White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

I was thirsty for the way she felt, the way she looked, the sound of her voice, the way her front teeth were square but her second teeth turned slightly, her one dimple, left side, her halfsmile, her wonderfully blue eyes flecked with white, like new galaxies, the firm intact planes of her face. She didn’t even look like she should be in prison, she looked like she could have just walked off the Venice boardwalk with a book under her arm, ready to settle in at an oceanside café.

  She pulled me down to sit next to her at the picnic table, whispered to me, “Don’t cry. We’re not like that. We’re the Vikings, remember?”

  I nodded, but my tears dripped on the orange vinyl table. Lois, someone had scratched into it. 18th Street. Cunt.

  One of the women in the concrete courtyard behind the visitors covered area whistled and shouted out, something about my mother or me. My mother looked up and the woman caught her gaze full in the face like a punch. It stopped her cold. She turned away quickly, like it wasn’t she who’d said it.

  “You’re so beautiful,” I said, touching her hair, her collar, her cheek. Not pliable at all.

  “Prison agrees with me,” she said. “There’s no hypocrisy here. Kill or be killed, and everybody knows it.”

  “I missed you so much,” I whispered.

  She put her arm around me, her head right next to mine. She pressed my forehead with her hand, her lips against my temple. “I won’t be here forever. It’ll take more than this to keep me behind bars. I promise you. I will get out, one way or another. One day you’ll look out your window and I’ll be there.”

  I looked into her determined face, cheekbones like razors, her eyes making me believe. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me.”

  She stretched me out at arm’s length to look at me, her hands gripping my shoulders. “Why would you think that?”

  Because I couldn’t lie well enough. But I couldn’t say it.

  She hugged me again. Those arms around me made me want to stay there forever. I’d rob a bank and get convicted so we could always be together. I wanted to curl up in her lap, I wanted to disappear into her body, I wanted to be one of her eyelashes, or a blood vessel in her thigh, a mole on her neck.

  “Is it terrible here? Do they hurt you?”

  “Not as much as I hurt them,” she said, and I knew she was smiling, though all I could see was the denim of her sleeve and her arm, still lightly tanned. I had to pull away a little to see her. Yes, she was smiling, her half-smile, the little comma-shaped curve at the corner of her mouth. I touched her mouth. She kissed my fingers.

  “They assigned me to office work. I told them I’d rather clean toilets than type their bureaucratic vomit. Oh, they don’t much care for me. I’m on grounds crew. I sweep, pull weeds, though of course only inside the wire. I’m considered a poor security risk. Imagine. I won’t tutor their illiterates, teach writing classes, or otherwise feed the machine. I will not serve.” She stuck her nose in my hair, she was smelling me. “Your hair smells of bread. Clover and nutmeg. I want to remember you just like this, in that sadly hopeful pink dress, and those bridesmaid, promise-of-prom-night pumps. Your foster mother’s, no doubt. Pink being the ultimate cliché.”

  I told her about Starr and Uncle Ray, the other kids, dirt bikes and paloverde and ironwood, the colors of the boulders in the wash, the mountain and the hawks. I told her about the sin virus. I loved the sound of her laughter.

  “You must send me drawings,” she said. “You always drew better than you wrote. I can’t think of any other reason you haven’t written.”

  I could write? “You never did.”

  “You haven’t been getting my letters?” she said. And her smile was gone, her face deflated, masklike, like the women behind the fence. “Give me your address. I’ll write you directly. And you write to me, don’t go through your social worker. My mistake. Oh, we’ll learn.” And the vigor returned to her eyes. “We’re smarter than they are, ma petite.”

  I didn’t know my address, but she told me hers, had me repeat it over and over so I would remember. My mind rebelled against my mother’s address. Ingrid Magnussen, Inmate w99235, California Institution for Women, Corona-Frontera.

  “Wherever you go, write to me. Write at least once a week. Or send drawings, God knows the visual stimulation in this place leaves something to be desired. I especially want to see the ex—topless dancer and Uncle Ernie, the clumsy carpenter.”

