Astrid Magnussen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_oleander) wrote2020-06-07 08:04 am
white_oleander) wrote2020-06-07 08:04 am
Entry tags:
Room 210; Sunday Afternoon [06/07].
Astrid had pulled out the bag of her letters from underneath her bed that afternoon, some packets thin as a promise, others fat like white koi. The bag was heavy, it exhaled the scent of Ingrid's violets. Usually, Astrid kept the door open, in the spirit of their shared communial living, in the unspoken invitation for distraction or interruption, but today, she got up and closed it softly shut, before going back to her bed and lifted handfuls of letters out of the bag onto her bed.
Astrid hated her mother but she craved her. She wanted to understand how she could fill her world with such beauty, and could also say thigns like that woman was born to OD.
And so she read. Just one, for now. One at a time, like small little meals to get her through the day, as to not gorge herself on a feast and discover herself, suddenly, within an inescapable famine.
Dear Astrid,
It’s three in the morning, we've just had fourth count. In Ad Seg, the lights burn all night, fluorescent and stark on gray block wells just wide enough for the bed and the toilet. Still no letter from you. Only Sister Lunaria’s sexual litany. It runs day and night from the bottom bunk, like shifts of Tibetan monks praying the world into being. This evening, the exegesis has centered upon the Book of Raul, her last boyfriend. How worshipfully she describes the size and configuration of his member, the prismatic catalog of his erotic response.
Sex is the last thing I think about here. Freedom is my only concern. I ponder the configuration of molecules in the walls. I meditate upon the nature of matter, a prevalence of void within the whirling electron rodeo. I try to vibrate between the packets of quanta, phasing at precisely the opposite wavelength, so that eventually I will exist in between the pulses, and matter will become wholly permeable. Someday I will walk right through these walls. “He is giving it to Vicki Manolo over on Simmons A,” quoth Lunaria. “He’s hung like a horse. When he sits down it’s like he’s got a baseball bat in there. “
The inmates like Goniales. He takes the trouble to flirt, mars cologne, his hands are clean as white calla. She is masturbating, imagining enormous penises, she’s coupling with horses, with bulls, she’s positively Jovian in her fantasies, while I stare up at the pinpricks in the acoustical tiles and listen to the nightbreath of the prison.
These days, I hear everything. I hear the click of the cards in guard tower f, not poker, sounds like gin rummy, listen to their sad admissions of hemorrhoids and domestic suspicions. The old ladies in the honor cottage, Miller, snore with their dentures in a glass. I hear the rats in Culinary. A woman screams in the SCU, she hears the rats too, but doesn’t understand they’re not in her bed. Restraints are quickly applied.
In the dormitories of Reception, I hear murmured threats as they shake down a new girl. She’s soft, a check kiter, she;s not prepared to be here. They take everything she has left to take. “Pussy,” they say after they’re through.
The rest of the prison sleeps fitfully, rocked in dreams made vivid by captivity. I know what they're dreaming. I read them like novels, it’s better than Joyce. They’re dreaming of men who beat them, a backhand, unsubtle kick to the groin. Men who clench their teeth before striking, they hiss, “Look what you’re making me do. ” The women cringe even in sleep, under the stares of men’s eyeballs road mapped with veins, popped with rage, the whites the color of mayonnaise left out for a week. One wonders how they could even see to deliver their blows. But women’s fear is a magnet. I hope you dont know this. It draws the fist, the hands of men, hard as God’s.
Others are luckier. They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers’ braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.
Some dream of crime, guns and money. Vials of dreams that disappeared like late snow I am there. I see the face of a surprised ARCO attendant just at the moment it spreads into a collage of bright blood and bone.
I lie down in the cherished apartment, its white carpet, garbage disposal, dishwasher, security parking. I too cheat the old couple out of their savings and celebrate over a bottle of Mumm’s and Sevruga on toast. I carefully take a sliding glass door off the track of a two-story house in Mar Vista. I buy a fur coat at Saks with a stolen American Express credit card. It’s the best Russian sable, golden as brandy.
