White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  “You’ll like it with us, Astrid,” Ann said, her clean white hand on my arm.

  She smelled of Jergens hand lotion, a pallid pink sweetness, not L’Air du Temps or Ma Griffe or my mother’s secretive violets, a scent which for chemical reasons could only be smelled for a moment at a time. Which do you like better, tarragon or thyme? All that was a dream, you couldn’t hold on, you couldn’t depend on frosted glass birds and Debussy.

  I looked at Bill and Ann, their well-meaning faces, sturdy shoes, no hard questions. Bill’s graying blond crew cut, his silver-rimmed glasses, Ann’s snip-and-curl beauty shop hair. This was attainable, solid and homely and indestructible as indoor-outdoor carpeting. I should have been grabbing it. But I found myself pulling away from her hand.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t believe them. I believed everything they said, they were a salvation, a solution to my most basic lack. But I recalled a morning years ago in a boxy church in Tujunga, the fluorescent lights, chipped folding chairs. Starr charmed as a snake while Reverend Thomas explained damnation. The damned could be saved, he said, anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love.

  I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life. It wasn’t like I didn’t know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and ever-present loss. But I knew I would never go to Bill with a troubling personal matter, a boy who liked me too much, a teacher who scolded unfairly. I had already seen more of the world, its beauty and misery and sheer surprise, than they could hope or fear to perceive.

  But I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They were blind sleepwalkers on tightropes, fingers scoring thin air. So I let them go, got up and walked away, knowing I’d given up something I could never get back. Not Ann and Bill Greenway, but some illusion I’d had, that I could be saved, start again.

  So now I sat at the tables again, waiting for my next interview. I saw her, a skinny brunette in dark glasses, she was taking a shortcut across the wet lawn, sinking into the just-watered turf in high heels, not caring she was ripping up the grass. Her silver earrings flashed in the January sun like fishing lures. Her sweater fell off one shoulder, revealing a black bra strap. She lost a shoe, the earth sucking it right off her foot. She hopped back on one leg, and mashed her bare foot angrily in. I knew already, I’d be going with her.

  23

  HER NAME was Rena Grushenka. In a week, she took me home in her whitewashed Econoline van with the Grateful Dead sticker in the back window, the red and blue halves of the skull divided down the middle like a bad headache. It was cold, raining, sky a smother of dull gray. I liked how she laid rubber in the parking lot. Watching the wall and wire of Mac dropping away out the window, I tried not to think too much about what lay ahead. We wandered through a maze of suburban neighborhood, looking for the freeway, and I concentrated on memorizing the way I had come — the white house with the dovecote, the green shutters, the mailbox, an Oriental pierced-concrete wall streaked with rain. High-voltage wires stretched between steel towers like giants holding jump ropes into the distance.

  Rena lit a black cigarette and offered me one. “Russian Sobranie. Best in world.”

  I took it, lit it with her disposable lighter, and studied my new mother. Her coal-black hair, completely matte, was a hole in the charcoal afternoon. High breasts pushed into a savage cleavage framed in a black crocheted sweater unbuttoned to the fourth button. Her dream-catcher earrings touched her shoulders, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of dreams might lodge there. When she ’d found the freeway, she shoved a tape into the cassette deck, an old Elton John. “Like a candle in the wind,” she sang in a deep throaty voice flavored with Russian soft consonants, hands on the big steering wheel grubby and full of rings, the nails chipped red.

  Butterflies suddenly filled the cab of the van — swallowtails, monarchs, buckeyes, cabbage whites — the fluttering wings of my too many feelings, too many memories, I didn’t know how Rena could see through the windshield for the heartbeat gossamer of their wings.

  It was less than a year, I told myself. Eighteen and out. I would graduate, get a job, my life would be my own. This was just a place to live rent-free until I could decide what the next act was going to be. Forget college, that wasn’t going to happen for me, so why set myself up. I sure wasn’t going to let myself get disappointed again. I never let anyone touch me. Damn straight.

