White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  Niki laughed. “He’s huge, Sergei. Haven’t you heard of him? Moby Dick.”

  Olivia had told me all about men like Sergei. Hard men with blue veins in their sculpted white arms, heavy-lidded blue eyes and narrow waists. You could make a deal with a man like that. A man who knew what he wanted. I kept my eyes on my broccoli and cheese.

  “You get tired of waiting,” he said. “You come see me.”

  “What if you’re no good?” I said, making the other girls laugh.

  “Only worry you fall in love Sergei,” he said, his voice like a hand between my legs.

  MY LATEST CASEWORKER, Mrs. Luanne Davis, was a middle-aged black woman in a white blouse tied in a bow at the neck and relaxed hair in a pageboy. I spotted her right off when I arrived at the McDonald’s on Sunset after school. I ordered a burger and fries and a Coke, and for once, the screaming of children in the ball pit didn’t bother me. I’d gone to Playland the night before with Niki, where she sang with one of Werner’s bands, Freeze. I carried her microphone stand, which made me a roadie, so I didn’t need an ID. Niki was the only one who could sing. She had a purring, ironical voice, she sang the way Anne Sexton read poetry. But everyone else screamed, and nobody could play, and I was still half-deaf from it.

  The social worker passed a wad of letters across the sticky table to me. Such potential for damage, I didn’t even want to pick them up. I hated the sight of them, my mother’s handwriting, the crabbed lines I could see through the blue airmail envelopes. She could get seven pages per stamp, and each thin sheet weighed more than the night. They were like a kelp forest, they cast a weird green light, you could get lost there, become tangled and drown. I had not written to her since Claire died.

  Sipping her black coffee with Sweet’n Low, Mrs. Luanne Davis spoke slowly, overenunciating in light of my temporary deafness. “You really should write her. She’s in segregation. It can’t be easy.”

  “I didn’t put her there,” I said, still eyeing the letters like Portuguese man-of-wars floating on the innocent sea.

  She frowned. She had lines between her eyebrows from frowning at girls like me, girls who didn’t believe anybody could love them, least of all their dangerous parents. “I can’t tell you how few children I have whose parents write. They’d be thrilled to death.”

  “Yeah, I’m super lucky,” I said, but I dutifully put them in my pack.

  I finished my food, watching the kids jump off the net onto one small boy who couldn’t find his feet in the ball pit. Over and over they jumped onto him, laughing while he screamed. His teenaged mother was too busy talking to her friend to help him. Finally, she yelled something at the other kids, but she didn’t get up or do anything to protect her son. When she turned back to her friend, our eyes met. It was Kiki Torrez. We made no sign that we knew each other, we just looked a little longer than a casual glance, and then she went on talking to her friend. And I thought, prisoners probably traded just that glance, when they met on the outside.

  When I got home, Yvonne was in front of the TV on the figured green velvet couch, watching a talk show for teenagers. “This is the mother,” she told me, not taking her eyes from the screen. “She gave up the daughter when she was sixteen. They never saw each other before this second.” Big child’s tears dripped down her face.

  I didn’t know how she could stand to watch this, it was as phony as an ad. I couldn’t help thinking of the adopted mother who’d raised the girl, how sick it must make her feel to see her carefully raised daughter in the arms of a stranger, applauded by the talk show audience. But I knew Yvonne was imagining herself coming back into her baby’s life twenty years from now, slim, confident, dressed in a blue suit with high heels and perfect hair, her grown child embracing her, forgiving her everything. And what were the chances of that.

  I sat down next to Yvonne and looked through my mother’s letters, opened one.

  Dear Astrid,

  Why don’t you write? You cannot possibly hold me responsible for Claire Richards’s suicide. That woman was born to overdose. I told you the first time I saw her. Believe me, she’s better off now.

  On the other hand, I am writing from Ad Seg, prison within a prison. This is what is left of my world, an 8x8 cell shared with Lunaria Irolo, a woman as mad as her name.

