White Oleander

I dipped a small sumi brush into a bottle of ink, and in a few strokes I inked in arcs and lines, a black spot. Her violence. Claire, what did you know about violence? My mother's strength? Well, she wasn't strong enough to avoid being the background of my art. Just the background. Her words just my canvas.

 

ONE SLUGGISHLY warm and hazy day, as I came home from school, Claire met me at the rose arch. "I got a part!" she called out before I was even through it.

 

She threw her head back and bared her throat to the weak winter sun, laughter bursting upward like a geyser. Hugging me, kissing me. She tried calling Ron in Russia, in the Urals, where he was covering a research convention for telekinetics. She couldn't reach him. Even that didn't take the sparkle from the air. She opened a bottle of Tattinger champagne, kept cold in the refrigerator for a special occasion. It came flooding out all over the glasses and the table, foaming down to the floor. We toasted the new job.

 

It wasn't a big part, but it was tricky. She played a character's elegant but drunken wife at a dinner party, in a long gown and diamonds. A lot of drinking and eating, she had to remember when to do what, so it would all cut together. "Always somebody's lonely wife," she sighed. "What is this, typecasting?"

 

She got the part because the director was a friend of Ron's, and the actress who was supposed to play the lonely wife, the director's ex-wife's sister, broke her collarbone at the last minute and they needed someone about the same height and coloring who could wear the strapless dress.

 

"At least I'm talking to the protagonist," she explained. "They can't cut the scene."

 

It was a small role, just five lines, a woman who shows up dead two scenes later. I helped her rehearse it, playing the hero. The hard part, she explained, was that she had to eat and drink during the scene, while she was talking. She had it down after the second try, but insisted on doing it over and over again. She was very particular to remember which word she paused and drank the wine on, exactly when she raised her fork, with which hand and how high. "Eating scenes are the worst," she explained. "Everything has to match." We rehearsed the part for a week. She was so serious about five lines. I didn't realize actors were so perfectionistic. I'd always thought they just went on and did it.

 

ON THE DAY of the shoot, she had a six A.M. makeup call. She told me not to get up, but I got up anyway. I sat with her as she made herself a smoothie, added protein powder, spirulina, brewer's yeast, vitamin E and C. She was very pale, and silent. Concentrating. She did a breathing exercise called Breathing Monkeys, singing Chinese syllables on both the exhale and the inhale. The exhaled tones were low and resonant, but the inhaled ones were weird, high and wailing. It was called chi gong, she said it kept her calm.

 

I gave her a quick hug as she was leaving. She'd taught me never to say "good luck." "Break a leg" was what you said to actors. "Break a leg!" I called after her, and cringed to see her trip on a sprinkler head.

 

I raced home after school, eager to hear how the shoot had gone, and especially to hear about Harold McCann — the English star playing Guy — but she wasn't back yet. I did all my homework, even read ahead in English and history. By six it was dark, and not a call, not a clue. I hoped she hadn't gotten into an accident, she was so nervous this morning. But she probably went out for a drink with the other actors afterward, or dinner or something. Still, it wasn't like her not to call. She called if she was so much as running late at the market.

 

I fixed dinner, meat loaf and corn bread, a salad, and kept thinking, by the time it was ready she 'd be home. At twenty after eight, I heard her car in the driveway. I met her at the door. "I made dinner," I said.

 

Her eye makeup in circles around her eyes. She ran past me, made for the bathroom. I heard her throwing up.

 

"Claire?"

 

She came out, lay down on the couch, covered her eyes with the back of her arm. I took her shoes off. "Can I get you something? Aspirin? Seven-Up?"

 

She started crying, deep harsh moans, turned her head away from me.

 

I got her some Tylenol and a glass of soda, watched as she took it in sips. "Vinegar. On a washcloth." She fell back onto the cushions. "White vinegar. Wring it out." Her voice hoarse as sandpaper. "And turn out the lights."

 

I turned off the lamps, soaked a washcloth in vinegar, wrung it out, brought it to her. I didn't dare ask what had happened.

 

"Seventeen takes," she said, placing the washcloth over her forehead and eyes. "Do you know how long that is? A hundred people waiting for you? I will never, ever act again."

 

I held her hand, sat on the floor by her supine figure in the dark room filled with vinegar fumes. I didn't know what to say. It was like watching someone you loved step on a land mine, all the parts flying around. You don't know what to do with the pieces.