White Oleander

I stepped up to the chain-link fence. "Excuse me," I said. "Olivia said you could leave the package with me." I smiled, trying to project a neighborly trustworthiness. I was the girl next door, after all. "She told me she was expecting it."

 

He brought the clipboard and I signed. The shipment was a small box marked Williams-Sonoma. I wondered what it could be, but my curiosity about what was in the box paled when compared to my determination to make friends with Olivia Johnstone, to someday enter the shuttered house.

 

THE DAY SHE returned, I made up a story about a project I had to finish with a classmate in the neighborhood. I wasn't a good liar. My mother always said I had no imagination. But I kept it short, and Marvel gave me an hour. "I need you home at five, I've got a party." She sold Mary Kay, and though she didn't make much money at it, it made her feel important.

 

I took the box out of my laundry bag, where I'd kept it hidden, and walked up Olivia's steps, onto her porch. I rang the doorbell. Almost immediately, her shape appeared behind the bubble-glass diamonds of her door, just like ours except the inserts were yellow instead of turquoise. I could feel her looking at me through the spyhole. I tried to look calm. Just a neighbor doing a favor. The door opened. Olivia Johnstone was wearing a long print halter dress, her hair in a low chignon, her bare cinnamon shoulders smooth as bedposts.

 

I held the box out to her. "The UPS man left this." One tooth on the comb, one tooth. She was perfect.

 

Olivia smiled and took the box. Her nails were short, white-tipped. She thanked me in an amused voice. I could tell she knew it was just a ploy, that I wanted to climb into her life. I tried to look past her but could only see a mirror and a small red-lacquered table.

 

Then she said the words I'd been dreaming of, hoping for. "Would you like to come in? I was just pouring some tea."

 

Was there anything as elegant as Olivia's house? In the living room, the walls were covered with a gold paper burnished to the quality of cork. She had a taupe velvet couch with a curved back and a leopard throw pillow, a tan leather armchair, and a carved daybed with a striped cotton cover. A wood table with smaller tables tucked underneath it held a dull green ceramic planter bearing a white spray of orchids like moths. Jazz music quickened the pace of the room, the kind the BMW man liked, complicated trumpet runs full of masculine yearning.

 

"What's this music?" I asked her.

 

"Miles Davis," she said. " 'Seven Steps to Heaven.'"

 

Seven steps, I thought, was that all it took?

 

Where we had sliding glass doors, Olivia had casements, open to the backyard. Instead of the air-conditioning, ceiling fans turned lazily. Upon closer examination, a big gilded birdcage held a fake parrot wearing a tiny sombrero, a cigar clamped in its beak. "That's Charlie," Olivia said. "Be careful, he bites." She smiled. She had a slight overbite. I could understand how a man would want to kiss her.

 

We sat on the velvet couch and drank iced tea sweetened with honey and mint. Now that I was here, I was at a loss to begin. I'd had so many questions, but I couldn't think of one. The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I'd never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother's contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.

 

"How long have you been over there?" Olivia asked, stroking down the condensation on her glass with a manicured forefinger. Her profile was slightly dish-shaped, her forehead high and round.

 

"Not long. A couple months." I nodded to the UPS package untouched on the coffee table. "What'd they send you?"

 

Olivia walked to a small secretary desk, opened it and found a letter opener. She slit the side of the box and lifted out two terracotta hearts. "They're breadwarmers. You heat them and put them in the basket to keep the rolls warm."

 

I was disappointed. I thought it would be something secret and sexual. Breadwarmers didn't go with my fantasy of Olivia Johnstone.

 

She sat closer to me this time, arm across the back of the couch. I liked it though it made me nervous. She seemed to know exactly the effect she had on me. I couldn't stop staring at her skin, which gleamed as if polished, exactly the color of the wallpaper, and I could smell Ma Griffe.

 

"Where did you go?" I asked.

 

"Back east. New York, Washington," she said. "A friend had business there."

 

"The BMW?"

 

She smiled, her overbite winking at me. She had an impish quality up close, not so perfect, but better. "No, not the BMW. He's very married. You don't see this man here."