Tag: white oleander

white oleander – IX

The caseworker, Ms. Cardoza, scolded me all the way back into town, down the Ventura Freeway. “Mrs. Turlock told me everything. That you was doing drugs, running around. With little kids in the house. I’m taking you somewhere you’ll learn to act right.” She was an ugly young woman with a broad, rough-skinned face and a set look about the jowls. I didn’t bother to argue with her. I would never speak to anyone ever again.

little boy. “This is my son, Cesar, and my husband.”

I wondered what had happened in Argentina, if it was so great there, what was she doing here in Hollywood? What had happened to her husband, and her little boy? I was about to ask when she turned the page and pointed a lacquered nail at a picture of two girls in tan uniforms kneeling on a lawn. “My maids,” she said, smiling nostalgically. “They were sitting around on their fat culos, so I made them pull weeds out of the lawn.”

She gazed admiringly at the picture of the girls pulling weeds. It gave me the creeps. It was one thing to have somebody pull weeds, but why would anybody take a picture of it? I decided I was better off not knowing.

While I made the white sauce for the macaroni and cheese, I hid a stick of margarine behind a stack of plates. The girls told me right off that whoever had kitchen duty stole food for everybody, and if I didn’t, they could make life hell for me. After the dishes, I carried it up to my room inside my shirt. Once we could hear Amelia in her room talking on the phone to a friend, they all came into our room and we ate the whole stick. I divided it into cubes with my knife. We ate it slowly, licking it, like candy. I could feel the calories enter my bloodstream, undiluted, making me high.

WHAT CAN I tell you about that time in my life? Hunger dominated every moment, hunger and its silent twin, the constant urge to sleep. School passed in a dream. I couldn’t think. Logic fled, and memory drained away like motor oil. My stomach ached, my period stopped. I rose above the sidewalks, I was smoke. The rains came and I was sick and after school I had nowhere to go.

I drifted the streets of Hollywood. Everywhere were homeless kids, huddled in doorways, asking for dope, change, a cigarette, a kiss. I looked into their faces and saw my own.

I picked an orange from somebody’s tree, it was sour as vinegar, but I needed the vitamin C.

It was not until I emerged onto Hollywood Boulevard that I realized where I was going. I stood in front of our old apartment

But no McMillan, no Magnussen.

I knew by my disappointment what I had really expected. That we would still be here. That I could go in and find my mother writing a poem, and I could wrap myself in her quilt and this would just be a dream I could tell her about. I was not really a girl one step from homeless, eating scraps off Amelia’s plates. In that apartment, my mother had never met Barry Kolker, and prison was something she’d read about in the papers. I would brush her hair, smelling of violets, and swim again in the hot nights. We would rename the stars.

I drew a picture of myself eating out of the garbage, furtive, with both hands, like a squirrel, and sent it to my mother. I got a letter back from her cellmate.

Dere Asrid,

You dont know me, I am your mamas roomayt. Your letters make her too sad. Send more chereful things, how youre getten strate A’s, homecome queen. Shes here for life. Why make it hardr.

youre frend

Lydia Guzman

Why make it harder, Lydia? Because it was her fault I was there. I

would spare her nothing.

My mother’s reply was more practical. She ordered me to call Children’s Services every day and yell my head off until they changed my placement. Her writing was big and dark and emphatic. I could feel her rage, I warmed myself by it. I needed her strength, her fire. “Don’t you let them forget about you,” she said.

But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe.

cost.

AMELIA FOUND OUT I’d been asking for a new placement. I cringed on the uncomfortable wooden-edged sofa in the sitting room as she paced back and forth, ranting, her hands cutting the air. “How dare you tell such outrageous lies about my house! I treat you like my own daughter, and this is how you repay me? With these lies?” The whites of her eyes showed all around the black irises, and spittle accumulated in the corners of her thin lips. “You don’t like my house? I send you to Mac. See how well you eat there. You’re lucky I allow you to sit at the table with the other girls, with that hideous face. In Argentina you would not be allowed to walk through the front door.” My face. I felt my scars throb along my jaw.

“What do you know about a noble home? Just a common piece of street garbage. Mother in prison. You know, you stink like garbage. When you come into a room, the girls hold their breath. You soil my home. Your presence insults me. I don’t want to look at you.” She turned away, pointed to the polished stairway. “Go to your room and stay there.”

