Astrid Magnussen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_oleander) wrote2019-11-14 02:36 pm
white_oleander) wrote2019-11-14 02:36 pm
Hollywood, California, 1993. Thursday [11/14 FT].
That day, when Astrid came home from school, Claire brought out the jewelry she kept in the freezer and dumped it onto her bed, a pirate’s treasure, deliciously icy. Freezing strands of green jade beads with jeweled clasps, a pendant of amber enclosing a fossilized fern. Astrid pressed it, cold, to her cheek. She draped an antique crystal bracelet down the part in in her hair, let it lap on her forehead like a cool tongue.
“That was my great-aunt Priscilla’s,” Claire said. “She wore it to her presentation ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, just before the Great War.” She lay on her back in her underwear, her hair dark with sweat, a smoky topaz bracelet across her forehead intersected by an intricate gold chain that came to rest on the tip of her nose. She was painfully thin, with sharp hipbones and ribs stark as a carved wooden Christ. Astrid could see her beauty mark above the line of her panties. “She was a field nurse at Ypres. A very brave woman.”
Every bracelet, every bead, had a story. Astrid plucked an onyx ring from the pile between them on the bed, rectangular, its black slick surface pierced by a tiny diamond. She slipped it on, but it was tiny, only fit her smallest finger, above the knuckle.
“Whose was this?” She held it out so Claire could see it without moving her head.
“Great-grandmother Matilde. A quintessential Parisienne.”
Its owner dead a hundred years, perhaps, but still she made Astrid feel large and ill bred. She imagined jet-black hair, curls, a sharp tongue. Her black eyes would have caught Astrid's least awkwardness. She would have disapproved of her gawky arms and legs, Astrid would have been too large for her little chairs and tiny gold- rimmed porcelain cups, a moose among antelope. She gave it to Claire, who slipped it right on.
The garnet choker, icy around Astrid's neck, was a wedding present from Claire's mill-owning Manchester great¬grandfather to his wife, Beatrice. The gold jaguar with emerald eyes Astrid balanced on her knee was brought back from Brazil in the twenties by Claire's father’s aunt Geraldine Woods, who danced with Isadora Duncan. Astrid was wearing Claire’s family album. Maternal grandmothers and paternal great-aunts, women in emerald taffeta, velvet and garnets. Time, place, and personality locked into stone and silver filigree.
In comparison to this, Astrid's past was smoke, a story her mother once told her and later denied. No onyxes for Astrid, no aquamarines memorializing the lives of her ancestors. She had only their eyes, their hands, the shape of a nose, a nostalgia for snowfall and carved wood.
Claire dripped a gold necklace over one closed eye socket, jade beads in the other. She spoke carefully, nothing slid off.
“They used to bury people like this. Mouths full of jewels and a gold coin over each eye. Fare for the
ferryman.” She drizzled her coral necklace into the well of her navel, and her pearl double strand, between her breasts. After a minute, she picked up the pearls, opened her mouth and let the strand drop in, closed her lips over the shiny eggs. Her mother had given her the pearls when she married, though she didn’t want her to marry a Jew. When Claire told Astrid this, she expected her to be horrified, but predjudices were hardly a surprise. The only thing she wondered was why would her mother give her pearls.
Claire lay still, pretending to be dead. A jeweled corpse in her pink lace lingerie, covered with a fine drizzle of sweat. Astrid wasn’t sure she liked this new game. Through the French doors, in the foot of space showing under the blinds, she could see the garden, left a little wild. Claire didn’t garden anymore, no pruning and weeding under her Chinese peaked hat.
Ron was away again, this time in Andalusia taping a piece about Gypsies. Out combing the world for what was most bizarre, racking up frequent flier miles. If he wanted to see something weird and uncanny, he should have just walked into his own bedroom and seen his wife lying on the bed in her pink lace panties and bra, covered in jade and pearls, pretending she was dead.
Underneath the bed, the voodoo box, magnets and clippers and pens, sealed Polaroid photographs, conjured him home.
Suddenly, she was gagging on the pearls. She sat up, retching. The jewels fell from her body. She pulled the strand of pearls from her mouth, catching it in her hand. She was so pale, her mouth seemed unnaturally red by comparison, and she had dark circles under her eyes. She slumped over the cluster of lustrous eggs, wet with spit, on the edge of the bed with her back to Astrid, her spine threaded like jade.
She reached back for Astrid's hand, her nails dirty, tips small and sensitive as a child’s, the rings incongruous as gumball machine prizes. Astrid took her hand, and Claire brought her hand around to her face, pressing its back against her wet cheek. She was burning up. Astrid rested her face on her shoulder, her back was like fire.
