White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  She sent me down to the store for a bottle of milk. Une bouteille du lait, I rehearsed as I walked. I didn’t want to go but she made me. The milk came in a bottle with a bright foil lid. I got lost on the way back. I wandered in circles, too frightened to cry, holding the milk in the gathering dusk. Finally I was too tired to walk, and sat down on the steps of an apartment house by the rows of buttons, darkened except where the fingers touched, there it was bright. A glass door with a curved handle. Smell of French cigarettes, car exhaust. Flannel trouserlegs went by, nylons and high heels, woolen coats. I was hungry but I was afraid to open the milk, afraid she would be angry.

  Suddenly I saw the blank windows of my dream.

  Où est ta maman? the nylons asked, the trouserlegs asked. Elle revient, I said, but I didn’t believe it.

  My mother jumped out of a taxi in her Afghan coat with the embroidery and the curly wool trim. She screamed at me, grabbed me. The bottle slipped from my hands. The way the milk looked on the sidewalk. Shiny white, with sharp pieces of glass.

  ON THE WAY home from school, I copied the battlefield photograph and sent it to her with four cut-out words, loose in an envelope:

  WHO REALLY

  ARE YOU

  I SAT on the rag rug in my room after dinner, cutting old magazine covers into shadow puppets with the X-acto and sewing them onto bamboo skewers I’d saved from Tiny Thai. They were mythical figures, half-animal, half-human — the Monkey King, the antlered man who was sacrificed each year to fertilize the crops, wise centaur Chiron and cowheaded Isis, Medusa and the Minotaur, the Goat Man and the White Crow Woman and the Fox Mistress with her latest moneymaking scheme. Even sad Daedalus and his feathered boy.

  I was sewing the Minotaur’s arm to his body when there was a soft knock on the door. Musk, the smell of something stolen. Sergei leaned against the doorjamb, his muscled arms folded, in a crisp white shirt and jeans, a gold watch like a ship’s clock on his wrist. His eyes flicking around the room, taking in the clutter — clothes piled in boxes, my bags of full sketch pads and finished drawings, the flowered curtains fading to pastel. His glance took in everything, but not like an artist’s, seeing form, seeing shadow. This gaze was professional, wordlessly estimating the possibilities, how hard it would be to get what he wanted through the window and out to the truck. Nothing that he saw was worth bothering about. Threadbare carpet, old beds, Yvonne’s paper horse, a paperweight with glitter instead of snow that said Universal Studios Tour. He shook his head. “A dog should not live here,” he said. “Astrid. What you going to do?”

  I tied the Minotaur’s arm to the skewer, held it in front of the lamp, made it go up and down, miming his words. “A dog should not live here,” I said, imitating his heavy accent. “Children, yes. But dogs no. No dogs.” The Minotaur pointed at him. “What you got against dogs?”

  “Play with dolls.” He smiled. “Sometimes you are woman, sometimes little girl.”

  I put the Minotaur in a can with the others, a bouquet of paper demigods and monsters. “Rena’s not here. She’s out getting loaded with Natalia.”

  “Who say I come to see Rena?” Sergei peeled himself away from his doorjamb and came in, casually, just wandering, innocent as a shoplifter. He picked things up and put them down exactly where they had been, and he never made a sound. I couldn’t stop watching him. It was as if one of my animal-men had come to life, as if I had summoned him. How many times had I thought of just this moment, Sergei come a-calling, like a cat yowling on the back fence for you. I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.

  Sergei picked up Yvonne’s paperweight and shook it, watched the glitter fall. Out in the living room, the TV was on, Yvonne absorbed in some trendy nighttime drama about hip young people wearing clothes from Fred Segal, with good haircuts and more stylish problems than hers. He stuck a finger in Yvonne’s eyeshadow tray, traced some on his eyelids. “What you think?” he smiled, cocking his head, looking at himself, smoothing his blond hair back with one hand, vain as a woman. He watched me in the mirror.

