White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  “At least you have something larger to fall back on,” I said, touching the cross around my neck, zipping it back and forth along the chain. “You have a compass and a map.”

  “And if there’s no God?”

  “You act as if there is, and it’s the same thing.”

  He sucked at his pipe, filling the room with its skunky smell, while I examined the board. “What does your mother have to say about that?” he asked.

  “She says, ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ ”

  “My kind of woman.”

  I didn’t say that she called him Uncle Ernie. Through the screen door, the summer crickets sang. I flicked my hair behind my shoulders, moved my bishop to queen’s knight 3, threatening his knight. I sensed how he looked at my bare arm, the shoulder, my lips. To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful. I had never been beautiful before. I didn’t think it went against Christ. Everybody needed to feel love.

  We heard the crunch of Starr’s Torino turning into the yard, car tires in the gravel, earlier than she normally came home. I was disappointed. Ray paid attention to me when she was gone, but when she came home I went back to being just one of the kids. What was she doing home so early anyway? She usually stayed out until eleven, drinking coffee with the addicts, or discussing Matthew 20 verse 13 with the old ladies at the church.

  “Shit.” Uncle Ray quickly pocketed his stash and small pipe just as the screen door swung open and the bug zapper zapped a big one at the same time.

  Starr stopped for a second at the door, seeing us, and the boys sitting on the couch, mesmerized by the TV. Then it was like she was confused to find herself home so soon. She dropped her keys and picked them up. Uncle Ray watched her, her breasts practically coming out of the scooped neck of her dress.

  Then her smile came on, and she kicked off her shoes and sat on the arm of his chair, kissed him. I could see her sticking her tongue in his ear.

  “Was it canceled?” he asked.

  It was my move, but he wasn’t paying attention.

  She draped herself over his shoulder, her breast squashed into his neck. “Sometimes I just get so tired of hearing them complain. Taking everybody else’s darn inventory.” She picked up my remaining white knight. “I love this,” she said. “Why don’t you ever teach me, Ray baby?”

  “I did once,” he said in a murmuring, tender voice, turning his head and kissing her breast, right in front of me. “Don’t you remember? You got so mad you turned the board over.” He plucked the knight from her hand and put it back down on the board. King 5.

  “That was in my drinking days,” she said.

  “‘Can white mate in one move?’” he repeated out of the Bobby Fischer book.

  “One move?” she said, tickling his nose with a strand of her hair. “That doesn’t sound too exciting.”

  White knight to king’s bishop 6. I rode the delicately carved knight into place. “Mate.”

  But they were kissing and then she told the boys to go to bed when they were done and led Uncle Ray back to her bedroom.

  ALL NIGHT LONG as I lay in my sleeping bag with its bucking broncos and lariats, I heard their headboard smacking the wall, their laughter. And I wondered whether real daughters were jealous of their mothers and fathers, if it made them sick to see their fathers kiss their mothers, squeeze their breasts. I squeezed my own small breast, hot from the sleeping bag, and imagined how it might feel to another hand, imagined having a body like Starr’s. She was almost a different species with her narrow waist, her breasts round as grapefruit, her bottom round like that too. I imagined taking off my clothes and having a man like Uncle Ray look at me the way he looked at her.

  God, it was so hot. I opened the zipper of the sleeping bag, lay on top of the hot flannel.

  And she didn’t even hide it, she wasn’t that Christian. Always the shortest of shorts, the tightest of tops. You could see where her jeans crept up inside her labia. I wanted someone to want me that way, touch me the way Uncle Ray did her, like Barry and my mother.

  I wished Carolee were there. She would make funny comments about the headboard or joke about Uncle Ray having a heart attack — he was almost fifty, for Christ’s sake, lucky if he didn’t die with his boots on. He met Starr at the club when she was still waitressing, and what kind of sleazy guys went to places like that anyway. But Carolee was never home at night anymore. She climbed out the window as soon as Starr said good night and went to meet her friends in the wash. She never invited me to come with her. It hurt my feelings, but I didn’t like her friends much — girls with mean laughter and boys with shaved heads, awkward and boasting.

