White Oleander

12

I LAY ON MY BED, wondering what I would be like when I was a woman. I’d never thought much about it before, my possible futures. I’d been too busy sucking fish juice, burying myself in the sand against the killing rays of desert sun. But now I was intrigued by this future Astrid that Olivia had seen in me. I saw myself sort of like Catherine Deneuve, pale and stoic, the way she was in Belle De Jour. Or maybe Dietrich, Shanghai Express, all shimmer and smoke. Would I be fascinating, the star of my own magic theater? What would I do with a wad of hundred-dollar bills?

I imagined that money in my hand. My mind went blank. So far, my fantasies had centered completely on survival. Luxury had been beyond imagining, let alone beauty. I let my eyes rest on the striped curtains, until the stripes themselves formed a sculptural shape. Ray had seen it in me. With Olivia’s help, I could own it, create it, use it. I could work in beauty as an artist worked in paint or language.

I would have three lovers, I decided. An older man, distinguished, with silver hair and a gray suit, who would take me traveling with him, for company on long first-class flights to Europe, and stuffy cocktail receptions for visiting dignitaries. I called him the Swedish ambassador. Yes, Mother, I would lie down for the father, gladly.

Then there was Xavier, my Mexican lover, Mother’s Eduardo reconstituted, but more tender and passionate, less silly and spoiled. Xavier spread camellias on the bed, he swore he would marry me if he could, but he had been engaged since birth to a girl with a harelip. It was fine with me, I didn’t want to live with his overbearing parents in Mexico City and bear his ten Catholic children. I had a room of my own in the hotel, and a maid who brought me Mexican chocolate for breakfast in bed.

The third man was Ray. I met him in secret in big-city hotels, he sat in the bar with his sad face, and I would come in in a white linen suit with black-tipped shoes, my hair back in a chignon, a scarf tied to my purse. “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” I said in a deep, slightly humorous voice, like Dietrich. “But I came anyway.”

I heard Marvel calling to me, but she was in another country, too far away. She didn’t mean me. She meant some other girl, some drab hopeless thing destined for the army or else beauty school. I lay with my legs wrapped around Ray in a room with tall windows, a bouquet of full-bloom red roses in a vase on the dresser.

“Astrid!”

Her voice was like a drill, penetrating, relentless. If I had a choice, I’d rather be a man’s slave than a woman’s. I pulled myself out of bed, stumbled into the living room where Marvel and her friends sat on the flowered couch, their heads pressed together over sodas tinted space-alien colors, hands in the snack mixture I’d made from a recipe on the cereal box.

“Here she is.” Debby raised her horsey face under her curly perm, eye shadow layered like strata in sedimentary rock. “Ask her.”

“I’m telling you, the car,” Marvel said. “You come back and you’re still living in the same dump, still driving around the same old shitbox. What good does it do?”

Linda took a hit on her cigarette, fanning the smoke away with a pearl-nailed hand. A blond with blue eyes perpetually wide with surprise, she wore shiny eye shadow like the inside of shells. They all went to Birmingham High together, were bridesmaids at each other’s weddings, and now sold Mary Kay.

It was the new Mary Kay brochure, illustrating the prizes they could win if they sold enough mascara wands and lip liners and face-firming masques, that they’d been arguing about. “They used to have Cadillacs.” Linda sniffed.

Marvel finished her soda, smacked it down on the coffee table. “Just once in my life, I’d like a goddamn new car. Is that too much to ask? Everybody’s got a new car, the kids at the high school. The slut next door’s got a goddamn Corvette.” She handed me her glass. “Astrid, get me some more Tiki Punch.”

Debby handed me hers too. I took them back to the kitchen, and poured Tiki Punch from the big Shasta bottle, getting momentarily lost in its irradiated Venusian pinkness.

“Astrid,” Linda called, her feet tucked under herself on the flower-print couch. “If you had a choice between two weeks in Paris France, all expenses paid, or a car—”

“Shitty Buick,” Debby interjected.

“What’s wrong with a Buick?” Marvel said.

“—which would you take?” Linda picked something out of the corner of her eye with a long press-on nail.

I brought their drinks, suppressing the desire to limp theatrically, the deformed servant, and fit all the glasses into hands without spilling. They couldn’t be serious. Paris? My Paris? Elegant fruit shops and filterless Gitanes, dark woolen coats, the Bois de Boulogne? “Take the car,” I said. “Definitely.”

