White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  8

  ALL DAY AT SCHOOL, and in the Ray-less afternoons down the wash, or at dinner with Starr and the kids, or when we watched TV at night, Ray was my only thought, my singular obsession. How soft his skin was, softer than you’d think a man’s skin could be, and the thickness of his arms, the sinews tracing along his forearms like tree roots, and the sad way he looked at me when my clothes were gone.

  I sketched the way he looked nude, gazing out the window after we’d made love, or lying on the pile of carpet padding he’d dragged into the corner of the new bedroom. On our afternoons we ’d lie on those pads, our legs entwined, smooth over hairy, his fingers lightly covering my breast and playing with my nipple, making it stand up like a pencil eraser. I hid the drawings in the box with my mother’s journals, a place Starr would never think to look. I knew I should throw them out, but I couldn’t bear to.

  “Why are you with Starr?” I asked him one afternoon, tracing the white scar under his ribs where a Vietcong bullet had left its mark.

  He ran his fingertips over my ribs so the goose bumps came up. “She’s the only woman who ever let me just be myself,” he said.

  “I would,” I said, doing the same on his balls with the back of my fingernails, making him jump. “Is she good in bed, is that it?”

  “That’s personal,” he said. He covered my hand with his and held it to his groin. I felt him growing hard again. “I don’t talk about one woman to another. That’s plain bad manners.”

  He ran his finger between my legs, into the wet like silk, then put his finger in his mouth. I never imagined it would be like this, to be desired. Everything was possible. He pulled me on top of him and I rode him like a horse in the surf, my forehead against his chest, riding through a spray of sparks. If my mother were free, would this be one of her lovers, filling me up with his stars? And would my mother watch me the way Starr did, realizing I was no longer transparent as an encyclopedia overlay?

  No. If she were free, I wouldn’t be here. She would never have allowed me to have this. She kept everything good for herself.

  “I love you, Ray,” I said.

  “Shhh,” he said, holding my hips. His eyelids fluttered. “Don’t say anything.”

  So I just rode, the ocean spray tingling all over me, the tide rising, filled with starfish and phosphorescence, into the dawn.

  STARR’S EDGINESS spilled over, mostly at the kids. She was accusing her daughter of all the things she wanted to accuse me of. Carolee barely ever came home, she went dirt biking with Derrick in the afternoon, the drone of the bikes like a nagging doubt. When I wasn’t with Ray, I stayed at school or went to the library, or hunted frogs with the boys as the Big Tujunga’s winter flow slowly dried up into rivulets and muddy pools. The frogs looked like the mud and you had to be very still to see them. Mostly I just sat on a rock in the sun and painted.

  But one day I came home from the wash to find Starr curled up on the porch swing, her hair in hot rollers, wearing a blue blouse tied up tight under her breasts and tiny cutoffs that bunched up at her crotch. She was playing with the kittens the cat had had under the house that spring, fishing for them with ribbons Davey had tied to a stick. She was laughing and talking to them, it wasn’t like her. She usually called them rats with fur.

  “Well, the artiste. Come talk to me, missy, I’m so bored I’m talking to cats.”

  She never wanted to talk to me, and there was something about her mouth that seemed slower than the words she was saying. She gave me the stick and took a cigarette out of the Benson and Hedges pack. She stuck the wrong end in her mouth, and I watched to see if she would light it. She caught it just in time. “Don’t know which end is up,” she joked, and took a sip from her coffee cup. I dragged the ribbons along the carpet, luring a little gray-and-white furball out from beneath the swing. It hopped, pounced, ran off.

  “So talk to me,” she said, taking an exaggerated drag from her cigarette and blowing it out in a long stream. She bared her lovely throat as she arched back her neck, her head huge with hot curlers like a dandelion puff. “We used to talk all the time. Everybody’s so darn busy, that’s what’s wrong with life. You seen Carolee?”

  Up the road, we could both see the plumes of dust from the dirt bikes rising into the thin blue sky. I wanted to be dust, smoke, the wind, sun glimmering over the chaparral, anywhere but sitting here with the woman whose man I was stealing.

