White Oleander

I walked past her and took the first of the Vicodins, scooping water from the faucet. I went down to my room without saying a word, closed the door, and lay on my bed. In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? I thought of the girl with the scar tattoos at the Crenshaw group home. She was right, it should bloody well show.

 

14

 

SEAMS TRACED my jaw and cheek, arms and legs. Everyone at Birmingham High still stared at me, but differently, not because I was a baby hooker, but because I was a freak. I liked it better this way. Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. Marvel wanted me to cover the weals with pancake, but I wouldn't do it. I was torn and stitched, I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.

 

Olivia was still gone, her Corvette covered and silent, sprinklers coming on at eight in the morning for seven minutes exactly, lamps lighting at six P.M. by remote control. Magazines piled up on her doorstep. I left them there. I hoped it would rain on them, her sixteen-dollar Vogue.

 

How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention. I promised myself that when she returned, I would stay away, I would learn to be alone, it was better than the disappointment when you found it out anyway. Loneliness was the human condition, I had to get used to it.

 

I thought about her as I sat under the bleachers with Conrad and his friends, getting stoned. Boys were easy, she was right about that. I knew what they wanted, could give it to them or not. What did she need me for, nothing. She could buy herself a Georg Jensen bangle, a Roblin vase.

 

AT CHRISTMASTIME, it was hot again, and smog lay thick over the Valley, like a vast headache over a defeated terrain, obscuring the mountains. Olivia was back, but I hadn't seen her, only her discernible patterns, deliveries and men. At Marvel's we went all out for the holidays. We dragged the green metal tree in from the garage, wound ropes of colored tinsel like bottle scrubbers around every door and window, put the plastic Frosty the Snowman on the blacktop, wired up the rooftop Santa-and-reindeer display.

 

Relatives came by and I wasn't introduced, I passed around the Chex mix, the nutty cheese ball. They took pictures in groups nobody asked me to be in. I drank eggnog from the grown-ups' punch bowl, fiery with bourbon, and went outside when I couldn't take it anymore.

 

I sat out in the playhouse in the dark, smoking a Tiparillo I'd found in a pack someone had left out. I could hear the Christmas tapes Marvel played round the clock, Joey Bishop Christmas, Neil Diamond at Bethlehem. At least Starr believed in Christ. We had gone to church, visited the fluffed straw in the manger, the baby Jesus, newborn King.

 

Of all the red-letter events of the American sentimental calendar, my mother hated Christmas the most. I remembered the year I came home with a paper angel I made in school, with golden sparkles on tissue paper wings, and she threw it straight into the trash. Didn't even wait until I went to bed. On Christmas Eve, she always read Yeats's "The Second Coming": What rough beast. .. slouches towards Bethlehem .. . We 'd drink mulled wine and cast runestones. She wouldn't come to hear me sing "O Come All Ye Faithful," "God Rest Ye Merry," with my class at Cheremoya Elementary. She wouldn't drive me.

 

But now that I'd shadowed Marvel in and out of malls, heard the wall-to-wall canned Christmas carols, experienced Marvel's blinking Christmas light earrings, I was starting to come around to my mother's point of view.

 

I sat in the dark in the playhouse and imagined I was with her now, and we were in Lapland, in a cottage of painted wood, where the winter was nine months long and we wore felt boots and drank reindeer milk and celebrated the solstice. We tied forks and metal pans to the trees to frighten evil spirits, drank fermented honey and took mushrooms we collected in the fall and had visions. The reindeer followed us when we tried to pee, craving the salt of our bodies.

 

In the house, Ed's brother George was dressed as Santa, pink drunk. I could hear his laughter over the other voices. Ed sat on the couch next to him, even drunker, but he was a quiet drunk. Justin got a road race set that cost Ed a week's pay, Caitlin had a plastic ride-in Barbie car. All my gifts came from the 99-cent store. A flashlight on a keychain. A sweatshirt with a teddy bear on it. I was wearing the sweatshirt. Marvel insisted. I smoked my Tiparillo and turned the flashlight on and off, just a heartbeat ahead of Rudolph's nose on Marvel's rooftop Santa display. We were having a secret conversation, Rudy and I.