White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  RENA SOAKED UP the fierce April sun in her black macramé bikini, drinking a tumbler of vodka and Fresca, she called it a Russian Margarita. The men from the plumbing contractor next door loitered by the low chain-link fence, sucking their teeth at her. She pretended she didn’t notice, but slowly applied Tropic Tan to the tops of her breasts, stroked down her arms, while the workmen grabbed their crotches and called out suggestions in Spanish. The metal chaise was half-collapsed beneath her, we were lulled by the sound of the rusty sprinkler watering the lawn of crabgrass and dandelions.

  “You’re going to get skin cancer,” I said.

  She rolled her bottom lip out. “We’re dead long time, kiddo.” She liked to say these American words, knowing how they sounded in her mouth. She lifted her Russian Margarita, drank. “Nazdaroviye.”

  It meant to your health, but she didn’t care about that. She lit a black cigarette, let the smoke rise in arabesques.

  I was sitting on an old lawn chair in the shade of the big oleander, sketching Rena as she soaked up the blistering UV rays. She sprayed herself with a small bottle filled with ice water, and the men watching over the chain-link fence shuddered. You could see the shape of her nipples through the knitted fabric. She smiled to herself.

  This is what she loved, to make a few plumber’s grunts come in their pants. A sale, a Russian Margarita, a quickie in the bathroom with Sergei, that was as far into the future as she cared to look. I admired her confidence. Skin cancer, lung cancer, men, furniture, junk, something would always come along. It was good for me to be around her now. I could not afford to think about the future.

  I had only two months until graduation, and then a short fall off the edge of the world. At night, I dreamed of my mother, she was always leaving. I dreamed I missed a ride out to New York for art school, I lost an invitation to a party with Paul Trout. I stayed up and looked through my stack of twelve-year-old ArtNewses I’d found on trash day, studied the photographs of the women artists, their tangled hair, gray, long brown, stringy blond. Amy Ayres, Sandal McInnes, Nicholette Reis. I wanted to be them. Amy, with her curly gray hair and her wrinkled T-shirt, posing in front of her huge abstract of curved cones and cylinders. Amy, how can I be you? I read your article, but I can’t find the clue. Your middle-class parents, your sick father. Your art teacher in high school created a scholarship for you. At Marshall I didn’t even have art.

  I gazed down at my drawing of Rena, dotted with water from the sprinkler. Really, I didn’t even like drawings. When I went to the museum, I looked at paintings, sculptures, anything but lines on a piece of paper. It was just that my hand needed something to do, my eye needed a reason to shape the space between Rena and the sprinkler she had running and her wobbly-legged table of rusted white diamond mesh that held one drink and an ashtray. I liked the way the tabletop echoed the black diamonds of her bikini and the chain-link fence, how the curve of her tumbler was the same as the curve of her raised thigh and the taller man’s arm draped over the fence, and leaves on the banana tree at the Casados’ house across the street.

  If I didn’t draw, what reason would there be for the way the light fell on the scallop of tiles on the Casados’ roof, and the lumpy tufts of lawn, the delicate braids of green foxtails soon to go brown, and the way the sky seemed to squash everything flat to the earth like an enormous foot? I’d have to get pregnant, or drink, to blur it all out, except for myself very large in the foreground.

  Luckily I wasn’t in the classes where they talked about college. I was in the classes where they told us about condoms and bringing guns to school. Claire signed me up for all the honors classes, but I couldn’t hold on. If she were alive, I might have tried, followed up, asked for a scholarship, I would know what to do. Now all that was slipping away.

  On the other hand, I still went to school, did the work, took the tests. I was going to graduate, for all that meant. Niki thought I was an idiot. Who would know if I went or not, who would care? But it was still something to do. I went and drew the chair legs, the way they looked like the legs of water striders. I could spend an hour exaggerating the perspective of all the desks diminishing toward the blackboard, the backs of heads, necks, hair. Yolanda Collins sat in front of me in math class. I could gaze at the back of her head all period long, the layers of tiny braids laced together in designs intricate as Persian rugs, sometimes with beads or cord woven in.

  I looked down at the pad in my hands. At least I had this diamond-shaped pattern, the trapezoid of the gate. Wasn’t that enough? Did there have to be more?

