White Oleander

THE SUN was hot through the screens when I woke up, illuminating the milky stagnant air wrapped like a towel around the morning. I could hear a man singing, the shower pipes clanking as he turned the water off. Barry had stayed the night. She was breaking her rules. They weren't stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes. I stared at her as she dressed for work, waiting for an explanation, but she just smiled.

 

After that night, the change was startling. Sunday, we went together to the Hollywood farmer's market, where she and Barry bought spinach and green beans, tomatoes and grapes no bigger than the head of a thumbtack, papery braids of garlic, while I trailed behind them, mute with amazement at the sight of my mother examining displays of produce like it was a trip to a bookstore. My mother, for whom a meal was a carton of yogurt or a can of sardines and soda crackers. She could eat peanut butter for weeks on end without even noticing. I watched as she bypassed stands full of her favorite white flowers, lilies and chrysanthemums, and instead filled her arms with giant red poppies with black stains in the centers. On the walk home, she and Barry held hands and sang together in deep croony voices old songs from the sixties, "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" and "Waterloo Sunset."

 

So MANY THINGS I would never have imagined. She wrote tiny haiku that she slipped into his pockets. I fished them out whenever I got a chance, to see what she had written. It made me blush to read them: Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battleground.

 

One morning at the magazine, she showed me a picture in the weekly throwaway Caligula's Mother, taken at a party after a play's opening night. They both looked bombed. The caption dubbed her Barry's new lady love. It was exactly the kind of thing she hated the most, a woman as a man's anything. Now it was as if she'd won a contest.

 

Passion. I never imagined it was something that could happen to her. These were days she couldn't recognize herself in a mirror, her eyes black with it, her hair forever tangled and smelling of musk, Barry's goat scent.

 

They went out and she told me about it afterward, laughing. "Women approach him, their peacock voices crying, 'Barry! Where have you been?' But it doesn't matter. He is with me now. I am the only one he wants."

 

Passion ruled her. Gone were the references to his physical goatishness, his need for dental work, his flabby physique, his squalid taste in clothes, the wretchedness of his English, his shameless cliches, the criminal triteness of his oeuvre, a man who wrote "snuck." I never thought I'd see my mother plaster herself against a stout ponytailed man in the hallway outside our apartment, or let him inch his hand up her skirt under the table when we ate dinner one night at a dark Hunan restaurant in old Chinatown. I watched her close her eyes, I could feel the waves of her passion like perfume across the teacups.

 

In the mornings, he lay with her on the wide white mattress when I crossed the room on the way to the toilet. They would even talk to me, her head cradled on his arm, the room full of the scent of their lovemaking, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. It made me want to laugh out loud. In the courtyard at Crossroads of the World, I sat under a pepper tree and wrote "Mr. and Mrs. Barry Kolker" in my sketchbook. I practiced saying, "Can I call you Dad?"

 

I never told my mother I wanted a father. I had only questioned her once on the subject, I must have been in kindergarten. We were back in the States that year, living in Hollywood. A hot, smoggy day, and my mother was in a bad mood. She picked me up late from day care, we had to go to the market. We were driving in an old Datsun she had then, I still remember the hot waffled seat and how I could see the street through a hole in the floorboards.

 

School  had  just  started,   and   our  young  teacher,   Mrs. Williams, had asked us about our fathers. The fathers lived in Seattle or Panorama City or San Salvador, a couple were even dead. They had jobs like lawyers or drummers or installing car window glass.

 

"Where's my father?" I asked my mother. She downshifted irritably, throwing me against the seat belt. "You have no father," she said. "Everybody has a father," I said.

 

"Fathers are irrelevant. Believe me, you're lucky. I had one, I know. Just forget it." She turned on the radio, loud rock 'n' roll. It was as if I was blind and she'd told me, sight doesn't matter, it's just as well you can't see. I began to watch fathers, in the stores, on the playgrounds, pushing their daughters on swings. I liked how they seemed to know what to do. They seemed like a dock, firmly attached to the world, you could be safe then, not always drifting like us. I prayed Barry Kolker would be that man.