  During the day, the crows caw, dissonant and querulous, a perfect imitation of the damned. Of course, nothing that sings would alight near this place. No, we are left quite alone with our unholy crows and the long-distance cries of the gulls.

  The buzz and slam of the gates reverberate in this great hollow chamber, roll across poured cement floors to where we crouch behind a chain-link fence, behind the slitted doors, plotting murder, plotting revenge. I am behind the fence, they say. They handcuff us even to shower. Well they should.

  I liked that idea, my mother behind the fence, handcuffed. She couldn’t hurt me from there.

  From the slitted window in the door, I can see the COs at their desks in the middle of the unit. Our janitors of penitence, eating doughnuts. Keys glitter important at their waists. It’s the keys I watch. I am hypnotized by keys, thick fistfuls of them, I can taste their acid galvanization, more precious than wisdom.

  Yesterday, Sgt. Brown decided my half hour in the shower counts as part of the hour I’m permitted out of my cell each day. I remember when I had hoped he would be a reasonable man, black, slender, well-spoken. But I should have known. His deep voice seems not to issue from his meager frame, it’s as artificial as a preacher’s, steeped in an overblown sense of his own importance, the Cerberus of our concrete Inferno.

  In my extensive leisure time, I am practicing astral projection. As Lunaria’s voice drones on, I rise from my bunk and fly out across the fields, following the freeway west until I can see the downtown towers. I have touched the mosaics of the Central Library’s glazed pyramid. I have seen the ancient carp glistening orange, pimento, dappled silver, and black in the koi ponds of the New Otani. I ride updrafts around the Bonaventure’s neat cylinders, its glass elevators ricocheting between floors. Do you remember the time we ate at the top, went once around in the revolving bar? You wouldn’t get near the windows, you screamed that the space was pulling you out. We had to move to a booth in the center, remember? You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don’t know whether you’re going to jump.

  And I see you, walking in alleys, sitting in vacant lots crowded with weeds, Queen Anne’s lace dotted with rain. You think you cannot bear losing that weakling, Claire. Remember, there’s only one virtue, Astrid. The Romans were right. One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

  Mother.

  But I didn’t believe her for a second. Long ago, she told me that to slash each other to ribbons in battle each day and be put back together each night was the Vikings’ idea of heaven. Eternal slaughter, that was the thing. You were never killed out-right. It was like the eagle feeding on your liver by day and having it grow back, only more fun.

  26

  THE TRAINS ACROSS the river rolled on iron wheels, making a soothing percussion in the night. On our side, back by the bakery, a boy was playing electric guitar. He couldn’t sleep either, the sound of the trains stirred him. His guitar bore his longing up into the darkness like sparks, a music profound in its objectless desire, beautiful beyond solace or solution.

  In the other bed, Yvonne was restless. The maple frame groaned under her weight when she turned. She had eight weeks to go and I couldn’t imagine her getting any larger. The swell of her belly rose above the plane of sheet in a smooth volcanic dome, a Mount Saint Helens, Popocatépetl, ready for eruption. Time was moving in the room, in the music of the trains, ratchet by ratchet, a train so vast it needed three locomotives to roll its bulk through the night. Where did the trains go, Mother? Were we there yet?

  Sometimes I imagined I had a father who worked nights for the railroad. A signalman for the Southern Pacific who wore heavy fireproof gloves big as oars, and
wiped sweat from his forehead with a massive forearm. If I had a father who worked nights for the railroad, I might have had a mother who would listen for the click of the door when he came home, and I would hear her quiet voice, their muffled laughter through the thin walls of the house. How soft their voices would be, and sweet, like pigeons brooding under a bridge.

  If I were a poet, that’s what I’d write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle hands. Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question, “How’s it going, how’s the kids?” They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare.

