White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.

  Yvonne was sitting up, holding her breath, eyes bulging out. It was the thing she should not do.

  “Breathe,” I said in her ear. “Please, Yvonne, try.”

  She tried to breathe, a couple of shallow inhalations, but it hurt too much. She flopped back down on the narrow bed, too tired to go on. All she could do was grip my hand and cry. And I thought of the way the baby was linked to her, as she was linked to her mother, and her mother, all the way back, inside and inside, knit into a chain of disaster that brought her to this bed, this day. And not only her. I wondered what my own inheritance was going to be.

  “I wish I was dead,” Yvonne said into the pillowcase with the flowers I’d brought from home.

  THE BABY CAME four hours later. A girl, born 5:32 p.m. A Gemini. We went home the next day. Rena picked us up at the hospital’s front loop. She refused to come in. We stopped at the observation window in Neonatal, but the baby was already gone. Rena wouldn’t let Yvonne take the baby home even for a few weeks.

  “Better just walk away,” Rena had said. “You get attach, a loser game.”

  She was right, I thought, as I pushed Yvonne’s wheelchair to the exit, though her motives cared nothing for Yvonne, she just didn’t want to become a foster grandma. She never had any kids, never wanted any. What’s in it for me? “Babies make me sick,” she was always telling Yvonne. “Eat, shit, cry. You think you keep, think again.”

  In the hospital driveway, Niki got out of the van, gave Yvonne a bunch of balloons, hugged her. We helped her into the back. She was still tired, she could barely walk. There was a pinched nerve in her left leg, and stitches where the doctor cut her. She smelled sour, like old blood. She looked like she just got hit by a car. Rena didn’t even look at her.

  I sat with her in the back on the ripped-out carseat. Yvonne leaned against me, her head on my shoulder. “Sing ‘Michelle,’” she whispered.

  I held her hand, pressed my other hand against her forehead the way she liked, and sang softly in my tuneless voice as we bounced and clattered along, heading for home. “Michelle, ma belle.” The song seemed to soothe her. She rested her head against my shoulder and quietly sucked her thumb.

  WEEKS WENT BY, and there was no call from Susan to let me know when I would see my mother. Now that she’d won my complicity, I heard no more about it. Not in May, not in June. I sat by the river’s edge, watching the white egrets and brown wading birds fish in the current. It was my graduation day over at Marshall High School, but I saw no reason to attend. Even if she were out, my mother would never have come. Ceremonies not of her own invention didn’t interest her. I would rather just let it pass quietly, like a middle-aged woman’s birthday.

  The truth was, I was scared, so scared I was afraid to even mention it, like the morning I did the acid. It was a fear that could open its mouth and swallow me whole, like a hammerhead shark in five feet of water. I didn’t know what happened now. I wasn’t headed to Yale or art school, I was going nowhere. I was painting license plate frames, I was sleeping with a thief, he said I could move in with him anytime. Maybe I’d learn to pick locks, hijack a truck. Why should my mother have a monopoly on crime?

  I sat by the water, watching it flow, and the egrets preen, their button eyes, thinking about what Mr. Delgado had said in our last class. He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn’t know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.

  Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother’s totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way up-river, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox. There was a swan in it, a white wooden swan with long black nares, like the swan on Claire ’s frosted shower doors. I sat on the swan and made tinkle for Annie. There were white tile squares on the floor, that I played making shapes out of as I sat there, flowers and houses. They were perfect six-sided hexagonals and they all fit together. Also a yellow kitchen linoleum with a paint-spatter design, red and black, and laundry baskets. That laundry feeling, the smell of dryer. Yellow sunlight through a roll-down blind. My finger through the round pull.

  But who was Annie? A friend? A babysitter? And why had she potty-trained me instead of my mother? I wanted to know what was behind the swan and the yellow linoleum. There were other children there, I remembered that, watching them going to school. And a box full of crayons. Did we live with her, or had she left me there?

  And Klaus, the silhouette that was my father. We are larger than biography. Where did that leave me? I wanted to know how they met, fell in love, why they split up. Their time together was a battleground full of white stones, grass grown over the trenches, a war I lost everything in and had no way to know what happened. I wanted to know about our traveling years, why we could never go home.

  I lay back on the sloped embankment and looked up. It was the best place to look at the sky. The concrete banks blocked out its fuzzy flat edges, where you saw the smog and the haze, and you just got the good part, the center, a perfect bowl of infinite blue. I let myself fall upward into that ultramarine. Not a pale, arctic morning like my mother’s eyes, this blue was tender, warm, merciful, without white, pure chroma, a Raphael sky. When you didn’t see the horizon, you could almost believe it was a bowl. The roundness of it hypnotized me.

  I heard someone’s steps coming toward me. It was Yvonne. Her heavy tread, long hair like a sheet of water. I lay back down. She sat next to me.

