Astrid Magnussen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_oleander) wrote2021-09-25 03:06 pm
white_oleander) wrote2021-09-25 03:06 pm
California Institution for Women, Chino, California, 1995 [Saturday 09/25 FT].
And so on a morning already surrendered to the scourging wind and punishing heat, Camille Barren, Susan D. Valeris’s assistant, came for Astrid at the Hollywood portalocity hub, and they took the long drive out to Corona. In the visitors yard, they sat at an orange picnic table under the shade structure, drinking cold cans of soda from the pop machine, wiping them across their foreheads, pressing them to their cheeks. Waiting for Ingrid. Sweat dripped between Astrid's breasts, down her back, far more accustomed now to the milder Maryland temperatures. 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 Astrid, she was only the errand girl.
“Here she comes,” Camille said.
Ingrid 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. Astrid stood up as her mother walked over, warily, squinting in the sun, wisps of her hair blowing in the wind like smoke. Her tanned skin was more lined since Astrid’d seen her last, getting that leathery look, like a white settler in Kenya. But she hadn’t changed as much as Astrid had. She stopped when she got under the overhang, and Astrid didn't move, she wanted her to see who she was now. Her acid green shirt with the industrial zipper, eyes ringed in the black shadow and liner that made frequent appearances ever since a cat-faced girl asked if she was goth now. Skinny jeans out of fashion in 2021 but decades away back here in the past, her hips, her full breasts. High wedge shoes that were on clearance at the store. Not the pink girl with the prom shoes, not the rich orphan. She was her own girl now. She would not take anything from her. Not anymore. For the first time when Astrid visited, Ingrid didn’t smile. Astrid could see shock on her face, and she 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 them alone.
Ingrid reached out and took Astrid's hand. “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 Astrid's hand, standing a foot away. Astrid stared at her. It felt as if some alien was speaking through her. What kind of routine was this?
“Who said you’re getting out?” Astrid said.
Ingrid dropped her 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," Astrid said. "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 Astrid saw her last, now two shades lighter blue.
“A trade,” Astrid said. “Do you want to sit here or under the trees?”
She turned and led Astrid 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. They sat on the dry, summer-battered grass, it scored Astrid's bare legs.
Ingrid sat gracefully, her legs to one side, like a girl in a meadow. Astrid was larger than her now, but not as graceful, not beautiful, but present, solid as a hunk of marble before it’s been carved. Astrid let her mother watch her in profile. She couldn’t look at Ingrid while she spoke. She was not hard enough, she knew she would be thrown by her bitter surprise.
“Here’s the deal,” Astird said. “There are certain things I want to know. You tell me, and I’ll do what you want me to do.”
Ingrid 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,” Astrid said.
Astrid heard the grass rustle as Ingrid changed her position. When she looked, r mother 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,” Astrid said. “You know it. Whatever she says.”
Ingrid was twirling the dandelion between her palms.
“I’m the one who can tell them it was Barry’s paranoid fixation," Astrid said. "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 Astrid 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?” Astrid asked.
“A man.” Watching her bare toes, clicking together.
“Klaus Anders, no middle name,” Astrid 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,” Astrid 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 passe by that time.” She parted the grass like short hair. “He was always passe. His ideas, his enthusiasms. Mediocre. I don’t know what I saw in him.”
“Don’t say you don’t know, that’s crap,” Astrid said.
Ingrid sighed, like Astrid was making her tired. So what. “It was a long time ago, Astrid. Several lifetimes at least. I’m not the same person.”
“Liar,” Astrid said. “You’re exactly the same.”
She was silent. Astrid had never called her a name before.
“You’re still such a child, aren’t you,” she said, though Astrid could tell she was struggling for composure. Another person wouldn’t have been able to see it, but she 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,” Astrid 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, Astrid 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,” Astrid 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 Astrid a killing look. “I didn’t ‘get pregnant.’ 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. Voila.”
“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.
Astrid looked up at her, her mother, this woman she had known and never really knew, this woman always on the verge of disappearance. Astrid would not let her get away from her 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.”
Astrid imagined them, 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.”
Astrid tried to remember, the playpen, the fire. She could distinctly remember the smell of turpentine, a smell she'd always loved. But the smell of fire, that pervasive odor of danger, she’d always associated with her 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 Astrid could think of was the big man lifting her in and out of the surf. She could almost remember it. The feeling of the waves on her 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?” Ingrid snapped, pushing away from the tree. She squatted so she could look her daughter 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,” Astrid said.
