White Oleander

15

ON THE FIRST DAY back at school after winter break, I was given a yellow summons slip during third period. It led to a sour, overweight caseworker waiting in the office with the girls’ vice principal. The vice principal told me to clear my locker out and leave my books at the front desk. She never once looked at my face. The new caseworker said she had my things in the car.

I twirled my combination and emptied the books from my locker. I was stunned, and somehow not. How like Marvel to do this while I was at school, without a word of warning. I was there and then I wasn’t. I would never see any of them again, would never have the chance to tell Olivia good-bye.

The caseworker, Ms. Cardoza, scolded me all the way back into town, down the Ventura Freeway. “Mrs. Turlock told me everything. That you was doing drugs, running around. With little kids in the house. I’m taking you somewhere you’ll learn to act right.” She was an ugly young woman with a broad, rough-skinned face and a set look about the jowls. I didn’t bother to argue with her. I would never speak to anyone ever again.

I thought of the lies Marvel would tell the kids, why I didn’t come home. That I died, or ran off. But no, that wasn’t Marvel, the Hallmark card woman, dyeing her hair behind closed doors. She would think up something completely the opposite, something you could paint on a Franklin Mint plate. That I went to live with my grandma on a farm, where we had ponies and ate ice cream all day.

Though it hurt me to admit it, I realized Olivia would probably be relieved. She’d miss me a little, but it wasn’t her style to miss anyone much. Too many gold badges knocking on her door. She would rather worship sweaters. I wrapped my arms around my waist and slumped against the door. If I had had more energy I would have opened the car door and fallen out under the sixteen-wheeler driving next to us.

THE NEW HOME was in Hollywood, a big wooden Craftsman with a deep eaved porch, too nice for foster care. I wondered what the story was. Ms. Cardoza was excited, she kept opening and closing her handbag. A Latina girl with a long braid let us in, eyed me guardedly. Inside it was dark, the windows covered with heavy curtains. The woodwork gleamed halfway up the walls, smelling of lemon oil.

In a moment, the foster mother appeared, chic and straight-backed, with a dramatic streak in her dark hair. She shook hands with us, and Ms. Cardoza’s eyes shone as she took in Amelia’s fitted suit and high heels. “¿Que pasa con su cam?” the foster mother asked. What happened to my face. The social worker shrugged.

Amelia invited us to sit in the living room. It was beautiful, carved wood and claw-footed chairs, white damask and needlepoint. She served tea from a silver set, and butter cookies on flowered bone china. I put to work all I had learned at Olivia’s, showing her how I could hold my cup and saucer and keep the spoon from falling. They spoke Spanish while I looked into the deodar cedar framing the bay window. It was quiet, no TV. I could hear the little clock on the mantel.

“It’s beautiful, no? Not a dormitory,” Amelia Ramos said with a smile. She sat on the edge of her chair, her legs crossed at the ankle. “This is my home, and I hope you will enjoy becoming part of our life.”

Every once in a while a girl would pass by, cast an inscrutable glance through the doorway, as Amelia signed the papers and explained the rules in her lightly accented English. Each girl cooked and cleaned up one night a week. I would make my bed, shower every other day. The girls took turns doing the laundry and other chores. She was an interior decorator, she explained. She needed the girls to look after themselves. I nodded each time she paused, wondering why she took in girls at all. Maybe the house was too big for her, made her lonely.

OVER THE POLISHED dining table, the other girls spoke in Spanish to each other, laughing in lowered voices, and only stared at me. I was the White Girl. I had been here before, there was nothing you could do about it. Amelia introduced them. Kiki, Lina, Silvana. The girl with the long braid was Micaela, and the wiry, tough-looking girl with a crescent-moon scar on her forehead serving the meal was Nidia Diaz. We ate chiles rellenos, with a salad and corn bread.

“It’s good,” I said, hoping Nidia would stop glaring at me.

“I provide the recipes,” Amelia said. “Some of these girls come to me, they cannot even open a can.” She eyed Nidia and smiled.

Afterward, we took our plates into the kitchen, where Nidia was starting on the dishes. She took my plate and narrowed her eyes at me, but said nothing.

“Come in here, Astrid,” Amelia called. She brought me into the sitting room, more feminine than the living room, with lace-edged tabletops and an old-fashioned couch. She had me sit in the armchair next to hers. She opened a large leather-bound album on the marble-topped coffee table. “This is my home. In Argentina. I had a splendid house there.” There were photos of a pink house with a flagstone courtyard, a dinner party with candlelit tables set up around a rectangular pool. “I could seat two hundred for dinner,” she said.