“Smart girl,” Marvel said, toasting me with her Shasta. “You always had a good head on your shoulders.”

“You know, we should do Astrid,” Debby said.

Three sets of eyes, all those circles, looking at me. It was unnerving. Invisibility was my normal state in the turquoise house.

They seated me on a stool in the kitchen. Suddenly, I was a valued guest. Was the gooseneck lamp in my face too bright? Did I want something to drink? Linda turned me from side to side. They were examining my pores, touching my skin with tissue to see if I was oily, normal, or dry. I liked being the center of so much attention. It made me feel close to them. My freckles were a matter of concern, the shape of my forehead. The merits of foundations were discussed, samples streaked along my jaw.

“Too ruddy,” Linda said.

The others nodded sagely. I needed correction. Correction was important. Pots and tubes of white and brown. Anything could be corrected. My Danish nose, my square jaw, my fat lips, so far from ideal. And I thought of a mannequin I saw once in a store window, bald and nude, as two men dressed her, laughing and talking under her nippleless breasts. One man, I remembered, had a pincushion stuck to his shaved head.

“You’ve got the perfect face for makeup,” Debby said, applying base with a sponge, turning me back and forth like a sculptor turning the clay.

Of course I did, I was blank, anyone could fill me in. I waited to see who I would be, what they would create on my delicious vacancy. The woman in first class, reading French Vogue and sipping champagne? Catherine Deneuve walking her dog in the Bois, admired by strangers?

Linda outlined my eyes on the inside, rolling back my lids, dabbing tenderly at my tears with the corner of a Q-tip when it made me cry. She gave me four coats of mascara, until I was seeing through a tangle of spiders. I was going to be so beautiful, I could feel it. Marvel redefined my big lips smaller, penciling them inside the lines and filling in Piquant Peach.

“God, she could be Miss America,” Debby said.

Linda said. “No shit. Go look in the mirror.”

“Hair,” Debby said. “Let me get my curling wand.”

“We don’t have to get carried away, now,” Marvel said. She’d suddenly remembered who I was, not Miss America at all, only the kid who did her wash and set.

But Debby overrode her objections with the phrase “total effect.” Heat and the smell of burning hair tangled in the spikes of the curling wand, section by section.

Then I was done. They led me into Marvel’s bedroom by both arms, my eyes closed. My skin crawled with anticipation. Who would I be? “And here, representing the great State of California—Astrid!”

They pulled me in front of the mirror.

My hair curled and frizzed around my shoulders and rose three inches above my scalp. White stripes raced down my forehead and nose like Hindu caste marks. Brown patches appeared under my cheekbones, white on the ridges, dividing my otherwise dead beige face into a paint-by-number kit. Blusher broke out on my cheeks like a rash, my lips reduced to a geisha’s tiny bow. My eyebrows glared in dark wings, protecting the glistening bands of eye shadow, purple, blue, and pink, like a child’s rainbow. I never cried, but now tears sprang unbidden to my eyes, threatening a mud slide if they were to break out of their pool.

“She looks just like Brigitte what’s-her-name, the model.” Linda held me by the shoulders, her face next to mine in the mirror. I tried to smile, they’d been so nice.

Debby’s brown eyes went soft with pride. “We should send Mary Kay her picture. Maybe they’ll give us a prize.”

At the thought of reward, Marvel quickly rummaged in her closet, found her Polaroid, and arranged me in front of the mirror. It was the only picture she ever took of me. You could see the unmade bed, the bureautop clutter. They congratulated themselves and went back out to their sodas and Chex mix, leaving me in front of the mirror, a toddler’s fussed-over Barbie abandoned in the sandbox. I blinked back my tears and forced myself to look in the mirror.

Looking back at me was a thirty-year-old hostess at Denny’s. Anything else I can get you, hon? I could feel this vision burning itself into my soul, burning away Deneuve and Dietrich like acid thrown in my face. The woman in the mirror would not have to orchestrate three different lovers. She would not dance on rooftops in Mexico, fly first class to London over the pole. She was in for varicose veins and a single apartment with cat litter and Lana Turner movies. She would drink by herself with tomatoes dying on the windowsills. She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I’m so lonely, so desperate. I’ll give you whatever you want.

