Janet Fitch - White Oleander

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 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.

I carried Caitlin across the grass to where the boys clustered around the car. A man’s world. I saw myself as they would see me, as Ray saw me, a tall pale girl with long floating hair, a shy smile on my big lips, my legs bare in summer cutoffs. I hitched Caitlin up higher on my hip as I came near, they were all watching me. I glanced back to see if Justin’s keeper was looking. She was busy putting sunblock on her kid.

“Mind if I have a hit?” I asked. “I’ve been babysitting all day, I’m desperate.”

A boy with skin that looked like it had been grated handed me the joint. “We saw you get here,” he said. “I’m Brian, that’s PJ, and Big Al. And Mr. Natural.” The boys ducked, nodded. They waited for me to introduce myself, but I didn’t. I could give it to them or not. I liked that.

The pot wasn’t first class, not like Ray’s, which you could smell right through the Baggie. This smelled like burning straw and tasted dry and brown, but it was sweet as sunshine to me. I sucked in the smoke, turning my head away from Caitlin so she wouldn’t get stoned. She squirmed in my arms but I couldn’t set her down, she’d be under the first car that drove by.

“Wanna buy some?” The boy named PJ had dyed his hair blond. His T-shirt said Stone Temple Pilots in orange psychedelic writing.

I had three dollars in my pocket, for ice cream for the kids. “How much?”

The others turned to the chunky boy, Mr. Natural, seated in the passenger seat of the car. “Five a gram,” he said.

I switched Caitlin to the other hip, the bad one, took the joint from the Stoned Temple Pilot. It felt so good to be high. I felt the lid of the pencil-gray sky lift and I could breathe, I didn’t dread the rest of the afternoon now. “I have three.”

“How come I never saw you before? You go to Birmingham?” the chunky boy said, getting out of the car. He had rosy cheeks and wavy brown hair, he looked about twelve.

I shook my head, aware of how he was looking at me, and for once I wasn’t embarrassed. He was interested. It was my currency, my barter goods. I exhaled away from Caitlin, in a way that showed my neck, drawing his eyes where I wanted.

“Got a boyfriend?” he asked.

“Juice,” Caitlin said, tugging on my shirt, pulling the strap off my shoulder. “Assi, juice.”

I changed hips, jiggled her quiet, feeling their eyes stroking the smooth ball of my shoulder. “No,” I told the boy, watching him touch his lips with his fingers.

He leaned against the open car door, foot on the sill, thinking. “Suck my dick, I’ll give you a quarter O-Z.”

The Stoned Pilot laughed. “Shut the fuck up, dickhead,” he told him, turned back to me. “Half,” he said softly. “Half a bag, that’s a lot for head.”

The other boys watched to see what would happen.

I hitched Caitlin high on my hip, looked back at the playground, how far away it was, the swings opposing, like a machine in a factory, the product hurled down the slides. Did I want to? The fat boy bit his lower lip, chapped, unkissed. He was blushing under his light tan, trying so hard to look tough. 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.

Caitlin burrowed herself in my neck, trying to make farts, wet and buzzing, against my skin, laughing to herself. I didn’t know these boys, I would never see them again. The pot made me brave, curious at how far I would go, as if I was somebody else, someone Olivia would be proud of. “Somebody’s got to hold Caitlin. You can’t put her down, she’ll run off in a second.”

“Al’s got four little brothers.”

I gave her to the quiet boy with short cropped hair and straggly beard, followed the fat boy back into the bushes behind the bathrooms. 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. I thought he would walk away, but he gave me his hand, pulled me up. “My name’s Conrad,” he said. He was a foreign taste in my mouth, a scent in my hair. He gave me the half-bag of pot. “If you ever want anything, I’m always around.”