White Oleander

29

AS I HAD PROMISED, I accompanied Yvonne to baby class at Waite Memorial Hospital. I held her tennis balls, her towel. I couldn’t seem to take it seriously. I didn’t know if it was the aftermath of the acid, but everything seemed funny. The plastic doll we handled looked like a space alien. The young couples seemed like big children, playing a game, the pregnancy game. These girls couldn’t really be pregnant, they had pillows shoved up underneath their baby doll dresses. I liked the feeling of all the baby things, even washing the doll and diapering it with the Mickey Mouse diaper.

Yvonne pretended she was my sister-in-law, and that her husband, my brother, was in the army. Patrick, she liked the name. A TV actor. “I got a letter from Patrick, did I fell you?” she told me during the break, while we all drank sweet juice from tiny paper cups, ate ginger snaps. “My husband,” she told the couple next to her. “He’s getting sent to, you know—”

“Dar es Salaam,” I said.

“I miss him, don’t you?”

“Not that much,” I said. “He’s way older than me.” I imagined a big blond man who brought me dolls from his different tours. Heidi dolls, dope hidden up their skirts.

“He sent me five hundred dollars for the layette,” she said.

“Made me promise not to go to yard sales. He wants everything brand-new. It’s a waste of money, but if that’s what he wants . . .”

This was fun. I was never a little girl playing games with other little girls, dolly mommy daddy games.

They showed her how to hold the baby to her breast, holding the breast in one hand. She suckled the plastic child. I had to laugh.

“Shhh,” Yvonne said, cuddling the space alien, stroking its indented head. “Such a pretty little baby. Don’t you listen to that bad girl laughing, mija. You’re my baby, yes you are.”

Later, Yvonne lay on the orange mat, blowing and counting, and I put the tennis balls under her back, switched to the rolled towels. I held the watch and timed her contractions, I breathed with her, we both hyperventilated. She wasn’t nervous. “Don’t worry,” Yvonne said, smiling up at me, her belly like a giant South Sea Island pearl in a cocktail ring. “I been through this before.”

They explained about the epidural and drugs, but no one there was going to have drugs. They all wanted the natural experience. It all seemed wrapped in plastic, unreal, like stewardesses on planes demonstrating the seat belts and the pattern for orderly disembarkation in case of crash at sea, the people taking a glance at the cards in the seat pocket in front of them. Sure, they thought, no problem. A peek at the nearest exit and then they were ready for in-flight service, peanuts and a movie.

RENA SOAKED UP the fierce April sun in her black macrame 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. The metal chaise was half-collapsed beneath her, we were lulled by the sound of the rusty sprinkler watering the lawn of crabgrass and dandelions.

“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 dreamed I missed a ride out to New York for art school, I lost an invitation to a party with Paul Trout. I stayed up and looked through my stack of twelve-year-old ArtNewses I’d found on trash day, studied the photographs of the women artists, their tangled hair, gray, long brown, stringy blond. Amy Ayres, Sandal Mclnnes, Nicholette Reis. I wanted to be them. Amy, with her curly gray hair and her wrinkled T-shirt, posing in front of her huge abstract of curved cones and cylinders. Amy, how can I be you? I read your article, but I can’t find the clue. Your middle-class parents, your sick father. Your art teacher in high school created a scholarship for you. At Marshall I didn’t even have art.

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.

Lucidly I wasn’t in the classes where they talked about college. I was in the classes where they told us about condoms and bringing guns to school. Claire signed me up for all the honors classes, but I couldn’t hold on. If she were alive, I might have tried, followed up, asked for a scholarship, I would know what to do. Now all that was slipping away.

On the other hand, I still went to school, did the work, took the tests. 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. I could spend an hour exaggerating the perspective of all the desks diminishing toward the blackboard, the backs of heads, necks, hair. Yolanda Collins sat in front of me in math class. I could gaze at the back of her head all period long, the layers of tiny braids laced together in designs intricate as Persian rugs, sometimes with beads or cord woven in.

