White Oleander

I rested my head in the crook of his shoulder and gazed at the squares of blue TV light shining, through the frost blossoms on our window from the windows just across the way. I tried to imagine what she was feeling right now. In Los Angeles it was noon. A bright sunny February, it looked from the picture. I imagined her in a hotel room, courtesy Susan D. Valeris, some luxury suite full of flowers from well-wishers, waking up on fresh sheets. She would have her bath in a double-wide tub, and write a poem overlooking the winter roses.

 

Then she might take a few interviews, or rent a white convertible for a spin down the beach, where she 'd pick up a young man with clear eyes and sand in his hair, and make love to him until he wept with the beauty of it. What else would you do when you were acquitted of murder?

 

It was too much to imagine her tempering her joy with a moment of grief, a moment for the knowledge of what her triumph had cost. I couldn't expect that from her. But I had seen her remorse, and it had nothing to do with Barry or anyone else, it was a gift offered despite a price she had had no way to estimate then, it could have been heavy as mourning, final as a tomb. No matter how much she had damaged me or how flawed she was, how violently mistaken, my mother loved me, unquestionably.

 

I thought of her, facing a court of law without the pawn formation of my lies. The queen stripped bare, she had mastered the end game on her own.

 

Paul rolled a Drum cigarette, the shreds like hair as he lifted them from the bag, tore the shag from the ends, lit it with a match scraped under the box that served as our end table. "You want to go call her?" We couldn't afford a phone. Oskar Schein let us use his.

 

"Too cold."

 

He smoked, the ashtray resting on his chest. I reached over and took a puff, handed it back. We had come such a long way together, Paul and I. From the apartment on St. Marks to the squat in South London, an uninsulated barge in Amsterdam, now Senefelderstrasse. I wished we knew someone in Italy, or Greece. I hadn't been warm since I left L.A.

 

"Do you ever want to go home?" I asked Paul. He brushed an ash from my face. "It's the century of the displaced person," he said. "You can never go home."

 

He didn't have to tell me, he was afraid I was going to go back. Become an American college coed on the three-meal plan, field hockey and English comp, and leave him holding the foster kid bag. There it was. On the one hand, there was Frau Acker and the rent, my cough, Paul's print run. On the other, a place with heat, a degree, decent food, and someone taking care of me. I'd never told him, sometimes I felt old. How we lived was depressing. Before, I couldn't afford to think about it, but now that she was out, how could I not. And now Oskar Schein was asking if he could see me alone, take me to dinner, he wanted to talk to me about a gallery show. I'd put him off, but I didn't know how long I could hold out. I found him attractive, a bearish man with a cropped silver beard. Lying down for the father again. If it weren't for Paul, I'd have done it months ago. But Paul was more than my boyfriend. He was me.

 

And now my mother was calling me, I didn't have to get on the phone. I could hear her. My blood whispered her name.

 

I stared at her photograph, waving in the California sunlight. At this very moment, she was out. Driving around, ready to start again fresh, so American after all. I thought of my life bundled in suitcases against the wall, the shapes I had taken, the selves I had been. Next I could be Ingrid Magnussen's daughter at Stanford or Smith, answering the hushed breathless questions of her new children. She's your mother? What's she really like? I could do it. I knew how to trade on my tragic past, skillfully revealing my scars, my foster kid status, I'd perfected the art with Joan Peeler. People took me up, made me their project, their pet. They cast themselves as my champions, and I let them. I hadn't come this far to be left at some river bottom among the wrecked cars.

 

To be my mother's daughter again. I played with the idea like a child with a blanket, running it between my fingers. To be lost in the tide of her music again. It was an idea more seductive than any man. Was it really too late for childhood, to crawl back into the crucible, to dissolve into the fire, to rise without memory? The phoenix must burn., . How would I dare? It had taken me this long to be free of her shadow, to breathe on my own, even if in this singed-hair space-heater Europe.