And I could remember my mother’s voice, her irritation when the roar of the cappuccino machine interrupted her reading, her books stacked on the table where I drew and took the money when someone bought one.

I wanted her back. I was overwhelmed with a need to hear her low, expressive voice. I wanted her to say something funny and cruel about the art, or tell a story about one of the other poets. I wanted to feel her hand on my hair, stroking me while she spoke.

I laughed out loud, pulled up my sweater to show her my ribs. The men across the aisle looked too, a writer with a portable computer, a student making notes on a legal pad. Seeing if I’d pull it up any higher. Not that it mattered, I didn’t have much on top anymore. “We’re starving,” I said, covering myself again.

Joan put her strainer down. “If what you say is true and we can prove it,

she can have her license revoked.”

I imagined how it would really play. Joan started her investigation, got transferred to the San Gabriel Valley, and I lost my chance to have a young caseworker who still got excited about her clients. “That could take a long time. I need out now.”

JOAN PEELER said she had never come across a kid like me, she wanted to have me tested. I spent a couple of days filling out forms with a fat black pencil. Sheep is to horse as ostrich is to what. I’d been through this before, when we came back from Europe and they thought I was retarded. I wasn’t tempted to draw Pictures on the computer cards this time. Joan said the results were significant. I should be going to a special school, I should be challenged, I was beyond tenth grade, I should be in college already.

It was a game. She wanted me to strip myself bare, I lifted my long sleeve to the elbow, let her see a few of my dogbite scars. I hated her and needed her. Joan Peeler never ate a stick of margarine. She never begged for quarters in a liquor store parking lot to make a phone call. I felt like I was trading pieces of myself for hamburgers. Strips of my thigh to bait the hook.

While we talked, I sketched naked Carnival dancers wearing elaborate masks.

“You’ll like these people, Astrid,” she said as we drove west on Melrose, past body shops and pupuserias. “Ron and Claire Richards. She’s an actress and he does something with television.”

“Do they have kids?” I asked. Hoping they didn’t. No more babysitting, or 99-cent gifts when the two-year-old gets a ride-in Barbie car.

“No. In fact, they’re looking to adopt.”

That was a new one, something I never considered. Adoption. The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box. I didn’t know what to think.

We passed Paramount Studios, the big triple-arched gate, parking kiosk, people riding around on fattired bicycles. The longing in her eyes. “Next year, I’ll be in there,” Joan said. Sometimes I didn’t know who was younger, her or me.

The woman who answered the door reminded me of Audrey Hepburn.

Dark hair, long neck, wide radiant smile, about thirty. Her cheeks were flushed as she waved us in. “I’m Claire. We’ve been waiting for you.”

Art, something painted by hand. I couldn’t believe it. Someone bought a piece of art. And a wall of books with worn spines, CDs, records, and tapes. The free-form couch along two walls looked comfortable, a blue, red, and purple woven design, reading lamp in the center. I was afraid to breathe. This couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be for me. She was going to change her mind.

She sat down with Joan, who opened my file, but she kept smiling at me, too much, like she was worried what I’d think of her and her home. I wished I could tell her she had nothing to worry about.

Kitsch, I heard my mother’s voice in my ear. But it wasn’t, it was charming.

Claire Richards was charming, with her wide love-me smile.

The bathroom would be my favorite room, I could tell that already.

Tiled aqua and rose, the original twenties ceramic, a frosted glass enclosure on the tub, a swan swimming between cattails. There was something deeply familiar about the swan. Had we lived somewhere with swan-etched glass like this? Bottles and soaps and candles nestled on the bath tray that stretched between the two sides of the tub. I opened containers and smelled and rubbed things on my arms. Luckily the scars were fading, Claire Richards wouldn’t have to see the glaring red weals, she seemed the sensitive type.

I sat down on the bed. I couldn’t picture myself filling this room, inhabiting it, imposing my personality here.

I NEVER SPENT more time with anyone than I spent with Claire Richards the week that followed. I could tell she’d never been around kids. She took me with her to the dry cleaner’s, the bank, like she was afraid to leave me alone for a moment, as if I were five and not fifteen.