  He had wide sleepy eyelids, the silver suited them. He looked like a prince in ballet, but his scent was distinctly animal, he filled the room with his musk. I’d once stolen a T-shirt of his, for just that smell. I wondered if he ever found out.

  “Astrid.” He sat on the edge of my bed, put his thick rope-veined arm along the back of my headboard. You didn’t even hear the springs squeak when he sat. “Why you avoid me?”

  I started to cut a mermaid with long, art nouveau hair from the cover of an old Scientific American. “You’re her boyfriend. I like living here. Therefore, I avoid you.”

  That purring cat voice. “Who tells her? Me? You?” he said. “I know you a little, Astrid krasavitza. Not such good girl. People think, but not what I see.”

  “What do you see?” I asked. Curious as to what bizarre distortions my image had undergone in the translation within the sewer system of Sergei’s mind.

  “You see me, you like. I feel you watch but then look away. Maybe afraid you get like her, da?” He jerked his head toward the front of the house, Yvonne, gesturing a big belly. “You don’t trust. I never give you baby.”

  As if that were it. I was afraid, but not of that. I knew if I ever let him touch me, I would not be able to stop. I remembered the day my mother and her friends went to drink at the revolving bar on top of the Bonaventure Hotel, and I was pulled toward the windows, the nothingness was pulling me out. I felt that feeling every time I was in a room with Sergei, that sliding toward a fall.

  “Maybe I like Rena,” I said, making tiny cuts down the mermaid’s tail for scales. “Women don’t like it much when you screw around with their lovers.”

  His smile wiped his face like a mop. “Don’t worry Rena.” He laughed, a rumbling laugh that came from beneath the neat belt, the tight jeans. “She don’t own thing long. She like to trade. Sergei today, somebody tomorrow. Hi, bye, don’t forget hat. But for you, something else. Look.”

  He pulled something out of his shirt pocket. It caught my eye like a firefly. It was a necklace, a diamond on a silvery chain. “I find this lying in street. You want?”

  He was trying to buy me off with a stolen necklace? I had to laugh. Found it in the street. In someone’s nightstand, more likely. Or around her throat even, how could I know? I take the sliding glass door off the track of a two-story house in Mar Vista. A child-molester offering you candy, a ride in his car. So this was how someone like Sergei seduced a woman he wanted. Where just his smell and voice and the blue ropes of vein in his arms was enough, those sleepy blue eyes now sparkling under silver lids, that criminal smile.

  He pulled a sad face. “Astrid. Beauty girl. This is gift from my heart.”

  Sergei’s heart. That empty corridor, that unaired room. Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got. If I were a good girl, I would be insulted, I would kick him out. I would ignore his smile, and shape of him inside his jeans. But he knew me. He smelled my desire. I felt myself slipping toward the windows, pulled by thin air.

  He hooked the chain around my neck. Then he took my hand and put it on his groin, warm, I could feel him getting hard under my hand. It was obscene, and it excited me to feel him there, a man I wanted like falling. He leaned down and kissed me the way I wanted to be kissed, hard and tasting of last night’s booze-up. He unzipped my polyester shirt, pulled it over my head, took my skirt off and threw it onto Yvonne ’s bed. His hands waking me up, I’d been sleeping, I hadn’t even known it, it had been so long.

  Then he stopped, and I opened my eyes. He was looking at my scars. Tracing the Morse code of dog bite on my arms and legs with his fingertips, then the bullet scars, shoulder, chest, and hip, measuring their depth with his thumb, calculating their age and severity. “Who does this to you?”

  How could I begin to explain who did it to me. I would have to start with the date of my birth. I gl
anced at the door, still open, we could hear the TV. “Is this an exhibition or what?”

  He shut it noiselessly, unbuttoned his shirt and hung it on the chair, pulled off his pants. His body white as milk, blue-veined, it was frightening, lean and dense as marble. It took my breath away. How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.

