White Oleander

But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women on barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what's in it for me? Not the women watching TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.

 

They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.

 

Yvonne was sitting up, holding her breath, eyes bulging out. It was the thing she should not do.

 

"Breathe," I said in her ear. "Please, Yvonne, try."

 

She tried to breathe, a couple of shallow inhalations, but it hurt too much. She flopped back down on the narrow bed, too tired to go on. All she could do was grip my hand and cry. And I thought of the way the baby was linked to her, as she was linked to her mother, and her mother, all the way back, inside and inside, knit into a chain of disaster that brought her to this bed, this day. And not only her. I wondered what my own inheritance was going to be.

 

"I wish I was dead," Yvonne said into the pillowcase with the flowers I'd brought from home.

 

THE BABY CAME four hours later. A girl, born 5:32 P.M. A Gemini. We went home the next day. Rena picked us up at the hospital's front loop. She refused to come in. We stopped at the observation window in Neonatal, but the baby was already gone. Rena wouldn't let Yvonne take the baby home even for a few weeks.

 

"Better just walk away," Rena had said. "You get attach, a loser game."

 

She was right, I thought, as I pushed Yvonne's wheelchair to the exit, though her motives cared nothing for Yvonne, she just didn't want to become a foster grandma. She never had any kids, never wanted any. What's in it for me? "Babies make me sick," she was always telling Yvonne. "Eat, shit, cry. You think you keep, think again."

 

In the hospital driveway, Niki got out of the van, gave Yvonne a bunch of balloons, hugged her. We helped her into the back. She was still tired, she could barely walk. There was a pinched nerve in her left leg, and stitches where the doctor cut her. She smelled sour, like old blood. She looked like she just got hit by a car. Rena didn't even look at her.

 

I sat with her in the back on the ripped-out carseat. Yvonne leaned against me, her head on my shoulder. "Sing 'Michelle,'" she whispered.

 

I held her hand, pressed my other hand against her forehead the way she liked, and sang softly in my tuneless voice as we bounced and clattered along, heading for home. "Michelle, ma belle." The song seemed to soothe her. She rested her head against my shoulder and quietly sucked her thumb.

 

WEEKS WENT BY, and there was no call from Susan to let me know when I would see my mother. Now that she'd won my complicity, I heard no more about it. Not in May, not in June. I sat by the river's edge, watching the white egrets and brown wading birds fish in the current. It was my graduation day over at Marshall High School, but I saw no reason to attend. Even if she were out, my mother would never have come. Ceremonies not of her own invention didn't interest her. I would rather just let it pass quietly, like a middle-aged woman's birthday.

 

4The truth was, I was scared, so scared I was afraid to even mention it, like the morning I did the acid. It was a fear that could open its mouth and swallow me whole, like a hammerhead shark in five feet of water. I didn't know what happened now. I wasn't headed to Yale or art school, I was going nowhere. I was painting license plate frames, I was sleeping with a thief, he said I could move in with him anytime. Maybe I'd learn to pick locks, hijack a truck. Why should my mother have a monopoly on crime?

 

I sat by the water, watching it flow, and the egrets preen, their button eyes, thinking about what Mr. Delgado had said in our last class. He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.