White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

  “Take mine,” Claire said. “I can have another set made.”

  “Yeah, but it bugs me that I’m losing things. They’ve got to be around here somewhere.”

  He took Claire’s keys, but it bothered him. He was a highly organized man.

  One day, I saw Claire take a pen from Ron’s inside jacket pocket, slip it into her jeans.

  “Have you seen my Cross pen?” he asked a few days later.

  “No,” she said.

  He frowned at me. “Did you take it, Astrid? Tell me the truth, I won’t be upset. It’s just things are disappearing and it’s driving me crazy. I’m not accusing you of stealing them, but did you borrow it and not put it back?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to rat on Claire, but I didn’t want him thinking I was stealing from him either. I would do anything not to lose this placement. “I didn’t take it, really. I wouldn’t.”

  “I believe you,” he said, running his hand through his silver hair. “I must be getting senile.”

  “Maybe it’s poltergeists,” Claire said.

  When Claire went out for an audition, I searched the house methodically. Under their bed I found a box painted red and white and decorated with pieces of broken mirror. Inside, it was also red, and full of the things that he’d been missing — an army knife, a watch, his stapler, scissors, keys, nail clippers. There was a Polaroid of them laughing, and two Polaroids glued together face-to-face, I couldn’t pry them apart. A magnet hung from the lid of the box, and a steel plate was glued to the bottom. I could feel the tug of the magnet as I replaced the lid.

  17

  I FINISHED the tenth grade at the end of June. I did incredibly well, considering. C in algebra, it was a mercy grade, they never give out D’s as final grades in honors classes. But with Claire’s nightly help, I got A’s in English and history, world art and biology, even Spanish. If she had asked me to go out for football, I would have done that too. To celebrate, Ron took us to Musso and Frank, a restaurant right on Hollywood Boulevard. I’d never noticed it before. Just down from the last apartment I lived in with my mother.

  We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing. We walked single file past the scarred wooden counter, people eating steaks and chops and reading Variety, warmed by the grill fires, served by old men waiters in green-and-red jackets. It was a time warp, flash frozen in 1927. I liked it, it made me feel safe.

  We were seated in the back room. Ron knew people. He introduced us — “my wife, Claire,” and for a moment I thought he was going to introduce me as their daughter. But it was “and our friend Astrid.” I beat back the sharpness of my disappointment with the thought that Marvel wouldn’t have bothered to introduce me at all, and Amelia, well, we were lucky to get fed.

  I drank my Shirley Temple and Claire pointed out movie stars in excited whispers. They didn’t look very glamorous in real life. Smaller than you’d think, dressed plainly, just eating dinner. Jason Robards and another man sat across from us with two bored kids, the men talking business, the kids making bread balls and throwing them at each other.

  Claire and Ron split a bottle of wine, and Claire gave me sips from her glass. She touched Ron constantly, his hair, arm, shoulder. I was jealous. I wanted her all to myself. I was aware it wasn’t normal, normal daughters didn’t get jealous of their fathers. They wished both their parents would disappear.

  Ron took something from his pocket, concealed in his smooth hand. “For a job well done,” he said.

  He put it on my plate. It was a red velvet box, shaped like a heart. I opened it. Inside was a faceted lavender jewel on a gold chain. “Every girl needs a little jewelry,” he said.

  Claire clipped it around my neck. “Amethyst is a great healer,” she whispered as she put it on me, kissing me on the cheek. “Only good times now.” Ron leaned forward and I let him kiss me too.

  I felt tears coming. They surprised me.

  The food arrived and I watched them while we ate, Claire ’s dark glossy hair falling against her cheek, her large soft eyes. Ron’s smooth man’s face. I pretended that they were really my parents. The steak and the wine went to my head, and I imagined being the child of Claire and Ron Richards. Who was I, the real Astrid Richards? Doing well in school, of course I was going to college. I listened as they laughed, something about their days at Yale together, though I knew Ron was married to somebody else then, that he dumped his wife for Claire. I imagined myself at Yale, knee-deep in crisp fall leaves, in a thick camel’s hair coat. I sat in dark paneled lecture halls looking at slides of Da Vinci. I was going to study in Tuscany my junior year. On Parents’ Day, Claire and Ron came to visit, Claire wearing her pearls. She showed me where her dorm was.

