White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  She chose the Indian pajamas, which covered every inch of her golden skin. “I’ll be home early,” she said.

  I lay on her bed after she was gone and imagined them together, their deep voices a duet in the dusk over the rijsttafel. I hadn’t had any since we left Amsterdam, where we lived when I was seven; the smell of it used to permeate our neighborhood there. My mother always said we’d go to Bali. I imagined us in a house with an extravagantly peaked roof, overlooking green rice terraces and miraculously clear seas, where we’d wake to chimes and the baaing of goats.

  After a while I made myself a cheese and sweet pickle sandwich and went next door to Michael’s. He was halfway through a bottle of red wine from Trader Joe’s — “poverty chic” he called it, because it had a cork — and he was crying, watching a Lana Turner movie. I didn’t like Lana Turner and I couldn’t stand looking at the dying tomatoes, so I read Chekhov until Michael passed out, then went downstairs and swam in the pool warm as tears. I floated on my back and looked up at the stars, the Goat, the Swan, and hoped my mother was falling in love.

  All that weekend, she didn’t say a thing about her date with Barry, but she wrote poems and crumpled them up, threw them at the wastebasket.

  IN THE ART ROOM, Kit proofread over my mother’s shoulder, while I sat at my table in the corner, making a collage about Chekhov, the lady with the little dog, cutting out figures from discarded photographs. Marlene answered the phone, covered the receiver with her hand.

  “It’s Barry Kolker.”

  Kit’s head jerked up at the sound of the name, a marionette in the hands of a clumsy puppeteer. “I’ll take it in my office.”

  “It’s for Ingrid,” Marlene said.

  My mother didn’t look up from her layout sheet. “Tell him I don’t work here anymore.”

  Marlene told him, lying like oil.

  “How do you know Barry Kolker?” the editor asked, her black eyes big as olives.

  “Just someone I met,” my mother said.

  That evening, in the long summer twilight, people came out of their apartments, walked their dogs, drank blender drinks down by the pool, their feet in the water. The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue. My mother knelt at her table, writing, and a slight breeze brushed the wind chimes we’d hung in the old eucalyptus, while I lay on her bed. I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I wished a thousand-year sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like the sleep over the castle of Sleeping Beauty.

  There was a knock on the door, wrecking the peace. Nobody ever came to our door. My mother put down her pen and grabbed the folding knife she kept in the jar with the pencils, its dark carbon blade sharp enough to shave a cat. She unfolded it against her thigh and put her finger to her lips. She clutched her white kimono, her skin bare underneath.

  It was Barry, calling her. “Ingrid!”

  “How dare he,” she said. “He cannot simply appear on my doorstep without an invitation.”

  She jerked the door open. Barry was wearing a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and carrying a bottle of wine and a bag that smelled of something wonderful. “Hi,” he said. “I was just in the neighborhood, thought I’d drop by.”

  She stood in the doorway, the open blade still against her thigh. “Oh, you did.”

  Then she did something I would never have imagined. She invited him in, closing the knife against her leg.

  He looked around at our big room, elegantly bare. “Just move in?” She said nothing. We had lived there over a year.

  THE SUN was hot through the screens when I woke up, illuminating the milky stagnant air wrapped like a towel around the morning. I could hear a man singing, the shower pipes clanking as he turned the water off. Barry had stayed the night. She was breaking her rules. They weren’t stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes. I stared at her as she dressed for work, waiting for an explanation, but she just smiled.

  After that night, the change was startling. Sunday, we went together to the Hollywood farmer’s market, where she and Barry bought spinach and green beans, tomatoes and grapes no bigger than the head of a thumbtack, papery braids of garlic, while I trailed behind them, mute with amazement at the sight of my mother examining displays of produce like it was a trip to a bookstore. My mother, for whom a meal was a carton of yogurt or a can of sardines and soda crackers. She could eat peanut butter for weeks on end without even noticing. I watched as she bypassed stands full of her favorite white flowers, lilies and chrysanthemums, and instead filled her arms with giant red poppies with black stains in the centers. On the walk home, she and Barry held hands and sang together in deep croony voices old songs from the sixties, “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” and “Waterloo Sunset.”

