White Oleander

In a moment, the foster mother appeared, chic and straight-backed, with a dramatic streak in her dark hair. She shook hands with us, and Ms. Cardoza's eyes shone as she took in Amelia's fitted suit and high heels. "jQue pasa con su cam?" the foster mother asked. What happened to my face. The social worker shrugged.

 

Amelia invited us to sit in the living room. It was beautiful, carved wood and claw-footed chairs, white damask and needlepoint. She served tea from a silver set, and butter cookies on flowered bone china. I put to work all I had learned at Olivia's, showing her how I could hold my cup and saucer and keep the spoon from falling. They spoke Spanish while I looked into the deodar cedar framing the bay window. It was quiet, no TV. I could hear the little clock on the mantel.

 

"It's beautiful, no? Not a dormitory," Amelia Ramos said with a smile. She sat on the edge of her chair, her legs crossed at the ankle. "This is my home, and I hope you will enjoy becoming part of our life."

 

Every once in a while a girl would pass by, cast an inscrutable glance through the doorway, as Amelia signed the papers and explained the rules in her lightly accented English. Each girl cooked and cleaned up one night a week. I would make my bed, shower every other day. The girls took turns doing the laundry and other chores. She was an interior decorator, she explained. She needed the girls to look after themselves. I nodded each time she paused, wondering why she took in girls at all. Maybe the house was too big for her, made her lonely.

 

OVER THE POLISHED dining table, the other girls spoke in Spanish to each other, laughing in lowered voices, and only stared at me. I was the White Girl. I had been here before, there was nothing you could do about it. Amelia introduced them. Kiki, Lina, Silvana. The girl with the long braid was Micaela, and the wiry, tough-looking girl with a crescent-moon scar on her forehead serving the meal was Nidia Diaz. We ate chiles rellenos, with a salad and corn bread.

 

"It's good," I said, hoping Nidia would stop glaring at me.

 

"I provide the recipes," Amelia said. "Some of these girls come to me, they cannot even open a can." She eyed Nidia and smiled.

 

Afterward, we took our plates into the kitchen, where Nidia was starting on the dishes. She took my plate and narrowed her eyes at me, but said nothing.

 

"Come in here, Astrid," Amelia called. She brought me into the sitting room, more feminine than the living room, with lace-edged tabletops and an old-fashioned couch. She had me sit in the armchair next to hers. She opened a large leather-bound album on the marble-topped coffee table. "This is my home. In Argentina. I had a splendid house there." There were photos of a pink house with a flagstone courtyard, a dinner party with candlelit tables set up around a rectangular pool. "I could seat two hundred for dinner," she said.

 

In the dark interior of the house were a heavy staircase, dark paintings of saints. In one photograph, Amelia in pearls sat in a thronelike chair before a painting of herself, she wore a ribbon diagonally across her ball gown, and flanking her chair were a man, also with ribbons, and a beautiful little boy. "This is my son, Cesar, and my husband."

 

I wondered what had happened in Argentina, if it was so great there, what was she doing here in Hollywood? What had happened to her husband, and her little boy? I was about to ask when she turned the page and pointed a lacquered nail at a picture of two girls in tan uniforms kneeling on a lawn. "My maids," she said, smiling nostalgically. "They were sitting around on their fat culos, so I made them pull weeds out of the lawn."

 

She gazed admiringly at the picture of the girls pulling weeds. It gave me the creeps. It was one thing to have somebody pull weeds, but why would anybody take a picture of it? I decided I was better off not knowing.

 

AT AMELIA'S, my room was large, two beds covered in white flower-sprinkled quilts, and a view into the deodar cedar. My roommate, Silvana, was an older girl, eyebrows plucked to a thin line, lips outlined in lip liner but not filled in. She lay on the bed farther from the door, filing her nails and watching me as I put my things away in the dresser, my boxes in the walk-in closet.

 

"Last place I slept was a laundry porch," I said. "This is nice."

 

"It's not what you think," Silvana said. "And don't think sucking up to that bitch is going to do you any good. You better side with us."

 

"She seems okay," I said.

 

Silvana laughed. "Stick around, muchacha."

 

In the morning I waited my turn to use the huge, white-tiled bathroom, then dressed and went downstairs. The girls were already leaving for school. "Did I miss breakfast?" I asked.

 

Silvana didn't answer, just shouldered her backpack, her eyebrows two indifferent arches. A horn honked, and she ran outside, got into a low-slung purple pickup truck and drove away.