  I touched the amethyst around my neck. Only good times now...

  RON WAS GONE most of the summer. He came home and she did his laundry and cooked too much food. He made phone calls, worked on his laptop computer, had meetings, checked his messages, and then he was gone again.

  It threw Claire when he came and then went so soon, but at least she didn’t pace at night anymore. She worked in her garden almost every day, wearing gloves and an enormous straw Chinese hat. Tending her tomatoes. She’d planted four different kinds — yellow and red cherry, Romas for spaghetti sauce, Beefsteaks big as a baby’s head. We faithfully watched a TV show on Saturday mornings that told her how to grow things. She staked the tall delphiniums, debudded the roses for the biggest flowers. She weeded every day, and watered at dusk, filling the air with the scent of wet hot earth. Her peaked hat moved in the beds like a floating Balinese temple.

  Sometimes I helped her, but mostly I sat under the Chinese elm and drew. She sang songs she learned when she was my age, “Are You Going to Scarborough Fair?” and “John Barleycorn Must Die.” Her voice was trained, supple as leather, precise as a knife thrower’s blade. Singing or talking, it had the same graceful quality, and an accent I thought at first was English, but then realized was the old-fashioned American of a thirties movie, a person who could get away with saying “grand.” Too classic, they told her when she went out on auditions. It didn’t mean old. It meant too beautiful for the times, when anything that lasted longer than six months was considered passé. I loved to listen to her sing, or tell me stories about her childhood in suburban Connecticut, it sounded like heaven to me.

  When she left to audition, or go to ballet class, I liked to go into her bedroom, brush my hair with her silver brush, touch the clothes in her closet, shaped cotton dresses simple as vases, watercolor silks. On her dresser, I unstoppered the L’Air du Temps in the frosted glass bottle, two doves nestled together, and touched the scent to my wrists, behind my ears. Time’s Air. I looked at myself in the mirror over her vanity. My hair gleamed the color of dull unbleached silk, brushed back from an offcenter part, revealing the hair slightly curly at the hairline. Claire and her hairdresser said the bangs had to go. I never knew they didn’t suit me before. I turned my face from side to side. The scars had all but disappeared. I could pass for beautiful.

  Around my neck, the amethyst glinted. Before, I would have hidden it in the toe of a sock crammed into a shoe in the closet. But here, we wore our jewelry. We deserved it. “When a woman has jewelry, she wears it,” Claire had explained. I had jewelry now. I was a girl with jewelry.

  I tried on Claire ’s double strand of pearls in the mirror, ran the smooth, lustrous beads through my fingers, touched the coral rose of the clasp. The pearls weren’t really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn’t come apart.

  “Dinner at eight? That would be grand,” I said to myself in the mirror, like Katharine Hepburn, my fingers looped in the pearls.

 
Claire had a picture of me on her bureau, next to one of her and Ron, in a sterling silver frame. Nobody had ever framed a picture of me and set it on the dresser. I took the hem of my T-shirt, huffed on the glass and shined it. She had taken it a couple of weeks before, at the beach. I was squinting into the camera, laughing at something she said, my hair paler than the sand. She didn’t frame the one I took of her, covered from head to toe in a long beach wrap, Chinese hat, and sunglasses. She looked like the Invisible Man. She only disrobed to go into the water, wading out to her thighs. She didn’t like to swim.

  “I know it’s ridiculous,” she said, “but I keep thinking I’m going to be sucked out to sea.”

  It wasn’t the only thing she was afraid of.

  She was afraid of spiders and supermarkets and sitting with her back to the door. “Bad chi,” she said. She hated the color purple, and the numbers four and especially eight. She detested crowds and the nosy lady next door, Mrs. Kromach. I thought I was afraid of things, but Claire was way ahead of me. She joked about her fears, but it was the kind of joke where you knew people thought it was ridiculous, and you pretended you thought so too, but underneath you were completely serious. “Actors are always superstitious,” she said.

