I didn't want to imagine her making love to this three-hundred-pound man, lying under him as he hurriedly thrust into her, so he could go again. "How did you know him?"
She fanned away a bee that was exploring her wine. "I was a loan officer in one of his banks."
I laughed out loud, picturing Olivia as a bank employee. Nine to five, behind a desk, in gabardine and flat shoes. Eating lunch at the Soup Exchange. "You're kidding."
"Sure, what did you think, I was some honeychile walking Van Nuys Boulevard in a bunnyfur jacket? I have an MBA. Oh, I knew all about money, except how to get my hands on some. I was out there making payments on a Honda Accord and keeping my little apartment off Chandler, just like everybody else."
"And the big man saved you from yourself."
She sighed. "Poor Mr. Fred. He had a heart attack last year. His brother got everything." She shrugged her shoulders. "But what do you expect of a man who'll eat three dinners in a row?"
I SAT AT MARVEL'S, watching them eat. They stared at the television the whole time, raising their forks to their lips like windup toys, oblivious to whether it was tuna casserole or cat food gratine. I'd begun to cook, told Marvel I might want to become a chef, it was a good living for a woman. I was gaining weight. My ribs smoothed into the buttery flesh of my torso. I admired my breasts in the mirror, wished Ray could have seen them, cupped them in his mauled hands. I liked the way my body moved as I walked down the street. Marvel thought it was just my age, filling out, she called it. But that wasn't it. I had been moving too fast. I had been too hungry to become a woman.
13
FULL-ON SUMMER fell like a hammer. By nine in the morning you could already start dreading how hot it was going to be. Olivia took me for rides in the Corvette, up the 101 and then out one of the canyons, Topanga, Kanan Dume, to the beach, then we'd cruise back down the coast highway, the wind against our skins bared to the sun, ignoring the shouts of men from other cars. I'd never felt so beautiful and unafraid.
Sometimes she'd make up a pitcher of rum punch and play Brazilian music on the stereo — Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, Jobim. Astrud Gilberto sang interestingly flat, like she was half asleep in a hammock, singing to a child. We sat in the living room on the striped cotton daybed, the fans turning slowly overhead, eating mangos with ham and looking at Olivia's pictures of Brazil. She pronounced the names of the cities in their hushing Portuguese: Rio de Janeiro, Itaparica, Recife, Ouro Preto, Salvador. Pictures of colonial cities painted popsicle colors, black women in white dresses sending candles out to sea. Pictures of Olivia at Carnival, wearing a dress of silver tinsel slit up to the armpits, her hair feathery and wild. She held a white man's hand, he was tanned and had flat blue eyes.
"You'd love Carnival," she said. "You dance for three days straight."
"I hate crowds," I said, drunk on the rum punch she'd made, sweet and heavy as a brick. "I'm always afraid I'm going to be crushed."
"It happens," Olivia said, nodding to the samba music. "You better not fall down at Carnival."
After a while she got up to dance. I lay down and watched her in her head scarf and wrapped skirt, moving in time to the complex rhythms of the samba. I imagined her dressed only in tinsel and sweat, dancing with the throbbing crowd under the southern sun, the smells of rum and mangos and Ma Griffe. The music moved along her body in waves, her feet shuffling in small, hesitation steps, arms swaying like palms atop her raised elbows. Hundreds of thousands of people of every hue pulsing under the sun.
"Dance with me," she said.
"Can't dance," I said. "I'm a white girl."
"Don't say can't." She grinned, her hips shifting in subtle circles like a stream over rocks. She grabbed my hand and pulled me off the daybed.
I stood awkwardly before her, tried to copy her movements, but even slightly inebriated, I was aware of how ridiculous I was, how out of time with the music, how out of step. Her body moved in ten directions at once, all harmonized, supple as ribbon. She laughed, then covered her smile with her hand. "Feel the music, Astrid. Don't look at me. Close your eyes and be inside it."
