White Oleander

STARR'S EDGINESS spilled over, mostly at the kids. She was accusing her daughter of all the things she wanted to accuse me of. Carolee barely ever came home, she went dirt hiking with Derrick in the afternoon, the drone of the bikes like a nagging doubt. When I wasn't with Ray, I stayed at school or went to the library, or hunted frogs with the boys as the Big Tujunga's winter flow slowly dried up into rivulets and muddy pools. The frogs looked like the mud and you had to be very still to see them. Mostly I just sat on a rock in the sun and painted.

 

But one day I came home from the wash to find Starr curled up on the porch swing, her hair in hot rollers, wearing a blue blouse tied up tight under her breasts and tiny cutoffs that bunched up at her crotch. She was playing with the kittens the cat had had under the house that spring, fishing for them with ribbons Davey had tied to a stick. She was laughing and talking to them, it wasn't like her. She usually called them rats with fur.

 

"Well, the artiste. Come talk to me, missy, I'm so bored I'm talking to cats."

 

She never wanted to talk to me, and there was something about her mouth that seemed slower than the words she was saying. She gave me the stick and took a cigarette out of the Benson and Hedges pack. She stuck the wrong end in her mouth, and I watched to see if she would light it. She caught it just in time. "Don't know which end is up," she joked, and took a sip from her coffee cup. I dragged the ribbons along the carpet, luring a little gray-and-white furball out from beneath the swing. It hopped, pounced, ran off.

 

"So talk to me," she said, taking an exaggerated drag from her cigarette and blowing it out in a long stream. She bared her lovely throat as she arched back her neck, her head huge with hot curlers like a dandelion puff. "We used to talk all the time. Everybody's so darn busy, that's what's wrong with life. You seen Carolee?"

 

Up the road, we could both see the plumes of dust from the dirt bikes rising into the thin blue sky. I wanted to be dust, smoke, the wind, sun glimmering over the chaparral, anywhere but sitting here with the woman whose man I was stealing.

 

"Carolee's trouble," Starr said, holding out her foot to look at the silvery pedicure. "You stay away from her. I'm going to have to talk to that girl, stop the downward spiral. Needs a big dose of the Word." She pulled out a curler, looked cross-eyed at the ringlet over her forehead, started pulling out the other ones, dropping them into her lap. "You're the good girl. I'm making my amends to you. A-mend. Where's Carolee, you seen her?" she asked again.

 

"I think she's with Derrick," I said, wiggling the ribbon end near the glider where the kitten was hiding.

 

She leaned her head forward to get the curlers at the back. "Of all the white trash. His mama's so dumb she puts the TV dinner in the oven with the box still on." She laughed and dropped the curler, and the kitten that had just come out dashed back underneath the glider.

 

That's when I realized Starr was drunk. She'd been sober eighteen months, kept the AA chips on her key ring, red, yellow, blue, purple. It was such a big deal to her, too. I never quite understood it. Ray drank. My mother drank. Michael drank from the moment he finished reading his Books on Tape at noon until he passed out at midnight. It didn't seem to hurt him any. If anything, Starr looked happier now. I wondered why she'd tried so hard to be some kind of saint, when it wasn't really her nature. What was the big deal?

 

"He's crazy about me, you know," she said. "That Ray. There's a man that needs a real woman." She rolled her hips in their tight cutoffs as if she were sitting on him right now. "His wife wouldn't do shit for him." She took another hit on her cigarette, lowering her mascaraed eyelashes, remembering. "That man was starving for a piece. I saw her once, you know. The wife." She drank from her coffee cup, and now I could smell it. "Sailor's delight. Sensible shoes, you know what I'm saying. Wouldn't give head or anything. He'd come to the Trop and just sit and watch us girls with those sad eyes, like a starving man in a supermarket." She squared her shoulders, rolled them forward, so I'd get an idea of what Ray had been watching, the cross caught in her cleavage, Jesus drowning in flesh. She laughed, dropped cigarette ash on the white-patched kitten. "I just had to fall in love with him."

 

It made me queasy thinking of Ray in some strip club, goggling at the girls with their enormous breasts. He just didn't know where else to go. I picked up the stick again, rustled the ribbons, trying to get the kitten interested so she wouldn't see my red face.

 

"I must have been crazy to think you and him ... ," she said into her coffee cup, drained it and put it on the mosaic-topped table with a thud. "I mean, look at you, you're just a baby. You didn't even wear a bra until I got you that one."