"I'll be there," I said. Imagining the wedding party, not a soul over eighteen, each one planning a life along the course of the lyrics of popular songs. It made me sad to think of it.

"You'll get back together with your boyfriend," she said, as if to soften the blow. "Don't worry. He'll wait for you."

"Sure," I said. But I knew, nobody waited for anybody.

THE NEXT NIGHT, Yvonne packed a few clothes, her horse, and her radio, but she left the picture of the TV actor in his frame on the dresser. Rena gave her some money, rolled up in a rubber band. We all waited on the front porch with her until Benito came by in his primer-gray Cutlass. Then she was gone.

31

ON THE ANVIL OF AUGUST, the city lay paralyzed, stunned into stupidity by the heat. The sidewalks shrank under the sun. It was a landscape of total surrender. The air was chlorinated, thick and hostile, like the atmosphere of a dead planet. But in the front yard, the big oleander bloomed like a wedding bouquet, a sky full of pinwheel stars. It made me think of my mother.

There was still no call from Susan. Many times, I'd wanted to call her and demand a meeting. But I knew better. This was a chess game. First the urgency, then the waiting. I would not run down the street after her, begging. I would develop my pieces and secure my defenses.

I woke up very early now, to catch a few breaths of cool air before the heat set in. I stood on the porch and gazed at the giant oleander. It was old, it had a trunk like a tree. You just had to roast a marshmallow on one twig and you were dead. She'd boiled pounds of it to make the brew of Barry's death. I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn't they just be bitter? They weren't like rattlesnakes, they didn't even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn't want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn't a source of poison, but just another victim.

By eight it was already too hot to be outside. I went back inside to make Tasha's lunch. She was the new girl in Yvonne's bed, thirteen, going to King Junior High, D track, summer term. Grave, silent, she had a vertical scar on her upper lip just healing. She flinched if people moved too fast near her.

"You'll do great," I said, making her celery with peanut butter in the creases and a Granny Smith apple. "I'll be watching."

I drove her to school in Niki's truck, let her off in front of Thomas Starr King Junior High, watched her go in scared and small, her backpack hanging with key chains. I felt helpless to prevent her life from taking its likely direction. Could a person save another person? She turned to wave at me. I waved back. I didn't drive off until she was inside.

Dear Astrid,

It's been six years today. Six years since I walked through the gates of this peculiar finishing school. Like Dante: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. /Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura. / Che la diritta via era smarrita. The third day over 110. Yesterday an inmate slit another woman's throat with a bent can. Lydia tore up a poem I wrote about a man I saw once, a snake tattoo disappearing into his jeans. I made her tape it together again, but you can't imagine the strain. Aside from you, I think this is the longest relationship I've ever had. She's sure I love her, though it's nothing of the kind. She adores those poems of mine that refer to her, thinks it's a public declaration.

Love. I would ban the word from the vocabulary. Such imprecision. Love, which love, what love? Sentiment, fantasy, longing, lust? Obsession, devouring need? Perhaps the only love that is accurate without qualification is the love of a very young child. Afterward, she too becomes a person, and thus compromised. "Do you love me?" you asked in the dark of your narrow bed. "Do you love me Mommy?"

"Of course," I told you. "Now go to sleep."

Love is a bedtime story, a teddy bear, familiar, one eye missing.

"Do you love me, carita?" Lydia says, twisting my arm, forcing my face into the rough horsehair blanket, biting my neck. "Say it, you bitch."

Love is a toy, a token, a scented handkerchief.

"Tell me you love me," Barry said.

"I love you," I said. "I love you, I love you."

Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.

Lydia lies on her side on my bunk, the curve of her hip the crest of a wave in shallow water, turquoise, Playa del Carmen, Martinique. Leafing through a new Celebridades. I bought her a subscription. She says it makes her feel part of the world. I can't see getting excited about movies I won't see, political issues of the day fail to move me, they have nothing to say within the deep prison stillness.

Time has taken on an utterly different quality for me. What difference does a year make? In a perverse way, I pity the women who are still a part of time, trapped by it, how many months, how many days. I have been cut free, I move among centuries. Writers send me books —Joseph Brodsky, Marianne Moore, Pound. I think maybe I will study Chinese.

"You ever go to Guanajuato?" Lydia asks. "All the big stars going there now.

Guanajuato, Astrid. Do you remember? I know you do. We went with Alejandro the painter, as distinguished from Alejandro the poet. From San Miguel. My Spanish wasn't good enough to determine the quality of the poet's oeuvre, but Alejandro the painter was very bad indeed. He should not have created at all. He should have simply sat on a stool and charged one to look at him. And so shy, he could never look in my eyes until after he'd finished speaking. Instead, he'd talk to my hand, the arch of my foot, the curve of my calf. Only after he had stopped could he look into my eyes. He trembled when we made love, the faint smell of geraniums.

But he was never shy with you, was he? You had such long conversations — conspiring, head to head. I felt excluded. He was the one who taught you to draw. He would draw for you, and then you would draw after him. La mesa, la botilla, las mujeres. I tried to teach you poetry, but you were always so obstinate. Why would you never learn any thing from me?

I wish we'd never left Guanajuato.

Mother.

Alejandro the painter. Watching the line flow from his fingers, the movements of his arm. Was he a bad painter? It never occurred to me, as it never occurred to me that she could have felt excluded. She was beautiful there, she wore a white dress, and the buildings were ochre and yellow, her sandals crisscrossed like a Roman's up her leg. I traced the white X's when she took them off. The hotel with screens and scrollwork around the door, the rooms open to the tiled walkway. You could hear what everybody was saying. When she smoked a joint she had to blow it out the balcony doors. It was a strange room, ochre, taller than it was square. She liked it, said there was room to think. And the bands of mariachis competed in the street below, the sound of concerts every night, from our beds under the netting.