White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

I began to watch fathers, in the stores, on the playgrounds, pushing their daughters on swings. I liked how they seemed to know what to do. They seemed like a dock, firmly attached to the world, you could be safe then, not always drifting like us.

“My hatred gives me strength,” she said.

“Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness.”

In the picture, none of this had ever happened. I was safe then, a tiny pinhead egg buried in her right-side ovary, and we never were apart.

She didn’t even look like she should be in prison, she looked like she could have just walked off the Venice boardwalk with a book under her arm, ready to settle in at an oceanside café.

we burst into flame like oilfat chaparral in oleander time.

looked up in time to see her, a striking black woman in a white linen suit. I’d only seen her a couple of times, picking up her magazines, leaving her house in the evening in silk and pearls. She never spoke to us or anyone in the neighborhood.

It seemed impossible that a woman so elegant could live right next door to us with our fifty-inch TV. I wanted to crawl under her windows, peep through a crack in her fat-slatted shutters, and see what she was doing in there. But I didn’t have the nerve. I picked up a handful of her jacaranda blooms from the ground and pressed them to my face.

HER NAME WAS Olivia Johnstone. That was the name on the magazines and catalogs on her doormat. She took Condé Nast Traveler and French Vogue, thick as a phone book.

Was there anything as elegant as Olivia’s house? In the living room, the walls were covered with a gold paper burnished to the quality of cork. She had a taupe velvet couch with a curved back and a leopard throw pillow, a tan leather armchair, and a carved daybed with a striped cotton cover. A wood table with smaller tables tucked underneath it held a dull green ceramic planter bearing a white spray of orchids like moths. Jazz music quickened the pace of the room, the kind the BMW man liked, complicated trumpet runs full of masculine yearning.

Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I’d never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I

Olivia was linen and champagne and terra-cotta, botanical prints and “Seven Steps to Heaven.”

Women like my mother, alone as tigers, fighting every step. Women with men, like Marvel and Starr, trying to please. Neither one seemed to have the advantage. But Olivia didn’t mean men like Ed Turlock or even Ray. She meant men with money. That man’s world.

And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.