White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  Best are the freedom dreams. Steering wheels so real in the hand, the spring of the accelerator, gas tanks marked FULL. Wind through open windows, we don’t use the air conditioner, we suck in the live air going by. We take the freeways, using the fast lanes, watch for signs saying San Francisco, New Orleans. We pass trucks on great interstates, truck drivers blowing their airhorns. We drink sodas at gas stations, eat burgers rare at roadside cafés, order extra everything. We listen to country music stations, we pick up Tijuana, Chicago, Atlanta, GA, and sleep in motels where the clerk never even looks up, just takes the money.

  On Barneburg B, my cellmate Lydia Guzman dreams of walking on Whittier Blvd. in summertime, a rush of roughly cut drugs throbbing salsa down her thighs slick with ten-dollar nylons. She stuns the vatos with her slow haunch-dripping stride, her skirt impossibly tight. Her laughter tastes like burnt sunshine, cactus, and the worm.

  But most of all, we dream of children. The touch of small hands, glinty rows of seed pearl teeth. We are always losing our children. In parking lots, in the market, on the bus. We turn and call. Shawanda, we call, Luz, Astrid. How could we lose you, we were being so careful. We only looked away for a moment. Arms full of packages, we stand alone on the side-walk and someone has taken our children.

  Mother.

  They could lock her up, but they couldn’t prevent the transformation of the world in her mind. This was what Claire never understood. The act by which my mother put her face on the world. There were crimes that were too subtle to be effectively prosecuted.

  I sat up and the white cat flowed off me like milk. I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, threw it onto the crowded coffee table. She didn’t fool me. I was the soft girl in Reception. She ’d rob me of everything I had left to take. I would not be seduced by the music of her words. I could always tell the ragged truth from an elegant lie.

  Nobody took me away, Mother. My hand never slipped from your grasp. That wasn’t how it went down. I was more like a car you’d parked while drunk, then couldn’t remember where you’d left it. You looked away for seventeen years and when you looked back, I was a woman you didn’t recognize. So now I was supposed to feel pity for you and those other women who’d lost their own children during a holdup, a murder, a fiesta of greed? Save your poet’s sympathy and find some better believer. Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good. Someday I’d read it all in a poem for the New Yorker.

  Yes, I was tattooed, just as she’d said. Every inch of my skin was penetrated and stained. I was the original painted lady, a Japanese gangster, a walking art gallery. Hold me up to the light, read my bright wounds. If I had warned Barry I might have stopped her. But she had already claimed me. I wiped my tears, dried my hands on the white cat, and reached for another handful of glass to rub on my skin. Another letter full of agitated goings-on, dramas, and fantasies. I skimmed down the page.

  Somewhere in Ad Seg, a woman is crying. She’s been crying all night. I’ve been trying to find her, but at last, I realize, she’s not here at all. It’s you. Stop crying, Astrid. I forbid it. You have to be strong. I’m in your room, Astrid, do you feel me? You share it with a girl, I see her too, her lank hair, her thin arched eyebrows. She sleeps well, but not you. You sit up in bed with the yellow chenille spread — God, where did she find that thing, your new foster mother? My mother had one just like it.

  I see you cradling your bare knees, forehead pressed against them. Crickets stroke their legs like pool players lining up shots. Stop crying, do you hear me? Who do you think you are? What am I doing here, except to show you how a woman is stronger than that?

  It’s such a liability to love another person, but in here, it’s like playing catch with grenades. The lifers tell me to forget you, do easy time. “You can make a life here,” they say. “Choose a mate, find new children.” Sometimes it’s so awful, I think that they’re right. I should forget you. Sometimes I wish you were dead, so I would know you were safe.

  A woman in my unit gave her children heroin from the time they were small, so she’d always know where they were. They’re all in jail, alive. She likes it that way. If I thought I’d be here forever, I would forget you. I’d have to. It sickens me to think of you out there, picking up wounds while I spin in this cellblock, impotent as a genie in a lamp. Astrid, stop crying,

  damn you!

