White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  “Snow again,” he said along with Garbo, tilting his face up like hers. “Eternal snow.” He handed me a bowl of sunflower seeds. “I am Garbo.”

  I cracked seeds in my teeth and flicked off the rubber sandals I’d been wearing since April. I couldn’t tell my mother I’d outgrown my shoes again. I didn’t want to remind her that I was the reason she was trapped in electric bills and kid’s shoes grown too small, the reason she was clawing at the windows like Michael’s dying tomatoes. She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress.

  “What are you reading these days?” I asked Michael. He was an actor, but he didn’t work that much, and he wouldn’t do TV, so he made most of his money reading for Books on Tape. He had to do it under a pseudonym, Wolfram Malevich, because it was nonunion. We could hear him every morning, very early, through the wall. He knew German and Russian from the army, he’d been in army intelligence — an oxymoron, he always said — so they put him on German and Russian authors.

  “Chekhov short stories.” He leaned forward and handed me the book from the coffee table. It was full of notes and Post-its and underlines.

  I leafed through the book. “My mother hates Chekhov. She says anybody who ever read him knows why there had to be a revolution.”

  “Your mother.” Michael smiled. “Actually, you might really like him. There’s a lovely melancholy in Chekhov.” We both turned to the TV to catch the best line in Queen Christina, saying along with Garbo, “The snow is like a white sea, one could go out and be lost in it... and forget the world.”

  I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple. My deepest fear was that someday she would find her way back there and never return. It was why I always waited up when she went out on nights like this, no matter how late she came home. I had to hear her key in the lock, smell her violet perfume again.

  And I tried not to make it worse by asking for things, pulling her down with my thoughts. I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn’t they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren’t chains ashamed of their prisoners?

  But how I envied the way their mothers sat on their beds and asked what they were thinking. My mother was not in the least bit curious about me. I often wondered what she thought I was, a dog she could tie in front of the store, a parrot on her shoulder?

  I never told her that I wished I had a father, that I wanted to go to camp in summertime, that sometimes she scared me. I was afraid she would fly away, and I would end up alone, living in some place where there were too many children, too many smells, where beauty and silence and the intoxication of her words rising in air would be as far away as Saturn.

  Out the window, the glow of the Hollywood sign was slightly blurred with June fog, a soft wetness on the hills raising the smell of sage and chamise, moisture wiping the glass with dreams.

  SHE CAME HOME at two when the bars closed, alone, her restlessness satisfied for the moment. I sat on her bed, watched her change clothes, adoring each gesture. Someday I would do this, the way she crossed her arms and pulled her dress over her head, kicked off her high heels. I put them on, admiring them on my feet. They were almost the right size. In another year or so, they would fit. She sat down next to me, handed me her brush, and I brushed her pale hair smooth, painting the air with her violets. “I saw the goat man again,” she said.

  “What goat man?”

  “From the wine garden, remember? The grinning Pan, cloven hooves peeping out from under his pants?”

  I could see the two of us in the round mirror on the wall, our long hair down, our blue eyes. Norsewomen. When I saw us like this, I could almost remember fishing in cold deep seas, the smell of cod, the charcoal of our fires, our felt boots and our strange alphabet, runes like sticks, a language like the ploughing of fields.

  “He stared at me the entire time,” she said. “Barry Kolker. Marlene says he’s a writer of personal essays.” Her fine lips turned into long commas of disapproval. “He was with that actress from The Cactus Garden, Jill Lewis.”

  Her white hair, like unbleached silk, flowed through the boar bristle brush.

  “With that fat goat of a man. Can you imagine?” I knew she couldn’t. Beauty was my mother’s law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren’t, you just didn’t exist. She had drummed it into my head since I was small. Although I had noticed by now that reality didn’t always conform to my mother’s ideas.

  “Maybe she likes him,” I said.

  “She must be insane,” my mother said, taking the brush away from me and brushing my hair now, bearing down on the scalp hard. “She could have any man she wanted. What could she possibly be thinking?”

  SHE SAW HIM again at her favorite artists’ bar downtown with no sign by the tracks. She saw him at a party in Silverlake. Wherever she went, she complained, there he was, the goat man.

  I thought it was only coincidence, but one night at a performance space in Santa Monica where we went to watch one of her friends beating on Sparkletts bottles and ranting about the drought, I saw him too, four rows back. He spent the whole time trying to catch her eye. He waved at me and I waved back, low, so she wouldn’t see.

  After it was over, I wanted to talk to him, but she dragged me out fast. “Don’t encourage him,” she hissed.

  When he turned up at the annual publication party for Cinema Scene, I had to agree that he was following her. It was outside in the courtyard of an old hotel on the Strip. The heat of the day was beginning to dissipate. The women wore bare dresses, my mother like a moth in white silk. I threaded my way through the crowd to the hors d’oeuvres table, quickly loaded my purse with things I thought could stand a few hours unrefrigerated — crab claws and asparagus spears, liver in bacon — and there was Barry, piling a plate with shrimp. He saw me, and his eyes immediately swept the crowd for my mother. She was behind me, drinking white wine, gossiping with Miles, the photo editor, a gaunt, stubble-chinned Englishman whose fingers were stained with nicotine. She hadn’t seen Barry yet. He started through the crowd toward her. I was close behind him.

