White Oleander

She had big plans for me, Marvel Turlock. Looking out after my welfare. I'd rather drink bleach. I rinsed off the dye, leaning over her like a rock. She showed me a page in a hairdo magazine, a setting diagram intricate as an electrical schematic. A style called The Cosmopolitan. Upswept on the sides, with curls in the back and curled bangs, like Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe. I thought of Michael, how he would shudder. He adored Stanwyck. I wondered how the Scottish play went. I wondered if he ever thought of me. You could not even imagine how it was, Michael.

 

The pink sticky setting gel added to the stench in the hot bathroom as I wrapped the strings of hair around the curlers. I was getting faint. As soon as I was done rolling, I wrapped the scarf over her pink curlers and finally was allowed to open the bathroom door. I felt like I hadn't breathed in an hour. Marvel went out to the family room. "Ed?" I heard her calling.

 

The TV was on, but Ed had slipped out to the Good Knight bar, where he drank beer and watched the game on pay-per-view.

 

"Damn him," she said without bitterness. She turned the station to a show about middle-aged sisters and settled onto the couch with a carton of ice cream.

 

Dear Astrid,

 

Don't tell me how you hate your new foster home. If they're not beating you, consider yourself lucky. Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you 'II ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

 

Moo.

 

IT HADN'T OCCURRED to me the worst was yet to come, until my prescription ran out. I had foolishly doubled my dose, and now I lay shipwrecked on a desolate shore littered with broken glass. I caught a cold from the air-conditioning, which worked too well in my small porch room. All I could think of was how alone I was. My loneliness tasted like pennies. I thought about dying. A boy in the hospital had told me the best way was an air bubble in the bloodstream. He had bone cancer and had stolen a syringe he kept in an Archie comic book. He said if it ever got too bad, he'd shoot up some air, and it'd be over in seconds. If it weren't for my mother's letters, I would have thought of something. I reread them until they were soft and divided along the creases.

 

When I couldn't sleep, I'd go out in the backyard, where the crickets sang duets and the blacktop was warm as an animal under my bare feet. The crushed white gravel flowerbeds glowed in the moonlight, their sterile length punctuated by white plastic dahlias stuck into the gravel at regular intervals. I once sent my mother a painting of the house set in its sea of blacktop and white gravel edges, and she sent me a poem about the infant Achilles, whose mother dipped him in black water to make him immortal. It didn't make me feel any better.

 

I sat on the redwood picnic table and listened to music coming through the closed shutters of the house next door. They were always closed, but a jazz saxophone worked its way out from between the wood slats, music personal as a touch. I ran my fingertips over the dark carbon blade of my mother's old knife, imagining opening my wrists. If you did it in the bathtub, they said, you didn't even feel it. I wouldn't have hesitated, except for my mother. But the scales were in precarious balance, everything on one side but my mother's letters, light as good night, a hand touching my hair.

 

I played with the knife, spread out my hand on top of the slide, and jabbed the point past my fingers. Johnny johnny johnny whoops! Johnny johnny whoops! Johnny johnny johnny johnny. I liked it just as well when it stabbed me.

 

Dear Astrid,