  Under the bed, a darker current wove itself into the night. My mother’s unread letters, fluid with lies, shifted and heaved, like the debris of an enormous shipwreck that continued to be washed ashore years after the liner went down. I would allow no more words. From now on, I only wanted things that could be touched, tasted, the scent of new houses, the buzz of wires before rain. A river flowing in moonlight, trees growing out of concrete, scraps of brocade in a fifty-cent bin, red geraniums on a sweatshop window ledge. Give me the way rooftops of stucco apartments piled up forms in the afternoon like late surf, something without a spin, not a self-portrait in water and wind. Give me the boy playing electric guitar, my foster home bed at the end of Ripple Street, and the shape of Yvonne and her baby that was coming. She was the hills of California under mustard and green, tawny as lions in summer.

  Across the room, Yvonne cried out. Her pillow fell on the floor. I got it for her. It was spongy with sweat. She sweated so much at night, I sometimes had to help her change the sheets. I put the pillow behind her dark hair, pushed the soaked strands from her face. She was hot as a steaming load of wet laundry.

  The guitar unraveled a song I could only occasionally recognize

  as “So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star.”

  “Astrid,” Yvonne whispered.

  “Listen,” I said. “Someone ’s playing guitar.”

  “I had the worst dream,” she mumbled. “People kept stealing my stuff. They took my horse.”

  Her felted paper horse, white with gold paper trappings and red silk fringe, sat on the dresser, front leg raised, neck curved into an arch that echoed the frightened curve of her eyebrows.

  “It’s still there,” I said, putting my hand on her cheek. I knew it would feel cool on her hot skin. My mother used to do this when I was sick, I suddenly remembered, and for a moment I could feel it distinctly, the touch of her cool hands.

  Yvonne lifted her head to see the horse still prancing in the moonlight, then lay back on the pillow. “I wish this was over.”

  I knew what Rena would say. The sooner the better. A few months ago, I’d have gone her one further. I would have thought, what was the difference? When she gave birth to the baby, once it had been given away, there would always be something more to lose, a boyfriend, a home, a job, sickness, more babies, days and nights rolling over each other in an ocean that was always the same. Why hurry disaster?

  But now I had seen her sitting cross-legged on her bed whispering to her belly, telling it how great the world was going to be, that there were horses and birthdays, white cats and ice cream. Even if Yvonne wouldn’t be there for roller skates and the first day of school, it had to count for something. She had it now, that sweetness, that dream. “Yeah, when it’s time, you’ll think it’s too soon,” I said.

  Yvonne held my hand to her hot forehead. “You’re always cool. You don’t sweat at all. Oh, the baby’s moving,” she whispered. “You want to feel it?”

  She shoved up her T-shirt and I put my hand on her bare belly, round and hot as rising dough, to feel the odd distortions of the baby’s movements against my palm. Her smile was lopsided, divided, delight warring with what she knew was coming.

  “I think it’s a girl,” she whispered. “The other one was a girl.”

  She talked about her babies only late at night when we were alone. Rena wouldn’t let her talk about them, she told her not to think about them. But Yvonne needed to talk. The father of this one, Ezequiel, drove a pickup truck. They had met at Griffith Park, and she fell in love when he put her on the merry-go-round.

  I tried to think of something to say. “She ’s got a good kick. Maybe she’ll be a ballerina, ese.”

  The simple melody line of the electric guitar bounced off the hills and fed in through the window, and the mound of Yvonne ’s stomach danced in time, the tiny bumps of hands and feet.

  “I want her to do Girl Scouts. You’re gonna do Girl Scouts, mija,” she said to the mound. She looked back up at me. “Did you ever do it?”

  I shook my head.

  “I always wanted to,” she said, tracing figure eights on the damp sheet. “But I couldn’t ask. My mom would’ve laughed her head off. ‘Your big ass in the damn Girl Scouts?’ ”

  We sat there for the longest time, not saying anything. Hoping her daughter would have all the good things. The guitarist had quieted down, he was playing “Michelle.” My mother loved that song. She could sing it in French.

  Yvonne dozed off, and I went back to bed, thinking of my mother’s cool hands on my face in the heat of a fever, the way she would wrap me in sheets soaked in ice water, eucalyptus, and cloves. I am your home, she’d once said, and it was still true.