“Ron’ll be back soon,” she tried to reassure her.
She nodded, head heavy on her slender neck, like one of her drooping tulips, the knobs of her spine like a diamondback’s rattle. ‘‘It’s so hot still. What will I do when summer comes back?”
She was all skin and nerves, no substance, no weight. She was her own skin kite, stretched before dry violent winds.
“We should go to the beach,” Astrid suggested.
She shook her head, fast, as if a fly had landed on her. “It’s not that.”
Astrid was sitting on one of the jewels, it was digging into her hip. SHe freed one of her hands and reached under herself,pulled it out. It was an aquamarine, big as an almond in the shell. Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told her. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren’t worth as much. It was the emerald that didn’t break that was the really valuable thing.
She handed Claire the ice-blue stone, the color of her mother’s eyes. She put it on her forefinger, where it hung like a doorknob on a rope. She gazed into it. “This belonged to my mother. My father got it for her to celebrate an around-the-world cruise.” She took it off. “It was too big for her too.”
Next door, Mrs. Kromach’s parrot whistled the same three notes in an ascending scale, three and a half notes apart. An icecream truck rolled down the street, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Claire lay down on her back so she could look at Astrid, one hand behind her head. She was very beautiful, even now, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, wet at the hairline, her dark eyebrows arched and glossy, her small breasts curved in pink lace.
“If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” she asked.
Astrid turned onto her stomach, sorted through the jewelry. She tried on a gold bangle. It wouldn’t fit over her hand. She thought of her suicides, the way she would run her death through her fingers like jet beads. “I wouldn’t.”
She laced an Indian silver necklace onto her flat stomach, strands of hairlike tubes making metal into a fluid like mercury. “Well, say you wanted to.”
“It’s against my religion.” Sweat trickled down between Astrid's breasts, pooled in her navel.
“What religion is that?”
“I’m a survivalist.”
She wouldn’t allow that. Astrid wasn’t playing. It was against the rules. “Just say you did. Say you were very old and had a horrible incurable cancer.”
“I'd get lots of Demerol and wait it out.” Astrid was not going to discuss suicide with Claire. It was on Ingrid’s list of antisocial acts. Astrid wasn’t going to tell her the surest way, injecting an air bubble into your vein and letting it move through your blood like a pearl. She was sure her aunt Priscilla used that once or twice on the battlefield when the morphine ran out. Then there was a load of cyanide at the back of the tongue, the way they did it to cats. It was very fast. When you committed suicide, you didn’t want something slow. Someone could walk in, someone could save you.
Claire clasped her hand to one knee, rocked a little, up and down her spine. “You know how I’d do it?”
She was pulling Astrid down that road and Astrid wasn’t going to go there. “Let’s go to the beach, okay? It’s so hot for November, it’s making us crazy.”
She didn’t even hear her. Her eyes looked dreamy, like somene in love. “I’d gas myself. That’s the way. They say it’s just like going to sleep.”
She reminded me of a woman lying down in snow. Just lying down for a little while, she was so tired. She’d been walking so long, she just wanted to rest, and it wasn’t as cold as she thought. She was so sleepy. It was the surrender she wanted. To stop fighting the storm and the enveloping night, to lie down in whiteness and sleep. Astrid understood. She used to dream that she was skin-diving down a coral wall. Euphoria set in as the nitrogen built up in her bloodstream, and the only direction was down into darkness and forgetting.
Astrid had to wake Claire up. Slap her face, march her around, feed her black coffee. Astrid told her about a Japanese sailor she'd read about, adrift for four days when he killed himself. “They found him twenty minutes later. He was still warm.”
They heard the hum of someone running a lawn mower down the street. The sweetness of jasmine took the rest of the air. Claire sighed, filling out ribs sharp as the blades of the mower. “But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?”
What answer could Astrid give her? She’d been doing it for years. Claire was her life raft, her turtle. Astrid laid down, put her head on Claire's shoulder. She smelled of sweat and L’Air du Temps, but now dusty blue, as if her melancholy had stained the perfume.
“Anything can happen,” Astrid said.
Then Claire kissed Astrid. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and Astrid was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. She was confused, but not unwilling. She would have let her do anything.
She dropped back onto the pillow, her arm over her eyes. Astrid raised up on one elbow, didn't know what to say.
“I feel so unreal,” Claire said. She turned over, her back to Astrid, her garnet heart pendant stuck to the back of her shoulder. Her dirty hair was heavy as a bunch of black grapes, and her waist and hip curved like a pale guitar. She picked up the strand of pearls and lowered it in a spiral on the bedspread, but when she moved it slid in toward her body, spoiling the design. She picked it up, tried again, like a girl picking petals off daisies, trying to get the right answer.