In the dark interior of the house were a heavy staircase, dark paintings of saints. In one photograph, Amelia in pearls sat in a thronelike chair before a painting of herself, she wore a ribbon diagonally across her ball gown, and flanking her chair were a man, also with ribbons, and a beautiful little boy. “This is my son, Cesar, and my husband.”

I wondered what had happened in Argentina, if it was so great there, what was she doing here in Hollywood? What had happened to her husband, and her little boy? I was about to ask when she turned the page and pointed a lacquered nail at a picture of two girls in tan uniforms kneeling on a lawn. “My maids,” she said, smiling nostalgically. “They were sitting around on their fat culos, so I made them pull weeds out of the lawn.”

She gazed admiringly at the picture of the girls pulling weeds. It gave me the creeps. It was one thing to have somebody pull weeds, but why would anybody take a picture of it? I decided I was better off not knowing.

AT AMELIA’S, my room was large, two beds covered in white flower-sprinkled quilts, and a view into the deodar cedar. My roommate, Silvana, was an older girl, eyebrows plucked to a thin line, lips outlined in lip liner but not filled in. She lay on the bed farther from the door, filing her nails and watching me as I put my things away in the dresser, my boxes in the walk-in closet.

“Last place I slept was a laundry porch,” I said. “This is nice.”

“It’s not what you think,” Silvana said. “And don’t think sucking up to that bitch is going to do you any good. You better side with us.”

“She seems okay,” I said.

Silvana laughed. “Stick around, muchacha.”

In the morning I waited my turn to use the huge, white-tiled bathroom, then dressed and went downstairs. The girls were already leaving for school. “Did I miss breakfast?” I asked.

Silvana didn’t answer, just shouldered her backpack, her eyebrows two indifferent arches. A horn honked, and she ran outside, got into a low-slung purple pickup truck and drove away.

“You like breakfast?” Nidia said, putting on her baseball jacket in the front hall. “It’s in the fridge. We saved it for you.”

Una and Kiki Torrez laughed.

I walked back to the kitchen. The refrigerator was padlocked.

When I went out into the hall again, they were still standing there. “Was it good?” Nidia asked. Her eyes glittered under her moon-scar like a hawk’s, amber-centered.

“Where’s the key?” I asked.

Kiki Torrez, a petite girl with long glossy hair, laughed out loud. “With our lady of the keys. Your friend, the noblewoman.”

“She’s at work now,” said Lina, a tiny Central American with a broad Mayan face. “She’ll be home by six.”

“Adios, Blondie,” Nidia said, holding the door open for them all to go out.

IT DIDN’T TAKE ME long to figure out why the girls called Amelia Cruella De Vil. In the beautiful wooden house, we went hungry all the time. On the weekends, when Amelia was home, we got fed, but during the week, we only had dinner. She kept a lock on the refrigerator, and had the phone and the TV in her room. You had to ask permission to use the phone. Her son, Cesar, lived in a room over the garage. He had AIDS and smoked pot all day. He felt sorry for us, knew how hungry we were, but on the other hand, he didn’t pay rent, so he felt there was nothing he could do.

I sat in my tenth-grade health class at Hollywood High with a searing headache. I couldn’t tell you whether we were studying VD or TB. Words buzzed like flies that would not land, words drifted across the pages of my book like columns of ants. All I could think of was the macaroni and cheese I would make that night for dinner, how I would devour as much of the cheese as I could without getting caught.

While I made the white sauce for the macaroni and cheese, I hid a stick of margarine behind a stack of plates. The girls told me right off that whoever had kitchen duty stole food for everybody, and if I didn’t, they could make life hell for me. After the dishes, I carried it up to my room inside my shirt. Once we could hear Amelia in her room talking on the phone to a friend, they all came into our room and we ate the whole stick. I divided it into cubes with my knife. We ate it slowly, licking it, like candy. I could feel the calories enter my bloodstream, undiluted, making me high.

“Eighteen and out,” Nidia said as she licked her fingers. “If I don’t kill that bitch first.”

But Amelia liked me. She had me sit next to her and finish the food on her plate when she was done eating. If I was really lucky, she invited me into the sitting room after dinner to talk about decorating, look at her fabric swatches and wallpaper patterns. I nodded to her endless anecdotes about aristocratic Argentina while scarfing down tea and butter cookies. The girls resented my collaborating with the enemy, and I didn’t blame them. They didn’t speak to me at school or on the street in the long hungry lockout afternoons before she got home. Nobody had a key—we might steal something, break into her room, use the phone.

