White Oleander

He shrugged. As if that was something people did. Not good, but not shocking.

 

I FINISHED OUT the eighth grade at Mount Gleason Junior High, my third school this year. I didn't know anyone, didn't want to. I ate lunch with Davey. We quizzed each other using flash cards he'd made for himself. What's a baby ferret called? A kitten. How many kittens in a litter? Six to nine. Constellation Andromeda. Major feature? The Great Andromeda Nebula. Favorite object for observation? The double star Gamma Andromedae. Distance to earth? Two million light-years. Anomaly? Unlike the other spiral nebulae, which are receding from us at high velocities, Andromeda is approaching us at a rate of three hundred kilometers per second.

 

My caseworker visited our trailer often, sat with Starr, trying to look handsome on the porch under the spider plants. One day he said my mother was settled at the women's prison in Chino now, and could have visitors starting Thursday. There was a group that brought children to see their parents in prison, and I was going to have a visit.

 

After the last visit, I was afraid. I didn't know if I could do that again. What if she was still like that, a zombie? I couldn't stand that. And I was afraid of the prison, the bars and hands snaking between them. Clanging their cups. How could my mother live there, my mother who arranged white flowers in a crackle-glass vase, who could argue for hours about whether Frost was an important poet?

 

But I knew how. Drugged, sitting in a corner, vaguely reciting her poems, plucking pills of fuzz off the blanket, that's how. Or beaten senseless by guards, or other prisoners. She didn't know when to lie low, avoid the radar.

 

And what if she didn't want to see me? What if she blamed me for not being able to help her? It had been eight months since that day at the jail, when she didn't even recognize me. At one point in the night, I even thought of not going. But at five I got up, showered, dressed.

 

"Remember, no jeans, nothing blue," Starr reminded me the night before. "You want to walk back out of there, don't you?" I didn't need reminding. I wore my new pink dress, my bra and my Daisy Duck shoes. I wanted to show her I was growing up, I could take care of myself.

 

THE VAN CAME at seven. Starr got up and signed the papers while the driver eyed her figure in her bathrobe. There was one other kid in the van. I took the seat in front of him, also by the window. We picked up three more on the way out.

 

The day was overcast, June gloom, the moisture in the air beading on the windshield. You couldn't see down the freeway as far as the next overpass. It came out of the mist and then it vanished, the world creating and erasing itself. It made me carsick. I cracked the window. We drove a long way, through suburbs and more suburbs. If only I knew what she would be like when I got there. I couldn't imagine my mother in prison. She didn't smoke or chew on toothpicks. She didn't say "bitch" or "fuck." She spoke four languages, quoted T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, drank Lapsang souchong out of a porcelain cup. She had never even been inside a McDonald's. She had lived in Paris and Amsterdam. Freiburg and Martinique. How could she be in prison?

 

At Chino, we turned off the freeway and drove south. I tried to memorize this, so I could find it again in my dreams. We drove past nice suburbs, then not-so-nice ones, then brand-new subdivisions alternating with lumberyards and farm equipment rentals. Finally we came to real country, and drove along roads with no signals, just dairies and fields, the smell of manure.

 

There was a big complex of buildings on the right. "Is that it?" I asked the girl next to me. "CYA," she said. I shook my head. "Youth Authority."

 

All the kids eyed it grimly as we passed. We could be there, behind that razor wire. We were silent as death when we went by the California Institution for Men, set way back from the road in the middle of a field. Finally, we turned onto a fresh blacktopped road, past a little market, case of Bud $5.99. I wanted to remember it all. The kids got their bags, their backpacks. Now I could see the prison — a steam stack, a water tower, the guard tower. It was aluminum-sided, like Starr's trailer. Frontera wasn't at all as I had imagined. I'd been picturing Birdman of Alcatra{, or / Want to Live! with my mother as Susan Hayward. Its low brick buildings were widely spaced and landscaped with trees and roses and acres of green lawn. It was more like a suburban high school than a prison. Except for the guard towers, the razor wire.