White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  “It’s a man’s world, Astrid,” she said. “You ever hear that?”

  I nodded. A man’s world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you could get raped or beat up. A man’s world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money, and didn’t have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.

  But I didn’t know much more about a man’s world. That place where men wore suits and watches and cuff links and went into office buildings, ate in restaurants, drove down the street talking on cell phones. I’d seen them, but their lives were as incomprehensible as the lives of Tibetan Sherpas or Amazonian chiefs.

  Olivia took my hand and turned it over, brushed the tips of her dry fingers down my moist palm, sending waves of electricity up my arms. “Who has the money?” she asked, softly. “Who has the power? You have a good mind, you’re artistic, you’re very sensitive, see?” She showed me lines in my hand, her fingertips like a grainy fabric stroking my skin. “Don’t fight the world. Your carpenter friend, he didn’t fight the wood, did he? He made love to it, and what he made was beautiful.”

  I thought about that. My mother fought the wood, hacking at it, trying to slam it into place with a hammer. She considered it the essence of cowardice not to. “What else do you see?” I asked.

  Olivia curled my fingers up, wrapping my fate, handing it back to me.

  I picked at a burn blister on my middle finger and thought about fighting the grain or not. Women like my mother, alone as tigers, fighting every step. Women with men, like Marvel and Starr, trying to please. Neither one seemed to have the advantage. But Olivia didn’t mean men like Ed Turlock or even Ray. She meant men with money. That man’s world. The cuff links and offices.

  “You’ll figure out what men want and how to give it to them. And how not to.” She smiled her naughty crooked grin. “And when to do which.”

  The little brass clock whirred and struck five, a music box tune, tiny chimes. So many pretty things, but it was getting late, I didn’t want to go, I wanted to find out more, I wanted Olivia to handle my future like wax, softening it in the heat of her parched hands, shaping it into something I didn’t have to dread. “You mean sex.”

  “Not necessarily.” She glanced at the round mirror over the fireplace, at the drop-top desk with its secret drawers and pigeonholes. “It’s magic, Astrid. You have to know how to reach up and pull beauty out of thin air.” She pretended to reach up and grab a firefly, then opened her palms slowly and watched it fly out. “People want a little magic. Sex is its theater. There are sliding panels and trapdoors.”

  The night magic. Never let a man stay the night. But my mother’s theater was her own pleasure. This was something quite different. I was excited that I knew this.

  “The secret is — a magician doesn’t buy magic. Admire the skill of a fellow magician, but never fall under his spell.” She rose and collected our glasses. And I thought of how Barry seduced my mother, his smoked mirrors and hidden trained doves. She never chose him, not really, but she gave him everything. She would always be his, even if he was dead. He had shaped her destiny.

  “So what about love?” I asked.

  She had started toward the kitchen but stopped, turned back, glasses in her hands. “What about it?” When Olivia frowned, two vertical lines sliced between her eyebrows and cut into her rounded forehead.

  I flushed red, but I wanted to know. If only I could ask without falling all over myself like a clown in size fourteen shoes. “Don’t you believe in it?”

  “I don’t believe in it the way people believe in God or the tooth fairy. It’s more like the National Enquirer. A big headline and a very dull story.”

  I followed her into the kitchen, exactly like ours yet light-years away, a parallel universe. Her pots and pans dangled overhead from a restaurant rack — copper pots, iron. Ours were Corning Ware with the little blue flowers. I ran my hands over Olivia’s terra-cotta counters, inset with painted ceramics, where ours were mottled green and white, like a bad cold.

  “So what do you believe in?” I asked her.

  Her dark gaze ran with pleasure along the warm cinnamon tile, the beaten copper hood over the range. “I believe in living as I like. I see a Stickley lamp, a cashmere sweater, and I know I can have it. I own two houses besides this. When the ashtrays are full in my car, I’ll sell it.”

  I laughed, imagining her bringing it back to the dealer, explaining why she was selling. She probably would. I could hardly fathom someone living so close to her own desire.

