White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  I looked at Ray, gazing out into the rain — and I knew how she felt. I loved his smoke, his smell, his sad hazel eyes. I couldn’t have him as a father, but at least we could talk like this out on the porch. He relit his pipe, toked, coughed.

  “You might be disappointed,” he said. “He might be a jerk.

  Most guys are jerks.” I rocked myself, knowing it wasn’t true. “You’re not.” “Ask my ex.” “What you doing out there?” Starr opened the screen door, slammed it behind her. She was wearing a sweater she knitted herself, fuzzy and yellow as a chick. “Is this a party anybody can come to?”

  “I’m going to blast that fucking TV set,” Ray said evenly.

  She pulled at the brown tassels of spider plants over her head, plucking the dried leaves and throwing them off the porch, her breasts pushing out of the V neck. “Look at you, smoking in front of the kids. You always were a bad influence.” But she smiled when she said it, soft and flirting. “Do me a favor, Ray baby? I’m out of cigs, could you run down to the store and get me a carton?” She flashed him her flat wide smile.

  “I need some beer anyway,” he said. “You want to come, Astrid?” As if her smile couldn’t stretch anymore, it sprang back to the center, then she stretched it again. “You can go yourself, can’t you, big boy? Astrid needs to help me for a minute.” Pluck, pluck, tearing the baby spiders off with the dead leaves.

  Ray got his jacket and ducked out under the waterfall of water coming off the corrugated steel porch roof, the jacket pulled up to cover his head.

  “You and me need to talk, missy,” Starr said to me as Ray closed the cab door to the truck and started the motor.

  Reluctantly, I followed her back into the house, into her bedroom. Starr never talked to the kids. Her room was dark and held the smell of unwashed grown-ups, dense and loamy, a woman and a man. The bed was unmade. A kid’s room never smelled like that, no matter how many were sleeping there. I wanted to open a window.

  She sat down on the unmade bed and reached for the pack of Benson and Hedges 100s, saw it was empty, threw it away. “You’re having a good time here, aren’t you,” she said, peering into the drawer of the bedside table, rummaging inside. “Making yourself at home? Getting comfortable?”

  I traced the flower pattern on her sheets, it was a poppy. My fingers followed the aureole, and then the feelers in the middle. Poppy, the shape of my mother’s undoing.

  “A little too darn comfortable, I’d say.” She shut the drawer, the little ring of the pull clicking. She tugged the blanket up, so I couldn’t trace the flower anymore. “I may not be some genius, but I’m getting your game. Believe me, it takes one to know one.”

  “One what?” I couldn’t help but be curious about what I was that Starr recognized in herself.

  “Going after my man.” She straightened out a cigarette butt from the plaid beanbag ashtray on the nightstand and lit it.

  I had to laugh. “I wasn’t.” That was what she saw? Bang bang bang, Lord almighty? “I didn’t.”

  “Always hanging around, handling his ‘tools’ — ‘What’s this for, Uncle Ray?’ Playing with his guns? I’ve seen the two of you. Everybody asleep except the two of you, cuddling up, just as sweet as you please.” She exhaled the stale butt-smoke into the close, humid air.

  “He’s old,” I said. “We’re not doing anything.”

  “He’s not that old,” Starr said. “He’s a man, missy. He sees what he sees and he does what he can. I’ve got to talk fast before he gets back, but I got to tell you, I decided I’m calling Children’s Services, so whatever you were thinking, it’s all over now, Baby Blue. You’re history.”

  I stared at her, her furry lashes. She couldn’t be that mean, could she? I hadn’t done anything. Sure, I loved him, but I couldn’t help that. I loved her too, and Davey, all of them. It was unfair. She couldn’t be serious.

  I started to protest, but she held up her hand, the butt smoldering between her fingers. “Don’t try to argue me out of it. I got a nice thing going here now. Ray’s the best man I ever had, treats me nice. Maybe you haven’t been trying, but I smell S-E-X, missy, and I’m not taking any chances. I lived too long and come too far to blow it now.”