  SO MANY THINGS I would never have imagined. She wrote tiny haiku that she slipped into his pockets. I fished them out whenever I got a chance, to see what she had written. It made me blush to read them: Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battleground.

  One morning at the magazine, she showed me a picture in the weekly throwaway Caligula’s Mother, taken at a party after a play’s opening night. They both looked bombed. The caption dubbed her Barry’s new lady love. It was exactly the kind of thing she hated the most, a woman as a man’s anything. Now it was as if she’d won a contest.

  Passion. I never imagined it was something that could happen to her. These were days she couldn’t recognize herself in a mirror, her eyes black with it, her hair forever tangled and smelling of musk, Barry’s goat scent.

  They went out and she told me about it afterward, laughing. “Women approach him, their peacock voices crying, ‘Barry! Where have you been?’ But it doesn’t matter. He is with me now. I am the only one he wants.”

  Passion ruled her. Gone were the references to his physical goatishness, his need for dental work, his flabby physique, his squalid taste in clothes, the wretchedness of his English, his shameless clichés, the criminal triteness of his oeuvre, a man who wrote “snuck.” I never thought I’d see my mother plaster herself against a stout ponytailed man in the hallway outside our apartment, or let him inch his hand up her skirt under the table when we ate dinner one night at a dark Hunan restaurant in old Chinatown. I watched her close her eyes, I could feel the waves of her passion like perfume across the teacups.

  In the mornings, he lay with her on the wide white mattress when I crossed the room on the way to the toilet. They would even talk to me, her head cradled on his arm, the room full of the scent of their lovemaking, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It made me want to laugh out loud. In the courtyard at Crossroads of the World, I sat under a pepper tree and wrote “Mr. and Mrs. Barry Kolker” in my sketchbook. I practiced saying, “Can I call you Dad?”

  I never told my mother I wanted a father. I had only questioned her once on the subject, I must have been in kindergarten. We were back in the States that year, living in Hollywood. A hot, smoggy day, and my mother was in a bad mood. She picked me up late from day care, we had to go to the market. We were driving in an old Datsun she had then, I still remember the hot waffled seat and how I could see the street through a hole in the floorboards.

  School had just started, and our young teacher, Mrs.

  Williams, had asked us about our fathers. The fathers lived in Seattle or Panorama City or San Salvador, a couple were even dead. They had jobs like lawyers or drummers or installing car window glass.

  “Where’s my father?” I asked my mother.

  She downshifted irritably, throwing me against the seat belt. “You have no father,” she said.

  “Everybody has a father,” I said.

  “Fathers are irrelevant. Believe me, you’re lucky. I had one, I know. Just forget it.” She turned on the radio, loud rock ’n’ roll.

  It was
as if I was blind and she’d told me, sight doesn’t matter, it’s just as well you can’t see. I began to watch fathers, in the stores, on the playgrounds, pushing their daughters on swings. I liked how they seemed to know what to do. They seemed like a dock, firmly attached to the world, you could be safe then, not always drifting like us. I prayed Barry Kolker would be that man.

  Their murmured words of love were my lullabies, my hope chest. I was stacking in linens, summer camp, new shoes, Christmas. I was laying up sit-down dinners, a room of my own, a bicycle, parent-teacher nights. A year like the one before it, and the next like that, one after another, a bridge, and a thousand things more subtle and nameless that girls without fathers know.

  Barry took us to the Fourth of July game at Dodger Stadium and bought us Dodger caps. We ate hot dogs and they drank beer from paper cups and he explained baseball to her like it was philosophy, the key to the American character. Barry threw money to the peanut vendor and caught the bag the man threw back. We littered the ground with peanut shells. I hardly recognized us in our peaked blue caps. We were like a family. I pretended we were just Mom, Dad, and the kid. We did the wave, and they kissed through the whole seventh inning, while I drew faces on the peanuts. The fireworks set off every car alarm in the parking lot.

