Astrid Magnussen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_oleander) wrote2018-12-23 11:11 am
white_oleander) wrote2018-12-23 11:11 am
Entry tags:
California Institution for Women, Chino, California, December 23rd, 1992.
Astrid's week had been frustrating in its uselessness; she'd spent all of her time between the home she was staying in and various cheap fast food restaurants where her case worker had taken her to talk about the details of her current situation, while not paying enough attention to what she really wanted to know: how her mother was doing and when she would be able to actually see her. But the prison was having a special visitor's day for the holidays on the 23rd (which fell on a Wednesday in 1992; she was sure it was Sunday back in Fandom, but tried not to think about that too much), so she just had to wait it out, fearful she'd wind up going crazy with the waiting.
The van came at seven, other kids already packed in, with three more to pick up on the way out. The day was overcast, late December gloom, and the rumbling of the vehicle, the bodies pressed in, uncomfortable and awkward, was making Astrid carsick. She cracked the window as they drove a long way, through suburbs and more suburbs, houses decked in lights, making her wonder what might be going on all the way on the other side of the country right now, twenty-six years in the future.
At Chino, they turned off the freeway and drove south. Astrid tried to memorize this, so she could find it again in her dreams. They drove past nice suburbs, then not-so-nice ones, then brand-new subdivisions alternating with lumberyards and farm equipment rentals. Finally they came to real country, and drove along roads with no signals, just dairies and fields, the smell of manure.
There was a big complex of buildings on the right. “Is that it?” Astrid asked the girl next to her. “CYA,” she said. Astrid shook her head. “Youth Authority.”
All the kids eyed it grimly as they passed. They could all be there, behind that razor wire. They were silent as death when they went by the California Institution for Men, set way back from the road in the middle of a field. Finally, they turned onto a fresh blacktopped road, past a little market, case of Bud $5.99. Astrid wanted to remember it all. The other kids got their bags, their backpacks. Now she could see the prison--a steam stack, a water tower, the guard tower. It was aluminum¬sided, like a trailer, and it surprised Astrid now as it had the first time. Its low brick buildings were widely spaced and landscaped with trees and roses and acres of green lawn. It was more like a suburban high school than a prison, except for the guard towers, the razor wire (though she’d nearly forgotten what those…normal high schools...even looked like).
Crows squawked raucously in the trees. It sounded like they were tearing something apart, something they didn’t even want, just for the fun of destroying it. They filed through the guard tower, signed in. They searched their backpacks and passed they through the metal detector. They took a package away from one girl. No gifts. You had to mail them, a package from family was allowed four times a year. The slam of the gate behind them made them all jump.
They were locked in.
They told Astrid to wait at an orange picnic table under a tree. She was still nervous and sick from the ride. She shivered, curling her hands into the ends of her sweater sleeves, glad to be sitting there this time in more practically clothes than her pink dress, her matching heels. Back to blonde, in well-worn jeans, her clunky, sturdy boots.
Women milled around behind the covered area of the visiting yard. Prisoners, their faces like masks. They jeered at the gathered children. One woman whistled at Astrid and licked between her fingers, and the others laughed. They kept laughing, they wouldn’t stop. They sounded like the crows.
The mothers started coming in from the prison through a different gate. They wore jeans and T-shirts, gray sweaters, sweatsuits. Astrid saw her mother waiting for the woman guard to bring her through. She wore a plain denim dress, button front, but on her the blue was a color, like a song. Her white blond hair had been hacked off at the neck by someone who had no feeling for the work, but her blue eyes were as clear as a high note on a violin. She had never looked more beautiful. Astrid stood up and then she couldn’t move, she waited trembling as she came over and hugged her daughter to her.
Just to feel her touch, to hold her, after all those months! Astrid put her head on her chest and Ingrid kissed her, smelled her hair. She didn’t smell of violets anymore, only the smell of detergent on denim. She lifted Astrid’s face in her hands and kissed her all over, wiped her tears with her strong thumbs. She pulled Astrid to sit down next to her.
Astrid was so thirsty for the way she felt, the way she looked, the sound of her voice, the way her front teeth were square but her second teeth turned slightly, her one dimple, left side, her half-smile, her wonderfully blue eyes flecked with white, like new galaxies, the firm intact planes of her face. She didn’t even look like she should be in prison, she looked like she could have just walked off the Venice boardwalk with a book under her arm, ready to settle in at an oceanside cafe.