  She did my numerology. I was a 50, which was the same as a

  32. I had the power to sway the masses. She was a 36, which was the same as a 27, the Scepter. A number of courage and power. She used to be a 22 before she was married, a 4. Very bad. “So you see, Ron saved my life.” She laughed uneasily.

  I couldn’t imagine ever having, or wanting to have, the power to sway the masses, but if it made her feel good, I figured, what was the harm. I helped her out with projects meant to boost good chi. One day we bought square mirrors and I actually climbed to the roof of the house to put them on the red tiles, facing Mrs. Kromach’s house. “So her bad chi will bounce back on her, the old bag.”

  There was a rose trellis over the front path, and she didn’t like people who wouldn’t go through it. Only goodness and love can pass through a rose arch, she said. She was uneasy if someone came in the back door. She wouldn’t let me wear black. The first time I did, she told me, “Black belongs to Saturn, he’s unfriendly to children.”

  I took off her pearls and put them back in the case under the scarves in her top left drawer. She kept most of her jewelry in a paper bag in the freezer, where she thought burglars wouldn’t find it. But the pearls couldn’t take being frozen, they had to stay warm.

  In the right two drawers were her silk things, in light midtones, champagne and shell pink and ice blue, slips and nightgowns, bras and panties that matched. Everything folded and tucked with sachets. Below that, T-shirts in neat stacks, a white stack and a colored pile, celadon, mauve, taupe. To the left, shorts and light sweaters. Shawls on the bottom. Her winter clothes lay folded and sealed in zippered cases at the top of the closet.

  This instinct to order and rituals was one of the things I liked best about Claire, her calendars and rules. She knew when it was time to put winter clothes away. I loved that. Her sense of order, graceful and eccentric, little secrets women knew, lingerie bags and matching underwear. She threw out my Starr underthings, full of holes, and bought me all new ones at a department store, discussing the fit of bras with the elderly saleslady. I wanted satin and lace, black and emerald green, but Claire gently overruled me. I pretended she was my mother and whined a bit before giving in.

  CLAIRE HAD new photographs taken, actor’s head shots. We went to Hollywood to pick them up from a shop on Cahuenga. In photographs, she looked different, focused, animated. In person she was thin, dreamy, as full of odd angles as a Picasso mademoiselle. The photographer, an old Armenian man with a sleepy eye, thought I should have photographs too. “She could model,” he said to Claire. “I’ve seen worse.”

  My hand instinctively rose to touch the scars on my jaw. Couldn’t he see how ugly I was?

  Claire smiled, stroked my hair. “Would you like that?”

  “No,” I said, low, so the photographer wouldn’t hear me.

  “We’ll keep it in mind,” Claire said.

  On the way back to the car in the heat of a pigeon-wing-pale afternoon, we passed an old hippie man with gray hair and a green army surplus bag strapped to his chest, asking people for money. Passersby shouldered his outstretched paper cup aside and crossed the street. He wasn’t menacing enough for this line of work. I thought of myself panhandling in the liquor store parking lot, but it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t an alkie, a drug addict. I was only fifteen. He’d done it to himself.

  “Come on,” he said. “Help a guy out.”

  I was ready to cross, to escape this scarecrow of a man, but Claire looked over at him. She didn’t know how to ignore people.

  “Can you spare some change, lady? Anything’ll help.”

  The light changed, but Claire wasn’t paying attention. She was digging in her purse, emptying out her change. She never learned about street people, that if you showed them the least little kindness, they’d latch onto you like castor seeds. Claire only saw how thin he was, the limp where he must have been hit by a car while panhandling between traffic lights. My mother would have offered to shove him out in front of a bus, but Claire cared. She believed in the commonality of the soul.