  Another weekend, he took us to Catalina. I was violently seasick on the ferry, and Barry held a cold handkerchief to my forehead and got me some mints to suck. I loved his brown eyes, the way he looked so worried, as if he’d never seen a kid throw up before. I tried not to hang around with them too much once we got there, hoping he would ask her while they strolled among the sailboats, eating shrimp from a paper cone.

  SOMETHING HAPPENED. All I remember is that the winds had started. The skeleton rattlings of wind in the palms. It was a night Barry said he would come at nine, but then it was eleven and he hadn’t arrived. My mother played her Peruvian flute tape to soothe her nerves, Irish harp music, Bulgarian singers, but nothing worked. The calming, chiming tones ill suited her temper. Her gestures were anxious and unfinished.

  “Let’s go for a swim,” I said.

  “I can’t,” she said. “He might call.”

  Finally, she flipped out the tape and replaced it with one of Barry’s, a jazz tape by Chet Baker, romantic, the kind of music she always hated before.

  “Cocktail lounge music. For people to cry into their beer with,” she said. “But I don’t have any beer.”

  He went out of town on assignments for different magazines. He canceled their dates. My mother couldn’t sleep, she jumped whenever the phone rang. I hated to see the look on her face when it wasn’t Barry. A tone I’d never heard crept into her voice, serrated, like the edge of a saw.

  I didn’t understand how this could happen, how he could give us fireworks and Catalina, how he could hold that cold cloth to my forehead, and talk about taking us to Bali, and then forget our address.

  ONE AFTERNOON, we stopped by his house unannounced.

  “He’s going to be mad,” I said.

  “We were just in the neighborhood. Just thought we’d stop by,” she said.

  I could no more keep her from doing this than I could keep the sun from coming up through the boiled smog on an August morning, but I didn’t want to see it. I waited in the car. She knocked on the door and he answered wearing a seersucker bathrobe. I didn’t have to hear her to know what she was saying. She wore her blue gauze dress, the hot wind ruffling her hem, the sun at her back, turning it transparent. He stood in his doorway, blocking it, and she held her head to one side, moving closer, touching her hair. I felt a rubber band stretching in my brain, tighter and tighter, until they disappeared into his house.

  I played the radio, classical music. I couldn’t stand to hear anything with words. I imagined my own ice-blue eyes looking at some man, telling him to go away, that I was busy. “You’re not my type,” I said coolly into the rearview mirror.

  A half hour later she reappeared, stumbling out to the car, tripping over a sprinkler, as if she were blind. She got in and sat behind the steering wheel and rocked back and forth, her mouth open in a square, but there was no sound. My mother was crying. It was the final impossibility.

  “He has a date,” she finally said, whispering, her voice like there were hands around her throat. “He made love with me, and then said I had to leave. Because he has a date.”

  I knew we shouldn’t have come. Now I wished she’d never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.

  I was afraid to let her drive like this, with her eyes wild, seeing nothing. She’d kill us before we got three blocks. But she didn’t start the car. She sat there, staring through the windshield, rocking herself, holding herself around her waist.

  A few minutes later, a car pulled up in the driveway, a new-model sports car, the top down, a blond girl driving. She was very young and wore a short skirt. She leaned over to get her bag out of the backseat.

  “She’s not as pretty as you,” I said.

  “But she ’s a simpler girl,” my mother whispered bitterly.

  KIT LEANED on the counter in the production room, her magenta lips a wolf ’s stained smile.

  “Ingrid, guess who I saw last night at the Virgins,” she said, her high voice breathless with malice. “Our old friend Barry Kolker.” She stage-sighed. “With some cheap little blond half his age. Men have such short memories, don’t they?” Her nostrils twitched as she stifled a laugh.

  At lunchtime, my mother told me to take everything I wanted, art supplies, stationery. We were leaving and we weren’t coming back.

  3

  “I SHOULD SHAVE my head,” she said. “Paint my face with ashes.”

  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 com
e 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 tête-à-tête. He got up and grabbed me by the arm.” She pushed up her sleeve and showed me the marks on her arm, angry, red.