White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  “I told him just that,” Claire said, leaning forward, dark eyes shining. “They had a ghost that almost killed someone this fall.” Then she stopped, unsure, thinking she’d made a gaffe, talking about murder in front of my mother. I could read her skin like a newspaper.

  “You don’t worry about him?”

  Claire was grateful my mother had let her little faux pas gently slide by. She didn’t see, my mother had hold of what she really wanted. “Oh, Ingrid, if you only knew. I don’t think people should fool around with things they don’t believe in. Ghosts are real, even if you don’t believe in them.”

  Oh, we knew about ghosts, my mother and I. They take their revenge. But rather than admit that, my mother quoted Shakespeare. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  Claire clapped her hands in delight, that someone else had quoted the Bard for a change. Ron’s friends always missed her references.

  My mother flicked her long hair back, draped her arm around me again. “It’s like not believing in electricity just because you can’t see it.” Her bright blue assassin’s eyes smiled at Claire. I knew what she was thinking. Can’t you see what an idiot this woman is, Astrid? How could you prefer her to me?

  “Absolutely,” Claire said.

  “I don’t believe in electricity, either,” I said. “Or Hamlet. He’s just a construct. A figment of some writer’s imagination.”

  My mother ignored me. “Does he have to travel a good deal, your husband? What’s his name again? Ron?” She wrapped a strand of my hair around her little finger, keeping me in check.

  “He’s always gone,” Claire admitted. “He wasn’t even home for Christmas.” She was playing with that garnet heart again, sliding it up and down the chain.

  “It must be lonely for you,” my mother said. Sadly. So sympathetic. I wished I could get up and run away, but I would never leave Claire here alone with her.

  “It used to be,” Claire said. “But now I have Astrid.”

  “Such a wonderful girl.” My mother stroked the side of my face with her work-roughened finger, deliberately scraping my skin. I was a traitor. I had betrayed my master. She knew why I’d kept Claire in the background. Because I loved her, and she loved me. Because I had the family I should have had all this time, the family my mother never thought was important, could never give me. “Astrid, do you mind letting us talk for a moment alone? Some grown-up things.”

  I looked from her to my foster mother. Claire smiled. “Go ahead. Just for a minute.” Like I was a kid who had to be encouraged to get into the sandbox. She didn’t know how long a minute could be, what might happen in a minute.

  I got up reluctantly and went over to the fence closest to the road, ran my fingertips over the bark of a tree. Overhead, a crow stared down at me with its soulless gaze, squawked in a voice that was almost human, as if it was trying to tell me something. “Piss off,” I said. I was getting as bad as Claire, listening to birds.

  I watched them, leaning toward each other over the table. My mother tanned and towheaded, in blue, Claire pale and dark, in brown. It was surreal, Claire here with my mother, at an orange picnic table at Frontera. Like a dream where I was naked and standing in line at the student store. I just forgot to get dressed. I was dreaming this, I told myself, and I could wake up.

  Claire pressed her palm to her forehead, like she was taking her temperature. My mother took Claire’s other thin hand between her large ones. My mother was talking without stopping, low, reasonable, I’d seen her hypnotize a cat this way. Claire was upset. What was she telling her? I didn’t care what my mother’s game was. Her time was up. We were leaving, she was staying. She couldn’t screw this up for me, no matter what she said.

  They both looked up as I rejoined them. My mother glared at me, then veiled it with a smile, patted Claire’s hand. “You just remember what I told you.”

  Claire said nothing. Serious now. All her giggles had vanished, her pleasure at finding another person who quoted Shakespeare. She stood up, pale fingernails propped on the tabletop. “I’ll meet you at the car,” she said.

  My mother and I watched her go, her long legs in their matte brown, the quietness of her movements. My mother had taken all the electricity away, the liveliness, the charm. She scooped her out, the way the Chinese used to cut open the skull of a living monkey and eat its brains with a spoon.

  “What did you tell her?”

  My mother leaned back on the bench, folding her arms behind her head. Yawned luxuriously, like a cat. “I hear she’s having trouble with her husband.” She smiled, sensually, rubbing the blond down on her forearms. “It’s not you, is it? I know you have an attraction to older men.”