  It hurt my feelings. Uncle Ray had been there when I needed him. She didn’t even know him. “It’s Ray, and he’s nice.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You stay away from Uncle Ray, especially if he ’s oh so nice.”

  But she was in here, and I was out there. I had a friend. She wasn’t going to take him away from me.

  “I think of you all the time,” she said. “Especially at night. I imagine where you are. When the prison’s still and everyone ’s asleep, I imagine I can see you. I try to contact you. Have you ever heard me calling, felt my presence in your room?” She stroked a strand of my hair between her fingers, stretched it to see how long it was against my arm. It came to my elbow.

  I had felt her, I had. I’d heard her call. Astrid? Are you awake? “Late at night. You never could sleep.”

  She kissed the top of my head, right in the part. “Neither could you. Now, tell me more about yourself. I want to know everything about you.”

  It was a strange idea. She never wanted to know about me before. But the long days of sameness had led her back to me, to remembering she had a daughter tied up somewhere. The sun was starting to come out and the ground fog glowed like a paper lantern.

  6

  THE NEXT SUNDAY, I slept too late. If only I hadn’t been dreaming about my mother. It was a sweet dream. We were in Arles, walking down the allée of dark cypress trees, past tombs and wildflowers. She had escaped from prison — she was pushing a lawnmower in front of the building and just walked away. Arles was deep shade and sunshine like honey, Roman ruins and our little pension. If I had not been hungry for that dream, for the sunflowers of Arles, I would have got up when the boys ran off into the wash.

  But now I was sitting in the front seat of the Torino. Carolee groaned in the back, she had a hangover from doing drugs all night with her friends. Starr had caught her sleeping too. Amy Grant played on the radio, and Starr sang along, wearing her hair in a sort of messy French twist like Brigitte Bardot, and long dangling earrings. She looked like she was going to a cocktail lounge, and not to the Truth Assembly of Christ.

  “I hate this,” my foster sister said in my ear as we followed her mother into church. “I’d kill for some ’ludes.”

  The Assembly met in a concrete-block building with linoleum-tiled floors and a high frosted glass window instead of stained. A modern fruitwood cross loomed in front, and a woman with a puffy hairdo played the organ. We sat on white folding chairs, Carolee on my left, face dark with sullenness and headache, Starr on the aisle, glowing with excitement. Her skirt was so short I could see where the dark part of her pantyhose started.

  The organ playing crescendoed and a man walked to the lectern wearing a dark suit and tie with shiny black shoes, like a businessman. I thought he would wear a graduation-type robe. His short, side-parted brown hair glistened like cellophane under the colored lights. Now Starr sat very straight, hoping he would notice her.

  As he spoke, I was surprised that he had a sort of speech defect. He swallowed his l’s, so it came out “alyive” instead of “alive.” “Though we were dead in our error, He made us alive together in Christ. By the Cross, we have been saved. He lifts us up to the life . . . everlasting.” He raised his hands, lifting us. He was good. He knew when to build and when to let off, and when he got quiet, that’s when he came in for the kill, with big shiny eyes and little flat nose, and a lipless mouth so wide he looked like a Muppet, like his whole head opened and closed when he talked. “Yes, we can live again, even when we are dying of . . . the sin virus.”

  Carolee shifted, making her chair squeak o
n purpose. Starr flapped her hand, nudged me and pointed at the Reverend, as if there was anything else to look at.

  Reverend Thomas started telling a story of a young man in the sixties, a good-hearted boy, who thought he could go his own way, as long as he didn’t hurt anyone. “He met a guru who taught him to look for the truth within himself.” The preacher paused and smiled, as if the idea of truth within yourself was absurd, ridiculous, the red light warning of doom. “You are the judge of what is true.” He smiled again, and I began to see that he always paused to smile when he said something he disapproved of. He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he was smashing them.