WHAT CAN I tell you about that time in my life? Hunger dominated every moment, hunger and its silent twin, the constant urge to sleep. School passed in a dream. I couldn’t think. Logic fled, and memory drained away like motor oil. My stomach ached, my period stopped. I rose above the sidewalks, I was smoke. The rains came and I was sick and after school I had nowhere to go.

I drifted the streets of Hollywood. Everywhere were homeless kids, huddled in doorways, asking for dope, change, a cigarette, a kiss. I looked into their faces and saw my own. On Las Palmas, a girl with half her hair shaved started following me, calling me Wendy. “Don’t you walk away from me, Wendy,” she yelled after me. I opened my knife in my pocket, and when she grabbed the back of my jacket, I turned and stuck it under her chin.

“I’m not Wendy,” I said.

Her face was streaked with tears. “Wendy,” she whispered.

Another day I found myself walking west instead of east, then north, zigzagging through wet side streets, drinking the resinous smells of eucalyptus and pittosporum and leftover oranges on the trees. Water squished in my shoes, my face burned with fever. I knew vaguely I should get out of the rain, dry my feet, prevent pneumonia, but I felt a strange pull to go north and west. I picked an orange from somebody’s tree, it was sour as vinegar, but I needed the vitamin C.

It was not until I emerged onto Hollywood Boulevard that I realized where I was going. I stood in front of our old apartment house, dingy white streaked with rain, water dripping from the bananas and the palms and the glossy oleanders. This was where our plane had crashed. I saw our windows, the ones that Barry had broken. Michael’s windows. There was a light on in his apartment.

My heart came to life for a moment, beating with hope as I studied the names by the buzzers, imagining him opening the door, his surprise, he would smell of Johnnie Walker, and the warmth of his apartment, the ceiling crumbling, the piles of Variety, a great movie on the TV, how welcome I’d be. Masaoka, Benoit/Rosnik, P. Henderson. But no McMillan, no Magnussen.

I knew by my disappointment what I had really expected. That we would still be here. That I could go in and find my mother writing a poem, and I could wrap myself in her quilt and this would just be a dream I could tell her about. I was not really a girl one step from homeless, eating scraps off Amelia’s plates. In that apartment, my mother had never met Barry Kolker, and prison was something she’d read about in the papers. I would brush her hair, smelling of violets, and swim again in the hot nights. We would rename the stars.

But we were gone. Michael was gone. The door was locked, and the pool was green with algae, its surface pimpled with rain.

I LEANED AGAINST the wall of the lunch court at Hollywood High, fevered and trying not to watch the other kids eat. A girl looked into her lunch bag, made a face, and threw away the offending meal. I was shocked. Of course, she would have a snack waiting when she got home. I wanted to smack her. Then I remembered The Art of Survival. When your plane crashed, you drank radiator water, you clubbed your sled dogs. This was no time to be fastidious.

I walked up to the garbage can and looked inside. I could see her brown paper bag on top of the trash. It stank, they never washed out the cans, but I could do this. I pretended I had dropped something in the garbage, and grabbed the lunch sack. It held a tuna sandwich with pickle relish on buttered white bread. The crusts were cut off. There were carrot sticks and even a can of apple juice fortified with vitamin C.

Compared with clubbing your sled dogs, this was easy. I learned to watch when the bell rang, when everybody threw their lunches away and rushed back to class. I was always tardy fifth period. But my hands didn’t shake anymore.

Then one day I got busted. A girl pointed me out to her friend. “Look at that nasty girl. Eating garbage.” And they all turned to look at me. I could see myself in their eyes, my scarred face, gobbling up a thrown-away yogurt with my finger. I would have stopped going to school, but I wouldn’t have known where else to eat.

I found a library where I could safely pass the afternoons, looking at pictures in art books and sketching. I couldn’t read anymore, the words wouldn’t stay still. They drifted down the page, like roses on wallpaper. I drew samba figures on lined notebook paper, copied Michelangelo’s muscular saints and Leonardo’s wise Madonnas. I drew a picture of myself eating out of the garbage, furtive, with both hands, like a squirrel, and sent it to my mother. I got a letter back from her cellmate.

Why make it harder, Lydia? Because it was her fault I was there. I would spare her nothing.

My mother’s reply was more practical. She ordered me to call Children’s Services every day and yell my head off until they changed my placement. Her writing was big and dark and emphatic. I could feel her rage, I warmed myself by it. I needed her strength, her fire. “Don’t you let them forget about you,” she said.

But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe.

