White Oleander

She smiled, slow and treacherous. "Help you, darling? I'd rather see you in the worst kind of foster hell than with a woman like that." She reached up to push a lock of hair away from my face, and I jerked away. She grabbed my wrist, forcing me to look at her. Now she was dead serious. What was under the games was pure will. I was terrified to struggle. "What are you going to learn from a woman like that?" she said. "How to pine artistically? Twenty-seven names for tears?" A guard made a motion toward us, and she quickly dropped my wrist.

 

She stood and kissed me on the cheek, embraced me lightly. We were the same height but I could feel how strong she was, she was like the cables that held up bridges. She hissed in my ear, "All I can say is, keep your bags packed."

 

CLAIRE STARED out at the road. A tear slipped from her overfilled eyes. Twenty-seven names for tears. But no, that wasn't my thought. I refused to be brainwashed. This was Claire. I put my hand on her shoulder as she made the turn onto the rural highway. She smiled and patted it with her small, cold one. "I think I did well with your mom, don't you?"

 

"You did," I told her, gazing out the window so I wouldn't have to lie to her face. "She really liked you."

 

A tear rolled down her cheek, and I brushed it away with the back of my hand. "What did she say to you?"

 

Claire shook her head, sighed. She started the windshield wipers, though it was only a mist, turned them off when they started squeaking on the dry glass. "She said I was right about Ron. That he was having an affair. I knew it anyway. She just confirmed it."

 

"How would she know," I said angrily. "For God's sake, Claire, she just met you."

 

"All the signs are there." She sniffled, wiped her nose on her hand. "I just didn't want to see them." But then she smiled. "Don't concern yourself. We'll work it out."

 

I SAT AT MY DESK under the ridiculous pyramid, drawing my self-portrait, looking in a hand mirror. I was doing it in pen, not glancing down, trying not to lift the pen from the paper. One line. The squarish jaw, the fat unsmiling lips, the round reproachful eyes. Broad Danish nose, mane of pale hair. I drew myself until I could make a good likeness even with my eyes closed, until I'd memorized the pattern of the movement in my hand, in my arm, the gesture of my face, until I could see my face on the wall. I'm not you, Mother. I'm not.

 

Claire was supposed to go to an audition. She had told Ron she would, but she had me call in and say she was sick. She was soaking in the bathtub with her lavender oil and a chunk of amethyst, trying to soothe her jagged edges. Ron was supposed to be home on Friday, but something came up. His trips home were handholds for her, so she could swing from one square on the calendar to the next. When he said he was going to come home and didn't, she swung forward and grasped thin air, fell.

 

I intercepted a letter from prison from my mother to Claire. In it, my mother advised a love potion to put in his food, but everything in the formula she sent looked poisonous to me. I drew a picture over her letter, a series of serpentine curves speared by an angle, put it in a new envelope and sent it back to her.

 

In the living room, Claire played her Leonard Cohen. Suzanne taking her down to the place by the river.

 

I kept drawing my face.

 

19

 

BY APRIL, the desert had already sucked spring from the air like blotting paper. The Hollywood Hills rose unnaturally clear, as if we were looking at them through binoculars. The new leaves were wilting in the heat that left us sweating and dispirited in the house with the blinds down.

 

Claire brought out the jewelry she kept in the freezer and dumped it onto her bed, a pirate's treasure, deliciously icy. Freezing strands of green jade beads with jeweled clasps, a pendant of amber enclosing a fossilized fern. I pressed it, cold, to my cheek. I draped an antique crystal bracelet down the part in my hair, let it lap on my forehead like a cool tongue.

 

"That was my great-aunt Priscilla's," Claire said. "She wore it to her presentation ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, just before the Great War." She lay on her back in her underwear, her hair dark with sweat, a smoky topaz bracelet across her forehead intersected by an intricate gold chain that came to rest on the tip of her nose. She was painfully thin, with sharp hipbones and ribs stark as a carved wooden Christ. I could see her beauty mark above the line of her panties. "She was a field nurse at Ypres. A very brave woman."