White Oleander

I shook my head. "Nowhere."

 

She finished the portfolio and handed it back to Claire. "Okay. We'll give it a try."

 

Every Tuesday night, Claire brought me to the museum, went home, and then returned three hours later to pick me up. I felt guilty for her willingness to do things for me, like I was using her. I heard my mother saying, "Don't be absurd. She wants to be used." But I didn't want to be like that. I wanted to be like Claire. Who but Claire would make sure I had art class, would give up a Tuesday night for me?

 

In art class, I learned to build a support, stretch canvas, gesso it smooth. Ms. Day had us experiment with color, with strokes. The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement. We painted still lifes. Flowers, books. Some of the ladies in class painted only tiny flowers. Ms. Day told them to paint bigger but they were too embarrassed. I painted flowers big as pizzas, strawberries magnified to a series of green triangles on a red ground, the patterns of the seeds. Ms. Day was spartan in her praise, blunt in her criticism. Every class there was somebody crying. My mother would have liked her. I liked her too.

 

I carefully edited what I wrote to my mother. Hello, how are you, how's the writing. I wrote about grades, gardening, art class, the smell of the Santa Anas and the scorched landscape, the blues of November, shortening of days. Strate A's, homecome queen. I sent her small drawings, watercolors the size of postcards, she didn't have much space. She loved the Kandinsky period, and my new work. I sent her a series of pencil drawings on onionskin paper. It was a self-portrait, but layered, a line here, a line there, one at a time, for her to figure out — she had to layer to get the whole thing. I didn't lay it out for her anymore. She had to work for it.

 

MY MOTHER WROTE that she had poems in Kenyan Review and in the all-poetry issue of Zyzyva. I asked Claire if we could get them, and she took me up to Book Soup on the Strip, bought them both for me. There was a long poem about running in prison, that was a big part of her day. When she wasn't writing she was running the track, fifty, a hundred miles a week. She wore out her shoes every four months, and sometimes they'd give her new ones and sometimes they wouldn't. I had an idea.

 

I Xeroxed ten copies of the poem, and used them as the background for drawings. I sat at the table in the red-and-white kitchen and drew in oil pastel on top of her words, the feeling of running, of senseless, circular activity. Like her mind.

 

The rains had begun, they whispered outside the steamed kitchen window. Claire sat next to me with a cup of mint tea. "Tell me about her."

 

There was something that kept me from talking much about my mother to Claire. She was curious, like everyone else, my counselors at school, Ray, Joan Peeler, the editors of small literary journals. Poets in prison, the sheer paradox. I didn't know what to say. She murdered a man. She was my mother. I didn't know if I was like her or not. Mostly, I didn't want to talk about her. I wanted Claire to be something separate from my mother, I wanted them to be on different pages, and only I could hold them up to the light together.

 

Claire read the running poem again. "I love this line, the back stretch, twenty years. A clock without hands. Life in prison, it's unimaginable. Three years gone, the beaten dirt around. She must be so brave. How can she stand it?"

 

"She's never where she is," I said. "She's only inside her head."

 

"That must be wonderful." Claire stroked the side of the mug like the cheek of a child. "I wish I could do that."

 

I was glad she couldn't. Things touched Claire. Maybe too much, but at least they touched her. She couldn't twist things around in her mind, make the ends come out right. I looked at my mother's poem in Kenyan. So interesting that she was always the heroine, the outlaw, one against the rest. Never the villain.

 

"It's the difference between a true artist and everybody else." Claire sighed. "They can remake the world."

 

"You're an artist," I said.

 

"An actress," she said. "Not even that."

 

I'd seen a couple of Claire's movies now. She was transparent, heartbreaking. I would be afraid to be so vulnerable. I'd spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I wouldn't drip with blood every time I brushed up against something. She was naked, she peeled herself daily. In one film, she played a professor's wife, trembling, in pearls. In another, an eighteenth-century woman, a cast-off lover, in a convent. "You're a terrific actress," I said.

 

Claire shrugged, read the other poem, about a fight in prison. "I like your mother's violence. Her strength. How I admire that."