  I concentrated on the shapes of the downtown towers as they emerged from the gloom, tops in the clouds, a half-remembered dream. We turned north on the 5, following train tracks around downtown, County Hospital, the warehouse area around the brewery, where the artists lived in their studios — we ’d been to parties there, my mother and I, a lifetime ago, so long it seemed like someone else’s memory, a song I’d heard once in a dream.

  Rena turned off at Stadium Way, and there were no houses now, just tangled green freewayside foliage and concrete. We paralleled the 5 for a while, then passed underneath, into a little neighborhood like an island below sea level, the freeway a wall on our left. On the right, through the rain-smeared windshield, street after street rolled by, each posted No Outlet. I saw cramped front yards, and laundry hanging wet on lines and over fences in front of Spanish cottages and tiny Craftsman bungalows, bars on all the windows. I saw macramé plant holders hanging from porches, children’s toys in bare-dirt front lawns, and enormous oleanders. Frogtown, the graffiti proclaimed.

  We pulled up in front of a glum cocoa-brown Spanish bungalow with heavy plasterwork, dark windows, and a patchy lawn surrounded by a chain-link fence. On one side, the neighbors had a boat in the driveway that was bigger than their house. On the other was a plumbing contractor. It was exactly where I belonged, a girl who could turn away from the one good thing in her life.

  “No place like home,” said Rena Grushenka. I couldn’t tell if she was being ironic or not.

  She didn’t help me carry my things. I took the most important bags — art supplies, the Dürer rabbit with Ron’s money hidden behind the frame — and followed her up the cracked path to the splintered porch. A white cat dashed in when Rena opened the door. “Sasha, you bad boy,” she said. “Out screwing.”

  It took a moment to adjust to the darkness inside the small house. Furniture was my first impression, jumbled together like in a thrift store. Too many lamps, none lit. A dark-haired plump girl lay on a green figured velvet sofa watching TV. She pushed the white cat away when it jumped in her lap. She glanced up at me, wasn’t impressed, went back to her show.

  “Yvonne,” Rena said. “She got more stuff. You help.”

  “You,” Yvonne said.

  “Hey, what I say you? Lazy cow.”

  “Chingao, talk about lazy.” But she pushed herself up from the too-soft couch, and I saw she was pregnant. Her dark eyes under the skimpy cover of half-moon plucked eyebrows met mine. “Have you ever came to the wrong place,” she said.

  Rena snorted. “What you think is right place? You tell me, we all go.”

  The girl gave her the finger, took a sweatshirt from the old-fashioned hatstand, lazily pulled the hood over her hair. “Come on.”

  We went back out into the rain, a fine drizzle now, and she took two bags, I took two more. “I’m Astrid,” I said.

  “Yeah, so?”

  We took the stuff to a room down a hall, across from the kitchen. Two beds, both unmade. “That one’s yours,” Yvonne said, dumping my bags onto it. “Don’t touch my stuff or I’ll kill you.” She turned and left me alone.

  It was a mess without precedence. Clothes on the beds, the desk, piled up against the walls, pouring out the open closet. I’d never seen so many clothes. And hair magazines, photonovelas in shreds. Over her bed, Yvonne h
ad pictures torn out of magazines, girls and boys holding hands, riding bareback on the beach. On the dresser, a Chinese paper horse with trappings of silky red fringe and gold foil guarded a bright yellow portable radio, a fancy makeup kit with twenty shades of eye shadow, and a picture of a young TV actor in a two-dollar frame.

  I gathered the stuff off my bed, a wet towel, pair of overalls, pink sweatshirt, a dirty plate, and tried to decide which would be less offensive, throwing them on the floor or the other bed. The floor, I decided. In the dresser, though, she’d left two drawers empty, and there were a half-dozen free hangers in the closet.

  I ordered my clothes into neat piles in my drawers, hung the best things, made the bed. There was no room for the rest. Don’t touch my stuff or I’ll kill you, she’d said. I’d spoken exactly those words myself. Now I remembered my room at Claire’s, seeing it for the first time and wondering how I would ever fill it up. She’d given me too much, I couldn’t hold on. I deserved this. I arranged my things in the shopping bags and slid them under the metal frame of the old-fashioned bed, all my artifacts. All the people I had been. It was like a graveyard under there. I hung the cartoon that Paul Trout had made of me over my bed. I never let anyone touch me. I wondered where he was now, whether I would ever hear from him again. Whether someone would love him someday, show him what beauty meant.