AS I HAD NO MONEY, I panhandled in the liquor store parking lot and the supermarket, asking men for change so I could call social services. Men always took pity on me. A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. They were nice men who smelled good, men from offices who looked like they’d have been good for a fifty. But I didn’t want to start. I knew how it would play. I’d just buy a bunch of food and then be hungry again and also a whore. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.

AMELIA FOUND OUT I’d been asking for a new placement. I cringed on the uncomfortable wooden-edged sofa in the sitting room as she paced back and forth, ranting, her hands cutting the air. “How dare you tell such outrageous lies about my house! I treat you like my own daughter, and this is how you repay me? With these lies?” The whites of her eyes showed all around the black irises, and spittle accumulated in the corners of her thin lips. “You don’t like my house? I send you to Mac. See how well you eat there. You’re lucky I allow you to sit at the table with the other girls, with that hideous face. In Argentina you would not be allowed to walk through the front door.” My face. I felt my scars throb along my jaw.

“What do you know about a noble home? Just a common piece of street garbage. Mother in prison. You know, you stink like garbage. When you come into a room, the girls hold their breath. You soil my home. Your presence insults me. I don’t want to look at you.” She turned away, pointed to the polished stairway. “Go to your room and stay there.”

I stood but hesitated. “What about dinner?”

She turned on her patent leather heel, and laughed. “Maybe tomorrow.”

I lay on my bed in the beautiful bedroom smelling of cedar, my stomach clawing inside me like a cat in a sack. During the day, all I wanted to do was sleep, but at night, images of my days returned like a slide show. Did I really smell? Was I garbage, hideous?

I heard Silvana come in, settle on her bed. “You thought you were something special, eh? Some hot shit. Now you see, you’re no better than us. You better shut up, or you’ll end up at Mac.” She tossed a dinner roll onto my blanket.

I ate it in two bites. It was so good, I almost cried. “What’s Mac?” I asked.

I heard her exasperated sigh. “Mac’s where they put you when you got no place to go. You won’t last a day. They’ll eat you for breakfast, white girl.”

“Least they get breakfast,” I said.

Silvana chuckled in the dark.

A car went by outside, its headlights painting the ceiling in moving shadows. “Were you ever there?” I asked.

“Nidia,” she said. “Even she said it was tough, and she’s a loca. Better shut up and take it like everybody else. Remember, eighteen and out.”

But I was only fifteen.

NOW KIKI TORREZ was the pet, the one who sat on Amelia’s right and ate scraps off her plate like a dog. I was both envious and disgusted. It was Kiki who turned the pages of the Argentine scrapbooks and ate butter cookies, while I washed Amelia’s dirty underwear by hand in the sink, scrubbed her bathtub, ironed her clothes and her lace-edged linens, and if I got any idea to ruin anything out of spite, then no dinner.

She played us off one another. I stole a can of yams one night, and she made Kiki tell her who did it. I lost more weight, my ribs stuck out like the staves of a boat. I was beginning to understand how one human being could kill another.

“You should take in girls,” I heard her tell her friend Constanza one day while I was polishing the silver. “It’s easy money. You can remodel. I’m remodeling the bathroom next.”

I polished the intricate coils of the fork handle with a toothbrush. I’d done it yesterday, but she didn’t like that there was still tarnish in the crevices, so I had to redo them. I would have liked to plant it in her gut. I could have eaten her flesh raw.

Finally in the darkness of March, after weeks of near-daily phone calls, Ms. Cardoza dumped me and I got a new caseworker, an angel of the Lord called Joan Peeler. She was young, wore black, and had long hair dyed rock’n’roll red. She had four silver rings on each hand. She looked more like a poet than a government drone. When it was time to go for our visit, I asked if she knew any coffeehouses.

She took me to one on Vermont. We ducked in past a few outside tables occupied by shivering smokers trying to stay dry, and into the warm, humid interior. Immediately, I was overcome by memories, the black walls and fragrance of hippie soup, the table by the cash register cluttered with handbills and flyers and free newspapers. Even the laughably ugly paintings in thick pigments seemed familiar—green women with long breasts and vampire teeth, men with baroque erections. And I could remember my mother’s voice, her irritation when the roar of the cappuccino machine interrupted her reading, her books stacked on the table where I drew and took the money when someone bought one.

I wanted her back. I was overwhelmed with a need to hear her low, expressive voice. I wanted her to say something funny and cruel about the art, or tell a story about one of the other poets. I wanted to feel her hand on my hair, stroking me while she spoke.

