White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  After all the fears, the warnings

  After all

  A woman’s mistakes are different from a girl’s

  They are written by fire on stone

  They are a trait and not an error...

  It was worse than I told you so. I didn’t want to believe it. I was still a girl, only fourteen. I could still be saved, couldn’t I? Redeemed. I could live a different life, I would go and sin no more. I scowled when the physical therapist flirted with me, a lean young man, kind, handsome. It took half the day to walk up and down the corridor. They moved me from Demerol to oral Percodan.

  IF I HAD had anywhere to go to, I could have been released after two weeks, but as it was, I recuperated on the county dollar until I could walk with a cane and the bandages came off. Then I was given a new placement, sent off with a thirty-day prescription for Percodan and my mother’s letters and books, the wooden box, and a lost boy’s poster of animal turds.

  10

  THE AIR IN VAN NUYS was thicker than in Sunland-Tujunga. It was a kingdom of strip malls and boulevards a quarter-mile across, neighborhoods of ground-hugging tracts dwarfed by full-growth peppers and sweet gums fifty feet high. It looked hopeful, until I saw a house down the street, and prayed, please Jesus, don’t let it be the turquoise one with the yard paved in blacktop behind the chain-link fence.

  The social worker parked in front of it. I stared. It was the color of a tropical lagoon on a postcard thirty years out of date, a Gauguin syphilitic nightmare. It was the gap in the chain of deciduous trees that cradled every other house on the block, defiantly ugly in its nakedness.

  The bubble-glass door was also turquoise, and the foster mother was a wide, hard-faced blond woman who held a dumbfounded toddler on her hip. A little boy stuck his tongue out at me from behind his mother. She glanced at my metal hospital cane, narrowed her small eyes. “You didn’t say she was lame.”

  The caseworker shrugged her narrow shoulders. I was glad I was high on Percodan, or I might have cried.

  Marvel Turlock led us through her living room dominated by a television set the size of Arizona, where a talk show hostess admonished a huge bearded man with a tattoo, and down a long hall to my new room, a made-over laundry porch with navy-and-green-striped curtains and a ripcord spread on the narrow rollaway bed. The little boy tugged at her oversized shirt and whined, like music played on a saw.

  Back in the TV room, the caseworker spread her papers on the coffee table, ready to bare the details of my life to this hardfaced woman, who told me to take Justin out to play in the backyard in a voice that was used to telling girls what to do.

  The paved backyard was thick with heat and littered with enough toys for a preschool. I saw a cat bury something in the sandbox, run away. I didn’t do anything about it. Justin roared around on his Big Wheel trike, smashing into the playhouse every round or two. I hoped he would decide to make a few mud pies. Mmm.

  After a while, the toddler came out, a little blond girl with large, transparent blue eyes. She didn’t know how much I feared the color turquoise, that I wanted to vomit thinking of her mother reading my file. If only I could have stayed in the hospital, with a steady Demerol drip. The baby headed for the sandbox. I wanted not to care, but found myself getting up, scooping out the catshit with a pail, throwing it over the fence.

  ED AND MARVEL Turlock were my first real family. We ate chicken with our hands, sucking barbecue sauce off our fingers as if forks had not yet been invented. Ed was tall and red-faced, quiet, with sandy hair going bald. He worked in the paint department of Home Depot. It didn’t surprise me to learn they got the turquoise paint at cost. We watched TV all through the meal and everybody talked and nobody listened, and I thought about Ray, and Starr, and the last time I saw Davey. Boulders and green paloverde, red-shouldered hawks. The beauty of stones, the river in flood, the stillness. My longing seesawed with hot prickling shame. Fourteen, and I’d already destroyed something I could never repair. I deserved this.

  I finished out the ninth grade at Madison Junior High, limping from class to class on my cane. My fractured hip was mending, but it was the slowest thing to heal. My shoulder was already functional, and even the chest wound that cracked my rib had stopped burning every time I straightened or bent. But the hip was slow. I was always late to class. My days passed in a haze of Percodan. Bells and desks, shuffling to the next class. The teachers’ mouths opened and butterflies burst out, too fast to capture. I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe watched a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?

  IT WASN’T LONG before my role in the turquoise house was revealed to me: babysitter, pot scrubber, laundry maid, beautician. This last I dreaded the most. Marvel would sit in the bathroom like a toad under a rock, calling for me just the way Justin called for her, relentlessly. I tried to escape by thinking of gamelan orchestras, creatures in tide pools, even the shape of the curtains, navy and green, noticing how the stripes created the curtain by the way they flowed or broke. I thought there was a meaning there, but she kept calling.

  “Astrid! Damn it, where is that girl?”

  There was no point in pretending, she’d keep calling until I came, exaggerating my limp like a servant in a horror movie.

  Her face was red when I got there, hands on her wide hips. “Where the hell have you been?”

  I never answered, just turned on the water, tested the temperature.

  “Not too hot,” she reminded me. “I’ve got a sensitive scalp.”

