White Oleander

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

 

"Astrid, they can't keep me," she said. "Don't worry, I'll be back in an hour."

 

She said. She said.

 

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

 

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

 

"I'm sorry," Michael said. "I'd keep you if I could. But you know how it is."

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

"Put it back," I said.

 

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