  After I’d unpacked, I crossed the narrow hall to the kitchen, where Rena sat with another girl, her dark-rooted hair dyed magenta. Each had an open Heineken bottle and they shared a filthy glass ashtray. The counters were all dirty dishes and takeout debris. “Astrid. This is other one, Niki.” Rena turned to the magenta-haired girl.

  This girl sized me up more carefully than the pregnant girl. Brown eyes weighed me to the tenth of an ounce, patted me down, checked the seams of my clothing. “Who hit you?”

  I shrugged. “Some girls at Mac. It’s going away.”

  Niki sat back in her mismatched dinette chair, skinny arms behind her head. “Sisters don’t like white girls messing with their men.” Tilted her head back to sip from her beer, but didn’t take her eyes off me. “They give you that haircut too?”

  “What, you’re Hawaii 5-0?” Rena said. “Leave her be.” She got up and fished another beer out of the battered refrigerator, covered with stickers from rock bands. A glimpse of the interior didn’t look promising. Beer, takeout cartons, some lunch meat. Rena held a beer up. “Want one?”

  I took it. I was here now. We drank beer, we smoked black cigarettes. I wondered what else we did on Ripple Street.

  Rena searched for something in the cabinets, opening and slamming the chipped beige doors. There wasn’t anything but a bunch of dusty old pots, odd glasses and plates. “You eat chips I buy?”

  “Yvonne,” Niki said, drinking her beer.

  “Eat for two,” Rena said.

  Niki and Rena went off somewhere in the van. Yvonne lay on one side, asleep on the couch, sucking her thumb. The white cat curled against her back. There was an empty bag of Doritos on the table. The TV was still on, local news. A helicopter crash on the 10. People crying, reporters interviewing them on the shoulder of the freeway. Blood and confusion.

  I went out onto the porch. The rain had stopped, the earth smelled damp and green. Two girls my age walked by with their kids, one on a tricycle, the other in a pink baby carriage. They stared at me, plucked eyebrows rendering their faces expressionless. A powder-blue American car from the sixties, somebody’s pride and joy, all shining chrome and white upholstery, roared by, the engine deep and explosive, and we watched it rise to the top of Ripple Street.

  A crack opened in the clouds to the west, and a golden light washed over the distant hills. Down here, the street was dark already, it would get dark early here, the hillside across the freeway blocked the light, but there was sunlight at the high end of the street and on the hills, gilding the domes of the observatory, which perched on the edge of the mountain like a cathedral.

  I walked toward the light, past businesses and little houses advertising child care, two-story fourplexes with wooden stairs and banana trees and corn growing in the yard, the Dolly Madison bakery. An electronics shop. A movie prop outlet, Cadillac Jack’s, a Conestoga wagon in its fenced lot. Salazar Mazda repair shop on the corner, where Fletcher Drive crossed the river.

  From the bridge, the view opened to the river, warmed in the last light like a gift, streaming between bruised gray clouds. The river ran under the road, heading for Long Beach. I rested my arms on the damp concrete railing and looked north toward the hills and the park. The water flowed through its big concrete embankments, the bottom covered with decades of silt and boulders and trees. It was returning to its wild state despite the massive sloped shore, a secret river. A tall white bird fished among the rocks, standing on one leg like in a Japanese woodcut. Fifty views of the L.A. River.

  A horn honked and a man shouted “Give me a piece of that” out of a car window. But it didn’t matter, nobody could stop on the bridge anyway. I wondered if Claire was here, if she could see me. I wished she could see this crane, the river bottom. It was beautiful and I didn’t deserve it, but I couldn’t help lifting my face to the last golden light.

  THE NEXT DAY Rena woke us before dawn. I was dreaming I was drowning, a shipwreck in the North Atlantic, it was just as well to wake up. The room was still dark, and freezing cold. “Workers of the world, arise,” Rena said, banishing our dreams with the smoke of her black cigarette. “You got nothing to lose but Visa Card, Happy Meal, Kotex with Wings.” She turned on the light.

