White Oleander

I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Just make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

 

Mother.

 

WITHOUT PERCODAN, I began to see why mothers abandoned their children, left them in supermarkets and at playgrounds. I had never imagined the whining, the constancy of those tiny demands, the endless watch. I told Marvel I had papers and reports to write, and buried myself in after-school library shelves, working my way through the book lists that came in my mother's letters, sharing table space with old men reading newspapers on sticks and Catholic school girls hiding teen magazines inside their history books.

 

I read everything — Colette, Françoise Sagan, Anais Nin's Spy in the House of Love, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I read The Moon and Sixpence, about Gauguin, and the Chekhov short stories Michael had recommended. They didn't have Miller but there was Kerouac. I read Lolita, but the man was nothing like Ray. I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.

 

One day a title jumped out at me from a shelf of adventure books. I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages, ignoring the dark glances of the girls in their white shirts and plaid jumpers, and fell into it as into a pool during a dry season.

 

The name of the book was The Art of Survival.

 

Every religion needs its bible, and I had found mine, not a moment too soon. I read it in eighteen hours, and then started over again. I learned how to stay alive for long weeks on the open sea when my white ocean liner went down. When shipwrecked, you catch fish, press their juices to drink. You sponge up morning dew off your life raft's rubberized deck. Adrift on a sailboat, you catch rainwater on the canvas. But if the sails were dirty, the book pointed out, the decks crusted with salt, what water you caught would be worthless. You had to keep the decks clean, the sails rinsed, you had to be ready.

 

I looked at my life and saw quite clearly that I was not surviving it in the turquoise house. I was letting my sails crust up with salt. I had to stop playing johnny johnny and concentrate on preparing for rain, preparing for rescue. I decided I would take daily walks, stop overdoing the limp, retire my cane. I would pull myself together.

 

I SAT ON THE BUS on the way home from school, head aching from the shrill laughter of the other kids, and recounted the grim means to survive disaster at sea. You make fishhooks from any kind of bent metal, form line from the thread in your clothes, bait the hook with bits of fish or dead fellow passengers, even a strip of your own flesh if you have to. I forced myself to imagine it, taking the sharp edge of a C ration and piercing my thigh. It hurt so much I could hardly stay conscious, but I knew I had to finish the job, there was no point passing out, it would just heal and I'd have to do it all over again. So I kept on until I had the yellow worm in my hand, bloodbacked and warm. Hooked it onto the sharpened shred from the can, threw it into the sea on my handmade thread.

 

Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair. A man from Japan was adrift four days in a boat when he panicked and hung himself. He was found twenty minutes later. A sailor from Soochow floated 116 days on a life raft before he was found. You never knew when rescue might come.

 

And if my life had come to this — shame and long bus rides and the stink of diesel-soaked air, trying not to get beat up at Madison Junior High, Justin's sweater and Caitlin's red rash — people had gone through far worse and survived. Despair was the killer. I had to prepare, hold hope between my palms like the flame of the last match in a long Arctic night.