I looked down at the pad in my hands. At least I had this diamond-shaped pattern, the trapezoid of the gate. Wasn’t that enough? Did there have to be more?

I looked at Rena, slathering on her Tropic Tan, baking to medium-well in the blistering sun, happy as a cupcake in frilled paper. “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.”

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.

She turned on her side, her large nippled breast falling out of her bikini top to the workmen’s vociferous approval. She hiked her top up, which called forth more excitement. She ignored it all, rested her head on her hand. “I been thinking. Everybody has license plate frame from dealer. Van Nuys Toyota, We’re Number 1. I think, we buy license plate frame, you paint nice, we get maybe ten, fifteen dollars. Cost us dollar.”

“What’s my cut?” I derived a perverse satisfaction in knowing the right moment to say it. I had arrived on Ripple Street, the paradise of my despair.

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. “Tiki restaurants, mai tais, Trader Vic’s, you name it.” 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. She was shorter than I was. She wore a good, green-scented perfume, a hint of citrus, almost like a man’s aftershave. She had on a gold necklace thick as a bike chain, with a square-cut emerald embedded in it. Her teeth were unnaturally white. “Susan D. Valeris.”

I shook her hand. It was very small and dry. She wore a wide wedding band on her forefinger, and an onyx intaglio signet on the pinky of the other hand.

“You mind if Astrid and I . . . ?” she asked Rena, wagging her wedding-banded finger between the two of us. Eeny meeny miney mo.

“It’s not problem,” Rena said, looking at the check again, putting it in her pocket. “You can stay, see if there’s anything else you like. Everything for sale.”

When we were alone, Susan D. gestured to the green couch for me to sit down. I didn’t. It was my house, I didn’t have to follow instruction. “How much did you give her?”

“Doesn’t matter,” the lawyer said, taking her seat again. “The point is, you’ve been avoiding my calls.” To my surprise, she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her Hermes 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. Carrier—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?”

I let my bookbag drop onto the dusty upholstered armchair, sending a cloud of motes up into the stuffy air. “Thought I might become a criminal lawyer,” I said. “That or a hooker. Maybe a garbage collector.”

She made no parry, kept her mind on her purpose. “May I ask why you haven’t returned my calls?”

I leaned against the wall, watching her quick, confident movements. “Go ahead and ask,” I said.

She put her slim red leather briefcase on her lap and opened it, removed a folder and a yellow legal pad. “Your mother said you might be difficult,” she said. “That you blame her for what’s happened.” Susan gazed into my eyes, as if she got a point for every second of eye contact she could maintain. I could see her practicing in front of a mirror when she was in law school. I waited to hear the rest of the story they’d concocted. “I know you’ve been through a terrible ordeal,” she said. She looked down at the file. “Six foster homes, MacLaren Hall. The suicide of your foster mother, Claire Richards, was it? Your mother said you were close to her. It must have been devastating.”

I felt the wave of anger rise through me. Claire’s death was mine. She had no right to handle it, to bring it up and somehow relate it to my mother’s case. But maybe this too was a tactic. To get it all out in the open to begin with, so I wouldn’t be sullen, withholding my feelings about Claire, difficult to draw out. An aggressive opening at chess. I saw that she knew just what she was doing. Going for the sore spot right away. “Did you ask your client about her involvement with that?”

“Surely you don’t blame your mother for the death of a woman she only met once,” Susan said, as if there was no question about the absurdity of such a statement. “She’s not a sorcerer, is she?” She settled back on the couch, took a drag on her cigarette, watching me through the smoke, evaluating my reaction.

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?”

I pushed away from the wall and went over to the hatrack. I didn’t want to look at her anymore, or rather, have her looking at me, sizing me up. I put on an old hat and watched her in the mirror. “Because Claire loved me.” It was a straw hat with a net veil, I pulled the veil over my eyes.

“You felt she was jealous,” Susan said in a motherly way, spewing smoke into the air, an octopus spraying ink.

I adjusted the veil, then tilted the brim of the hat. “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.”