  I stroked my hands under my nightgown and felt the different skins against my fingertips — the hair on my legs, the smoothness between my thighs, and the slippery, fragrant skin of my private parts. I felt the folds, the peak, and thought of rough hands with missing fingers tracing all the secret places. On the other side of the pressboard wall, the headboard banged.

  MY MOTHER sent me a reading list that summer with four hundred books on it, Colette and Chinua Achebe and Mishima, Dostoyevsky and Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. I imagined her lying in bed reciting their names like a rosary, running her tongue over them, round as beads. Sometimes Starr took us to the library. She waited in the car and gave us ten minutes to get our books or she’d leave without us. “I’ve got the only book I need, missy,” she said.

  Davey and I grabbed our books like Supermarket Sweep while Peter and Owen wistfully hovered near the library grandpa who read stories to kids. It had been better when Ray was home — he would drop us off, go have a few beers, and pick us up an hour or two later. Then the little boys would listen to the grandpa’s stories as long as he held out.

  But now Ray had a job doing finish carpentry in a new subdevelopment. I was used to him being home all day and missed him. He hadn’t had steady work since he ’d quit his job as the shop teacher at the high school over in Sunland. He’d gotten into a fight with the principal when he wouldn’t stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance at assembly. “I fought in fucking Vietnam, got a fucking Purple Heart,” he said. “What did that asshole do? Went to goddamn Valley State. What a goddamn sterling hero.”

  The owner of the development lived in Maryland and didn’t care about the Pledge of Allegiance. Ray knew someone who knew the subcontractor. So I was stuck at the height of summer in the trailer watching Starr knit a gigantic afghan that looked like a rainbow threw up on it. I read, drew. Ray bought me some kid’s watercolors from the drugstore and I started painting. I stopped trying to persuade my mother to accept Jesus. It was hopeless, she would have to come to it herself. It was God’s will, like Dmitry in The Brothers Karamazov, one of the books from her reading list.

  Instead of letters, I sent her drawings and watercolors: Starr in shorts and high heels, watering the geraniums with a hose. Ray drinking a beer, watching the sun set from the porch. The boys wandering the wash in the warm tender nights with flashlights, surprising a horned owl. Ray’s chess set. The way he studied the board, fist under chin. The paloverde trees in the cool of early morning, a rattlesnake lying across a rock at full length.

  I painted pictures for everybody that summer, lizards for Peter and children riding white giraffes and unicorns for Owen, raptors for Davey, both perched and in flight, from pictures in magazines: golden eagles, red-shouldered hawks, peregrine falcons, elf owls. I painted a head-and-shoulders portrait of Carolee for her to give to her boyfriend, and some for Starr, angels mostly, Jesus walking on water. Also her in different poses, wearing a bathing suit, in the style of World War II poster girls.

  Uncle Ray just wanted a picture of his truck. It was an old Ford, high and aqua green, with a feather roach clip hanging from the rearview mirror, and a bumper sticker that said, This Property Protected by Smith & Wesson. I painted it against the mountains in the clear morning, aqua and salmon and pale blue.

  THE SUMMER climaxed in Santa Anas like noth
ing I’d ever seen before. Fire came up over the ridges and burned down the flanks of the mountains a mile away. This was no mere smudge on the horizon with miles of concrete separating you. We could see a thousand acres burning off the Big Tujunga. We kept our things packed in Ray’s truck and in the trunk of the Torino. The winds blew like hurricanes and the burn area was being reported in square miles and there were riots down in the city. Uncle Ray took to cleaning his guns on the patio after work, as the ash from the fires sifted a fine powder over everything. He handed me the small gun, a Beretta. It was like a toy in my hand. “Want to shoot?”

  “Sure,” I said. He never let the boys touch his guns. Starr hated to even look at them, though now the riots were going on, she ’d stopped asking him to get rid of them. He took a can of green Rust-Oleum and spray-painted a human figure on a board, and for fun made it carrying a TV. He set it up against an oleander at the far end of the yard. “He’s taking your TV, Astrid. Plug him.”

