White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

I got up and went to lean on the tree trunk, on the other side of the trunk. She could hardly see me from there. But I could hear her. “You wanted to know. Don’t turn over rocks if you don’t want to see the pale creatures who live under them.”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “Last I heard he bought a farm somewhere on one of the Danish islands. Aero, I think.” When I looked around the trunk, she was playing with her shoes, walking them on her hands. “Picturesque, but unless his wife knows something about farming, I’m sure they’ve lost it by now.” She looked up just in time to catch my glance, and smiled her knowing half-smile, not my father’s wide-open smile, but the one that said she had read your mind, knew what you were thinking. “Why, are you planning to descend upon your long-lost father and his family? Don’t be surprised if they don’t kill the fatted calf.”

  “Better than you and your new children,” I said. The heat rippled off the blacktop, I could smell asphalt loosened by heat.

  “Ah,” she said and lay back on the grass, her arms folded underneath her head, her legs crossed at the ankle. “I told them you wouldn’t necessarily greet them with open arms. But they’re a tender lot. Idealistic. They thought they’d give you a try. They were so proud of the article. Did you like it, by the way?”

  “Threw it out.”

  “Pity.”

  The crows suddenly flew out of the tree in a series of shots, we listened to their rough calls doppler away. A truck went by on the frontage road, a club cab with dual back wheels, trailing ranchero music, absurdly cheerful. Like Guanajuato, I thought, and knew my mother was thinking the same.

  My shirt didn’t absorb sweat; it pooled and was soaked into the waistband of my skirt. I felt I’d been wading. “Tell me about Annie.”

  “Why do you have to hold on to the past?” She sat up, twisted her hair back, skewered it with the pencil. Her voice was sharp, irritated. “What’s the past, just a pile of moldy newspapers in some old man’s garage.”

  “The past is still happening. It never stopped. Who was Annie?”

  The wind shook the dense glossy foliage of the ficus, there was no other sound. She ran her fingers over her hair, pulling tight, like she was climbing out of a pool. “She was a neighbor. She took in kids, did people’s laundry.”

  The smell of laundry. The laundry basket, sitting in the laundry basket with other children, playing we were in a boat. The little squares. It was yellow. We scooted it across the kitchen floor. “What did she look like?”

  “Small. Talkative.” She shaded her eyes with one hand. “She wore those Dr. Scholl’s sandals.”

  Wooden clopping on the linoleum. Yellow linoleum with a multicolored paint-splotch pattern. The floor was cool when you put your cheek against it. And her legs. Tanned. Bare legs in cutoffs. But I couldn’t see her face. “Dark or fair?”

  “Dark. Straight hair with little bangs.”

  I couldn’t get the hair. Just the legs. And the way she sang all day long to the radio.

  “And where were you?”

  My mother was silent. She pressed her hand down on her eyes. “How could you possibly have remembered this.”

  Everything she knew about me, everything she walked around with in that thin skull case like a vault. I wanted to crack her open, eat her brain like a soft-boiled egg.

  “Imagine my life, for a moment,” she said, quietly, cupping her long fingers like a boat, like she was holding her life in a shell. “Imagine how unprepared I was to be the mother of a small child. The demand for the enactment of the archetype. The selfless eternal feminine. It couldn’t have been more foreign. I was a woman accustomed to following a line of inquiry or inclination until it led to its logical conclusion. I was used to having time to think, freedom. I felt like a hostage. Can you understand how desperate I was?”

  I didn’t want to understand, but I remembered Caitlin, tugging, always tugging, Assi, juice! Juice! Her imperiousness. On the other side of the fence, past my mother’s head, the young women in Reception watched one of them sweeping the concrete courtyard, sweeping, sweeping, like it was a penance. “That’s what babies are like. What were you thinking, that I would amuse you? That you and I could exchange thoughts on Joseph Brodsky?”