For a week, we ate out of paper cartons and jars with foreign writing on the labels from the Chalet Gourmet. Soft runny wedges of cheese, crusty baguettes, wrinkly Greek olives. Dark red proscuitto and honeydew melon, rose-scented diamonds of baklava. She didn’t eat much, but urged me to finish the roast beef, the grapefruit sweet as an orange. After three months with Cruella, I didn’t need urging.

We sat over our living room picnics and I told her stories about my mother, about the homes, avoiding anything too ugly, too extreme. I knew how to do this. I told her about my mother, but only the good things. I wasn’t a complainer, I wouldn’t end up saying bad things about you, Claire Richards.

She didn’t act much anymore. She slid her garnet heart pendant along its chain, tucked it under her ripe lower lip. “I get so tired of it. You spend hours getting ready, drag yourself to the call, where they look at you for two seconds and decide you’re too ethnic. Too classic. Too something.”

“Too ethnic?” Her wide pale forehead, her glossy hair.

“It means brunette.” She smiled. One front tooth was crooked, it crossed just slightly over the other one. “Too small means breasts. Classic means old. It’s not a very nice business, I’m afraid. I still go out, but it’s an exercise in futility.”

I wiped the last of the Boursin cheese out of the container with my

finger. “Why do it then?”

“What, and give up show business?” She laughed so easily, when she was happy, but also when she was sad.

THE NEW Beverly Cinema was right around the corner from her house.

They were playing King of Hearts and Children of Paradise, and we bought a giant popcorn and laughed and cried and laughed at each other crying. I used to go there all the time with my mother, but the movies were different.

She didn’t like weepy films. She liked to quote D. H. Lawrence:

really got.” Hers were grim European films — Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bergman — films where everybody died or wished they had. Claire’s

movies were lovely dreams. I wanted to crawl inside them, live in them, a pretty mad girl in a tutu. Gluttonous, we went back and saw them again the next night. My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.

At night I lay awake in my bed with the white eyelet ruffle, looking at the Dürer rabbit. It was bound to turn wrong. Joan Peeler was going to tell me it was just a mistake, that they’d changed their minds, they wanted a three-year-old. They’d decided to wait another couple of years. I worried about Claire’s husband. I didn’t want him to come home, take her away from me. I wanted it to always be like it was, the two of us in the living room eating pâté de foie gras and strawberries for dinner and listening to Debussy records, talking about our lives. She wanted to know all about me, what I was like, who I was. I worried, there wasn’t really much to tell. I had no preferences. I ate anything, wore anything, sat where you told me, slept where you said. I was infinitely adaptable. Claire wanted to know things like, did I like coconut soap or green apple? I didn’t know. “No, you have to decide,” she said.

So I became a user of green apple soap, of chamomile shampoo. I preferred to have the window open when I slept. I liked my meat rare. I had a favorite color, ultramarine blue, a favorite number, nine. But sometimes I suspected Claire was looking for more than there was to me.

“What was the best day of your life?” she asked me one afternoon as we lay on the free-form couch, her head on one armrest, mine on the other.

Judy Garland sang on the stereo, “My Funny Valentine.”

“Today,” I said.

“No.” She laughed, throwing her napkin at me. “From before.” I tried to remember, but it was like looking for buried coins in the sand.

I kept turning things over, cutting myself on rusty cans, broken beer bottles hidden there, but eventually I found an old coin, brushed it off. I could read the date, the country of origin.

“It was when we were living in Amsterdam. A tall thin house by the canal. There was a steep twisted staircase, and I was always afraid of falling.” Dark green canal water and rijsttafel. Water rats as big as opossums. The thick smell of hashish in the coffeehouses. My mother always stoned.

“I remember, it was a sunny day, and we ate sandwiches of raw hamburger and onions, standing up at a corner café, and my mother sang this cowboy song: ‘Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies.’” It was the only memory I had of Amsterdam being sunny.

Claire laughed, a sound like bells, drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them, gazing at me in a way I could have bottled and stored like a great wine.

“We sat in the sun overlooking the canal, and she said, ‘Look, Astrid, watch this.’ And she waved at the people passing by on a glass sightseeing boat. And all the passengers waved back. They thought we were Dutch, see, welcoming them to our city. That was my best day.” The sun and the herring gulls and all those people waving, thinking we were from there, that we belonged.

