White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  “That’s not true,” Hannah said. Shook her head, shook it again, as if she could clear my words out of it. “It isn’t.” She was asking me to tell her it wasn’t.

  “I was there,” I told her. “I saw her mix up the medicine. She ’s not what she seems.”

  “She’s still a great poet,” Julie said.

  “Yes,” I say. “A killer and a poet.”

  Hannah played with a button on the front of her gray dress, and it popped off in her hand. She stared at it in her palm, her face stained red as beet borscht. “She must have had her reasons. Maybe he was beating her.”

  “He wasn’t beating her,” I said. I put my hands on my knees and pushed myself into a standing position. I felt suddenly very tired. Maybe there was still some stash in Niki’s room.

  Julie looked up at me, brown eyes serious and calm. I would have thought her more sensible than Hannah, less likely to have been taken in by my mother’s spell. “Why’d she do it, then?”

  “Why do people kill people who leave them?” I said. “Because they feel hurt and angry and they can’t stand that feeling.”

  “I’ve felt that way,” Hannah said. The lowering light of the sun was touching the curly escaped ends of her hair, making a frizzy halo around her fair head.

  “But you didn’t kill anyone,” I said.

  “I wanted to.”

  I looked at her, twisting the hem of her vintage dress with the small flowers, the front gapping open where the button fell off, her stomach was rosy. “Sure. Maybe you even fantasized about how you would do it. You didn’t do it. There’s a huge difference.”

  A mockingbird sang in the yucca tree next door, a spill of liquid sound.

  “Maybe not so big a difference,” Julie said. “Some people are just more impulsive than others.”

  I slapped the magazine against the leg of my jeans. They were going to justify her some way. Protect the Goddess Beauty no matter what. They are willing to forgive me anything. “Look, thanks for coming, but I have to go in.”

  “I wrote my number on the back of the magazine,” Hannah said, rising. “Call if you, you know. Want to.”

  Her new children. I stood on the porch and watched them go back to their car. Julie was driving. It was a green Olds station wagon, vintage, so big it had skylights. It made a ringing sound as she drove away. I took the magazine and threw it in the trash. Trying to pass her lies off, like some elderly Salome hiding behind her veils. I could have told her children a thing or two about my mother. I could have told them they would never find the woman inside that shimmering cloth, smelling of mold and violets. There were always more veils underneath. They would have to tear them away like cobwebs, fiercely, and more would come as fast as they stripped them away. Eventually, she would spin them into her silk like flies, to digest at her leisure, and shroud her face again, a moon in a cloud.

  28

  NIKI TORE OFF a square of the acid and put it on my tongue, then one for her. It came on small sheets of paper printed with pink flamingos on motorcycles. We sat on the porch, looking at the wreck of the neighbor’s old Riviera parked up on blocks. The weather was heating up, hazing over, tepid as bathwater, moist as a wet sock. I felt nothing at all. “Maybe we should take another one.” If I was going to do it, I wanted to make sure I’d get off. Yvonne thought we were crazy to mess with our heads this way, but I was just crazy enough now. Susan D. Valeris had called me three times already. I stopped answering the phone, told Rena to hang up on anyone asking for me.

  “It takes a while,” Niki said. “You’ll know when it happens. Believe me, you won’t sleep through it.”

  Nothing happened for almost an hour, I was sure the stuff was no good, but then it came on, all at once, like an elevator. Niki laughed and waved her hand in front of my face, the fingers leaving trails behind them. “High enough now?”

  My skin felt hot and prickly, like I’d broken out in a rash, but my skin looked the same. It was the sky that had suddenly changed. It had gone blank. Blank as a cataract, an enormous white eye. I felt anxious under that terrible empty sky. It was as if God had gone senile and blind. Maybe he did not want to see anymore. That made sense. All around us, everything was the way it usually was, only unbearably so. I tried never to think about how ugly it was here. I tried to find the one beautiful thing.