"If only I had a child,” she said.
Astrid felt a twang on a rarely played string. She was well aware she was the instead-baby, a stand-in for what Claire really wanted. If she had a baby, she wouldn’t need Astrid. But a baby was out of the question. She was so thin, she was starving herself. Astrid caught her vomiting after they ate.
"I was pregnant once, at Yale. It never occurred to me that was the only baby I’d ever have.”
The whine of the lawn mower filled the silence. Astrid would have liked to say something encouraging, but she couldn’t think of anything. She plucked the heart off Claire's back. Her thinness belied her spoken desire. She’d lost so much weight she could wear Astrid's clothes now. And she did, when Astrid was at school. She came home sometimes and certain outfits were warm, smelling of L’Air du Temps. Astrid pictured her in those clothes, certain things she favored, a plaid skirt, a skinny top. Standing in the mirror, imagining she was newly sixteen, a sophomore in high school. She did a perfect imitation of Astrid, the gawky teenager. Crossing her legs the way Astrid did, twining them and tucking the foot behind the calf. Starting with a shrug before she talked, dismissing what she was about to say in advance. Astrid's uneasy smile, that flashed and disappeared in a second. She tried Astrid on just like she tried on her clothes. But it wasn’t Astrid she wanted to be, just sixteen.
Astrid watched the garden under the blinds, the long shadows cast by the cypress, the palm, across the textured green. If Claire was sixteen...what? She wouldn’t have made the mistakes she’s made? Maybe she would choose better? Maybe she wouldn’t have to choose at all. She could just stay sixteen. But she was trying on the wrong person’s clothes. Astrid wasn’t anyone she’d want to be. She was too fragile to be Astrid, it would crush her, like the pressure of a deep well dive.
Mostly she lay here like this, thinking about Ron, when would he come home, was there another woman? Worrying about luck and evil influences, while wearing talismans of her family past, women who did something with their lives, made something of themselves, or at least got dressed every day, women who never kissed a sixteen-year-old foster daughter because they felt unreal, never let the weeds grow in their gardens because it was too hot to pull them.
Astrid wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It frightened her for Claire to bare her needs so openly. If a person needed something badly, it was Astrid's experience that it would surely be taken away. She didn’t need to put mirrors on the roof to know that.
[[ and so we head into the darkness that is Chapter 19. Lifted and altered slightly from White Oleander by Janet Fitch. This one's a doozy. NFB, obviously, but can be open, as always ]]
“That was my great-aunt Priscilla’s,” Claire said. “She wore it to her presentation ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, just before the Great War.” She lay on her back in her underwear, her hair dark with sweat, a smoky topaz bracelet across her forehead intersected by an intricate gold chain that came to rest on the tip of her nose. She was painfully thin, with sharp hipbones and ribs stark as a carved wooden Christ. Astrid could see her beauty mark above the line of her panties. “She was a field nurse at Ypres. A very brave woman.”
Every bracelet, every bead, had a story. Astrid plucked an onyx ring from the pile between them on the bed, rectangular, its black slick surface pierced by a tiny diamond. She slipped it on, but it was tiny, only fit her smallest finger, above the knuckle.
“Whose was this?” She held it out so Claire could see it without moving her head.
“Great-grandmother Matilde. A quintessential Parisienne.”
Its owner dead a hundred years, perhaps, but still she made Astrid feel large and ill bred. She imagined jet-black hair, curls, a sharp tongue. Her black eyes would have caught Astrid's least awkwardness. She would have disapproved of her gawky arms and legs, Astrid would have been too large for her little chairs and tiny gold- rimmed porcelain cups, a moose among antelope. She gave it to Claire, who slipped it right on.
The garnet choker, icy around Astrid's neck, was a wedding present from Claire's mill-owning Manchester great¬grandfather to his wife, Beatrice. The gold jaguar with emerald eyes Astrid balanced on her knee was brought back from Brazil in the twenties by Claire's father’s aunt Geraldine Woods, who danced with Isadora Duncan. Astrid was wearing Claire’s family album. Maternal grandmothers and paternal great-aunts, women in emerald taffeta, velvet and garnets. Time, place, and personality locked into stone and silver filigree.
In comparison to this, Astrid's past was smoke, a story her mother once told her and later denied. No onyxes for Astrid, no aquamarines memorializing the lives of her ancestors. She had only their eyes, their hands, the shape of a nose, a nostalgia for snowfall and carved wood.
