White Oleander
Page 20
I wanted to tell her I wasn’t what she expected. I was different, she might not want me. “I like the Dürer”
She laughed, a short burst, clapped her hands together. “Oh, I think we’re going to get along fine. I’m only sorry Ron couldn’t be here. My husband. He ’s in Nova Scotia shooting this week, he won’t be back until next Wednesday. But what can you do. Would you like some tea? Or a Coke? I bought Coke, I didn’t know what you’d drink. We also have juice, or I could make you a smoothie —”
“Tea is fine,” I said.
I NEVER SPENT more time with anyone than I spent with Claire Richards the week that followed. I could tell she’d never been around kids. She took me with her to the dry cleaner’s, the bank, like she was afraid to leave me alone for a moment, as if I were five and not fifteen.
For a week, we ate out of paper cartons and jars with foreign writing on the labels from the Chalet Gourmet. Soft runny wedges of cheese, crusty baguettes, wrinkly Greek olives. Dark red proscuitto and honeydew melon, rose-scented diamonds of baklava. She didn’t eat much, but urged me to finish the roast beef, the grapefruit sweet as an orange. After three months with Cruella, I didn’t need urging.
We sat over our living room picnics and I told her stories about my mother, about the homes, avoiding anything too ugly, too extreme. I knew how to do this. I told her about my mother, but only the good things. I wasn’t a complainer, I wouldn’t end up saying bad things about you, Claire Richards.
She showed me her photo albums and scrapbooks. I didn’t recognize her in the pictures. She was very shy, I could hardly imagine her in front of an audience, but I saw from her albums that in character, she didn’t even resemble her normal self. She sang, she danced, she wept on her knees with a veil over her
head. She laughed in a low-cut blouse, a sword in her hand.
“That’s Threepenny Opera,” she said. “We did it at Yale.”
She was Lady Macbeth, before that the daughter in ’Night, Mother. Catherine in Suddenly, Last Summer.
She didn’t act much anymore. She slid her garnet heart pendant along its chain, tucked it under her ripe lower lip. “I get so tired of it. You spend hours getting ready, drag yourself to the call, where they look at you for two seconds and decide you’re too ethnic. Too classic. Too something.”
“Too ethnic?” Her wide pale forehead, her glossy hair.
“It means brunette.” She smiled. One front tooth was crooked, it crossed just slightly over the other one. “Too small means breasts. Classic means old. It’s not a very nice business, I’m afraid. I still go out, but it’s an exercise in futility.”
I wiped the last of the Boursin cheese out of the container with my finger. “Why do it then?”
“What, and give up show business?” She laughed so easily, when she was happy, but also when she was sad.
THE NEW Beverly Cinema was right around the corner from her house. They were playing King of Hearts and Children of Paradise, and we bought a giant popcorn and laughed and cried and laughed at each other crying. I used to go there all the time with my mother, but the movies were different. She didn’t like weepy films. She liked to quote D. H. Lawrence: “Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got.” Hers were grim European films — Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bergman — films where everybody died or wished they had. Claire’s movies were lovely dreams. I wanted to crawl inside them, live in them, a pretty mad girl in a tutu. Gluttonous, we went back and saw them again the next night. My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.
At night I lay awake in my bed with the white eyelet ruffle, looking at the Dürer rabbit. It was bound to turn wrong. Joan Peeler was going to tell me it was just a mistake, that they’d changed their minds, they wanted a three-year-old. They’d decided to wait another couple of years. I worried about Claire’s husband. I didn’t want him to come home, take her away from me. I wanted it to always be like it was, the two of us in the living room eating pâté de foie gras and strawberries for dinner and listening to Debussy records, talking about our lives. She wanted to know all about me, what I was like, who I was. I worried, there wasn’t really much to tell. I had no preferences. I ate anything, wore anything, sat where you told me, slept where you said. I was infinitely adaptable. Claire wanted to know things like, did I like coconut soap or green apple? I didn’t know. “No, you have to decide,” she said.
So I became a user of green apple soap, of chamomile shampoo. I preferred to have the window open when I slept. I liked my meat rare. I had a favorite color, ultramarine blue, a favorite number, nine. But sometimes I suspected Claire was looking for more than there was to me.
“What was the best day of your life?” she asked me one afternoon as we lay on the free-form couch, her head on one armrest, mine on the other. Judy Garland sang on the stereo, “My Funny Valentine.”
“Today,” I said.
“No.” She laughed, throwing her napkin at me. “From before.”
I tried to remember, but it was like looking for buried coins in the sand. I kept turning things over, cutting myself on rusty cans, broken beer bottles hidden there, but eventually I found an old coin, brushed it off. I could read the date, the country of origin.
“It was when we were living in Amsterdam. A tall thin house by the canal. There was a steep twisted staircase, and I was always afraid of falling.” Dark green canal water and rijsttafel. Water rats as big as opossums. The thick smell of hashish in the coffeehouses. My mother always stoned.
“I remember, it was a sunny day, and we ate sandwiches of raw hamburger and onions, standing up at a corner café, and my mother sang this cowboy song: ‘Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies.’” It was the only memory I had of Amsterdam being sunny.