Best are the freedom dreams. Steering wheels so real in the hand, the spring of the accelerator, gas tanks marked FULL. Wind through open windows, we dont use the air conditioner, we suck in the live air going by. We take the freeways, using the fast lanes, watch for signs saying San Francisco, New/ Orleans. We pass trucks on great interstates, truck drivers blowing their airhorns. We drink sodas at gas stations, eat burgers rare at roadside cafes, order extra everything. We listen to country music stations, we pick up Tijuana, Chicago, Atlanta, GA, and sleep in motels where the clerk never even looks up, just takes the money.
On Barneburg B, my cellmate Lydia Gunman dreams of walking on Whittier Blvd. in summertime, a rush of roughly cut drugs throbbing salsa down her thighs slick with ten-dollar nylons. She stuns the vatos with her slow haunch-dripping stride, her skirt impossibly tight. Her laughter tastes like burnt sunshine, cactus, and the worm.
But most of all, we dream of children. The touch of small hands, glinty rows of seed pearl teeth. We are always losing our children. In parking lots, in the market, on the bus. We turn and call. Shawanda, we call, Luz, Astrid. How could we lose you, we were being so careful. We only looked away for a moment. Arms full of packages, we stand alone on the sidewalk and someone has taken our children.
Mother.
They could lock Ingrid up, but they couldn’t prevent the transformation of the world in her mind. This was what Claire never understood. The act by which Ingrid Magnussen put her face on the world. There were crimes that were too subtle to be effectively prosecuted.
Astrid folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, threw it onto the crowded bed. Ingrid couldn't fool her, not anymore. She was the soft girl in Reception. Ingrid would rob her of everything she had left to take. She would not be seduced by the music of her words. She could tell the ragged truth from an elegant lie.
Nobody took me away, Mother. Her hand never slipped from Ingrid's grasp. That wasn’t how it went down. Astrid was more like a car she’d parked while drunk, then couldn’t remember where she’d left it. She looked away for sixteen years, and, when she looked back, Astrid was a young woman she didn’t recognize. So now she was supposed to feel pity for her and those other women who’d lost their own children during a hold-up, a murder, a fiesta of greed? She should save her 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 Astrid would read it all in a poem for the New Yorker.
Yes, she was tattooed, just as she’d said. Every inch of Astrid's skin was penetrated and stained, not just the roughly done oleander on her arm. She was the original painted lady, a Japanese gangster, a walking art gallery. Hold me up to the light, read my bright wounds. If she had warned Barry, she might have stopped her. But she had already claimed her.
Astrid wiped her tears, dried her hands on the blanket, and reached for another handful of glass to rub on her skin. Another letter full of agitated goings-on, dramas, and fantasies. Astrid skimmed down the page.
Somewhere in Ad Seg, a woman is crying. She’s been crying all night. I’ve been trying to find her, but at last, I realise, she’s not here at all. It’s you. Stop crying, Astrid. I forbid it. You have to be strong. I’m in your room, Astrid, do you feel me? You share it with a girl, I see her too, her colorful hair, her thin arched eyebrows. She sleeps well, but not you. You sit up in bed with the yellow chenille spread — God, where did you find that thing? My mother had one just like it.
I see you cradling your bare knees, forehead pressed against them. Crickets stroke their legs like pool players lining up shots. Stop crying, do you hear me? Who do you think you are? What am I doing here, except to show you how a woman is stronger than that?
It’s such a liability to love another person, but in here, it’s like playing catch with grenades. The lifers tell me to forget you, do easy time. “You can make a life here,” they say. “Choose a mate, find new children.” Sometimes it’s so awful, I think that they’re right. I should forget you. Sometimes I wish you were dead, so I would know you were safe.