  “I just spent three weeks in Tuscany. I saw the Palio in Siena,” she said, strumming the words like the strings of a guitar. “It’s a fifteenth-century horse race through the cobbled streets. Would I exchange that for a husband and kids and happily-ever-after? Not to mention the likely outcome, divorce and overtime at the bank and shaky child support. Let me show you something.”

  She picked up the small quilted bag on her counter, found her wallet, opened it for me to see the wad of cash as thick as my finger. She spread the bills, at least a dozen hundreds among the others. “Love’s an illusion. It’s a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I’d rather have cash.” She put her money away, zipped her purse.

  Then she put her arm around my shoulder and led me to the door. The amber light fell through the bubble glass against our cheeks. She hugged me lightly. I smelled Ma Griffe, it was warmer on her. “Come again, anytime. I don’t know many women. I’d like to know you.”

  I left walking backwards so I wouldn’t miss a moment of her. I hated the idea of going back to Marvel’s, so I walked around the block, feeling Olivia’s arms around me, my nose full of perfume and the smell of her skin, my head swirling with what I had seen and heard in the house so much like ours, and yet not at all. And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.

  12

  I LAY ON MY BED, wondering what I would be like when I was a woman. I’d never thought much about it before, my possible futures. I’d been too busy sucking fish juice, burying myself in the sand against the killing rays of desert sun. But now I was intrigued by this future Astrid that Olivia had seen in me. I saw myself sort of like Catherine Deneuve, pale and stoic, the way she was in Belle de Jour. Or maybe Dietrich, Shanghai Express, all shimmer and smoke. Would I be fascinating, the star of my own magic theater? What would I do with a wad of hundred-dollar bills?

  I imagined that money in my hand. My mind went blank. So far, my fantasies had centered completely on survival. Luxury had been beyond imagining, let alone beauty. I let my eyes rest on the striped curtains, until the stripes themselves formed a sculptural shape. Ray had seen it in me. With Olivia’s help, I could own it, create it, use it. I could work in beauty as an artist worked in paint or language.

  I would have three lovers, I decided. An older man, distinguished, with silver hair and a gray suit, who would take me traveling with him, for company on long first-class flights to Europe, and stuffy cocktail receptions for visiting dignitaries. I called him the Swedish ambassador. Yes, Mother, I would lie down for the father, gladly.

  Then there was Xavier, my Mexican lover, Mother’s Eduardo reconstituted, but more tender and passionate, less silly and spoiled. Xavier spread camellias on the bed, he swore he would marry me if he could, but he had been engaged since birth to a girl with a harelip. It was fine with me, I didn’t want to live with his overbearing parents in Mexico City and bear his ten Catholic children. I had a room of my own in the hotel, and a maid who brought me Mexican chocolate for breakfast in bed.

  The third man was Ray. I met him in secret in big-city hotels, he sat in the bar with his sad face
, and I would come in in a white linen suit with black-tipped shoes, my hair back in a chignon, a scarf tied to my purse. “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” I said in a deep, slightly humorous voice, like Dietrich. “But I came anyway.”

  I heard Marvel calling to me, but she was in another country, too far away. She didn’t mean me. She meant some other girl, some drab hopeless thing destined for the army or else beauty school. I lay with my legs wrapped around Ray in a room with tall windows, a bouquet of full-bloom red roses in a vase on the dresser.

  “Astrid!”

  Her voice was like a drill, penetrating, relentless. If I had a choice, I’d rather be a man’s slave than a woman’s. I pulled myself out of bed, stumbled into the living room where Marvel and her friends sat on the flowered couch, their heads pressed together over sodas tinted space-alien colors, hands in the snack mixture I’d made from a recipe on the cereal box.

  “Here she is.” Debby raised her horsey face under her curly perm, eye shadow layered like strata in sedimentary rock. “Ask her.”

  “I’m telling you, the car,” Marvel said. “You come back and you’re still living in the same dump, still driving around the same old shitbox. What good does it do?”

  Linda took a hit on her cigarette, fanning the smoke away with a pearl-nailed hand. A blond with blue eyes perpetually wide with surprise, she wore shiny eye shadow like the inside of shells. They all went to Birmingham High together, were bridesmaids at each other’s weddings, and now sold Mary Kay.