  I will get out, Astrid, I promise you that. I will win an appeal, I will walk through the walls, I will fly away like a white crow.

  Mother.

  Yes, I was crying. These words like bombs she sealed up and had delivered, leaving me ragged and bloody weeks later. You imagine you can see me, Mother? All you could ever see was your own face in a mirror.

  You always said I knew nothing, but that was the place to begin. I would never claim to know what women in prison dreamed about, or the rights of beauty, or what the night’s magic held. If I thought for a second I did, I’d never have the chance to find out, to see it whole, to watch it emerge and reveal itself. I don’t have to put my face on every cloud, be the protagonist of every random event.

  Who am I, Mother? I’m not you. That’s why you wish I were dead. You can’t shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act, I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don’t know. I am nothing like you. My nose is different, flat at the bridge, not sharp as a fold in rice paper. My eyes aren’t ice blue, tinted with your peculiar mix of beauty and cruelty. They are dark as bruises on the inside of an arm, they never smile. You forbid me to cry? I’m no longer yours to command. You used to say I had no imagination. If by that you meant I could feel shame, and remorse, you were right. I can’t remake the world just by willing it so. I don’t know how to believe my own lies. It takes a certain kind of genius.

  I went out on the front porch, the splintered boards under my bare feet. The wind carried the steady noise of traffic on the 5 and barking dogs, the pop of gunfire a block or two off in a night tinged red from the sodium vapor streetlights, it was bleeding. We were the ones who sacked Rome, she said on that long-ago night on the rooftop under the raven’s-eye moon. Don’t forget who you are.

  How could I ever forget. I was her ghost daughter, sitting at empty tables with crayons and pens while she worked on a poem, a girl malleable as white clay. Someone to shape, instruct in the ways of being her. She was always shaping me. She showed me an orange, a cluster of pine needles, a faceted quartz, and made me describe them to her. I couldn’t have been more than three or four. My words, that’s what she wanted. “What’s this?” she kept asking. “What’s this?” But how could I tell her? She’d taken all the words.

  The smell of vanilla wafers saturated the night air, and the wind clicked through the palms like thoughts through my sleepless mind. Who am I? I am a girl you didn’t know, Mother. The silent girl in the back row of the schoolroom, drawing in note-books. Remember how they didn’t know if I even spoke English when we came back to the States? They tested me to find out if I was retarded or deaf. But you never asked why. You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.

  I thought of Yvonne in our room, asleep, thumb in mouth, wrapped around her baby like a top. “I can see her,” you said. You could never see her, Mother. Not if you stood in that room all night. You could only see her plucked eyebrows, her bad teeth, the books that she read with fainting women on the covers. You could never recognize the kindness in that girl, the depth of her needs, how desperately she wanted to belong, that’s why she was pregnant again. You could judge her as you judged everything else, inferior, but you could never see her. Things weren’t real to you. They were just raw material for you to reshape to tell a story you liked better. You could never just listen to a boy play guitar, you’d have to turn it into a poem, make it all about you.

  I went back inside, spread all her letters out on Rena’s wobble-legged kitchen table, letters from Starr’s and from Marvel’s, letter
s from Amelia’s and Claire’s and these last bitter installments. There were enough to drown me forever. The ink of her writing was a fungus, a malignant spell on birch bark, a twisted rune. I picked up the scissors and began cutting, snapping the strings of her words, uncoupling her complicated train of thought car by car. She couldn’t stop me now. I refused to see through her eyes any longer.

  Carefully, I chose words and phrases from the pile, laid them out on the gray-and-white linoleum tabletop and began to arrange them in lines. Gray dawn was straining peaches by the time I was done.

  It sickens me to think of you

  a prevalence of void

  unholy

  immovable

  damned. gifts.

  an overblown sense of his own importance.