  It was fun, the little Beretta .22. I landed four out of nine shots. He put tape over the bullet holes so I’d know which were old, which were new. I got to try all the guns eventually — the rifle, the short-nosed .38 Police Special, Smith & Wesson, even the twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. I liked the Beretta best, but Ray insisted the Smith & Wesson was the thing to shoot, it had “stopping power.” He ’d put it in my hands, showing me how to sight it, how to squeeze the trigger with my mind. The .38 was the hardest of the four to shoot and be accurate with. You had to use both hands, and keep your arms very straight, or it came back and hit you in the face.

  Each gun had a purpose, like a hammer or a screwdriver. The rifle was for hunting, the Beretta for potentially touchy situations — a bar, a meeting with the ex, a date, what Ray called close-in work. The shotgun was for home protection. “Get behind me, kids!” he’d say in a grandmothery voice, and we’d all run behind him as he demonstrated, spraying the oleanders with buckshot.

  And the .38? “Only one reason for a thirty-eight. And that’s to kill your man.”

  I felt like an Israeli girl soldier, in shorts and the hot wind, sighting down the barrel of the rifle, holding the .38 with both hands. It was a strange feeling, him looking at me as I aimed. I found I couldn’t quite lose myself in the target. His eyes split my attention between the C in Coke and my awareness of him watching me.

  And I thought, this was what it was like to be beautiful. What my mother felt. The tug of eyes, pulling you back from your flight to the target. I was in two places at once, not only in my thought, my aim, but my bare feet on the dusty yard, my legs growing stronger, my breasts in the new bra, my long tanned arms, my hair flowing white in the hot wind. He was taking my silence but giving me something in return, a fullness of being recognized. I felt beautiful, but also interrupted. I wasn’t used to being so complicated.

  7

  IN NOVEMBER, when the air held blue in the afternoons and the sunlight washed the boulders in gold, I turned fourteen. Starr threw me a party, with hats and streamers, and invited Carolee’s boyfriend and even my caseworker, the Jack of Spades. There was a cake from Ralph’s Market with a hula girl in a grass skirt and my name written in blue, and they all sang “Happy Birthday.” The cake had a trick candle that wouldn’t go out, so I didn’t get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.

  Carolee bought me a mirror for my purse and Owen and Peter gave me a lizard in a jar with a bow. From Davey I got a big sheet of cardboard on which he ’d taped animal scat and Xeroxes of animal tracks to match, with carefully printed labels. Starr’s gift was a green stretchy sweater, and the social worker brought me a set of rhinestone barrettes.

  The last gift was from Ray. I carefully opened the paper, and saw the wood, carved and inlaid in the pattern of an art nouveau moonflower, the cover motif of my mother’s first book. I held my breath and took it out of the paper, a wooden jewelry box. It smelled of new wood. I ran my fingers over the moonflower, thought of Ray cutting the pieces, the sinuous edges, fitting them so perfectly you couldn’t feel the transitions in the woods. He must have done it late at night, when I was asleep. I was afraid to show how much I loved it. So I just said, “Thanks.” But I hoped he could tell.

  WHEN THE RAINS CAME, the yard turned to deep mud, and the river rose, filling its enormous channel. What had been a big dry wash littered with rocks and chaparral was transformed into a huge dirty torrent the color of a coffee milkshake. Parts of the burnt mountain sighed and gave way. I never thought it could rain so much. We kept putting pots and cartons and jugs under the leaks in Starr’s roof, emptying them in the yard.

  It was the break in a seven-year drought, and the rain that had been held back was being delivered, all at once. It lasted without a break through Christmas, leaving us crammed inside the trailer, the boys playing road race and Nintendo and watching a National Geographic double video of tornadoes, over and over again.

  I spent my days out on the porch swing, staring out at the rain, listening to its voices on the metal roof and the runoff thundering down the Tujunga, boulders tumbling, trees washed away whole, knocking into one another like bowling pins. Every color turned to a pale brownish gray.