“My God, you were a baby,” she said, standing up again, smoothing the 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.”
Astrid thought of him, from the photograph, his sheepish face, the long blond hair. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. 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 Astrid, 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?” Astrid 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 Astrid, propped her head against hers. They sat like that for a while.
“He called once when you were, I don’t know. Seven or eight?” She ran her fingers through Astrid's 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?” Astrid just wanted Ingrid to hold her.
“It sounded like the plot of a bad movie,” Ingrid said. “I told him to go to hell.”
He had called, he had wanted to see Astrid, and she said no. Without asking her, without mentioning it. It struck Astrid across the throat like a blow with a pipe.
She got up and went to lean on the tree trunk, on the other side of the trunk. Ingrid could hardly see her from there. But Astrid could hear her. “You wanted to know. Don’t turn over rocks if you don’t want to see the pale creatures who live under them.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“Last I heard he bought a farm somewhere on one of the Danish islands. Aero, I think.” When Astrid looked around the trunk, Ingrid was playing with her shoes, walking them on her hands. “Picturesque, but unless his wife knows something about farming, I’m sure they’ve lost it by now.” She looked up just in time to catch Astrid's glance, and smiled her knowing half-smile, not Klaus's wide-open smile, but the one that said she had read your mind, knew what you were thinking. “Why, are you planning to descend upon your long-lost father and his family? Don’t be surprised if they don’t kill the fatted calf.”
“Better than you and your new children,” Astrid said. The heat rippled off the blacktop, she could smell asphalt loosened by heat.
“Ah,” she said and lay back on the grass, her arms folded underneath her head, her legs crossed at the ankle. “I told them you wouldn’t necessarily greet them with open arms. But they’re a tender lot. Idealistic. They thought they’d give you a try. They were so proud of the article. Did you like it, by the way?”
“Threw it out.”
“Pity.”
The crows suddenly flew out of the tree in a series of shots, theu listened to their rough calls doppler away. A truck went by on the frontage road, a club cab with dual back wheels, trailing ranchero music, absurdly cheerful. Like Guanajuato, Astrid thought, and she knew her mother was thinking the same.
Astrid's shirt didn’t absorb sweat; it pooled and was soaked into the waistband of her skirt. She felt she’d been wading. “There was a woman," she said, "I think her name was Annie..."
“Why do you have to hold on to the past?” Ingrid sat up, twisted her hair back, skewered it with the pencil. Her voice was sharp, irritated. “What’s the past, just a pile of moldy newspapers in some old man’s garage.”
“The past is still happening. It never stopped. Who was Annie?”
The wind shook the dense glossy foliage of the ficus, there was no other sound. Ingrid ran her ringers over her hair, pulling tight, like she was climbing out of a pool. “She was a neighbor. She took in kids, did people’s laundry.”
The smell of laundry. The laundry basket, sitting in the laundry basket with other children, playing they were in a boat. The little squares. It was yellow. They scooted it across the kitchen floor. “What did she look like?”
“Small. Talkative.” She shaded her eyes with one hand. “She wore those Dr. Scholl’s sandals.”
Wooden clopping on the linoleum. Yellow linoleum with a multicolored paint-splotch pattern. The floor was cool when you put your cheek against it. And her legs. Tanned. Bare leas in cutoffs. But Astrid still couldn’t see her face. “Dark or fair?”
“Dark. Straight hair with little bangs.”
Astrid couldn’t get the hair. Just the legs. And the way she sang all day long to the radio.
“And where were you?”
Ingrid was silent. She pressed her hand down on her eyes. “How could you possibly have remembered this?”
Everything she knew about Astrid, everything she walked around with in that thin skull case like a vault. Astrid wanted to crack her open, eat her brain like a soft-boiled egg.
“Imagine my life, for a moment,” Ingrid said, quietly, cupping her long ringers like a boat, like she was holding her life in a shell. “Imagine how unprepared I was to be the mother of a small child. The demand for the enactment of the archetype. The selfless eternal feminine. It couldn’t have been more foreign. I was a woman accustomed to following a line of inquiry or inclination until it led to its logical conclusion. I was used to having time to think, freedom. I felt like a hostage. Can you understand how desperate I was?”