“Don’t cry,” she whispered as they sat at the picnic table. “We’re not like that. We’re the Vikings, remember?”
Just as Astrid had expected her to say as soon as her eyes started to water. She nodded, but her tears dripped on the orange vinyl table. Lois, someone had scratched into it. 18th Street. Cunt.
One of the women in the concrete courtyard behind the visitors covered area whistled and shouted out. Ingrid looked up and the woman caught her gaze full in the face like a punch. It stopped her cold. She turned away quickly, like it wasn’t she who’d said it.
“You’re so beautiful,” Astrid said, unable to hold it back, touching her hair, her collar, her cheek. Not pliable at all.
“Prison agrees with me,” Ingrid said. “There’s no hypocrisy here. Kill or be killed, and everybody knows it.”
“I missed you so much,” Astrid whispered.
Ingrid put her arm around her, her head right next to hers. She pressed Astrid’s forehead with her hand, lips against her temple. “I won’t be here forever. It’ll take more than this to keep me behind bars. I promise you. I will get out, one way or another. One day you’ll look out your window and I’ll be there.”
Astrid looked into her determined face, cheekbones like razors, her eyes making her believe. “I was afraid you’d still be mad at me.”
She stretched Astrid out at arm’s length to look at her, hands gripping her shoulders. “Why would you think that?”
Because she still remembered that letter, the words burned into her memory, just like the tattoo on her arm was burning. Because she almost hadn’t wanted to come back, because she had this whole life now, without her, hidden from here. For keeping secrets, for letting others out, for not being able to lie well enough, for being the entire reason she was in this prison in the first place...
But Astrid couldn’t say it, any of it. Ingrid hugged her again. Those arms around her made her want to stay there forever. She’d graffiti every corner of Turtle & Canary, she’d rob a bank and get convicted so they could always be together. She wanted to curl up in her lap, she wanted to disappear into her body, she wanted to be one of her eyelashes, or a blood vessel in her thigh, a mole on her neck. “Is it terrible here? Do they hurt you?”
“Not as much as I hurt them,” she said, and Astrid knew she was smiling, though all she could see was the denim of her sleeve and her arm, still lightly tanned. She had to pull away a little to see her. Yes, she was smiling, her half-smile, the little comma-shaped curve at the corner of her mouth. Astrid touched her mouth. Ingrid kissed her fingers.
“They assigned me to office work. I told them I’d rather clean toilets than type their bureaucratic vomit. Oh, they don’t much care for me. I’m on grounds crew. I sweep, pull weeds, though of course only inside the wire. I’m considered a poor security risk. Imagine. I won’t tutor their illiterates, teach writing classes, or otherwise feed the machine. I will not serve.” She stuck her nose in Astrid’s hair, she was smelling her. ‘‘Your hair smells of bread. Clover and nutmeg. I want to remember you just like this.
“I think of you all the time,” she added. “Especially at night. I imagine where you are. When the prison’s still and everyone’s asleep, I imagine I can see you. I try to contact you. Have you ever heard me calling, felt my presence in your room?” She stroked a strand of Astrid’s hair between her fingers, stretched it to see how long it was against Astrid’s arm. It came to her elbow, and all Astrid could think was that she was imagining how it had looked in red.
Astrid had felt her, she thought. She thought she’d heard her call. Astrid? Are you awake? “Late at night,” she said quietly. “You never could sleep.”
Ingrid kissed the top of her head, right in the part. “Neither could you. Now, tell me more about yourself. I want to know everything about you.”
It was a strange idea. She never wanted to know about Astrid before. But the long days of sameness had led her back to her, to remembering she had a daughter tied up somewhere. The sun was starting to come out and the ground fog glowed like a paper lantern.
And Astrid told her. About nearly everything, though she deftly avoided any of the stranger things, the time travel, the island’s magic, the attacking singing fish. She did tell her about the nightmares, though, Ingrid speaking to her in the form of book of poetry, but she didn’t mention the silk-robe Barry. She told her about her roommate, her friends, her teachers, about reading and the ever-changing walls of her room, about her two jobs, and her own brief stay in a jail far more lenient than this one, which meant she told her about the tattoo, even showed her, and Ingrid complimented the shade work, likened her to sailors and carnival workers of the past who would cover themselves in ink like their skins were canvas.
She hadn’t meant to talk so much, to tell her nearly everything, but once she started, once she realized that she actually had things to tell, and that her mother, looking at her with those clear eyes and that unreadable but attentive face, heard it all, listened to her, actually seemed to want to soak up everything she spilled.
