Janet Fitch - White Oleander

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

“You know, we should do Astrid,” Debby said.

Three sets of eyes, all those circles, looking at me. It was unnerving. Invisibility was my normal state in the turquoise house.

They seated me on a stool in the kitchen. Suddenly, I was a valued guest. Was the gooseneck lamp in my face too bright? Did I want something to drink? Linda turned me from side to side. They were examining my pores, touching my skin with tissue to see if I was oily, normal, or dry. I liked being the center of so much attention. It made me feel close to them. My freckles were a matter of concern, the shape of my forehead. The merits of foundations were discussed, samples streaked along my jaw.

“Too ruddy,” Linda said.

The others nodded sagely. I needed correction. Correction was important. Pots and tubes of white and brown. Anything could be corrected. My Danish nose, my square jaw, my fat lips, so far from ideal. And I thought of a mannequin I saw once in a store window, bald and nude, as two men dressed her, laughing and talking under her nippleless breasts. One man, I remembered, had a pincushion stuck to his shaved head.

“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. 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.

Debby’s brown eyes went soft with pride. “We should send Mary Kay her picture. Maybe they’ll give us a prize.”

At the thought of reward, Marvel quickly rummaged in her closet, found her Polaroid, and arranged me in front of the mirror. It was the only picture she ever took of me. You could see the unmade bed, the bureautop clutter. 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. The woman in the mirror would not have to orchestrate three different lovers. 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 sodomites me on the hood of his ’32 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 Womannn, 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.