  I sat like a fish in that airless room, flopping, as the rain battered the metal roof and walls. She was kicking me out, for nothing. I felt the ocean tugging me from my tiny little place on the rock. I could hear the river, carrying its tons of debris. I tried to think of an explanation, a reason that might satisfy her.

  “I never had a father,” I said.

  “Don’t.” She crushed the twice-smoked butt out in the ashtray, watched her fingers. “I’ve got myself and my own kids to worry about. You and me, we hardly know each other. I don’t owe you a thing.” She looked down at the front of her fuzzy sweater and brushed at some ash that had fallen on her full breast.

  I was slipping, falling. I had trusted Starr and I’d never given her a reason to doubt me. It wasn’t fair. She was a Christian, but she wasn’t acting on faith, on goodness. “What about charity?” I said, like a falling man reaching for a branch. “Jesus would give me a chance.”

  She stood up. “I’m not Jesus,” she said. “Not even close.”

  I sat on the bed, praying to the voice in the rain. Please, Jesus, don’t let her do this to me. Jesus, if you can see this, open up her heart. Please Jesus, don’t let it be like this.

  “I’m sorry, you were a good kid,” she said. “But that’s life.”

  The only answer was rain. Silence and tears. Nothing. I thought of my mother. What she would do if she were me. She would not hesitate. She would spare nothing to have what she wanted. And thinking of her, I felt something flow into my emptiness like a flexible rod of rebar climbing up my spine. I knew it was evil, what I was feeling, self-will, but if it was, then it was. I suddenly saw us on a giant chessboard, and saw my move.

  “He might be mad,” I said. “You thought of that? If he knew you sent me away, because you were jealous.”

  Starr had been halfway to the door, but she stopped and turned around. She looked at me as if she ’d never seen me before. I was surprised at how fast the words poured out of me then. I was the one who never had words. “Men don’t like jealous women. You’re trying to make him a prisoner. He’s going to hate you. He might even break up with you.”

  And I liked the way she flinched, knowing I had caused the lines in her forehead. There was power in me now, where there had been none.

  She pulled down her sweater so her breasts were even more prominent, glanced at herself in the mirror. Then she laughed. “What do you know about men. You baby.”

  But I felt the doubt that had made her turn to the mirror, and kept going. “I know that men don’t like women who try to own them. They dump them.”

  Starr hovered by her dresser, uncertain now whether she should stop listening to me and get rid of me quick, or let me go on mining the possibilities of her doubts. She busied herself looking for another butt in the ashtray, found one that wasn’t so long, straightened it out between her fingers, and lit it with her powder-blue Bic lighter.

  “Especially when there’s nothing going on. I like you, I like him, I like the kids, I would never do anything to screw it up. Don’t you know that?” The more I said it, the less true it was. The angel on her bureau looked down, ashamed, afraid to see me. The rain drummed on the roof.

  “Swear you’re not interested in him?” she said finally, squinting against the vile smoke. She grabbed the Bible off the bedside table, a white leather Bible with red ribbons and a gilded edge. “Swear on the Bible?”

  I put my hand on it. It could have been the phone book for all I cared now. “I swear to God,” I said.

  SHE NEVER CALLED Children’s Services, but she watched my every move, every gesture. I wasn’t used to being watched, it made me feel important. I sensed a layer of myself had been peeled off that day in her bedroom, and what was under it glowed.

  One night she was late gettin
g dinner, and as we were finishing, Uncle Ray glanced at the clock. “You’re going to be tardy if you don’t get a move on.”

  Starr leaned back in her seat and reached for the coffeepot behind her on the counter, poured herself a cup. “I guess they can get on without me for one night, don’t you think, baby?”

  The following week, she skipped two more meetings, and the third week, she actually missed church. Instead, they made love all morning, and when they finally did get up, she took us all out to the IHOP, where we ate chocolate pancakes and waffles with whipped cream in a big corner booth. Everyone was laughing and having a good time, but all I could see was Ray’s arm around her shoulder on the back of the leatherette booth. I felt strange, and moved the waffle around on my plate. I wasn’t hungry anymore.