At the other end of the couch, Claire sighed, unfolding her legs, smiling nostalgically. She didn’t see who I had been then, a thin, lonely child, warmed by the mistaken thought that I belonged. She saw only the childish fun.

“You’ve been everywhere, haven’t you.” I had, but it hadn’t done me much good.

March 13, 2025

astrid magnussen, janet fitch, white oleander
white oleander – VIII

I would have three lovers, I decided. An older man, distinguished, with silver hair and a gray suit, who would take me traveling with him, for company on long first-class flights to Europe, and stuffy cocktail receptions for visiting dignitaries. I called him the Swedish ambassador. Yes, Mother, I would lie down for the father, gladly.

Then there was Xavier, my Mexican lover, Mother’s Eduardo reconstituted, but more tender and passionate, less silly and spoiled. Xavier spread camellias on the bed, he swore he would marry me if he could, but he had been engaged since birth to a girl with a harelip. It was fine with me,

I didn’t want to live with his overbearing parents in Mexico City and bear his ten Catholic children. I had a room of my own in the hotel, and a maid who brought me Mexican chocolate for breakfast in bed.

The third man was Ray. I met him in secret in big-city hotels, he sat in the bar with his sad face, and I would come in in a white linen suit with black-tipped shoes, my hair back in a chignon, a scarf tied to my purse. “1 wasn’t sure you’d come,” I said in a deep, slightly humorous voice, like Dietrich. “But I came anyway.”

I heard Marvel calling to me, but she was in another country, too far away. She didn’t mean me. She meant some other girl, some drab hopeless thing destined for the army or else beauty school. I lay with my legs wrapped around Ray in a room with tall windows, a bouquet of full-bloom red roses in a vase on the dresser.

“Astrid!”

Her voice was like a drill, penetrating, relentless. If I had a choice, l’d rather be a man’s slave than a woman’s.

“Astrid,” Linda called, her feet tucked under herself on the flower-print couch. “If you had a choice between two weeks in Paris France, all expenses paid, or a car —”

“Shitty Buick,” Debby interjected.

“What’s wrong with a Buick?” Marvel said.

“— which would you take?” Linda picked something out of the corner

of her eye with a long press-on nail.

They couldn’t be serious. Paris? My Paris? Elegant fruit shops and filterless Gitanes, dark woolen coats, the Bois de Boulogne? “Take the car,” I said.

“Definitely.”

“Smart girl,” Marvel said, toasting me with her Shasta. “You always had a good head on your shoulders.”

■■■

“You’ve got the perfect face for makeup,” Debby said, applying base with a sponge, turning me back and forth like a sculptor turning the clay.

Of course I did, I was blank, anyone could fill me in. I waited to see who I would be, what they would create on my delicious vacancy. The woman in first class, reading French Vogue and sipping champagne?

Catherine Deneuve walking her dog in the Bois, admired by strangers?

Linda outlined my eyes on the inside, rolling back my lids, dabbing tenderly at my tears with the corner of a Q-tip when it made me cry. She gave me four coats of mascara, until I was seeing through a tangle of spiders. I was going to be so beautiful, I could feel it. Marvel redefined my big lips smaller, penciling them inside the lines and filling in Piquant Peach.

“God, she could be Miss America,” Debby said.

Linda said. “No shit. Go look in the mirror.”

“Hair,” Debby said. “Let me get my curling wand.”

“We don’t have to get carried away, now,” Marvel said. She’d suddenly remembered who I was, not Miss America at all, only the kid who did her wash and set.

But Debby overrode her objections with the phrase “total effect.” Heat and the smell of burning hair tangled in the spikes of the curling wand, section by section.

Then I was done. They led me into Marvel’s bedroom by both arms, my eyes closed. My skin crawled with anticipation. Who would I be? “And here, representing the great State of California — Astrid!”

They pulled me in front of the mirror.

My hair curled and frizzed around my shoulders and rose three inches above my scalp. White stripes raced down my forehead and nose like Hindu caste marks. Brown patches appeared under my cheekbones, white on the ridges, dividing my otherwise dead beige face into a paint-by-number kit.

