White Oleander

KIT LEANED on the counter in the production room, her magenta lips a wolf's stained smile.

 

"Ingrid, guess who I saw last night at the Virgins," she said, her high voice breathless with malice. "Our old friend Barry Kolker." She stage-sighed. "With some cheap little blond half his age. Men have such short memories, don't they?" Her nostrils twitched as she stifled a laugh.

 

At lunchtime, my mother told me to take everything I wanted, art supplies, stationery. We were leaving and we weren't coming back.

 

3

 

"I SHOULD SHAVE my head," she said. "Paint my face with ashes."

 

Her eyes were strange, circled dark like bruises, and her hair was greasy and lank. She lay on her bed, or stared at herself in the mirror. "How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?"

 

She didn't go back to work. She wouldn't leave the darkened apartment except to go down to the pool, where she sat for hours watching the reflections in the shimmering blue, or swam silently underwater like a fish in an aquarium. It was time for me to go back to school. But I couldn't leave her alone, not when she was like this. She might not be there when I returned. So we stayed in, eating all the canned food in the apartment, then we were eating rice and oatmeal.

 

"What do I do?" I asked Michael as he fed me cheese and sardines at his battered coffee table. The TV news showed fires burning on the Angeles Crest.

 

Michael shook his head, at me, at the line of firemen straddling the hillside. "Honey, this is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster."

 

I vowed I would never fall in love. I hoped Barry died a slow lingering death for what he was doing to my mother.

 

A RED MOON rose over downtown, red from the fires burning to the north and out in Malibu. It was the season of fire, and we were trapped in the heart of the burning landscape. Ashes floated in the pool. We sat on the roof in the burnt wind.

 

"This ragged heart," she said, pulling at her kimono. "I should rip it out and bury it for compost."

 

I wished I could touch her, but she was inside her own isolation booth, like on Miss America. She couldn't hear me through the glass.

 

She doubled over, pressing her forearms against her chest, pressing the air out of herself. "I press it within my body," she said. "As the earth presses a lump of prehistoric dung in heat and crushing weight deep under the ground. I hate him. Hate. I hate him." She whispered this last, but ferociously. "A jewel is forming inside my body. No, it's not my heart. This is harder, cold and clean. I wrap myself around this new jewel, cradle it within me."

 

The next morning she got up. She took a shower, went to the market. And I thought things were going to be better now. She called Marlene and asked if she could come back to work. It was shipping week and they needed her desperately. She dropped me at school, to start the eighth grade at Le Conte Junior High. As if nothing had ever happened. And I thought it was over.

 

It was not over. She began to follow Barry, as he had followed her in the beginning. She went everywhere he might be, hunting him so that she could polish her hatred on the sight of him.

 

"My hatred gives me strength," she said.

 

She took Marlene to lunch at his favorite restaurant, where they found him eating at the bar, and she smiled at him. He pretended he didn't notice her, but he kept touching his face along the jaw. "Searching for acne that was no longer there," she told me that night. "The force of my gaze threatened to call it back into being."

 

She seemed so happy, and I didn't know which was worse, this or before, when she wanted to shave her head.

 

We shopped at his market, driving miles out of our way to meet him over the cantaloupes. We browsed at his favorite music store. We went to book signings for books written by his friends.

 

SHE CAME HOME one night after three. It was a school night but I'd stayed up watching a white hunter movie starring Stewart Granger on cable. Michael was passed out on the couch. The hot winds tested the windows like burglars looking for a way in. Finally I went home and fell asleep on my mother's bed, dreaming about carrying supplies on my head through the jungle, the white hunter nowhere to be seen.

 

She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her shoes. "I found him. A party at Gracie Kelleher's. We crossed paths by the diving board." She lay down next to me, whispering in my ear. "He and a chubby redhead in a transparent blouse were having a little tete-a-tete. He got up and grabbed me by the arm." She pushed up her sleeve and showed me the marks on her arm, angry, red.