Astrid couldn’t have stopped herself even if she tried.
[[NFB, NFI, cut for length, a bit of language, and a completely and totally normal mother-daughter relationship (nope. nope. not even a little bit). Almost entirely lifted from Chapter Five of White Oleander by Janet Fitch, with some alterations and edits here and there]]
The van came at seven, other kids already packed in, with three more to pick up on the way out. The day was overcast, late December gloom, and the rumbling of the vehicle, the bodies pressed in, uncomfortable and awkward, was making Astrid carsick. She cracked the window as they drove a long way, through suburbs and more suburbs, houses decked in lights, making her wonder what might be going on all the way on the other side of the country right now, twenty-six years in the future.
At Chino, they turned off the freeway and drove south. Astrid tried to memorize this, so she could find it again in her dreams. They drove past nice suburbs, then not-so-nice ones, then brand-new subdivisions alternating with lumberyards and farm equipment rentals. Finally they came to real country, and drove along roads with no signals, just dairies and fields, the smell of manure.
There was a big complex of buildings on the right. “Is that it?” Astrid asked the girl next to her. “CYA,” she said. Astrid shook her head. “Youth Authority.”
All the kids eyed it grimly as they passed. They could all be there, behind that razor wire. They were silent as death when they went by the California Institution for Men, set way back from the road in the middle of a field. Finally, they turned onto a fresh blacktopped road, past a little market, case of Bud $5.99. Astrid wanted to remember it all. The other kids got their bags, their backpacks. Now she could see the prison--a steam stack, a water tower, the guard tower. It was aluminum¬sided, like a trailer, and it surprised Astrid now as it had the first time. Its low brick buildings were widely spaced and landscaped with trees and roses and acres of green lawn. It was more like a suburban high school than a prison, except for the guard towers, the razor wire (though she’d nearly forgotten what those…normal high schools...even looked like).
Crows squawked raucously in the trees. It sounded like they were tearing something apart, something they didn’t even want, just for the fun of destroying it. They filed through the guard tower, signed in. They searched their backpacks and passed they through the metal detector. They took a package away from one girl. No gifts. You had to mail them, a package from family was allowed four times a year. The slam of the gate behind them made them all jump.
They were locked in.
They told Astrid to wait at an orange picnic table under a tree. She was still nervous and sick from the ride. She shivered, curling her hands into the ends of her sweater sleeves, glad to be sitting there this time in more practically clothes than her pink dress, her matching heels. Back to blonde, in well-worn jeans, her clunky, sturdy boots.
Women milled around behind the covered area of the visiting yard. Prisoners, their faces like masks. They jeered at the gathered children. One woman whistled at Astrid and licked between her fingers, and the others laughed. They kept laughing, they wouldn’t stop. They sounded like the crows.
The mothers started coming in from the prison through a different gate. They wore jeans and T-shirts, gray sweaters, sweatsuits. Astrid saw her mother waiting for the woman guard to bring her through. She wore a plain denim dress, button front, but on her the blue was a color, like a song. Her white blond hair had been hacked off at the neck by someone who had no feeling for the work, but her blue eyes were as clear as a high note on a violin. She had never looked more beautiful. Astrid stood up and then she couldn’t move, she waited trembling as she came over and hugged her daughter to her.
Just to feel her touch, to hold her, after all those months! Astrid put her head on her chest and Ingrid kissed her, smelled her hair. She didn’t smell of violets anymore, only the smell of detergent on denim. She lifted Astrid’s face in her hands and kissed her all over, wiped her tears with her strong thumbs. She pulled Astrid to sit down next to her.
Astrid was so thirsty for the way she felt, the way she looked, the sound of her voice, the way her front teeth were square but her second teeth turned slightly, her one dimple, left side, her half-smile, her wonderfully blue eyes flecked with white, like new galaxies, the firm intact planes of her face. She didn’t even look like she should be in prison, she looked like she could have just walked off the Venice boardwalk with a book under her arm, ready to settle in at an oceanside cafe.
“Don’t cry,” she whispered as they sat at the picnic table. “We’re not like that. We’re the Vikings, remember?”
Just as Astrid had expected her to say as soon as her eyes started to water. She nodded, but her tears dripped on the orange vinyl table. Lois, someone had scratched into it. 18th Street. Cunt.
