White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  She swore she could hear the click before she hung up. She made

  me listen.

  “Do you hear it?” she asked, her dark eyes glittering.

  “Maybe,” I said, not wanting her to be all alone in her night. “I can’t really tell.”

  IN OCTOBER the heat gave way to the blue afternoon haze of true autumn, hand-shaped leaves of the sycamores showed orange against the dusty white trunks, and a red-gold blush lay on the hills. One day I came home from school and found Claire staring at herself in her round vanity mirror in her room, her silver brush forgotten in her hand. “My face is uneven, have you noticed? My nose is off-center.” She turned her head to the side, examined the profile, puffed out her cheeks and pushed her imagined off-center nose to the right, mashed the tip down. “I hate pointed noses. Your mother has Garbo’s nose, did you ever notice that? If I had mine done, I’d want one like that.”

  She wasn’t talking about noses. Claire was just tired of seeing her own face in the mirror, it was a code of her failings. There was something missing, but it wasn’t what she thought. She fretted that her hairline was receding, that she was going to end up looking like Edgar Allan Poe. Her fearful gaze magnified the incomplete tops of her ears, shrank her small lips.

  “Small teeth mean bad luck,” she said, showing them to me in the mirror. “Short life.” Her teeth were barley beads, pearllike and gleaming. But her eyes had grown increasingly deep. I could hardly see the lids anymore, and her sharp bones once again made bridges in her face, a Rodin sculptured bronze head, merciless in its paring down.

  As we got into December, Claire cheered up. She loved the holidays. She was reading magazines with pictures of Christmas in England, in Paris, in Taos, New Mexico. She wanted to do everything. “Let’s have a perfect Christmas,” she said.

  We wired a wreath in eucalyptus and pomegranates we dipped into melted wax. She bought boxes of Christmas cards, soft handmade paper with lace and golden stars. Swan Lake played on the classical station. We sewed garlands of tiny chili peppers, stuck cloves into tangerines, tied them with velvet the color of brandy. She bought me a red velvet dress with a white lace collar and cuffs at Jessica McClintock in Beverly Hills. Perfect, she said.

  It scared me when she said perfect. Perfect was always too much to ask.

  RON CAME HOME until after New Year’s. She waited for him, so we could all buy the tree together, like a real family. In the car, she described just what she wanted. Symmetrical, soft-needled, six feet at least. The tree man tried to help but gave up after pulling out and untwining dozens of trees.

  “I don’t get any of this,” Ron said, watching Claire’s desperate search. “Jesus grew up in Bethlehem. High desert. We should be buying an olive, a date palm. A frigging Jerusalem artichoke.”

  I walked along the side with the spray-painted trees, some in white like a starched chemical snowfall, others painted gold, pink, red, even black. The black tree, about three feet high, looked like it had been burnt. I wondered who would want a black tree, but I knew someone would. There was no limit to the ways in which people could be strange. Someone would buy it as a joke, a belated Halloween, to decorate with plastic skulls and tiny guillotines. Or it would become someone’s Yuletide political statement. Or someone would take it just for the pleasure of making their kids cry.

  The smell of the trees was like Oregon. If only we could be back there right now, a soft rain falling, in the cabin, the woodstove. I joined Claire, where she was agonizing over a tree that was almost right, except for a bit of a gap in the branches on one side. She pointed it out with anxious hands. I assured her she could keep it to the wall, nobody would ever notice it.

  “That’s not the point,” she said. “If something is wrong, you can’t just turn it to the wall.”

  I knew what she meant, but convinced her to take it anyway.

  At home, Claire instructed Ron in the hanging of lights. Originally she wanted candles, but Ron drew the line there. We wound strings of chilies and popcorn round and around, while Ron watched a big soccer game on TV. Mexico playing Argentina. He wouldn’t turn it off so Claire could have Christmas carols. A man’s world. He could barely pull himself away long enough to put the gold angel on top.

  Claire turned out the room lights and we sat and watched the tree in the dark, while Mexico overran South America.

