White Oleander

I LOOKED FOR the bottle of DMSO. I couldn't find it anywhere. I looked under the kitchen sink and in the bathroom, in the drawers — there just weren't many places to hide things in our apartment, and anyway, hiding things wasn't my mother's style. I waited up for her. She came back late, with a handsome young man whose dark curls trailed halfway down his back. She held his hand.

 

"This is Jesus," she said. "He's a poet. My daughter, Astrid."

 

"Hi," I said. "Mom, can I talk to you for a second?"

 

"You should be in bed," she said. "I'll be right back." She smiled at Jesus, let go of his hand, and walked me out onto the screen porch. She looked beautiful again, no circles under her eyes, hair like falling water.

 

I lay down in my bed and she covered me with a sheet, stroked my face. "Mom, what happened to that stuff from Mexico?"

 

She just kept smiling, but her eyes told me everything.

 

"Don't do it," I said.

 

She kissed me and stroked my hair with her cool hand, always cool, despite the heat, despite the wind and the fires, and then she was gone.

 

THE NEXT DAY I called Barry's number.

 

"Tunnel of Love," a girl answered, stoned, giggling. I heard his voice, velvet, in the background. Then he came on the line.

 

"Hello?"

 

I was going to warn him, but now all I could remember was my mother's face when she came out of his house that day. The way she rocked, the square of her mouth. Anyway, what could I tell him — don't touch anything, don't eat anything, watch out? He was already suspicious of her. If I told him, they might arrest her, and I would not hurt my mother, not for Barry Kolker and his screwing Shivas. He deserved it. He had it coming.

 

"Hello," he said, as she said something and laughed, stupidly. "Well, fuck you too," he said, and hung up.

 

I didn't call again.

 

WE SAT ON the roof and watched the moon, red and huge in the ash-laden air, hovering over the city laid out like a Ouija board. All around us was a Greek chorus of sirens, while my mother's mad low voice murmured, "They can't touch us. We're the Vikings. We go into battle without armor for the flush and the blood of it." She leaned down and kissed my head, smelling of metal and smoke.

 

The hot wind blew and blew and would not stop.

 

4

 

THEN CAME A TIME I can hardly describe, a season underground. A bird trapped in a sewer, wings beating against the ceiling in that dark wet place, while the city rumbled on overhead. Her name was Lost. Her name was Nobody's Daughter.

 

In my dreams, my mother walked through a city of bricks and rubble, a city after war, and she was blind, her eyes empty and white as stones. There were tall apartments all around her, with triangles over windows, all bricked up and burning. Blind windows, and her blind eyes, and yet still she came toward me, inevitable and insane. I saw that her face was melted and horribly pliable. There were hollows in the tops of her cheeks, under her eyes, as if someone had pressed into soft clay with their thumbs.

 

Those heavy days, how heavy the low gray sky, my wings were so heavy, so heavy my panicked flight under the ground. So many faces, so many lips, wanting me to tell, it made me tired, I fell asleep as they spoke. Just tell us what happened. What could I tell? When I opened my mouth, a stone fell out. Her poor white eyeballs. Just where I hoped to find mercy. I dreamed of white milk in the street, white milk and glass. Milk down the gutter, milk like tears. I kept her kimono against my face, her scent of violets and ash. I rubbed the silk between my fingers.

 

In that place under the ground lived many children, babies, teenagers, and the rooms echoed noise like a subway. Music like a train wreck, arguing, crying, the ceaseless TV. The heavy smell of cooking, thin sickly urine, pine cleaner. The woman who ran it made me get out of bed at regular intervals, sit at the table with the others before platters of beans and greens, meat. I dutifully came out, sat, ate, then returned to the cocoon of bed and sleep, plastic sheet crinkling under me. I woke up soaked to the armpits more nights than not.

 

The girl in the other bed had seizures. The niece told me, "There's more money in disability children like you all."

 

Roses drifted down the walls in brownish slants in the room. I counted roses. Diagonal rows of forty, ninety-two across. Over the dresser, Jesus, JFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all in profile, facing left, like racehorses at the starting gate, Jesus on the outside. The woman who ran the home, Mrs. Campbell, thin and raisinish, dusted with a yellow T-shirt. The horses all lined up, straining at the barrier. Hers was number seven, Medea's Pride. That was a day with a trapdoor, and we all fell through. I ran the belt of her kimono over my mouth, over and over, all day long, the taste of what had been lost.