  THE RAINS PASSED, and now in the nights the new-washed sky showed all its stars. The boys and I stood out in the darkest part of the clay-muddy yard, listening to the runoff on the Tujunga out in the dark beyond the trees. Heavy pancakes of mud congealed around my boots as I craned my head back in the vapor-breath cold and tried to pick out the dippers and the crosses. Davey’s books didn’t show so many stars. I couldn’t separate them.

  I thought I saw a streak of light. I wasn’t sure if I even saw it. I gazed upward, trying not to blink, waited.

  “There!” Davey pointed.

  In a different quadrant of the sky, another star broke loose. It was eerie, the one thing you didn’t plan on, stellar movement. I tried to keep my eyes open without blinking. When you blinked, you missed them. I held them open for the light to develop on them like a photograph.

  The little boys shivered despite the jackets over their pajamas and muddy boots, chattering and giggling in the cold and the excitement of being up so late as they gazed at the stars that started pinging like pinballs, mouths opened in case one should fall in. It was completely dark except for the line of Christmas lights that twinkled along the edge of the trailer porch.

  The screen door opened and slammed. I didn’t have to look to know it was him. The flare of a match, the warm stinky pot smell. “Ought to take down those Christmas lights,” he said. He came out on the yard where we were, the ember glow, and then the sharpness of his body, the smell of new wood.

  “It’s the Quadrantid shower,” Davey said. “We’ll be getting forty an hour pretty soon. It’s the shortest-lived meteorite display, but the densest except for the Perseids.”

  I could hear the mud sucking at his boots as he shifted his weight. I was glad it was dark, that he couldn’t see the flush of pleasure on my face as he drew closer, looking up at the sky, as if he cared about the Quadrantids, as if that’s why he’d come out.

  “There!” Owen said. “Did you see it, Uncle Ray? Did you?”

  “Yeah, I saw it buddy. I saw it.”

  He was standing right next to me. If I shifted just an inch to my left, I could brush him with my sleeve. I felt the radiant heat of him across the narrow gap between us in the darkness. We had never stood so close.

  “You and Starr having a beef?” he asked me softly.

  I exhaled vapor, imagined I was smoking, like Dietrich in The Blue Angel. “What did she say?”

  “Nothing. She’s just been acting funny lately.”

  Shooting stars hurled themselves into the empty places, burned up. Just for the pleasure of it. Just like this. I could have swallowed the night whole.

  Ray toked too hard, coughed, spat. “Must be hard on her, getting older, pretty girls coming up in the same house.”

  I gazed up as if I hadn’t heard, but what I was thinking was, tell me more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, it was base, what did pretty matter? I had thought that so many times with my mother. A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it.

  “She still looks good,” I said, thinking that it wouldn’t be so hard on her if he didn’t follow me out into the star-filled night, if he didn’t watch me the way he did, touching his mouth with his fingertips.

  But I didn’t want him to stop. I was sorry for Starr, but not enough. I had the sin virus. I was the center of my own universe, it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around me, and I liked the way he looked at me. Who had ever looked at me, who had ever noticed me? If this was evil, let God change my mind.

  Dear Astrid,

  Do not tell me how much you admire this man, how he cares for you! I don’t know which is worse, your Jesus phase or the advent of a middle-aged suitor. You must find a boy your own age, someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered, someone whose fingers are a poem. Never lie down for the father. I forbid it, do you understand?

  Mother.

  You couldn’t stop it, Mother. I didn’t have to listen to you anymore.

  IT WAS SPRING, painting the hillsides with orange drifts of California poppies, dotting the cracks in gas stations and parking lots with poppies and blue lupine and Indian paintbrush. Even in the burn zones, the passes were matted with yellow mustard as we jounced along in Ray’s old pickup truck.

  I told him I wanted to see the new development up in Lancaster, the custom cabinetry he’d been working on. Maybe he could pick me up after school sometime. “You know how funny Starr’s been,” I said. Every day I came out of school hoping I would see his truck with the feathered roach clip hanging from the rearview mirror. Finally he had come.