  But on this drug, I found I couldn’t shut it out, focus down. It was terrifying. I was overwhelmed by the sordid and abandoned, growing like a hellish garden, the splintered step, the four dead cars in the neighbor’s weedy lot, rusting back to earth, the iron fence of the prop outlet topped with razor wire, the broken glass in the street. It occurred to me that we lived exactly at the bottom of L.A., the place where people dumped stolen cars and set them on fire. The place where everything drifting came to rest. I felt sick, my skin burned. There was a metal taste in my mouth as if I’d chewed foil. In the street, I noticed a dead bird, smashed flat, surrounded by its soft feathers.

  I was afraid to tell Niki I was scared, it occurred to me if I named it, I might start screaming. I might never stop.

  The whole world had been reduced to this, lifeless debris. And we were just more of the city’s detritus, like the bird, the abandoned shopping carts, the wrecked Riviera. I could feel the hum of the high power lines, the insidious radiation mutating our cells. Nobody cared about the people down here. We were at the end of civilization, where it had given up out of senility and exhaustion. And we were what was left, Niki and I, like cockroaches after the end of the world, scuttling through the ruins, fighting over scraps of the dead corpse. Like my dream of my mother’s melted face. I was afraid to ask if my face was melting. I didn’t want to call attention to it.

  “You okay?” Niki had hold of a handful of my hair at the nape of my neck, pulled gently.

  I shook my head, infinitesimally, I couldn’t even be sure whether I had done it or just thought I had. I was afraid to do more.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re just coming on.”

  She was turning into a jack-in-the-box, a Raggedy Ann. I had to hold on to the fact that I knew her, it was only a trick of my mind. This was Niki, I kept telling myself. I knew her. Abandoned at six by her mother at a Thrifty drugstore in Alhambra, Niki always counted the house, assessed the odds, worked out percentages. I liked to watch her when she was getting ready for work, with her starched Bavarian waitress costume on, looking like Heidi in a Warhol film. Even if I did not recognize her, I knew her. I had to hang on to that.

  I was sweating, cracking up like the decades-old paving job in the smeared linoleum sun.

  “Can we get out of here?” I whispered, trembling, nauseated. “I hate this. I mean, really.”

  “Just tell me where,” she said. Her eyes looked strange, black and buttony, like a doll’s.

  IN THE COOL HUSH of the Impressionist rooms at the County Art Museum, the world was restored to me, in all its color and light and form. How had I forgotten? Nothing could happen to me here. This was the port, the outpost of the true world, where there could still be art, and beauty, and memory. How many times had I walked here with Claire, with my mother. Niki had never been here before. The two of us walked past fishing boats rocking at anchor, luminescent lemony gold white skies shading to rose, foreground reflections in the watery street.

  We stopped before a painting where a woman was reading a book in a garden in the shade at the edge of a park. Her dress of white linen edged in blue rustled when she turned the pages. Such a delicious blue-green, the picture smelled like mint, the grass deep as ferns. I saw us in the picture, Niki in trailing white, myself in dotted swiss. We walked out to the woman slowly, she was ready to pour our tea. I was here in the gallery, but I was also walking through the damp grass, my hem stained with green, the breeze through the thin cloth of my dress.

  The acid came on in waves, we rocked as we stood before the paintings from the force of the drug. But I wasn’t frightened anymore. I knew where I was. I was with Niki in the tru
e world.

  “This is out-fucking-rageous,” she whispered, holding my hand.

  Some of the paintings opened up, like windows, like doors, while others remained just painted canvas. I could reach in to Cézanne ’s peaches and cherries on a rich white crumpled table-cloth, pick up a peach and put it back on the plate. I understood Cézanne. “Look how you see the cherries from above, but the peaches from the side,” I said.

  “They look like cherry bombs,” Niki said, gathering her fingers together and then flicking them out wide. The lively stems of the cherries flicked out like firecrackers.

  “Your eyes want to make it normal but it won’t go,” I said.

  I imagined painting the picture, I could see exactly what order he did what.

  The owlman sidled over and hunched his shoulders. “No touch.”

  “Yodo,” Niki said under her breath, and we moved away to the next painting.

  I felt I could have painted all the paintings myself. The acid kept coming on and coming on, I didn’t know how much higher I could get. It wasn’t at all like the Percodans — stoned, stupid, escape. This was higher than high. Two-hundredth floor, five-hundredth floor. Van Gogh’s night sky.

