White Oleander - Janet Fitch [151]
Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest — where you want to erect a museum.
Don’t hoard the past, Astrid. Don’t cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.
Mother.
I SEPARATED our dirty clothes at the Fletcher coin op, colors from lights, cold from hot. I liked doing laundry, the sorting, dropping the coins, the soothing smell of detergent and dryers, rumble of the machines, the snap of cotton and denim as the women folded their clothes, their fresh sheets. Children played games with their mothers’ laundry baskets, wearing them like cages, sitting in them like boats. I wanted to sit in one too, pretend I was sailing.
My mother hated any chore, especially the ones that had to be performed in public. She waited until all our clothes were dirty, and sometimes washed our underwear in the sink, so we could put it off another few days. When we finally could not get away with it one day more, we’d quickly load our wash in the machines and then leave, go take in a movie, look at some books. Each time, we ’d come back to find it wet, thrown out on top of the washers or on the folding tables. I hated it that people handled our things. Everybody else could stay and watch their laundry, why couldn’t we? “Because we’re not everybody,” my mother would say. “We ’re not even remotely like everybody.”
Except even she had dirty laundry.
When the loads of laundry were dry, the sheets bleached back to sanity, I drove home in Niki’s truck, she let me borrow it for special occasions, like when she was too drunk to drive, or I was washing her clothes. I parked in the driveway. There were two girls I’d never seen before sitting on Rena’s front steps. White girls, fresh faces, no makeup. One wore a vintage-style dress with little flowers, her sandy hair in a bun with a chopstick stuck in it. The dark one had on jeans and a pink cotton turtleneck. Black clean shoulder-length hair. Her little nipples poked at the front of the pink cotton.
The vintage-dress girl stood up, squinting into the sun, her eyes the same gray as her dress, freckles. She smiled uncertainly when I got out of the truck. “Are you Astrid Magnussen?” she asked.
I hauled a garbage bag full of folded clothes out of the passenger seat, lifted another from the bed in the back. “Who wants to know?”
“I’m Hannah,” she said. “This is Julie.”
The other girl smiled too, but not as widely.
I never saw them before. They sure didn’t go to Marshall, and they were too young to be social workers. “Yeah, and?”
Hannah, pink-cheeked with embarrassment, looked over at dark-haired Julie for encouragement. Suddenly, I became aware of what I must seem like to them. Hard, street. My eyeliner, my black polyester shirt, my heavy black boots, my cascade of silver earrings, hoops from pinkie-sized to softball. Niki and Yvonne had pierced my ears one day when they were bored. I let them do it. It pleased them to shape me. I’d learned, whatever you hung from my earlobes or put on my back, I was insoluble, like sand in water. Stir me up, I always came to rest on the bottom.
“We just came to meet you, to see, you know, if there was anything we could do,” Hannah said.
“We know your mother,” Julie said. She had a deeper voice, calmer. “We visit with her in Corona.”
Her children. Her new children. Stainless as snowdrops. Bright and newborn. Amnesiac. I had been in foster care almost six years now, I had starved, wept, begged, my body was a battlefield, my spirit scarred and cratered as a city under siege, and now I was being replaced by something