SCHOOL LET OUT at the end of June under a marine layer heavy as wet towels. The pencil-gray days were broken only by the blue flowers in Olivia’s yard. I babysat, ran errands, reread A Spy in the House of Love. I longed to see Olivia, but Marvel kept me working. If I so much as walked outside, she gave me four other things to do. Sometimes I’d see Olivia picking herbs in her garden, and our eyes would meet, but she gave no indication she knew me. She would have been a good secret agent, I thought, and tried to do the same, but after a while, I wondered if it was a good act or if she had forgotten me entirely.

Not one word about me. How are you, Astrid? Are you happy? I miss you. It seemed like years since she’d considered the possibility of losing me. I’d returned to the shadows. My job once again was to share in her triumphs, to snicker at her unfortunate admirers with her, a sort of pocket mirror and studio audience. I realized I was exactly where she wanted me, safely unhappy with Marvel Turlock, a prisoner in turquoise, brewing into an artist, someone she might want to know someday. When all I wanted was for her to see me now, the way she saw me that day at the prison. To want to know me, what I thought, how I felt.

I wrote to her about Olivia, about another way to be in the world. I inserted drawings of Olivia, lying on the couch pulling magic out of the air. You’re not the only beauty in the world, Mother. There is burnished teak as well as alabaster, rippling mahogany as well as silk. And a world of satisfaction where you found only fury and desire. The world parts for Olivia, it lies down at her feet, where you hack through it like a thorn forest.

MARVEL MADE ME sit the kids at the park in the long dull summer afternoons, sometimes not picking us up until dinnertime. I was supposed to buy their snacks and help them on the slides, adjudicate their sandbox wars, push them on the swings. Mostly I sat on the rim of the sandbox with the mothers, who ignored me, each in her own way—the Latina teen mothers importantly, proud of their strollers and made up as formally as Kabuki actors, and the older Anglo moms, plain as pancakes, smoking cigarettes and talking about car trouble, man trouble, son trouble. I sketched the women talking, their heads together and apart. They looked like mourners crouched around the foot of the Cross.

One of those afternoons, I smelled marijuana on the sluggish air and looked around the playground for the source. Over by the parking lot a group of boys sat on a yellow car, doors cocked, their music piercing the dullness of the day. What I wouldn’t give to get high. To be mellow and sympathetic, not jagged and spiteful and ready to smack Justin in the head with his shovel if he whined to me one more time about some kid throwing sand or pushing him off the bars. He was relentless, just like his mother. I tried to remind myself he was only four, but after a while it didn’t seem like any excuse.

I pulled out the letter that had arrived that morning from my mother, unfolded the scrap of notebook paper. At least she was paying attention now.

Mother prescribing her books like medicines. A good dose of Whitman would set me straight, like castor oil. But at least she was thinking of me. I existed once more.

The smell of that pot on the sullen air was driving me crazy. I watched the boys around the yellow car enviously. I would normally go out of my way to avoid boys like that, gangly, pimply groups bonded by crude comments and a posture of entitlement. Reminding me of their ownership of this world. But Olivia would not be afraid of them. She would make magic there. She knew what they wanted, she could give it to them or not. Did I have the nerve?

I turned to the mother of the child playing with Justin. “Could you watch him a second? I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be here,” she sighed, stubbing out her cigarette in the sand.

I carried Caitlin across the grass to where the boys clustered around the car. A man’s world. I saw myself as they would see me, as Ray saw me, a tall pale girl with long floating hair, a shy smile on my big lips, my legs bare in summer cutoffs. I hitched Caitlin up higher on my hip as I came near, they were all watching me. I glanced back to see if Justin’s keeper was looking. She was busy putting sunblock on her kid.

“Mind if I have a hit?” I asked. “I’ve been babysitting all day, I’m desperate.”

A boy with skin that looked like it had been grated handed me the joint. “We saw you get here,” he said. “I’m Brian, that’s PJ, and Big Al. And Mr. Natural.” The boys ducked, nodded. They waited for me to introduce myself, but I didn’t. I could give it to them or not. I liked that.

The pot wasn’t first class, not like Ray’s, which you could smell right through the Baggie. This smelled like burning straw and tasted dry and brown, but it was sweet as sunshine to me. I sucked in the smoke, turning my head away from Caitlin so she wouldn’t get stoned. She squirmed in my arms but I couldn’t set her down, she’d be under the first car that drove by.