  She sat up, crossed her legs, and rested her hands on her knees. “I thought Klaus and I were going to live happily ever after. Adam and Eve in a vine-covered shack. I was walking the archetypes. I was out of my fucking mind.”

  “You were in love with him.”

  “Yes, I was in love with him, all right?” she yelled at me. “I was in love with him and baby makes three and all that jazz, and then we had you and I woke up one morning married to a weak, selfish man, and I couldn’t stand him. And you, you just wanted, wanted, wanted. Mommy Mommy Mommy until I thought I would throw you against the wall.”

  I felt sick. I had no trouble believing it, seeing it. I saw it all too clearly. And I understood why she never told me about this, had simply, kindly, refrained.

  “So you left me there.”

  “I hadn’t really intended to. I dropped you at her house just for the afternoon, to go to the beach with some friends, and one thing led to another, they had some friends down in Ensenada, and I went, and it felt wonderful, Astrid. To be free! You can’t imagine. To go to the bathroom by myself. To take a nap in the afternoon. To make love all day long if I wanted, and walk on the beach, and not to have to think, where’s Astrid? What’s Astrid doing? What’s she going to get into? And not having you on me all the time, Mommy Mommy Mommy, clinging to me, like a spider...”

  She shuddered. She still remembered my touch with revulsion. It made me dizzy with hatred. This was my mother. The woman who raised me. What chance could I ever have had.

  “How long were you gone?” My voice sounded flat and dead in my own ears.

  “A year,” she said quietly. “Give or take a few months.”

  And I believed it. Everything in my body told me that was right. All those nights, waiting for her to come home, listening for her key in the lock. No wonder. No wonder they had to tear me away from her when I started school. No wonder I always worried she was going to leave me one night. She already had.

  “But you’re asking the wrong question,” she said. “Don’t ask me why I left. Ask me why I came back.”

  A truck with a four-horse trailer rattled up the road toward the highway. We could smell the horses, see their sleek rumps over the rear gate, and I thought about that day at the races, Medea’s Pride.

  “You should have been sterilized.”

  Suddenly she was up, pinning me by my shoulders to the tree trunk. Her eyes were a sea in fog. “I could have left you there, but I didn’t. Don’t you understand? For once, I did the right thing. For you.”

  I was supposed to forgive her now, but it was too late. I would not say my line. “Bully. For. You,” I replied dryly.

  She wanted to slap me, but she couldn’t. They’d end the visit right now. I lifted my head, knowing the white scars were gleaming.

  She dropped her grip on my arms. “You were never like this before,” she said. “You’re so hard. Susan told me, but I thought it was just a pose. You’ve lost yourself, your dreaminess, that tender quality.”

  I stared at her, not letting her look away. We were the same height, eye to eye, but I was bigger-boned, I probably could have beaten her in a fair fight. “I would have thought you’d approve. Wasn’t that the thing you hated about Claire? Her tenderness? Be strong, you said. I despise weakness.”

  “I wanted you to be strong, but intact,” she said. “Not this devastation. You’re like a bomb site. You frighten me.”

  I smiled. I liked the idea that I frightened her. The tables were truly turned. “You, the great Ingrid Magnussen, goddess of September fires, Saint Santa Ana, ruler over life and death?”

  She reached out her hand, as if to touch my face, like a blind woman, but she couldn’t reach me. I would burn her if she touched me. The hand stayed in the air, h
overing in front of my face. I saw, she was afraid. “You were the one thing that was entirely good in my life, Astrid. Since I came back for you, we’ve never been apart, not until this.”

  “The murder, you mean.”

  “No, this. You, now.” The gesture, the attempt to reach me, faded like sunset. “You know, when I came back, you knew me. You were sitting there by the door when I came in. You looked up, and you smiled and reached for me to pick you up. As if you were waiting for me.”

  I wanted to cut through this moment with the blue flame of an acetylene torch. I wanted to burn it to ash and scatter it into the wind, so the pieces would never come back together again. “I was always waiting for you, Mother. It’s the constant in my life. Waiting for you. Will you come back, will you forget that you’ve tied me up in front of a store, left me on the bus?”