Susan leaned forward, elbows on knees, eyes lifted to the rough, cottage-cheese ceiling, and I could hear her brain clicking, a mechanical readjustment, tapping and turning what I had just told her, searching for the advantage. “But what mother wouldn’t be jealous,” she said. “Of a daughter growing fond of a foster mother. Honestly speaking.” She flicked her ash into the beanbag ashtray, shaping the cherry on the bottom.

I turned to her, looking at her through the veil, glad she couldn’t see the fear in my eyes. “Honestly speaking, she killed Claire. She shoved her over the cliff, okay? Maybe she can’t be prosecuted for it, but don’t try to sell me this new and improved spin. She killed Claire and she killed Barry. Let’s just get on with it.”

Susan sighed and put her pen down. She took another hit of her cigarette and ground it out in the ashtray. “You’re a tough nut, aren’t you.”

“You’re the one who wants to let a murderer go free,” I said. I took off the hat and threw it on the chair, scaring the white cat, who ran out of the room.

“She was denied due process. It’s in the record,” Susan said, striking the edge of her hand into the other palm. I could see her in court, her hands translating her for the hearing impaired. “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.” Hands palm down, crossed and cut outward, like a baseball ref’s “safe.” She was building momentum, but I’d heard enough.

“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.”

Susan slumped to the back of the couch, as if my comments had drained her of all her righteous vigor. A car with the radio up loud, spewing ranchero music, cruised by and Susan quickly turned to look out the window at the dark green Jaguar parked in front. When she was satisfied that it was still there, gleaming by the curb, she returned to me. Slowly, and wearily. “Astrid, when young people are so cynical, it makes me despair for the future of this country.”

It was the funniest thing I’d heard all day. I had to laugh. I didn’t find much funny these days, but this definitely was bizarre by anyone’s standards.

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.”

Susan slowly smiled in her red lipstick, pushing her black curls back from her face with one hand, her lashes very black against her white face. As if a bit ashamed of herself, but also somewhat relieved that she did not have to sell me as hard as she thought she might.

“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. She had the jazz station from Long Beach on the radio, a free-form West Coast piece with a flute and an electric guitar. We rose out of Ripple Street, past the unlicensed day care and the bakery and the trompe 1’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. The drought had exposed a huge concrete collar around the lake, but in the sealed world of the Jaguar, it was sixty-eight degrees. Such a pleasure to be in a rich woman’s car. Now a new song filled the rarified atmosphere, I immediately recognized it. Oliver Nelson, “Stolen Moments.”

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. I hung on to it as Susan parked on the far side of the lake, where we could see the blue-green water, dotted with white, the picturesque hillside beyond. She turned the music down, but you could still hear 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?” She cracked her window with the electric button, snapped in the car’s lighter, and reached into her bag for her cigarettes. “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?”

She put a cigarette in her mouth and the lighter popped out. She lit it, filling the car with smoke. She exhaled up toward the slit in the window. “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.”

Out the window, in the unairconditioned part of reality, a very red-faced jogger trotted by us, dragging a tired setter on a leash. “Is that what you’ll say if I tell the truth at her trial?”

We watched her plodding down the sidewalk, the dog trying to sniff at the plants as they went by. “Something like that,” she said, the first honest thing I’d heard her say since I’d shaken her small hand. She sighed and flicked ash out the window. Some blew back in. She brushed it off her suit. “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.”

“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.”

My moment’s uncertainty faded. 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. I opened up the airflow vent and let the air-conditioning kiss my face.

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 I’d learned to ask, un-apologetically, 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.”

Susan took a last drag of her cigarette, threw it out the window, then raised the glass. 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 concrete 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.

A makeshift tent sat on a small island in the middle of the miniature forest, its blue plastic tarp startling amid the grays and greens. The here-and-now Hiltons, Barry used to call them. I knew whose it was. A tall, thin Vietnam vet in khakis and camouflage, I’d seen him around early in the mornings, the thin thread of smoke from his small coffee-can stove. I’d seen him in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, the boarded-up side, playing poker with his friends in the long shadows of afternoon.

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? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cezanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them.

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 sunglasses 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.”