  THE MORNING of Christmas Eve, Ron got a call about a vision of the Virgin Mary seen in Bayou St. Louis. He had to go film it. They had a big fight and Claire locked herself in their room. In the kitchen, I was polishing the silver, a job I’d learned to do very well. We were going to have dinner with crystal and linens. I had my new Christmas dress from Jessica McClintock. Claire had already stuffed the goose, and picked up a real English trifle from Chalet Gourmet. We had tickets for the midnight Messiah at the Hollywood Bowl.

  We didn’t go. I ate ham sandwiches and watched It’s a Wonderful Life. Claire came out and threw the goose in the trash. She poured herself small glasses of sherry, one after the other, and watched TV with me, crying on and off in the plaid bathrobe Ron had given her as an early Christmas present. I had a glass or two of the sweet liquor to keep her company, it was no worse than cough syrup. She finally took a couple of sleeping pills and passed out on the couch. She snored like a mower in high grass.

  She slept through most of Christmas morning, then woke with a terrible headache at noon. We didn’t talk about Ron, but she wouldn’t touch the presents he left for her. I got a real fisherman sweater, a new set of acrylic paints, a big book of Japanese woodcuts, and silk pajamas like something Myrna Loy would wear in a Thin Man movie.

  My present was small compared with the ones Ron bought her. “Here, open something.”

  “I don’t want anything,” she said from under her washcloth soaked in vinegar.

  “I made it for you.”

  She pushed aside the washcloth, and despite the pain in her temples, slipped off the raffia ties, and opened the marbled paper wrapping I had made myself. Inside was a portrait of her, in a round wooden frame. She started to cry, then ran to the bathroom and threw up. I could hear her gagging. I picked up the picture, in charcoal, traced her high rounded forehead, the slope of fine bones, the sharp chin, arched brows.

  “Claire?” I said through the bathroom door.

  I heard water running and tried the door. It wasn’t locked. She sat on the edge of the tub in her red plaid bathrobe, pale as winter, hand over her mouth, eyes turned toward the windows. She was blinking back tears and wouldn’t look at me. She seemed to be collapsing at the center, one arm wrapped around her waist, as if keeping herself from breaking in two.

  I didn’t know what to do when she was like this. I gazed down at the tiles, salmon pink, counted the shiny squares. Twenty-four from tub to heater. Thirty from the door to the sink. A decorative motif was the color of cherry cough drops, punctuated with almond cuneiform script. The frosted glass shower door swan bowed its head.

  “I should never drink.” She washed her mouth out in the sink, cupping water in her palm. “It just makes things worse.” She wiped her hands and face on a towel, took my hand. “Now I’ve ruined your Christmas.”

  I made her lie down on the couch, opened my new paints, spread colors on a plate, and painted a sheet of thick paper half black, half red, and made flames like the back of the Leonard Cohen album. The woman on the radio sang “Ave Maria.” “What does Ave mean?”

  “Bird,” she said.

  The woman’s voice was a bird, flying in a hot wind, battered by the effort. I painted it in the fire, black.

  WHEN RON came home from New Orleans, Claire didn’t get up from the couch. She didn’t clean up, shop, cook, change the sheets, put on lipstick, or try to make it better. She lay in her red bathrobe on the couch, sherry bottle right by her hand, she’d been sipping steadily all day long, eating cinnamon toast and leaving the crusts, listening to opera. That’s what she craved. Hysterical loves and inevitable betrayals. The women all ended
up stabbing themselves, drinking poison, bitten by snakes.

  “For Christ’s sake, at least get dressed,” Ron said. “Astrid shouldn’t have to see this.”

  I wished he wouldn’t use me as a reason. Why couldn’t he say, I’m worried about you, I love you, you need to see someone?

  “Astrid, do I embarrass you?” Claire asked. If she were sober, she would never have put me on the spot like that.

  “No,” I said. But it did, when they passed me back and forth like a side dish at dinner.

  “She says I don’t embarrass her.”

  Ron said, “You embarrass me.”

