White Oleander

You were always frightened of the wrong thing. I found the fact that the doves returned, though the chicken wire had long since given way to ivy, afar more troubling prospect.

 

You want to write me off? Try. Just realise when you 're cutting off the plank upon which you stand, which end of it is nailed to the ship.

 

I will survive, but will you? I have a following — I call them my children. Young pierced artists avid with admiration, they make their pilgrimage here from Fontana and Long Beach, Sonoma and San Bernardino, they come from as far away as Vancouver, B.C. And if I can say so, they are much more to my taste than trembling actresses with two-carat wedding bands. They claim a network of renegade feminists, lesbians, practitioners of Wicca and performance artists up and down the West Coast, a sort of Underground Goddess Train. They're ready to help me any way that they can; they are willing to forgive me anything. Why aren't you?

 

Your loving mother,

 

Masturbating Rot Crow

 

P.S. I have a surprise for you. I've just met with my new attorney, Susan D. Valeris. Recognise the name? Attorney for the feminine damned? The one in the black curls, red lips like those chattering windup teeth? She's come to exploit my martyrdom. I don't begrudge her. There's more than enough for everyone.

 

I stood in the doorway, watching the clouds rise from the mountains. They would not let her out. She killed a man, he was only thirty-two. Why should it matter that she was a poet, a jail-house Plath? A man was dead because of her. He wasn't perfect, he was selfish, a flawed person, so what. She would do it again, next time with even less reason. Look at what she did to Claire. I could not believe any attorney would consider representing her.

 

No, she was making this up. Trying to snare me, trip me up, stuff me back in her sack. It wasn't going to work, not anymore. I had freed myself from her strange womb, I would not be lured back. Let her wrap her new children in fantasy, conspire with them under the ficuses in the visitors yard. I knew exactly what there was to be frightened about. They had no idea there were snakes in the ivy.

 

IN FOURTH-PERIOD American history at Marshall High School, we were studying the Civil War. In the overcrowded classroom, students sat on windowsills and the bookcases in the back. The heat in the classroom wasn't working and Mr. Delgado wore a thick green sweater someone knitted for him. He wrote on the board, backhand, the word Gettysburg, as I tried to capture the rough weave of the sweater and his awkward stance on my lined notebook paper. Then I turned to my history book, open on the desk, with its photograph of the great battlefield.

 

I'd examined it at home under a magnifying glass. You couldn't see it without the glass, but the bodies in the photograph had no shoes, no guns, no uniforms. They lay on the short grass in their socks and their white eyes gazed at the clouded-over sky and you couldn't tell which side they were on. The landscape ended behind a row of trees in the distance like a stage. The war had moved on, there was nothing left but the dead.

 

In three days of battle, 150,000 men fought at Gettysburg. There were fifty thousand casualties. I struggled with the enormity of that. One in three dead, wounded, or missing. Like a giant hole ripped in the fabric of existence. Claire died, Barry died, but seven thousand died at Gettysburg. How could God watch them pass without weeping? How could he have allowed the sun to rise on Gettysburg?