White Oleander

I was creating my personal museum. They were all here: Claire and Olivia, my mother and Starr, Yvonne and Niki and Rena, Amelia Ramos, Marvel. The Musee de Astrid Magnussen. I'd had to leave everything behind at Rena's when I went to New York to find Paul, all my boxes and souvenirs, everything but my mother's four books and the jewelry I'd acquired, the aquamarine ring, the amethyst, and the stolen necklace, plus eight hundred dollars in cash. Before I left, Sergei slipped me the name of a Russian fence in Brighton Beach, Ivan Ivanov, who would help me transfer my stash into cash. "He don't speak much of English, but he give you good price." The phoenix must burn to emerge, I kept thinking as I took a bus across the country with nothing but the address of a comic book store on St. Marks Place to steer by.

 

But now I'd assembled it again, my museum. There, against the wall, in this cold northern city, I'd re-created my life.

 

Here was Rena, a brown leather case lined in green figured velvet holding a spread-eagled wax nude with a white cat head made in white bunny fur. The lid was lined with doll furniture and decorated in fanned phony greenbacks. Niki was an American Tourister glazed in magenta enamel, metal-flaked like a drumkit. Inside, it had knackwursts made from condoms stuffed with foam rubber. For Yvonne, I'd found a child's suitcase and covered it in pastel blanket fuzz. Inside stretched guitar wire, and little baby dolls were tangled there. I was looking for a music box, so that when you opened the lid, it would play "Michelle."

 

Marvel's was turquoise, it opened to reveal white gravel stuck to the bottom, and a battery-powered flashlight signaling SOS in Morse code. One of our art student friends helped me wire it. Girl toy soldiers — free giveaways from an American movie — crawled among the moon rocks with their AK-47s. I'd painted tiny swastikas on their arms. There was a little TV screen in the lid, where a decoupaged Miss America beamed, her face dotted with clear nailpolish tears.

 

Starr and Ray shared a plastic cloth suitcase with cracked leather bindings, bleached tan with a faded plaid. When you propped it open, it released a heady scent of raw wood and Obsession. Against bright op-art jersey I'd crisscrossed strips of a Pendleton plaid. Inside the lid, a prom-pink satin rose uncoiled, richly vaginal, under a glow-in-the-dark Jesus. The edges were furred with wood shavings from a local cabinetmaker, poodle curly. The base held a tiny reliquary chest, filled with chunks of scrap lead. You couldn't get bullets in Europe, I'd had to make do. In a glass terrarium on the bottom, a snake crawled over yellow sand, broken glass, and a half-buried pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

 

Like Berlin, I was layered with guilt and destruction. I had caused grief as well as suffering it. I could never honestly point a finger without it turning around in mid-accusation.

 

Olivia Johnstone was a hatbox covered in green crocodile plastic that released Ma Griffe when you opened it. Dagmar, the perfume counter girl at the Wertheim Department Store, let,me wet cotton balls with the sample perfumes, which I stashed in film canisters in my pockets. Inside, I'd woven a nest of taupe and black stockings, which surrounded a Carnival mask of black feathers, and a beaker that held the white ocean. On its surface floated a gumball ring, also white.

 

They were all here. A lunchbox decoupaged in flea market postcards of fin de siecle aristocracy was the Amelia Ramos. Inside, antique forks thrust up through a mat of black wig hair striped in white. The forks looked like hands reaching out, begging.

 

And Claire. I built her memorial from a train case from the thirties, white leather with red patent trim. It cost me 5oDM, but it opened to watermarked mauve moire silk, like the grain in wood, like a funeral in a box. Inside the lid, I'd glued pieces of white-painted record vinyl to resemble the wings of butterflies. Each tiny cache drawer had a secret inside. A reticulated, miniature fish. A drawer full of pills. A strand of pearls. A fern fiddle. A sprig of rosemary. A picture of Audrey Hepburn in Two for the Road.  And  in  one  drawer,  twenty-seven  names  for  tears. Heartdew. Griefhoney. Sadwater. Die Trdnen. Eau de douleur. Los rios del corazon. It was the one Oskar Schein kept wanting to buy. All my mothers. Like guests at a fairy-tale christening, they had bestowed their gifts on me. They were mine now. Olivia's generosity, her knowledge of men. Claire's tenderness and faith. If not for Marvel, how would I have penetrated the mysteries of the American family? If not for Niki, when might I have learned to laugh? And Yvonne, mi hermosa, you gave me the real mother, the blood mother, that wasn't behind wire, but somewhere inside. Rena stole my pride but gave me back something more, taught me to salvage, glean from the wreckage what could be remade and resold.