Claire laughed, a sound like bells, drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them, gazing at me in a way I could have bottled and stored like a great wine.
“We sat in the sun overlooking the canal, and she said, ‘Look, Astrid, watch this.’ And she waved at the people passing by on a glass sightseeing boat. And all the passengers waved back. They thought we were Dutch, see, welcoming them to our city. That was my best day.” The sun and the herring gulls and all those people waving, thinking we were from there, that we belonged.
At the other end of the couch, Claire sighed, unfolding her legs, smiling nostalgically. She didn’t see who I had been then, a thin, lonely child, warmed by the mistaken thought that I belonged. She saw only the childish fun.
“You’ve been everywhere, haven’t you.”
I had, but it hadn’t done me much good.
THE DAY Ron was expected home from Nova Scotia, Claire threw out all the take-out packages, cleaned the kitchen, and did three loads of laundry. The house was fragrant with cooking, and Emmylou Harris sang something about bandits in Mexico. Claire had rubber gloves on, she was pulling meat off a chicken that was still hot, wearing a red-and-white-checked apron and lipstick. “I’m making paella, what do you think of that?”
It made me anxious. I liked the way it was, we’d settled into a routine, and now it was being thrown off by the part I didn’t yet know, the part that could change everything for me. Already I resented her husband, and I hadn’t even met him. But I vacu-umed the living room, helped her make their bed with fresh sheets printed with falling roses, red and white. “Red and white are the marriage colors,” Claire explained.
She opened the French doors to the garden, blooming vibrantly in the April sun. Her hands lingered and smoothed the white quilt. I knew she wanted to be in this bed with him, making love with him. I secretly hoped he would miss his plane, get into an accident on the way to the airport. I was unnerved by her tremulous anticipation. She reminded me of a certain kind of rose she grew in the garden, called Pristine. It was white with a trace of pink around the outside, and when you picked it, the petals all fell off.
I didn’t know why he had to come back now. I was having such a good time. I’d never been such a source of interest. I certainly didn’t want to share this with some husband, some Ed on the couch. Even an Uncle Ray would upset the wonderful balance.
At about six, his car pulled up in the driveway, a small silver Alfa Romeo. He got out, slung a hanging bag over his shoulder, removed a duffel and an aluminum briefcase, the gray of his hair catching the late sun. I stood uneasily on the porch as she ran to him. They kissed, and I had to look away. Didn’t she know how easily this could go bad, wasn’t she afraid?
WE ATE PAELLA outside on the patio under a string of lights shaped like chili peppers, Emmylou singing in the background, the sweetheart of the rodeo. Mosquitoes whined. Claire lit citronella candles, and Ron told us about the assignment he’d gone to Halifax to film, a story about a haunted bar. He was a segment producer on a show about the weird and occult. Evidently the ghost nearly smothered a customer to death last year in the men’s room.
“It took us three hours to get him back in there. Even with the film crew, he almost chickened out. He knew it was going to try to finish him off.”
“What would you have done if it had?” Claire asked.
Ron stretched his legs out on the bench in front of him, hands clasped behind his head. “I’d have sicced the Tidy Bowl man on it.”
“Very funny.” Her face was the shape of a perfect candy-box heart, but there was a haze of mistrust over her features.
“I could try Vanish.”
As they joked, I tried to see what Claire found so great about him. He was attractive but not stunning — medium height, trim, small features, closely shaven. He brushed his steel-gray hair back without a part. He wore rimless glasses and his cheeks were rosy for a man’s. Hazel eyes, hands smooth with trimmed nails, smooth wedding band. Everything about Ron was smooth, calm, underplayed. He told a story, but it didn’t matter if we liked it or not, not like Barry, looking for applause. He didn’t overwhelm you. He didn’t seem to need anything.
She took his plate, scraped the scraps onto hers, stacked it underneath, reaching for mine. “If you don’t watch out, you could be the one to vanish.” She said it lightly, but the timing was off.
“The La Brea Vortex,” he said.
The phone rang and Ron went through the open French doors to answer it. We saw him lie down on the white quilt, pick at his toenails as he talked. Claire stopped clearing the table, and her face blurred, resolved, blurred. She stood at the picnic table fiddling with the plates, with the scraps and silverware, trying to hear what he was saying.
He hung up and came back to the table. Her shadows swept back by his sun.
“Work?” Claire asked, as if it made no difference.
“Jeffrey wanted to come over and talk about a script. I said no.” He reached out and took her hand. I couldn’t stand to see how she flushed with pleasure.
Now he remembered that I was still there, playing with some saffron rice from the paella on the tabletop, making an orange spiral. “We ’ve got some catching up to do.” He was so smooth. I could imagine him getting some lonely Ouija board reader to confess her conversations with the dead husband on camera, holding her gnarled hand in his smooth one, the smooth gold wedding band, his calm voice saying, “Go on.”
She talked some about what we’d been doing, that she’d signed me up at Fairfax High, that we’d gone to the movies and a jazz concert at the art museum. “Astrid’s quite an artist,” she said. “Show him what you’ve been doing.”
