'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. Voila.'
'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.' 'My past,' I said.
'My God, you were a baby,' she said, standing up again, smoothing the line of her denim dress over her hips. 'Don't project.'
'Did he?'
'No. Does that make you feel any better?' She walked to the fence, to look out at the road, the dirt and trash blowing in the wind, trash stuck in the weeds on the other side of the road. 'Maybe once or twice, he came by to see if you were all right. But I let him know in no uncertain terms that his presence was no longer appreciated. And that was that.'
I thought of him, his sheepish face, the long blond hair. He hadn't meant to hurt me. She could have given him another chance. 'You never thought maybe I'd like a father.'
'In ancient times there were no fathers. Women copulated with men in the fields, and their babies came nine months later. Fatherhood is a sentimental myth, like Valentine's Day.' She turned back to me, her aquamarine eyes pale behind her tanned face, like a crime in a lit room behind curtains. 'Have I answered enough, or is there more?'
