White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  When we got home, Marvel was waiting in the kitchen in her dirty blue robe, hair Autumn Flame. “What the hell were you thinking?” She waved her plump hands in the air. If it hadn’t been for the bandages, she would have smacked me. “Walking around all hours of the night. What did you expect?”

  I walked past her and took the first of the Vicodins, scooping water from the faucet. I went down to my room without saying a word, closed the door, and lay on my bed. In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? I thought of the girl with the scar tattoos at the Crenshaw group home. She was right, it should bloody well show.

  14

  Seams traced my jaw and cheek, arms and legs. Everyone at Birmingham High still stared at me, but differently, not because I was a baby hooker, but because I was a freak. I liked it better this way. Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. Marvel wanted me to cover the weals with pancake, but I wouldn’t do it. I was torn and stitched, I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.

  Olivia was still gone, her Corvette covered and silent, sprinklers coming on at eight in the morning for seven minutes exactly, lamps lighting at six p.m. by remote control. Magazines piled up on her doorstep. I left them there. I hoped it would rain on them, her sixteen-dollar Vogue.

  How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention. I promised myself that when she returned, I would stay away, I would learn to be alone, it was better than the disappointment when you found it out anyway. Loneliness was the human condition, I had to get used to it.

  I thought about her as I sat under the bleachers with Conrad and his friends, getting stoned. Boys were easy, she was right about that. I knew what they wanted, could give it to them or not. What did she need me for, nothing. She could buy herself a Georg Jensen bangle, a Roblin vase.

  AT CHRISTMASTIME, it was hot again, and smog lay thick over the Valley, like a vast headache over a defeated terrain, obscuring the mountains. Olivia was back, but I hadn’t seen her, only her discernible patterns, deliveries and men. At Marvel’s we went all out for the holidays. We dragged the green metal tree in from the garage, wound ropes of colored tinsel like bottle scrubbers around every door and window, put the plastic Frosty the Snowman on the blacktop, wired up the rooftop Santa-and-reindeer display.

  Relatives came by and I wasn’t introduced, I passed around the Chex mix, the nutty cheese ball. They took pictures in groups nobody asked me to be in. I drank eggnog from the grown-ups’ punch bowl, fiery with bourbon, and went outside when I couldn’t take it anymore.

  I sat out in the playhouse in the dark, smoking a Tiparillo I’d found in a pack someone had left out. I could hear the Christmas tapes Marvel played round the clock, Joey Bishop Christmas, Neil Diamond at Bethlehem. At least Starr believed in Christ. We had gone to church, visited the fluffed straw in the manger, the baby Jesus, newborn King.

  Of all the red-letter events of the American sentimental calendar, my mother hated Christmas the most. I remembered the year I came home with a paper angel I made in school, with golden sparkles on tissue paper wings, and she threw it straight into the trash. Didn’t even wait until I went to bed. On Christmas Eve, she always read Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: What rough beast... slouches towards Bethlehem . . . We ’d drink mulled wine and cast runestones. She wouldn’t come to hear me sing “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “God Rest Ye Merry,” with my class at Cheremoya Elementary. She wouldn’t drive me.

  But now that I’d shadowed Marvel in and out of malls, heard the wall-to-wall canned Christmas carols, experienced Marvel’s blinking Christmas light earrings, I was starting to come around to my mother’s point of view.

  I sat in the dark in the playhouse and imagined I was with her now, and we were in Lapland, in a cottage of painted wood, where the winter was nine months long and we wore felt boots and drank reindeer milk and celebrated the solstice. We tied forks and metal pans to the trees to frighten evil spirits, drank fermented honey and took mushrooms we collected in the fall and had visions. The reindeer followed us when we tried to pee, craving the salt of our bodies.