  He knew how to touch me, knew what I liked. I wasn’t surprised. I was a bad girl, lying down for the father again. His mouth on my breasts, his hands over my bottom, up between my legs. There was no poetry about us humping on the yellow chenille bedspread on the floor. He hauled me into the positions he liked, my legs over his shoulders, riding me like a Cossack. Standing up with his arms linked to hold my weight as he thrust into me. I saw us in the closet mirror. I was surprised to see how little I resembled myself, with my lidded eyes, my sexual smile, not Astrid, not Ingrid, nobody I ever saw before, with my big bottom and long legs around him, how long I was, how white.

  Dear Astrid,

  A girl from Contemporary Literature came to interview me. She wanted to know all about me. We talked for hours; everything I told her was a lie. We are larger than biography, my darling. If anyone should know this it’s you. After all, what is the biography of the spirit? You were an artist’s daughter. You had beauty and wonder, you received genius with your toddler’s applesauce, with your goodnight kiss. Then you had plastic Jesus and a middle-aged lover with seven fingers, you were held hostage in turquoise, you were the pampered daughter of a shadow. Now you are on Ripple Street, where you send me pictures of dead men and make bad poems out of my words, you want to know who I am?

  Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest — where you want to erect a museum.

  Don’t hoard the past, Astrid. Don’t cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

  Mother.

  I SEPARATED our dirty clothes at the Fletcher coin op, colors from lights, cold from hot. I liked doing laundry, the sorting, dropping the coins, the soothing smell of detergent and dryers, rumble of the machines, the snap of cotton and denim as the women folded their clothes, their fresh sheets. Children played games with their mothers’ laundry baskets, wearing them like cages, sitting in them like boats. I wanted to sit in one too, pretend I was sailing.

  My mother hated any chore, especially the ones that had to be performed in public. She waited until all our clothes were dirty, and sometimes washed our underwear in the sink, so we could put it off another few days. When we finally could not get away with it one day more, we’d quickly load our wash in the machines and then leave, go take in a movie, look at some books. Each time, we ’d come back to find it wet, thrown out on top of the washers or on the folding tables. I hated it that people handled our things. Everybody else could stay and watch their laundry, why couldn’t we? “Because we’re not everybody,” my mother would say. “We ’re not even remotely like everybody.”

  Except even she had dirty laundry.

  When the loads of laundry were dry, the sheets bleached back to sanity, I drove home in Niki’s truck, she let me borrow it for special occasions, like when she was too drunk to drive, or I was washing her clothes. I parked in the driveway. There were two girls I’d never seen before sitting on Rena’s front steps. White girls, fresh faces, no makeup. One wore a vintage-style dress with little flowers, her sandy hair in a bun with a chopstick stuck in it. The dark one had on jeans and a pink cotton turtleneck. Black clean shoulder-length hair. Her little nipples poked at the front of the pink cotton.

  The vintage-dress girl stood up, squinting into the sun, her eyes the same gray as her dress, freckles. She smiled uncertainly when I got out of the truck. “Are you Astrid Magnussen?” she asked.

  I hauled a garbage bag full of folded clothes out of the passenger seat, lifted another from the bed in the back. “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m Hannah,” she said. “This is Julie.”

  The other girl smiled too, but not as widely.

  I never saw them before. They sure didn’t go to Marshall, and they were too young to be social workers. “Yeah, and?”

  Hannah, pink-cheeked with embarrassment, looked over at dark-haired Julie for encouragement. Suddenly, I became aware of what I must seem like to them. Hard, street. My eyeliner, my black polyester shirt, my heavy black boots, my cascade of silver earrings, hoops from pinkie-sized to softball. Niki and Yvonne had pierced my ears one day when they were bored. I let them do it. It pleased them to shape me. I’d learned, whatever you hung from my earlobes or put on my back, I was insoluble, like sand in water. Stir me up, I always came to rest on the bottom.

  “We just came to meet you, to see, you know, if there was anything we could do,” Hannah said.

  “We know your mother,” Julie said. She had a deeper voice, calmer. “We visit with her in Corona.”

