White Oleander

4

THEN CAME A TIME I can hardly describe, a season underground. A bird trapped in a sewer, wings beating against the ceiling in that dark wet place, while the city rumbled on overhead. Her name was Lost. Her name was Nobody’s Daughter.

In my dreams, my mother walked through a city of bricks and rubble, a city after war, and she was blind, her eyes empty and white as stones. There were tall apartments all around her, with triangles over windows, all bricked up and burning. Blind windows, and her blind eyes, and yet still she came toward me, inevitable and insane. I saw that her face was melted and horribly pliable. There were hollows in the tops of her cheeks, under her eyes, as if someone had pressed into soft clay with their thumbs.

Those heavy days, how heavy the low gray sky, my wings were so heavy, so heavy my panicked flight under the ground. So many faces, so many lips, wanting me to tell, it made me tired, I fell asleep as they spoke. Just tell us what happened. What could I tell? When I opened my mouth, a stone fell out. Her poor white eyeballs. Just where I hoped to find mercy. I dreamed of white milk in the street, white milk and glass. Milk down the gutter, milk like tears. I kept her kimono against my face, her scent of violets and ash. I rubbed the silk between my fingers.

In that place under the ground lived many children, babies, teenagers, and the rooms echoed noise like a subway. Music like a train wreck, arguing, crying, the ceaseless TV. The heavy smell of cooking, thin sickly urine, pine cleaner. The woman who ran it made me get out of bed at regular intervals, sit at the table with the others before platters of beans and greens, meat. I dutifully came out, sat, ate, then returned to the cocoon of bed and sleep, plastic sheet crinkling under me. I woke up soaked to the armpits more nights than not.

The girl in the other bed had seizures. The niece told me, “There’s more money in disability children like you all.”

Roses drifted down the walls in brownish slants in the room. I counted roses. Diagonal rows of forty, ninety-two across. Over the dresser, Jesus, JFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all in profile, facing left, like racehorses at the starting gate, Jesus on the outside. The woman who ran the home, Mrs. Campbell, thin and raisinish, dusted with a yellow T-shirt. The horses all lined up, straining at the barrier. Hers was number seven, Medea’s Pride. That was a day with a trapdoor, and we all fell through. I ran the belt of her kimono over my mouth, over and over, all day long, the taste of what had been lost.

THE DAY OF her arrest returned in my dreams, they were tunnels that kept coming around to the same place. The knock on the door. It had been very early, still dark. Another knock, and then voices, pounding. I ran into her room as the cops, cops in uniform, not in uniform, burst in. The manager stood in the doorway, his head in a shower cap. They pulled my mother out of bed, voices like snapping dogs. She yelled at them in German, calling them Nazis, calling them blackshirts. “Schutzstaffel. Durch Ihre Verordnung, mein Führer.” Her naked body, tender breasts swaying, stomach welted red from the sheets. It was impossible, a faked photograph. Someone had cut out these policemen and stuck them on our apartment. They kept looking at her, a dirty magazine. Her body like moonlight.

“Astrid, they can’t keep me,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in an hour.”

She said. She said.

I sat on Michael’s couch, slept and waited, the way dogs wait, all day, and then the next. A week went by, but she didn’t come. She said she would, but she never did.

WHEN THEY CAME to get me, they gave me fifteen minutes to make up my mind what to take from our apartment. We never had many things. I took her four books, a box of her journals, the white kimono, her tarot cards, and her folding knife.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said. “I’d keep you if I could. But you know how it is.”

How it was. How it was that the earth could open up under you and swallow you whole, close above you as if you never were. Like Persephone snatched by the god. The ground opened up and out he came, sweeping her into the black chariot. Then down they plunged, under the ground, into the darkness, and the earth closed over her head, and she was gone, as if she had never been.

So I came to live underground, in the house of sleep, in the house of plastic sheets and crying babies and brown roses in drifts, forty down, ninety-two across. Three thousand six hundred and eighty brown roses.

ONCE THEY BROUGHT me to see her behind glass. She wore an orange jumpsuit, like a car mechanic, and there was something wrong with her. Her eyes were all clouded over. I told her I loved her, but she didn’t recognize me. I saw her there in my dreams, again and again, her blind eyes.