  “Oh, he was by no means alone in his philosophy at the time,” Reverend Thomas continued, his button eyes shining. “‘Do your own thing, man,’ was the wisdom of the day. If there was something you wanted, it was good, because you wanted it. There was no God, no dying. There was only your own pleasure.” He smiled at the word “pleasure,” as if pleasure was hideous, an abomination, and he felt pity for anyone who would be so weak as to value it. “And if anyone spoke of responsibility or consequences, they were held up to ridicule. ‘Lighten up, man. Don’t be square.’

  “Yes, the young man had unwittingly contracted the deadly virus. It had infiltrated his heart, weakening the structure of his conscience, liquefying his judgment.” Reverend Thomas seemed positively overjoyed. “After a while, there just didn’t seem much difference between right and wrong.”

  So how could the kid have ended up as anything but one of the Manson killers?

  I had sunk back in my chair as far as Carolee by now, and Starr’s perfume and the hissing words of the Reverend were making me sick to my stomach.

  Luckily, in prison, the young man had a revelation. He realized he was a part of a raging epidemic of the sin virus, and through another inmate discovered the Lord and the life-giving serum of His Blood. Now he was preaching to the other inmates and doing good works among the hopeless. Although he was twenty-five years into a life sentence, his life was not a waste. He had a reason for being, to help others, and bring the Good News to people who had never looked an inch beyond their own momentary desires. He was redeemed, a new man, reborn in the Lord.

  It wasn’t hard for me to imagine the Manson kid in prison, his hardness, his warped thinking, a killer. Then something had happened. A light had come on, which let him see the awful reality of his crime. I imagined his agony, when he saw what a monster he had become and knew that he had ruined his life for nothing. He could have killed himself, how very close he must have come. But then came the ray of hope, that there might be another way to live, some meaning after all. And he prayed, and the spirit came into his heart.

  And now, instead of living out his years as a walking corpse in San Quentin, hating and more hate, he had become someone with a purpose, someone with the light within him. I understood that. I believed it.

  “There is an answer to this deadly epidemic laying waste our vital substance,” Reverend Thomas was saying, lifting his arms, like an embrace. “A powerful vaccine for the devastating infection within the human heart. But we have to recognize the danger we are in. We have to accept the grave diagnosis, that by acting upon our own desires instead of following God’s plan, we have become infected by this terrible plague. We have to receive the knowledge of our responsibility to the heavenly power, and our own vulnerability.”

  Suddenly, a scene that I had kept at bay all these months came flooding in. The day I’d phoned Barry to warn him, and then hung up. I could feel the weight of the receiver as I put it on the cradle. My responsibility. My infection.

  “We need Christ’s antibodies, to overcome this contagion within our souls. And those who choose to serve themselves instead of the Heavenly Father will experience the deadly consequences.”

  It wasn’t surreal anymore. What Reverend Thomas was saying was true. I had contracted the virus. I had been infected all the while. There was blood on my hands. I thought of my beautiful mother, sitting in her tiny cell, her life at full stop. She was just like the Manson kid. She didn’t believe in anything but herself, no higher law, no morality. She thought she could justify anything, even murder, just because it was what she wanted. She didn’t even use the excuse of who was she hurting. She had no conscience. I will not serve. That’s what Stephen Dedalus said in Portrait of the Artist, but it meant Satan. That’s what the Fall was. Satan would not serve.

  An old lady stepped forward from the choir and began to sing, “The blood that Jesus shed for me, way back at Calvary . . .” and she could really sing. And I was crying, my tears coming down. We were dying inside, my mother and I. If only we had God, Jesus, something larger than ourselves to believe in, we could be healed. We could still have a new life.

  IN JULY, I was baptized into the Truth Assembly of Christ. It didn’t even matter that it was Reverend Thomas, how fake he was, how he looked down Starr’s dress, the way his eyes fondled her when she walked up the stairs in front of him. I closed my eyes as he laid me back in the square pool behind the Assembly building, my nose filling with chlorine. I wanted the spirit to enter me, to wash me clean. I wanted to follow God’s plan for me. I knew where following my own would get me.