  It was the new Mary Kay brochure, illustrating the prizes they could win if they sold enough mascara wands and lip liners and face-firming masques, that they’d been arguing about. “They used to have Cadillacs.” Linda sniffed.

  Marvel finished her soda, smacked it down on the coffee table. “Just once in my life, I’d like a goddamn new car. Is that too much to ask? Everybody’s got a new car, the kids at the high school. The slut next door’s got a goddamn Corvette.” She handed me her glass. “Astrid, get me some more Tiki Punch.”

  Debby handed me hers too. I took them back to the kitchen, and poured Tiki Punch from the big Shasta bottle, getting momentarily lost in its irradiated Venusian pinkness.

  “Astrid,” Linda called, her feet tucked under herself on the flower-print couch. “If you had a choice between two weeks in Paris France, all expenses paid, or a car —”

  “Shitty Buick,” Debby interjected.

  “What’s wrong with a Buick?” Marvel said.

  “— which would you take?” Linda picked something out of the corner of her eye with a long press-on nail.

  I brought their drinks, suppressing the desire to limp theatrically, the deformed servant, and fit all the glasses into hands without spilling. They couldn’t be serious. Paris? My Paris? Elegant fruit shops and filterless Gitanes, dark woolen coats, the Bois de Boulogne? “Take the car,” I said. “Definitely.”

  “Smart girl,” Marvel said, toasting me with her Shasta. “You always had a good head on your shoulders.”

  “You know, we should do Astrid,” Debby said.

  Three sets of eyes, all those circles, looking at me. It was unnerving. Invisibility was my normal state in the turquoise house.

  They seated me on a stool in the kitchen. Suddenly, I was a valued guest. Was the gooseneck lamp in my face too bright? Did I want something to drink? Linda turned me from side to side. They were examining my pores, touching my skin with tissue to see if I was oily, normal, or dry. I liked being the center of so much attention. It made me feel close to them. My freckles were a matter of concern, the shape of my forehead. The merits of foundations were discussed, samples streaked along my jaw.

  “Too ruddy,” Linda said.

  The others nodded sagely. I needed correction. Correction was important. Pots and tubes of white and brown. Anything could be corrected. My Danish nose, my square jaw, my fat lips, so far from ideal. And I thought of a mannequin I saw once in a store window, bald and nude, as two men dressed her, laughing and talking under her nippleless breasts. One man, I remembered, had a pincushion stuck to his shaved head.

  “You’ve got the perfect face for makeup,” Debby said, applying base with a sponge, turning me back and forth like a sculptor turning the clay.

  Of course I did, I was blank, anyone could fill me in. I waited to see who I would be, what they would create on my delicious vacancy. The woman in first class, reading French Vogue and sipping champagne? Catherine Deneuve walking her dog in the Bois, admired by strangers?

  Linda outlined my eyes on the inside, rolling back my lids, dabbing tenderly at my tears with the corner of a Q-tip when it made me cry. She gave me four coats of mascara, until I was seeing through a tangle of spiders. I was going to be so beautiful, I could feel it. Marvel redefined my big lips smaller, penciling them inside the lines and filling in Piquant Peach.

  “God, she could be Miss America,” Debby said.

  Linda said. “No shit. Go look in the mirror.”

  “Hair,” Debby said. “Let me get my curling wand.”

  “We don’t have to get carried away, now,” Marvel said. She’d suddenly remembered who I was, not Miss America at all, only the kid who did her wash and set.

  But Debby overrode her objections with the phrase “total effect.” Heat and the smell of burning hair tangled in the spikes of the curling wand, section by section.

  Then I was done. They led me into Marvel’s bedroom by both arms, my eyes closed. My skin crawled with anticipation. Who would I be? “And here, representing the great State of California — Astrid!”

  They pulled me in front of the mirror.