  “No, it’s not me.” She couldn’t play with me the way she played with Claire. “You stay out of it.”

  I’d never dared speak to her that way before. If she were not stuck here at Frontera, I would never have had the nerve. But I would be leaving and she would be staying, and in that fact there was a strength I would never have found if she were out.

  I could see it startled her to have me oppose her. It angered her that I felt I could, but she was controlled, I could see her switch gears. She gave me a smile of slow irony. “Your mommy just wants to help, precious,” she said, licking her words like a cat lapping cream. “I have to do what I can for my new friend.”

  We both watched Claire out past the cyclone fencing, as she walked to the Saab, distracted. She bumped into the fender of a station wagon. “Just leave her alone.”

  “Oh, but it’s fun,” my mother said, bored with the pretense. She always preferred to bring me behind the scenes. “Easy, but fun. Like drowning kittens. And in my current situation, I have to take my fun where I can. What I want to know is, how could you stand to live with Poor Claire? Did you know there was an entire order, the Poor Claires? I would imagine it’s a terrible bore. Keeping up the old grade point average and whatnot. Pathetic.”

  “She’s a genuinely nice person,” I said, turning away from her. “You wouldn’t know about that.”

  My mother snorted. “God forbid, the nice disease. I would have thought you’d outgrown fairy tales.”

  I kept my back to her. “Don’t screw it up for me.”

  “Who, me?” My mother was laughing at me. “What could I do? I’m a poor prisoner. A little bird with a broken wing.”

  I turned around. “You don’t know what it’s been like.” I bent over her, one knee on the bench beside her. “If you love me, you’ll help me.”

  She smiled, slow and treacherous. “Help you, darling? I’d rather see you in the worst kind of foster hell than with a woman like that.” She reached up to push a lock of hair away from my face, and I jerked away. She grabbed my wrist, forcing me to look at her. Now she was dead serious. What was under the games was pure will. I was terrified to struggle. “What are you going to learn from a woman like that?” she said. “How to pine artistically? Twenty-seven names for tears?” A guard made a motion toward us, and she quickly dropped my wrist.

  She stood and kissed me on the cheek, embraced me lightly. We were the same height but I could feel how strong she was, she was like the cables that held up bridges. She hissed in my ear, “All I can say is, keep your bags packed.”

  CLAIRE STARED out at the road. A tear slipped from her overfilled eyes. Twenty-seven names for tears. But no, that wasn’t my thought. I refused to be brainwashed. This was Claire. I put my hand on her shoulder as she made the turn onto the rural highway. She smiled and patted it with her small, cold one. “I think I did well with your mom, don’t you?”

  “You did,” I told her, gazing out the window so I wouldn’t have to lie to her face. “She really liked you.”

  A tear rolled down her cheek, and I brushed it away with the back of my hand. “What did she say to you?”

  Claire shook her head, sighed. She started the windshield wipers, though it was only a mist, turned them off when they started sq
ueaking on the dry glass. “She said I was right about Ron. That he was having an affair. I knew it anyway. She just confirmed it.”

  “How would she know,” I said angrily. “For God’s sake, Claire, she just met you.”

  “All the signs are there.” She sniffled, wiped her nose on her hand. “I just didn’t want to see them.” But then she smiled. “Don’t concern yourself. We’ll work it out.”

  I SAT AT MY DESK under the ridiculous pyramid, drawing my self-portrait, looking in a hand mirror. I was doing it in pen, not glancing down, trying not to lift the pen from the paper. One line. The squarish jaw, the fat unsmiling lips, the round reproachful eyes. Broad Danish nose, mane of pale hair. I drew myself until I could make a good likeness even with my eyes closed, until I’d memorized the pattern of the movement in my hand, in my arm, the gesture of my face, until I could see my face on the wall. I’m not you, Mother. I’m not.