Astrid didn’t want to understand, but she couldn't help it. On the other side of the fence, past Ingrid's head, the young women in Reception watched one of them sweeping the concrete courtyard, sweeping, sweeping, like it was a penance. “That’s what babies are
like," she said. "What were you thinking, that I would amuse you? That you and I could exchange thoughts on Joseph Brodsky?”
Ingrid sat up, crossed her legs, and rested her hands on her knees. “I thought Klaus and I were going to live happily ever after. Adam and Eve in a vine-covered shack. I was walking the archetypes. I was out of my fucking mind.”
“You were in love with him.”
“Yes, I was in love with him, all right?” she yelled. “I was in love with him and baby makes three and all that jazz, and then we had you and I woke up one morning married to a weak, selfish man, and I couldn’t stand him. And you, you just wanted, wanted, wanted. Mommy Mommy Mommy until I thought I would throw you against the wall.”
Astrid felt sick. She had no trouble believing it, seeing it. She saw it all too clearly. And she understood why Ingrid never told her about this, had simply, kindly, refrained. “So you left me there.”
“I hadn’t really intended to. I dropped you at her house just for the afternoon, to go to the beach with some friends, and one thing led to another, they had some friends down in Ensenada, and I went, and it felt wonderful, Astrid. To be free! You can’t imagine. To go to the bathroom by myself. To take a nap in the afternoon. To make love all day long if I wanted, and walk on the beach, and not to have to think, where’s Astrid? What’s Astrid doing? What’s she going to get into? And not having you on me all the time, Mommy Mommy Mommy, clinging to me, like a spider...”
She shuddered. She still remembered her daughter's touch with revulsion, which made Astrid dizzy with hatred. This was her mother. The woman who raised her. What chance could Astrid ever really have in the world?
“How long were you gone?” Astrid's voice sounded flat in her own ears.
“A year,” she said quietly. “Give or take a few months.”
And Astrid believed it. Everything in her body told her that was right. All those nights, waiting for her to come home, listening for her key in the lock. No wonder. No wonder they had to tear her away from her when she started school. No wonder she always worried she was going to just leave one night. She already had.
“But you’re asking the wrong question,” Ingrid said. “Don’t ask me why I left. Ask me why I came back.”
A truck with a four-horse trailer rattled up the road toward the highway. They could smell the horses, see their sleek rumps over the rear gate, and Astrid thought about that day at the races, ages ago, Barry and Medea’s Pride.
“You should have been sterilized.”
Suddenly Ingrid was up, pinning Astrid by her shoulders to the tree trunk. Her eyes were a sea in fog. “I could have left you there, but I didn’t. Don’t you understand? For once, I did the right thing. For you.”
Astrid was apparently supposed to forgive her now, but it was too late. She would not say my line. “Bully. For. You,” she replied dryly.
Astrid knew that Ingrid wanted to slap her, but she couldn’t. They’d end the visit right if she did that. So Astrid lifted her head with every ounce of her newfound defiance.
Ingrid dropped her grip on her daughter's ams. “You were never like this before,” she said. “You’re so hard. Susan told me, but I thought it was just a pose. You’ve lost yourself, your dreaminess, that tender quality.”
Astrid stared at her, not letting her look away. They were the same height, eye to eye, but Astrid was bigger-boned, she probably
could have beaten her in a fair fight. “I would have thought you’d approve," Astrid said. "Wasn’t that the thing you hated about Claire? Her tenderness? Be strong, you said. You despise weakness.”
"I wanted you to be strong, but in tact,” she said. “Not this devastation. You’re like a bomb site. You frighten me.”
Astrid smiled. She liked the idea that she frightened her. The tables had truly turned, after all this time. "You, the great Ingrid Magnussen, goddess of September fires, Saint Santa Ana, ruler over life and death?”
She reached out her hand, as if to touch Astrid's face, like a blind woman, but she couldn’t reach her. As if it would burn Ingrid if she touched her. The hand stayed in the air, hovering in place. Astrid saw that she was afraid.
“You were the one thing that was entirely good in my life, Astrid. Since I came back for you, we’ve never been apart, not until this.”
“The murder, you mean.”
“No, this. You, now.” The gesture, the attempt to reach Atrid, faded like sunset. “You know, when I came back, you knew me. You were sitting there by the door when I came in. You looked up, and you smiled and reached for me to pick you up. As if you were waiting for me.”