  In the house, Ed’s brother George was dressed as Santa, pink drunk. I could hear his laughter over the other voices. Ed sat on the couch next to him, even drunker, but he was a quiet drunk. Justin got a road race set that cost Ed a week’s pay, Caitlin had a plastic ride-in Barbie car. All my gifts came from the 99-cent store. A flashlight on a keychain. A sweatshirt with a teddy bear on it. I was wearing the sweatshirt. Marvel insisted. I smoked my Tiparillo and turned the flashlight on and off, just a heartbeat ahead of Rudolph’s nose on Marvel’s rooftop Santa display. We were having a secret conversation, Rudy and I.

  I thought how easily you could kill yourself when you were drunk. Take a bath, fall asleep, drown. No turtle would come floating by to rescue you, no spotter plane would find you. I took my mother’s knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges on my face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.

  I pressed the knife to my wrist, drew it softly across, imagining how it would feel, but I knew that wasn’t the way. You opened the vein from top to bottom. You had to consider the underlying structure.

  What was the underlying structure of this, that’s what I needed to know: Joey Bishop singing “Jingle Bell Rock,” poets sleeping in cots bolted to walls, and beautiful women lying under men who ate three dinners in a row. Where children hugged broken-necked giraffes and cried, or else drove around in plastic Barbie cars, and men with missing fingers longed for fourteen-year-old lovers, while women with porn-star figures cried out for the Holy Spirit.

  If I could have one wish, Jesus, it was to let my mother come get me. I was tired of sucking the sails. Tired of being alone, of walking and eating and thinking for myself. I wasn’t going to make it after all.

  Slivers of light escaped through the shutters of Olivia’s house. No men tonight. They were home with their good wives or girlfriends. Who wanted a whore on Christmas?

  Oh Christ. I’d been spending so much time with Marvel, it was starting to rub off. Next thing I knew I’d be making racist jokes. Olivia was Olivia. She had some nice pieces of furniture and some clocks, a rug and a stuffed parrot named Charlie, while I had some books and a box, and a torn cashmere sweater, a poster of animal turds. Not that much different. Neither of us had much, when you got down to it.

  So I went next door. Nobody would notice tonight. Her yard smelled of chives. I knocked, heard her footsteps. She opened the door. The expression of shock on her face reminded me she hadn’t seen me since November.

  She pulled me inside and locked the door. She was wearing a silver-gray satin nightgown and peignoir. She’d been listening to the music I’d heard that first night, the woman with tears in her voice. Olivia sat on the couch and tugged at my hand but I resisted her. She could hardly look at me. Scarface, the kids said. Frank N. Stein.

  “Good God, what happened?”

  I wanted to think of something clever, something cool and sarcastic. I wanted to hurt her. She’d let me down, she’d abandoned me. She didn’t think twice. “Where were you?” I asked.

  “England. What happened to your face?”

  “Did you have a good time in England?” I picked up the CD box on the table, a black woman with a face full of light, white flower behind her ear. She sang something sad, about moonlight through the pines. Billie Holiday, it said. I could feel Olivia staring at my face, the scars on my arms where my sleeves crept up. I wasn’t beautiful anymore. Now I looked like what I was, a raw wound. She wouldn’t want me around.

  “Astrid, look at
me.”

  I put the box down. There was a new paperweight, grainy French blue with white raised figures. It was heavy and cool in my hand. I wondered what she’d do if I dropped it on the stone tabletop, let it go smash. I was drunk but not drunk enough. I put it down. “Actually, it’s a dog’s world. Did you know that? They do anything they want. It was my birthday too. I’m fifteen.”

  “What do you want, Astrid?” she asked me quietly, beautiful as always, still elegant, that smooth unbroken face.

  I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted her to hold me, feel sorry for me. I wanted to hit her. I wanted her not to know how much I needed her, I wanted her to promise never to go away again.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You aren’t really,” I said. “Don’t pretend.”

  “Astrid! What did I do, go out of town?” Her pink palms were cupped, what was she expecting, for me to fill them? With what? Water? Blood? She smoothed her satin skirt. “It’s not a crime. I’m sorry I wasn’t here, okay? But it’s not like I did something wrong.”

  I sat down on the couch, put my feet on the coffee table among the antiques. I felt like a spoiled child, and I liked it. She shifted toward me on the couch, I could smell her perfume, green and familiar. “Astrid, look at me. I am sorry. Why can’t you believe me?”