I closed my eyes, and felt her hands on my hips, moving me. Each hip turned independently of the other. She let go, and I tried to keep the rhythm, letting my hips swing in big arcs to the complex beat. I lifted my arms and let the waves of motion travel along the length of me. I closed my eyes and imagined us in Brazil, on a beach with a palm-covered bar, dancing dangerously with men we would never see again.
"Oh Astrid, you've got to come to Carnival," Olivia said. "We'll tell your keeper your class is taking a trip to see the Liberty Bell, and steal you away. For three days in a row you don't sleep, you don't eat, you just dance. I promise, you'll never move like a white girl after Carnival."
When the songs turned quiet, she put her arm around my waist, danced with me close. Her perfume still smelled fresh, despite the heat and the sweat, like pine trees. I was as tall as Olivia now, and her holding me made me awkward, I was stepping on her feet.
"I'm the man," she said. "All you have to do is follow."
I could feel her leading me, her hand open on the small of my back, always dry, even in the heat.
"You're growing up so fast," she said softly in my ear as we danced like waves on Copacabana. "I'm so glad I found you now. In a year or two, it would have been different."
I imagined she was a man, dancing with me, whispering. "Different how?"
"Everything would have been decided," she said. "Now you're so open. You could go any number of ways." She danced me in slow circles, teaching my feet how to move, my hips to trace the sign of infinity.
THE WINDS of September fanned harvests of fire on the dry hills of Altadena, Malibu, San Fernando, feeding on chaparral and tract homes. The smell of the smoke always brought me back to my mother, to a rooftop under an untrustworthy moon. How beautiful she had been, how perfectly unhinged. It was my second season of fire without her. Oleander time. I read that the Jews celebrated their New Year now, and decided I too would calculate time from this season.
Coyotes drifted down into the city at night, driven by thirst. I saw them walking down the center line on Van Nuys Boulevard. The smoke and ash filled the basin like a gray bath. Ashes filtered into my dreams, I was the ash girl, born to these Santa Anas, born to char and aftermath.
At the height of the fires, 105 in the shade, I went back to school. The world burned and I started the tenth grade at Birmingham High. Boys blew me kisses in the halls, waved money at me. They heard I would do things. But I could hardly see them, they were just shapes in the smoke. Conrad, the chunky boy from the park, was in my typing class. He slipped me joints in the hall. He didn't ask me to suck him off now. He could see the flames in my hair, he knew my lips would scorch him. I liked the feeling. I felt like my mother in oleander time. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.
I sent my mother pictures of Olivia, making gumbo, stirring the huge pot, dancing the samba with her pink palms and feet, driving with her Grace Kelly scarf tied around her head, how bright her skin looked against the white.
Dear Astrid,
I look at the fires that burn on the horizon and I only pray they come closer, immolate me. You have proved every bit as retarded as your school once claimed you were. You'll attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention, won't you? I wash my hands of you. Do not remind me that it has been two years since I last lived in the world. Do you think I would forget how long it has been? How many days hours minutes I have sat looking at the walls of this cell, listening to women with a vocabulary of twenty-five words or less? And you send pictures of your Mulholland rides, your great good jnend. Spare me your enthusiasms. Are you trying to drive me mad?
DialM.
IN OCTOBER the leaves began to redden and fall, the black plums and cutleaf maples, the sweet gums. I came home from school, planning what I would tell Olivia about a teacher who had asked if I would stay after school, he wanted to talk to me about my "home life situation," imagining how she would laugh when I imitated his hangdog look. I wanted to know which kind of man he was, when I saw something that sucked the winds out of my sails, they flapped and then hung empty in midocean. Olivia's car hidden under its canvas cover.
I'd just seen her, and she'd said nothing about leaving. How could she go and not tell me? Maybe it was an emergency, I thought, but she could have left a note for me somewhere, I'd have found it. I waited two days, three, but still the leaves piled up in her yard, floated in and lay on her car cover like Japanese paper screens.