Astrid wanted to cut through this moment with the blue flame of an acetylene torch. She wanted to burn it to ash and scatter
it into the wind, like she had with so many of Ingrid's letters, so the pieces would never come back together again.
“I was always waiting for you, Mother," she said. "It’s the one constant in my life. Waiting for you. Will you come back, will you forget that you’ve tied me up in front of a store, left me on the bus?”
The hand came out again. Tentatively, but this time it lightly touched Astrid's hair. “Are you still?”
“No,” she said, brushing her hand away. “I stopped when Claire showed me what it felt like to be loved.”
Now she looked tired, every day of forty-nine years. She picked up her shoes. “Is there anything else you want? Have I fulfilled my end of the bargain?”
“Do you ever regret what you’ve done?”
The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. “You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I’ve given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.”
Astrid never thought she’d hear the day her mother, Ingrid Magnussen, would admit to regret. Now that she stood in there in front of her, shaking with it, she couldn’t think of anything to say. It was like watching a river run backwards.
There stood there staring out at the empty road.
“What are you going to do when you get out?” Astrid asked her. “Where are you going to go?”
She wiped the sweat off her face with the collar of her dress. Secretaries and office workers and COs were coming out of the brick administration building. They leaned into the hot wind, holding their skirts down, heading for lunch, a nice air-conditioned Coco’s or Denny’s. When they saw Astrid with her mother, they drew closer together, talking among themselves. She was already a celebrity, Astrid could see it. She watched them start up their cars, and she knew Ingrid imagined herself with those keys in her hand, accelerator, gas tank marked Full.
Ingrid sighed. “By the time Susan is done, I’ll be a household icon, like Aunt Jemima, the Pillsbury Doughboy. I'll have my choice of teaching positions. Where would you like to go, Astrid?” She glanced at her daughter, smiled, holding up the carrot. Reminding Astrid which end of the plank and so on.
“That’s years away,” Astrid said.
“You can’t make it alone,” she said. “You need an environment, a context. People invested in your success. God knows, look at me. I had to go to prison to get noticed.”
The cars started up, crunched over the gravel. Camille came out of the shelter, pointed at her watch. It was over. Astrid just felt empty and used. Whatever she thought knowing the truth would do for her, it hadn’t. It was her last hope. All Astrid wanted was her to hurt like she did. She wanted it so very much.
“So, how does it feel, knowing I don’t give a damn anymore?” Astrid said. “That I'll do anything to get what I want. Even lie for you, I won’t blink an eye. I’m like you now, aren’t I? I look at the world and ask what’s in it for me.”
Ingrid shook her head, gazed down at her bare tanned feet. “If I could take it all back, I would, Astrid.” She lifted her eyes to meet Astrid's. “You’ve got to believe me.” Her eyes, glinting in the sun, were exactly the color of the pool they swam in together the summer she was arrested. She wanted to swim there again, to submerge herself in them.
“Then tell me you don’t want me to testify,” Astrid said. “Tell me you don’t want me like this. Tell me you would sacrifice the rest of your life to have me back the way I was.”
Ingrid turned her blue gaze toward the road, that road, the beautiful road, the road women in prison dreamed about. The road she had already left her for once. Her hair like smoke in the wind. Overhead, the foliage blew back and forth like a fighter working a small bag in air that smelled of brushfire and dairy cattle. She pressed her hands over her eyes, then slid them down her face to her mouth. Astrid watched her staring out at the road. She seemed lost there, sealed in longing, searching for an exit, a hidden door.
And suddenly Astrid felt panic. She’d made a mistake, like when she’d played chess and knew a second too late she’d made the wrong move. She had asked a question she could afford to know the answer to. It was the thing she didn’t want to know. She thought she wanted to, but it was the rock that never should be turned over. Because she what was under there. She didn’t need to see it, the hideous eyeless albino creature that lived underneath.
“Listen," she said. "Forget it. A deal’s a deal. Let’s leave it at that.”
The wind crackled its dangerous whip in the air, Astird imagined she could see the shower of sparks, smell the ashes. She was afraid that Ingrid hadn’t heard her. She was still as a daguerreotype, arms crossed across her denim dress.
“I’ll tell Susan,” she said quietly. “To leave you alone.”
Astrid knew she had heard it, but she didn’t believe it. She waited for something, to make her believe it was true.