  I looked at Rena, slathering on her Tropic Tan, baking to medium-well in the blistering sun, happy as a cupcake in frilled paper. “Rena, you ever wonder why people get out of bed in the morning? Why do they bother? Why not just drink turpentine?”

  Rena turned her head to the side, shaded her eyes with her hand, glanced at me, then went back to sunny-side up. “You are Russian I think. A Russian always ask, what is meaning of life.” She pulled a long, depressed face. “What is meaning of life, maya liubov? Is our bad weather. Here is California, Astrid darling. You don’t ask meaning. Too bad Akhmatova, but we got beach volleyball, sports car, tummy tuck. Don’t worry, be happy. Buy something.”

  She smiled to herself, arms down at her sides, eyes closed, glistening on her chaise lounge like bacon frying in a pan. Small beads of water clung to the tiny hairs of her upper lip, pooled between her breasts. Maybe she was the lucky one, I thought, a woman who had divested herself of both future and past. No dreams, no standards, a woman who smoked and drank and slept with men like Sergei, men who were spiritually what came up out of the sewers when it rained. I could learn from her. Rena Grushenka didn’t worry about her teeth, didn’t take vitamin C.

  She ate salt on everything and was always drunk by three. She certainly didn’t feel sick because she wasn’t going to college and making something of her life. She lay in the sun and gave the workmen hard-ons while she could.

  “You get boyfriend, you stop worry,” she said.

  I didn’t want to tell her I had a boyfriend. Hers.

  She turned on her side, her large nippled breast falling out of her bikini top to the workmen’s vociferous approval. She hiked her top up, which called forth more excitement. She ignored it all, rested her head on her hand. “I been thinking. Everybody has license plate frame from dealer. Van Nuys Toyota, We’re Number 1. I think, we buy license plate frame, you paint nice, we get maybe ten, fifteen dollars. Cost us dollar.”

  “What’s my cut?” I derived a perverse satisfaction in knowing the right moment to say it. I had arrived on Ripple Street, the paradise of my despair.

  THE DARK GREEN Jaguar sedan parked in front of the plumbing contractor should have tipped me off, but I didn’t put it together until I saw her in the living room, the explosion of black curls, her bright red lipstick I recognized from the news. She wore a white-trimmed navy blue Chanel suit that might even have been real. She was sitting on the green couch, writing a check. Rena was talking to her, smoking, laughing, her gold inlays glinting in her mouth. I wanted to run out the door. Only a morbid interest kept me in the room. What could she possibly have to say to me?

  “She like the salad set.” Rena looked at me. “She buy for friend collect Tiki everything.”

  “It’s the latest,” said the woman, handing the yellow check to Rena. “Tiki restaurants, mai tais, Trader Vic’s, you name it.” Her voice was higher than you’d think, girlish for a lawyer’s.

  She stood and held out her hand to me, short red nails garish against her white skin. She was shorter than I was. She wore a good, green-scented perfume, a hint of citrus, almost like a man’s aftershave. She had on a gold necklace thick as a bike chain, with a square-cut emerald embedded in it. Her teeth were unnaturally white. “Susan D. Valeris.”

  I shook her hand. It was very small and dry. She wore a wide wedding band on her forefinger, and an onyx intaglio signet on the pinky of the other hand.

  “You mind if Astrid
and I...?” she asked Rena, wagging her wedding-banded finger between the two of us. Eeny meeny miney mo.

  “It’s not problem,” Rena said, looking at the check again, putting it in her pocket. “You can stay, see if there’s anything else you like. Everything for sale.”

  When we were alone, Susan D. gestured to the green couch for me to sit down. I didn’t. It was my house, I didn’t have to follow instruction. “How much did you give her?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” the lawyer said, taking her seat again. “The point is, you’ve been avoiding my calls.” To my surprise, she pulled a pack of cigarettes from her Hermès Kelly bag, which I recognized from my Olivia days to be strictly genuine. “Mind if I smoke?”

  I shook my head. She lit up with a gold lighter. Cartier — the gold pleats. “Cigarette?” she offered. I shook my head. She put the pack and the lighter down on the cluttered table, exhaled into the afternoon light. “I don’t know why I never got around to quitting,” she said.

  “All the prisoners smoke,” I said. “You can offer them a cigarette.”