  Afterward, we went out to Church’s Fried Chicken to celebrate. Nobody had ever given me a party before. Starr gave me a white leatherette Bible with passages highlighted in red. From Carolee and the boys I got a box of stationery with a dove in the corner, trailing a banner in its beak that said, “Praise the Lord,” but I knew Starr must have picked it out. Uncle Ray gave me a tiny gold cross on a chain. Even though he thought I was nuts to be baptized.

  “You can’t really believe in this crap,” he whispered in my ear as he helped me put the necklace on.

  I held up my hair so he could fasten it. “I’ve got to believe in something,” I said, low.

  His hand rested on my neck, warm, heavy. His good plain face, sad hazel eyes. And I realized he wanted to kiss me. I felt it inside me. And when he saw that I felt it, he reddened and looked Away.

  Dear Astrid,

  ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?? You may not 1) be baptized, 2) call yourself a Christian, and 3) write to me on that ridiculous stationery. You will not sign your letters “born again in Christ”! God is dead, haven’t you heard, he died a hundred years ago, gave out from sheer lack of interest, decided to play golf instead. I raised you to have some self-respect, and now you’re telling me you’ve given it all away to a 3-D postcard Jesus? I would laugh if it weren’t so desperately sad.

  Don’t you dare ask me to accept Jesus as my savior, wash my soul in the Blood of the Lamb. Don’t even think of trying to redeem me. I regret NOTHING. No woman with any self-respect would have done less.

  The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy’s most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. I’m not quarreling with your choice of issues, only with your intellectually diminished approach. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind’s destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race.

  Three cheers for Eve.

  Mother.

  I prayed for her redemption. She took a life because someone humiliated her, hurt her image of herself as the Valkyrie, the stainless warrior. Exposed her weakness, which was only love. So she avenged herself. So easy to justify, I wrote to her. It’s because you felt like a victim you did it. If you were really strong, you could have tolerated the humiliation. Only Jesus can make us strong enough to fight the temptations of sin.

  She wrote back, a quotation from Milton, Satan’s part in Paradise Lost:

  What though the field be lost?

  All is not lost; the
unconquerable will,

  And study of revenge, immortal hate,

  And courage never to submit or yield.

  UNCLE RAY was teaching me to play chess from a book, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. He had taught himself in Vietnam. “I had a lot of time to kill there,” he said, running his fingers over the peaked hat of the white pawn. He’d carved the set there, Vietnamese kings and Buddhas for bishops, horses with sculpted cheeks and combed manes. I couldn’t imagine the months it must have taken him, patiently carving with a Swiss Army knife while all the bombs blasted around him.

  I liked the order of chess, the coolness of reason, the joy of its patient steps. We played most nights when Starr was at AA or CA meetings or at Bible study, while the boys watched TV. Uncle Ray kept a little pipe of dope next to him on the arm of the chair to smoke while he waited for me to make my move.

  That night the boys were watching a nature show. The littlest one, Owen, sucked his thumb, holding his stuffed giraffe, while Peter twined a bit of his hair around his finger, over and over again. Davey narrated the show for them, pointing to the screen.

  “That’s Smokey, he’s the alpha male.” The light from the screen reflected in his glasses.

  Uncle Ray waited for my move, looking at me in a way that made my heart open like a moonflower — his eyes on my face, my throat, my hair over my shoulders, changing color in the TV lights. On TV I saw the white of snow, the wolves hunting in pairs, their strange yellow eyes. I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.

  “Oh, don’t,” Owen said, clutching his giraffe with the broken neck as the wolves leapt on their deer, pulling it down by the throat.

  “It’s the law of nature,” Davey said.

  “There, look at that.” Ray pointed with the black bishop he was moving. “It’s like, if God saved that deer, he’d starve the wolf. Why would he favor one person over another?” He had never quite resigned himself to my becoming a Christian. “The good don’t get any better a break than anybody else. You could be a fucking saint, and still, you got the plague or stepped on a Bouncing Betty.”