Ingrid came back to her then, put her arms around her, rested her cheek against Astrid's hair. Although Astrid knew it was impossible, she could smell her violets. “If you could go back, even partway, I would give anything,” she said into her daughter's ear.
Her large hands gently stroked Astrid's hair. It was all she ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.
[[ taken and altered slightly from Chapter 31 of White Oleander by Janet Fitch. I hav ebeen dying to get to this scene for ages now! NFI, NFB, but OOC is always love ]]
“Here she comes,” Camille said.
Ingrid 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. Astrid stood up as her mother walked over, warily, squinting in the sun, wisps of her hair blowing in the wind like smoke. Her tanned skin was more lined since Astrid’d seen her last, getting that leathery look, like a white settler in Kenya. But she hadn’t changed as much as Astrid had. She stopped when she got under the overhang, and Astrid didn't move, she wanted her to see who she was now. Her acid green shirt with the industrial zipper, eyes ringed in the black shadow and liner that made frequent appearances ever since a cat-faced girl asked if she was goth now. Skinny jeans out of fashion in 2021 but decades away back here in the past, her hips, her full breasts. High wedge shoes that were on clearance at the store. Not the pink girl with the prom shoes, not the rich orphan. She was her own girl now. She would not take anything from her. Not anymore. For the first time when Astrid visited, Ingrid didn’t smile. Astrid could see shock on her face, and she 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 them alone.
Ingrid reached out and took Astrid's hand. “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 Astrid's hand, standing a foot away. Astrid stared at her. It felt as if some alien was speaking through her. What kind of routine was this?
“Who said you’re getting out?” Astrid said.
Ingrid dropped her 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," Astrid said. "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 Astrid saw her last, now two shades lighter blue.
“A trade,” Astrid said. “Do you want to sit here or under the trees?”
She turned and led Astrid 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. They sat on the dry, summer-battered grass, it scored Astrid's bare legs.
Ingrid sat gracefully, her legs to one side, like a girl in a meadow. Astrid was larger than her now, but not as graceful, not beautiful, but present, solid as a hunk of marble before it’s been carved. Astrid let her mother watch her in profile. She couldn’t look at Ingrid while she spoke. She was not hard enough, she knew she would be thrown by her bitter surprise.
“Here’s the deal,” Astird said. “There are certain things I want to know. You tell me, and I’ll do what you want me to do.”
Ingrid 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,” Astrid said.
Astrid heard the grass rustle as Ingrid changed her position. When she looked, r mother 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,” Astrid said. “You know it. Whatever she says.”
Ingrid was twirling the dandelion between her palms.
“I’m the one who can tell them it was Barry’s paranoid fixation," Astrid said. "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 Astrid 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?” Astrid asked.
“A man.” Watching her bare toes, clicking together.
“Klaus Anders, no middle name,” Astrid 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,” Astrid 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 passe by that time.” She parted the grass like short hair. “He was always passe. His ideas, his enthusiasms. Mediocre. I don’t know what I saw in him.”
“Don’t say you don’t know, that’s crap,” Astrid said.
Ingrid sighed, like Astrid was making her tired. So what. “It was a long time ago, Astrid. Several lifetimes at least. I’m not the same person.”
“Liar,” Astrid said. “You’re exactly the same.”
She was silent. Astrid had never called her a name before.
“You’re still such a child, aren’t you,” she said, though Astrid could tell she was struggling for composure. Another person wouldn’t have been able to see it, but she 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,” Astrid 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, Astrid 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,” Astrid 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 Astrid a killing look. “I didn’t ‘get pregnant.’ 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. Voila.”
“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.
Astrid looked up at her, her mother, this woman she had known and never really knew, this woman always on the verge of disappearance. Astrid would not let her get away from her 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.”
Astrid imagined them, 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.”
Astrid tried to remember, the playpen, the fire. She could distinctly remember the smell of turpentine, a smell she'd always loved. But the smell of fire, that pervasive odor of danger, she’d always associated with her 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 Astrid could think of was the big man lifting her in and out of the surf. She could almost remember it. The feeling of the waves on her 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?” Ingrid snapped, pushing away from the tree. She squatted so she could look her daughter 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,” Astrid said.
“My God, you were a baby,” she said, standing up again, smoothing the 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.”
Astrid thought of him, from the photograph, his sheepish face, the long blond hair. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. 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 Astrid, 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?” Astrid 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 Astrid, propped her head against hers. They sat like that for a while.
