White Oleander

I stayed close to Claire, but it made me nervous to watch her wait on these people, these indifferent strangers, chilling their white wine, making pesto, taking another trip to Chalet Gourmet. Ron said not to bother, they could order pizza, bring in El Polio Loco, but Claire said she could never serve guests out of cardboard containers. She didn't get it. They didn't see themselves as her guests. To them she was just a wife, an out-of-work actress, a drudge. There were so many pretty women that summer, in sundresses and bikini tops, sarongs, I knew she was trying to figure out which one was Ron's Circe.

 

Finally, she went on Prozac, but it gave her too much energy. She couldn't sit down, and she started to drink to even out the effects. Ron didn't like it because she said things that she thought were funny but nobody else laughed. She was like a woman in a film that was badly dubbed, either too fast or too slow. She bungled the punch lines.

 

IN SEPTEMBER, in wind and ashes, I started the twelfth grade at Fairfax, and Ron went back to work. Now Claire couldn't find enough to do in the husbandless house. She scrubbed floors, cleaned windows, rearranged the furniture. One day she gave all her clothes away to Goodwill. Without sedatives, she was up all night, filing magazine clippings, dusting books. She had headaches, and believed someone was listening in on the phone.

 

She swore she could hear the click before she hung up. She made me listen.

 

"Do you hear it?" she asked, her dark eyes glittering.

 

"Maybe," I said, not wanting her to be all alone in her night. "I can't really tell."

 

IN OCTOBER the heat gave way to the blue afternoon haze of true autumn, hand-shaped leaves of the sycamores showed orange against the dusty white trunks, and a red-gold blush lay on the hills. One day I came home from school and found Claire staring at herself in her round vanity mirror in her room, her silver brush forgotten in her hand. "My face is uneven, have you noticed? My nose is off-center." She turned her head to the side, examined the profile, puffed out her cheeks and pushed her imagined off-center nose to the right, mashed the tip down. "I hate pointed noses. Your mother has Garbo's nose, did you ever notice that? If I had mine done, I'd want one like that."

 

She wasn't talking about noses. Claire was just tired of seeing her own face in the mirror, it was a code of her failings. There was something missing, but it wasn't what she thought. She fretted that her hairline was receding, that she was going to end up looking like Edgar Allan Poe. Her fearful gaze magnified the incomplete tops of her ears, shrank her small lips.

 

"Small teeth mean bad luck," she said, showing them to me in the mirror. "Short life." Her teeth were barley beads, pearllike and gleaming. But her eyes had grown increasingly deep. I could hardly see the lids anymore, and her sharp bones once again made bridges in her face, a Rodin sculptured bronze head, merciless in its paring down.

 

As we got into December, Claire cheered up. She loved the holidays. She was reading magazines with pictures of Christmas in England, in Paris, in Taos, New Mexico. She wanted to do everything. "Let's have a perfect Christmas," she said.

 

We wired a wreath in eucalyptus and pomegranates we dipped into melted wax. She bought boxes of Christmas cards, soft handmade paper with lace and golden stars. Swan Lake played on the classical station. We sewed garlands of tiny chili peppers, stuck cloves into tangerines, tied them with velvet the color of brandy. She bought me a red velvet dress with a white lace collar and cuffs at Jessica McClintock in Beverly Hills. Perfect, she said.

 

It scared me when she said perfect. Perfect was always too much to ask.

 

RON CAME HOME until after New Year's. She waited for him, so we could all buy the tree together, like a real family. In the car, she described just what she wanted. Symmetrical, soft-needled, six feet at least. The tree man tried to help but gave up after pulling out and untwining dozens of trees.

 

"I don't get any of this," Ron said, watching Claire's desperate search. "Jesus grew up in Bethlehem. High desert. We should be buying an olive, a date palm. A frigging Jerusalem artichoke."

 

I walked along the side with the spray-painted trees, some in white like a starched chemical snowfall, others painted gold, pink, red, even black. The black tree, about three feet high, looked like it had been burnt. I wondered who would want a black tree, but I knew someone would. There was no limit to the ways in which people could be strange. Someone would buy it as a joke, a belated Halloween, to decorate with plastic skulls and tiny guillotines. Or it would become someone's Yuletide political statement. Or someone would take it just for the pleasure of making their kids cry.