  “I don’t buy magic. I’m not one of your tricks. Look, you got something to drink? I want to get really drunk,” I said.

  “I was going to have a coffee and cognac, and I’ll let you have a small one.”

  She left me there listening to Billie Holiday sing while she made clicks and clatters in the kitchen. I didn’t offer to help. In a minute, she was back with glasses, a bottle of brandy, and coffee on a tray. So perfect in every way, even the way she put the tray on the table, keeping her back straight, bending her knees.

  “Look,” she said, sitting down next to me. “Next time I’ll send you a postcard, how’s that. Wish you were here, love... Brandy.” She poured cognac into the snifters.

  I drank mine down in a swallow, not even trying to savor it. It was probably five hundred years old, brought over on the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. She looked down into her glass, swirled it, smelled it, sipped.

  “I’m not the world’s most considerate person,” Olivia said. “I’m not the type who sends birthday cards. But I’ll try, Astrid. It’s the best I can do.” She reached her hand to touch my face but couldn’t bring herself to do it. The hand fell on my shoulder instead. I ignored it there.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Olivia said, removing it, sitting back against the pillows. “Don’t sulk. You’re acting just like a man.”

  I looked away and caught our reflection in the mirror over the fireplace, the beauty of the room, of Olivia in her silver nightgown like mercury in moonlight. Then there was this wretched blond girl who looked like she had wandered in from another movie, her face scored with welts, her 99-cent sweatshirt, her unbrushed hair.

  “I brought you something from England,” Olivia said. “You want to see it?”

  I wouldn’t look at her. What, did she think presents would make it all better? But I couldn’t help watching that beautiful slow walk as she went into the back of the house, silver satin trailing her like a pet dog. I poured myself some more brandy, swirled and watched the liquid separate into trails and meet in the amber pool at the bottom. The smell was fire and fruit, and it burned as it went down. I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I’d cried all I could and it wasn’t enough.

  She came back out with a small white box and dropped it into my lap.

  “I don’t want things,” I said. “I just want to feel like someone gives a shit.”

  “So you don’t want it?” she teased, moving to take it away.

  I opened the box marked Penhaligon, and nested in tissue was an antique perfume bottle, silver and glass with a lace-covered bulb, filled with a perfume tinged a slight pink. I set it on the table. “Thanks.”

  “No, don’t be like that. Here, smell it.” She picked it up and squirted me with it, a fine mist propelled by the lace-covered bulb.

  I was surprised at the scent, not at all like Ma Griffe, it smelled like small flowers that grew in leafy English woods, like a girl who would wear pinafores and pantaloons and make chains of wild daisies, a fairy-tale girl from the Victorian age.

  When Olivia grinned, the charm of her overbite got to me in a way her perfection never could. “Now, isn’t that you?”

  I took it away from her and sprayed it over my head so the mist fell like light rain. Wash my sins away. Make me a girl who’d never seen the firestorms of September, who’d never been shot, who’d never gone down on a boy behind a bathroom in a park. A nursery-rhyme girl in a blue dress holding a pet lamb in a cottage garden. It was me, after all. I didn’t know quite whether to laugh or to cry, so I poured some more brandy in my glass.

  “That’s enough,” she said, taking the bottle away.

  The threads of my scars throbbed with alcohol. I knew it wasn’t up to Olivia to love me. She did the best she could, bought me a bit of childhood in a bottle, by appointment to the Queen. “Thanks, Olivia, really,” I said.

  “That’s better,” she said.

  I WOKE UP the next morning painfully curled on Olivia’s couch. Someone had taken my shoes off, the bottle of pink perfume still clutched in my hands. Either it was hot, or I had a fever, and a headache that beat the sides of my skull like an African drum. I slid my feet into my shoes, not tying the laces, and went looking for Olivia.

  She lay on top of her bedspread in her crewel paisley canopy bed, completely passed out, still in her robe, bent legs at right angles like she was running in her dream. The clock past her pillow read eleven. I ran down the hall and hit the door.