“He called once when you were, I don’t know. Seven or eight?” She ran her fingers through Astrid's 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?” Astrid just wanted Ingrid to hold her.
“It sounded like the plot of a bad movie,” Ingrid said. “I told him to go to hell.”
He had called, he had wanted to see Astrid, and she said no. Without asking her, without mentioning it. It struck Astrid across the throat like a blow with a pipe.
She got up and went to lean on the tree trunk, on the other side of the trunk. Ingrid could hardly see her from there. But Astrid could hear her. “You wanted to know. Don’t turn over rocks if you don’t want to see the pale creatures who live under them.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“Last I heard he bought a farm somewhere on one of the Danish islands. Aero, I think.” When Astrid looked around the trunk, Ingrid was playing with her shoes, walking them on her hands. “Picturesque, but unless his wife knows something about farming, I’m sure they’ve lost it by now.” She looked up just in time to catch Astrid's glance, and smiled her knowing half-smile, not Klaus's wide-open smile, but the one that said she had read your mind, knew what you were thinking. “Why, are you planning to descend upon your long-lost father and his family? Don’t be surprised if they don’t kill the fatted calf.”
“Better than you and your new children,” Astrid said. The heat rippled off the blacktop, she could smell asphalt loosened by heat.
“Ah,” she said and lay back on the grass, her arms folded underneath her head, her legs crossed at the ankle. “I told them you wouldn’t necessarily greet them with open arms. But they’re a tender lot. Idealistic. They thought they’d give you a try. They were so proud of the article. Did you like it, by the way?”
“Threw it out.”
“Pity.”
The crows suddenly flew out of the tree in a series of shots, theu listened to their rough calls doppler away. A truck went by on the frontage road, a club cab with dual back wheels, trailing ranchero music, absurdly cheerful. Like Guanajuato, Astrid thought, and she knew her mother was thinking the same.
Astrid's shirt didn’t absorb sweat; it pooled and was soaked into the waistband of her skirt. She felt she’d been wading. “There was a woman," she said, "I think her name was Annie..."
“Why do you have to hold on to the past?” Ingrid sat up, twisted her hair back, skewered it with the pencil. Her voice was sharp, irritated. “What’s the past, just a pile of moldy newspapers in some old man’s garage.”
“The past is still happening. It never stopped. Who was Annie?”
The wind shook the dense glossy foliage of the ficus, there was no other sound. Ingrid ran her ringers over her hair, pulling tight, like she was climbing out of a pool. “She was a neighbor. She took in kids, did people’s laundry.”
The smell of laundry. The laundry basket, sitting in the laundry basket with other children, playing they were in a boat. The little squares. It was yellow. They scooted it across the kitchen floor. “What did she look like?”
“Small. Talkative.” She shaded her eyes with one hand. “She wore those Dr. Scholl’s sandals.”
Wooden clopping on the linoleum. Yellow linoleum with a multicolored paint-splotch pattern. The floor was cool when you put your cheek against it. And her legs. Tanned. Bare leas in cutoffs. But Astrid still couldn’t see her face. “Dark or fair?”
“Dark. Straight hair with little bangs.”
Astrid couldn’t get the hair. Just the legs. And the way she sang all day long to the radio.
“And where were you?”
Ingrid was silent. She pressed her hand down on her eyes. “How could you possibly have remembered this?”
Everything she knew about Astrid, everything she walked around with in that thin skull case like a vault. Astrid wanted to crack her open, eat her brain like a soft-boiled egg.
“Imagine my life, for a moment,” Ingrid said, quietly, cupping her long ringers like a boat, like she was holding her life in a shell. “Imagine how unprepared I was to be the mother of a small child. The demand for the enactment of the archetype. The selfless eternal feminine. It couldn’t have been more foreign. I was a woman accustomed to following a line of inquiry or inclination until it led to its logical conclusion. I was used to having time to think, freedom. I felt like a hostage. Can you understand how desperate I was?”
Astrid didn’t want to understand, but she couldn't help it. On the other side of the fence, past Ingrid's head, the young women in Reception watched one of them sweeping the concrete courtyard, sweeping, sweeping, like it was a penance. “That’s what babies are
like," she said. "What were you thinking, that I would amuse you? That you and I could exchange thoughts on Joseph Brodsky?”
