White Oleander

Carolee's mouth twisted into something not quite a smile, her boot on her bed, she was doing the laces. "Christians don't say, 'Fuck me baby.' Actually they're not supposed to do it at all, but she's got the sin virus in her blood." She posed in front of the mirror, lowered the zipper of her top an inch, so it showed the well between her breasts. She bared her teeth and wiped them with her finger.

 

A dirt bike whined, and she pushed the screen out, climbed onto the dresser, narrowly missing her basket of makeup. "See you in the morning. Don't close the window."

 

I got up and watched her on the dirt bike disappearing up the road. It was wide and white in the moonlight, the darkness of mountains darker than the sky, a perfect vanishing point of the road and the telephone poles. I imagined you could follow that road through the vanishing point, come out somewhere else entirely.

 

"WITHOUT JESUS, I'd be dead today," Starr was saying as she cut in front of a semi, which punished us with its air horn. "That's the God's honest truth. They'd taken my kids, I was ready for roadkill."

 

I sat in the passenger seat of Starr's Ford Torino while Carolee slouched in the back, ankle bracelet glittering, a present from her boyfriend, Derrick. Starr drove too fast, bumping up the road, and chain-smoked Benson and Hedges loos from a gold pack, listening to Christian radio. She was talking about how she used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead and topless waitress at a club called the Trop.

 

She wasn't beautiful like my mother, but you couldn't help looking at her. I'd never seen anyone with a figure like that. Only in the back pages of the L.A. Weekly, chewing on a phone cord. But her energy was overwhelming. She never stopped talking, laughing, lecturing, smoking. I wondered what she was like on cocaine.

 

"I can't wait for you to meet Reverend Thomas. Have you accepted Christ as your personal savior?"

 

I considered telling her that we hung our gods from trees, but thought better of it.

 

"Well, you will. Lord, once you hear that man, you'll be saved on the spot."

 

Carolee lit a Marlboro, lowered the back window. "That phony-ass con. How can you swallow such shit."

 

"He who believeth in me, though he was dead, yet he will live, and don't you forget it, missy," Starr said. She never called us by our names, not even her own children, only "mister" or "missy."

 

She was taking us to the Clothestime in the next town, Sunland, she wanted to get me a few things for my new life. I'd never been into a store like that. My mother and I got our clothes on the boardwalk in Venice. Inside the Clothestime, colors assaulted us from every side. Magenta! they screamed. Turquoise! Battery acid! under the nicker of fluorescent lighting. Starr filled my arms with clothes to try on, herded me into a dressing room with her, so we could continue our chat.

 

In the cubicle, she wriggled into a tiny striped minidress and smoothed it over her ribs, turning to the side to see what it looked like in profile. The stripes widened and tapered over her breasts and bottom like op art. I tried not to stare, but how could you not be astounded. I wondered what Reverend Thomas would think of her in a dress like that.

 

She frowned, pulled the dress over her head, and hung it back up. It still was stretched to fit her figure. Her body in the small dressing room was almost too much to bear. I could only look at her in the mirror, her breasts falling out of the top of her under-wired brassiere, the cross hiding between them like a snake in a rock.

 

"Sin's a virus, that's what Reverend Thomas says. Infecting the whole country, like the clap," she told me. "They've got clap now you can't get rid of. Sin's just exactly the same. We've got every excuse in the book. Like what difference does it make if I shovel coke up my nose or not? What's wrong with wanting to feel good all the time? Who does it hurt?"

 

She opened her eyes wide, I could see the glue on her false eyelashes. "It hurts us and it hurts Jesus. Because it's wrong." She said it soft and sweet, like a nursery school teacher. I tried to imagine what it was like working in a gentleman's club. Walking naked into a room full of men.

 

She tried on a pink stretchy dress, rolling it down over her hips. "It's a virus that eats you up from the inside out, you infect everything around you. Oh, wait till you hear Reverend Thomas." She frowned at the dress in the mirror, the way it looked in the back, it was so tight it rose up between her legs. "This would look better on you."

 

She stripped it off and handed it to me. It smelled of her heavy perfume. Obsession. When I took off my clothes, she looked at my body closely, like she was trying to decide if she wanted to buy it or not. My underwear was torn. "You'd better start wearing a bra, missy. Thirteen years old, I should say. I had my first bra in the fourth grade. You don't want 'em hanging to your knees when you're thirty, do you?"