  The hand came out again. Tentatively, but this time it lightly touched my hair. “Are you still?”

  “No,” I said, brushing her hand away. “I stopped when Claire showed me what it felt like to be loved.”

  Now she looked tired, every day of forty-nine years. She picked up her shoes. “Is there anything else you want? Have I fulfilled my end of the bargain?”

  “Do you ever regret what you’ve done?”

  The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. “You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I’ve given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.”

  I never thought I’d hear the day my mother, Ingrid Magnussen, would admit to regret. Now that she stood in front of me, shaking with it, I couldn’t think of anything to say. It was like watching a river run backwards.

  We stood there staring out at the empty road.

  “What are you going to do when you get out?” I asked her. “Where are you going to go?”

  She wiped the sweat off her face with the collar of her dress. Secretaries and office workers and COs were coming out of the brick administration building. They leaned into the hot wind, holding their skirts down, heading for lunch, a nice air-conditioned Coco’s or Denny’s. When they saw me with my mother, they drew closer together, talking among themselves. She was already a celebrity, I could see it. We watched them start up their cars. I knew she imagined herself with those keys in her hand, accelerator, gas tank marked Full.

  She sighed. “By the time Susan is done, I’ll be a household icon, like Aunt Jemima, the Pillsbury Doughboy. I’ll have my choice of teaching positions. Where would you like to go, Astrid?” She glanced at me, smiled, my carrot. Reminding me

  which end of the plank and so on.

  “That’s years away,” I said.

  “You can’t make it alone,” she said. “You need an environment, a context. People invested in your success. God knows, look at me. I had to go to prison to get noticed.”

  The cars started up, crunched over the gravel. Camille came out of the shelter, pointed at her watch. It was over. I felt empty and used. Whatever I thought knowing the truth would do for me, it hadn’t. It was my last hope. I wanted her to hurt the way I did. I wanted it very much.

  “So, how does it feel, knowing I don’t give a damn anymore?” I said. “That I’ll do anything to get what I want. Even lie for you, I won’t blink an eye. I’m like you now, aren’t I? I look at the world and ask what’s in it for me.”

  She shook her head, gazed down at her bare tanned feet. “If I could take it all back, I would, Astrid.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “You’ve got to believe me.” Her eyes, glinting in the sun, were exactly the color of the pool we swam in together the summer she was arrested. I wanted to swim there again, to submerge myself in them.

  “Then tell me you don’t want me to testify,” I said. “Tell me you don’t want me like this. Tell me you would sacrifice the rest of your life to have me back the way I was.”

  She turned her blue gaze toward the road, that road, the beautiful road, the road women in prison dreamed about. The road she had already left me for once. Her hair like smoke in the wind. Overhead, the foliage blew back and forth like a fighter working a small bag in air that smelled of brushfire and dairy cattle. She pressed her hands over her eyes, then slid them down her face to her mouth. I watched her staring out at the road. She seemed lost there, sealed in longing, searching for an exit, a hidden door.

  And suddenly I felt panic. I’d made a mistake, like when I’d played chess with Ray and knew a second too late I’d made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn’t afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn’t want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn’t need to see it, the hideous eyeless albino creature that lived underneath. “Listen, forget it. A deal’s a deal. Let’s leave it at that.”

  The wind crackled its dangerous whip in the air, I imagined I could see the shower of sparks, smell the ashes. I was afraid she hadn’t heard me. She was still as a daguerreotype, arms crossed across her denim dress. “I’ll tell Susan,” she said quietly. “To leave you alone.”

  I knew I had heard her but I didn’t believe it. I waited for something, to make me believe it was true.

  My mother came back to me then, put her arms around me, rested her cheek against my hair. Although I knew it was impossible, I could smell her violets. “If you could go back, even part-way, I would give anything,” she said into my ear.

