White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  “‘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,’ 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.”

  She took her X-acto knife and selected a shirt from his closet, his favorite brown shirt. “How right he should wear clothing the color of excrement.” She laid it on the bed and slashed it into fringe. Then she tucked a white oleander into a buttonhole.

  SOMEONE WAS pounding on our door. She looked up from a new poem she was writing. She wrote all the time now. “Do you think he lost something valuable on that hard disk? Maybe a collection of essays due at the publisher this fall?” It frightened me, watching the door jump on its hinges. I thought of the marks on my mother’s arms. Barry wasn’t a brutal person, but everyone has a limit. If he got in, she was dead.

  But my mother didn’t seem upset. In fact, the harder he pounded, the happier she looked, pink-cheeked, bright-eyed. She had brought him back to her. She got out the folding knife from her pencil can and unfolded it against her thigh. We could hear him screaming, crying, his velvet voice rubbed threadbare. “I’m going to kill you, Ingrid, so help me God.”

  The pounding stopped. My mother listened, holding the knife open against the white silk of her robe. Suddenly he was on the other side of the apartment, pounding on the windows, we could see him, his face distorted with rage, huge and terrifying in the oleanders. I shrank back against the wall, but my mother just stood in the center of the room, gleaming, like a grassfire.

  “I’m going to kill you!” he screamed.

  “So helpless in his fury,” my mother said to me. “Impotent, one might say.”

  He broke a windowpane. I could tell he hadn’t intended to because he hesitated, and then, in a sudden burst of courage, he thrust his arm through the window and fumbled for the latch. She crossed the room faster than I could have believed possible, lifted her arm and stabbed him in the hand. The knife struck home. She had to jerk it out, and his arm raced back through the hole in the window. “You bloody bitch!” he was screaming.

  I wanted to hide, to stop up my ears, but I couldn’t stop watching. This was how love and passion ended. The lights were going on in the next building.

  “My neighbors are calling the police,” she said out the broken window. “You better go.”

  He stumbled away, and in a moment we heard him kick the front door. “You fucking cunt. You won’t get away with this. You can’t do this to me.”

  She threw open the front door then, and stood there in her white kimono, his blood on her knife. “You don’t know what I can do,” she said softly.

  AFTER THAT NIGHT, she couldn’t find him anymore, at the Virgins or Barney’s, at parties or club dates. He changed his locks. We had to use a metal pasteup ruler to open a window. This time she put a sprig of oleander in his milk, another in his oyster sauce, in his cottage cheese. She stuck one in his tooth-paste. She made an arrangement of white oleanders in a hand-blown vase on his coffee table, and scattered blooms on his bed.

  I was torn. He deserved to be punished, but now she had crossed over some line. This wasn’t revenge. She’d had her revenge, she had won, but it was like she didn’t even know it. She was drifting outside the limit of all reason, where the next stop was light-years away through nothing but darkness. How lovingly she arranged the dark leaves, the white blooms.

  A POLICE OFFICER showed up at our apartment. The officer, Inspector Ramirez, informed her that Barry was accusing her of breaking and entering and of trying to poison him. She was completely calm. “Barry is terribly angry with me,” she said, posing in the doorway, her arms crossed. “I ended our relationship several weeks ago, and he just can’t let go of it. He’s obsessed with me. He even tried to break into this apartment. This is my daughter, Astrid, she can tell you what happened.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t like this. It was going way too far.

  My mother kept going without missing a comma. “The neighbors even called the police that night. You must have a record of it. And now he ’s accusing me of breaking into his house? That poor man, really, he’s not all that attractive, it must be hard for him.”

  Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway. Oh Inspector Ramirez, her eyes said, you’re a good-looking man, how could you understand someone as desperate as Barry Kolker?

  After he left, how she laughed.

  THE NEXT TIME we saw Barry was at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, where he liked to shop for ugly gag gifts for his friends. My mother wore a hat that dappled her face with light. He saw her and turned away quickly, fear plain as billboards, but then he thought again, turned back, smiled at us.

  “A change of tactic,” she whispered. “Here he comes.”

  He walked right over to us, a papier-mâché Oscar in his hands. “Congratulations on your performance with Ramirez,” he said, and held it out to her. “Best actress of the year.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” my mother said. She was holding my hand, squeezing it too tight, but her face was smiling and relaxed.

