White Oleander

At the height of the fires, 105 in the shade, I went back to school. The world burned and I started the tenth grade at Birmingham High. Boys blew me kisses in the halls, waved money at me. They heard I would do things. But I could hardly see them, they were just shapes in the smoke. Conrad, the chunky boy from the park, was in my typing class. He slipped me joints in the hall. He didn't ask me to suck him off now. He could see the flames in my hair, he knew my lips would scorch him. I liked the feeling. I felt like my mother in oleander time. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

 

I sent my mother pictures of Olivia, making gumbo, stirring the huge pot, dancing the samba with her pink palms and feet, driving with her Grace Kelly scarf tied around her head, how bright her skin looked against the white.

 

Dear Astrid,

 

I look at the fires that burn on the horizon and I only pray they come closer, immolate me. You have proved every bit as retarded as your school once claimed you were. You'll attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention, won't you? I wash my hands of you. Do not remind me that it has been two years since I last lived in the world. Do you think I would forget how long it has been? How many days hours minutes I have sat looking at the walls of this cell, listening to women with a vocabulary of twenty-five words or less? And you send pictures of your Mulholland rides, your great good jnend. Spare me your enthusiasms. Are you trying to drive me mad?

 

DialM.

 

IN OCTOBER the leaves began to redden and fall, the black plums and cutleaf maples, the sweet gums. I came home from school, planning what I would tell Olivia about a teacher who had asked if I would stay after school, he wanted to talk to me about my "home life situation," imagining how she would laugh when I imitated his hangdog look. I wanted to know which kind of man he was, when I saw something that sucked the winds out of my sails, they flapped and then hung empty in midocean. Olivia's car hidden under its canvas cover.

 

I'd just seen her, and she'd said nothing about leaving. How could she go and not tell me? Maybe it was an emergency, I thought, but she could have left a note for me somewhere, I'd have found it. I waited two days, three, but still the leaves piled up in her yard, floated in and lay on her car cover like Japanese paper screens.

 

I sat in my room at Marvel's, sullen and stoned, sketching the curtains. The stripes were the only thing that interested me now, that made sense. I didn't write to my mother, I couldn't stand for her to gloat over my loss. She wrote to me, and told me she was corresponding with a classics professor whose name had three initials. He was sending her original translations of some of the more obscene passages of Ovid and Aristophanes. She said she liked the contrast with Dan "The Man" Wylie's mash notes. She also had a lively exchange going with an editor of a small press in North Carolina, and Hana Gruen, a famous feminist in Cologne who had heard of her plight. She wrote me about her new cellmate, she had finally gotten rid of the last one, sent her off to the Special Care Unit babbling about witchcraft. Of course, none of it had anything to do with me, except teeth.

 

Dear Astrid,

 

I have  a  loose  tooth garnered in  a  contretemps  on Barneburg B. I cannot possibly lose a tooth here - the idea of a prison dentist is just too grotesque. I see a thin man palsied with early Parkinson 's, florid with alcoholism, rife with malpractice. Or a stout woman, a real pig slaughterer, administering procedures without anesthesia, relishing the victim's screams.