The next morning she got up. She took a shower, went to the market. And I thought things were going to be better now. She called Marlene and asked if she could come back to work. It was shipping week and they needed her desperately. She dropped me at school, to start the eighth grade at Le Conte Junior High. As if nothing had ever happened. And I thought it was over.
It was not over. She began to follow Barry, as he had followed her in the beginning. She went everywhere he might be, hunting him so that she could polish her hatred on the sight of him.
“My hatred gives me strength,” she said.
She took Marlene to lunch at his favorite restaurant, where they found him eating at the bar, and she smiled at him. He pretended he didn’t notice her, but he kept touching his face along the jaw. “Searching for acne that was no longer there,” she told me that night. “The force of my gaze threatened to call it back into being.”
She seemed so happy, and I didn’t know which was worse, this or before, when she wanted to shave her head.
We shopped at his market, driving miles out of our way to meet him over the cantaloupes. We browsed at his favorite music store. We went to book signings for books written by his friends.
SHE CAME HOME one night after three. It was a school night but I’d stayed up watching a white hunter movie starring Stewart Granger on cable. Michael was passed out on the couch. The hot winds tested the windows like burglars looking for a way in. Finally I went home and fell asleep on my mother’s bed, dreaming about carrying supplies on my head through the jungle, the white hunter nowhere to be seen.
She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her shoes. “I found him. A party at Gracie Kelleher’s. We crossed paths by the diving board.” She lay down next to me, whispering in my ear. “He and a chubby redhead in a transparent blouse were having a little tête-à-tête. He got up and grabbed me by the arm.” She pushed up her sleeve and showed me the marks on her arm, angry, red.
“ ‘Are you following me?’ he hissed. I could have cut his throat right there. ‘I don’t have to follow you,’ I replied. ‘I can read your mind. I know every move you make. I know your future, Barry, and it doesn’t look good.’ ‘I want you to leave, he said. I smiled. ‘I’m sure you do.’ I could see his red flush even in the dark. ‘It’s not going to work,’ he said. ‘I’m warning you, Ingrid, it’s not going to work.’ ” My mother laughed, her arms twined behind her head. “He doesn’t understand. It’s already working.”
A SATURDAY AFTERNOON, hot and scented with fire, a parched sky. The time of year you couldn’t even go to the beach because of the toxic red tide, the time when the city dropped to its knees like ancient Sodom, praying for redemption. We sat in the car down the block from Barry’s house, under a carob tree. I hated the way she watched his house, her calm that was not even sane, like a patient hawk on top of a lightning-struck tree. But there was no point in trying to convince her to go home. She no longer spoke the language I did. I broke a carob pod under my nose and smelled the musky scent and pretended I was waiting for my father, a plumber inspecting some pipes in this small brick house with its dandelion-dotted lawn, its leaded picture window with a lamp in it.
Then Barry came out, wearing Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt that said Local Motion, funky little John Lennon sunglasses, his hair in its ponytail. He got in the old gold Lincoln and drove away. “Come on,” my mother said. She put on a pair of white cotton gloves, the kind the photo editor used when he handled stills, and threw me a pair. I didn’t want to go with her but didn’t want to be left in the car either, so I went.
We walked up the path to his house as if we belonged there, and my mother reached into the Balinese spirit house he kept on the porch and pulled out a key. Inside, I was seized again by the sadness of what had happened, the finality. Once I had thought I might even live there, with the big wayang kulit puppets, batik pillows, and dragon kites hanging from the ceiling. His statues of Shiva and Parvati in their eternal embrace hadn’t bothered me before, when I thought he and my mother would be like that, that it would last forever and engender a new universe. But now I hated them.
My mother turned on his computer at the great carved desk. The machine whirred. She typed something in and all the things on the screen disappeared. I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have. She took a horseshoe magnet from her purse and wiped it over all his floppy diskettes marked “backup.”
“I almost feel sorry for him,” she said as she turned the computer off. “But not quite.”
She took her X-acto knife and selected a shirt from his closet, his favorite brown shirt. “How right he should wear clothing the color of excrement.” She laid it on the bed and slashed it into fringe. Then she tucked a white oleander into a buttonhole.
SOMEONE WAS pounding on our door. She looked up from a new poem she was writing. She wrote all the time now. “Do you think he lost something valuable on that hard disk? Maybe a collection of essays due at the publisher this fall?” It frightened me, watching the door jump on its hinges. I thought of the marks on my mother’s arms. Barry wasn’t a brutal person, but everyone has a limit. If he got in, she was dead.
But my mother didn’t seem upset. In fact, the harder he pounded, the happier she looked, pink-cheeked, bright-eyed. She had brought him back to her. She got out the folding knife from her pencil can and unfolded it against her thigh. We could hear him screaming, crying, his velvet voice rubbed threadbare. “I’m going to kill you, Ingrid, so help me God.”
The pounding stopped. My mother listened, holding the knife open against the white silk of her robe. Suddenly he was on the other side of the apartment, pounding on the windows, we could see him, his face distorted with rage, huge and terrifying in the oleanders. I shrank back against the wall, but my mother just stood in the center of the room, gleaming, like a grassfire.
“I’m going to kill you!” he screamed.
“So helpless in his fury,” my mother said to me. “Impotent, one might say.”
He broke a windowpane. I could tell he hadn’t intended to because he hesitated, and then, in a sudden burst of courage, he thrust his arm through the window and fumbled for the latch. She crossed the room faster than I could have believed possible, lifted her arm and stabbed him in the hand. The knife struck home. She had to jerk it out, and his arm raced back through the hole in the window. “You bloody bitch!” he was screaming.
I wanted to hide, to stop up my ears, but I couldn’t stop watching. This was how love and passion ended. The lights were going on in the next building.
“My neighbors are calling the police,” she said out the broken window. “You better go.”
He stumbled away, and in a moment we heard him kick the front door. “You fucking cunt. You won’t get away with this. You can’t do this to me.”
She threw open the front door then, and stood there in her white kimono, his blood on her knife. “You don’t know what I can do,” she said softly.
AFTER THAT NIGHT, she couldn’t find him anymore, at the Virgins or Barney’s, at parties or club dates. He changed his locks. We had to use a metal pasteup ruler to open a window. This time she put a sprig of oleander in his milk, another in his oyster sauce, in his cottage cheese. She stuck one in his toothpaste. She made an arrangement of white oleanders in a hand-blown vase on his coffee table, and scattered blooms on his bed. I was torn. He deserved to be punished, but now she had crossed over some line. This wasn’t revenge. She’d had her revenge, she had won, but it was like she didn’t even know it. She was drifting outside the limit of all reason, where the next stop was light-years away through nothing but darkness. How lovingly she arranged the dark leaves, the white blooms.