White Oleander

"So, you want to grab a bite to eat?" he asked her.

 

"I never eat," she said.

 

I was hungry, but once my mother took a position, she never wavered from it. We went home, where I ate tuna out of a can while she wrote a poem using the rhythms of the gamelan, about shadow puppets and the gods of chance.

 

2

 

THE SUMMER I was twelve, I liked to wander in the complex where the movie magazine had its offices. It was called Crossroads of the World, a 19205 courtyard with a streamline-moderne ocean liner in the middle occupied by an ad agency. I sat on a stone bench and imagined Fred Astaire leaning on the liner's brass rail, wearing a yachting cap and blue blazer.

 

Along the outside ring of the brick-paved courtyard, fantasy bungalows built in styles from Brothers Grimm to Don Quixote were rented by photo studios, casting agents, typesetting shops. I sketched a laughing Carmen lounging under the hanging basket of red geraniums in the Sevillian doorway of the modeling agency, and a demure braided Gretel sweeping the Germanic steps of the photo studio with a twig broom.

 

While I drew, I watched the tall beautiful girls coming in and out of these doors, passing from the agency to the studio and back, where they bled a bit more of their hard-earned money from waitressing and temp jobs to further their careers. It was a scam, my mother said, and I wanted to tell them so, but their beauty seemed a charm. What ill could befall girls like that, long-legged in their hip-hugger pants and diaphanous summer dresses, with their clear eyes and sculpted faces? The heat of the day never touched them, they were living in another climate.

 

At eleven or so one morning, my mother appeared in the tiled doorway of the Cinema Scene staircase and I closed my notebook, figuring she was taking an early lunch. But we didn't go to the car. Instead, I followed her around the corner, and there, leaning on an old gold Lincoln with suicide doors, stood Barry Kolker. He was wearing a bright plaid jacket.

 

My mother took one look at him and closed her eyes. "That jacket is so ugly I can't even look at you. Did you steal it from a dead man?"

 

Barry grinned, opening the doors for me and my mother. "Haven't you ever been to the races? You've got to wear something loud. It's traditional."

 

"You look like a couch in an old-age home," she said as we got in. "Thank God no one I know will see me with you."

 

We were going on a date with Barry. I was astonished. I was sure the gamelan concert would be the last we'd ever see him. And now he was holding open the back door of the Lincoln for me. I'd never been to the racetrack. It wasn't the kind of place my mother would think of taking me — outdoors, horses, nobody reading a book or thinking about Beauty and Fate.

 

"I normally wouldn't do this," my mother said, settling herself in the front seat, putting on her seat belt. "But the idea of the stolen hour is just too delicious."

 

"You'll love it." Barry climbed behind the wheel. "It's way too nice a day to be stuck in that sweatshop."

 

"Always," my mother said.

 

We picked up the freeway on Cahuenga, drove north out of Hollywood into the Valley, then east toward Pasadena. The heat lay on the city like a lid.

 

Santa Anita sat at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, a sheer blue granite wall like a tidal wave. Bright banks of flowers and perfect green lawns breathed out a heavy perfume in the smoggy air. My mother walked a little ahead of Barry and pretended she didn't know him, until she finally realized that everybody was dressed like that, white shoes and green polyester.

 

The horses were fine-tuned machines on steel springs, shiny as metal, and the jockeys' satin shirts gleamed in the sun as they walked their mounts around the track, each horse coupled with an older, steadier partner. The horses shied at children at the rail, at flags, all nerves and heat.

 

"Pick a horse," Barry told my mother.

 

She picked number seven, a white horse, because of her name, Medea's Pride.

 

The jockeys had trouble getting them into the starting gates, but when the gates opened, the horses pounded the brown of the track in a unit.

 

"Come on, seven," we yelled. "Lucky seven." She won. My mother laughed and hugged me, hugged Barry. I'd never seen her like this, excited, laughing, she seemed so young. Barry had bet twenty dollars for her, and handed her the money, one hundred dollars.

 

"How about dinner?" he asked her.

 

Yes, I prayed. Please say yes. After all, how could she refuse him now?

 

She took us to dinner at the nearby Surf 'n' Turf, where Barry and I both ordered salads and steaks medium rare, baked potatoes with sour cream. My mother just had a glass of white wine. That was Ingrid Magnussen. She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they'd been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T'ang Dynasty.