Dear Astrid,

Blusher broke out on my cheeks like a rash, my lips reduced to a geisha’s tiny bow. My eyebrows glared in dark wings, protecting the glistening bands of eye shadow, purple, blue, and pink, like a child’s rainbow. I never cried, but now tears sprang unbidden to my eyes, threatening a mud slide if they were to break out of their pool.

“She looks just like Brigitte what’s-her-name, the model.” Linda held me by the shoulders, her face next to mine in the mirror. I tried to smile, they’d been so nice.

They congratulated themselves and went back out to their sodas and Chex mix, leaving me in front of the mirror, a toddler’s fussed-over Barbie abandoned in the sandbox. I blinked back my tears and forced myself to look in the mirror.

Looking back at me was a thirty-year-old hostess at Denny’s. Anything else I can get you, hon? I could feel this vision burning itself into my soul, burning away Deneuve and Dietrich like acid thrown in my face.

She would not dance on rooftops in Mexico, fly first class to London over the pole. She was in for varicose veins and a single apartment with cat litter and Lana Turner movies. She would drink by herself with tomatoes dying on the windowsills. She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I’m so lonely, so desperate. I’ll give you whatever you want.

■■■

SCHOOL LET OUT at the end of June under a marine layer heavy as wet towels. The pencil-gray days were broken only by the blue flowers in Olivia’s yard. I babysat, ran errands, reread A Spy in the House of Love. I longed to see Olivia, but Marvel kept me working. If I so much as walked outside, she gave me four other things to do. Sometimes I’d see Olivia picking herbs in her garden, and our eyes would meet, but she gave no indication she knew me. She would have been a good secret agent, I thought, and tried to do the same, but after a while, I wondered if it was a good act or if she had forgotten me entirely.

■■■

Dear Astrid,

The all-prison issue of Witness is out, you must buy it, they printed my whole poem. It ran seven pages, illustrated with photographs by Ellen Mary McConnell. The response has been tremendous. I had them include a brief note in which I humbly mentioned that gifts of stamps, books, and money would be deeply appreciated.

Already I’ve made new fast friends. For instance, the delightful Dan Wiley, #M143522, a strong-arm robber serving twelve years at San Quentin. Dan the Man, as he calls himself, writes almost daily, a series of rough-trade fantasies in which I am the starring player. The best to date is one in which he sodomizes me on the hood of his ’72 Mustang while watching the sun go down over Malibu. Doesn’t that sound romantic? Did it have a hood ornament that year?

A woman just had the Collected Anne Sexton sent. Hallelujah.

Finally something else to read. The only books in the prison library without heaving bodices on the covers are a large-print edition of War and Peace and a tattered Jack London. Arf. Arf.

Of course, this admirer also had to send a sheaf of the most dreadful po-e-tree for my approval. She lives on a farm in Wisconsin, some sort of aged hippie commune, where she spins her own sheep. How could anyone who loves Sexton produce work so unrelievedly bad? I am Womann, hear me Roarrr. So just roar, please, it would be far less embarrassing for all concerned.

However, she believes me to be a prisoner of the patriarchy, a martyr in my own small way. So long as her solidarity includes gifts — power to the people. Free Huey! Free Ingrid Magnussen.

Not one word about me. How are you, Astrid? Are you happy? I miss you. It seemed like years since she’d considered the possibility of losing me. I’d returned to the shadows. My job once again was to share in her triumphs, to snicker at her unfortunate admirers with her, a sort of pocket mirror and studio audience. I realized I was exactly where she wanted me, safely unhappy with Marvel Turlock, a prisoner in turquoise, brewing into an artist, someone she might want to know someday. When all I wanted was for her to see me now, the way she saw me that day at the prison. To want to know me, what I thought, how I felt.

I wrote to her about Olivia, about another way to be in the world. I inserted drawings of Olivia, lying on the couch pulling magic out of the air.

You’re not the only beauty in the world, Mother. There is burnished teak as well as alabaster, rippling mahogany as well as silk. And a world of satisfaction where you found only fury and desire. The world parts for Olivia, it lies down at her feet, where you hack through it like a thorn forest.

