White Oleander

11

HER NAME WAS Olivia Johnstone. That was the name on the magazines and catalogs on her doormat. She took Conde Nast Traveler and French Vogue, thick as a phone book. I babysat the kids in the front yard now, not to miss the least glimpse of her leaving the house in her Jackie O sunglasses, returning from shopping, clipping her herbs. Hoping our eyes would meet again. Packages came for her almost daily, the handsome UPS man lingering in her doorway. I wondered if he was in love with her, his legs like tree trunks in his UPS brown shorts.

At night, from the kitchen window, I began to take note of her visitors. Always men. A black man whose white French cuffs lay bright against his dark skin, gold cuff links glimmering. He drove a black BMW, came around seven-thirty, and was always gone by midnight. A young man with Rasta hair and Birkenstocks came in a Porsche. Sometimes he was still there when I got up in the morning. A large balding white man who wore striped shirts and double-breasted suits with big lapels. He drove a monstrous Mercedes, and came every day for a week.

What I noticed especially was the way they hurried from their shining cars, their excitement. I wondered what she must do that put such urgency in their steps. I wondered which she liked best. I thought about what she must know about men, how she must shine for them like a lighthouse.

I refused to think for a second that Marvel might be right about anything, let alone Olivia Johnstone. I lived for the sight of her, taking out her trash or alighting from her car in the dim light of dawn while I was making my breakfast. It was just enough dew on my decks to keep me another day.

I picked sprigs of her rosemary and tucked them in my pockets. I went through her garbage when I knew she was out, thirsty to know more, to touch the things she touched. I found a wide-toothed tortoiseshell comb from Kent of London, good as new except for a single broken tooth, and a soap box, Crabtree and Evelyn’s Elderflower. She drank Myers’s rum, used extra virgin olive oil in a tall bottle. One of her boyfriends smoked cigars. I found an impossibly soft stocking, the garter kind, cloud taupe, laddered, and an empty flagon of Ma Griffe perfume, its label decorated with a scribble of black lines on white. It smelled of whispery black organdy dresses, of spotted green orchids and the Bois de Boulogne after rain, where my mother and I once walked for hours. I thrilled to share Paris with Olivia Johnstone. I saved the bottle in my drawer to scent my clothes.

THEN ONE DAY Olivia’s newspapers and magazines lay on her doorstep, untouched. The Corvette sat sullen under a tan canvas cover dotted with fallen jacaranda flowers like mementos of loss. Just the sight of the landlocked Corvette made me wish I had some Percodan left. I settled for some leftover codeine cough syrup Marvel had in her medicine chest. The sticky cloying taste lingered as I sat on my ripcord bedspread and combed my hair with Olivia’s comb. I was in awe of her perfection. A woman who would throw out a handmade tortoiseshell comb just because it was missing a tooth. I wondered if she really made love to men for money, what that was like. Prostitute. Whore. What did they really mean anyway? Only words. My mother would hate that, but it was true. Words trailing their streamers of judgment. A wife got money from her husband and nobody said anything. And if Olivia’s boyfriends gave her money? So what?

I combed my hair and made a French twist, imagining myself as Olivia. I stalked the small room, walking the way she walked, hips first, like a runway model. What difference did it make if she was a whore. It sounded like ventriloquism to even say it. I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water. I ran her stocking up my leg, smelled the Ma Griffe.

I imagined she’d gone to Paris, that she was sitting at a cafe, having a cloudy Pernod and water, scarf tied to her purse like the women in her French Vogue. I imagined she was with the BMW man, the quiet one with gold cuff links who liked jazz. I’d imagined them often, dancing in the old-fashioned way in her living room, hardly moving their feet, his cheek resting on the top of her close-waved hair. That’s how I saw her in Paris. Staying up late in a jazz club only black Parisians knew, in a cellar on the Rive Gauche, dancing. I could see the champagne and the way their eyes closed, and they weren’t thinking of anything but more of the same.

I sat in the sun’s blistering glare off the blacktop after school, doing my homework and listening to Justin and Caitlin splash in the inflatable pool, shrieking, squabbling over the toys. I was waiting, thinking ahead, setting out my hubcaps. At 4:25 the UPS man stopped in front of Olivia’s and began to write up a delivery slip.

I stepped up to the chain-link fence. “Excuse me,” I said. “Olivia said you could leave the package with me.” I smiled, trying to project a neighborly trustworthiness. I was the girl next door, after all. “She told me she was expecting it.”

He brought the clipboard and I signed. The shipment was a small box marked Williams-Sonoma. I wondered what it could be, but my curiosity about what was in the box paled when compared to my determination to make friends with Olivia Johnstone, to someday enter the shuttered house.

THE DAY SHE returned, I made up a story about a project I had to finish with a classmate in the neighborhood. I wasn’t a good liar. My mother always said I had no imagination. But I kept it short, and Marvel gave me an hour. “I need you home at five, I’ve got a party.” She sold Mary Kay, and though she didn’t make much money at it, it made her feel important.