Ingrid sat up, crossed her legs, and rested her hands on her knees. “I thought Klaus and I were going to live happily ever after. Adam and Eve in a vine-covered shack. I was walking the archetypes. I was out of my fucking mind.”
“You were in love with him.”
“Yes, I was in love with him, all right?” she yelled. “I was in love with him and baby makes three and all that jazz, and then we had you and I woke up one morning married to a weak, selfish man, and I couldn’t stand him. And you, you just wanted, wanted, wanted. Mommy Mommy Mommy until I thought I would throw you against the wall.”
Astrid felt sick. She had no trouble believing it, seeing it. She saw it all too clearly. And she understood why Ingrid never told her about this, had simply, kindly, refrained. “So you left me there.”
“I hadn’t really intended to. I dropped you at her house just for the afternoon, to go to the beach with some friends, and one thing led to another, they had some friends down in Ensenada, and I went, and it felt wonderful, Astrid. To be free! You can’t imagine. To go to the bathroom by myself. To take a nap in the afternoon. To make love all day long if I wanted, and walk on the beach, and not to have to think, where’s Astrid? What’s Astrid doing? What’s she going to get into? And not having you on me all the time, Mommy Mommy Mommy, clinging to me, like a spider...”
She shuddered. She still remembered her daughter's touch with revulsion, which made Astrid dizzy with hatred. This was her mother. The woman who raised her. What chance could Astrid ever really have in the world?
“How long were you gone?” Astrid's voice sounded flat in her own ears.
“A year,” she said quietly. “Give or take a few months.”
And Astrid believed it. Everything in her body told her that was right. All those nights, waiting for her to come home, listening for her key in the lock. No wonder. No wonder they had to tear her away from her when she started school. No wonder she always worried she was going to just leave one night. She already had.
“But you’re asking the wrong question,” Ingrid said. “Don’t ask me why I left. Ask me why I came back.”
A truck with a four-horse trailer rattled up the road toward the highway. They could smell the horses, see their sleek rumps over the rear gate, and Astrid thought about that day at the races, ages ago, Barry and Medea’s Pride.
“You should have been sterilized.”
Suddenly Ingrid was up, pinning Astrid by her shoulders to the tree trunk. Her eyes were a sea in fog. “I could have left you there, but I didn’t. Don’t you understand? For once, I did the right thing. For you.”
Astrid was apparently supposed to forgive her now, but it was too late. She would not say my line. “Bully. For. You,” she replied dryly.
Astrid knew that Ingrid wanted to slap her, but she couldn’t. They’d end the visit right if she did that. So Astrid lifted her head with every ounce of her newfound defiance.
Ingrid dropped her grip on her daughter's ams. “You were never like this before,” she said. “You’re so hard. Susan told me, but I thought it was just a pose. You’ve lost yourself, your dreaminess, that tender quality.”
Astrid stared at her, not letting her look away. They were the same height, eye to eye, but Astrid was bigger-boned, she probably
could have beaten her in a fair fight. “I would have thought you’d approve," Astrid said. "Wasn’t that the thing you hated about Claire? Her tenderness? Be strong, you said. You despise weakness.”
"I wanted you to be strong, but in tact,” she said. “Not this devastation. You’re like a bomb site. You frighten me.”
Astrid smiled. She liked the idea that she frightened her. The tables had truly turned, after all this time. "You, the great Ingrid Magnussen, goddess of September fires, Saint Santa Ana, ruler over life and death?”
She reached out her hand, as if to touch Astrid's face, like a blind woman, but she couldn’t reach her. As if it would burn Ingrid if she touched her. The hand stayed in the air, hovering in place. Astrid saw that she was afraid.
“You were the one thing that was entirely good in my life, Astrid. Since I came back for you, we’ve never been apart, not until this.”
“The murder, you mean.”
“No, this. You, now.” The gesture, the attempt to reach Atrid, faded like sunset. “You know, when I came back, you knew me. You were sitting there by the door when I came in. You looked up, and you smiled and reached for me to pick you up. As if you were waiting for me.”
Astrid wanted to cut through this moment with the blue flame of an acetylene torch. She wanted to burn it to ash and scatter
it into the wind, like she had with so many of Ingrid's letters, so the pieces would never come back together again.
“I was always waiting for you, Mother," she said. "It’s the one constant in my life. Waiting for you. Will you come back, will you forget that you’ve tied me up in front of a store, left me on the bus?”