■■■

MARVEL MADE ME sit the kids at the park in the long dull summer afternoons, sometimes not picking us up until dinnertime. I was supposed to buy their snacks and help them on the slides, adjudicate their sandbox wars, push them on the swings. Mostly I sat on the rim of the sandbox with the mothers, who ignored me, each in her own way — the Latina teen mothers importantly, proud of their strollers and made up as formally as Kabuki actors, and the older Anglo moms, plain as pancakes, smoking cigarettes and talking about car trouble, man trouble, son trouble. I sketched the women talking, their heads together and apart. They looked like mourners crouched around the foot of the Cross.

One of those afternoons, I smelled marijuana on the sluggish air and looked around the playground for the source. Over by the parking lot a group of boys sat on a yellow car, doors cocked, their music piercing the dullness of the day. What I wouldn’t give to get high. To be mellow and sympathetic, not jagged and spiteful and ready to smack Justin in the head with his shovel if he whined to me one more time about some kid throwing sand or pushing him off the bars. He was relentless, just like his mother. I tried to remind myself he was only four, but after a while it didn’t seem like any excuse.

■■■

I pulled out the letter that had arrived that morning from my mother, unfolded the scrap of notebook paper. At least she was paying attention now.

Dear Astrid,

Wasn’t Uncle Ernie bad enough? No, you had to locate the most detestable kind of creature to attach yourself to. Don’t you dare allow her to seduce you. All Ernie wanted was your body. If you possess the slightest hint of common sense, RUN from this woman as you would a flesh-eating virus.

Yes, the patriarchy has created this reprehensible world, a world of prisons and Wall Streets and welfare mothers, but it’s not something in which one should collude! My God, the woman is a prostitute, what would you expect her to say? “Stand up for your rights”? You’d think, as a black woman, she would be ashamed to lick the master’s boots, say it’s Whitey’s world, make the best of it.

If she was a Nazi collaborator, they’d shave her head and march her through the streets. A woman like her is a parasite, she fattens on injustice like a tick on a hog. Of course, to the tick, it’s a hog’s world.

You’d think any daughter of mine would be far too intelligent to be taken in by such ancient offal. Get Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, read some Ai. Even your tragically limited local library must have a copy of Leaves of Grass.

Mother.

Mother prescribing her books like medicines. A good dose of Whitman would set me straight, like castor oil. But at least she was thinking of me. I existed once more.

The smell of that pot on the sullen air was driving me crazy. I watched the boys around the yellow car enviously. I would normally go out of my way to avoid boys like that, gangly, pimply groups bonded by crude comments and a posture of entitlement. Reminding me of their ownership of this world. But Olivia would not be afraid of them. She would make magic there. She knew what they wanted, she could give it to them or not.

Did I have the nerve?

I turned to the mother of the child playing with Justin. “Could you watch him a second? I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be here,” she sighed, stubbing out her cigarette in the sand.

Suck his dick for half a bag? If anyone had suggested this before, I would have been disgusted. But now my lips could remember holding Ray’s column of vein, jerk, and pulse, soft skin of the head, the salty come. I looked at the fat boy and wondered how it would feel.

The pot made me brave, curious at how far I would go, as if I was somebody else, someone Olivia would be proud of.

He unbuckled his pants, pushed them down over his hips. I knelt on a bed of pine needles, like a supplicant, like a sinner. Not like a lover. He leaned against the rough stucco wall of the bathroom as I prayed with him in my mouth, his hands in my hair. Just like Miss America.

With Ray it was never like this. Then it was one pleasure after another, mouths, hands, the richness of skin, every surprise. This was the opposite of sex. I felt nothing for this boy, for his body moving. It felt like working. It cut the heart out of making love, turned it into something no more exciting than brushing your teeth. When the boy was done, I spat out the bitter come, wiped my mouth on my shirt.

For her, it was a job. She was earning her car, her copper pots, just as much as someone pasting up magazines or delivering mail. These men weren’t lovers, the Rastaman, the BMW. They were customers. The kneeling was just more subtle, the service more discreet, the illusion more substantial, and the payoff no half-bag of dope.

