White Oleander - Janet Fitch [145]
I see you cradling your bare knees, forehead pressed against them. Crickets stroke their legs like pool players lining up shots. Stop crying, do you hear me? Who do you think you are? What am I doing here, except to show you how a woman is stronger than that?
It’s such a liability to love another person, but in here, it’s like playing catch with grenades. The lifers tell me to forget you, do easy time. “You can make a life here,” they say. “Choose a mate, find new children.” Sometimes it’s so awful, I think that they’re right. I should forget you. Sometimes I wish you were dead, so I would know you were safe.
A woman in my unit gave her children heroin from the time they were small, so she’d always know where they were. They’re all in jail, alive. She likes it that way. If I thought I’d be here forever, I would forget you. I’d have to. It sickens me to think of you out there, picking up wounds while I spin in this cellblock, impotent as a genie in a lamp. Astrid, stop crying,
damn you!
I will get out, Astrid, I promise you that. I will win an appeal, I will walk through the walls, I will fly away like a white crow.
Mother.
Yes, I was crying. These words like bombs she sealed up and had delivered, leaving me ragged and bloody weeks later. You imagine you can see me, Mother? All you could ever see was your own face in a mirror.
You always said I knew nothing, but that was the place to begin. I would never claim to know what women in prison dreamed about, or the rights of beauty, or what the night’s magic held. If I thought for a second I did, I’d never have the chance to find out, to see it whole, to watch it emerge and reveal itself. I don’t have to put my face on every cloud, be the protagonist of every random event.
Who am I, Mother? I’m not you. That’s why you wish I were dead. You can’t shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act, I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don’t know. I am nothing like you. My nose is different, flat at the bridge, not sharp as a fold in rice paper. My eyes aren’t ice blue, tinted with your peculiar mix of beauty and cruelty. They are dark as bruises on the inside of an arm, they never smile. You forbid me to cry? I’m no longer yours to command. You used to say I had no imagination. If by that you meant I could feel shame, and remorse, you were right. I can’t remake the world just by willing it so. I don’t know how to believe my own lies. It takes a certain kind of genius.
I went out on the front porch, the splintered boards under my bare feet. The wind carried the steady noise of traffic on the 5 and barking dogs, the pop of gunfire a block or two off in a night tinged red from the sodium vapor streetlights, it was bleeding. We were the ones who sacked Rome, she said on that long-ago night on the rooftop under the raven’s-eye moon. Don’t forget who you are.
How could I ever forget. I was her ghost daughter, sitting at empty tables with crayons and pens while she worked on a poem, a girl malleable as white clay. Someone to shape, instruct in the ways of being her. She was always shaping me. She showed me an orange, a cluster of pine needles, a faceted quartz, and made me describe them to her. I couldn’t have been more than three or four. My words, that’s what she wanted. “What’s this?” she kept asking. “What’s this?” But how could I tell her? She’d taken all the words.
The smell of vanilla wafers saturated the night air, and the wind clicked through the palms like thoughts through my sleepless mind. Who am I? I am a girl you didn’t know, Mother. The silent girl in the back row of the schoolroom, drawing in note-books. Remember how they didn’t know if I even spoke English when we came back to the States? They tested me to find out if I was retarded or deaf. But you never asked why. You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.
I thought of Yvonne in our room,