A woman in my unit gave her children heroin from the time they were small, so she’d always know where they were. They’re all in jail, alive. She likes it that way. If I thought I’d be here forever, I would forget you. I’d have to. It sickens me to think of you out there, picking up wounds while I spin in this cellblock, impotent as a genie in a lamp. Astrid, stop crying, damn you!
I will get out, Astrid, I promise you that. I will win an appeal, I will walk through the walls, I will fly away like a white crow
Mother.
Yes, she was crying. These words like bombs that Ingrid sealed up and delivered, leaving Astrid ragged and bloody weeks later. You imagine you can see me, Mother? All she could ever see was her own face in a mirror.
She'd always said that Astrid knew nothing, but that was the place to begin. Astrid would never claim to know what women in prison dreamed about, or the rights of beauty, or what the night’s magic held. If she thought for a second she did, she’d never have the chance to find out, to see it whole, to watch it emerge and reveal itself. Astrid didn’t have to put her 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.
She couldn't shape Astrid anymore. She was the uncontrolled element, the random act, she was forward movement in time. She was far away now, and not just in distance.
You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don’t know. I am nothing like you.
Astrid's nose was different, flat at the bridge, not sharp as a fold in rice paper. Her eyes weren’t ice blue, tinted with Ingrid's peculiar mix of beauty and cruelty. They are dark as bruises on the inside of an arm, they hardly ever smile.
You forbid me to cry? I’m no longer yours to command.
She always said Astrid had no imagination. If by that she meant that Astrid could feel shame, and remorse, then she was right. Astrid couldn't remake the world just by willing it so. She didn't know how to believe her own lies. It took a certain kind of genius.
We were the ones who sacked Rome, she said, one night, long ago on the rooftop under the raven’s-eye moon. Don’t forget who you are.
How could she ever forget? She 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 being shaped. She showed Astrid an orange, a cluster of pine needles, a faceted quartz, and made her describe them to her. She couldn’t have been more than three or four. Her words, that’s what she wanted. “What’s this?” she kept asking. “What’s this?” But how could Astrid tell her? Ingrid had taken all the words.
Outside, a wind clattered the branches of a tree together, like the clattering in Astrid's restless mind. Who was she? I am a girl you didn't know, Mother. The silent girl in the back row of the school room,
drawing in notebooks. Did Ingrid remember how they didn’t know if Astrid even spoke English when they came back to the States? They tested her to find out if she was slow or deaf. But Ingrid never asked why. She never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.
Astrid spread all the letters out on her bed more, not just the ones she'd sent recently, but all the others that Astrid had kept through the past two years. Letters from Starr’s and letters from Claire’s, letters from Astrid's first time at Fandom, and her time at the MAC, and these last bitter installments. There were enough to drown Astrid forever. The ink of her writing was a fungus, a malignant spell on birch bark, a twisted rune. Astrid reached for a pair of scissors among her and Sabine's seemingly endless mountain of supplies, and she began cutting, snapping the strings of Ingrid's words, uncoupling her complicated train of thought car by car. She couldn’t stop her now. Astrid refused to see through Ingrid's eyes any longer.
Carefully, she chose words and phrases from the pile, laid them out in front of her andbegan to arrange them in lines. Brilliant red and purple dusk would probably paint the sky by the time she was done, piecing together the words, creating her own:
It sickens me to think of you
a prevalence of void
unholy
immovable
damned, gifts.
an overblown sense of his own importance.
I wish you were dead
forget about you.
crow
florid with
fantasies
it’s so awful
a perfect imitation
a liability to love
forget you
Ingrid Magnussen
quite alone
masturbating
rot
disappointment
grotesque
Your arms cradle
poisons
garbage
grenades
Loneliness
long-distance cries
forever
never
response,
take everything
feel me?
the human condition
Stop
plotting murder
penitence
Cultivate it
you
forbid
appeal
rage
impotent
it's too
important
I
cringe
fuck
you
insane
person
dissonant and querulous
my gas tanks marked FULL
Astrid glued them to sheets of paper. She'll give them all back to her.
