White Oleander

I could smell his sweat, sharp and strong, a man's smell, and it was hot in the room with the new windows, heady with the fragrance of raw wood. I put my hands around his waist, pressed my face into the scratchy wool between his shoulder blades, something I'd wanted to do since he held me that first Sunday when I'd ditched church and stayed behind in the trailer. I closed my eyes and breathed in his scent, dope and sweat and new wood. He didn't move, just gave a shuddering sigh.

 

"You're a kid," he said.

 

"I'm a fish swimming by, Ray," I whispered into his neck. "Catch me if you want me."

 

For a moment he stood still as a suspect, his hands open on the window frame. Then he caught my hands, turned them over and kissed the palms, pressed them to his face. And I was the one who was trembling, it was me and my marguerite.

 

He turned and held me. It was precisely how I had wanted to be held, all my life — by strong arms and a broad, wool-shirted chest smelling of tobacco and pot. I threw my head back and it was my first kiss, I opened my mouth for him to taste me, my lips, my tongue. I couldn't stop shaking unless he held me very tight.

 

He pushed me away then, gently. "Look, maybe we should go back. It isn't right."

 

I didn't care what was right anymore. I had a condom from Carolee's drawer in my pocket, and the man I'd always wanted for once in a place we could be alone.

 

I took off my plaid shirt, tossed it onto the floor. I took off my T-shirt. I took off my bra and let him see me, small and very pale, not Starr, but me, all I had. I untied my hiking boots, kicked them off. I unbuttoned my jeans and let them fall.

 

Ray looked sad right then, like someone was dying, his back pressed against the smudged window. "I never wanted this to happen," he said.

 

"You're a liar, Ray," I said.

 

Then he was kneeling in front of me, his arms around my hips, kissing my belly, my thighs, his hands on my bare bottom, fingers in the silky wetness between my legs, tasting me there. My smell on his mouth as I knelt down with him, ran my hands over his body, opened his clothes, felt for him, hard, larger than I'd thought it would be. And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

 

8

 

ALL DAY AT SCHOOL, and in the Ray-less afternoons down the wash, or at dinner with Starr and the kids, or when we watched TV at night, Ray was my only thought, my singular obsession. How soft his skin was, softer than you'd think a man's skin could be, and the thickness of his arms, the sinews tracing along his forearms like tree roots, and the sad way he looked at me when my clothes were gone.

 

I sketched the way he looked nude, gazing out the window after we'd made love, or lying on the pile of carpet padding he'd dragged into the corner of the new bedroom. On our afternoons we'd lie on those pads, our legs entwined, smooth over hairy, his fingers lightly covering my breast and playing with my nipple, making it stand up like a pencil eraser. I hid the drawings in the box with my mother's journals, a place Starr would never think to look. I knew I should throw them out, but I couldn't bear to.

 

"Why are you with Starr?" I asked him one afternoon, tracing the white scar under his ribs where a Vietcong bullet had left its mark.

 

He ran his fingertips over my ribs so the goose bumps came up. "She's the only woman who ever let me just be myself," he said.

 

"I would," I said, doing the same on his balls with the back of my fingernails, making him jump. "Is she good in bed, is that it?"

 

"That's personal," he said. He covered my hand with his and held it to his groin. I felt him growing hard again. "I don't talk about one woman to another. That's plain bad manners."

 

He ran his finger between my legs, into the wet like silk, then put his finger in his mouth. I never imagined it would be like this, to be desired. Everything was possible. He pulled me on top of him and I rode him like a horse in the surf, my forehead against his chest, riding through a spray of sparks. If my mother were free, would this be one of her lovers, filling me up with his stars? And would my mother watch me the way Starr did, realizing I was no longer transparent as an encyclopedia overlay?

 

No. If she were free, I wouldn't be here. She would never have allowed me to have this. She kept everything good for herself.

 

"I love you, Ray," I said.

 

"Shhh," he said, holding my hips. His eyelids fluttered. "Don't say anything."

 

So I just rode, the ocean spray tingling all over me, the tide rising, filled with starfish and phosphorescence, into the dawn.