepless mind. Who am I? I am a girl you didn’t know, Mother. The silent girl in the back row of the schoolroom, drawing in notebooks. Remember how they didn’t know if I even spoke English when we came back to the States? They tested me to find out if I was retarded or deaf. But you never asked why. You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.

I thought of Yvonne in our room, asleep, thumb in mouth, wrapped around her baby like a top. “I can see her,” you said. You could never see her, Mother. Not if you stood in that room all night. You could only see her plucked eyebrows, her bad teeth, the books that she read with fainting women on the covers. You could never recognize the kindness in that girl, the depth of her needs, how desperately she wanted to belong, that’s why she was pregnant again. You could judge her as you judged everything else, inferior, but you could never see her. Things weren’t real to you. They were just raw material for you to reshape to tell a story you liked better. You could never just listen to a boy play guitar, you’d have to turn it into a poem, make it all about you.

I went back inside, spread all her letters out on Rena’s wobble-legged kitchen table, letters from Starr’s and from Marvel’s, letters from Amelia’s and Claire’s and these last bitter installments. There were enough to drown me forever. The ink of her writing was a fungus, a malignant spell on birch bark, a twisted rune. I picked up the scissors and began cutting, snapping the strings of her words, uncoupling her complicated train of thought car by car. She couldn’t stop me now. I refused to see through her eyes any longer.

Carefully, I chose words and phrases from the pile, laid them out on the gray-and-white linoleum tabletop and began to arrange them in lines. Gray dawn was straining peaches by the time I was done.

I glued them to sheets of paper. I give them back to you. Your own little slaves. Oh my God, they’re in revolt. It’s Spartacus, Rome is burning. Now sack it, Mother. Take what you can before it all burns to ash.