  Her large hands gently stroked my hair. It was all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.

  32

  THE YEAR my mother’s new trial was held, February was bitter cold. I was living in Berlin with Paul Trout, in a fourth-story flat in the old Eastern sector, a sublet of a sublet some friends found for us. It was crumbling and coal-heated, but we could afford it most of the time. Ever since Paul’s graphic novels had become the codebook of a new secret society among European art students, we’d made friends in every city. They passed us along from squat to sublet to spare couch like torches in a relay race.

  I liked Berlin. The city and I understood each other. I liked that they had left the bombed-out hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church as a monument to loss. Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn’t learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas.

  I had begun turning to sculpture, an outgrowth of my time with Rena Grushenka. I’d developed an obsessive fondness for scavenged materials, for flea markets and curbside treasures and haggling in six different languages. Over time, this flotsam worked its way into my art, along with bits of German and worship of the Real and twenty-four kinds of animal scat. At the Hochschule der Künste, our art student friends had a professor, Oskar Schein, who liked my work. He smuggled me into classes there as sort of a shadow student, and was lobbying for my acceptance as a bona fide scholar working toward a degree, but in a perverse way, my current status suited me. I was still a foster child. The Hochschule der Künste was Cal Arts in German, students with funny haircuts making ugly art, but I was developing a context, as my mother would have said. My classmates knew about Paul and me, we were the wild children with all the talent, living on my waitress tips and sidewalk sales of our handmade rearview-mirror ornaments. They wished they could be us. We are the free birds, I could still hear Rena say.

  That year, I craved suitcases. I haunted the flea market near the Tiergarten, bargaining and trading for old-fashioned suitcases — there were thousands for sale now, since unification. Leather with yellow celluloid handles. Train cases and hatboxes. In the old Eastern sector, no one had ever thrown them out, becaus
e there had been nothing to replace them with. Now they sold cheap, the Easterners were buying the latest carry-ons, uprights with wheels. Along the flea market booths of the Strasse des 17 Juni, the dealers all knew me. Handkofferfräulein, they called me. Suitcase girl.

  I was making altars inside them. Secret, portable museums. Displacement being the modern condition, as Oskar Schein liked to say. He kept wanting to buy one, but I couldn’t sell, though Paul and I were quite obviously broke. I needed them. Instead, I made Oskar one of his own for his birthday, with Louise Brooks as Lulu, and inflation marks in denominations of hundreds of thousands, toy train tracks like veins, and a black plastic clay swamp in the bottom printed with a giant bootprint that I’d filled with clear, green-tinted gel. Through the Lucite you could see the submerged likenesses of Goethe, Schiller, and Rilke.

  All winter long I sat on the floor in the corner of the flat with my glue and my clay, resins and solvents and paint and thread and bags of scavenged materials, my coat still on, my fingerless gloves. I could never decide whether to work with the windows open to ventilate fumes, or closed to stay warm. It depended. Sometimes my sense of futurity was stronger, sometimes my sense there was only the past.

  I was creating my personal museum. They were all here: Claire and Olivia, my mother and Starr, Yvonne and Niki and Rena, Amelia Ramos, Marvel. The Musée de Astrid Magnussen. I’d had to leave everything behind at Rena’s when I went to New York to find Paul, all my boxes and souvenirs, everything but my mother’s four books and the jewelry I’d acquired, the aquamarine ring, the amethyst, and the stolen necklace, plus eight hun-dred dollars in cash. Before I left, Sergei slipped me the name of a Russian fence in Brighton Beach, Ivan Ivanov, who would help me transfer my stash into cash. “He don’t speak much of English, but he give you good price.” The phoenix must burn to emerge, I kept thinking as I took a bus across the country with nothing but the address of a comic book store on St. Marks Place to steer by.

  But now I’d assembled it again, my museum. There, against the wall, in this cold northern city, I’d re-created my life.