  She nodded. “Your mother said you were bright. I think it was an underestimation.” She looked around the crowded living room, the bentwood hatrack and the hi-fi and the records, the beaded lamp and the fringed lamp and the poodle lamp with the milk glass shade, the peasant woman with the orange scarf, and the rest of the artifacts in Rena’s thrift shop. A white cat jumped into her lap and she quickly stood up, brushed off her navy suit. “Nice place you got here,” she said, and sat back down, glancing for the location of the hairy interloper. “Looking forward to graduation? Making your plans for the future?”

  I let my bookbag drop onto the dusty upholstered armchair, sending a cloud of motes up into the stuffy air. “Thought I might become a criminal lawyer,” I said. “That or a hooker. Maybe a garbage collector.”

  She made no parry, kept her mind on her purpose. “May I ask why you haven’t returned my calls?”

  I leaned against the wall, watching her quick, confident movements. “Go ahead and ask,” I said.

  She put her slim red leather briefcase on her lap and opened it, removed a folder and a yellow legal pad. “Your mother said you might be difficult,” she said. “That you blame her for what’s happened.” Susan gazed into my eyes, as if she got a point for every second of eye contact she could maintain. I could see her practicing in front of a mirror when she was in law school.

  I waited to hear the rest of the story they’d concocted.

  “I know you’ve been through a terrible ordeal,” she said. She looked down at the file. “Six foster homes, MacLaren Hall. The suicide of your foster mother, Claire Richards, was it? Your mother said you were close to her. It must have been devastating.”

  I felt the wave of anger rise through me. Claire ’s death was mine. She had no right to handle it, to bring it up and somehow relate it to my mother’s case. But maybe this too was a tactic. To get it all out in the open to begin with, so I wouldn’t be sullen, withholding my feelings about Claire, difficult to draw out. An aggressive opening at chess. I saw that she knew just what she was doing. Going for the sore spot right away. “Did you ask your client about her involvement with that?”

  “Surely you don’t blame your mother for the death of a woman she only met once,” Susan said, as if there was no ques-tion about the absurdity of such a statement. “She’s not a sorcerer, is she?” She settled back on the couch, took a drag on her cigarette, watching me through the smoke, evaluating my reaction.

  Now I was scared. The two of them could really pull this off. I saw how easily this bouquet of oleander and nightshade could be twisted around into a laurel wreath. “But I do blame her, Susan.”

  “Tell me,” she said, holding the cigarette in the left hand, making some notes on the yellow pad with the right.

  “My mother did everything she could do to get Claire out of my life,” I said. “Claire was fragile and my mother knew exactly where to push.”

  Susan took a drag, squinted against the smoke. “And why would she do that?”

  I pushed away from the wall and went over to the hatrack. I didn’t want to look at her anymore, or rather, have her looking at me, sizing me up. I put on an old hat and watched her in the mirror. “Because Claire loved me.” It was a straw hat with a net veil, I pulled the veil over my eyes.

  “You felt she was jealous,” Susan said in a motherly way, spewing smoke into the air, an octopus spraying ink.

  I adjusted the veil, then tilted the brim of the hat. “She was extremely jealous. Claire was nice to me, and I loved her. She couldn’t stand that. Not that she ever paid attention to me when she had the chance, but when someone else did, she couldn’t take it.”

  Susan leaned forward, elbows on knees, eyes lifted to the rough, cottage-cheese ceiling, and I could hear her brain clicking, a mechanical readjustment, tapping and turning what I had just told her, searching for the advantage. “But what mother wouldn’t be jealous,” she said. “Of a daughter growing fond of a foster mother. Honestly speaking.” She flicked her ash into the beanbag ashtray, shaping the cherry on the bottom.

  I turned to her, looking at her through the veil, glad she couldn’t see the fear in my eyes. “Honestly speaking, she killed Claire. She shoved her over the cliff, okay? Maybe she can’t be prosecuted for it, but don’t try to sell me this new and improved spin. She killed Claire and she killed Barry. Let’s just get on with it.”

  Susan sighed and put her pen down. She took another hit of her cigarette and ground it out in the ashtray. “You’re a tough nut, aren’t you.”

  “You’re the one who wants to let a murderer go free,” I said. I took off the hat and threw it on the chair, scaring the white cat, who ran out of the room.