  “Carolee’s trouble,” Starr said, holding out her foot to look at the silvery pedicure. “You stay away from her. I’m going to have to talk to that girl, stop the downward spiral. Needs a big dose of the Word.” She pulled out a curler, looked cross-eyed at the ringlet over her forehead, started pulling out the other ones, dropping them into her lap. “You’re the good girl. I’m making my amends to you. A-mend. Where’s Carolee, you seen her?” she asked again.

  “I think she’s with Derrick,” I said, wiggling the ribbon end near the glider where the kitten was hiding.

  She leaned her head forward to get the curlers at the back. “Of all the white trash. His mama’s so dumb she puts the TV dinner in the oven with the box still on.” She laughed and dropped the curler, and the kitten that had just come out dashed back underneath the glider.

  That’s when I realized Starr was drunk. She’d been sober eighteen months, kept the AA chips on her key ring, red, yellow, blue, purple. It was such a big deal to her, too. I never quite understood it. Ray drank. My mother drank. Michael drank from the moment he finished reading his Books on Tape at noon until he passed out at midnight. It didn’t seem to hurt him any. If anything, Starr looked happier now. I wondered why she’d tried so hard to be some kind of saint, when it wasn’t really her nature. What was the big deal?

  “He’s crazy about me, you know,” she said. “That Ray. There’s a man that needs a real woman.” She rolled her hips in their tight cutoffs as if she were sitting on him right now. “His wife wouldn’t do shit for him.” She took another hit on her cigarette, lowering her mascaraed eyelashes, remembering. “That man was starving for a piece. I saw her once, you know. The wife.” She drank from her coffee cup, and now I could smell it. “Sailor’s delight. Sensible shoes, you know what I’m saying. Wouldn’t give head or anything. He ’d come to the Trop and just sit and watch us girls with those sad eyes, like a starving man in a supermarket.” She squared her shoulders, rolled them forward, so I’d get an idea of what Ray had been watching, the cross caught in her cleavage, Jesus drowning in flesh. She laughed, dropped cigarette ash on the white-patched kitten. “I just had to fall in love with him.”

  It made me queasy thinking of Ray in some strip club, goggling at the girls with their enormous breasts. He just didn’t know where else to go. I picked up the stick again, rustled the ribbons, trying to get the kitten interested so she wouldn’t see my red face.

  “I must have been crazy to think you and him... ,” she said into her coffee cup, drained it and put it on the mosaic-topped table with a thud. “I mean, look at you, you’re just a baby. You didn’t even wear a bra until I got you that one.”

  She was convincing herself there was nothing between Ray and me, that nothing could possibly be going on, because she was a woman and I was nothing. But I could still feel how he knelt in front of me on the unfinished floor, how he held me around the thighs, kissed my bare belly. I could smell the odor of the raw wood, feel the clutch of his fingers, and we burst into flame like oilfat chaparral in oleander time.

  A FULL MOON poured white through the curtains. The refrigerator cycled around in the kitchen, ice cubes dropping in the ice-maker. “I can’t believe she’d go out after all this time,” Carolee said. “Never trust an alcoholic, Astrid. Rules one, two, and three.”

  Carolee sat up in bed, peeled off her nightgown, put on her miniskirt, nylons, and a shiny shirt. She opened the window, pushed the screen out, and clambered onto the dresser, high-heeled shoes in her hand. I heard her drop down on the porch outside.

  “And where you think you
’re goin’, missy?” Starr’s voice came from out of the darkness.

  “Since when did you care,” I could hear Carolee reply.

  I went to the window. I couldn’t see Starr, only Carolee’s hip jutting out in her white skirt, hands on her hips, her elbows defiant.

  “Goin’ out to spread ’em for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.” Starr must have had a few on the porch, in the lawn chair over by the living room.

  Carolee put on her high heels, one at a time, and walked out into the yard, which was full-moon lit, bright as a stage. “So what if I am.” I wished I could draw the way her broad-shouldered body threw a shadow on the moonpale dust. How brave she looked just then.

  Starr wouldn’t let it go at that. “You know what they say. ‘Call Carolee, she does it for free.’ Whores are supposed to get paid, don’t you know anything?”

  “You should know better than me.” Carolee turned and started walking to the road.

