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
feel me?
the human condition
Stop
plotting murder
penitence
Cultivate it
you
forbid
appeal
rage
impotent
it's too
important
I
cringe
fuck
you
insane
person
dissonant and querulous
my
gas tanks marked FULL
I glued them to sheets of paper. I give them back to you. Your own little slaves. Oh my God, they're in revolt. It's Spartacus, Rome is burning. Now sack it, Mother. Take what you can before it all burns to ash.
27
THE CRYSTALLINE DAYS of March, that rarest of seasons, came like a benediction, regal and scented with cedar and pine. Needle-cold winds rinsed every impurity from the air, so clear you could see the mountain ranges all the way to Riverside, crisp and denned as a paint-by-the-numbers kit, windclouds pluming off their powdered flanks like a PBS show about Everest. The news said snowline was down to four thousand feet. These were ultramarine days, trimmed in ermine, and the nights showed all their ten thousand stars, gleaming overhead like a proof, a calculus woven on the warp and weft of certain fundamental truths.
How clear it was without my mother behind my eyes. I was reborn, a Siamese twin who had finally been separated from its hated, cumbersome double. I woke early, expectant as a small child, to a world washed clean of my mother's poisonous fog, her milky miasmas. This sparkling blue, this March, would be my metaphor, my insignia, like Mary's robe, blue edged with ermine, midnight with diamonds. Who would I be now that I had taken myself back, to be Astrid Magnussen, finally, alone.
Dear Astrid,
Bravo! Though your letter as poetry leaves something to be desired, at least it indicates a spark, a capacity for fire which I never would have believed you possessed. But really, you cannot think you will cut yourself free of me so easily. Hive in you, in your bones, the delicate coils of your mind. I made you. I formed the thoughts you find, the moods you carry. Your blood whispers my name. Even in rebellion, you are mine.