  Her children. Her new children. Stainless as snowdrops. Bright and newborn. Amnesiac. I had been in foster care almost six years now, I had starved, wept, begged, my body was a battlefield, my spirit scarred and cratered as a city under siege, and now I was being replaced by something unmutilated, something intact?

  “We’re at Pitzer College, out in Pomona. We studied her in Women’s Studies. We visit her every week. She knows so much about everything, she’s really incredible. Every time we go she just blows us away.”

  What was my mother thinking, sending these college girls? Was she trying to grind me into talc, flour for some bitter bread? Was this the ultimate punishment for my refusal to forget? “What does she want from me?”

  “Oh, no,” Hannah said. “She didn’t send us. We came on our own. But we told her we’d send you a copy of the interview, you know?” She held up a magazine she had rolled in her hands, blushed deeply. In a way, I envied that blush. I couldn’t blush like that anymore. I felt old, gnawed pliant and unrecognizable as a shoe given to a dog. “And then we thought, you know, now that we knew where you lived, we could —” She smiled helplessly.

  “We thought we ’d come and see if we could help you or something,” Julie said.

  I saw that I scared them. They thought my mother’s daughter would be something else, something more like them. Something gentle, wide-open. That was a riot. My mother didn’t scare them, but I did.

  “Is that it?” I asked, holding out my hand for the magazine.

  Hannah tried to straighten out the curl of the magazine on her flowered knee. My mother’s face on the cover, behind chicken wire, on the phone in the seclusion room. She must have done something, usually you get to be at the picnic tables. She looked beautiful, smiling, her teeth still perfect, the only lifer at Frontera with perfect teeth, but her eyes looked weary. Contemporary Literature.

  I sat down next to Julie on the splintered front steps. Hannah took a seat a step down, her dress flowing in a curve like an Isadora Duncan dance step. I opened the piece, flipped through it. My mother’s gestures, flat of palm to forehead, elbow on the ledge. Head against the window, eyes downcast. We are larger than biography. “What do you talk about with her?” I asked.

  “Poetry.” Hannah shrugged. “What we’re reading. Music, all kinds of things. She sometimes talks about something she saw on the news. Stuff you wouldn’t even think twice about, but she gets some take on it that’s just incredible.”

  The transformation of the world.

  “She talks about you,” Julie said.

  That was a surprise. “What’s she say about me?”

  “That you’re in a, you know. Home. She feels terrible about what’s happened,�
� Hannah said. “For you most of all.”

  I looked at these girls, college girls, with their fresh makeupless faces, trusting, caring. And I felt the gap between us, all the things I wouldn’t be because I was who I was. I was graduating in two months, but I wasn’t going to Pitzer, that was for sure. I was the old child, the past that had to be burned away, so my mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising from ash. I tried to see my mother through their eyes. The beautiful imprisoned poetic soul, the suffering genius. Did my mother suffer? I forced myself to imagine it. She certainly suffered when Barry kicked her out of his house that day, after sleeping with her. But when she killed him, the suffering was somehow redeemed. Was she suffering now? I really couldn’t say.

  “So you thought you’d come out and what?” I asked. “Adopt me?”

  I laughed but they didn’t. I’d grown too hard, maybe I was more like my mother than I thought.

  Julie gave Hannah a “told you so” look. I could see this had been the sandy girl’s idea. “Yeah, well, sort of. If you wanted.”

  Their sincerity so unexpected, their sympathies so misplaced. “You don’t think she killed him, do you,” I said.

  Hannah shook her head, quickly. “It’s all been a terrible mistake. A nightmare. She talks all about it in the interview.”

  I was sure she had. She was always at her best with an audience. “Something you should know,” I told her. “She did kill him.”

  Hannah stared at me. Julie’s gaze fled to her friend. They were shocked. Julie stepped protectively toward her gauzy friend, and I felt suddenly cruel, like I’d told small children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed. But they weren’t small children, they were women, they were admiring someone they didn’t know the first thing about. Look at the hag Truth for once, college girl.