White Oleander - Janet Fitch [176]
“The past is still happening. It never stopped. Who was Annie?”
The wind shook the dense glossy foliage of the ficus, there was no other sound. She ran her fingers over her hair, pulling tight, like she was climbing out of a pool. “She was a neighbor. She took in kids, did people’s laundry.”
The smell of laundry. The laundry basket, sitting in the laundry basket with other children, playing we were in a boat. The little squares. It was yellow. We scooted it across the kitchen floor. “What did she look like?”
“Small. Talkative.” She shaded her eyes with one hand. “She wore those Dr. Scholl’s sandals.”
Wooden clopping on the linoleum. Yellow linoleum with a multicolored paint-splotch pattern. The floor was cool when you put your cheek against it. And her legs. Tanned. Bare legs in cutoffs. But I couldn’t see her face. “Dark or fair?”
“Dark. Straight hair with little bangs.”
I couldn’t get the hair. Just the legs. And the way she sang all day long to the radio.
“And where were you?”
My mother was silent. She pressed her hand down on her eyes. “How could you possibly have remembered this.”
Everything she knew about me, everything she walked around with in that thin skull case like a vault. I wanted to crack her open, eat her brain like a soft-boiled egg.
“Imagine my life, for a moment,” she said, quietly, cupping her long fingers like a boat, like she was holding her life in a shell. “Imagine how unprepared I was to be the mother of a small child. The demand for the enactment of the archetype. The selfless eternal feminine. It couldn’t have been more foreign. I was a woman accustomed to following a line of inquiry or inclination until it led to its logical conclusion. I was used to having time to think, freedom. I felt like a hostage. Can you understand how desperate I was?”
I didn’t want to understand, but I remembered Caitlin, tugging, always tugging, Assi, juice! Juice! Her imperiousness. On the other side of the fence, past my mother’s head, the young women in Reception watched one of them sweeping the concrete courtyard, sweeping, sweeping, like it was a penance. “That’s what babies are like. What were you thinking, that I would amuse you? That you and I could exchange thoughts on Joseph Brodsky?”
She sat up, crossed her legs, and rested her hands on her knees. “I thought Klaus and I were going to live happily ever after. Adam and Eve in a vine-covered shack. I was walking the archetypes. I was out of my fucking mind.”
“You were in love with him.”
“Yes, I was in love with him, all right?” she yelled at me. “I was in love with him and baby makes three and all that jazz, and then we had you and I woke up one morning married to a weak, selfish man, and I couldn’t stand him. And you, you just wanted, wanted, wanted. Mommy Mommy Mommy until I thought I would throw you against the wall.”
I felt sick. I had no trouble believing it, seeing it. I saw it all too clearly. And I understood why she never told me about this, had simply, kindly, refrained.
“So you left me there.”
“I hadn’t really intended to. I dropped you at her house just for the afternoon, to go to the beach with some friends, and one thing led to another, they had some friends down in Ensenada, and I went, and it felt wonderful, Astrid. To be free! You can’t imagine. To go to the bathroom by myself. To take a nap in the afternoon. To make love all day long if I wanted, and walk on the beach, and not to have to think, where’s Astrid? What’s Astrid doing? What’s she going to get into? And not having you on me all the time, Mommy Mommy Mommy, clinging to me, like a spider...”
She shuddered. She still remembered my touch with revulsion. It made me dizzy with hatred. This was my mother. The woman who raised me. What chance could I ever have had.
“How long were you gone?” My voice sounded flat and dead in my own ears.
“A year,” she said quietly. “Give or take a few months.”
And I believed it. Everything in my body told me that was right. All those nights, waiting for her to