White Oleander

Thunder rolled, but the clouds were too thick to see lightning. The glider squeaked as I rocked myself, thinking of my father, Klaus Anders, no middle name. I'd found a Polaroid picture of him stuck in a book of my mother's, Windward Avenue. They were sitting together in a beachside cafe with a bunch of other people who looked like they'd all just come in off the beach — tanned, long-haired people wearing beads, the table covered with beer bottles. Klaus had his arm across the back of her chair, careless and proprietary. They looked like they were sitting in a special patch of sunlight, an aura of beauty around them. They could have been brother and sister. A leonine blond with sensual lips, he smiled all the way and his eyes turned up at the corners. Neither my mother nor I smiled like that.

 

The picture and the birth certificate were all I had of him, that and the question mark in my genetic code, all that I didn't know about myself. "Mostly I think about what he would think of me."

 

We looked out at the sepia pepper tree, the mud in the yard thick as memory. Ray turned so he could lean his back flat against the post, lifted his hands over his head. His shirt crawled up, I could see his hairy stomach. "He probably thinks you're still two. That's how I think of Seth. When the boys are down by the river, I imagine he's down there with them. I have to remind myself he's too big for frogs now."

 

Klaus thought of me as two. My hair like white feathers, my diaper full of sand. He never imagined that I was grown. I could walk right past him, he might even look at me the way Ray did, and never know it was his own daughter. I shivered, pulled the sleeves of my sweater over my hands.

 

"Have you ever thought to call him, find him?" I asked.

 

Ray shook his head. "I'm sure he hates my guts. I know his mother fed him all kinds of crap about me."

 

"I bet he misses you, though," I said. "I miss Klaus and I never even met him. He was an artist too. A painter. I imagine he'd be proud of me."

 

"He would be," Ray said. "Maybe someday you'll meet him."

 

"I think about that sometimes. That when I'm an artist, he'll read about me in the paper, and see how I turned out. When I see a middle-aged blond man sometimes, I want to call out, Klaus! And see if he turns his head." I made the glider creak as I pushed myself slowly.

 

My mother once told me she chose him because he looked like her, so it was as if she were having her own child. But there was a different story in the red Tibetan notebook with the orange binding dated Venice Beach, 1972.

 

July 12. Ran into K. at Small World this afternoon. Saw him before he saw me. Thrill at the sight of him, the slight slouch of broad shoulders, paint in his hair. That threadbare shirt, so ancient it is more an idea than a shirt, I wanted him to discover me the same way, so I turned away, browsed an Illuminati chapbook. Knowing how I looked against the light through the window, my hair on fire, my dress barely there. Waiting to stop his heart.

 

I looked at Ray, gazing out into the rain — and I knew how she felt. I loved his smoke, his smell, his sad hazel eyes. I couldn't have him as a father, but at least we could talk like this out on the porch. He relit his pipe, toked, coughed.

 

"You might be disappointed," he said. "He might be a jerk. Most guys are jerks."

 

I rocked myself, knowing it wasn't true. "You're not."

 

"Ask my ex."

 

"What you doing out there?" Starr opened the screen door, slammed it behind her. She was wearing a sweater she knitted herself, fuzzy and yellow as a chick. "Is this a party anybody can come to?"

 

"I'm going to blast that fucking TV set," Ray said evenly.

 

She pulled at the brown tassels of spider plants over her head, plucking the dried leaves and throwing them off the porch, her breasts pushing out of the V neck. "Look at you, smoking in front of the kids. You always were a bad influence." But she smiled when she said it, soft and flirting. "Do me a favor, Ray baby? I'm out of cigs, could you run down to the store and get me a carton?" She flashed him her flat wide smile.

 

"I need some beer anyway," he said. "You want to come, Astrid?"

 

As if her smile couldn't stretch anymore, it sprang back to the center, then she stretched it again. "You can go yourself, can't you, big boy? Astrid needs to help me for a minute." Pluck, pluck, tearing the baby spiders off with the dead leaves.

 

Ray got his jacket and ducked out under the waterfall of water coming off the corrugated steel porch roof, the jacket pulled up to cover his head.

 

"You and me need to talk, missy," Starr said to me as Ray closed the cab door to the truck and started the motor.

 

Reluctantly, I followed her back into the house, into her bedroom. Starr never talked to the kids. Her room was dark and held the smell of unwashed grown-ups, dense and loamy, a woman and a man. The bed was unmade. A kid's room never smelled like that, no matter how many were sleeping there. I wanted to open a window.