“Wanna buy some?” The boy named PJ had dyed his hair blond. His T-shirt said Stone Temple Pilots in orange psychedelic writing.

I had three dollars in my pocket, for ice cream for the kids. “How much?”

The others turned to the chunky boy, Mr. Natural, seated in the passenger seat of the car. “Five a gram,” he said.

I switched Caitlin to the other hip, the bad one, took the joint from the Stoned Temple Pilot. It felt so good to be high. I felt the lid of the pencil-gray sky lift and I could breathe, I didn’t dread the rest of the afternoon now. “I have three.”

“How come I never saw you before? You go to Birmingham?” the chunky boy said, getting out of the car. He had rosy cheeks and wavy brown hair, he looked about twelve.

I shook my head, aware of how he was looking at me, and for once I wasn’t embarrassed. He was interested. It was my currency, my barter goods. I exhaled away from Caitlin, in a way that showed my neck, drawing his eyes where I wanted.

“Got a boyfriend?” he asked.

“Juice,” Caitlin said, tugging on my shirt, pulling the strap off my shoulder. “Assi, juice.”

I changed hips, jiggled her quiet, feeling their eyes stroking the smooth ball of my shoulder. “No,” I told the boy, watching him touch his lips with his fingers.

He leaned against the open car door, foot on the sill, thinking. “Suck my dick, I’ll give you a quarter O-Z.”

The Stoned Pilot laughed. “Shut the fuck up, dickhead,” he told him, turned back to me. “Half,” he said softly. “Half a bag, that’s a lot for head.”

The other boys watched to see what would happen.

I hitched Caitlin high on my hip, looked back at the playground, how far away it was, the swings opposing, like a machine in a factory, the product hurled down the slides. Did I want to? The fat boy bit his lower lip, chapped, unkissed. He was blushing under his light tan, trying so hard to look tough. Suck his dick for half a bag? If anyone had suggested this before, I would have been disgusted. But now my lips could remember holding Ray’s column of vein, jerk, and pulse, soft skin of the head, the salty come. I looked at the fat boy and wondered how it would feel.

Caitlin burrowed herself in my neck, trying to make farts, wet and buzzing, against my skin, laughing to herself. I didn’t know these boys, I would never see them again. The pot made me brave, curious at how far I would go, as if I was somebody else, someone Olivia would be proud of. “Somebody’s got to hold Caitlin. You can’t put her down, she’ll run off in a second.”

“Al’s got four little brothers.”

I gave her to the quiet boy with short cropped hair and straggly beard, followed the fat boy back into the bushes behind the bathrooms. He unbuckled his pants, pushed them down over his hips. I knelt on a bed of pine needles, like a supplicant, like a sinner. Not like a lover. He leaned against the rough stucco wall of the bathroom as I prayed with him in my mouth, his hands in my hair. Just like Miss America.

With Ray it was never like this. Then it was one pleasure after another, mouths, hands, the richness of skin, every surprise. This was the opposite of sex. I felt nothing for this boy, for his body moving. It felt like working. It cut the heart out of making love, turned it into something no more exciting than brushing your teeth. When the boy was done, I spat out the bitter come, wiped my mouth on my shirt. I thought he would walk away, but he gave me his hand, pulled me up. “My name’s Conrad,” he said. He was a foreign taste in my mouth, a scent in my hair. He gave me the half-bag of pot. “If you ever want anything, I’m always around.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said as we walked back to the car and I collected Caitlin. My first trick, I thought, trying out the sound of it.

THROUGH the kitchen window, I watched Olivia emerge from her house, cinnamon and beige silk, hair sleeked back. I was peeling apple slices for Justin and Caitlin’s snack. I watched her climb into the champagne Corvette, back it out, and I understood.

For her, it was a job. She was earning her car, her copper pots, just as much as someone pasting up magazines or delivering mail. These men weren’t lovers, the Rastaman, the BMW. They were customers. The kneeling was just more subtle, the service more discreet, the illusion more substantial, and the payoff no half-bag of dope.

I ANNOUNCED to Marvel that I was starting an exercise program, so I could be ready for the army. I tied on my gym shoes on a cloudy morning, put my hair back, did a couple of jumping jacks, touched my toes, stretched my hamstrings against the fence, the full display for her approval. The army would be a good place, job security, benefits.

Then I ran around the block once and knocked on Olivia’s door.