  The development itself was bare as a scar, with torn and dusty streets of big new houses. Some were already roofed and sided, others finished to the insulation, some skeletal and open to the sky. Ray led me through the house where he was working, clean, the exterior finished, smelling of raw sawdust. He showed me the solid maple cabinetry in the eat-in kitchen, the bay window, the built-in bookcases, the backyard gazebo. I felt the sun glinting off my hair, knew how my mother felt that day long ago at the Small World bookstore, when she had seen my father and stood in the window, beautiful in the light.

  I let him show me around like a real estate agent — the living room’s two-story picture window, the streamlined toilets in the two and a half baths, the turned banister, the carved newel post. “I lived in a house like this when I was married,” he said, running his hand along the flank of the heavy banister, pushing against the solidity of the post. I tried to imagine Ray in a two-and-a-half-bath life, dinner on the table at six, the regular job, the wife, the kid. But I couldn’t. Anyway, even when he was doing it, he was going to the Trop instead of coming home, falling in love with strippers.

  I followed him upstairs, where he showed me the finish work, cedar-lined linen closets and window seats. In the master bedroom we could hear the hammering from the other houses and the sound of the bulldozer cutting a pad for a new one. Ray looked out the smudgy casement at the surrounding construction. I imagined what the room would look like once the people moved in. Lilac carpets and blue roses on the bedspread, white-and-gold double dresser, headboard. I liked it better the way it was, pink wood, the sweet raw smell. I watched the browns and greens of his Pendleton shirt, his hands spread on either side of the window frame, as he looked down into the unplanted yard. “What are you thinking?” I asked him.

  “That they won’t be happy,” he said quietly.

  “Who?”

  “People who buy these houses. I’m building houses for people who won’t be happy in them.” His good face looked so sad.

  I came closer to him. “Why can’t they?”

  He pressed his forehead to the window, so new there was still a sticker on it. “Because it’s always wrong. They don’t want to hurt anyone.”

  I could smell his sweat, sharp and strong, a man’s smell, and it was hot in the room with the new windows, heady with the fragrance of raw wood. I put my hands around his waist, pressed my face into the scratchy wool between his shoulder
blades, something I’d wanted to do since he held me that first Sunday when I’d ditched church and stayed behind in the trailer. I closed my eyes and breathed in his scent, dope and sweat and new wood. He didn’t move, just gave a shuddering sigh.

  “You’re a kid,” he said.

  “I’m a fish swimming by, Ray,” I whispered into his neck. “Catch me if you want me.”

  For a moment he stood still as a suspect, his hands open on the window frame. Then he caught my hands, turned them over and kissed the palms, pressed them to his face. And I was the one who was trembling, it was me and my marguerite.

  He turned and held me. It was precisely how I had wanted to be held, all my life — by strong arms and a broad, wool-shirted chest smelling of tobacco and pot. I threw my head back and it was my first kiss, I opened my mouth for him to taste me, my lips, my tongue. I couldn’t stop shaking unless he held me very tight.

  He pushed me away then, gently. “Look, maybe we should go back. It isn’t right.”

  I didn’t care what was right anymore. I had a condom from Carolee’s drawer in my pocket, and the man I’d always wanted for once in a place we could be alone.

  I took off my plaid shirt, tossed it onto the floor. I took off my T-shirt. I took off my bra and let him see me, small and very pale, not Starr, but me, all I had. I untied my hiking boots, kicked them off. I unbuttoned my jeans and let them fall.

  Ray looked sad right then, like someone was dying, his back pressed against the smudged window. “I never wanted this to happen,” he said.

  “You’re a liar, Ray,” I said.

  Then he was kneeling in front of me, his arms around my hips, kissing my belly, my thighs, his hands on my bare bottom, fingers in the silky wetness between my legs, tasting me there. My smell on his mouth as I knelt down with him, ran my hands over his body, opened his clothes, felt for him, hard, larger than I’d thought it would be. And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.