  Claire nodded, drunk against the armrest of the couch in the blinking Christmas lights. She raised one thin philosophical finger. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me, Ron, have I always embarrassed you? Or is this a recent development?” She had a funny way of talking when she was drinking, of lipping her words, top over bottom, like Sandy Dennis in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  On the stereo, the soprano launched into her big aria before she did herself in, Madame Butterfly or Aida, I can’t remember which. Claire closed her eyes, tried to lose herself in the singing. Ron turned off the CD.

  “Claire, I had to go. It’s what I do,” Ron explained, standing over her, his palms out, as if he were singing. “I’m sorry it was Christmas, but it was a Christmas story. I couldn’t wait until February, now could I.”

  “It’s what you do,” she said in the flat voice I hated.

  He pointed with that smooth clean finger. “Don’t.”

  I wished she’d bite it, break it off, but instead she glanced down, finished her drink and put the sherry glass on the table, carefully, and nestled down under the mohair blanket. She was always cold now. “Did she go with you? The blond, what’s-her-bimbo, Cindy. Kimmie.”

  “Oh this.” He turned away, starting picking things up, dirty Kleenexes, empty glasses, dishtowel, bowl. I didn’t help him. I sat on the couch with Claire, wishing he’d leave us alone. “Christ I’m tired of your paranoia. I should have an affair, just to give you some basis. At least then I’d get the fun along with the crap.”

  Claire watched him with heavy-lidded eyes, red-rimmed from crying. “She doesn’t embarrass you, though. It doesn’t embarrass you to be running around with her.”

  He reached down to pick up her empty glass. “Blah, blah, blah.”

  Before I realized what was happening, she sprang to her feet and slapped him across the face. I was glad, she ’d needed to do that for months. But then, instead of telling him so, she sagged back to the couch, hands flopped on her knees, and started to cry in hiccupy sobs. It took all her strength just to slap him. I felt both sorry and disgusted.

  “Excuse us, will you?” Ron asked me.

  I looked at Claire, to see if she wanted me to stay, be a witness. But she was just sobbing, her face uncovered.

  “Please,” he said, more firmly.

  I went back to my room, closed the door, then opened it slightly when they started talking again.

  “You promised,” he said. “If we got a child.”

  “I can’t help it,” she said.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said. “She really should go, then.”

  I strained my ears for the sound of her voice, but I couldn’t hear her reply. Why didn’t she say something? I wished I could see her, but his back blocked my view as he stood over her. I tried to imagine her face. She was drunk, her skin stained and rubbery. What was in her eyes? Hatred? Pleading? Confusion? I waited for her to defend me, something, but she didn’t respond.

  “It isn’t working out,” he continued.

  What struck me was not so much that he could talk about sending me back, like a dog you got from the pound when it dug up the yard and ruined the carpets. It was the reasonableness of his tone, caring but detached, like a doctor. It was the only reasonable thing, the voice said. It just wasn’t working out.

  “Maybe you’re the one who’s not working out,” she said, reaching for the sherry bottle as she said it. He knocked it from her hand. It went flying, I heard it hit and roll on the pine floor.

  “I can’t stand your poses,” he said. “Who are you supposed to be now, the wounded matriarch? Christ, she takes care of you. That wasn’t the idea.”

  He was lying. That was exactly the idea. He got me to take care of her, keep an eye on her, keep her company while he was away. Why didn’t she say it? She didn’t know how to defy him.

  “You can’t take her away,” was all she said. “Where would she go?”

  It was the wrong question, Claire.

  “She’ll have a place, I’m sure,” Ron said. “But look at you. You’re falling apart. Again. You promised, but here we are. And I’m supposed to drop everything and put you back together again. Well, I’m warning you, if I have to pick up the pieces again, you’re going to give up something too.” Still the reasonable voice. He was making it all her fault.

  “You take everything away,” she sobbed. “You leave me with nothing.”

  He turned away from her, and now I could see his face, the disgust. “God, you’re such a bad actress,” he said. “I’d almost forgotten.”

  When he stepped out of my line of sight, I saw her, hands around her ears, her knees under her chin, she was rocking back and forth, saying, “Do you have to take everything? Do you have to have it all?”

  “Maybe you need some time,” he said. “Think it over.”

  I heard his footsteps, closed the door before he caught me spying on them. I heard him pass down the hall.