  “Ingrid,” Barry said, penetrating her circle of two. “I’ve been looking for you.” He smiled. Her eyes flicked cruelly over his mustard-colored tie hanging to one side, his brown shirt pulling at the buttons over his stomach, his uneven teeth, the shrimp in his chubby fist. I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn’t seem to feel the chill.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said, coming even closer.

  “I’d rather you wouldn’t,” she said.

  “You’ll change your mind about me,” he said. He put his finger alongside his nose, winked at me, and walked on to another group of people, put his arm around a pretty girl, kissed her neck. My mother turned away. That kiss went against everything she believed. In her universe, it simply would never happen.

  “You know Barry?” Miles asked.

  “Who?” my mother said.

  That night, she couldn’t sleep. We went down to the apartment pool and swam slow quiet laps under the local stars, the Crab Claw, the Giant Shrimp.

  MY MOTHER bent over her drafting table, cutting type without a ruler in long elegant strokes. “This is Zen,” she said. “No flaw, no moment’s hesitation. A window onto grace.” She looked genuinely happy. It sometimes happened when she was pasting up just right, she forgot where she was, why she was there, where she ’d been and would rather be, forgot about everything but the gift of cutting a perfectly straight freehand line, a pleasure as pure as when she ’d just written a beautiful phrase.

  But then I saw what she didn’t see, the goat man enter the production room.
I didn’t want to be the one to ruin her moment of grace, so I kept making my Chinese tree out of benday dots and wrong-sized photo stills from Salaam Bombay! When I glanced up, he caught my eye and put his finger to his lips, crept up behind her and tapped her shoulder. Her knife went slicing through the type. She whirled around and I thought she was going to cut him, but he showed her something that stopped her, a small envelope he put on her table.

  “For you and your daughter,” he said.

  She opened it, removed two tickets, blue-and-white. Her silence as she examined them astonished me. She stared at them, then him, jabbing the sharp end of her X-acto into the rubbery surface of the desk, a dart that stuck there for a moment before she pulled it out.

  “Just the concert,” she said. “No dinner, no dancing.”

  “Agreed,” he said, but I could see he really didn’t believe her. He didn’t know her yet.

  It was a gamelan concert at the art museum. Now I knew why she accepted. I only wondered how he knew exactly the right thing to propose, the one thing she would never turn down. Had he hidden in the oleanders outside our apartment? Interviewed her friends? Bribed somebody?

  THE NIGHT crackled as my mother and I waited for him in the forecourt of the museum. Everything had turned to static electricity in the heat. I combed my hair to watch the sparks fly from the ends.

  Forced to wait, my mother made small, jerky movements with her arms, her hands. “Late. How despicable. I should have known. He ’s probably off rutting in some field with the other goats. Remind me never to make plans with quadrupeds.”

  She still had on her work clothes, though she’d had time to change. It was a sign, to indicate to him that it wasn’t a real date, that it meant nothing. All around us, women in bright summer silks and a shifting bouquet of expensive perfumes eyed her critically. Men admired her, smiled, stared. She stared back, blue eyes burning, until they grew awkward and turned away.

  “Men,” she said. “No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.”

  I saw Barry across the plaza, his bulk jolting on his short legs. He grinned, flashing the gap between his teeth. “Sorry, but traffic was murder.”

  My mother turned away from the apology. Only peons made excuses for themselves, she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.

  THE GAMELAN orchestra was twenty small slim men kneeling before elaborately carved sets of chimes and gongs and drums. The drum began, joined by one of the lower sets of chimes. Then more entered the growing mass of sound. Rhythms began to emerge, expand, complex as lianas. My mother said the gamelan created in the listener a brain wave beyond all alphas and betas and thetas, a brain wave that paralyzed the normal channels of thought and forced new ones to grow outside them, in the untouched regions of the mind, like parallel blood vessels that form to accommodate a damaged heart.

  I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids. They took me away, spoke to me in languages that had no words for strange mothers with ice-blue eyes and apartments with ugly sparkles on the front and dead leaves in the pool.

  Afterward, the audience folded its plush velvet chairs and pressed to the exits, but my mother didn’t move. She sat in her chair, her eyes closed. She liked to be the last one to leave. She despised crowds, and their opinions as they left a performance, or worse, discussed the wait for the bathroom or where do you want to eat? It spoiled her mood. She was still in that other world, she would stay there as long as she possibly could, the parallel channels twining and tunneling through her cortex like coral.

  “It’s over,” Barry said.

  She raised her hand for him to be quiet. He looked at me and I shrugged. I was used to it. We waited until the last sound had faded from the auditorium. Finally she opened her eyes.

  “So, you want to grab a bite to eat?” he asked her.

  “I never eat,” she said.

  I was hungry, but once my mother took a position, she never wavered from it. We went home, where I ate tuna out of a can while she wrote a poem using the rhythms of the gamelan, about shadow puppets and the gods of chance.