  “Lie down, look at this great sky.”

  She lay down next to me, her hands folded across her stomach the way she did when she was pregnant, though the baby was gone. She was quiet, smaller than usual, like a leaf shrinking. A flight of pigeons raced across the rich curved surface of the sky, their wings beating white and gray in unison, like a semaphore. I wondered if they knew where they were going when they flew like that.

  I squeezed her hand. It was like holding my own hand. Her lips were pouty, chapped. It was like we were floating here in the sky, cut off from future and past. Why couldn’t that be enough.

  A flight of pigeons should be enough. Something without a story. Maybe I should set aside my broken string of beads, my shoeboxes of memories. No matter how much I dug, it was only a story, and not enough. Why couldn’t it just be a heron. No story, just a bird with long thin legs.

  If I could just stop time. The river and the sky.

  “You ever think of killing yourself?” Yvonne said.

  “Some people say that when you come back, you pick up just where you left off.” I took Yvonne’s arm in mine. Her skin was so soft. Her T-shirt smelled of despair, like metal and rain.

  “I thought it was your graduation today, ese,” she said.

  “What’s the point,” I said. “Marching across the stage like ducks in a shooting gallery.”

  Yvonne sighed. “If I was you, I’d be proud.”

  I smiled. “If you were me, you’d be me. Whoever the hell that is.”

  Mrs. Luanne Davis suggested applying to City College, I could transfer anytime, but I’d already lost faith. A future wasn’t something I could forge by myself out of all these broken pieces I had, like Siegfried’s sword in the old story. The future was a white fog into which I would vanish, unmarked by the flourish of rustling taffeta blue and gold. No mother to guide me.

&nb
sp; I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she ’d tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you’re ever going to. Look around. It’s all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.

  I was crying. I knew I could have done better, I could have made arrangements, I could have followed up, found someone to help me. At this moment my classmates were going up for their awards, National Merit, Junior State. How did I get so lost? Mother, why did you let my hand slip from yours on the bus, your arms so full of packages? I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.

  “So funny, you know,” Yvonne said. “I was sure I was going to hate you. When you came, I thought, who needs this gringa, listen to her, who she thinks she is, Princess Diana? That’s what I say to Niki. This is all we need, girlfriend. But now, you know, we did. Need you.”

  I squeezed her hand. I had Yvonne, I had Niki. I had this Raphael sky. I had five hundred dollars and an aquamarine from a dead woman and a future in salvage. What more could a girl want.

  THAT SUMMER we flogged our stuff at swap meets from Ontario to Santa Fe Springs. Rena got a deal on zebra-striped contact paper, so I zebra-striped barstools, bathroom scales, shoebox “storage units.” I striped the hospital potty chair, the walker, for the zingy seniors. The cats hid.

  “Display,” was Rena’s new catchword. “We have to have display.”

  Our dinette set already went, striped and varnished. She got four hundred dollars for it, gave me a hundred. She said I could stay as long as I wanted, pay room and board like Niki. She meant it as a compliment, but it scared me to death.

  At the Fairfax High swap meet, we had a blue plastic tarp stretched over our booth, so the ladies could come in and look at our clothes without having sunstroke. They were like fish, nibbling along the reef, and we were the morays, waiting patiently for them to come closer.

  “Benito wants me to move in,” Yvonne said when Rena was busy with a customer, adjusting a hat on the woman, telling her how great it looked.

  “You’re not going to,” Niki said.

  Yvonne smiled dreamily.

  She was in love again. I saw no reason to dissuade her. These days, I had given up trying to understand what was right or wrong, what mattered or didn’t. “He seems like a nice guy,” I said.

  “How many people ask you to come share their life?” Yvonne said.

  “People who want a steady screw,” Niki said. “Laundry and dishes.”

  I shared a mug of Russian Sports Mix with Yvonne, a weak brew of vodka and Gatorade that Rena drank all day long.

  Rena brought a sunburned woman over to meet me, hoisted the striped American Tourister hardsider onto the folding table.

  “This is our artist,” Rena said, lighting one of her black Sobranies. “Astrid Magnussen. You remember name. Someday that suitcase worth millions.”

  The woman smiled and shook my hand. I tried not to breathe Sports Mix on her. Rena handed me a permanent marker with a flourish, and I signed my name along the bottom edge of the suitcase. Sometimes being with Rena was like doing acid. The artist. The Buddhist book I’d found on trash day said you accrued virtue just by doing a good job with whatever you were doing, completely applying yourself to the task at hand. I looked at the zebra bar and barstools, the suitcase disappearing with the sunburned woman. They looked good. I liked making them. Maybe if that was all I did my entire life, wasn’t that good enough? The Buddhists thought it shouldn’t matter whether it’s contact paper or Zen calligraphy, brain surgery or literature. In the Tao, they were of equal value, if they were done in the same spirit.