Ingrid's 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.
[[ the bulk of this was swiped and modified from Chapter 26 of White Oleander by Janet Fitch, naturally, and I have been looking forward to this post for a long, long time. Door is closed, but the post is open! ]]
Astrid hated her mother but she craved her. She wanted to understand how she could fill her world with such beauty, and could also say thigns like that woman was born to OD.
And so she read. Just one, for now. One at a time, like small little meals to get her through the day, as to not gorge herself on a feast and discover herself, suddenly, within an inescapable famine.
Dear Astrid,
It’s three in the morning, we've just had fourth count. In Ad Seg, the lights burn all night, fluorescent and stark on gray block wells just wide enough for the bed and the toilet. Still no letter from you. Only Sister Lunaria’s sexual litany. It runs day and night from the bottom bunk, like shifts of Tibetan monks praying the world into being. This evening, the exegesis has centered upon the Book of Raul, her last boyfriend. How worshipfully she describes the size and configuration of his member, the prismatic catalog of his erotic response.
Sex is the last thing I think about here. Freedom is my only concern. I ponder the configuration of molecules in the walls. I meditate upon the nature of matter, a prevalence of void within the whirling electron rodeo. I try to vibrate between the packets of quanta, phasing at precisely the opposite wavelength, so that eventually I will exist in between the pulses, and matter will become wholly permeable. Someday I will walk right through these walls. “He is giving it to Vicki Manolo over on Simmons A,” quoth Lunaria. “He’s hung like a horse. When he sits down it’s like he’s got a baseball bat in there. “
The inmates like Goniales. He takes the trouble to flirt, mars cologne, his hands are clean as white calla. She is masturbating, imagining enormous penises, she’s coupling with horses, with bulls, she’s positively Jovian in her fantasies, while I stare up at the pinpricks in the acoustical tiles and listen to the nightbreath of the prison.
These days, I hear everything. I hear the click of the cards in guard tower f, not poker, sounds like gin rummy, listen to their sad admissions of hemorrhoids and domestic suspicions. The old ladies in the honor cottage, Miller, snore with their dentures in a glass. I hear the rats in Culinary. A woman screams in the SCU, she hears the rats too, but doesn’t understand they’re not in her bed. Restraints are quickly applied.
In the dormitories of Reception, I hear murmured threats as they shake down a new girl. She’s soft, a check kiter, she;s not prepared to be here. They take everything she has left to take. “Pussy,” they say after they’re through.
The rest of the prison sleeps fitfully, rocked in dreams made vivid by captivity. I know what they're dreaming. I read them like novels, it’s better than Joyce. They’re dreaming of men who beat them, a backhand, unsubtle kick to the groin. Men who clench their teeth before striking, they hiss, “Look what you’re making me do. ” The women cringe even in sleep, under the stares of men’s eyeballs road mapped with veins, popped with rage, the whites the color of mayonnaise left out for a week. One wonders how they could even see to deliver their blows. But women’s fear is a magnet. I hope you dont know this. It draws the fist, the hands of men, hard as God’s.
Others are luckier. They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers’ braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.
Some dream of crime, guns and money. Vials of dreams that disappeared like late snow I am there. I see the face of a surprised ARCO attendant just at the moment it spreads into a collage of bright blood and bone.
I lie down in the cherished apartment, its white carpet, garbage disposal, dishwasher, security parking. I too cheat the old couple out of their savings and celebrate over a bottle of Mumm’s and Sevruga on toast. I carefully take a sliding glass door off the track of a two-story house in Mar Vista. I buy a fur coat at Saks with a stolen American Express credit card. It’s the best Russian sable, golden as brandy.