  When there was no color, and I was lonely, I thought of Jesus. Jesus knew my thoughts, knew everything, even if I couldn’t see Him, or really feel Him, He would keep me from falling, from being washed away. Sometimes I read the tarot cards, but they were always the same, the swords, the moon, the hanged man, the burning tower with its toppled crown and people falling. Sometimes when Ray was home, he’d come out with his chess set, and we played and he got high, or we’d go out to the shed where he had his workbench set up and he ’d show me how to make little things, a birdhouse, a picture frame. Sometimes we’d just talk on the porch, listening to the streetfighting sound effect of the boys’ Double Dragons and Zaxxon video games muffled by rain. Ray propped himself against one of the posts, while I lay on the porch glider, swinging it with one foot.

  One day, he came out and smoked his pipe awhile, leaning one shoulder on the porch upright, not looking at me. He seemed moody, his face troubled.

  “You ever think about your dad?” he asked.

  “I never met him,” I said, stirring with my dangling foot slightly to keep the glider moving. “I was two when he left, or she left him, whatever.”

  “She tell you about him?”

  My father, that silhouette, a form comprised of all I did not know, a shape filled with rain. “Whenever I asked, she’d say, ‘You had no father. I’m your father. You sprang full-blown from my forehead, like Athena.’”

  He laughed, but sadly. “Some character.”

  “I found my birth certificate once. ‘Father: Anders, Klaus, no middle name. Birthplace: Copenhagen, Denmark. Residing in Venice Beach, California.’ He’d be fifty-four now.” Ray was younger than that.

  Thunder rolled, but the clouds were too thick to see lightning. The glider squeaked as I rocked myself, thinking of my father, Klaus Anders, no middle name. I’d found a Polaroid picture of him stuck in a book of my mother’s, Windward Avenue. They were sitting together in a beachside café with a bunch of other people who looked like they’d all just come in off the beach — tanned, long-haired people wearing beads, the table covered with beer bottles. Klaus had his arm across the back of her chair, careless and proprietary. They looked like they were sitting in a special patch of sunlight, an aura of beauty around them. They could have been brother and sister. A leonine blond with sensual lips, he smiled all the way and his eyes turned up at the corners. Neither my mother nor I smiled like that.

  The picture and the birth certificate were all I had of him, that and the question mark in my genetic code, all that I didn’t know about myself. “Mostly I think about what he would think of me.”

  We looked out at the sepia pepper tree, the mud in the yard thick as memory. Ray turned so he could lean his back flat against the post, lifted his hands over his head. His
shirt crawled up, I could see his hairy stomach. “He probably thinks you’re still two. That’s how I think of Seth. When the boys are down by the river, I imagine he’s down there with them. I have to remind myself he’s too big for frogs now.”

  Klaus thought of me as two. My hair like white feathers, my diaper full of sand. He never imagined that I was grown. I could walk right past him, he might even look at me the way Ray did, and never know it was his own daughter. I shivered, pulled the sleeves of my sweater over my hands.

  “Have you ever thought to call him, find him?” I asked.

  Ray shook his head. “I’m sure he hates my guts. I know his mother fed him all kinds of crap about me.”

  “I bet he misses you, though,” I said. “I miss Klaus and I never even met him. He was an artist too. A painter. I imagine he’d be proud of me.”

  “He would be,” Ray said. “Maybe someday you’ll meet him.”

  “I think about that sometimes. That when I’m an artist, he’ll read about me in the paper, and see how I turned out. When I see a middle-aged blond man sometimes, I want to call out, Klaus! And see if he turns his head.” I made the glider creak as I pushed myself slowly.

  My mother once told me she chose him because he looked like her, so it was as if she were having her own child. But there was a different story in the red Tibetan notebook with the orange binding dated Venice Beach, 1972.

  July 12. Ran into K. at Small World this afternoon. Saw him before he saw me. Thrill at the sight of him, the slight slouch of broad shoulders, paint in his hair. That threadbare shirt, so ancient it is more an idea than a shirt. I wanted him to discover me the same way, so I turned away, browsed an Illuminati chapbook. Knowing how I looked against the light through the window, my hair on fire, my dress barely there. Waiting to stop his heart.