  I peeked out the door, she was back lying on the couch. She pulled the mohair blanket up over her head. I could hear her moaning.

  I closed the door and sat on my bed, helpless. It was my mother all over again. Why did they do this? I’d been taking care of Claire for almost two years. I was the one she told everything.

  I was the one who worried, submitted to her rituals, calmed her fears, while he was off chasing poltergeists and Virgin Mary apparitions. How could he send me away now? I opened the door, determined to talk to him, to tell him he couldn’t, when he came out of the bedroom with his hanging bag over his shoulder, his briefcase in his hand. His eyes caught mine, but they slid closed like steel doors as he swung past me out into the living room.

  I didn’t think Claire could get any paler, but when she saw Ron with those bags, she turned powder white. She scrambled from the couch, the blanket fell to the floor. Her bathrobe was all twisted around, I could see her underwear. “Don’t go.” She grabbed onto his corduroy jacket. “You can’t leave me. I love you.”

  He inhaled, and for a moment I thought he was going to change his mind, but then his eyebrows pressed down on his eyes, and he turned, breaking her hold. “Work it out.”

  “Ron, please.” She grabbed for him again but she was too drunk, she missed and fell onto her knees. “Please.”

  I went back to my room and lay facedown on the bed. I couldn’t stand to watch her crawl after him, grabbing onto his legs, begging, staggering after him out the door, in her red Christmas bathrobe all falling open. I could hear her outside now, weeping, promising she’d be good, promising him everything. The slam of his car door, the engine starting up, the unwinding ascending note of the Alfa backing out as she continued to plead. I imagined Mrs. Kromach peering out from behind her powder-blue curtains, Mr. Levi staring in amazement from under his Hasidic brim.

  Claire came back in, calling me. I put the pillow over my head. Weakling, I thought. Traitor. She was in front of my door, but I didn’t answer. She would give me up for him, she would do anything to have him. Just like before, my mother and Barry. “Please, Astrid,” she begged me through the door, but I wouldn’t listen. This sickness would never happen to me.

  Finally she went to her room, closed the door, and I hated her for crawling after him and hated myself for my disgust, for knowing just how Ron felt. I lay there on my bed, hating all of us, listening to her cry, she ’d done nothing but
for a week. Twenty-seven names for tears.

  I heard Leonard Cohen start up, asking if she heard her master sing. The circular repetition of an overwhelming question. I wanted to seal myself up, while I still had something of my own that I hadn’t given to Claire. I had to pull back or I would be torn away, like a scarf closed in a car door.

  How I despised her weakness. Just like my mother said I would. It repelled me. I would have fought for her, but Claire couldn’t even stand up for herself. I couldn’t save us both. On my desk was the picture of me and the steelhead trout from summer. Ron had it framed. I looked so happy. I should have known it wouldn’t last. Nothing lasts. Didn’t I know that by now? Keep your bags packed, my mother said. And me with less than a year to go, with college dangling before me.

  But then I remembered how Claire took me to Cal Arts to see if I wanted to apply there, even got me the application. How she made me take honors classes, helped me with the homework, drove me to the museum every Tuesday night. If I had a future at all, it was only because she gave it to me. But then I saw her crawling again, begging, and was repelled afresh. Astrid help me. Astrid pick up the pieces. How could I? I was counting on her too much. I had to start facing that.

  I read for a while in a book about Kandinsky, tried out some of his ideas about form and tension. How the tension in a line increased as it approached the edge. I tried not to listen as the Leonard Cohen cycled around. She must have fallen asleep by now. Let her sleep it off.

  I drew until it got dark, then turned on the light and spun the pyramid that hung over my desk, the ridiculous pyramid my mother had sold Claire on. When I closed the Kandinsky book, I couldn’t help noticing the inscription. To Astrid, with all my love, Claire.

  It went through me like a current, shorting out my childish resentment. If I had anything good, it was only because of Claire. If I could think of myself as worthwhile for a second, it was because Claire made me think so. If I could contemplate a future at all, it was because she believed there was one. Claire had given me back the world. And what was I doing now that she needed me? Rolling up my windows, loading in supplies, unreeling the barbed wire.