White Oleander

During the meal Barry told us of his travels in the Orient, where we had never been. The time he ordered magic mushrooms off the menu at a beachside shack in Bali and ended up wandering the turquoise shore hallucinating Paradise. His trip to the temples of Angkor Wat in the Cambodian jungle accompanied by Thai opium smugglers. His week spent in the floating brothels of Bangkok. He had forgotten me entirely, was too absorbed in hypnotizing my mother. His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebes, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.

 

On the way home, she let him touch her waist as she got into the car.

 

BARRY ASKED us to dinner at his house, said he'd like to cook some Indonesian dishes he'd learned there. I waited until afternoon to tell her I wasn't feeling well, that she should go without me. I hungered for Barry, I thought he might be the one, someone who could feed us and hold us and make us real.

 

She spent an hour trying on clothes, white Indian pajamas, the blue gauze dress, the pineapples and hula girls. I'd never seen her so indecisive.

 

"The blue," I said. It had a low neck and the blue was exactly the color of her eyes. No one could resist her in her blue dress.

 

She chose the Indian pajamas, which covered every inch of her golden skin. "I'll be home early," she said.

 

I lay on her bed after she was gone and imagined them together, their deep voices a duet in the dusk over the rijsttafel. I hadn't had any since we left Amsterdam, where we lived when I was seven; the smell of it used to permeate our neighborhood there. My mother always said we'd go to Bali. I imagined us in a house with an extravagantly peaked roof, overlooking green rice terraces and miraculously clear seas, where we’d wake to chimes and the baaing of goats.

 

After a while I made myself a cheese and sweet pickle sandwich and went next door to Michael's. He was halfway through a bottle of red wine from Trader Joe's — "poverty chic" he called it, because it had a cork — and he was crying, watching a Lana Turner movie. I didn't like Lana Turner and I couldn't stand looking at the dying tomatoes, so I read Chekhov until Michael passed out, then went downstairs and swam in the pool warm as tears. I floated on my back and looked up at the stars, the Goat, the Swan, and hoped my mother was falling in love.

 

All that weekend, she didn't say a thing about her date with Barry, but she wrote poems and crumpled them up, threw them at the wastebasket.

 

IN THE ART ROOM, Kit proofread over my mother's shoulder, while I sat at my table in the corner, making a collage about Chekhov, the lady with the little dog, cutting out figures from discarded photographs. Marlene answered the phone, covered the receiver with her hand.

 

"It's Barry Kolker."

 

Kit's head jerked up at the sound of the name, a marionette in the hands of a clumsy puppeteer. "I'll take it in my office."

 

"It's for Ingrid," Marlene said.

 

My mother didn't look up from her layout sheet. "Tell him I don't work here anymore."

 

Marlene told him, lying like oil.

 

"How do you know Barry Kolker?" the editor asked, her black eyes big as olives.

 

"Just someone I met," my mother said.

 

That evening, in the long summer twilight, people came out of their apartments, walked their dogs, drank blender drinks down by the pool, their feet in the water. The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue. My mother knelt at her table, writing, and a slight breeze brushed the wind chimes we’d hung in the old eucalyptus, while I lay on her bed. I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs' leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother's dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I wished a thousand-year sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like the sleep over the castle of Sleeping Beauty.

 

There was a knock on the door, wrecking the peace. Nobody ever came to our door. My mother put down her pen and grabbed the folding knife she kept in the jar with the pencils, its dark carbon blade sharp enough to shave a cat. She unfolded it against her thigh and put her finger to her lips. She clutched her white kimono, her skin bare underneath.

 

It was Barry, calling her. "Ingrid!"

 

"How dare he," she said. "He cannot simply appear on my doorstep without an invitation."

 

She jerked the door open. Barry was wearing a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and carrying a bottle of wine and a bag that smelled of something wonderful. "Hi," he said. "I was just in the neighborhood, thought I'd drop by."

 

She stood in the doorway, the open blade still against her thigh. "Oh, you did."

 

Then she did something I would never have imagined. She invited him in, closing the knife against her leg.

 

He looked around at our big room, elegantly bare. "Just move in?" She said nothing. We had lived there over a year.