I sat up and the white cat flowed off me like milk. I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, threw it onto the crowded coffee table. She didn't fool me. I was the soft girl in Reception. She'd rob me of everything I had left to take. I would not be seduced by the music of her words. I could always tell the ragged truth from an elegant lie.
Nobody took me away, Mother. My hand never slipped from your grasp. That wasn't how it went down. I was more like a car you'd parked while drunk, then couldn't remember where you'd left it. You looked away for seventeen years and when you looked back, I was a woman you didn't recognize. So now I was supposed to feel pity for you and those other women who'd lost their own children during a holdup, a murder, a fiesta of greed? Save your poet's sympathy and find some better believer. Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good. Someday I'd read it all in a poem for the New Yorker.
Yes, I was tattooed, just as she'd said. Every inch of my skin was penetrated and stained. I was the original painted lady, a Japanese gangster, a walking art gallery. Hold me up to the light, read my bright wounds. If I had warned Barry I might have stopped her. But she had already claimed me. I wiped my tears, dried my hands on the white cat, and reached for another handful of glass to rub on my skin. Another letter full of agitated goings-on, dramas, and fantasies. I skimmed down the page.
Somewhere in Ad Seg, a woman is crying. She's been crying all night. I've been trying to find her, but at last, I realise, she's not here at all. It's you. Stop crying, Astrid. I forbid it. You have to be strong. I'm in your room, Astrid, do you feel •• me? You share it with a girl, I see her too, her lank hair, her thin arched eyebrows. She sleeps well, but not you. You sit up in bed with the yellow chenille spread — God, where did she find that thing, your new foster mother? My mother had one just like it.
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 thinkyou 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.</I>
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 notebooks. 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, asleep, thumb in mouth, wrapped around her baby like a top. "I can see her," you said. You could never see her, Mother. Not if you stood in that room all night. You could only see her plucked eyebrows, her bad teeth, the books that she read with fainting women on the covers. You could never recognize the kindness in that girl, the depth of her needs, how desperately she wanted to belong, that's why she was pregnant again. You could judge her as you judged everything else, inferior, but you could never see her. Things weren't real to you. They were just raw material for you to reshape to tell a story you liked better. You could never just listen to a boy play guitar, you'd have to turn it into a poem, make it all about you.
I went back inside, spread all her letters out on Rena's wobble-legged kitchen table, letters from Starr's and from Marvel's, letters from Amelia's and Claire's and these last bitter installments. There were enough to drown me forever. The ink of her writing was a fungus, a malignant spell on birch bark, a twisted rune. I picked up the scissors and began cutting, snapping the strings of her words, uncoupling her complicated train of thought car by car. She couldn't stop me now. I refused to see through her eyes any longer.
Carefully, I chose words and phrases from the pile, laid them out on the gray-and-white linoleum tabletop and began to arrange them in lines. Gray dawn was straining peaches by the time I was done.
It sickens me to think of you
a prevalence of void
unholy
immovable
damned, gifts.
an overblown sense of his own importance.
I wish you were dead
forget about you.
crow
florid with
fantasies
it's so awful
a perfect imitation
a liability to love
forget you
Ingrid Magnussen
quite alone
masturbating
rot
disappointment
grotesque
Your arms cradle
poisons
garbage
grenades
Loneliness
long-distance cries
forever
never
response.
take everything