I sat in my room at Marvel's, sullen and stoned, sketching the curtains. The stripes were the only thing that interested me now, that made sense. I didn't write to my mother, I couldn't stand for her to gloat over my loss. She wrote to me, and told me she was corresponding with a classics professor whose name had three initials. He was sending her original translations of some of the more obscene passages of Ovid and Aristophanes. She said she liked the contrast with Dan "The Man" Wylie's mash notes. She also had a lively exchange going with an editor of a small press in North Carolina, and Hana Gruen, a famous feminist in Cologne who had heard of her plight. She wrote me about her new cellmate, she had finally gotten rid of the last one, sent her off to the Special Care Unit babbling about witchcraft. Of course, none of it had anything to do with me, except teeth.
Dear Astrid,
I have a loose tooth garnered in a contretemps on Barneburg B. I cannot possibly lose a tooth here - the idea of a prison dentist is just too grotesque. I see a thin man palsied with early Parkinson 's, florid with alcoholism, rife with malpractice. Or a stout woman, a real pig slaughterer, administering procedures without anesthesia, relishing the victim's screams.
Astrid, take care of your teeth. No one will take you to a decent dentist now. If anything goes wrong, they'll let them rot in your head and you 'II have to pull the lot when you 're 24.1 floss every day, even in here, brush with salt, massage my gums. Try to get some vitamin C, if they won't buy it, eat oranges.
Mammy Yokum.
At least she couldn't vanish, I thought as I folded the letter back into the envelope. But she couldn't see me, either. I needed Olivia to come back and feed me.
THERE WAS a water ring around the moon, raven's eye in the mist. It was the first of November. I didn't tell anyone it was my birthday. To celebrate a birthday without Olivia was worse than having it forgotten. I felt like a painting of Icarus, falling into the sea, all you could see was his legs, and the peasant and the cow kept plowing.
I lay out in the backyard in the cold on the picnic table, brushed my cheek against my blue cashmere shoulder. There was already a seed hole in the front. I flaked the last of the joint into a beer can in the cold yard, then threw the can over the back fence, making the dog bark. I wished the BMW man were there, it was his time of night, and Olivia would be playing Oliver Nelson, "Stolen Moments." They would have a fire in the fireplace, they would dance slow, the way Olivia danced with me, he would whisper in her ear, the way she whispered in mine. Now I could dance, but she had left me without music.
I pulled my sweater close and stared up at the veiled moon. I heard laughter from the house, Marvel and Ed in their bedroom watching Leno. I'd just reddened her hair for the fall, Autumn Flame. I shivered under the wet sheets of fog on the picnic table, still smelling dye on my hands, thinking of the infant Achilles. But this was no intentional trial, and the only stars in the sky were lines of planes coming into Burbank from the west.
I thought how it was sunset right now in Hawaii, and hot curried noon in Bombay. That's where I should be. I would dye my hair black and wear sunglasses, I would forget all about Olivia, Marvel, my mother, all of it. Why couldn't she tell me. she was leaving? Did she think it didn't matter to me, didn't she know how entirely I depended on her? I felt hope slipping out from between my fingers like fish juice.
Was I the party jinx, a piece of space junk jettisoned from a capsule? No one to see me, no one to notice. I wished I was back with Ray, that he could hold me down with his eyes, bring me to earth again. It made me nauseous, to float, weightless and spinning in the moon rocks' white glare, the silent funeral of the cypresses. No more jacaranda bloom. It was a landscape Van Gogh could have painted.
I was tired of the moon staring at me so indifferently, tired of the lunar landscape with the white rocks. What I needed was more cover. I slipped through the cyclone fence, careful to close the gate without making noise. The unpicked oranges spread their resinous scent in the moist air, reminding me of her. And then I thought of my mother and her teeth, her vitamin C. My ridiculous life. I crunched through the leaves heaped on the unswept sidewalks, humming a sweet-sad Jobim tune. Back to sucking dew off the sails. I should have known how it would end.
I should know enough by now not to expect anything from life, instead of giving in to Stockholm syndrome.
A white dog emerged from the mist and I called him, glad for a little company. Another stray. But he started barking at me, so intently that his front legs lifted off the sidewalk. "Don't bark, it's okay." I moved toward him, to pet him, but another dog appeared, a brown one, then a third, a blue-eyed husky.