“A trade,” I said. “Do you want to sit here or under the trees?”
She turned and led me to her favorite place in the visitors yard, under the white-trunked ficus trees looking out at the road, her back to Reception, the farthest point from the first lookout tower. We sat on the dry, summer-battered grass, it scored my bare legs.
She sat gracefully, her legs to one side, like a girl in a meadow. I was larger than her now, but not as graceful, not beautiful, but present, solid as a hunk of marble before it’s been carved. I let her watch me in profile. I couldn’t look at her while I spoke. I was not hard enough, I knew I would be thrown by her bitter surprise.
“Here’s the deal,” I said. “There are certain things I want to know. You tell me, and I’ll do what you want me to do.”
My mother picked one of the dandelions out of the grass, blew the tufts from the head. “Or what.”
“Or I tell the truth and you can rot in here till you die,” I said.
I heard the grass rustle as she changed her position. When I looked, she was lying on her back, examining the stem from which the plumes had been blown. “Susan can discredit your testimony any number of ways.”
“You need me,” I said. “You know it. Whatever she says.”
“I hate this look, by the way,” she said. “You’re a Sunset Boulevard motel, a fifteen-dollar blow job in a parked car.”
“I can look however you want,” I said. “I’ll wear kneesocks if you like.” She was twirling the dandelion between her palms. “I’m the one who can tell them it was Barry’s paranoid fixation. That he hounded you. I can say he had threatened to commit suicide, fake it to look like you did it, to punish you for leaving him.” Her blurred features behind the chicken-wire glass. “I’m the one who knows how fucked up you were at Sybil Brand. When I came to see you that day, you didn’t even recognize me.” It still made me sick to think of it.
“If I submit to this examination.” She flicked the dandelion stem away.
“Yes.”
She kicked off her two-hole tennis shoes and ran her feet through the grass. She stretched her legs out in front of her and propped herself on her elbows, like she was at the beach. She gazed at her feet, tapping them together at the ball. “You used to have a certain delicacy about you. A transparency. You’ve become heavy, opaque.”
“Who was my father?” I asked.
“A man.” Watching her bare toes, clicking together.
“Klaus Anders, no middle name,” I said, picking at a scab on the web of my hand. “Painter. Age forty. Born, Copenhagen, Denmark. How did you meet?”
“In Venice Beach.” She was still watching her feet. “At one of those parties that last all summer long. He had the drugs.”
“You looked just like brother and sister,” I said.
“He was much older than I,” she said. She rolled over onto her belly. “He was forty, a painter of biomorphic abstractions. It was already passe by that time.” She parted the grass like short hair. “He was always passe. His ideas, his enthusiasms. Mediocre. I don’t know what I saw in him.”
“Don’t say you don’t know, that’s crap,” I said.
She sighed. I was making her tired. So what. “It was a long time ago, Astrid. Several lifetimes at least. I’m not the same person.”
“Liar,” I said. “You’re exactly the same.”
She was silent. I had never called her a name before.
“You’re still such a child, aren’t you,” she said. I could tell she was struggling for composure. Another person wouldn’t have been able to see it, but I could tell in the way the skin around her eyes seemed to grow thinner, her nose a millimeter more sharp. “You’ve taken my propaganda for truth.”
“So set me straight,” I said. “What was it you saw in him.”
“Comfort probably. He was easy. Very physical. He made friends easily. He called everybody ‘pal.’ ” She smiled slightly, still looking down at the grass she was parting, like going through a file. “Big and easy. He asked nothing of me.”
Yes, I believed that. A man who wanted something from her would never have been attractive. It had to be her desire, her fire. “Then what?”
She plucked a handful of grass, threw it away. “Do we have to do this? It’s such an old newsreel.”
“I want to see it,” I said.
“He painted, he got loaded more than he painted. He went to the beach. He was mediocre. There’s just not much to say. It’s not that he was going nowhere, it’s that he’d already arrived.”
“And then you got pregnant.”
She cut me a killing look. “I didn’t ‘get pregnant,’ I’ll leave that for your illiterate friends. I decided I would have you. ‘Decision’ being the operative word.” She let her hair down, shook the grass out of it. It was raw silk in the filtered light. “Whatever fantasy you might have spun for yourself, an accident you were not. A mistake, maybe, but not an accident.”
A woman’s mistakes . . . “Why him? Why then?”
“I needed someone, didn’t I? He was handsome, good-natured. He wasn’t averse to the idea. Voilà.”
“Did you love him?”
“I don’t want to talk about love, that semantic rat’s nest.” She unbent her long, slim legs and stood, brushing her skirt off. She leaned against the tree trunk, one foot up on the white flesh, crossed her arms to steady herself. “We had a rather heated sexual relationship. One overlooks many things.” Over her head, a woman had scratched Mona ’76 in the white wood.
I looked up at her, my mother, this woman I had known and never really knew, this woman always on the verge of disappearance. I would not let her get away from me now. “You worshipped him. I read it in your journal.”
“ ‘Worship’ is not quite the word we’re looking for here,” she said, watching the road. “Worship assumes a spiritual dimension. I’m looking for a term with an earthier connotation.”
“Then I was born.”
“Then you were born.”
I imagined him and her, the blonds, him with that wide laughing mouth, probably stoned out of his mind, her, comfortable, in the curve of his heavy arm. “Did he love me?”
She laughed, the commas of irony framing her mouth. “He was rather a child himself, I’m afraid. He loved you the way a boy loves a pet turtle, or a road race set. He could take you to the beach and play with you for hours, lifting you up and down in the surf. Or he could stick you in the playpen and leave the house to go out drinking with his friends, when he was supposed to be baby-sitting. One day I came home and there had been a fire. His turpentine-soaked rags and brushes had caught fire, the house went up in about five minutes. He was nowhere around. Evidently your crib sheet had already scorched. It was a miracle you weren’t burned alive. A neighbor heard you screaming.”
I tried to remember, the playpen, the fire. I could distinctly remember the smell of turpentine, a smell I’d always loved. But the smell of fire, that pervasive odor of danger, I’d always associated with my mother.
“That was the end of our idyll de Venice Beach. I was tired of his mediocrity, his excuses. I was making what little money we had, he was living off me, we had no home anymore. I told him it was over. He was ready, believe me, there were no tears on that score. And so ends the saga of Ingrid and Klaus.”
But all I could think of was the big man lifting me in and out of the surf. I could almost remember it. The feeling of the waves on my feet, bubbling like laughter. The smell of the sea, and the roar. “Did he ever try to see me, as I grew up?”
“Why do you want to know all this useless history?” she snapped, pushing away from the tree. She squatted so she could look me in the eye. Sweat beaded her forehead. “It’s just going to hurt you, Astrid. I wanted to protect you from all this. For twelve years, I stood between you and these senseless artifacts of someone else’s past.”