The hand came out again. Tentatively, but this time it lightly touched Astrid's hair. “Are you still?”
“No,” she said, brushing her hand away. “I stopped when Claire showed me what it felt like to be loved.”
Now she looked tired, every day of forty-nine years. She picked up her shoes. “Is there anything else you want? Have I fulfilled my end of the bargain?”
“Do you ever regret what you’ve done?”
The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. “You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I’ve given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.”
Astrid never thought she’d hear the day her mother, Ingrid Magnussen, would admit to regret. Now that she stood in there in front of her, shaking with it, she couldn’t think of anything to say. It was like watching a river run backwards.
There stood there staring out at the empty road.
“What are you going to do when you get out?” Astrid asked her. “Where are you going to go?”
She wiped the sweat off her face with the collar of her dress. Secretaries and office workers and COs were coming out of the brick administration building. They leaned into the hot wind, holding their skirts down, heading for lunch, a nice air-conditioned Coco’s or Denny’s. When they saw Astrid with her mother, they drew closer together, talking among themselves. She was already a celebrity, Astrid could see it. She watched them start up their cars, and she knew Ingrid imagined herself with those keys in her hand, accelerator, gas tank marked Full.
Ingrid sighed. “By the time Susan is done, I’ll be a household icon, like Aunt Jemima, the Pillsbury Doughboy. I'll have my choice of teaching positions. Where would you like to go, Astrid?” She glanced at her daughter, smiled, holding up the carrot. Reminding Astrid which end of the plank and so on.
“That’s years away,” Astrid said.
“You can’t make it alone,” she said. “You need an environment, a context. People invested in your success. God knows, look at me. I had to go to prison to get noticed.”
The cars started up, crunched over the gravel. Camille came out of the shelter, pointed at her watch. It was over. Astrid just felt empty and used. Whatever she thought knowing the truth would do for her, it hadn’t. It was her last hope. All Astrid wanted was her to hurt like she did. She wanted it so very much.
“So, how does it feel, knowing I don’t give a damn anymore?” Astrid said. “That I'll do anything to get what I want. Even lie for you, I won’t blink an eye. I’m like you now, aren’t I? I look at the world and ask what’s in it for me.”
Ingrid shook her head, gazed down at her bare tanned feet. “If I could take it all back, I would, Astrid.” She lifted her eyes to meet Astrid's. “You’ve got to believe me.” Her eyes, glinting in the sun, were exactly the color of the pool they swam in together the summer she was arrested. She wanted to swim there again, to submerge herself in them.
“Then tell me you don’t want me to testify,” Astrid said. “Tell me you don’t want me like this. Tell me you would sacrifice the rest of your life to have me back the way I was.”
Ingrid turned her blue gaze toward the road, that road, the beautiful road, the road women in prison dreamed about. The road she had already left her for once. Her hair like smoke in the wind. Overhead, the foliage blew back and forth like a fighter working a small bag in air that smelled of brushfire and dairy cattle. She pressed her hands over her eyes, then slid them down her face to her mouth. Astrid watched her staring out at the road. She seemed lost there, sealed in longing, searching for an exit, a hidden door.
And suddenly Astrid felt panic. She’d made a mistake, like when she’d played chess and knew a second too late she’d made the wrong move. She had asked a question she could afford to know the answer to. It was the thing she didn’t want to know. She thought she wanted to, but it was the rock that never should be turned over. Because she what was under there. She didn’t need to see it, the hideous eyeless albino creature that lived underneath.
“Listen," she said. "Forget it. A deal’s a deal. Let’s leave it at that.”
The wind crackled its dangerous whip in the air, Astird imagined she could see the shower of sparks, smell the ashes. She was afraid that Ingrid hadn’t heard her. She was still as a daguerreotype, arms crossed across her denim dress.
“I’ll tell Susan,” she said quietly. “To leave you alone.”
Astrid knew she had heard it, but she didn’t believe it. She waited for something, to make her believe it was true.
Ingrid came back to her then, put her arms around her, rested her cheek against Astrid's hair. Although Astrid knew it was impossible, she could smell her violets. “If you could go back, even partway, I would give anything,” she said into her daughter's ear.
Her large hands gently stroked Astrid's hair. It was all she ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.
[[ taken and altered slightly from Chapter 31 of White Oleander by Janet Fitch. I hav ebeen dying to get to this scene for ages now! NFI, NFB, but OOC is always love ]]