I took the box out of my laundry bag, where I’d kept it hidden, and walked up Olivia’s steps, onto her porch. I rang the doorbell. Almost immediately, her shape appeared behind the bubble-glass diamonds of her door, just like ours except the inserts were yellow instead of turquoise. I could feel her looking at me through the spyhole. I tried to look calm. Just a neighbor doing a favor. The door opened. Olivia Johnstone was wearing a long print halter dress, her hair in a low chignon, her bare cinnamon shoulders smooth as bedposts.

I held the box out to her. “The UPS man left this.” One tooth on the comb, one tooth. She was perfect.

Olivia smiled and took the box. Her nails were short, white-tipped. She thanked me in an amused voice. I could tell she knew it was just a ploy, that I wanted to climb into her life. I tried to look past her but could only see a mirror and a small red-lacquered table.

Then she said the words I’d been dreaming of, hoping for. “Would you like to come in? I was just pouring some tea.”

Was there anything as elegant as Olivia’s house? In the living room, the walls were covered with a gold paper burnished to the quality of cork. She had a taupe velvet couch with a curved back and a leopard throw pillow, a tan leather armchair, and a carved daybed with a striped cotton cover. A wood table with smaller tables tucked underneath it held a dull green ceramic planter bearing a white spray of orchids like moths. Jazz music quickened the pace of the room, the kind the BMW man liked, complicated trumpet runs full of masculine yearning.

“What’s this music?” I asked her.

“Miles Davis,” she said. “ ‘Seven Steps to Heaven.’ ”

Seven steps, I thought, was that all it took?

Where we had sliding glass doors, Olivia had casements, open to the backyard. Instead of the air-conditioning, ceiling fans turned lazily. Upon closer examination, a big gilded birdcage held a fake parrot wearing a tiny sombrero, a cigar clamped in its beak. “That’s Charlie,” Olivia said. “Be careful, he bites.” She smiled. She had a slight overbite. I could understand how a man would want to kiss her.

We sat on the velvet couch and drank iced tea sweetened with honey and mint. Now that I was here, I was at a loss to begin. I’d had so many questions, but I couldn’t think of one. The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I’d never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother’s contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.

“How long have you been over there?” Olivia asked, stroking down the condensation on her glass with a manicured forefinger. Her profile was slightly dish-shaped, her forehead high and round.

“Not long. A couple months.” I nodded to the UPS package untouched on the coffee table. “What’d they send you?”

Olivia walked to a small secretary desk, opened it and found a letter opener. She slit the side of the box and lifted out two terracotta hearts. “They’re breadwarmers. You heat them and put them in the basket to keep the rolls warm.”

I was disappointed. I thought it would be something secret and sexual. Breadwarmers didn’t go with my fantasy of Olivia Johnstone.

She sat closer to me this time, arm across the back of the couch. I liked it though it made me nervous. She seemed to know exactly the effect she had on me. I couldn’t stop staring at her skin, which gleamed as if polished, exactly the color of the wallpaper, and I could smell Ma Griffe.

“Where did you go?” I asked.

“Back east. New York, Washington,” she said. “A friend had business there.”

“The BMW?”

She smiled, her overbite winking at me. She had an impish quality up close, not so perfect, but better. “No, not the BMW. He’s very married. You don’t see this man here.”

I’d been afraid she would talk about breadwarmers, but here she was, telling me about the men, as if it was the weather. Encouraged, I pressed for more. “Don’t you worry they’re going to run into each other?”

She pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows. “I do try to avoid it.”

Maybe it was true. Maybe she was. But if she was, it was nothing like the girls on Van Nuys Boulevard in their hot pants and satin baseball jackets. Olivia was linen and champagne and terra-cotta, botanical prints and “Seven Steps to Heaven.” “Do you like one of them best?” I asked.

She stirred her iced tea with a long-handled spoon, letting Miles Davis seep into our pores. “No. Not really. How about you, do you have a boyfriend, someone special?”

I was going to tell her that I did, an older man, make it sound glamorous, but I ended up telling her my sorry life history, Starr and Ray, my mother, Marvel Turlock. She was easy to talk to, sympathetic. She asked questions, listened, and kept the music coming, tea and lemon cookies. I felt I had woken up on my raft to find a yacht dropping a ladder. You never knew when rescue might come.

“It won’t always be so hard, Astrid,” she told me, brushing a lock of my hair behind my ear. “Beautiful girls have certain advantages.”

I wanted to believe her. I wanted to know those things she knew, so I wouldn’t be afraid anymore, so I’d believe there was an end to it all. “Like what?”

She looked at me close, examining the planes of my face, the bangs I cut myself now. My stubborn chin, my fat, chapped lips. I tried to look ready. She picked up my hand and held it in hers. Her hands were more delicate than I’d thought, no larger than mine, warm and surprisingly dry, but a bit rough. She twined her fingers in mine, as if we had always held hands.

“It’s a man’s world, Astrid,” she said. “You ever hear that?”

