White Oleander

Across the room, Yvonne 's bed was empty, she had left with someone at about eleven to go to a party across the river. I sat up in bed, drawing by lamplight, chasing an indigo line of oil pastel on violet paper with a whispery silver. It was a boat, a dark canoe, on the shore of a moonless sea. There was no one in the boat, no oars, no sail. It made me think of the sunless seas of Kublai Khan and also of my mother's Vikings sending their dead out on boats.

 

I blew on my hands, rubbed them together. The furnace wasn't working, Rena still hadn't fixed it. We just wore sweaters all the time. "Cold?" she said. "In California? You joke." They weren't feeling it, out there braying to the records, drinking Hunter's Brandy, some high-octane Russian specialty that tasted like vodka flavored with nails.

 

I looked around the cramped, crowded room, like the stockroom of a Goodwill store. I imagined what my mother would say if she could see who I was now, her burning little artist. Just another used item in Rena's thrift shop. You like that lamp with the bubbled green base? Name a price. How about the oil painting of the fat-cheeked peasant woman with the orange kerchief? For you, ten dollars. A bouquet of beaded flowers? Talk to Rena, she'd let you have it for seven-fifty. We had a furry Oriental rug, and a solid oak table, only slightly tilted, along with five unmatched chairs, special today. We had an enormous tiki salad set, and a complete Encyclopedia Britannica from 1962. We had three matted white cats, cathair over everything, cat smell. All this, and an old-fashioned hi-fi in a fruitwood cabinet and a stack of records from the seventies higher than'Bowie's platform shoes.

 

And our clothes, Mother, how do you like our clothes? Polyester tops and lavender hiphuggers, yellow shirts with industrial zippers. Clothes floated around from closet to closet until we were bored, then we sold them and bought something else. You wouldn't recognize the girl I've become. My hair is growing out, I found a pair of Jackie O sunglasses and I wear them all the time.

 

My clothes are gone, the rich orphan clothes from Fred Segal and Barney's New York. Rena made me sell them. I'm sure you'd approve. We were unloading in the parking lot of Natalia's Nails one Saturday. I was arranging coffee mugs when I saw Rena pulling my clothes out of a black plastic garbage bag. My French blue tweed jacket, my Betsey Johnson halter dress, my Myrna Loy pajamas. Hanging them on hangers on the rolling rack.

 

I snatched them off the rack, stood there shaking. She had gone through my drawers, my closet. "These are mine."

 

Rena ignored me, shook out a rose-and-gray long skirt, pinned it to a hanger. "Why you need? Dressed best at Marshall High School? Maybe Tiny Thai, Trader Joe? Maybe Melrose Place call for you to be star?" She bent and took out an armful of my Fred Segal T-shirts, dumped them into my arms. "Here." She put a roll of tape and a marker on top. "You name price, you keep money, ladno?" She kept pulling my things out of plastic garbage bags, hanging them up. Dove-gray high-waisted pants with an Edwardian jacket, a charcoal velvet collar. White shirt with ruffled front. My Jessica McClintock dress with the white cutwork collar.

 

"Not that," I said. "Come on, have a heart."

 

Rena squinted at me, blowing a strand of her matte black hair out of her face, exasperated. "You get good price for that. What you saving it for, tea with little Tsarevich Alexei? They shot him 1918." She took the dress out of the bag, shook it and hung it back up. "Is fact."

 

I stood there, my arms full of the silky T-shirts. Egyptian cotton. Sour pliers squeezed my throat, juicing it like a lemon. She couldn't make me sell my clothes. That witch.

 

But I couldn't stop the thought that, really, what exactly was I saving them for? When would I ever need a two-hundred-dollar Jessica McClintock dress again? It was a roast-goose-with-chest-nuts dress, Puccini at the Music Center, gold rims on china. I looked at Rena in her shiny red blouse, unbuttoned to the third button, high heels, and jeans. Niki, setting up kitchen appliances, magenta hair and black polyester. Yvonne, round as a watermelon in her purple baby doll dress with a swirl pattern from the sixties, sadly arranging the baby furniture, posing a worn teddy bear in the high chair.

 

Why couldn't anybody ever hang on to anything? You never believed in sentiment, Mother, you saved only your own words, one picture of my grandmother and one of your 4-H cow. Only Claire could hold memory. It was the present that she couldn't sort out.