  Starr lurched across my field of vision, staggering down the stairs in a shortie nightgown, and smacked Carolee in the face. The sound of the blow reverberated in the still night, irrevocable.

  Carolee’s arm drew back and struck. Starr’s head jerked to one side. It was ugly, but fascinating, like a movie, like I didn’t even know them. Starr grabbed her by the hair and dragged her around as Carolee screamed and tried to hit her, but she couldn’t straighten up far enough to reach her. So she took off a high heel and hit her with that, and Starr let her go.

  I saw Ray come down the steps wearing just a pair of jeans. I knew he had nothing on underneath, that body I loved so much, as Carolee grabbed Starr by the front of her nightgown and shoved her down hard in the dirt. She stood above Starr so she had to look up at Carolee ’s legs in their nylons, her high-heeled shoes. How bad could this get, could a daughter kick a mother in the face? I could see that she wanted to.

  I was relieved when Ray got between them and helped Starr to her feet. “Let’s go back to bed, baby.”

  “You lousy drunk,” Carolee yelled after them. “I hate you.”

  “Get lost then,” Starr said, staggering unsteadily on Ray’s arm. “Bug off. Who needs you.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Ray said. “Let’s just sleep it off, okay?”

  “I’ll leave,” Carolee said. “You bet I will.”

  “You leave, you are never coming back, missy.”

  “Who’d the fuck want to?” Carolee said.

  She slammed into our room, opening drawers, pulling stuff onto the bed, cramming what would fit into a flowered suitcase. “Bye, Astrid. It’s been real.”

  Davey and the little boys were waiting in the hall, scared, blinking from sleep. “Don’t go,” Davey said.

  “I can’t stay. Not in this nuthouse.” Carolee gave him a quick one-armed hug and went out, banging her suitcase against her knee. She walked right past Ray and Starr, never turning her head, strode out of the yard on her high heels and walked down the road, smaller and smaller.

  I watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait. This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren’t crying, that it wasn’t the worst day of their lives. That they didn’t want their mothers to come running after them, begging their forgiveness, that they wouldn’t have gone down on their knees and thanked God if they could stay.

  WHEN CAROLEE LEFT, Starr lost something essential, something she needed, like a gyroscope that kept the plane from flipping over or a depth gauge that told you whether you were going deeper or coming up. She might suddenly want to go out dancing, or stay home and drink and complain, or get all sweet and sloppy and want to be a family and play games and cook brownies that burned, and you never knew which it would be. Peter didn’t eat her casserole one night and she took his plate and turned it over on his head. And I knew it was my defiance, my sin. I took it all, never said a word.

  If only I hadn’t started with Ray. I made her go off her program. I was the snake in the garden.

  But knowing it wasn’t enough to make me stop. I had the virus. Ray and I made love in the new houses, we made love in his woodshop behind the garage, sometimes even in the wash among the boulders. We tried not to be in the same room at the same time when Starr was home, we set the air on fire between us.

  THEN ONE DAY Starr was yelling at the boys for their mess in the living room, some plastic lizards and Legos and an exhibit Davey was working on. It was a painstakingly accurate model of Vasquez Rocks and the fossils he’d found there on a field trip with his class, turritella shells and trilobites from the Cambrian era. Starr threw toys and puzzles and then marched over to Davey, lifted her foot and crushed his project in two fast stomps. “I told you to clean this crap up!”

  The other boys ran out the screen door, but Davey knelt by his ruined exhibit, touching the crushed shells. He looked up, and I didn’t have to see his eyes behind his glasses to know he was crying. “I hate you!” Davey yelled. “You ruin everything! You can’t even comprehend —”

  Starr grabbed him, started hitting him, holding him by one arm so he couldn’t get away, screaming, “Who do you think I am? Don’t you call me stupid! I’m your mother! I’m a person! I can’t do all this by myself! Have some respect!”

  It started as a spanking, but it turned into just a beating. The little boys had run away, but I couldn’t. This was because of me.

  “Starr,” I said, trying to pull her off. “Don’t.”

  “You shut up!” she screeched, and threw me off. Her hair was in her face, her eyes white all the way around the pupil. “You have nothing to say, you hear me?”