  We stopped to get something to drink at the museum café. I knew exactly where I was, in the same building as the auditorium, my old classroom just downstairs. My own personal playground. I got into the drink dispenser, I played the opening of the “Sleeping Beauty Waltz” with the different soft drinks.

  “What am I playing?” I asked her.

  “Be cool,” Niki said.

  I tried to be cool, but it was too funny. When it was time to pay, I couldn’t remember about the money, how it worked. The cashier looked like a tapioca pudding. She wouldn’t look at us. She said some numbers and I pulled out my money, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I held it open on my hand and let her pick the right combination from the palm. “Danke, chorisho, guten tag, Arigato,” I said. “Dar es Salaam.” Hoping she’d think we were just foreigners.

  “Dar es Salaam,” Niki said as we took seats on the plaza.

  This was exactly how I should have been as a child, joyful, light as a toy balloon. Niki and I sat in the shade and drank our drinks, watched the people go by, noticing how much they looked like certain animals. There was a gnu, and a lion, and a secretary bird. Tapir and a curly-haired yak. When had I ever laughed like this before?

  After we were done, Niki said we should go use the bathroom.

  “I don’t have to,” I said.

  “You won’t know until it’s too late,” Niki said. “Come on.”

  We walked back into the building, found the doors with the ridiculous stick figures in pants or skirt. The ridiculous way we thought male, female, as pants or skirt. Suddenly, the whole sexual universe and its conventions seemed fantastic, contrived.

  “Don’t look in the mirror,” Niki said. “Look at your shoes.”

  It was dark gray tile, bad light, dirty floor. I felt the fear return. A metallic taste in my mouth. An old lady in a tan pantsuit, tan face, tan hair, tan shoes, a yellow belt, came out of one of the stalls, stared at us. “She looks like a grilled cheese sandwich,” I said.

  “My friend’s sick,” Niki said, trying not to laugh out loud. She pushed me into the handicapped toilet, closed the door behind us. She had to unzip my pants and put me on the pot like I was two years old. I couldn’t go, it was too funny.

  “Shut up and go,” Niki said.

  I swung my legs. It really felt like I was two. “Make tinkle for Annie,” I said. And I let go. I really had to, after all. The sound made me laugh. “I love you, Niki,” I said.

  “I love you too,” she said.

  But on the way out I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked very red-faced, my eyes black as a magpie’s, hair tangled. I looked feral. It scared me. Niki hurried me out.

  We were in the Contemporary wing. I never went there. When I came with my mother, she would stand me in front of a Rothko, a blue-and-red square, and explain it to me for an hour. I never did get it. Now Niki and I stood in front of it, in the same space I stood when I was young, and watched the three zones of color throb, pulse, and other tones emerge, a tomato, a garnet, purple. The red advanced, the blue retreated, just like Kandinsky said. It was a door and we walked in.

  Loss. That’s what was in there. Grief, sorrow, wordless and unfathomable. Not what I felt this morning, septic, panicked. This was distilled. Niki put her arm around my waist, I put mine around hers. We stood and mourned. I could imagine how Jesus felt, his pity for all of humanity, how impossible it was, how admirable. The painting was Casals, a requiem. My mother and me, Niki and Yvonne, Paul and Davey and Claire, everybody. How vast was a human being’s capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn’t a question of sur-vival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.

  We walked out into the sunshine, gravely, like people after a funeral.

  I took Niki into the Permanent Collection, I had to see the goddesses now. In the Indian rooms lived the rest of the ancient equation. Ripe figures dancing, making love, sleeping, sitting on lotuses, their hands in their characteristic mudras. Shiva danced in his bronze frame of fire. Indian raga music played softly in the background. We found a stone Boddhisattva, in his mustache and fine jewels. He had been through the door that Rothko painted, and held both that and the dance. He had come out the other side. We sat on the bench and allowed his heart to enter us. Other people came through but they didn’t stay. Their eyes flickered on us, and they moved away. They were like flies to a stone. We couldn’t even see them.

