Janet Fitch - White Oleander

The smell of the trees was like Oregon. If only we could be back there right now, a soft rain falling, in the cabin, the wood-stove. I joined Claire, where she was agonizing over a tree that was almost right, except for a bit of a gap in the branches on one side. She pointed it out with anxious hands. I assured her she could keep it to the wall, nobody would ever notice it.

“That’s not the point,” she said. “If something is wrong, you can’t just turn it to the wall.”

I knew what she meant, but convinced her to take it anyway.

At home, Claire instructed Ron in the hanging of lights. Originally she wanted candles, but Ron drew the line there. We wound strings of chilies and popcorn round and around, while Ron watched a big soccer game on TV. Mexico playing Argentina. He wouldn’t turn it off so Claire could have Christmas carols. A man’s world. He could barely pull himself away long enough to put the gold angel on top.

Claire turned out the room lights and we sat and watched the tree in the dark, while Mexico overran South America.

THE MORNING of Christmas Eve, Ron got a call about a vision of the Virgin Mary seen in Bayou St. Louis. He had to go film it. They had a big fight and Claire locked herself in their room. In the kitchen, I was polishing the silver, a job I’d learned to do very well. We were going to have dinner with crystal and linens. I had my new Christmas dress from Jessica McClintock. Claire had already stuffed the goose, and picked up a real English trifle from Chalet Gourmet. We had tickets for the midnight Messiah at the Hollywood Bowl.

We didn’t go. I ate ham sandwiches and watched It’s a Wonderful Life. Claire came out and threw the goose in the trash. She poured herself small glasses of sherry, one after the other, and watched TV with me, crying on and off in the plaid bathrobe Ron had given her as an early Christmas present. I had a glass or two of the sweet liquor to keep her company, it was no worse than cough syrup. She finally took a couple of sleeping pills and passed out on the couch. She snored like a mower in high grass.

She slept through most of Christmas morning, then woke with a terrible headache at noon. We didn’t talk about Ron, but she wouldn’t touch the presents he left for her. I got a real fisherman sweater, a new set of acrylic paints, a big book of Japanese woodcuts, and silk pajamas like something Myrna Loy would wear in a Thin Man movie.

My present was small compared with the ones Ron bought her. “Here, open something.”

“I don’t want anything,” she said from under her washcloth soaked in vinegar.

“I made it for you.”

She pushed aside the washcloth, and despite the pain in her temples, slipped off the raffia ties, and opened the marbled paper wrapping I had made myself. Inside was a portrait of her, in a round wooden frame. She started to cry, then ran to the bathroom and threw up. I could hear her gagging. I picked up the picture, in charcoal, traced her high rounded forehead, the slope of fine bones, the sharp chin, arched brows.

“Claire?” I said through the bathroom door.

I heard water running and tried the door. It wasn’t locked. She sat on the edge of the tub in her red plaid bathrobe, pale as winter, hand over her mouth, eyes turned toward the windows. She was blinking back tears and wouldn’t look at me. She seemed to be collapsing at the center, one arm wrapped around her waist, as if keeping herself from breaking in two.

I didn’t know what to do when she was like this. I gazed down at the tiles, salmon pink, counted the shiny squares. Twenty-four from tub to heater. Thirty from the door to the sink. A decorative motif was the color of cherry cough drops, punctuated with almond cuneiform script. The frosted glass shower door swan bowed its head.

“I should never drink.” She washed her mouth out in the sink, cupping water in her palm. “It just makes things worse.” She wiped her hands and face on a towel, took my hand. “Now I’ve ruined your Christmas.”

I made her lie down on the couch, opened my new paints, spread colors on a plate, and painted a sheet of thick paper half black, half red, and made flames like the back of the Leonard Cohen album. The woman on the radio sang “Ave Maria.” “What does Ave mean?”

“Bird,” she said.

The woman’s voice was a bird, flying in a hot wind, battered by the effort. I painted it in the fire, black.

WHEN RON came home from New Orleans, Claire didn’t get up from the couch. She didn’t clean up, shop, cook, change the sheets, put on lipstick, or try to make it better. She lay in her red bathrobe on the couch, sherry bottle right by her hand, she’d been sipping steadily all day long, eating cinnamon toast and leaving the crusts, listening to opera. That’s what she craved. Hysterical loves and inevitable betrayals. The women all ended up stabbing themselves, drinking poison, bitten by snakes.

“For Christ’s sake, at least get dressed,” Ron said. “Astrid shouldn’t have to see this.”

I wished he wouldn’t use me as a reason. Why couldn’t he say, I’m worried about you, I love you, you need to see someone?

“Astrid, do I embarrass you?” Claire asked. If she were sober, she would never have put me on the spot like that.

“No,” I said. But it did, when they passed me back and forth like a side dish at dinner.

“She says I don’t embarrass her.”

Ron said, “You embarrass me.”

Claire nodded, drunk against the armrest of the couch in the blinking Christmas lights. She raised one thin philosophical finger. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me, Ron, have I always embarrassed you? Or is this a recent development?” She had a funny way of talking when she was drinking, of lipping her words, top over bottom, like Sandy Dennis in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

On the stereo, the soprano launched into her big aria before she did herself in, Madame Butterfly or Aida, I can’t remember which. Claire closed her eyes, tried to lose herself in the singing. Ron turned off the CD.

“Claire, I had to go. It’s what I do,” Ron explained, standing over her, his palms out, as if he were singing. “I’m sorry it was Christmas, but it was a Christmas story. I couldn’t wait until February, now could I.”

“It’s what you do,” she said in the flat voice I hated.

He pointed with that smooth clean finger. “Don’t.”

I wished she’d bite it, break it off, but instead she glanced down, finished her drink and put the sherry glass on the table, carefully, and nestled down under the mohair blanket. She was always cold now. “Did she go with you? The blond, what’s-her-bimbo, Cindy. Kimmie.”

“Oh this.” He turned away, starting picking things up, dirty Kleenexes, empty glasses, dishtowel, bowl. I didn’t help him. I sat on the couch with Claire, wishing he’d leave us alone. “Christ I’m tired of your paranoia. I should have an affair, just to give you some basis. At least then I’d get the fun along with the crap.”

Claire watched him with heavy-lidded eyes, red-rimmed from crying. “She doesn’t embarrass you, though. It doesn’t embarrass you to be running around with her.”

He reached down to pick up her empty glass. “Blah, blah, blah.”

Before I realized what was happening, she sprang to her feet and slapped him across the face. I was glad, she’d needed to do that for months. But then, instead of telling him so, she sagged back to the couch, hands flopped on her knees, and started to cry in hiccupy sobs. It took all her strength just to slap him. I felt both sorry and disgusted.

“Excuse us, will you?” Ron asked me.

I looked at Claire, to see if she wanted me to stay, be a witness. But she was just sobbing, her face uncovered.