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.
The brown one showed his teeth. The big husky barked. I didn't know if I should keep walking or back slowly away.