■■■

THE WINDS of September fanned harvests of fire on the dry hills of Altadena, Malibu, San Fernando, feeding on chaparral and tract homes. The smell of the smoke always brought me back to my mother, to a rooftop under an untrustworthy moon. How beautiful she had been, how perfectly unhinged. It was my second season of fire without her. Oleander time. I read that the Jews celebrated their New Year now, and decided I too would calculate time from this season.

At the height of the fires, 105 in the shade, I went back to school. The world burned, and I started the tenth grade at Birmingham High. Boys blew me kisses in the halls, waved money at me. They heard I would do things.

But I could hardly see them, they were just shapes in the smoke. Conrad, the chunky boy from the park, was in my typing class. He slipped me joints in the hall. He didn’t ask me to suck him off now. He could see the flames in my hair, he knew my lips would scorch him. I liked the feeling. I felt like my mother in oleander time.

Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

■■■

She wrote to me, and told me she was corresponding with a classics professor whose name had three initials. He was sending her original translations of some of the more obscene passages of Ovid and Aristophanes. She said she liked the contrast with Dan “The Man” Wylie ‘s mash notes. She also had a lively exchange going with an editor of a small press in North Carolina, and Hana Gruen, a famous feminist in Cologne who had heard of her plight. She wrote me about her new cellmate, she had finally gotten rid of the last one, sent her off to the Special Care Unit babbling about witchcraft. Of course, none of it had anything to do with me, except teeth.

Astrid, take care of your teeth. No one will take you to a decent dentist now. If anything goes wrong, they’ll let them rot in your head and you’ll have to pull the lot when you’re 24. I floss every day, even in here, brush with salt, massage my gums. Try to get some vitamin C, if they won’t buy it, eat oranges.

At least she couldn’t vanish, I thought as I folded the letter back into the envelope.

■■■

Was I the party jinx, a piece of space junk jettisoned from a capsule? No one to see me, no one to notice. I wished I was back with Ray, that he could hold me down with his eyes, bring me to earth again. It made me nauseous, to float, weightless and spinning in the moon rocks’ white glare, the silent funeral of the cypresses. No more jacaranda bloom. It was a landscape Van Gogh could have painted.

■■■

I was shaking as the woman filled out a chart. Then the red-headed nurse led me back. I told her it was my birthday, that I was fifteen, that Ed wasn’t my father. She squeezed my hand and had me lie down on a crisp narrow bed, then gave me a shot, something good to relax me, or maybe because it was my birthday. I didn’t tell her just how nice it felt. If you had to get mauled, at least there were drugs. She stripped off my clothes, and the shreds of cashmere made me cry.

“Don’t throw it away,” I begged. “Give it to me.”

I held the bits of my luxurious life against the good side of my face as she cleaned out the wounds, injecting a beautiful numbness. She said if it hurt, just tell her. The redheaded angel. I loved nurses and hospitals.

Come with me, Mother. She loved to swim, her hair like a fan, musical staff for a mermaid’s song. They sang on the rocks, combing their hair. Mother…. My tears flowed from nowhere, like a spring from a rock.

All I wanted was her cool hand on my forehead. What else was there ever?

Where you were, there was my home.

I walked past her and took the first of the Vicodins, scooping water from the faucet. I went down to my room without saying a word, closed the door, and lay on my bed. In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? I thought of the girl with the scar tattoos at the Crenshaw group home. She was right, it should bloody well show.

■■■

Justin got a road race set that cost Ed a week’s pay, Caitlin had a plastic ride-in Barbie car. All my gifts came from the 99-cent store. A flashlight on a keychain. A sweatshirt with a teddy bear on it. I was wearing the sweatshirt. Marvel insisted.

What was the underlying structure of this, that’s what I needed to know:

Joey Bishop singing “Jingle Bell Rock,” poets sleeping in cots bolted to walls, and beautiful women lying under men who ate three dinners in a row.

Where children hugged broken-necked giraffes and cried, or else drove around in plastic Barbie cars, and men with missing fingers longed for fourteen-year-old lovers, while women with porn-star figures cried out for the Holy Spirit.

If I could have one wish, Jesus, it was to let my mother come get me. I was tired of sucking the sails. Tired of being alone, of walking and eating and thinking for myself. I wasn’t going to make it after all.

Slivers of light escaped through the shutters of Olivia’s house. No men tonight. They were home with their good wives or girlfriends. Who wanted a whore on Christmas?