  Yvonne groaned in the other bed, picked up a shoe and threw it half heartedly at Rena. “Fuckin’ Thursday.”

  We dressed with our backs to each other. Yvonne’s heavy breasts and lush thighs were startling in their beauty. I saw Matisse in her lines, I saw Renoir. She was only my age, but by comparison I had the body of a child.

  “Gonna report that puta to the INS. Kick her ass back to Russia.” She pawed through the piles of clothes, pulled out a turtleneck, sniffed it, threw it back. I stumbled down the hall to wash my face, brush my teeth. When I came out, she was already in the kitchen, pouring coffee into a battered Thermos, stuffing handfuls of saltines in a bag.

  In the cold darkness, clouds of white vapor escaped from the tailpipe of the Ford panel van, ghostly in its whitewash, which didn’t entirely conceal the gray bondo underneath. In the big captain’s chair, Rena Grushenka smoked a black Sobranie with a gold tip and sipped coffee from a Winchell’s slotted cup. Rolling Stones played on the tape deck. Her high-heeled boots tapped time on the dash.

  Yvonne and I climbed into the back and closed the doors. It was dark and smelled of moldy carpet squares. We huddled together on the ripped-out carseat against the far wall. Niki got in the front and Rena slammed the three-on-the-tree shift into place. “Find ’em, don’t grind ’em.” Niki lit a Marlboro, coughed wetly and spat out the window.

  “I quit smokin’ for the baby, but what’s the damn point,” Yvonne said.

  Rena found first, and we lurched into the stillness of Ripple Street. The orange streetlights illuminated the quiet neighborhood, the air perfumed caramel and vanilla by the night shift at the Dolly Madison bakery. I could hear the trucks pulling up to the loading bays as we ascended from the river bottom. A deep truck horn honked, and Rena fluffed her tangled black hair. Even at five in the morning, her shirt was already unbuttoned, her cleavage heightened severely by a Fredericks push-up bra. She sang along with the tape in her good alto voice, about how some girls give you diamonds, some girls Cadillacs. Her Jagger impersonation was impressive.

  We turned left on Fletcher, past the Mazda repair and the Star Strip, our van rattling like cans in the moist darkness. We went under the 5 and crossed Riverside Drive, fragrant with hamburgers from Rick’s. She turned left at the Astro coffee shop, its parking lot half-full of police cars. She spat three times out the window as we passed by.

  Then we began to climb, up into a neighborhood of narrow stre
ets, houses crowded along steep slopes wall to wall, stucco duplexes and nondescript boxes, occasionally an old Spanish-style. Stairs on the uphill side, carports on the downhill. I knelt between the captain’s seats for the view. I could see the whole river valley from here — headlights of cars on the 5 and the 2, the sleeping hills of Glassell Park and Elysian Heights dotted with lights. Vacant lots full of wild fennel, ferny and licorice-smelling in the dewy darkness. The smell mingled with the mold of the van and cigarettes and the reek of leftover alcohol. Rena flicked her cigarette out the window.

  Yvonne snapped on the interior light and flipped through a water-bloated Seventeen magazine. The blond girl on the cover smiled bravely, although clearly dismayed to have found herself in such circumstances. I looked at the magazine over her shoulder. I could never figure out where they found all those happy, pimpleless teens. Yvonne paused at a picture of a girl and a boy riding a fat horse bareback on the beach. “Did you ever ride a horse?”

  “No. I went to the racetrack once.” Medea’s Pride at five-to-one. His hand on her waist. “You?”

  “I been on the pony ride at Griffith Park,” Yvonne said.

  “Over there,” Rena pointed.

  A gray texturecoat house had black plastic bags plumped next to the trash. Rena stopped and Niki jumped out, cut the tab of one with a pocketknife. “Clothes.” She and Yvonne handed the bags up to me in the back. They were heavier than I’d thought, must have had appliances in the bottom. Yvonne lifted them easily, she was strong as a man. Niki swung the bags, a practiced move.