  I wish you were dead

  forget about you.

  crow

  florid with

  fantasies

  it’s so awful

  a perfect imitation

  a liability to love

  forget you

  Ingrid Magnussen

  quite alone

  masturbating

  rot

  disappointment

  grotesque

  Your arms cradle

  poisons

  garbage

  grenades

  Loneliness

  long-distance cries

  forever

  never

  response.

  take everything

  feel me?

  the human condition

  Stop

  plotting murder

  penitence

  Cultivate it

  you

  forbid

  appeal

  rage

  impotent

  it’s too

  important

  I

  cringe

  fuck

  you

  insane

  person

  dissonant and querulous

  my

  gas tanks marked FULL

  I glued them to sheets of paper. I give them back to you. Your own little slaves. Oh my God, they’re in revolt. It’s Spartacus, Rome is burning. Now sack it, Mother. Take what you can before it all burns to ash.

  27

  THE CRYSTALLINE DAYS of March, that rarest of seasons, came like a benediction, regal and scented with cedar and pine. Needle-cold winds rinsed every impurity from the air, so clear you could see the mountain ranges all the way to Riverside, crisp and defined as a paint-by-the-numbers kit, windclouds pluming off their powdered flanks like a PBS show about Everest. The news said snowline was down to four thousand feet. These were ultramarine days, trimmed in ermine, and the nights showed all their ten thousand stars, gleaming overhead like a proof, a calculus woven on the warp and weft of certain fundamental truths.

  How clear it was without my mother behind my eyes. I was reborn, a Siamese twin who had finally been separated from its hated, cumbersome double. I woke early, expectant as a small child, to a world washed clean of my mother’s poisonous fog, her milky miasmas. This sparkling blue, this March, would be my metaphor, my insignia, like Mary’s robe, blue edged with ermine, midnight with diamonds. Who would I be now that I had taken myself back, to be Astrid Magnussen, finally, alone.

  Dear Astrid,

  Bravo! Though your letter as poetry leaves something to be desired, at least it indicates a spark, a capacity for fire

  which I never would have believed you possessed. But really, you cannot think you will cut yourself free of me so easily. I live in you, in your bones, the delicate coils of your mind. I made you. I formed the thoughts you find, the moods you carry. Your blood whispers my name. Even in rebellion, you are mine.

  You want my penitence, demand my shame? Why would you want me to be less than I am, so you could find it easier to dismiss me? I’d rather you think me grotesque, florid with fantasy.

  I’m out of segregation, thank you for asking. Waiting for me on my restoration to Barneburg B was, among other missives, a letter from Harper’s. Oh the praise, a jailhouse Plath! (Although I am no suicide, no baked poetess with my head among the potatoes.)

  Do not give up on me so soon, Astrid. There are people who are interested in my case. I will not molder here like the Man in the Iron Mask. This is the millennium. Anything can happen. And if I had to be wrongly imprisoned to be noticed by Harper’s —well... you could almost say it was worth it.

  And to think, when I was out, a good day was a handwritten rejection from Dog Breath Review.

  They’re taking a long poem on bird themes — the prison crows, migratory geese, I even used the doves, remember them? On St. Andrew’s Place. Of course you do. You remember everything. You were afraid of the ruined dovecote, wouldn’t go out into the yard until I’d prodded among the clumps of ivy to scare off snakes.

  You were always frightened of the wrong thing. I found the fact that the doves returned, though the chicken wire had long since given way to ivy, a far more troubling prospect.

  You want to write me off? Try. Just realize when you’re cutting off the plank upon which you stand, which end of it is nailed to the ship.

  I will survive, but will you? I have a following — I call them my children. Young pierced artists avid with admiration, they make their pilgrimage here from Fontana and Long Beach, Sonoma and San Bernardino, they come from as far away as Vancouver, B.C. And if I can say so, they are much more to my taste than trembling actresses with two-carat wedding bands. They claim a network of renegade feminists, lesbians, practitioners of Wicca and performance artists up and down the West Coast, a sort of Underground Goddess Train. They’re ready to help me any way that they can; they are willing to forgive me anything. Why aren’t you?