  Finally she stumbled away, crying into her hands. Davey just sat by the devastation of his project, and I could see the tears rolling down his face. I crouched next to him, seeing if there was anything that could be salvaged.

  Starr opened the Jim Beam she ’d started keeping in the cabinet with the breakfast cereal, poured herself a glass, threw in a few ice cubes. She was drinking right in front of us now. “You just can’t talk to people like that,” she said, wiping her eyes, her mouth. “Little shit.”

  Davey’s arm hung at a funny angle. “Does your arm hurt?” I asked softly.

  He nodded, but he wouldn’t look at me. Did he know, could he guess?

  Starr sat on a molded kitchen chair, slumped with exhaustion after the beating. Sullen, drinking her booze. She took a cigarette from the gold package and lit it.

  “I think it’s dislocated,” Davey said.

  “Whine, whine, whine. Why don’t you go somewhere and whine.”

  I filled a bag with ice, put it against Davey’s shoulder. It looked bad. His mouth was all puckery. He never whined.

  “He needs to go to the hospital,” I said, afraid, trying not to sound accusing.

  “Well I can’t drive him. You drive him.” She fumbled in her purse for the keys and threw them at me. She had forgotten I was only fourteen.

  “Call Uncle Ray.”

  “No.”

  “Mom?” Davey was sobbing now. “Help me.”

  She looked at him, and now she saw the angle of his arm, the way he held it out by the elbow in front of him. “Oh Lord.” She ran over to Davey, knocking her shin into the coffee table, crouched by her son where he sat on the couch, holding his arm. “Oh, mister, I’m sorry. Mommy’s sorry, baby.” The more she thought about it, the more upset she got, running at the nose, trying to comb his hair back with her awkward hands, making jerky, meaningless gestures. He turned his head away.

  She crossed her arms across her chest, but low, more toward the belly, and huddled next to the couch on the floor, rocking herself, hitting her forehead with her fist. “What do I do, Lord, what do I do?”

  “I’m calling Uncle Ray,” I said.

  Davey knew the number, recited it while I called him at the new houses. Half an hour later, he was home, his mouth set in a thin line.

  “I didn’t mean it,” Starr said, her hands in fro
nt of her like an opera singer. “It was an accident. You’ve got to believe me.”

  Nobody said anything. We left Starr crying in monotonous sobs, took Davey to the emergency hospital, where they popped his shoulder back in, taped it down. We concocted a story about how we were playing on the river. He jumped off a rock and fell. It sounded stupid even to me, but Davey made us promise not to say it was Starr. He still loved her, after everything.

  EASTER. A pure crystalline morning where you could see every bush and boulder on the mountain. The air was so clean it hurt. Starr was in the kitchen fixing a ham, pushing little points of cloves into the squares she’d scored into the top. She’d been sober for two weeks, taking a meeting a day. We were all making an effort. Davey’s sling was a constant reminder of how bad it could get.

  Starr put the ham in the oven, and we all went to church, even Uncle Ray, though he stayed behind in the car for a minute to get stoned before he came in, I could smell it as he passed by me to take the seat between Owen and Starr. Her eyes begged Reverend Thomas for a dose of the Blood. I tried to pray, to feel once again that there was something bigger than just me, someone who cared what I did, but it was gone, I could no longer detect the presence of God in that cinder-block church or in what was left of my soul. Starr yearned toward the sagging Jesus on the pearwood cross, while Uncle Ray cleaned his fingernails with his Swiss Army knife and I waited for the singing to start.

  Afterward we stopped at a gas station and Uncle Ray bought her an Easter lily, the promise of a new life.

  At home, the trailer smelled of ham. Starr served up lunch, creamed corn, canned pineapple rings, brown-and-serve rolls. Ray and I couldn’t look at each other, or it would all start again. We looked at the little kids, we played with our food, congratulated Starr on her cooking. Ray said Reverend Thomas wasn’t half bad. We had to put our eyes anywhere but on the other one ’s face. I studied the little bowl of pink peppermint ice cream with jelly beans sprinkled over, and the Easter lily in the middle of the table in its foil-wrapped pot. We hadn’t been together since we took Davey to the emergency room. We hadn’t talked about it, how it had all gone too far.