She was dressed in white jeans and a sweater, loafers. On her it looked sexy, I tried to see why. The shoes weren’t quite school shoes, they were slimmer, with a tassel. The sweater lightly skimmed her body, the neckline showing one shoulder. I had drawn that shoulder, which gleamed as if polished as it slid out from the soft ginger wool. Her hair was caught in a long silver pin, which probably cost more than the pot I’d just earned.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

She invited me in, glanced over my shoulder as she shut the door. On the stereo, a man was singing in French, sexy, half talking. “I’m glad you came,” she said. “I’ve wanted to see you, but I’ve been so busy. Excuse me, I was just cleaning up.” She loaded glasses and plates on a lacquered tray, emptied a crystal ashtray with cigar butts. I wondered which man was the cigar smoker. The Mercedes had been there again. The fan turned slowly, stirring cigar-sour air. She carried the tray to the kitchen, poured some coffee. “Milk?”

The coffee was so strong it didn’t change color when she poured the milk in. “You look different,” she said. We sat down at her dining room table, gilded chairs with harp backs. She pulled out small mats with Dutch tulips for our cups.

I took out the bag of pot from my pocket, put it on the table. “I sucked a fat kid’s dick at the park. He gave me this.”

She held the bag in her hand, in the palm, the fingers lightly cupped around it, and I thought it was the way she would hold a man’s penis. She turned her hand over, knuckles to the table, and shook her head. The two vertical lines scored her brow. “Astrid. That’s not what I meant.”

“I wanted to see how it felt.”

“How did it feel?” she asked softly.

“Not great,” I said.

She handed it back to me. “Roll one, we’ll smoke together.”

I rolled a joint on the elegant mat, a parrot-striped bloom. I wasn’t good, but she didn’t offer to help. While we smoked, I looked around and thought how much come all this must equate to, the framed botanical prints and harp-backed chairs and fat wooden shutters. It must be an ocean. If I were Olivia, I would have nightmares about it at night, a white sea of sperm, and the albino monsters that lived in its depths.

“Do you like having sex?” I asked her. “I mean, do you enjoy it?”

“You enjoy anything you’re good at,” she said. “Like an ice skater. Or a poet.” She got up, stretched, yawned. I could see her slim belly as she lifted her arms. “I’ve got to run an errand, would you like to come?”

I wasn’t sure. Maybe my mother was right, maybe I should run. She could steal my soul. She was already doing it. But who else did I have, what other beauty was there? We agreed to meet down the block, so Marvel wouldn’t see me in her Corvette.

She had the top down, a white polka-dot scarf tied over her hair and around her neck, front and back, Grace Kelly-style. Was there ever a woman so glamorous as Olivia Johnstone? I slid into the passenger seat, so low it was like lying down, buckled my seat belt, keeping my head ducked in case anybody saw me as we sped away.

I fell in love that cloudy afternoon. With the speed and the road and the spin of scenery like a fast film pan. I usually got carsick, but the pot lifted me out of it, and the road and the pines peeled away the gloom I’d been carrying around since the park, leaving nothing but the tenor song of the engine and the wind in my face, Olivia’s dished profile, her big sunglasses, Coltrane’s “Naima” unfolding like a story on the CD player. The slut next door’s got a goddamn Corvette. And I loved Olivia for sharing it with me, this champagne pearl she’d brought up from the depths of the white sea.

We drove down Ventura, up Coldwater Canyon, the twists in the road like the rise and fall of Coltrane’s tenor sax. We were dancing it, embodying it as we climbed past overblown Valley ranch homes, white cinder block pierced ornamentally, black cypresses planted in unimaginative rows and geometrically trimmed, up over the top into Beverly Hills.

Now it was tree ferns and banks of impatiens and houses with two-story front doors, grass the radiant green of pool tables, the gardeners with blowguns the only humans in sight. We were entirely free. No children, no job, no foster mothers, just speed and our beauty and the soulful breath of Coltrane’s sax. Who could touch us.

She valet-parked at a hotel on Rodeo Drive, and we walked past the expensive shops, stopping to look in the windows. We went into a store so fancy it had a doorman. Olivia took a liking to a black crocodile bag, bought it with cash. She wanted to buy me something. She pulled me into a store that had nothing but sweaters, scarves, and knit hats. She held a sweater up against my cheek. The softness was startling. I realized I had not thought enough about the possibilities of physical reality.