Olivia was Olivia. She had some nice pieces of furniture and some clocks, a rug and a stuffed parrot named Charlie, while I had some books and a box, and a torn cashmere sweater, a poster of animal turds. Not that much different. Neither of us had much, when you got down to it.

There was a new paperweight, grainy French blue with white raised figures. It was heavy and cool in my hand. I wondered what she’d do if I dropped it on the stone tabletop, let it go smash. I was drunk but not drunk enough. I put it down. “Actually, it’s a dog’s world. Did you know that? They do anything they want. It was my birthday too. I’m fifteen.”

“I’m not the world’s most considerate person,” Olivia said. “I’m not the type who sends birthday cards. But I’ll try, Astrid. It’s the best I can do.” She reached her hand to touch my face but couldn’t bring herself to do it.

The hand fell on my shoulder instead. I ignored it there.

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Olivia said, removing it, sitting back against the pillows. “Don’t sulk. You’re acting just like a man.”

I looked away and caught our reflection in the mirror over the fireplace, he beauty of the room, of Olivia in her silver nightgown like mercury in moonlight. Then there was this wretched blond girl who looked like she had wandered in from another movie, her face scored with welts, her 99-cent sweatshirt, her unbrushed hair.

I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I’d cried all I could and it wasn’t enough.

I was surprised at the scent, not at all like Ma Griffe, it smelled like small flowers that grew in leafy English woods, like a girl who would wear pinafores and pantaloons and make chains of wild daisies, a fairy-tale girl from the Victorian age.

When Olivia grinned, the charm of her overbite got to me in a way her perfection never could. “Now, isn’t that you?”

I took it away from her and sprayed it over my head so the mist fell like light rain. Wash my sins away. Make me a girl who’d never seen the firestorms of September, who’d never been shot, who’d never gone down on a boy behind a bathroom in a park. A nursery-rhyme girl in a blue dress holding a pet lamb in a cottage garden. It was me, after all. I didn’t know quite whether to laugh or to cry, so I poured some more brandy in my glass.

“That’s enough,” she said, taking the bottle away.

The threads of my scars throbbed with alcohol. I knew it wasn’t up to Olivia to love me. She did the best she could, bought me a bit of childhood in a bottle, by appointment to the Queen.

■■■

If I hadn’t been so hungover, something might have sprung to mind. But we stared at each other and I knew I was caught, knee-deep in rosemary and alyssum, frozen as a deer. Then it was all screaming and confusion. She ran out the gate as I took a few feeble steps back toward Olivia’s. She seized me by my hair and yanked me back. Her head jerked as she smelled my breath.

“Drinking with the whore? Did you sleep with her too?” She smacked me in the face, not caring about my scars, her voice reverberating in my tenderized skull like a shot in a cave. She smacked me as she dragged me back over to the turquoise house, head, arms, anywhere she could get me.

“What were you doing over there? Is that where you spent the night? Is it? Is it?” She hit me square on the ear and the Penhaligon perfume leaped from my hands and smashed on the blacktop.

I broke away from her, knelt down, the bottle broken inside its silver cage, perfume already soaking the pavement. I put my hands in the puddle.

My childhood, my English garden, that tiny piece of something real.

■■■

I threw out the big pieces, Jo and Amy and Beth, the other one, and Marmee. Broken. Well, that’s the way it is, Marmee. One little accident, and it’s all gone forever. Jo won’t like foster care, she’ll get moved around, shot.

Amy’ll get adopted, she’s cute, but you’ll never see her again. Beth’ll croak and the other one ‘ll turn tricks in a park for dope. Say good-bye to the fireside, welcome to my life.

I swept the shards into a pile, careful not to leave any slivers, Caitlin always went barefoot.

■■■

“She ever introduce you to her friends?”

I shook my head, let my mouth go slack, a little moronic, as if I had no idea what he was getting at. You mean, did she ever set me up on a date with one of her johns? Did she ever sell me to the BMW man on a cake platter like Pretty Baby? I wanted to laugh in his face.

I left messages on Olivia’s machine, but she never picked up.

March 7, 2025

astrid magnussen, janet fitch, white oleander

Tag: white oleander

white oleander – IX

white oleander – VIII