  “Sure you do,” he said. He tucked Oscar under his arm. “But that’s not why I came over. I thought we could bury the hatchet. Look, I’ll admit I went too far calling the cops. I know I was an asshole, but for Christ’s sake, you tried to destroy the better part of a year’s work. Of course my agent had a preliminary draft, thank God, but eve
n so. Why don’t we just call it a draw?”

  My mother smiled, shifted to the other foot. She was waiting for him to do something, say something.

  “It’s not like I don’t respect you as a person,” he said. “And as a writer. We all know you’re a great poet. I’ve even talked you up at some of the magazines. Can’t we move on to the next phase now, and be friends?”

  She bit her lip as if she was seriously considering what he was saying, while all the while she poked the center of my palm with her nail until I thought it would go right through my hand. Finally she said in her low rich voice, “Sure we can. Well, why not.”

  They shook hands on it. He looked a little suspicious but relieved as he went back to his bargain hunting. And I thought, he still didn’t know her at all.

  We showed up at his house that night. He had bars on all the windows now. She stroked his new security door with the pads of her fingers like it was fur. “Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness.”

  She rang the bell. He opened the inner door, gazed at us through the security mesh. Smiled uncertainly. The wind rippled through the silk of her dress, through her moon-pale hair. She held up the bottle of Riesling she’d brought. “Seeing we’re friends and all.”

  “Ingrid, I can’t let you in,” he said.

  She smiled, slid her finger down one of the bars, flirting. “Now is that any way to treat a friend?”

  WE SWAM in the hot aquamarine of the pool late at night, in the clatter of palms and the twinkle of the new-scoured sky. My mother floated on her back, humming to herself. “God, I love this.” She splashed gently with her fingers, letting her body drift in a slow circle. “Isn’t it funny. I’m enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind.” Her eyes were closed. Beads of water decorated her face, and her hair spread out from her head like jellyfish tendrils. “But hatred, now. That’s something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It’s hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It’s so soothing. I feel infinitely better now.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. I was glad she felt happier, but I didn’t like the kind of happiness it was, I didn’t believe in it, I believed it would crack open sooner or later and terrible things would come flying out.

  WE DROVE down to Tijuana. We didn’t stop to buy piñatas or crepe paper flowers or earrings or purses. She kept looking at a scrap of paper in her hand as we wandered around the side streets past the burros painted like zebras and the tiny Indian women begging with their children. I gave them my change until it was all gone, and chewed the stale gum they gave me. She paid no attention. Then she found what she was looking for, a pharmacy, just like a pharmacy in L.A., brightly lit, the pharmacist in a white coat.

  “Por favor, tiene usted DMSO?” she asked.

  “You have arthritis?” he asked in easy English.

  “Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact. A friend of mine told me you carry it.”

  “What size would you like?” He pulled out three bottles, one the size of a bottle of vanilla, one the same as nail polish remover, and the largest like a bottle of vinegar. She chose the big one.

  “How much?”

  “Eighty dollars, miss.”

  “Eighty.” My mother hesitated. Eighty dollars was food money for two weeks, eighty dollars was two months’ worth of gas for the car. What could be worth eighty dollars, that we drove down to Tijuana to buy?

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s get in the car and just drive. Let’s go to La Paz.”

  She looked at me. I’d caught her by surprise, so I kept talking, thinking maybe I could get us back onto some planet I recognized. “We could take the first ferry in the morning. Can’t we just do that? Drive to Jalisco. San Miguel de Allende. We could close our accounts, have the money wired to the American Express, and just keep going.”

  How easy it could be. She knew where all the gas stations were from here to Panama, the cheap grand hotels with high ceilings and carved wooden headboards just off the main plazas. In three days we could put a thousand miles between us and this bottle of disaster. “You always liked it down there. You never wanted to come back to the States.”

  For an instant, I had her. I knew she was remembering the years we had spent down there, her lovers, the color of the sea. But it wasn’t a strong enough spell, I wasn’t a word spinner like her, not good enough, and the image faded, returning to the screen of her obsession: Barry and the blond, Barry and the red-head, Barry in a seersucker bathrobe.

  “Too late,” she said. She pulled out her wallet, counted four twenties onto the counter.

  AT NIGHT she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots of a vine with white trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors’ fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet spinach-green stuff into somebody else’s dumpster. She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon.