  IT TOOK a long time to come down. We sat with Yvonne for a while, watching TV, but it seemed incomprehensible. The room swirled with color and motion, and she was staring at tiny heads in a box. The lamps were more interesting. I drew the way the air filled with perfect six-sided snowflakes. I could make them fall and make them go back up again. Sergei came into the room, he looked just like the white cat that followed him in. He talked to us about something, but his mind was a goldfish bowl. The skirts and pants thing.

  Suddenly I couldn’t stand to be inside our cramped, ugly house, with Sergei and his goldfish, its mouth opening and closing stupidly. I took some paper and watercolors onto the porch and painted wet on wet, streaks that became Blakean figures in sunrise, and dancers under the sea. Niki came out and smoked and looked at the rings around the streetlights. Later Rena and Natalia shared their Stoli with us, but it didn’t do a thing. Rena was the fox woman and Natalia an Arabian horse with a dish face. They spoke Russian and we understood every word they said.

  By three in the morning, I was getting awfully tired of snowflakes and the way the walls were breathing. Make tinkle for Annie. That’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about. At first, I thought, maybe it was really make tinkle for Mommy, but when I heard it in my head, it was always the same. Make tinkle for Annie. Who was Annie, and why do I make tinkle for her? I was trembling, my nerves shot, as Yvonne lay sleeping on her tide-foam and the snowflakes fell in our room. Annie, who are you, and where is Mommy? Yellow, was all I could get, yellow sunlight, and a white swan, a warm smell like laundry.

  IN THE MORNING, I cut out words from the funny section of the paper:

  WHO IS ANNIE

  29

  AS I HAD PROMISED, I accompanied Yvonne to baby class at Waite Memorial Hospital. I held her tennis balls, her towel. I couldn’t seem to take it seriously. I didn’t know if it was the aftermath of the acid, but everything seemed funny. The plastic doll we handled looked like a space alien. The young couples seemed like big children, playing a game, the pregnancy game. These girls couldn’t really be pregnant, they had pillows shoved up underneath their baby doll dresses. I liked the feeling of all the baby things, even washing the doll and diapering it with the Mickey Mouse diaper.

  Yvonne pretended she was my sister-in-law, and that her husband, my brother, was in the arm
y. Patrick, she liked the name. A TV actor. “I got a letter from Patrick, did I tell you?” she told me during the break, while we all drank sweet juice from tiny paper cups, ate ginger snaps. “My husband,” she told the couple next to her. “He’s getting sent to, you know —”

  “Dar es Salaam,” I said.

  “I miss him, don’t you?”

  “Not that much,” I said. “He’s way older than me.” I imagined a big blond man who brought me dolls from his different tours. Heidi dolls, dope hidden up their skirts.

  “He sent me five hundred dollars for the layette,” she said.

  “Made me promise not to go to yard sales. He wants everything brand-new. It’s a waste of money, but if that’s what he wants...”

  This was fun. I was never a little girl playing games with other little girls, dolly mommy daddy games.

  They showed her how to hold the baby to her breast, holding the breast in one hand. She suckled the plastic child. I had to laugh.

  “Shhh,” Yvonne said, cuddling the space alien, stroking its indented head. “Such a pretty little baby. Don’t you listen to that bad girl laughing, mija. You’re my baby, yes you are.”

  Later, Yvonne lay on the orange mat, blowing and counting, and I put the tennis balls under her back, switched to the rolled towels. I held the watch and timed her contractions, I breathed with her, we both hyperventilated. She wasn’t nervous. “Don’t worry,” Yvonne said, smiling up at me, her belly like a giant South Sea Island pearl in a cocktail ring. “I been through this before.”

  They explained about the epidural and drugs, but no one there was going to have drugs. They all wanted the natural experience. It all seemed wrapped in plastic, unreal, like stewardesses on planes demonstrating the seat belts and the pattern for orderly disembarkation in case of crash at sea, the people taking a glance at the cards in the seat pocket in front of them. Sure, they thought, no problem. A peek at the nearest exit and then they were ready for in-flight service, peanuts and a movie.