White Oleander

Sometimes she'd make up a pitcher of rum punch and play Brazilian music on the stereo — Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, Jobim. Astrud Gilberto sang interestingly flat, like she was half asleep in a hammock, singing to a child. We sat in the living room on the striped cotton daybed, the fans turning slowly overhead, eating mangos with ham and looking at Olivia's pictures of Brazil. She pronounced the names of the cities in their hushing Portuguese: Rio de Janeiro, Itaparica, Recife, Ouro Preto, Salvador. Pictures of colonial cities painted popsicle colors, black women in white dresses sending candles out to sea. Pictures of Olivia at Carnival, wearing a dress of silver tinsel slit up to the armpits, her hair feathery and wild. She held a white man's hand, he was tanned and had flat blue eyes.

 

"You'd love Carnival," she said. "You dance for three days straight."

 

"I hate crowds," I said, drunk on the rum punch she'd made, sweet and heavy as a brick. "I'm always afraid I'm going to be crushed."

 

"It happens," Olivia said, nodding to the samba music. "You better not fall down at Carnival."

 

After a while she got up to dance. I lay down and watched her in her head scarf and wrapped skirt, moving in time to the complex rhythms of the samba. I imagined her dressed only in tinsel and sweat, dancing with the throbbing crowd under the southern sun, the smells of rum and mangos and Ma Griffe. The music moved along her body in waves, her feet shuffling in small, hesitation steps, arms swaying like palms atop her raised elbows. Hundreds of thousands of people of every hue pulsing under the sun.

 

"Dance with me," she said.

 

"Can't dance," I said. "I'm a white girl."

 

"Don't say can't." She grinned, her hips shifting in subtle circles like a stream over rocks. She grabbed my hand and pulled me off the daybed.

 

I stood awkwardly before her, tried to copy her movements, but even slightly inebriated, I was aware of how ridiculous I was, how out of time with the music, how out of step. Her body moved in ten directions at once, all harmonized, supple as ribbon. She laughed, then covered her smile with her hand. "Feel the music, Astrid. Don't look at me. Close your eyes and be inside it."

 

I closed my eyes, and felt her hands on my hips, moving me. Each hip turned independently of the other. She let go, and I tried to keep the rhythm, letting my hips swing in big arcs to the complex beat. I lifted my arms and let the waves of motion travel along the length of me. I closed my eyes and imagined us in Brazil, on a beach with a palm-covered bar, dancing dangerously with men we would never see again.

 

"Oh Astrid, you've got to come to Carnival," Olivia said. "We'll tell your keeper your class is taking a trip to see the Liberty Bell, and steal you away. For three days in a row you don't sleep, you don't eat, you just dance. I promise, you'll never move like a white girl after Carnival."

 

When the songs turned quiet, she put her arm around my waist, danced with me close. Her perfume still smelled fresh, despite the heat and the sweat, like pine trees. I was as tall as Olivia now, and her holding me made me awkward, I was stepping on her feet.

 

"I'm the man," she said. "All you have to do is follow."

 

I could feel her leading me, her hand open on the small of my back, always dry, even in the heat.

 

"You're growing up so fast," she said softly in my ear as we danced like waves on Copacabana. "I'm so glad I found you now. In a year or two, it would have been different."

 

I imagined she was a man, dancing with me, whispering. "Different how?"

 

"Everything would have been decided," she said. "Now you're so open. You could go any number of ways." She danced me in slow circles, teaching my feet how to move, my hips to trace the sign of infinity.

 

THE WINDS of September fanned harvests of fire on the dry hills of Altadena, Malibu, San Fernando, feeding on chaparral and tract homes. The smell of the smoke always brought me back to my mother, to a rooftop under an untrustworthy moon. How beautiful she had been, how perfectly unhinged. It was my second season of fire without her. Oleander time. I read that the Jews celebrated their New Year now, and decided I too would calculate time from this season.

 

Coyotes drifted down into the city at night, driven by thirst. I saw them walking down the center line on Van Nuys Boulevard. The smoke and ash filled the basin like a gray bath. Ashes filtered into my dreams, I was the ash girl, born to these Santa Anas, born to char and aftermath.