  2

  THE SUMMER I was twelve, I liked to wander in the complex where the movie magazine had its offices. It was called Crossroads of the World, a 1920s courtyard with a streamline-moderne ocean liner in the middle occupied by an ad agency. I sat on a stone bench and imagined Fred Astaire leaning on the liner’s brass rail, wearing a yachting cap and blue blazer.

  Along the outside ring of the brick-paved courtyard, fantasy bungalows built in styles from Brothers Grimm to Don Quixote were rented by photo studios, casting agents, typesetting shops. I sketched a laughing Carmen lounging under the hanging basket of red geraniums in the Sevillian doorway of the modeling agency, and a demure braided Gretel sweeping the Germanic steps of the photo studio with a twig broom.

  While I drew, I watched the tall beautiful girls coming in and out of these doors, passing from the agency to the studio and back, where they bled a bit more of their hard-earned money from waitressing and temp jobs to further their careers. It was a scam, my mother said, and I wanted to tell them so, but their beauty seemed a charm. What ill could befall girls like that, long-legged in their hip-hugger pants and diaphanous summer dresses, with their clear eyes and sculpted faces? The heat of the day never touched them, they were living in another climate.

  At eleven or so one morning, my mother appeared in the tiled doorway of the Cinema Scene staircase and I closed my notebook, figuring she was taking an early lunch. But we didn’t go to the car. Instead, I followed her around the corner, and there, leaning on an old gold Lincoln with suicide doors, stood Barry Kolker. He was wearing a bright plaid jacket.

  My mother took one look at him and closed her eyes. “That jacket is so ugly I can’t even look at you. Did you steal it from a dead man?”

  Barry grinned, opening the doors for me and my mother. “Haven’t you ever been to the races? You’ve got to wear something loud. It’s traditional.”

  “You look like a couch in an old-age home,” she said as we got in. “Thank God no one I know will see me with you.”

  We were going on a date with Barry. I was astonished. I was sure the gamelan concert would be the last we’d ever see him. And now he was holding open the back door of the Lincoln for me. I’d never been to the racetrack. It wasn’t the kind of place my mother would think of taking me — outdoors, horses, nobody reading a book or thinking about Beauty and Fate.

  “I normally wouldn’t do this,” my mother said, settling herself in the front seat, putting on her seat belt. “But the idea of the stolen hour is just too delicious.”

  “You’ll love it.” Barry climbed behind the wheel. “It’s way too nice a day to be stuck in that sweatshop.”

  “Always,” my mother said.

  We picked up the freeway on Cahuenga, drove north out of Hollywood into the Valley, then east toward Pasadena. The heat lay on the city like a lid.

  Santa Anita sat at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, a sheer blue granite wall like a tidal wave. Bright banks of flowers and perfect green lawns breathed out a heavy perfume in the smoggy air. My mother walked a little ahead of Barry and pretended she didn’t know him, until she finally realized that everybody was dressed like that, white shoes and green polyester.

  The horses were fine-tuned machines on steel springs, shiny as metal, and the jockeys’ satin shirts gleamed in the sun as they walked their mounts around the track, each horse coupled with an older, steadier partner. The horses shied at children at the rail, at flags, all nerves and heat.

  “Pick a horse,” Barry told my mother.

  She picked number seven, a white horse, because of her name, Medea’s Pride.

  The jockeys had trouble getting them into the starting gates, but when the gates opened, the horses pounded the brown of the track in a unit.

  “Come on, seven,” we yelled. “Lucky seven.”

  She won. My mother laughed and
hugged me, hugged Barry. I’d never seen her like this, excited, laughing, she seemed so young. Barry had bet twenty dollars for her, and handed her the money, one hundred dollars.

  “How about dinner?” he asked her.

  Yes, I prayed. Please say yes. After all, how could she refuse him now?

  She took us to dinner at the nearby Surf ’n’ Turf, where Barry and I both ordered salads and steaks medium rare, baked potatoes with sour cream. My mother just had a glass of white wine. That was Ingrid Magnussen. She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they’d been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T’ang Dynasty.

  During the meal Barry told us of his travels in the Orient, where we had never been. The time he ordered magic mushrooms off the menu at a beachside shack in Bali and ended up wandering the turquoise shore hallucinating Paradise. His trip to the temples of Angkor Wat in the Cambodian jungle accompanied by Thai opium smugglers. His week spent in the floating brothels of Bangkok. He had forgotten me entirely, was too absorbed in hypnotizing my mother. His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebes, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.

  On the way home, she let him touch her waist as she got into the car.

  BARRY ASKED US to dinner at his house, said he’d like to cook some Indonesian dishes he’d learned there. I waited until afternoon to tell her I wasn’t feeling well, that she should go without me. I hungered for Barry, I thought he might be the one, someone who could feed us and hold us and make us real.

  She spent an hour trying on clothes, white Indian pajamas, the blue gauze dress, the pineapples and hula girls. I’d never seen her so indecisive.

  “The blue,” I said. It had a low neck and the blue was exactly the color of her eyes. No one could resist her in her blue dress.