  I made sure it felt a little cold to me, because the Percodan I was doing around the clock made it hard to sense temperature. She knelt on the rug and stuck her head under the faucet and I washed her hair, stiff with dirt and hair spray. Her roots needed touching up. She went for a blond shade that on the package looked like soft butter gold, but on her more closely resembled the yellow shredded cellophane lining kids’ Easter baskets.

  I worked in a conditioner that smelled of rancid fat, rinsed, and sat her on the stool she’d dragged in from the kitchen. I covered the sink with newspaper and started to comb. It was like combing tangled pasta. One good yank and it would all come out. I combed starting at the bottom and worked my way up, thinking how I used to brush my mother’s hair at night. It was shiny as glass.

  Marvel talked continuously, about her friends, her Mary Kay customers, something a woman saw on Oprah — not that Marvel watched Oprah, only Sally Jessy because Oprah was a fat nignog and not good enough to scrub Marvel’s floor, though she made ten million a season, blah blah blah. I pretended she was speaking Hungarian and that I couldn’t understand a word as I put on the gloves and mixed the contents of the two bottles. The smell of ammonia was overwhelming in the small windowless bathroom, but Marvel wouldn’t let me open the door. She didn’t want Ed to know she dyed her hair.

  I separated the shreds of hair, applied bleach to the roots, set the timer. If I left the mixture too long, it would eat huge bloody sores into her scalp and all her hair would fall out. I thought that might be interesting, but I knew there were places worse than the Turlocks’. At least Marvel didn’t drink, and Ed was unattractive and barely noticed me. There wasn’t much damage I could do here.

  “This is good practice for you,” Marvel said as we waited the last five minutes before working in the color to the ends. “You could go to beauty school. That’s a good living for a woman.”

  She had big plans for me, Marvel Turlock. Looking out after my welfare. I’d rather drink bleach. I rinsed off the dye, leaning over her like a rock. She showed me a page in a hairdo magazine, a setting diagram intricate as an electrical schematic. A style called The Cosmopolitan. Upswept on the sides, with curls in the back and curled bangs, like Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe. I thought of Michael, how
he would shudder. He adored Stanwyck. I wondered how the Scottish play went. I wondered if he ever thought of me. You could not even imagine how it was, Michael.

  The pink sticky setting gel added to the stench in the hot bathroom as I wrapped the strings of hair around the curlers. I was getting faint. As soon as I was done rolling, I wrapped the scarf over her pink curlers and finally was allowed to open the bathroom door. I felt like I hadn’t breathed in an hour. Marvel went out to the family room. “Ed?” I heard her calling.

  The TV was on, but Ed had slipped out to the Good Knight bar, where he drank beer and watched the game on pay-per-view.

  “Damn him,” she said without bitterness. She turned the station to a show about middle-aged sisters and settled onto the couch with a carton of ice cream.

  Dear Astrid,

  Don’t tell me how you hate your new foster home. If they’re not beating you, consider yourself lucky. Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

  Moo.

  IT HADN’T OCCURRED to me the worst was yet to come, until my prescription ran out. I had foolishly doubled my dose, and now I lay shipwrecked on a desolate shore littered with broken glass. I caught a cold from the air-conditioning, which worked too well in my small porch room. All I could think of was how alone I was. My loneliness tasted like pennies. I thought about dying. A boy in the hospital had told me the best way was an air bubble in the bloodstream. He had bone cancer and had stolen a syringe he kept in an Archie comic book. He said if it ever got too bad, he’d shoot up some air, and it’d be over in seconds. If it weren’t for my mother’s letters, I would have thought of something. I reread them until they were soft and divided along the creases.

  When I couldn’t sleep, I’d go out in the backyard, where the crickets sang duets and the blacktop was warm as an animal under my bare feet. The crushed white gravel flowerbeds glowed in the moonlight, their sterile length punctuated by white plastic dahlias stuck into the gravel at regular intervals. I once sent my mother a painting of the house set in its sea of blacktop and white gravel edges, and she sent me a poem about the infant Achilles, whose mother dipped him in black water to make him immortal. It didn’t make me feel any better.

  I sat on the redwood picnic table and listened to music coming through the closed shutters of the house next door. They were always closed, but a jazz saxophone worked its way out from between the wood slats, music personal as a touch. I ran my fingertips over the dark carbon blade of my mother’s old knife, imagining opening my wrists. If you did it in the bathtub, they said, you didn’t even feel it. I wouldn’t have hesitated, except for my mother. But the scales were in precarious balance, everything on one side but my mother’s letters, light as good night, a hand touching my hair.

  I played with the knife, spread out my hand on top of the slide, and jabbed the point past my fingers. Johnny johnny johnny whoops! Johnny johnny whoops! Johnny johnny johnny johnny. I liked it just as well when it stabbed me.

  Dear Astrid,

  I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Just make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

  Mother.

  WITHOUT PERCODAN, I began to see why mothers abandoned their children, left them in supermarkets and at playgrounds. I had never imagined the whining, the constancy of those tiny demands, the endless watch. I told Marvel I had papers and reports to write, and buried myself in after-school library shelves, working my way through the book lists that came in my mother’s letters, sharing table space with old men reading newspapers on sticks and Catholic school girls hiding teen magazines inside their history books.

