Her eyes were strange, circled dark like bruises, and her hair was greasy and lank. She lay on her bed, or stared at herself in the mirror. 'How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?'
She didn't go back to work. She wouldn't leave the darkened apartment except to go down to the pool, where she sat for hours watching the reflections in the shimmering blue, or swam silently underwater like a fish in an aquarium. It was time for me to go back to school. But I couldn't leave her alone, not when she was like this. She might not be there when I returned. So we stayed in, eating all the canned food in the apartment, then we were eating rice and oatmeal.
'What do I do?' I asked Michael as he fed me cheese and sardines at his battered coffee table. The TV news showed fires burning on the Angeles Crest.
Michael shook his head, at me, at the line of firemen straddling the hillside. 'Honey, this is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.'
I vowed I would never fall in love. I hoped Barry died a slow lingering death for what he was doing to my mother.
A RED MOON rose over downtown, red from the fires burning to the north and out in Malibu. It was the season of fire, and we were trapped in the heart of the burning landscape. Ashes floated in the pool. We sat on the roof in the burnt wind.
'This ragged heart,' she said, pulling at her kimono. 'I should rip it out and bury it for compost.'
I wished I could touch her, but she was inside her own isolation booth, like on Miss America. She couldn't hear me through the glass.
She doubled over, pressing her forearms against her chest, pressing the air out of herself. 'I press it within my body,' she said. 'As the earth presses a lump of prehistoric dung in heat and crushing weight deep under the ground. I hate him. Hate. I hate him.' She whispered this last, but ferociously. 'A jewel is forming inside my body. No, it's not my heart. This is harder, cold and clean. I wrap myself around this new jewel, cradle it within me.'
The next morning she got up. She took a shower, went to the market. And I thought things were going to be better now. She called Marlene and asked if she could come back to work. It was shipping week and they needed her desperately. She dropped me at school, to start the eighth grade at Le Conte Junior High. As if nothing had ever happened. And I thought it was over.
It was not over. She began to follow Barry, as he had followed her in the beginning. She went everywhere he might be, hunting him so that she could polish her hatred on the sight of him.
'My hatred gives me strength,' she said.
She took Marlene to lunch at his favorite restaurant, where they found him eating at the bar, and she smiled at him. He pretended he didn't notice her, but he kept touching his face along the jaw. 'Searching for acne that was no longer there,' she told me that night. 'The force of my gaze threatened to call it back into being.'
She seemed so happy, and I didn't know which was worse, this or before, when she wanted to shave her head.
We shopped at his market, driving miles out of our way to meet him over the cantaloupes. We browsed at his favorite music store. We went to book signings for books written by his friends.
SHE CAME HOME one night after three. It was a school night but I'd stayed up watching a white hunter movie starring Stewart Granger on cable. Michael was passed out on the couch. The hot winds tested the windows like burglars looking for a way in. Finally I went home and fell asleep on my mother's bed, dreaming about carrying supplies on my head through the jungle, the white hunter nowhere to be seen.
She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her shoes. 'I found him. A party at Gracie Kelleher's. We crossed paths by the diving board.' She lay down next to me, whispering in my ear. 'He and a chubby redhead in a transparent blouse were having a little tete-a-tete. He got up and grabbed me by the arm.' She pushed up her sleeve and showed me the marks on her arm, angry, red.
''Are you following me?' he hissed. I could have cut his throat right there. 'I don't have to follow you,' I replied. 'I can read your mind. I know every move you make. I know your future, Barry, and it doesn't look good.' 'I want you to leave,1 he said. I smiled. 'I'm sure you do.' I could see his red flush even in the dark. 'It's not going to work,' he said. 'I'm warning you, Ingrid, it's not going to work.'' My mother laughed, her arms twined behind her head. 'He doesn't understand. It's already working.'
A SATURDAY AFTERNOON, hot and scented with fire, a parched sky. The time of year you couldn't even go to the beach because
of the toxic red tide, the time when the city dropped to its knees like ancient Sodom, praying for redemption. We sat in the car down the block from Barry's house, under a carob tree. I hated the way she watched his house, her calm that was not even sane, like a patient hawk on top of a lightning-struck tree. But there was no point in trying to convince her to go home. She no longer spoke the language I did. I broke a carob pod under my nose and smelled the musky scent and pretended I was waiting for my father, a plumber inspecting some pipes in this small brick house with its dandelion-dotted lawn, its leaded picture window with a lamp in it.
Then Barry came out, wearing Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt that said Local Motion, funky little John Lennon sunglasses, his hair in its ponytail. He got in the old gold Lincoln and drove away. 'Come on,' my mother said. She put on a pair of white cotton gloves, the kind the photo editor used when he handled stills, and threw me a pair. I didn't want to go with her but didn't want to be left in the car either, so I went.
We walked up the path to his house as if we belonged there, and my mother reached into the Balinese spirit house he kept on the porch and pulled out a key. Inside, I was seized again by the sadness of what had happened, the finality. Once I had thought I might even live there, with the big wayang kulit puppets, batik pillows, and dragon kites hanging from the ceiling. His statues of Shiva and Parvati in their eternal embrace hadn't bothered me before, when I thought he and my mother would be like that, that it would last forever and engender a new universe. But now I hated them.
My mother turned on his computer at the great carved desk. The machine whirred. She typed something in and all the things on the screen disappeared. I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have. She took a horseshoe magnet from her purse and wiped it over all his floppy diskettes marked 'backup.'
'I almost feel sorry for him,' she said as she turned the computer off. 'But not quite.'
