White Oleander

In the dormitories of Reception, I hear murmured threats as they shake down a new girl. She's soft, a check kiter, she wasn 't prepared to be here. They take everything she has left to take. 'Pussy,' they say after they're through.

The rest of the prison sleeps fitfully, rocked in dreams made vivid by captivity. I know what they're dreaming. I read them like novels, it's better than Joyce. They're dreaming of men who beat them, a backhand, unsubtle kick to the groin. Men who clench their teeth before striking, they hiss, 'Look what you 're making me do. ' The women cringe even in sleep, under the stares of men's eyeballs roadmapped with veins, popped with rage, the whites the color of mayonnaise left out for a week. One wonders how they could even see to deliver their blows. But women 's fear is a magnet. I hope you don 't know this. It draws the fist, the hands of men, hard as God's.

Others are luckier. They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers' braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.

Some dream of crime, guns and money. Vials of dreams that disappeared like late snow. I am there. I see the face of a surprised ARCO attendant just at the moment it spreads into a collage of bright blood and bone.

I lie down in the cherished apartment, its white carpet, garbage disposal, dishwasher, security parking. I too cheat the old couple out of their savings and celebrate over a bottle of Mumm 's and Sevruga on toast. I carefully take a sliding glass door off the track of a two-story house in Mar Vista. I buy a fur coat at Saks with a stolen American Express credit card. It's the best Russian sable, golden as brandy.

Best are the freedom dreams. Steering wheels so real in the hand, the spring of the accelerator, gas tanks marked FULL. Wind through open windows, we don't use the air conditioner, we suck in the live air going by. We take the freeways, using the fast lanes, watch for signs saying San Francisco, New Orleans. We pass trucks on great interstates, truck drivers blowing their airhorns. We drink sodas at gas stations, eat burgers rare at roadside cafes, order extra everything. We listen to country music stations, we pick up Tijuana, Chicago, Atlanta, GA, and sleep in motels where the clerk never even looks up, just takes the money.

On Barneburg B, my cellmate Lydia Gunman dreams of walking on Whittier Blvd. in summertime, a rush of roughly cut drugs throbbing salsa down her thighs slick with ten-dollar nylons. She stuns the vatos with her slow haunch-dripping stride, her skirt impossibly tight. Her laughter tastes like burnt sunshine, cactus, and the worm.

But most of all, we dream of children. The touch of small hands, glmty rows of seed pearl teeth. We are always losing our children. In parking lots, in the market, on the bus. We turn and call. Shawanda, we call, Luz, Astrid. How could we lose you, we were being so careful. We only looked away for a moment. Arms full of packages, we stand alone on the sidewalk and someone has taken our children.

Mother.

They could lock her up, but they couldn't prevent the transformation of the world in her mind. This was what Claire never understood. The act by which my mother put her face on the world. There were crimes that were too subtle to be effectively prosecuted.

I sat up and the white cat flowed off me like milk. I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, threw it onto the crowded coffee table. She didn't fool me. I was the soft girl in Reception. She'd rob me of everything I had left to take. I would not be seduced by the music of her words. I could always tell the ragged truth from an elegant lie.

Nobody took me away, Mother. My hand never slipped from your grasp. That wasn't how it went down. I was more like a car you'd parked while drunk, then couldn't remember where you'd left it. You looked away for seventeen years and when you looked back, I was a woman you didn't recognize. So now I was supposed to feel pity for you and those other women who'd lost their own children during a holdup, a murder, a fiesta of greed? Save your poet's sympathy and find some better believer. Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good. Someday I'd read it all in a poem for the New Yorker.

Yes, I was tattooed, just as she'd said. Every inch of my skin was penetrated and stained. I was the original painted lady, a Japanese gangster, a walking art gallery. Hold me up to the light, read my bright wounds. If I had warned Barry I might have stopped her. But she had already claimed me. I wiped my tears, dried my hands on the white cat, and reached for another handful of glass to rub on my skin. Another letter full of agitated goings-on, dramas, and fantasies. I skimmed down the page.

Somewhere in Ad Seg, a woman is crying. She's been crying all night. I've been trying to find her, but at last, I realise, she's not here at all. It's you. Stop crying, Astrid. I forbid it. You have to be strong. I'm in your room, Astrid, do you feel •• me? You share it with a girl, I see her too, her lank hair, her thin arched eyebrows. She sleeps well, but not you. You sit up in bed with the yellow chenille spread — God, where did she find that thing, your new foster mother? My mother had one just like it.

I see you cradling your bare knees, forehead pressed against them. Crickets stroke their legs like pool players lining up shots. Stop crying, do you hear me? Who do you thinkyou are? What am I doing here, except to show you how a woman is stronger than that?

It's such a liability to love another person, but in here, it's like playing catch with grenades. The lifers tell me to forget you, do easy time. 'You can make a life here,' they say. 'Choose a mate, find new children.' Sometimes it's so awful, I think that they're right. I should forget you. Sometimes I wish you were dead, so I would know you were safe.

A woman in my unit gave her children heroin from the time they were small, so she'd always know where they were. They're all in jail, alive. She likes it that way. If I thought I'd be here forever, I would forget you. I'd have to. It sickens me to think of you out there, picking up wounds while I spin in this cellblock, impotent as a genie in a lamp. Astrid, stop crying, damn you!

I will get out, Astrid, I promise you that. I will win an appeal, I will walk through the walls, I will fly away like a white crow.

Mother.</I>

Yes, I was crying. These words like bombs she sealed up and had delivered, leaving me ragged and bloody weeks later. You imagine you can see me, Mother? All you could ever see was your own face in a mirror.

You always said I knew nothing, but that was the place to begin. I would never claim to know what women in prison dreamed about, or the rights of beauty, or what the night's magic held. If I thought for a second I did, I'd