  My hair curled and frizzed around my shoulders and rose three inches above my scalp. White stripes raced down my forehead and nose like Hindu caste marks. Brown patches appeared under my cheekbones, white on the ridges, dividing my otherwise dead beige face into a paint-by-number kit. Blusher broke out on my cheeks like a rash, my lips reduced to a geisha’s tiny bow. My eyebrows glared in dark wings, protecting the glistening bands of eye shadow, purple, blue, and pink, like a child’s rainbow. I never cried, but now tears sprang unbidden to my eyes, threatening a mud slide if they were to break out of their pool.

  “She looks just like Brigitte what’s-her-name, the model.” Linda held me by the shoulders, her face next to mine in the mirror. I tried to smile, they’d been so nice.

  Debby’s brown eyes went soft with pride. “We should send Mary Kay her picture. Maybe they’ll give us a prize.”

  At the thought of reward, Marvel quickly rummaged in her closet, found her Polaroid, and arranged me in front of the mirror. It was the only picture she ever took of me. You could see the unmade bed, the bureautop clutter. They congratulated themselves and went back out to their sodas and Chex mix, leaving me in front of the mirror, a toddler’s fussed-over Barbie abandoned in the sandbox. I blinked back my tears and forced myself to look in the mirror.

  Looking back at me was a thirty-year-old hostess at Denny’s. Anything else I can get you, hon? I could feel this vision burning itself into my soul, burning away Deneuve and Dietrich like acid thrown in my face. The woman in the mirror would not have to orchestrate three different lovers. She would not dance on rooftops in Mexico, fly first class to London over the pole. She was in for varicose veins and a single apartment with cat litter and Lana Turner movies. She would drink by herself with tomatoes dying on the windowsills. She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I’m so lonely, so desperate. I’ll give you whatever you want.

  SCHOOL LET OUT at the end of June under a marine layer heavy as wet towels. The pencil-gray days were broken only by the blue flowers in Olivia’s yard. I babysat, ran errands, reread A Spy in the House of Love. I longed to see Olivia, but Marvel kept me working. If I so much as walked outside, she gave me four other things to do. Sometimes I’d see Olivia picking herbs in her garden, and our eyes would meet, but she gave no indication she knew me. She would have been a good secret agent, I thought, and tried to do th
e same, but after a while, I wondered if it was a good act or if she had forgotten me entirely.

  Dear Astrid,

  The all-prison issue of Witness is out, you must buy it, they printed my whole poem. It ran seven pages, illustrated with photographs by Ellen Mary McConnell. The response has been tremendous. I had them include a brief note in which I humbly mentioned that gifts of stamps, books, and money would be deeply appreciated.

  Already I’ve made new fast friends. For instance, the delightful Dan Wiley, #M143522, a strong-arm robber serving twelve years at San Quentin. Dan the Man, as he calls himself, writes almost daily, a series of rough-trade fantasies in which I am the starring player. The best to date is one in which he sodomizes me on the hood of his ’72 Mustang while watching the sun go down over Malibu. Doesn’t that sound romantic? Did it have a hood ornament that year?

  A woman just had the Collected Anne Sexton sent. Hallelujah. Finally something else to read. The only books in the prison library without heaving bodices on the covers are a large-print edition of War and Peace and a tattered Jack London. Arf. Arf.

  Of course, this admirer also had to send a sheaf of the most dreadful po-e-tree for my approval. She lives on a farm in Wisconsin, some sort of aged hippie commune, where she spins her own sheep. How could anyone who loves Sexton produce work so unrelievedly bad? I am Womannn, hear me Roarrr. So just roar, please, it would be far less embarrassing for all concerned.

  However, she believes me to be a prisoner of the patriarchy, a martyr in my own small way. So long as her solidarity includes gifts — power to the people. Free Huey! Free Ingrid Magnussen.

  Not one word about me. How are you, Astrid? Are you happy? I miss you. It seemed like years since she ’d considered the possibility of losing me. I’d returned to the shadows. My job once again was to share in her triumphs, to snicker at her unfortunate admirers with her, a sort of pocket mirror and studio audience. I realized I was exactly where she wanted me, safely unhappy with Marvel Turlock, a prisoner in turquoise, brewing into an artist, someone she might want to know someday. When all I wanted was for her to see me now, the way she saw me that day at the prison. To want to know me, what I thought, how I felt.