Claire dripped a gold necklace over one closed eye socket, jade beads in the other. She spoke carefully, nothing slid off.
“They used to bury people like this. Mouths full of jewels and a gold coin over each eye. Fare for the
ferryman.” She drizzled her coral necklace into the well of her navel, and her pearl double strand, between her breasts. After a minute, she picked up the pearls, opened her mouth and let the strand drop in, closed her lips over the shiny eggs. Her mother had given her the pearls when she married, though she didn’t want her to marry a Jew. When Claire told Astrid this, she expected her to be horrified, but predjudices were hardly a surprise. The only thing she wondered was why would her mother give her pearls.
Claire lay still, pretending to be dead. A jeweled corpse in her pink lace lingerie, covered with a fine drizzle of sweat. Astrid wasn’t sure she liked this new game. Through the French doors, in the foot of space showing under the blinds, she could see the garden, left a little wild. Claire didn’t garden anymore, no pruning and weeding under her Chinese peaked hat.
Ron was away again, this time in Andalusia taping a piece about Gypsies. Out combing the world for what was most bizarre, racking up frequent flier miles. If he wanted to see something weird and uncanny, he should have just walked into his own bedroom and seen his wife lying on the bed in her pink lace panties and bra, covered in jade and pearls, pretending she was dead.
Underneath the bed, the voodoo box, magnets and clippers and pens, sealed Polaroid photographs, conjured him home.
Suddenly, she was gagging on the pearls. She sat up, retching. The jewels fell from her body. She pulled the strand of pearls from her mouth, catching it in her hand. She was so pale, her mouth seemed unnaturally red by comparison, and she had dark circles under her eyes. She slumped over the cluster of lustrous eggs, wet with spit, on the edge of the bed with her back to Astrid, her spine threaded like jade.
She reached back for Astrid's hand, her nails dirty, tips small and sensitive as a child’s, the rings incongruous as gumball machine prizes. Astrid took her hand, and Claire brought her hand around to her face, pressing its back against her wet cheek. She was burning up. Astrid rested her face on her shoulder, her back was like fire.
“Ron’ll be back soon,” she tried to reassure her.
She nodded, head heavy on her slender neck, like one of her drooping tulips, the knobs of her spine like a diamondback’s rattle. ‘‘It’s so hot still. What will I do when summer comes back?”
She was all skin and nerves, no substance, no weight. She was her own skin kite, stretched before dry violent winds.
“We should go to the beach,” Astrid suggested.
She shook her head, fast, as if a fly had landed on her. “It’s not that.”
Astrid was sitting on one of the jewels, it was digging into her hip. SHe freed one of her hands and reached under herself,pulled it out. It was an aquamarine, big as an almond in the shell. Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told her. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren’t worth as much. It was the emerald that didn’t break that was the really valuable thing.
She handed Claire the ice-blue stone, the color of her mother’s eyes. She put it on her forefinger, where it hung like a doorknob on a rope. She gazed into it. “This belonged to my mother. My father got it for her to celebrate an around-the-world cruise.” She took it off. “It was too big for her too.”
Next door, Mrs. Kromach’s parrot whistled the same three notes in an ascending scale, three and a half notes apart. An icecream truck rolled down the street, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Claire lay down on her back so she could look at Astrid, one hand behind her head. She was very beautiful, even now, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, wet at the hairline, her dark eyebrows arched and glossy, her small breasts curved in pink lace.
“If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” she asked.
Astrid turned onto her stomach, sorted through the jewelry. She tried on a gold bangle. It wouldn’t fit over her hand. She thought of her suicides, the way she would run her death through her fingers like jet beads. “I wouldn’t.”
She laced an Indian silver necklace onto her flat stomach, strands of hairlike tubes making metal into a fluid like mercury. “Well, say you wanted to.”
“It’s against my religion.” Sweat trickled down between Astrid's breasts, pooled in her navel.
“What religion is that?”
“I’m a survivalist.”
She wouldn’t allow that. Astrid wasn’t playing. It was against the rules. “Just say you did. Say you were very old and had a horrible incurable cancer.”
“I'd get lots of Demerol and wait it out.” Astrid was not going to discuss suicide with Claire. It was on Ingrid’s list of antisocial acts. Astrid wasn’t going to tell her the surest way, injecting an air bubble into your vein and letting it move through your blood like a pearl. She was sure her aunt Priscilla used that once or twice on the battlefield when the morphine ran out. Then there was a load of cyanide at the back of the tongue, the way they did it to cats. It was very fast. When you committed suicide, you didn’t want something slow. Someone could walk in, someone could save you.