I nodded. A man’s world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you could get raped or beat up. A man’s world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money, and didn’t have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.

But I didn’t know much more about a man’s world. That place where men wore suits and watches and cuff links and went into office buildings, ate in restaurants, drove down the street talking on cell phones. I’d seen them, but their lives were as incomprehensible as the lives of Tibetan Sherpas or Amazonian chiefs.

Olivia took my hand and turned it over, brushed the tips of her dry fingers down my moist palm, sending waves of electricity up my arms. “Who has the money?” she asked, softly. “Who has the power? You have a good mind, you’re artistic, you’re very sensitive, see?” She showed me lines in my hand, her fingertips like a grainy fabric stroking my skin. “Don’t fight the world. Your carpenter friend, he didn’t fight the wood, did he? He made love to it, and what he made was beautiful.”

I thought about that. My mother fought the wood, hacking at it, trying to slam it into place with a hammer. She considered it the essence of cowardice not to. “What else do you see?” I asked.

Olivia curled my fingers up, wrapping my fate, handing it back to me.

I picked at a burn blister on my middle finger and thought about fighting the grain or not. Women like my mother, alone as tigers, fighting every step. Women with men, like Marvel and Starr, trying to please. Neither one seemed to have the advantage. But Olivia didn’t mean men like Ed Turlock or even Ray. She meant men with money. That man’s world. The cuff links and offices.

“You’ll figure out what men want and how to give it to them. And how not to.” She smiled her naughty crooked grin. “And when to do which.”

The little brass clock whirred and struck five, a music box tune, tiny chimes. So many pretty things, but it was getting late, I didn’t want to go, I wanted to find out more, I wanted Olivia to handle my future like wax, softening it in the heat of her parched hands, shaping it into something I didn’t have to dread. “You mean sex.”

“Not necessarily.” She glanced at the round mirror over the fireplace, at the drop-top desk with its secret drawers and pigeonholes. “It’s magic, Astrid. You have to know how to reach up and pull beauty out of thin air.” She pretended to reach up and grab a firefly, then opened her palms slowly and watched it fly out. “People want a little magic. Sex is its theater. There are sliding panels and trapdoors.”

The night magic. Never let a man stay the night. But my mother’s theater was her own pleasure. This was something quite different. I was excited that I knew this.

“The secret is—a magician doesn’t buy magic. Admire the skill of a fellow magician, but never fall under his spell.” She rose and collected our glasses. And I thought of how Barry seduced my mother, his smoked mirrors and hidden trained doves. She never chose him, not really, but she gave him everything. She would always be his, even if he was dead. He had shaped her destiny.

“So what about love?” I asked.

She had started toward the kitchen but stopped, turned back, glasses in her hands. “What about it?” When Olivia frowned, two vertical lines sliced between her eyebrows and cut into her rounded forehead.

I flushed red, but I wanted to know. If only I could ask without falling all over myself like a clown in size fourteen shoes. “Don’t you believe in it?”

“I don’t believe in it the way people believe in God or the tooth fairy. It’s more like the National Enquirer. A big headline and a very dull story.”

I followed her into the kitchen, exactly like ours yet light-years away, a parallel universe. Her pots and pans dangled overhead from a restaurant rack—copper pots, iron. Ours were Corning Ware with the little blue flowers. I ran my hands over Olivia’s terracotta counters, inset with painted ceramics, where ours were mottled green and white, like a bad cold.

“So what do you believe in?” I asked her.

Her dark gaze ran with pleasure along the warm cinnamon tile, the beaten copper hood over the range. “I believe in living as I like. I see a Stickley lamp, a cashmere sweater, and I know I can have it. I own two houses besides this. When the ashtrays are full in my car, I’ll sell it.”

I laughed, imagining her bringing it back to the dealer, explaining why she was selling. She probably would. I could hardly fathom someone living so close to her own desire.

“I just spent three weeks in Tuscany. I saw the Palio in Siena,” she said, strumming the words like the strings of a guitar. “It’s a fifteenth-century horse race through the cobbled streets. Would I exchange that for a husband and kids and happily-ever-after? Not to mention the likely outcome, divorce and overtime at the bank and shaky child support. Let me show you something.”

She picked up the small quilted bag on her counter, found her wallet, opened it for me to see the wad of cash as thick as my finger. She spread the bills, at least a dozen hundreds among the others. “Love’s an illusion. It’s a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I’d rather have cash.” She put her money away, zipped her purse.

Then she put her arm around my shoulder and led me to the door. The amber light fell through the bubble glass against our cheeks. She hugged me lightly. I smelled Ma Griffe, it was warmer on her. “Come again, anytime. I don’t know many women. I’d like to know you.”

I left walking backwards so I wouldn’t miss a moment of her. I hated the idea of going back to Marvel’s, so I walked around the block, feeling Olivia’s arms around me, my nose full of perfume and the smell of her skin, my head swirling with what I had seen and heard in the house so much like ours, and yet not at all. And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.