windows, sucked a peppermint forcarsickness, nestled into my thick Irish sweater. Gradually, the suburbs thinned out, replaced by lumberyards and fields, the smell of manure, and long, fog-clad views framed by lines of windbreak eucalyptus. CYA, the men's prison. It had been more than two years since I'd last come this way, a very different girl in pink shoes. I even recognized the little market. Coke, 12 pack, $2.49. 'Turn here.'
We drove back along the same blacktop road to the CIW, the steam stack and the water tower, the guard tower that marked the edge of the prison. We parked in the visitors lot.
Claire took a deep breath. 'This doesn't look so bad.'
The crows cawed aggressively in the ficus trees. It was freezing cold. I pulled my sweater down over my hands. We passed through the guard tower. Claire brought a book for my mother, Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald, Claire's favorite, but the guards wouldn't let her bring it in. My boots set off the metal detector. I had to take them off for the guards to search. The jangle of keys, the slam of the gate, walkie-talkies, these were the sounds of visiting my mother.
We sat at a picnic table under the blue overhang. I watched the gate where my mother would come in, but Claire was looking the wrong way, toward Reception, where the new prisoners milled around or pushed brooms — they volunteered to sweep, they were so bored. Most were young, one or two over twenty-five. Their dead-looking faces wished us nothing good.
Claire shivered. She was trying to be brave. 'Why are they staring at us like that?'
I opened my hand, examined the lines in the palm, my fate. Life would be hard. 'Don't look at them.'
It was cold, but now I was sweating, waiting for my mother. Who knew, maybe they would become friends. Maybe my mother wasn't playing a game, or not too ugly a one. Claire could keep her in postage, and she would be a nice character witness someday.
I saw my mother, waiting while the CO opened the gate. Her hair was long again, forming a pale scarf across the front of her blue dress, down one breast. She hesitated, she was as nervous as I was. So beautiful. She always surprised me with her beauty.
Even when she had just been away for a night, I'd see her and catch my breath. She was thinner than the last time I'd seen her, all the excess flesh had been burned away. Her eyes had become even brighter, I could feel them from the gate. She was very upright, muscular, and tan. She looked less like a Lorelei now, more like an assassin from Blade Runner. She strode up, smiling, but I felt the uncertainty in her hands, stiff on my shoulders. We looked into each other's eyes, and I was astonished to find that we were the same height. Her eyes were searching within me, trying to find something to recognize. They made me suddenly shy, embarrassed of my fancy clothes, even of Claire. I was ashamed of the idea that I could escape her, even of wanting to. Now she knew me. She hugged me, and held her hand out to Claire. 'Welcome to Valhalla,' she said, shaking Claire's hand. I tried to imagine how my mother must be feeling right then, meeting the woman I'd been living with, a woman I liked so much I hadn't written anything about her. Now my mother could see how beautiful she was, how sensitive, the child's mouth, the heart-shaped face, the delicacy of her neck, her freshly cut hair. Claire smiled with relief that my mother had made the first move. She didn't understand the nature of poisons.
My mother sat down next to me, put her hand over mine, but it wasn't so large anymore. Our hands were growing into the same shape. She saw that too, held her palm to mine. She looked older than the last time I saw her, lines etching into her tanned face, around the eyes and thin mouth. Or maybe it was just in comparison to Claire. She was spare, dense, sharp, steel to Claire's wax. I prayed to a God I didn't believe in to please let this be over soon.
'It's not at all what I thought,' Claire said. 'It doesn't really exist,' my mother said, waving her hand in an elegant gesture. 'It's an illusion.'
'You said that in your poem.' A new poem, in Iowa Review.
About a woman turning into a bird, the pain of the new feathers coming in. 'It was exquisite.'
I winced at her old-fashioned, actressy diction. I could imagine my mother mocking her later to her cellblock sisters. But I couldn't protect Claire now. It was too late. I saw that the perennial hint of irony in the corners of my mother's lips had now been etched into a permanent line, the tattoo of a gesture.
My mother crossed her legs, tanned and muscular as carved oak, bare under her blue dress, white sneakers. 'My daughter says you're an actress.' She wore no sweater in the cold grayness of the morning. The fog suited her, I smelled the sea on her, although we were a hundred miles from any ocean.
Claire twisted her wedding ring, it was loose on her thin ringers. 'To tell you the truth, my career's a disaster. I botched my last job so badly, I'll probably never work again.'
Why did she always have to tell the truth? I should have told her, certain people should always be lied to.
My mother instinctively felt for the crack in Claire's personal history, like a rock climber in fog sensing fingerholds in a cliff face. 'Nerves?' she said kindly.
Claire leaned closer to my mother, eager to share confidences. 'It was a nightmare,' she said, and began to describe the awful day. Overhead the clouds roiled and clotted, like dysentery, and I felt sick. Claire was afraid of so many things, she only went thigh-deep into the ocean because she was afraid of being swept under. So why couldn't she feel the undertow? My mother's smile, so kind-looking. There's a riptide here, Claire. Lifeguards have had to rescue stronger swimmers than you. 'They treat actors so badly,' my mother said. 'I've had it.' Claire slid her garnet heart pendant along its chain, tucked it under her lip. 'No more. Dragging myself to auditions, just to have them look at me for two seconds and decide I'm too ethnic for orange juice, too classic for TV moms.'
My mother's profile sharp against the chinchilla sky. You could have drawn a straight line using the edge of her nose. 'What are you, all of thirty?'
'Thirty-five next month.' The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. She would be the witness from hell. She couldn't resist the urge to lie down and bare her breast to the lance. 'That's why Astrid and I get along. Scorpio and Pisces understand one another.' She winked at me across the table.
My mother didn't like that we understood each other, Claire and 1.1 could tell by the way she was pulling my hair. The crows cawed and flapped their dull, glossy wings. But she smiled at Claire. 'Astrid and I never understood each other. Aquarius and Scorpio. She's so secretive, haven't you found that? I never knew what she was thinking.'
'I wasn't thinking anything,' I said.
'She opens up,' Claire said cheerfully. 'We talk all the time. I had her chart done. It's very well balanced. Her