Claire clasped her hand to one knee, rocked a little, up and down her spine. “You know how I’d do it?”
She was pulling Astrid down that road and Astrid wasn’t going to go there. “Let’s go to the beach, okay? It’s so hot for November, it’s making us crazy.”
She didn’t even hear her. Her eyes looked dreamy, like somene in love. “I’d gas myself. That’s the way. They say it’s just like going to sleep.”
She reminded me of a woman lying down in snow. Just lying down for a little while, she was so tired. She’d been walking so long, she just wanted to rest, and it wasn’t as cold as she thought. She was so sleepy. It was the surrender she wanted. To stop fighting the storm and the enveloping night, to lie down in whiteness and sleep. Astrid understood. She used to dream that she was skin-diving down a coral wall. Euphoria set in as the nitrogen built up in her bloodstream, and the only direction was down into darkness and forgetting.
Astrid had to wake Claire up. Slap her face, march her around, feed her black coffee. Astrid told her about a Japanese sailor she'd read about, adrift for four days when he killed himself. “They found him twenty minutes later. He was still warm.”
They heard the hum of someone running a lawn mower down the street. The sweetness of jasmine took the rest of the air. Claire sighed, filling out ribs sharp as the blades of the mower. “But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?”
What answer could Astrid give her? She’d been doing it for years. Claire was her life raft, her turtle. Astrid laid down, put her head on Claire's shoulder. She smelled of sweat and L’Air du Temps, but now dusty blue, as if her melancholy had stained the perfume.
“Anything can happen,” Astrid said.
Then Claire kissed Astrid. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and Astrid was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. She was confused, but not unwilling. She would have let her do anything.
She dropped back onto the pillow, her arm over her eyes. Astrid raised up on one elbow, didn't know what to say.
“I feel so unreal,” Claire said. She turned over, her back to Astrid, her garnet heart pendant stuck to the back of her shoulder. Her dirty hair was heavy as a bunch of black grapes, and her waist and hip curved like a pale guitar. She picked up the strand of pearls and lowered it in a spiral on the bedspread, but when she moved it slid in toward her body, spoiling the design. She picked it up, tried again, like a girl picking petals off daisies, trying to get the right answer.
"If only I had a child,” she said.
Astrid felt a twang on a rarely played string. She was well aware she was the instead-baby, a stand-in for what Claire really wanted. If she had a baby, she wouldn’t need Astrid. But a baby was out of the question. She was so thin, she was starving herself. Astrid caught her vomiting after they ate.
"I was pregnant once, at Yale. It never occurred to me that was the only baby I’d ever have.”
The whine of the lawn mower filled the silence. Astrid would have liked to say something encouraging, but she couldn’t think of anything. She plucked the heart off Claire's back. Her thinness belied her spoken desire. She’d lost so much weight she could wear Astrid's clothes now. And she did, when Astrid was at school. She came home sometimes and certain outfits were warm, smelling of L’Air du Temps. Astrid pictured her in those clothes, certain things she favored, a plaid skirt, a skinny top. Standing in the mirror, imagining she was newly sixteen, a sophomore in high school. She did a perfect imitation of Astrid, the gawky teenager. Crossing her legs the way Astrid did, twining them and tucking the foot behind the calf. Starting with a shrug before she talked, dismissing what she was about to say in advance. Astrid's uneasy smile, that flashed and disappeared in a second. She tried Astrid on just like she tried on her clothes. But it wasn’t Astrid she wanted to be, just sixteen.
Astrid watched the garden under the blinds, the long shadows cast by the cypress, the palm, across the textured green. If Claire was sixteen...what? She wouldn’t have made the mistakes she’s made? Maybe she would choose better? Maybe she wouldn’t have to choose at all. She could just stay sixteen. But she was trying on the wrong person’s clothes. Astrid wasn’t anyone she’d want to be. She was too fragile to be Astrid, it would crush her, like the pressure of a deep well dive.
Mostly she lay here like this, thinking about Ron, when would he come home, was there another woman? Worrying about luck and evil influences, while wearing talismans of her family past, women who did something with their lives, made something of themselves, or at least got dressed every day, women who never kissed a sixteen-year-old foster daughter because they felt unreal, never let the weeds grow in their gardens because it was too hot to pull them.
Astrid wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It frightened her for Claire to bare her needs so openly. If a person needed something badly, it was Astrid's experience that it would surely be taken away. She didn’t need to put mirrors on the roof to know that.
[[ and so we head into the darkness that is Chapter 19. Lifted and altered slightly from White Oleander by Janet Fitch. This one's a doozy. NFB, obviously, but can be open, as always ]]