MY MOTHER WROTE that she had poems in Kenyan Review and in the all-poetry issue of Zyzyva. I asked Claire if we could get them, and she took me up to Book Soup on the Strip, bought them both for me. There was a long poem about running in prison, that was a big part of her day. When she wasn't writing she was running the track, fifty, a hundred miles a week. She wore out her shoes every four months, and sometimes they'd give her new ones and sometimes they wouldn't. I had an idea.
I Xeroxed ten copies of the poem, and used them as the background for drawings. I sat at the table in the red-and-white kitchen and drew in oil pastel on top of her words, the feeling of running, of senseless, circular activity. Like her mind.
The rains had begun, they whispered outside the steamed kitchen window. Claire sat next to me with a cup of mint tea. 'Tell me about her.'
There was something that kept me from talking much about my mother to Claire. She was curious, like everyone else, my counselors at school, Ray, Joan Peeler, the editors of small literary journals. Poets in prison, the sheer paradox. I didn't know what to say. She murdered a man. She was my mother. I didn't know if I was like her or not. Mostly, I didn't want to talk about her. I wanted Claire to be something separate from my mother, I wanted them to be on different pages, and only I could hold them up to the light together.
Claire read the running poem again. 'I love this line, the back stretch, twenty years. A clock without hands. Life in prison, it's unimaginable. Three years gone, the beaten dirt around. She must be so brave. How can she stand it?'
'She's never where she is,' I said. 'She's only inside her head.'
'That must be wonderful.' Claire stroked the side of the mug like the cheek of a child. 'I wish I could do that.'
I was glad she couldn't. Things touched Claire. Maybe too much, but at least they touched her. She couldn't twist things around in her mind, make the ends come out right. I looked at my mother's poem in Kenyan. So interesting that she was always the heroine, the outlaw, one against the rest. Never the villain.
'It's the difference between a true artist and everybody else.' Claire sighed. 'They can remake the world.'
'You're an artist,' I said.
'An actress,' she said. 'Not even that.'
I'd seen a couple of Claire's movies now. She was transparent, heartbreaking. I would be afraid to be so vulnerable. I'd spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I wouldn't drip with blood every time I brushed up against something. She was naked, she peeled herself daily. In one film, she played a professor's wife, trembling, in pearls. In another, an eighteenth-century woman, a cast-off lover, in a convent. 'You're a terrific actress,' I said.
Claire shrugged, read the other poem, about a fight in prison. 'I like your mother's violence. Her strength. How I admire that.'
I dipped a small sumi brush into a bottle of ink, and in a few strokes I inked in arcs and lines, a black spot. Her violence. Claire, what did you know about violence? My mother's strength? Well, she wasn't strong enough to avoid being the background of my art. Just the background. Her words just my canvas.
ONE SLUGGISHLY warm and hazy day, as I came home from school, Claire met me at the rose arch. 'I got a part!' she called out before I was even through it.
She threw her head back and bared her throat to the weak winter sun, laughter bursting upward like a geyser. Hugging me, kissing me. She tried calling Ron in Russia, in the Urals, where he was covering a research convention for telekinetics. She couldn't reach him. Even that didn't take the sparkle from the air. She opened a bottle of Tattinger champagne, kept cold in the refrigerator for a special occasion. It came flooding out all over the glasses and the table, foaming down to the floor. We toasted the new job.
It wasn't a big part, but it was tricky. She played a character's elegant but drunken wife at a dinner party, in a long gown and diamonds. A lot of drinking and eating, she had to remember when to do what, so it would all cut together. 'Always somebody's lonely wife,' she sighed. 'What is this, typecasting?'
She got the part because the director was a friend of Ron's, and the actress who was supposed to play the lonely wife, the director's ex-wife's sister, broke her collarbone at the last minute and they needed someone about the same height and coloring who could wear the strapless dress.
'At least I'm talking to the protagonist,' she explained. 'They can't cut the scene.'
It was a small role, just five lines, a woman who shows up dead two scenes later. I helped her rehearse it, playing the hero. The hard part, she explained, was that she had to eat and drink during the scene, while she was talking. She had it down after the second try, but insisted on doing it over and over again. She was very particular to remember which word she paused and drank the wine on, exactly when she raised her fork, with which hand and how high. 'Eating scenes are the worst,' she explained. 'Everything has to match.' We rehearsed the part for a week. She was so serious about five lines. I didn't realize actors were so perfectionistic. I'd always thought they just went on and did it.
ON THE DAY of the shoot, she had a six A.M. makeup call. She told me not to get up, but I got up anyway. I sat with her as she made herself a smoothie, added protein powder, spirulina, brewer's yeast, vitamin E and C. She was very pale, and silent. Concentrating. She did a breathing exercise called Breathing Monkeys, singing Chinese syllables on both the exhale and the inhale. The exhaled tones were low and resonant, but the inhaled ones were weird, high and wailing. It was called chi gong, she said it kept her calm.
I gave her a quick hug as she was leaving. She'd taught me never to say 'good luck.' 'Break a leg' was what you said to actors. 'Break a leg!' I called after her, and cringed to see her trip on a sprinkler head.
I raced home after school, eager to hear how the shoot had gone, and especially to hear about Harold McCann — the English star playing Guy — but she wasn't back yet. I did all my homework, even read ahead in English and history. By six it was dark, and not a call, not a clue. I hoped she hadn't gotten into an accident, she was so nervous this morning. But she probably went out for a drink with the other actors afterward, or dinner or something. Still, it wasn't like her not to call. She called if she was so much as running late at the market.
I fixed dinner, meat loaf and corn bread, a salad, and kept thinking, by the time it was ready she 'd be home. At twenty after eight, I heard her car in the driveway. I met her at the door. 'I made dinner,' I said.
Her eye makeup in circles around her eyes. She ran past me, made for the bathroom. I heard her throwing