Claire had bought me a set of Pelikan watercolors in a big black case, a book of thick-textured paper. I’d been painting the garden, the droop of the Chinese elm, the poinsettias against the white wall. Spires of delphinium, blush of roses. Copies of the Dürer rabbit. Claire practicing ballet in the living room. Claire with a glass of white wine. Claire, her hair up in a turbaned towel. I didn’t want to show them to Ron. They were too revealing.
“Show him,” Claire said. “They’re beautiful.”
It irked me that she wanted me to show him. I thought they were something between us, from me to her. I didn’t know him. Why did she want me to? Maybe to prove they’d made the right decision in taking me. Maybe to show what a good job she was doing with me.
I went and got the big pad, handed it to Ron, and then went out in the dark garden and kicked the heads off the stray Mexican evening primroses that crept into the lawn. I heard him turning the pages. I couldn’t watch.
“Look at this.” He laughed. “And this. She’s a natural. They’re terrific,” he called out to me in the dark. I kept kicking the heads off the primroses.
“She’s embarrassed,” Claire said. “Don’t be embarrassed, Astrid. You have a gift. How many people can say that?”
The only one I knew was behind bars.
A cricket or night bird was making squeaky sounds like a hamster going around a wheel. On the patio, under the chili lights, Claire described making the paella, as if it were a Keystone comedy, working up an enthusiasm that made my stomach ache. I looked at Ron, in his white shirt washed with a trace of pink-orange from the lights, laughing along with her. His arms crossed behind his head, his pleasant face laughing, his clean foot in its sandal perched on his jean-covered knee. Why don’t you go away, Ron? There were witch doctors waiting to be interviewed, tortilla miracles to be documented. But the sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.
“Astrid, are you still there?” Claire called out to me, peering into the darkness.
“Just thinking,” I said, pulling a sprig of mint from under the hose bib, crushing it in my hand. Thinking that tonight they would lie together in the pine bed with the rose sheets, and I would be alone again. Women always put men first. That’s how everything got so screwed up.
AFTER MY WEEK alone with Claire, I reluctantly returned to school, to finish out tenth grade at Fairfax High. I was happy enough not to have to go back to Hollywood, where they had seen me eating out of the garbage. This was a whole new start. At Fairfax I was blissfully invisible again. I came home from school each day to find Claire waiting for me with a sandwich and a glass of iced tea, a smile, questions. At first it seemed weird and unnecessary. I had never come home to someone waiting for me before, someone looking forward to the sound of my key in the door, not even when I was a child. It felt like she was going to accuse me of something, but that wasn’t it. She wanted to know about my composition on Edgar Allan Poe and my illustrations on the chambers of the heart and the circulation of the blood. She was sympathetic when I got a D on an algebra test.
She asked about the other kids, but I didn’t have much to tell. At the best of times, I was never very sociable. School was a job, I did it and left. I had no intention of joining the Spanish club or Students Against Drunk Driving. I even passed by the stoner crowd without a glance. I had Claire now, waiting for me. She was all I needed.
“Did you have a nice day at school?” she’d ask, drawing up a chair at the little red-and-white kitchen table.
She had some mistaken notion that Fairfax was like high school where she grew up in Connecticut, despite the clear presence of metal detectors at every entrance. I didn’t tell her about the free-for-alls on the school yard, muggings on the bus. A girl burned a cigarette hole into the back of another girl’s shirt at nutrition, right in front of me, looking at me, as if daring me to stop her. I saw a boy being threatened with a knife in the hallway outside my Spanish class. Girls talked about their abortions in gym class. Claire didn’t need to know about that. I wanted the world to be beautiful for her. I wanted things to work out. I always had a great day, no matter what.
ON SATURDAY, Ron mowed the lawn, cutting the heads off the primroses, and then settled into reading some scripts. We had lox and bagels for breakfast, and Claire went to her ballet class. I sat with my paints next to Ron at the table. I was getting used to him. He didn’t try to be any friendlier than I wanted.
“Fine,” I said.
But I had some idea what he was talking about. Claire paced at night, I heard her bare feet on the floorboards. She talked as if silence would crush her if she didn’t prop it up with a steady stream of sound. She cried easily. She took me to the observatory and started crying in the star show. The April constellations.
“You have my pager number, you know. You can always reach me.”
I kept painting the way the poinsettia looked against the white wall of the house. Like a shotgun blast.
CLAIRE PUSHED back the muslin curtain, glanced out at the street. She was waiting for Ron. It was still light out, moving toward summer, a six o’clock honeyed twilight.
“I think Ron is having an affair,” she said.
I was surprised. Not at the thought — I knew the reason she would stop talking when he was on the phone, the way she would gently probe him to discover his whereabouts. But that she would say it aloud indicated a progression of her doubts.
I thought about Ron. His smoothness. Sure, he could get women anytime he wanted. But he worried too much about Claire. If he was messing around, why would he care? And he worked hard, long hours, always came home tired. He wasn’t that young. I didn’t think he had the energy.
“He’s just working,” I said.
Claire peered out into the street from behind the curtain. “So he says.”
“Have you seen my keys?” Ron asked. “I’ve looked everywhere for them.”