  Claire was supposed to go to an audition. She had told Ron she would, but she had me call in and say she was sick. She was soaking in the bathtub with her lavender oil and a chunk of amethyst, trying to soothe her jagged edges. Ron was supposed to be home on Friday, but something came up. His trips home were handholds for her, so she could swing from one square on the calendar to the next. When he said he was going to come home and didn’t, she swung forward and grasped thin air, fell.

  I intercepted a letter from prison from my mother to Claire. In it, my mother advised a love potion to put in his food, but everything in the formula she sent looked poisonous to me. I drew a picture over her letter, a series of serpentine curves speared by an angle, put it in a new envelope and sent it back to her.

  In the living room, Claire played her Leonard Cohen. Suzanne taking her down to the place by the river.

  I kept drawing my face.

  19

  BY APRIL, the desert had already sucked spring from the air like blotting paper. The Hollywood Hills rose unnaturally clear, as if we were looking at them through binoculars. The new leaves were wilting in the heat that left us sweating and dispirited in the house with the blinds down.

  Claire brought out the jewelry she kept in the freezer and dumped it onto her bed, a pirate’s treasure, deliciously icy. Freezing strands of green jade beads with jeweled clasps, a pendant of amber enclosing a fossilized fern. I pressed it, cold, to my cheek. I draped an antique crystal bracelet down the part in my hair, let it lap on my forehead like a cool tongue.

  “That was my great-aunt Priscilla’s,” Claire said. “She wore it to her presentation ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, just before the Great War.” She lay on her back in her underwear, her hair dark with sweat, a smoky topaz bracelet across her forehead intersected by an intricate gold chain that came to rest on the tip of her nose. She was painfully thin, with sharp hipbones and ribs stark as a carved wooden Christ. I could see her beauty mark above the line of her panties. “She was a field nurse at Ypres. A very brave woman.”

  Every bracelet, every bead, had a story. I plucked an onyx ring from the pile between us on the bed, rectangular, its black slick surface pierced by a tiny diamond. I slipped it on, but it was tiny, only fit my smallest finger, above the knuckle. “Whose was this?” I held it out so she could see it without moving her head.

  “Great-grandmother Matilde. A quintessential Parisienne.”

  Its owner dead a hundred years, perhaps, but still she made me feel large and ill bred. I imagined jet-black hair, curls, a sharp tongue. Her black eyes would have caught my least awkwardness. She would have disapproved of me, my gawky arms and legs, I would have been too large for her little chairs and tiny gold-rimmed porcelain cups, a moose among antelope. I gave it to Claire, who slipped it right on.

  The garnet choker, icy around my neck, was a wedding present from her mill-owning Manchester great-grandfather to his wife, Beatrice. The gold jaguar with emerald eyes I balanced on my knee was brought back from Brazil in the twenties by her father’s aunt Geraldine Woods, who danced with Isadora Duncan. I was wearing Claire’s family album. Maternal grandmothers and paternal great-aunts, women in emerald taffeta, velvet and garnets. Time, place, and personality locked into stone and silver filigree.

  In comparison to this, my past was smoke, a story my mother once told me and later denied. No onyxes for me, no aquamarines memorializing the lives of my ancestors. I had only their eyes, their hands, the shape of a nose, a nostalgia for snowfall and carved wood.

  Claire dripped a gold necklace over one closed eye socket, jade beads in the other. She spoke carefully, nothing slid off.

  “They used to bury people like this. Mouths full of jewels and a gold coin over each eye. Fare for the ferryman.” She drizzled her coral necklace into the well of her navel, and her pearl double strand, between her breasts. After a minute, she picked up the pearls, opened her mouth and let the strand drop in, closed her lips over the shiny eggs. Her mother had given her the pearls when she married, though she didn’t want her to marry a Jew. When Claire told me, she expected me to be horrified, but I’d lived with Marvel Turlock, Amelia Ramos. Prejudice was hardly a surprise. The only thing I wondered was why would she give her pearls.

