Janet Fitch - White Oleander

Dear Astrid,

Don’t tell me how you hate your new foster home. If they’re not beating you, consider yourself lucky. Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

IT HADN’T OCCURRED to me the worst was yet to come, until my prescription ran out. I had foolishly doubled my dose, and now I lay shipwrecked on a desolate shore littered with broken glass. I caught a cold from the air-conditioning, which worked too well in my small porch room. All I could think of was how alone I was. My loneliness tasted like pennies. I thought about dying. A boy in the hospital had told me the best way was an air bubble in the bloodstream. He had bone cancer and had stolen a syringe he kept in an Archie comic book. He said if it ever got too bad, he’d shoot up some air, and it’d be over in seconds. If it weren’t for my mother’s letters, I would have thought of something. I reread them until they were soft and divided along the creases.

When I couldn’t sleep, I’d go out in the backyard, where the crickets sang duets and the blacktop was warm as an animal under my bare feet. The crushed white gravel flowerbeds glowed in the moonlight, their sterile length punctuated by white plastic dahlias stuck into the gravel at regular intervals. I once sent my mother a painting of the house set in its sea of blacktop and white gravel edges, and she sent me a poem about the infant Achilles, whose mother dipped him in black water to make him immortal. It didn’t make me feel any better.

I sat on the redwood picnic table and listened to music coming through the closed shutters of the house next door. They were always closed, but a jazz saxophone worked its way out from between the wood slats, music personal as a touch. I ran my fingertips over the dark carbon blade of my mother’s old knife, imagining opening my wrists. If you did it in the bathtub, they said, you didn’t even feel it. I wouldn’t have hesitated, except for my mother. But the scales were in precarious balance, everything on one side but my mother’s letters, light as good night, a hand touching my hair.

I played with the knife, spread out my hand on top of the slide, and jabbed the point past my fingers. Johnny johnny johnny whoops! Johnny johnny whoops! Johnny johnny johnny johnny. I liked it just as well when it stabbed me.

Dear Astrid,

I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Just make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

WITHOUT PERCODAN, I began to see why mothers abandoned their children, left them in supermarkets and at playgrounds. I had never imagined the whining, the constancy of those tiny demands, the endless watch. I told Marvel I had papers and reports to write, and buried myself in after-school library shelves, working my way through the book lists that came in my mother’s letters, sharing table space with old men reading newspapers on sticks and Catholic school girls hiding teen magazines inside their history books.

I read everything—Colette, Françoise Sagan, Anais Nin’s Spy in the House of Love , Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . I read The Moon and Sixpence , about Gauguin, and the Chekhov short stories Michael had recommended. They didn’t have Miller but there was Kerouac. I read Lolita , but the man was nothing like Ray. I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.

One day a title jumped out at me from a shelf of adventure books. I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages, ignoring the dark glances of the girls in their white shirts and plaid jumpers, and fell into it as into a pool during a dry season.

The name of the book was The Art of Survival .

Every religion needs its bible, and I had found mine, not a moment too soon. I read it in eighteen hours, and then started over again. I learned how to stay alive for long weeks on the open sea when my white ocean liner went down. When shipwrecked, you catch fish, press their juices to drink. You sponge up morning dew off your life raft’s rubberized deck. Adrift on a sailboat, you catch rainwater on the canvas. But if the sails were dirty, the book pointed out, the decks crusted with salt, what water you caught would be worthless. You had to keep the decks clean, the sails rinsed, you had to be ready.

I looked at my life and saw quite clearly that I was not surviving it in the turquoise house. I was letting my sails crust up with salt. I had to stop playing johnny johnny and concentrate on preparing for rain, preparing for rescue. I decided I would take daily walks, stop overdoing the limp, retire my cane. I would pull myself together.

I SAT ON THE BUS on the way home from school, head aching from the shrill laughter of the other kids, and recounted the grim means to survive disaster at sea. You make fishhooks from any kind of bent metal, form line from the thread in your clothes, bait the hook with bits of fish or dead fellow passengers, even a strip of your own flesh if you have to. I forced myself to imagine it, taking the sharp edge of a C ration and piercing my thigh. It hurt so much I could hardly stay conscious, but I knew I had to finish the job, there was no point passing out, it would just heal and I’d have to do it all over again. So I kept on until I had the yellow worm in my hand, bloodbacked and warm. Hooked it onto the sharpened shred from the can, threw it into the sea on my handmade thread.

Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn’t see possibilities. Then came despair. A man from Japan was adrift four days in a boat when he panicked and hung himself. He was found twenty minutes later. A sailor from Soochow floated 116 days on a life raft before he was found. You never knew when rescue might come.

And if my life had come to this—shame and long bus rides and the stink of diesel-soaked air, trying not to get beat up at Madison Junior High, Justin’s sweater and Caitlin’s red rash—people had gone through far worse and survived. Despair was the killer. I had to prepare, hold hope between my palms like the flame of the last match in a long Arctic night.

When I couldn’t sleep, I’d sit on the picnic table in the backyard, listening to the music from our next-door neighbor’s house and imagine my mother, awake in her cell just like me. Would I want her around if I’d crashed my plane in Papua New Guinea or Para, Brazil? We’d slog through a hundred-mile labyrinth of mangrove forest, covered with leeches like in The African Queen , maybe even pierced with a long native spear. My mother wouldn’t panic, rip out the spear, and die of blood loss. I knew she could do the right thing, let the maggots feed in the wound, clearing out the hole, and then in five days or a week, pull out the spear. She would even write a poem about it.

But I could also see her making a terrible mistake, a failure in judgment. I imagined us adrift in a life raft ten days outside shipping lanes, pressing fish juice, sponging each drop of water from the clean morning deck, when suddenly she determined seawater wasn’t undrinkable after all. I saw her going swimming among sharks.