It was a year of mouths, opening and closing, asking the same questions, saying the same things. Just tell us what happened. Tell us what we want to know. I wanted to help her, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t find words, I had no words. In the courtroom she wore a white shirt. I saw that shirt when I was awake and I saw it when I slept. I saw her on the stand in that shirt, her eyes blank as a doll’s. I saw her back in that white shirt walking away. Thirty-five to life, someone said. I came home and counted roses, and slept.

WHEN I WAS AWAKE, I tried to remember the things she taught me. We were the wands. We hung our gods from trees. Never let a man stay the night. Don’t forget who you are. But I couldn’t remember. I was the disability girl, stones in my mouth, lost on the battlefield, plastic sheets on the bed. I was the laundry monitor, I helped the niece take the laundry to the Laundromat. I watched the laundry go around. I liked the smell of it, it made me feel safe. I slept until sleep seemed like waking and waking like sleep. Sometimes I lay on my bed in the room with the roses and watched the girl in the other bed make scar tattoos on her ashy dark skin with a safety pin, a diaper pin with a yellow duck. She opened her skin in lines and loops. It healed over into pink pillowy tissue. She opened them again. It took me a while, but finally I understood. She wanted it to show.

I dreamed my mother was hunting me in the burnt-out city, blind, relentless. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. I wanted to lie, but the words deserted me. She was the one who always spoke for us. She was the goddess who threw out the golden apples. They would stoop to pick them up, and we’d make our escape. But when I reached into my pocket, there was only dust and dried leaves. I had nothing to protect her with, to cover her naked body. I had condemned her by my silence, condemned us both.

ONE DAY I woke to find the girl from the other bed going through my drawer in the dresser. Looking at a book, flicking through the pages. My mother’s book. My slender, naked mother, alone among the blackshirts. She was pawing my mother’s words. “Get out of my stuff,” I said.

The girl looked up at me, startled. She didn’t know I could talk. We had been in this room for months now and I’d never said a word.

“Put it back,” I said.

She broke out in a grin. Grabbed a page, crumpled it and tore it out of the book, watching me. What would I do. My mother’s words in her scaly-knuckled hand. What would I do, what would I do. She took another page, tore it out and stuffed it in her mouth, the pieces hanging from her blistered lips, grinning.

I fell on her, knocked her down. Sat on her, my knees in her back, the dark blade of my mother’s knife jabbed at her spine. A song in the blood. Don’t forget who you are.

I wanted to cut her. I could feel the tip of the knife in her, slipping into her neck, the indentation at the base of her skull like a well. She lay very still, waiting to see what came next. I looked at my hand, a hand that knew how to hold a knife, how to shove it into a crazy girl’s spine. It wasn’t mine. I wasn’t this. I wasn’t.

“Spit it out,” I whispered in her ear.

She spit out the pieces, her lips buzzing like a horse’s.

“Don’t touch my stuff,” I said.

She nodded.

I let her up.

She went back to her bed and started poking herself with the safety pin. I put the knife in my pocket and picked up the crumpled page, the torn pieces.

In the kitchen, the niece and her boyfriend were sitting at the table, drinking Colt 45, listening to the radio. Having an argument. “You’re never going to see that money, fool,” she said. They didn’t see me. They didn’t see any of us. I got the tape and went back to my room.

I taped the torn page together, taped them both back into the book. It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moon-flower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves. It was her reading copy, soft pencil notes in the margins. PAUSE. Upward Inflect. I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.

The picture on the back. My mother in a short dress with long graceful sleeves, her hair cut in long bangs, eyes peeking out underneath. Like a cat peering out from under a bed. That beautiful girl, she was a universe, bearer of these words that rang like gongs, that tumbled like flutes made of human bones. In the picture, none of this had ever happened. I was safe then, a tiny pin-head egg buried in her right-side ovary, and we never were apart.

WHEN I STARTED talking, they sent me to school. My name was White Girl. I was an albino, a freak. I had no skin at all. I was transparent, you could see the circulation of the blood. I drew pictures in every class. I drew pictures on the computer cards, connecting the dots into new constellations.