  I crawled under the bed, pulled out the sack of her letters, some packets thin as a promise, others fat like white koi. The bag was heavy, it exhaled the scent of her violets. I got up silently, not to wake Yvonne, and slipped out of the room, shutting the door tightly behind me.

  In the living room, on the green couch, I turned on the beaded lamp that made everything look like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. I lifted handfuls of letters onto the coffee table. I hated my mother but I craved her. I wanted to understand how she could fill my world with such beauty, and could also say, that woman was born to OD.

  The battered tomcat stalked along the back of the couch, cautiously climbed onto me. I let it curl up under my heart, heavy and warm and purring like a truck in low gear.

  Dear Astrid,

  It’s three in the morning, we’ve just had fourth count. In Ad Seg, the lights burn all night, fluorescent and stark on gray block walls just wide enough for the bed and the toilet. Still no letter from you. Only Sister Lunaria’s sexual litany. It runs day and night from the bottom bunk, like shifts of Tibetan monks praying the world into being. This evening, the exegesis has centered upon the Book of Raul, her last boyfriend. How worshipfully she describes the size and configuration of his member, the prismatic catalog of his erotic response.

  Sex is the last thing I think about here. Freedom is my only concern. I ponder the configuration of molecules in the walls. I meditate upon the nature of matter, a prevalence of void within the whirling electron rodeo. I try to vibrate between the packets of quanta, phasing at precisely the opposite wave-length, so that eventually I will exist in between the pulses, and matter will become wholly permeable. Someday, I will walk right through these walls.

  “Gonzales is giving it to Vicki Manolo over on Simmons A,” quoth Lunaria. “He’s hung like a horse. When he sits down it’s like he’s got a baseball bat in there.”

  The inmates like Gonzales. He takes the trouble to flirt, wears cologne, his hands are clean as white calla. She is masturbating, imagining enormous penises, she’s coupling with horses, with bulls, she’s positively Jovian in her fantasies, while I stare up at the pinpricks in the acoustical tiles and listen to the nightbreath of the prison.

  These days, I hear everything. I hear the click of the cards in guard tower 1, not poker, sounds like gin rummy, listen to their sad ad
missions of hemorrhoids and domestic suspicions. The old ladies in the honor cottage, Miller, snore with their dentures in a glass. I hear the rats in Culinary. A woman screams in the SCU, she hears the rats too, but doesn’t understand they’re not in her bed. Restraints are quickly applied.

  In the dormitories of Reception, I hear murmured threats as they shake down a new girl. She’s soft, a check kiter, she wasn’t prepared to be here. They take everything she has left to take. “Pussy,” they say after they’re through.

  The rest of the prison sleeps fitfully, rocked in dreams made vivid by captivity. I know what they’re dreaming. I read them like novels, it’s better than Joyce. They’re dreaming of men who beat them, a backhand, unsubtle kick to the groin. Men who clench their teeth before striking, they hiss, “Look what you’re making me do.” The women cringe even in sleep, under the stares of men’s eyeballs roadmapped with veins, popped with rage, the whites the color of mayonnaise left out for a week. One wonders how they could even see to deliver their blows. But women’s fear is a magnet. I hope you don’t know this. It draws the fist, the hands of men, hard as God’s.

  Others are luckier. They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers’ braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.

  Some dream of crime, guns and money. Vials of dreams that disappeared like late snow. I am there. I see the face of a surprised ARCO attendant just at the moment it spreads into a collage of bright blood and bone.

  I lie down in the cherished apartment, its white carpet, garbage disposal, dishwasher, security parking. I too cheat the old couple out of their savings and celebrate over a bottle of Mumm’s and Sevruga on toast. I carefully take a sliding glass door off the track of a two-story house in Mar Vista. I buy a fur coat at Saks with a stolen American Express credit card. It’s the best Russian sable, golden as brandy.