Janet Fitch - White Oleander

For a moment he stood still as a suspect, his hands open on the window frame. Then he caught my hands, turned them over and kissed the palms, pressed them to his face. And I was the one who was trembling, it was me and my marguerite.

He turned and held me. It was precisely how I had wanted to be held, all my life—by strong arms and a broad, wool-shirted chest smelling of tobacco and pot. I threw my head back and it was my first kiss, I opened my mouth for him to taste me, my lips, my tongue. I couldn’t stop shaking unless he held me very tight.

He pushed me away then, gently. “Look, maybe we should go back. It isn’t right.”

I didn’t care what was right anymore. I had a condom from Carolee’s drawer in my pocket, and the man I’d always wanted for once in a place we could be alone.

I took off my plaid shirt, tossed it onto the floor. I took off my T-shirt. I took off my bra and let him see me, small and very pale, not Starr, but me, all I had. I untied my hiking boots, kicked them off. I unbuttoned my jeans and let them fall.

Ray looked sad right then, like someone was dying, his back pressed against the smudged window. “I never wanted this to happen,” he said.

“You’re a liar, Ray,” I said.

Then he was kneeling in front of me, his arms around my hips, kissing my belly, my thighs, his hands on my bare bottom, fingers in the silky wetness between my legs, tasting me there. My smell on his mouth as I knelt down with him, ran my hands over his body, opened his clothes, felt for him, hard, larger than I’d thought it would be. And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

ALL DAY AT SCHOOL, and in the Ray-less afternoons down the wash, or at dinner with Starr and the kids, or when we watched TV at night, Ray was my only thought, my singular obsession. How soft his skin was, softer than you’d think a man’s skin could be, and the thickness of his arms, the sinews tracing along his forearms like tree roots, and the sad way he looked at me when my clothes were gone.

I sketched the way he looked nude, gazing out the window after we’d made love, or lying on the pile of carpet padding he’d dragged into the corner of the new bedroom. On our afternoons we’d lie on those pads, our legs entwined, smooth over hairy, his fingers lightly covering my breast and playing with my nipple, making it stand up like a pencil eraser. I hid the drawings in the box with my mother’s journals, a place Starr would never think to look. I knew I should throw them out, but I couldn’t bear to.

“Why are you with Starr?” I asked him one afternoon, tracing the white scar under his ribs where a Vietcong bullet had left its mark.

He ran his fingertips over my ribs so the goose bumps came up. “She’s the only woman who ever let me just be myself,” he said.

“I would,” I said, doing the same on his balls with the back of my fingernails, making him jump. “Is she good in bed, is that it?”

“That’s personal,” he said. He covered my hand with his and held it to his groin. I felt him growing hard again. “I don’t talk about one woman to another. That’s plain bad manners.”

He ran his finger between my legs, into the wet like silk, then put his finger in his mouth. I never imagined it would be like this, to be desired. Everything was possible. He pulled me on top of him and I rode him like a horse in the surf, my forehead against his chest, riding through a spray of sparks. If my mother were free, would this be one of her lovers, filling me up with his stars? And would my mother watch me the way Starr did, realizing I was no longer transparent as an encyclopedia overlay?

No. If she were free, I wouldn’t be here. She would never have allowed me to have this. She kept everything good for herself.

“I love you, Ray,” I said.

“Shhh,” he said, holding my hips. His eyelids fluttered. “Don’t say anything.”

So I just rode, the ocean spray tingling all over me, the tide rising, filled with starfish and phosphorescence, into the dawn.

STARR’S EDGINESS spilled over, mostly at the kids. She was accusing her daughter of all the things she wanted to accuse me of. Carolee barely ever came home, she went dirt hiking with Derrick in the afternoon, the drone of the bikes like a nagging doubt. When I wasn’t with Ray, I stayed at school or went to the library, or hunted frogs with the boys as the Big Tujunga’s winter flow slowly dried up into rivulets and muddy pools. The frogs looked like the mud and you had to be very still to see them. Mostly I just sat on a rock in the sun and painted.

But one day I came home from the wash to find Starr curled up on the porch swing, her hair in hot rollers, wearing a blue blouse tied up tight under her breasts and tiny cutoffs that bunched up at her crotch. She was playing with the kittens the cat had had under the house that spring, fishing for them with ribbons Davey had tied to a stick. She was laughing and talking to them, it wasn’t like her. She usually called them rats with fur.

“Well, the artiste. Come talk to me, missy, I’m so bored I’m talking to cats.”

She never wanted to talk to me, and there was something about her mouth that seemed slower than the words she was saying. She gave me the stick and took a cigarette out of the Benson and Hedges pack. She stuck the wrong end in her mouth, and I watched to see if she would light it. She caught it just in time. “Don’t know which end is up,” she joked, and took a sip from her coffee cup. I dragged the ribbons along the carpet, luring a little gray-and-white furball out from beneath the swing. It hopped, pounced, ran off.

“So talk to me,” she said, taking an exaggerated drag from her cigarette and blowing it out in a long stream. She bared her lovely throat as she arched back her neck, her head huge with hot curlers like a dandelion puff. “We used to talk all the time. Everybody’s so darn busy, that’s what’s wrong with life. You seen Carolee?”

Up the road, we could both see the plumes of dust from the dirt bikes rising into the thin blue sky. I wanted to be dust, smoke, the wind, sun glimmering over the chaparral, anywhere but sitting here with the woman whose man I was stealing.

“Carolee’s trouble,” Starr said, holding out her foot to look at the silvery pedicure. “You stay away from her. I’m going to have to talk to that girl, stop the downward spiral. Needs a big dose of the Word.” She pulled out a curler, looked cross-eyed at the ringlet over her forehead, started pulling out the other ones, dropping them into her lap. “You’re the good girl. I’m making my amends to you. A-mend. Where’s Carolee, you seen her?” she asked again.

“I think she’s with Derrick,” I said, wiggling the ribbon end near the glider where the kitten was hiding.

She leaned her head forward to get the curlers at the back. “Of all the white trash. His mama’s so dumb she puts the TV dinner in the oven with the box still on.” She laughed and dropped the curler, and the kitten that had just come out dashed back underneath the glider.

That’s when I realized Starr was drunk. She’d been sober eighteen months, kept the AA chips on her key ring, red, yellow, blue, purple. It was such a big deal to her, too. I never quite understood it. Ray drank. My mother drank. Michael drank from the moment he finished reading his Books on Tape at noon until he passed out at midnight. It didn’t seem to hurt him any. If anything, Starr looked happier now. I wondered why she’d tried so hard to be some kind of saint, when it wasn’t really her nature. What was the big deal?

“He’s crazy about me, you know,” she said. “That Ray. There’s a man that needs a real woman.” She rolled her hips in their tight cutoffs as if she were sitting on him right now. “His wife wouldn’t do shit for him.” She took another hit on her cigarette, lowering her mascaraed eyelashes, remembering. “That man was starving for a piece. I saw her once, you know. The wife.” She drank from her coffee cup, and now I could smell it. “Sailor’s delight. Sensible shoes, you know what I’m saying. Wouldn’t give head or anything. He’d come to the Trop and just sit and watch us girls with those sad eyes, like a starving man in a supermarket.” She squared her shoulders, rolled them forward, so I’d get an idea of what Ray had been watching, the cross caught in her cleavage, Jesus drowning in flesh. She laughed, dropped cigarette ash on the white-patched kitten. “I just had to fall in love with him.”