Best are the freedom dreams. Steering wheels so real in the hand, the spring of the accelerator, gas tanks marked FULL. Wind through open windows, we dont use the air conditioner, we suck in the live air going by. We take the freeways, using the fast lanes, watch for signs saying San Francisco, New/ Orleans. We pass trucks on great interstates, truck drivers blowing their airhorns. We drink sodas at gas stations, eat burgers rare at roadside cafes, order extra everything. We listen to country music stations, we pick up Tijuana, Chicago, Atlanta, GA, and sleep in motels where the clerk never even looks up, just takes the money.
On Barneburg B, my cellmate Lydia Gunman dreams of walking on Whittier Blvd. in summertime, a rush of roughly cut drugs throbbing salsa down her thighs slick with ten-dollar nylons. She stuns the vatos with her slow haunch-dripping stride, her skirt impossibly tight. Her laughter tastes like burnt sunshine, cactus, and the worm.
But most of all, we dream of children. The touch of small hands, glinty rows of seed pearl teeth. We are always losing our children. In parking lots, in the market, on the bus. We turn and call. Shawanda, we call, Luz, Astrid. How could we lose you, we were being so careful. We only looked away for a moment. Arms full of packages, we stand alone on the sidewalk and someone has taken our children.
Mother.
They could lock Ingrid up, but they couldn’t prevent the transformation of the world in her mind. This was what Claire never understood. The act by which Ingrid Magnussen put her face on the world. There were crimes that were too subtle to be effectively prosecuted.
Astrid folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, threw it onto the crowded bed. Ingrid couldn't fool her, not anymore. She was the soft girl in Reception. Ingrid would rob her of everything she had left to take. She would not be seduced by the music of her words. She could tell the ragged truth from an elegant lie.
Nobody took me away, Mother. Her hand never slipped from Ingrid's grasp. That wasn’t how it went down. Astrid was more like a car she’d parked while drunk, then couldn’t remember where she’d left it. She looked away for sixteen years, and, when she looked back, Astrid was a young woman she didn’t recognize. So now she was supposed to feel pity for her and those other women who’d lost their own children during a hold-up, a murder, a fiesta of greed? She should save her 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 Astrid would read it all in a poem for the New Yorker.
Yes, she was tattooed, just as she’d said. Every inch of Astrid's skin was penetrated and stained, not just the roughly done oleander on her arm. She was the original painted lady, a Japanese gangster, a walking art gallery. Hold me up to the light, read my bright wounds. If she had warned Barry, she might have stopped her. But she had already claimed her.
Astrid wiped her tears, dried her hands on the blanket, and reached for another handful of glass to rub on her skin. Another letter full of agitated goings-on, dramas, and fantasies. Astrid skimmed down the page.
Somewhere in Ad Seg, a woman is crying. She’s been crying all night. I’ve been trying to find her, but at last, I realise, she’s not here at all. It’s you. Stop crying, Astrid. I forbid it. You have to be strong. I’m in your room, Astrid, do you feel me? You share it with a girl, I see her too, her colorful hair, her thin arched eyebrows. She sleeps well, but not you. You sit up in bed with the yellow chenille spread — God, where did you find that thing? My mother had one just like it.
I see you cradling your bare knees, forehead pressed against them. Crickets stroke their legs like pool players lining up shots. Stop crying, do you hear me? Who do you think you are? What am I doing here, except to show you how a woman is stronger than that?
It’s such a liability to love another person, but in here, it’s like playing catch with grenades. The lifers tell me to forget you, do easy time. “You can make a life here,” they say. “Choose a mate, find new children.” Sometimes it’s so awful, I think that they’re right. I should forget you. Sometimes I wish you were dead, so I would know you were safe.
A woman in my unit gave her children heroin from the time they were small, so she’d always know where they were. They’re all in jail, alive. She likes it that way. If I thought I’d be here forever, I would forget you. I’d have to. It sickens me to think of you out there, picking up wounds while I spin in this cellblock, impotent as a genie in a lamp. Astrid, stop crying, damn you!