  “Lazy girls,” Rena said. “You have to talk to customer. Work up sale.”

  She saw a young man in shorts and Top-Siders looking at the barstools, turned on her smile and went out to hook him. She saw those Top-Siders fifty feet off.

  Niki finished her mug of Gatorade cocktail, made a face, poured some more while Rena had her hands full. “The things we do for a high.”

  “When are you going?” I asked Yvonne.

  “Tomorrow,” she whispered, half-hiding behind her curtain of smooth hair.

  I stroked her hair back with my hand, tucked it behind her small, multipierced ear. She looked up at me and smiled, and I hugged her. She burst into tears. “I don’t know, Astrid, do you think I should? You always know what to do.”

  I laughed, caught unaware. I squatted down by her seat on a rickety director’s chair. “Me? I know less than nothing.”

  “I thought you didn’t lie,” she said, smiling, holding her hand in front of her mouth, a habit to conceal her bad teeth. Maybe Benito would marry her. Maybe he would take her to the dentist. Maybe he would hold her in the night and love her. Who was to say he wouldn’t?

  “I’m going to miss you,” I said.

  She nodded, couldn’t talk, crying while she was smiling. “God, I must look like such a mess.” She swiped at her mascara that was running down her cheeks.

  “You look like Miss America,” I said, hugging her. It was what women said. “You know, when they put the crown on? And she ’s crying and laughing and taking her walk.”

  That made her laugh. She liked Miss America. We watched it and got stoned and she took some dusty silk flowers Rena had lying around and walked up and down the living room, waving the mechanical beauty queen wave.

  “If we get married, you can be maid of honor,” she said.

  I saw the cake in her eyes, the little bride and groom on top, the icing like lace, layer after layer, and a dress like the cake, white flowers glued to the car and everybody honking as they drove away.

  “I’ll be there,” I said. Imagining the wedding party, not a soul over eighteen, each one planning a life along the course of the lyrics of popular songs. It made me sad to think of it.

  “You’ll get back together with your boyfriend,” she said, as if to soften the blow. “Don’t worry. He’ll wait for you.”

  “Sure,” I said. But I knew, nobody waited for anybody.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, Yvonne packed a few clothes, her horse, and her radio, but she left the picture of the TV actor in his frame on the dresser. Rena gave her some money, rolled up in a rubber band. We all waited on the front porch with her until Benito came by in his primer-gray Cutlass. Then she was gone.

  31

  ON THE ANVIL OF AUGUST, the city lay paralyzed, stunned into stupidity by the heat. The sidewalks shrank under the sun. It was a landscape of total surrender. The air was chlorinated, thick and hostile, like the atmosphere of a dead planet. But in the front yard, the big oleander bloomed like a wedding bouquet, a sky full of pinwheel stars. It made me think of my mother.

  There was still no call from Susan. Many times, I’d wanted to call her and demand a meeting. But I knew better. This was a chess game. First the urgency, then the waiting. I would not run down the street after her, begging. I would develop my pieces and secure my defenses.

  I woke up very early now, to catch a few breaths of cool air before the heat set in. I stood on the porch and gazed at the giant oleander. It was old, it had a trunk like a tree. You just had to roast a marshmallow on one twig and you were dead. She’d boiled pounds of it to make the brew of Barry’s death. I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn’t they just be bitter? They weren’t like rattlesnakes, they didn’t even eat what they killed. The
way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn’t want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn’t a source of poison, but just another victim.

  By eight it was already too hot to be outside. I went back inside to make Tasha’s lunch. She was the new girl in Yvonne ’s bed, thirteen, going to King Junior High, D track, summer term. Grave, silent, she had a vertical scar on her upper lip just healing. She flinched if people moved too fast near her.

  “You’ll do great,” I said, making her celery with peanut butter in the creases and a Granny Smith apple. “I’ll be watching.”

  I drove her to school in Niki’s truck, let her off in front of Thomas Starr King Junior High, watched her go in scared and small, her backpack hanging with key chains. I felt helpless to prevent her life from taking its likely direction. Could a person save another person? She turned to wave at me. I waved back. I didn’t drive off until she was inside.

  Dear Astrid,

  It’s been six years today. Six years since I walked through the gates of this peculiar finishing school. Like Dante: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. / Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura. / Che la diritta via era smarrita. The third day over 110. Yesterday an inmate slit another woman’s throat with a bent can. Lydia tore up a poem I wrote about a man I saw once, a snake tattoo disappearing into his jeans. I made her tape it together again, but you can’t imagine the strain. Aside from you, I think this is the longest relationship I’ve ever had. She’s sure I love her, though it’s nothing of the kind. She adores those poems of mine that refer to her, thinks it’s a public declaration.