White Oleander

We heard the crunch of Starr's Torino turning into the yard, car tires in the gravel, earlier than she normally came home. I was disappointed. Ray paid attention to me when she was gone, but when she came home I went back to being just one of the kids. What was she doing home so early anyway? She usually stayed out until eleven, drinking coffee with the addicts, or discussing Matthew 20 verse 13 with the old ladies at the church.

 

"Shit." Uncle Ray quickly pocketed his stash and small pipe just as the screen door swung open and the bug zapper zapped a big one at the same time.

 

Starr stopped for a second at the door, seeing us, and the boys sitting on the couch, mesmerized by the TV. Then it was like she was confused to find herself home so soon. She dropped her keys and picked them up. Uncle Ray watched her, her breasts practically coming out of the scooped neck of her dress.

 

Then her smile came on, and she kicked off her shoes and sat on the arm of his chair, kissed him. I could see her sticking her tongue in his ear.

 

"Was it canceled?" he asked.

 

It was my move, but he wasn't paying attention.

 

She draped herself over his shoulder, her breast squashed into his neck. "Sometimes I just get so tired of hearing them complain. Taking everybody else's darn inventory." She picked up my remaining white knight. "I love this," she said. "Why don't you ever teach me, Ray baby?"

 

"I did once," he said in a murmuring, tender voice, turning his head and kissing her breast, right in front of me. "Don't you remember? You got so mad you turned the board over." He plucked the knight from her hand and put it back down on the board. King 5.

 

"That was in my drinking days," she said.

 

'"Can white mate in one move?'" he repeated out of the Bobby Fischer book.

 

"One move?" she said, tickling his nose with a strand of her hair. "That doesn't sound too exciting."

 

White knight to king's bishop 6. I rode the delicately carved knight into place. "Mate."

 

But they were kissing and then she told the boys to go to bed when they were done and led Uncle Ray back to her bedroom.

 

ALL NIGHT LONG as I lay in my sleeping bag with its bucking broncos and lariats, I heard their headboard smacking the wall, their laughter. And I wondered whether real daughters were jealous of their mothers and fathers, if it made them sick to see their fathers kiss their mothers, squeeze their breasts. I squeezed my own small breast, hot from the sleeping bag, and imagined how it might feel to another hand, imagined having a body like Starr's. She was almost a different species with her narrow waist, her breasts round as grapefruit, her bottom round like that too. I imagined taking off my clothes and having a man like Uncle Ray look at me the way he looked at her.

 

God, it was so hot. I opened the zipper of the sleeping bag, lay on top of the hot flannel.

 

And she didn't even hide it, she wasn't that Christian. Always the shortest of shorts, the tightest of tops. You could see where her jeans crept up inside her labia. I wanted someone to want me that way, touch me the way Uncle Ray did her, like Barry and my mother.

 

I wished Carolee were there. She would make funny comments about the headboard or joke about Uncle Ray having a heart attack — he was almost fifty, for Christ's sake, lucky if he didn't die with his boots on. He met Starr at the club when she was still waitressing, and what kind of sleazy guys went to places like that anyway. But Carolee was never home at night anymore. She climbed out the window as soon as Starr said good night and went to meet her friends in the wash. She never invited me to come with her. It hurt my feelings, but I didn't like her friends much — girls with mean laughter and boys with shaved heads, awkward and boasting.

 

I stroked my hands under my nightgown and felt the different skins against my fingertips — the hair on my legs, the smoothness between my thighs, and the slippery, fragrant skin of my private parts. I felt the folds, the peak, and thought of rough hands with missing fingers tracing all the secret places. On the other side of the pressboard wall, the headboard banged.

 

MY MOTHER sent me a reading list that summer with four hundred books on it, Colette and Chinua Achebe and Mishima, Dostoyevsky and Anai's Nin, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. I imagined her lying in bed reciting their names like a rosary, running her tongue over them, round as beads. Sometimes Starr took us to the library. She waited in the car and gave us ten minutes to get our books or she'd leave without us. "I've got the only book I need, missy," she said.

 

Davey and I grabbed our books like Supermarket Sweep while Peter and Owen wistfully hovered near the library grandpa who read stories to kids. It had been better when Ray was home — he would drop us off, go have a few beers, and pick us up an hour or two later. Then the little boys would listen to the grandpa's stories as long as he held out.