I will get out, Astrid, I promise you that. I will win an appeal, I will walk through the walls, I will fly away like a white crow
Mother.
Yes, she was crying. These words like bombs that Ingrid sealed up and delivered, leaving Astrid ragged and bloody weeks later. You imagine you can see me, Mother? All she could ever see was her own face in a mirror.
She'd always said that Astrid knew nothing, but that was the place to begin. Astrid would never claim to know what women in prison dreamed about, or the rights of beauty, or what the night’s magic held. If she thought for a second she did, she’d never have the chance to find out, to see it whole, to watch it emerge and reveal itself. Astrid didn’t have to put her 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.
She couldn't shape Astrid anymore. She was the uncontrolled element, the random act, she was forward movement in time. She was far away now, and not just in distance.
You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don’t know. I am nothing like you.
Astrid's nose was different, flat at the bridge, not sharp as a fold in rice paper. Her eyes weren’t ice blue, tinted with Ingrid's peculiar mix of beauty and cruelty. They are dark as bruises on the inside of an arm, they hardly ever smile.
You forbid me to cry? I’m no longer yours to command.
She always said Astrid had no imagination. If by that she meant that Astrid could feel shame, and remorse, then she was right. Astrid couldn't remake the world just by willing it so. She didn't know how to believe her own lies. It took a certain kind of genius.
We were the ones who sacked Rome, she said, one night, long ago on the rooftop under the raven’s-eye moon. Don’t forget who you are.
How could she ever forget? She 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 being shaped. She showed Astrid an orange, a cluster of pine needles, a faceted quartz, and made her describe them to her. She couldn’t have been more than three or four. Her words, that’s what she wanted. “What’s this?” she kept asking. “What’s this?” But how could Astrid tell her? Ingrid had taken all the words.
Outside, a wind clattered the branches of a tree together, like the clattering in Astrid's restless mind. Who was she? I am a girl you didn't know, Mother. The silent girl in the back row of the school room,
drawing in notebooks. Did Ingrid remember how they didn’t know if Astrid even spoke English when they came back to the States? They tested her to find out if she was slow or deaf. But Ingrid never asked why. She never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.
Astrid spread all the letters out on her bed more, not just the ones she'd sent recently, but all the others that Astrid had kept through the past two years. Letters from Starr’s and letters from Claire’s, letters from Astrid's first time at Fandom, and her time at the MAC, and these last bitter installments. There were enough to drown Astrid forever. The ink of her writing was a fungus, a malignant spell on birch bark, a twisted rune. Astrid reached for a pair of scissors among her and Sabine's seemingly endless mountain of supplies, and she began cutting, snapping the strings of Ingrid's words, uncoupling her complicated train of thought car by car. She couldn’t stop her now. Astrid refused to see through Ingrid's eyes any longer.
Carefully, she chose words and phrases from the pile, laid them out in front of her andbegan to arrange them in lines. Brilliant red and purple dusk would probably paint the sky by the time she was done, piecing together the words, creating her own:
It sickens me to think of you
a prevalence of void
unholy
immovable
damned, gifts.
an overblown sense of his own importance.
I wish you were dead
forget about you.
crow
florid with
fantasies
it’s so awful
a perfect imitation
a liability to love
forget you
Ingrid Magnussen
quite alone
masturbating
rot
disappointment
grotesque
Your arms cradle
poisons
garbage
grenades
Loneliness
long-distance cries
forever
never
response,
take everything
feel me?
the human condition
Stop
plotting murder
penitence
Cultivate it
you
forbid
appeal
rage
impotent
it's too
important
I
cringe
fuck
you
insane
person
dissonant and querulous
my gas tanks marked FULL
Astrid glued them to sheets of paper. She'll give them all back to her.
Ingrid's 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.
[[ the bulk of this was swiped and modified from Chapter 26 of White Oleander by Janet Fitch, naturally, and I have been looking forward to this post for a long, long time. Door is closed, but the post is open! ]]