  Your loving

  mother,

  Masturbating Rot Crow

  P.S. I have a surprise for you. I’ve just met with my new attorney, Susan D. Valeris. Recognize the name? Attorney for the feminine damned? The one in the black curls, red lips like those chattering windup teeth? She’s come to exploit my martyrdom. I don’t begrudge her. There’s more than enough for everyone.

  I stood in the doorway, watching the clouds rise from the mountains. They would not let her out. She killed a man, he was only thirty-two. Why should it matter that she was a poet, a jail-house Plath? A man was dead because of her. He wasn’t perfect, he was selfish, a flawed person, so what. She would do it again, next time with even less reason. Look at what she did to Claire. I could not believe any attorney would consider representing her.

  No, she was making this up. Trying to snare me, trip me up, stuff me back in her sack. It wasn’t going to work, not anymore. I had freed myself from her strange womb, I would not be lured back. Let her wrap her new children in fantasy, conspire with them under the ficuses in the visitors yard. I knew exactly what there was to be frightened about. They had no idea there were snakes in the ivy.

  IN FOURTH-PERIOD American history at Marshall High School, we were studying the Civil War. In the overcrowded classroom, students sat on windowsills and the bookcases in the back. The heat in the classroom wasn’t working and Mr. Delgado wore a thick green sweater someone knitted for him. He wrote on the board, backhand, the word Gettysburg, as I tried to capture the rough weave of the sweater and his awkward stance on my lined notebook paper. Then I turned to my history book, open on the desk, with its photograph of the great battlefield.

  I’d examined it at home under a magnifying glass. You couldn’t see it without the glass, but the bodies in the photograph had no shoes, no guns, no uniforms. They lay on the short grass in their socks and their white eyes gazed at the clouded-over sky and you couldn’t tell which side they were on. The landscape ended behind a row of trees in the distance like a stage. The war had moved on, there was nothing left but the dead.

  In three days of battle, 150,000 men fought at Gettysburg. There were fifty thousand casualties. I struggled with the enormity of that. One in three dead, wounded, or missing. Like a
giant hole ripped in the fabric of existence. Claire died, Barry died, but seven thousand died at Gettysburg. How could God watch them pass without weeping? How could he have allowed the sun to rise on Gettysburg?

  I remembered my mother and I once visited a battlefield in France. We took a train north, a long ride. My mother wore blue, there was a woman with thick black hair and a man in a worn leather jacket with us. We ate ham and oranges on the train. There were stains inside the oranges, they were bleeding. At the station, we bought poppies, and took a taxi out of town. The car stopped at the edge of an enormous field. It was cold, the brown grass bent down in the wind. White stones dotted the plain and I remembered how empty it was, and the wind passed right through my thin coat. Where is it? I asked. Ici, the man said, stroking his blond mustache. White plaster in his hair.

  I stared at the short rippling grass, but I couldn’t picture the soldiers there dying, the roar of cannons, it was so quiet, so very empty, and the poppy in my hand throbbed red like a heart. They took pictures of each other against the yellow-gray sky. The woman gave me a chocolate in a gold wrapper on the way home.

  I could still taste that chocolate, feel the poppy red in my hand. And the man. Etienne. The light came down from a sky-light into his studio, glass honeycombed with chicken wire. It was always cold there. The floor was gray concrete. There was an old gray couch bolstered with newspapers, and everything was covered with white dust from the plaster he used making his statues, plaster covering wire and rags. I played with a wooden sculptor’s doll there, posing it while my mother posed.

  So much white. Her body, and the plaster, and the dust, we were white as bakers. The old space heater he placed near her stool didn’t do much but buzz and throw out the smell of burned hair. He played French rock ’n’ roll. I could still feel how cold it was. He had a skeleton hanging from a hook that I could make dance.