  “She was denied due process. It’s in the record,” Susan said, striking the edge of her hand into the other palm. I could see her in court, her hands translating her for the hearing impaired. “The public defender didn’t even raise a sweat in her defense.” The accusing finger, red-tipped. “She was drugged, my God, she could barely speak. It’s in the file, the dose and everything. Nobody said a word. The prosecution’s case was completely circumstantial.” Hands palm down, crossed and cut outward, like a baseball ref ’s “safe.” She was building momentum, but I’d heard enough.

  “So what’s in it for you?” I interrupted, in as dry and unimpressed a voice as I could register.

  “Justice has not been served,” she said firmly. I could see her on the steps of the courthouse, performing for the TV crews.

  “But it has,” I said. “Blindly, and maybe even by mistake, but it has been served. Rare, I know. A modern miracle.”

  Susan slumped to the back of the couch, as if my comments had drained her of all her righteous vigor. A car with the radio up loud, spewing ranchero music, cruised by and Susan quickly turned to look out the window at the dark green Jaguar parked in front. When she was satisfied that it was still there, gleaming by the curb, she returned to me. Slowly, and wearily. “Astrid, when young people are so cynical, it makes me despair for the future of this country.”

  It was the funniest thing I’d heard all day. I had to laugh. I didn’t find much funny these days, but this definitely was bizarre by anyone’s standards.

  Suddenly the weariness disappeared like the courthouse righteousness before it. Now I was looking at a cold and clever strategist, not so very unlike Ingrid Magnussen herself. “Barry Kolker could have died of heart failure,” Susan said calmly. “The autopsy was not conclusive. He was overweight, and a drug user, was he not?”

  “Whatever you say.” The truth is whatever I say it is. “Look, you want me to lie for her. Let’s go on from there and see if we have anything to talk about.”

  Susan slowly smiled in her red lipstick, pushing her black curls back from her face with one hand, her lashes very black against her white face. As if a bit ashamed of herself, but also somewhat relieved that she did not have to sell me as hard as she thought she might.


  “Let’s go for a drive,” she said.

  BEHIND the tinted windows of her Jaguar, I nestled into the smell of leather and money. It wrapped around me like fur. She had the jazz station from Long Beach on the radio, a free-form West Coast piece with a flute and an electric guitar. We rose out of Ripple Street, past the unlicensed day care and the bakery and the trompe l’oeil of Clearwater in silence, made the left on Fletcher, left on Glendale, right onto Silverlake Boulevard, and drove around the lake for a while. Gulls bobbed on the blue-green water. The drought had exposed a huge concrete collar around the lake, but in the sealed world of the Jaguar, it was sixty-eight degrees. Such a pleasure to be in a rich woman’s car. Now a new song filled the rarified atmosphere, I immediately recognized it. Oliver Nelson, “Stolen Moments.”

  I closed my eyes and imagined I was with Olivia and not my mother’s lawyer. Her bare arms, her profile, scarf tied Kelly-style around her head and throat. That precious moment. All the more so for being unreal, gone in an instant, something to savor like perfume on the wind, piano played in a passing house in the afternoon. I hung on to it as Susan parked on the far side of the lake, where we could see the blue-green water, dotted with white, the picturesque hillside beyond. She turned the music down, but you could still hear Nelson’s trumpet.

  “I want you to ask yourself, what’s she guilty of?” Susan asked, turning toward me from the driver’s seat. “I mean, in your mind. Really. Murder, or being a lousy mother? Of not being there for you when you needed her.”

  I looked at the little woman, her black curls maybe one shade too black, her eyes a little mascara-smudged from the heat. The weariness was an act, but also the truth. Like so many things, the words hopelessly imprecise. I wished I had something to draw her with. She was in the process of becoming a caricature of herself. Not yet, now she was merely recognizable. But in five years, ten, she would only look like herself at a distance. Up close she would be drawn and frightened. “Honestly, aren’t you just trying to punish her for being a crappy parent, and not for the alleged murder?” She cracked her window with the electric button, snapped in the car’s lighter, and reached into her bag for her cigarettes. “What was Barry Kolker to you anyway, some boyfriend of your mother’s. She had a number of boyfriends. You couldn’t