White Oleander

I liked it when my mother tried to teach me things, when she paid attention. So often when I was with her, she was unreachable. Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

 

I didn't have to grope for the answer. It was like a song, and the light filtered through the sycamore tree as crazy Anne rang her bell, B-flat, and my mother nodded.

 

"Always learn poems by heart," she said. "They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay."

 

I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

 

IN THE AFTERNOON, the editor descended on the art room, dragging scarves of Oriental perfume that lingered in the air long after she was gone. A thin woman with overbright eyes and the nervous gestures of a frightened bird, Kit smiled too widely in her red lipstick as she darted here and there, looking at the design, examining pages, stopping to read type over my mother's shoulder, and pointing out corrections. My mother flipped her hair back, a cat twitching before it clawed you.

 

"All that hair," Kit said. "Isn't it dangerous in your line of work? Around the waxer and all." Her own hairstyle was geometric, dyed an inky black and shaved at the neck.

 

My mother ignored her, but let the X-acto fall so it impaled the desktop like a javelin.

 

After Kit left, my mother said to the art director, "I'm sure she 'd prefer me in a crew cut. Dyed to her own bituminous shade."

 

"Vampire 'n' Easy," Marlene said.

 

I didn't look up. I knew the only reason we were here was because of me. If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have to take jobs like this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a brand.

 

THAT NIGHT she went out by herself. I drew for an hour, ate a peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich, then drifted down to Michael's, knocked on the hollow door. Three bolts fell back. "It's Queen Christina." He smiled, a gentle soft man about my mother's age, but puffy and pale from drinking and being inside all the time. He cleared a pile of dirty clothes and Variety from the couch so I could sit down.

 

The apartment was very different from ours, crammed with furniture and souvenirs and movie posters, Variety and newspapers and empty wine bottles, tomato plants straggling on the windowsills, groping for a little light. It was dark even in the daytime, because it faced north, but it had a spectacular view of the Hollywood sign, the reason he took it in the first place.

 

"Snow again" he said along with Garbo, tilting his face up like hers. "Eternal snow." He handed me a bowl of sunflower seeds. "I am Garbo."

 

I cracked seeds in my teeth and flicked off the rubber sandals I'd been wearing since April. I couldn't tell my mother I'd outgrown my shoes again. I didn't want to remind her that I was the reason she was trapped in electric bills and kid's shoes grown too small, the reason she was clawing at the windows like Michael's dying tomatoes. She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress.

 

"What are you reading these days?" I asked Michael. He was an actor, but he didn't work that much, and he wouldn't do TV, so he made most of his money reading for Books on Tape. He had to do it under a pseudonym, Wolfram Malevich, because it was nonunion. We could hear him every morning, very early, through the wall. He knew German and Russian from the army, he 'd been in army intelligence — an oxymoron, he always said — so they put him on German and Russian authors.

 

"Chekhov short stories." He leaned forward and handed me the book from the coffee table. It was full of notes and Post-its and underlines.

 

I leafed through the book. "My mother hates Chekhov. She says anybody who ever read him knows why there had to be a revolution."

 

"Your mother." Michael smiled. "Actually, you might really like him. There's a lovely melancholy in Chekhov." We both turned to the TV to catch the best line in Queen Christina, saying along with Garbo, "The snow is like a white sea, one could go out and be lost in it. . . and forget the world."

 

I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple. My deepest fear was that someday she would find her way back there and never return. It was why I always waited up when she went out on nights like this, no matter how late she came home. I had to hear her key in the lock, smell her violet perfume again.