  “WHAT’S DMSO?” I asked Michael one night when she had gone out. He was drinking scotch, real Johnnie Walker, celebrating because he’d gotten a job at the Music Center in Macbeth, though he couldn’t call it that, it was bad luck. All the witches and stuff. You were supposed to call it the Scottish play. Michael was taking no chances, it had been a year since he’d done anything but Books on Tape.

  “People use it for arthritis,” he said.

  I leafed through a Variety and tried to ask casually, “Is it dangerous?”

  “Completely harmless,” he said. He raised his glass and examined the amber liquor, then sipped slowly, his eyes closing in satisfaction.

  I hadn’t expected good news. “What’s it for, then?”

  “It helps drugs absorb through your skin. That’s how the nicotine patch works, and those seasickness patches. You put it on and the DMSO lets it get through your skin into the blood-stream. Marvelous stuff. I remember when they used to worry that hippies would mix it with LSD and paint the doorknobs of public buildings.” He laughed into his drink. “As if anybody would waste their acid on a bunch of straights.”

  I LOOKED FOR the bottle of DMSO. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked under the kitchen sink and in the bathroom, in the drawers — there just weren’t many places to hide things in our apartment, and anyway, hiding things wasn’t my mother’s style. I waited up for her. She came back late, with a handsome young man whose dark curls trailed halfway down his back. She held his hand.

  “This is Jesus,” she said. “He’s a poet. My daughter, Astrid.”

  “Hi,” I said. “Mom, can I talk to you for a second?”

  “You should be in bed,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She smiled at Jesus, let go of his hand, and walked me out onto the screen porch. She looked beautiful again, no circles under her eyes, hair like falling water.

  I lay down in my bed and she covered me with a sheet, stroked my face. “Mom, what happened to that stuff from Mexico?”

  She just kept smiling, but her eyes told me everything.

  “Don’t do it,” I said.

  She kissed me and stroked my hair with her cool hand, always cool, despite the heat, despite the wind and the fires, and then she was gone.

  THE NEXT DAY I called Barry’s number.

  “Tunnel of Love,” a girl answered, stoned, giggling. I heard his voice, velvet, in the background. Then he came on the line. “Hello?”

  I was going to warn him, but now all I could remember was my mother’s face when she came out of his house that day. The way she rocked, the square of her mouth. Anyway, what could I tell him — don’t touch anything, don’t eat anything, watch out? He was already suspicious of her. If I told him, they might arrest her, and I would not hurt my mother, no
t for Barry Kolker and his screwing Shivas. He deserved it. He had it coming.

  “Hello,” he said, as she said something and laughed, stupidly. “Well, fuck you too,” he said, and hung up.

  I didn’t call again.

  WE SAT ON the roof and watched the moon, red and huge in the ash-laden air, hovering over the city laid out like a Ouija board. All around us was a Greek chorus of sirens, while my mother’s mad low voice murmured, “They can’t touch us. We’re the Vikings. We go into battle without armor for the flush and the blood of it.” She leaned down and kissed my head, smelling of metal and smoke.

  The hot wind blew and blew and would not stop.

  4

  THEN CAME A TIME I can hardly describe, a season underground. A bird trapped in a sewer, wings beating against the ceiling in that dark wet place, while the city rumbled on overhead. Her name was Lost. Her name was Nobody’s Daughter.

  In my dreams, my mother walked through a city of bricks and rubble, a city after war, and she was blind, her eyes empty and white as stones. There were tall apartments all around her, with triangles over windows, all bricked up and burning. Blind windows, and her blind eyes, and yet still she came toward me, inevitable and insane. I saw that her face was melted and horribly pliable. There were hollows in the tops of her cheeks, under her eyes, as if someone had pressed into soft clay with their thumbs.

  Those heavy days, how heavy the low gray sky, my wings were so heavy, so heavy my panicked flight under the ground. So many faces, so many lips, wanting me to tell, it made me tired, I fell asleep as they spoke. Just tell us what happened. What could I tell? When I opened my mouth, a stone fell out. Her poor white eyeballs. Just where I hoped to find mercy. I dreamed of white milk in the street, white milk and glass. Milk down the gutter, milk like tears. I kept her kimono against my face, her scent of violets and ash. I rubbed the silk between my fingers.