White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

THE SANTA ANAS blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon. “Oleander time,” she said. “Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.”

“We received our coloring from Norsemen,” she said. “Hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. We are the ones who sacked Rome. Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Don’t forget who you are.” “I promise,” I said.

IN THE SPRING this wound had been unimaginable, this madness, but it had lain before us, undetectable as a land mine. We didn’t even know the name Barry Kolker then.

“Never let a man stay the night,” she told me. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.”

I liked it when my mother tried to teach me things, when she paid attention. So often when I was with her, she was unreachable. Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

Beauty was my mother’s law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren’t, you just didn’t exist.

“So, you want to grab a bite to eat?” he asked her. “I never eat,” she said. I was hungry, but once my mother took a position, she never wavered from it.

I didn’t understand how this could happen, how he could give us fireworks and Catalina, how he could hold that cold cloth to my forehead, and talk about taking us to Bali, and then forget our address.

“She’s not as pretty as you,” I said. “But she’s a simpler girl,” my mother whispered bitterly.

She began to follow Barry, as he had followed her in the beginning. She went everywhere he might be, hunting him so that she could polish her hatred on the sight of him.

“‘Are you following me?’ he hissed. I could have cut his throat right there. ‘I don’t have to follow you,’ I replied. ‘I can read your mind. I know every move you make. I know your future, Barry, and it doesn’t look good.’

We sat in the car down the block from Barry’s house, under a carob tree. I hated the way she watched his house, her calm that was not even sane, like a patient hawk on top of a lightning-struck tree.

At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have. She took a horseshoe magnet from her purse and wiped it over all his floppy diskettes marked “backup.”

I shrank back against the wall, but my mother just stood in the center of the room, gleaming, like a grassfire. “I’m going to kill you!” he screamed. “So helpless in his fury,” my mother said to me. “Impotent, one might say.”

We showed up at his house that night. He had bars on all the windows now. She stroked his new security door with the pads of her fingers like it was fur.

Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you.

That beautiful girl, she was a universe, bearer of these words that rang like gongs, that tumbled like flutes made of human bones. 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.

“Whenever I asked, she’d say, ‘You had no father. I’m your father. You sprang full-blown from my forehead, like Athena.’”

My mother once told me she chose him because he looked like her, so it was as if she were having her own child. But there was a different story in the red Tibetan notebook with the orange binding dated Venice Beach, 1972.

In a different quadrant of the sky, another star broke loose. It was eerie, the one thing you didn’t plan on, stellar movement.

Then he was kneeling in front of me, his arms around my hips, kissing my belly, my thighs, his hands on my bare bottom, fingers in the silky wetness between my legs, tasting me there. My smell on his mouth as I knelt down with him, ran my hands over his body, opened his clothes, felt for him, hard, larger than I’d thought it would be. And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.