One of the women in the concrete courtyard behind the visitors covered area whistled and shouted out. Ingrid looked up and the woman caught her gaze full in the face like a punch. It stopped her cold. She turned away quickly, like it wasn’t she who’d said it.
“You’re so beautiful,” Astrid said, unable to hold it back, touching her hair, her collar, her cheek. Not pliable at all.
“Prison agrees with me,” Ingrid said. “There’s no hypocrisy here. Kill or be killed, and everybody knows it.”
“I missed you so much,” Astrid whispered.
Ingrid put her arm around her, her head right next to hers. She pressed Astrid’s forehead with her hand, lips against her temple. “I won’t be here forever. It’ll take more than this to keep me behind bars. I promise you. I will get out, one way or another. One day you’ll look out your window and I’ll be there.”
Astrid looked into her determined face, cheekbones like razors, her eyes making her believe. “I was afraid you’d still be mad at me.”
She stretched Astrid out at arm’s length to look at her, hands gripping her shoulders. “Why would you think that?”
Because she still remembered that letter, the words burned into her memory, just like the tattoo on her arm was burning. Because she almost hadn’t wanted to come back, because she had this whole life now, without her, hidden from here. For keeping secrets, for letting others out, for not being able to lie well enough, for being the entire reason she was in this prison in the first place...
But Astrid couldn’t say it, any of it. Ingrid hugged her again. Those arms around her made her want to stay there forever. She’d graffiti every corner of Turtle & Canary, she’d rob a bank and get convicted so they could always be together. She wanted to curl up in her lap, she wanted to disappear into her body, she wanted to be one of her eyelashes, or a blood vessel in her thigh, a mole on her neck. “Is it terrible here? Do they hurt you?”
“Not as much as I hurt them,” she said, and Astrid knew she was smiling, though all she could see was the denim of her sleeve and her arm, still lightly tanned. She had to pull away a little to see her. Yes, she was smiling, her half-smile, the little comma-shaped curve at the corner of her mouth. Astrid touched her mouth. Ingrid kissed her fingers.
“They assigned me to office work. I told them I’d rather clean toilets than type their bureaucratic vomit. Oh, they don’t much care for me. I’m on grounds crew. I sweep, pull weeds, though of course only inside the wire. I’m considered a poor security risk. Imagine. I won’t tutor their illiterates, teach writing classes, or otherwise feed the machine. I will not serve.” She stuck her nose in Astrid’s hair, she was smelling her. ‘‘Your hair smells of bread. Clover and nutmeg. I want to remember you just like this.
“I think of you all the time,” she added. “Especially at night. I imagine where you are. When the prison’s still and everyone’s asleep, I imagine I can see you. I try to contact you. Have you ever heard me calling, felt my presence in your room?” She stroked a strand of Astrid’s hair between her fingers, stretched it to see how long it was against Astrid’s arm. It came to her elbow, and all Astrid could think was that she was imagining how it had looked in red.
Astrid had felt her, she thought. She thought she’d heard her call. Astrid? Are you awake? “Late at night,” she said quietly. “You never could sleep.”
Ingrid kissed the top of her head, right in the part. “Neither could you. Now, tell me more about yourself. I want to know everything about you.”
It was a strange idea. She never wanted to know about Astrid before. But the long days of sameness had led her back to her, to remembering she had a daughter tied up somewhere. The sun was starting to come out and the ground fog glowed like a paper lantern.
And Astrid told her. About nearly everything, though she deftly avoided any of the stranger things, the time travel, the island’s magic, the attacking singing fish. She did tell her about the nightmares, though, Ingrid speaking to her in the form of book of poetry, but she didn’t mention the silk-robe Barry. She told her about her roommate, her friends, her teachers, about reading and the ever-changing walls of her room, about her two jobs, and her own brief stay in a jail far more lenient than this one, which meant she told her about the tattoo, even showed her, and Ingrid complimented the shade work, likened her to sailors and carnival workers of the past who would cover themselves in ink like their skins were canvas.
She hadn’t meant to talk so much, to tell her nearly everything, but once she started, once she realized that she actually had things to tell, and that her mother, looking at her with those clear eyes and that unreadable but attentive face, heard it all, listened to her, actually seemed to want to soak up everything she spilled.
Astrid couldn’t have stopped herself even if she tried.
[[NFB, NFI, cut for length, a bit of language, and a completely and totally normal mother-daughter relationship (nope. nope. not even a little bit). Almost entirely lifted from Chapter Five of White Oleander by Janet Fitch, with some alterations and edits here and there]]