  The hippie man pocketed the money. “You’re a real human being, lady. Most people won’t look a man in the eye when he’s down.” He gave me an accusing look. “I don’t care if a guy gives me something, I just want him to look me in the eye, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I do,” Claire said, in her voice that was cool water and soft hands.

  “I worked steady all my life, but I pulled my back out, see. I never drank on the job. I never did.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t.” The stoplight turned red again. I was ready to pull Claire out into traffic. Everywhere we went, people ended up telling her their sad stories. They could see she was too polite to just walk away. He came closer. She was probably the first normal person who’d listened to him for days.

  “Unemployment only lasts so long,” he said. I could smell him. Either he’d pissed on himself or someone else had done the honors. “Nobody gives a shit.”

  “Some people do,” Claire said. The late afternoon sun was turning her dark hair red around the edges.

  “You’re a real human being,” he said. “They’re out of style now, though. Machines, that’s what they want.” He was breathing right into her face, but she was too sweet to turn her head. She didn’t want to offend him. They always seemed to know that about her. “I mean, how many people they need to fry burgers?”

  “Not enough. Or maybe too many.” She smiled, insecure, shoving her windblown hair out of her face.

  The light turned green, but we were going nowhere. Stalled in the stream at Sunset and Cahuenga. People walked around us like we were a hole in the sidewalk.

  He stepped closer again, lowered his voice confidentially. “Do you think of me as a man?” He stuck his tongue through the slot of a missing tooth.

  She flushed, shrugged her shoulders, embarrassed. Of course she didn’t. I wanted to shove him off the curb.

  “Women used to like me a lot. While I was working.”

  I could see the tension on her face, she wanted to back away, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. She was twisting the bag of eight-by-ten glossies she ’d just paid two hundred dollars for. A black Corvette went by, trailing rap music.

  “You’re a nice lady, but you wouldn’t take your clothes off for me, would you.”

  She was bending her photographs, her sensitive face quivering with contradiction. “I don’t . . .” she mumbled.

  “I don’t blame you. But you wouldn’t.” He looked so sad.

  I took her arm. “Claire, we have to go now.”

  But she was too caught up in the homeless man who was pulling a mind trip on her. He had her snared.

  “I miss women,” he said. “The way they smelled. I miss that.
Like you, whatever you’ve got on.”

  She wore her L’Air du Temps, out of place as a wildflower in a war zone. I was amazed he could detect her fragrance through his own stench.

  But I knew what he meant. I loved the way she smelled too. I liked to sit on her bed as she combed and French-braided my hair. I could sit there as long as she wanted, just breathing the air where she was.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. That was Claire, afraid of hurting anyone ’s feelings, even this sad old bum.

  “Can I smell your hair?” he asked.

  She went pale. She had no boundaries. He could do anything, she wouldn’t know how to stop him.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said, holding up his hands, the nails like horn. “Look at all these people. I won’t touch you.”

  She swallowed and nodded, closed her eyes as the man came close, lifted a section of her dark hair gently on the tips of his fingers, like it was a flower, and breathed in the scent. She shampooed with rosemary and cloves. The smile on his face.

  “Thank you,” he whispered, and backed away without turning around, leaving her standing at Cahuenga and Sunset, her eyes closed, clutching her bag of photographs of a different person entirely.

  CLAIRE TOOK ME to see the Kandinsky show at the art museum. I’d never liked abstract art. My mother and her friends could go wild over a canvas that was just black and white pinstripes, or a big red square. I liked art that was of something. Cézanne card players, Van Gogh’s boots. I liked tiny Mughal miniatures, and ink-brushed Japanese crows and cattails and cranes.

  But if Claire wanted to see Kandinsky, we’d go see him.

  I felt better when I got to the museum, the familiar plaza, the fountains, the muted lighting, the softened voices. The way Starr felt in church, that’s how I felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated. Kandinsky wasn’t all that abstract, I could still see the Russian cities with their turbaned towers, and horsemen three abreast with spears, cannons, and ladies in long gowns with high headdresses. Pure colors, like the illustrations in a picture book.