  Claire lay still, pretending to be dead. A jeweled corpse in her pink lace lingerie, covered with a fine drizzle of sweat. I wasn’t sure I liked this new game. Through the French doors, in the foot of space showing under the blinds, I could see the garden, left wild this spring. Claire didn’t garden anymore, no pruning and weeding under her Chinese peaked hat. She didn’t stake the flowers, and now they bloomed ragged, the second-year glads tilting to one side, Mexican evening primroses annexing the unmowed lawn.

  Ron was away again, twice in one month, this time in Andalusia taping a piece about Gypsies. Out combing the world for what was most bizarre, racking up frequent flier miles. If he wanted to see something weird and uncanny, he should have just walked into his own bedroom and seen his wife lying on the bed in her pink lace panties and bra, covered in jade and pearls, pretending she was dead. Underneath the bed, the voodoo box, magnets and clippers and pens, sealed Polaroid photographs, conjured him home.

  Suddenly, she was gagging on the pearls. She sat up, retching. The jewels fell from her body. She pulled the strand of pearls from her mouth, catching it in her hand. She was so pale, her mouth seemed unnaturally red by comparison, and she had dark circles under her eyes. She slumped over the cluster of lustrous eggs, wet with spit, on the edge of the bed with her back to me, her spine threaded like jade.

  She reached back for my hand, her nails dirty, tips small and sensitive as a child’s, the rings incongruous as gumball machine prizes. I took her hand. She brought my hand around to her face, pressing its back against her wet cheek. She was burning up. I rested my face on her shoulder, her back was like fire. “Ron’ll be back soon,” I tried to reassure her.

  She nodded, head heavy on her slender neck, like one of her drooping tulips, the knobs of her spine like a diamondback’s rattle. “It’s so hot already. What will I do when summer comes?”

  She was all skin and nerves, no substance, no weight. She was her own skin kite, stretched before dry violent winds.

  “We should go to the beach,” I suggested.

  She shook her head, fast, as if a fly had landed on her. “It’s not that.”

  I was sitting on one of the jewels, it was digging into my hip. I freed one of my hands and reached under myself, pulled it out. It was an aquamarine, big as an almond in the shell. Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren’t worth as much. It was the emerald that didn’t break that was the really valuable thing.

  I handed her the ice-blue stone, the color of my mother’s eyes. She put it on her forefinger, where it hung like a doorknob on a rope. She gazed into it. “This belonged to my mother. My father got it for her to celebrate an around-the-world cruise.” She took it off. “It was too big for her too
.”

  Next door, Mrs. Kromach’s parrot whistled the same three notes in an ascending scale, three and a half notes apart. An ice-cream truck rolled down the street, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Claire lay down on her back so she could look at me, one hand behind her head. She was very beautiful, even now, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, wet at the hairline, her dark eyebrows arched and glossy, her small breasts curved in pink lace.

  “If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” she asked.

  I turned onto my stomach, sorted through the jewelry. I tried on a gold bangle. It wouldn’t fit over my hand. I thought of my suicides, the way I would run my death through my fingers like jet beads. “I wouldn’t.”

  She laced an Indian silver necklace onto her flat stomach, strands of hairlike tubes making metal into a fluid like mercury. “Well, say you wanted to.”

  “It’s against my religion.” Sweat trickled down between my breasts, pooled in my navel.

  “What religion is that?”

  “I’m a survivalist.”

  She wouldn’t allow that. I wasn’t playing. It was against the rules. “Just say you did. Say you were very old and had a horrible incurable cancer.”

  “I’d get lots of Demerol and wait it out.” I was not going to discuss suicide with Claire. It was on my mother’s list of antisocial acts. I wasn’t going to tell her the surest way, the bone cancer boy’s plan, injecting an air bubble into your vein and letting it move through your blood like a pearl. I was sure her aunt Priscilla used that once or twice on the battlefield when the morphine ran out. Then there was a load of cyanide at the back of the tongue, the way they did it to cats. It was very fast. When you committed suicide, you didn’t want something slow. Some-one could walk in, someone could save you.

  Claire clasped her hand to one knee, rocked a little, up and down her spine. “You know how I’d do it?”

  She was pulling me down that road and I wasn’t going to go there. “Let’s go to the beach, okay? It’s so hot, it’s making us crazy.”