  I read everything — Colette, Françoise Sagan, Anaïs Nin’s Spy in the House of Love, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I read The Moon and Sixpence, about Gauguin, and the Chekhov short stories Michael had recommended. They didn’t have Miller but there was Kerouac. I read Lolita, but the man was nothing like Ray. I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.

  One day a title jumped out at me from a shelf of adventure books. I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages, ignoring the dark glances of the girls in their white shirts and plaid jumpers, and fell into it as into a pool during a dry season.

  The name of the book was The Art of Survival.

  Every religion needs its bible, and I had found mine, not a moment too soon. I read it in eighteen hours, and then started over again. I learned how to stay alive for long weeks on the open sea when my white ocean liner went down. When shipwrecked, you catch fish, press their juices to drink. You sponge up morning dew off your life raft’s rubberized deck. Adrift on a sailboat, you catch rainwater on the canvas. But if the sails were dirty, the book pointed out, the decks crusted with salt, what water you caught would be worthless. You had to keep the decks clean, the sails rinsed, you had to be ready.

  I looked at my life and saw quite clearly that I was not surviving it in the turquoise house. I was letting my sails crust up with salt. I had to stop playing johnny johnny and concentrate on preparing for rain, preparing for rescue. I decided I would take daily walks, stop overdoing the limp, retire my cane. I would pull myself together.

  I SAT ON THE BUS on the way home from school, head aching from the shrill laughter of the other kids, and recounted the grim means to survive disaster at sea. You make fishhooks from any kind of bent metal, form line from the thread in your clothes, bait the hook with bits of fish or dead fellow passengers, even a strip of your own flesh if you have to. I forced myself to imagine it, taking the sharp edge of a C ration and piercing my thigh. It hurt so much I could hardly stay conscious, but I knew I had to finish the job, there was no point passing out, it would just heal and I’d have to do it all over again. So I kept on until I had the yellow worm in my hand, bloodbacked and warm. Hooked it onto the sharpened shred from the can, threw it into the sea on my handmade thread.

  Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn’t see possibilities. Then came despair. A man from Japan was adrift four days in a boat when he panicked and hung himself. He was found twenty minutes later. A sailor from Soochow floated 116 days on a life raft before he was found. You never knew when rescue might come.

  And if my life had come to this — shame and long bus rides and the stink of diesel-soaked air, trying not to get beat up at Madison Junior High, Justin’s sweater and Caitlin’s red rash — people had gone through far worse and survived. Despair was the killer. I had to prepare, hold hope between my palms like the flame of the last match in a long Arctic night.

  When I couldn’t sleep, I’d sit on the picnic table in the backyard, listening to the music from our next-door neighbor’s house and imagine my mother, awake in her cell just like me. Would I want her around if I’d crashed my plane in Papua New Guinea or Pará, Brazil? We’d slog through a hundred-mile labyrinth of mangrove forest, covered with leeches like in The African Queen, maybe even pierced with a long native spear. My mother wouldn’t panic, rip out the spear, and die of blood loss. I knew she could do the right thing, let the maggots feed in the wound, clearing out the hole, and then in five days or a week, pull out the spear. She would even write a poem about it.

  But I could also see her making a terrible mistake, a failure in judgment. I imagined us adrift in a life raft ten days outsi
de shipping lanes, pressing fish juice, sponging each drop of water from the clean morning deck, when suddenly she determined seawater wasn’t undrinkable after all. I saw her going swimming among sharks.

  “ASTRID, come help me,” Marvel called. She came out from the kitchen to where I sat on the back steps watching the kids, and twisted her neck around to see the picture, five blackened Frenchmen who tried to cross the Qaza basin in Egypt by day. “Still reading that book? You ought to think about the army, you like that kind of stuff. They take care of their people fine. Now they let women in, you’d probably get along. You work hard, you keep your mouth shut. Come on, help me with the groceries.”

  I went with her to unload the cans of soup and bottles of soda, cheese slices and family-pack pork chops, more food than I’d ever seen in my life. The army, I thought. How little she knew me. I appreciated her interest, I’d come to believe she really did want me somewhere comfortable, with a decent paycheck. But I would rather live out on the desert alone, like an old prospector. All I needed was a small water source. What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.

  Or even better, I thought, stashing packaged cocoa mix and Tang in the cupboards, a cabin in the woods, snow in the winter, jagged mountains all around, you’d have to hike in. I’d cut my own wood, have a few dogs, maybe a horse, put in bushels of food and stay there for years. I’d have a cow, plant a garden, it was a short growing season, but I’d raise enough to get by.

  My mother hated the country, couldn’t wait to get out. When I had her, the city was fine, it was free Thursday afternoons at the museum downtown, concerts on Sundays, poetry readings, her friends acting or painting or casting their private parts in plaster of paris. But now, what was the point. I hadn’t been to a museum since her arrest. Just that morning I saw a piece in the paper about a Georgia O’Keeffe show at the L.A. County Art Museum, asked Marvel if she’d take me.