  I was halfway across Olivia’s garden when Marvel came out of the turquoise house, Caitlin’s Barbie car in her arms. She glanced up. Her mouth opened wide. The only color left on her face was the Autumn Flame of her hair.

  If I hadn’t been so hungover, something might have sprung to mind. But we stared at each other and I knew I was caught, knee-deep in rosemary and alyssum, frozen as a deer. Then it was all screaming and confusion. She ran out the gate as I took a few feeble steps back toward Olivia’s. She seized me by my hair and yanked me back. Her head jerked as she smelled my breath.

  “Drinking with the whore? Did you sleep with her too?” She smacked me in the face, not caring about my scars, her voice reverberating in my tenderized skull like a shot in a cave. She smacked me as she dragged me back over to the turquoise house, head, arms, anywhere she could get me. “What were you doing over there? Is that where you spent the night? Is it? Is it?” She hit me square on the ear and the Penhaligon perfume leaped from my hands and smashed on the blacktop.

  I broke away from her, knelt down, the bottle broken inside its silver cage, perfume already soaking the pavement. I put my hands in the puddle. My childhood, my English garden, that tiny piece of something real.

  Marvel gripped my arm, hauled me to my feet, screaming, “You ungrateful thing!”

  I grabbed her around her arms and yelled in her face. “I hate you so much, I could kill you!”

  “How dare you raise your hand to me!” She was much stronger than I had thought. She broke my hold in a second, smacked my face so hard I saw patterns. She caught me under the armpit and marched me back home, kicking me every few feet. “Get in the house, get in there!”

  She opened the door and shoved me inside. I sailed into the wreckage of Christmas Eve, dirty glasses and bowls and gift wrapping. The kids looked up from their new toys, Ed from his football game. I staggered into the knickknack shelf and Marvel’s Little Women plate fell off and smashed.

  She screamed and hit me on the side of my head, I saw patterns again. “You did that on purpose!” She shoved me on the floor, I was afraid she was going to grind my face in the broken glass. She kicked me in the ribs. “Pick it up!” The kids were screaming.

  �
�Assi —” Caitlin ran toward me, arms spread. Marvel snatched her away. She bundled them out to the yard while I picked up the pieces, crying. I hadn’t done it on purpose, but I might have if I’d thought of it. She ’d broken my perfume, something real, by appointment to the Queen, made from pounds of English spring flowers, not a copy of a copy of a kid’s book illustration. When she came back she threw the broom at me. “Now sweep up the rest.” She turned to Ed. “God, you can’t believe where I just found her. Coming out of that nigger’s house, she spent the night there. This is what we get, for all the work and trouble?”

  Ed turned the sound up on the game.

  I threw out the big pieces, Jo and Amy and Beth, the other one, and Marmee. Broken. Well, that’s the way it is, Marmee. One little accident, and it’s all gone forever. Jo won’t like foster care, she’ll get moved around, shot. Amy’ll get adopted, she’s cute, but you’ll never see her again. Beth’ll croak and the other one ’ll turn tricks in a park for dope. Say good-bye to the fireside, welcome to my life.

  I swept the shards into a pile, careful not to leave any slivers, Caitlin always went barefoot.

  “And when you’re done with that, start cleaning this place up. I’m going to go give that nignog whore a piece of my mind.” I watched out the kitchen window as Marvel marched from our yard into Olivia’s, heard the chain-link gate slam but not click, bang open again. She was hammering on Olivia’s door, screaming, “Wake up, whore, you rat’s ass, piece of living crap. You stay away from that girl, hear me, nigger?”

  Everybody in the neighborhood was home on Christmas morning, listening to this as they celebrated the birth of the newborn King. Nice, Marvel. You go, girl. Show everybody what you’re really made of. My only consolation was that Olivia couldn’t hear it, passed out as she was at the back of the house.

  Marvel tore out handfuls of Olivia’s flowers as she stormed back to our house, flinging the uprooted plants at the shuttered windows.