“Cashmere.” She smiled, her overbite twinkling. “Like it?”

I sighed. I had seen the price tag.

“Good girl. But not peach.” She handed the sweater back to the shopgirl, an eighteen-year-old who smiled placidly. The store smelled of money, soft as a dream.

“Aqua is pretty,” the girl said, holding a cable knit sweater the color of spring.

“Too obvious,” I said.

Olivia knew what I meant. She found one in French blue, without cables, gave it to me to try on. It turned my eyes blue-berry, brought out the rose in my cheeks. Yet in my drawer, it could pass for something from the Jewish Women thrift store. It cost five hundred dollars. Olivia didn’t blink as she counted out fifties and hundreds. “What’s real is always worth it,” she explained to me. “Look how it’s made.” She showed me the shoulders, the way they were knit together with a separate yoke instead of a seam. “You’ll wear it your whole life.”

What was real. That’s what I learned as we moved from shop to shop. The Georg Jensen silver bangle. The Roblin pottery vase. Stores like churches in worship of the real. The quiet voices as the women handled Steuben glass, Hermes scarves. To own the real was to be real. I rubbed my cheek against my sweater, soft as a blue Persian cat.

She treated me to lunch in a restaurant under yellow-and-white-striped umbrellas, ordered us a meal composed solely of appetizers: oysters, gravlax, carpaccio. Hearts of palm salad. She explained how each dish was prepared as she sipped a glass of cold white wine and tasted first one, then another, putting her fork down between bites. I’d never seen anything so elegant as Olivia eating. As if she had all the time in the world.

“Life should always be like this.” She sighed. “Don’t you agree? Like lingering over a good meal. Unfortunately, most people have no talent for it.” She pointed out my empty water goblet to the white-jacketed busboy. “As soon as they start one thing, they want it to be over with, so they can start on the next.” He got a pitcher and refilled the glass.

“I used to go with a man who took me to the finest restaurants in the city,” Olivia continued. “And after we’d eaten, he’d stand up and say, ‘Now where shall we go?’ And we’d move on to another restaurant, where he’d eat a second complete meal, soup to dessert. Sometimes three in a row.”

She cut a small piece of the gravlax and put it on a piece of black bread, daintly spooned a bit of dill sauce onto it, and ate it like it was the last piece of food in the world. I tried to imitate her, eating so slowly, tasting the raw pink fish and the coarse, sour bread, salt and sugar around the rind, flavors and scents like colors on a palette, like the tones in music.

“A lovely man too. Intelligent, rich as Croesus,” she said, blotting her lips and taking a sip of wine. “But he lived like a tapeworm.” She gazed into her straw-yellow wine, as if the solution to the man’s greed was there. Then she shook her head when it wasn’t. “Enormous man, probably weighed three hundred pounds. A very unhappy person. I felt sorry for him. Poor Mr. Fred.”

I didn’t want to imagine her making love to this three-hundred-pound man, lying under him as he hurriedly thrust into her, so he could go again. “How did you know him?”

She fanned away a bee that was exploring her wine. “I was a loan officer in one of his banks.”

I laughed out loud, picturing Olivia as a bank employee. Nine to five, behind a desk, in gabardine and flat shoes. Eating lunch at the Soup Exchange. “You’re kidding.”

“Sure, what did you think, I was some honeychile walking Van Nuys Boulevard in a bunnyfur jacket? I have an MBA. Oh, I knew all about money, except how to get my hands on some. I was out there making payments on a Honda Accord and keeping my little apartment off Chandler, just like everybody else.”

“And the big man saved you from yourself.”

She sighed. “Poor Mr. Fred. He had a heart attack last year. His brother got everything.” She shrugged her shoulders. “But what do you expect of a man who’ll eat three dinners in a row?”

I SAT AT MARVEL’S, watching them eat. They stared at the television the whole time, raising their forks to their lips like windup toys, oblivious to whether it was tuna casserole or cat food gratine. I’d begun to cook, told Marvel I might want to become a chef, it was a good living for a woman. I was gaining weight. My ribs smoothed into the buttery flesh of my torso. I admired my breasts in the mirror, wished Ray could have seen them, cupped them in his mauled hands. I liked the way my body moved as I walked down the street. Marvel thought it was just my age, filling out, she called it. But that wasn’t it. I had been moving too fast. I had been too hungry to become a woman.