White Oleander

Astrid, take care of your teeth. No one will take you to a decent dentist now. If anything goes wrong, they'll let them rot in your head and you 'II have to pull the lot when you 're 24.1 floss every day, even in here, brush with salt, massage my gums. Try to get some vitamin C, if they won't buy it, eat oranges.

 

Mammy Yokum.

 

At least she couldn't vanish, I thought as I folded the letter back into the envelope. But she couldn't see me, either. I needed Olivia to come back and feed me.

 

THERE WAS a water ring around the moon, raven's eye in the mist. It was the first of November. I didn't tell anyone it was my birthday. To celebrate a birthday without Olivia was worse than having it forgotten. I felt like a painting of Icarus, falling into the sea, all you could see was his legs, and the peasant and the cow kept plowing.

 

I lay out in the backyard in the cold on the picnic table, brushed my cheek against my blue cashmere shoulder. There was already a seed hole in the front. I flaked the last of the joint into a beer can in the cold yard, then threw the can over the back fence, making the dog bark. I wished the BMW man were there, it was his time of night, and Olivia would be playing Oliver Nelson, "Stolen Moments." They would have a fire in the fireplace, they would dance slow, the way Olivia danced with me, he would whisper in her ear, the way she whispered in mine. Now I could dance, but she had left me without music.

 

I pulled my sweater close and stared up at the veiled moon. I heard laughter from the house, Marvel and Ed in their bedroom watching Leno. I'd just reddened her hair for the fall, Autumn Flame. I shivered under the wet sheets of fog on the picnic table, still smelling dye on my hands, thinking of the infant Achilles. But this was no intentional trial, and the only stars in the sky were lines of planes coming into Burbank from the west.

 

I thought how it was sunset right now in Hawaii, and hot curried noon in Bombay. That's where I should be. I would dye my hair black and wear sunglasses, I would forget all about Olivia, Marvel, my mother, all of it. Why couldn't she tell me. she was leaving? Did she think it didn't matter to me, didn't she know how entirely I depended on her? I felt hope slipping out from between my fingers like fish juice.

 

Was I the party jinx, a piece of space junk jettisoned from a capsule? No one to see me, no one to notice. I wished I was back with Ray, that he could hold me down with his eyes, bring me to earth again. It made me nauseous, to float, weightless and spinning in the moon rocks' white glare, the silent funeral of the cypresses. No more jacaranda bloom. It was a landscape Van Gogh could have painted.

 

I was tired of the moon staring at me so indifferently, tired of the lunar landscape with the white rocks. What I needed was more cover. I slipped through the cyclone fence, careful to close the gate without making noise. The unpicked oranges spread their resinous scent in the moist air, reminding me of her. And then I thought of my mother and her teeth, her vitamin C. My ridiculous life. I crunched through the leaves heaped on the unswept sidewalks, humming a sweet-sad Jobim tune. Back to sucking dew off the sails. I should have known how it would end.

 

I should know enough by now not to expect anything from life, instead of giving in to Stockholm syndrome.

 

A white dog emerged from the mist and I called him, glad for a little company. Another stray. But he started barking at me, so intently that his front legs lifted off the sidewalk. "Don't bark, it's okay." I moved toward him, to pet him, but another dog appeared, a brown one, then a third, a blue-eyed husky.

 

The brown one showed his teeth. The big husky barked. I didn't know if I should keep walking or back slowly away.

 

"Go home," I said. They were blocking my path. I yelled, hoping to scare them off, or that someone would hear, but the houses turned their blank garage faces to the street. "Go home!" I started to back away, but now the little one ran forward, lunged, snapped at my leg.

 

"Please, someone, come get your dogs!" I begged, but the sound of my voice caromed off the houses, shut down tight behind iron bars and block fences, security doors. And as the brown dog came at me, growling, I remembered what I'd managed to forget for just a few months — that it would always be like this. The brown dog sank its teeth through my jeans.