Joan Peeler ordered peach tea. I took strong coffee with cream and sugar and the biggest pastry, a blueberry scone shaped like a heart. We sat at a table where we could see the street, the funereal umbrellas, hear the soft hiss of cars through puddles. She opened my case file on the sticky tabletop. I tried to eat slowly, to enjoy the buttery biscuit and the whole blueberries, but I was too hungry. I finished half of it before she even looked up.

“Ms. Cardoza recommended you not be moved,” my new caseworker said. “She says the home is perfectly adequate. She says you have an attitude problem.”

I could picture her writing it, Ms. Cardoza, her skin muddy with makeup applied like cake frosting. She never once took me out for a visit, always spent the whole time talking to Amelia in Spanish over plates of butter cookies and yerbabuena tea in matching flowered cups and saucers. She was so impressed by Amelia and the big house, the sparkling silver. All that remodeling. She never wondered where the money came from. Six girls bought a lot of remodeling, even antiques, especially if you didn’t feed them.

I glanced up at a drippy, heavy painting of a woman lying on a bed, her legs spread, snakes crawling out of her vagina. Joan Peeler craned her neck around to see what I was looking at.

“Did she say why I asked to be moved?” I licked powdered sugar off my fingers.

“She said you complained about the food. And that Mrs. Ramos restricts use of the telephone. She found you bright but spoiled.”

I laughed out loud, pulled up my sweater to show her my ribs. The men across the aisle looked too, a writer with a portable computer, a student making notes on a legal pad. Seeing if I’d pull it up any higher. Not that it mattered, I didn’t have much on top anymore. “We’re starving,” I said, covering myself again.

Joan Peeler frowned, pouring tea through a wicker strainer into a chipped cup. “Why don’t the other girls complain?”

“They’re afraid of a worse placement. She says if we complain she’ll send us to Mac.”

Joan put her strainer down. “If what you say is true and we can prove it, she can have her license revoked.”

I imagined how it would really play. Joan started her investigation, got transferred to the San Gabriel Valley, and I lost my chance to have a young caseworker who still got excited about her clients. “That could take a long time. I need out now.”

“But what about the other children? Don’t you care what happens to them?” Joan Peeler’s eyes were large and disappointed in me, ringed in dark liner outside the lids.

I thought of the other girls, quiet Micaela, Lina, little Kiki Torrez. They were as hungry as I was. And the girls who came after us, girls who right now didn’t even know the word foster, what about them? I should want to close Amelia down. But it was hard for me to picture those girls. All I knew was, I was starving and I had to get myself out of there. I felt terrible that I would want to save myself and not them. It wasn’t how I wanted to think of myself. But at bottom, I knew they’d do the same. No one was going to worry about me if they had a chance to get out. I’d feel the wind as they hit the door. “I’ve stopped having my period,” I said. “I eat out of the trash. Don’t ask me to wait.” Reverend Thomas said that in hell, the sinners were indifferent to the suffering of others, it was part of damnation. I hadn’t understood that until now.

She bought me another pastry, and I made a sketch of her on the back of one of her papers, drew her hair a little less stringy, overlooked the zit on her chin, spaced her gray eyes a bit better. I dated it and gave it to her. A year ago I would have felt a panic at being thought heartless. Now I just wanted to eat regularly.

JOAN PEELER said she had never come across a kid like me, she wanted to have me tested. I spent a couple of days filling out forms with a fat black pencil. Sheep is to horse as ostrich is to what. I’d been through this before, when we came back from Europe and they thought I was retarded. I wasn’t tempted to draw pictures on the computer cards this time. Joan said the results were significant. I should be going to a special school, I should be challenged, I was beyond tenth grade, I should be in college already.

She started visiting me weekly, sometimes twice a week, taking me out for a good meal on the county. Fried chicken, pork chops. Half-pound hamburgers at restaurants where all the waiters were actors. They brought us extra onion rings and sides of cole slaw.

During these meals, Joan Peeler told me about herself. She was really a screenwriter, social work was just her day job. Screenwriter. I imagined my mother’s sneer. Joan was writing a screenplay about her experiences as a caseworker for DCS. “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. It’s incredible.” Her boyfriend, Marsh, was also a screenwriter; he worked for Kinko’s Copies. They had a white dog named Casper. She wanted to win my trust so I would tell her things about my life to include in her screenplay. Research, she called it. She was hip, working for the county, she knew where it was at, I could tell her anything.

It was a game. She wanted me to strip myself bare, I lifted my long sleeve to the elbow, let her see a few of my dogbite scars. I hated her and needed her. Joan Peeler never ate a stick of margarine. She never begged for quarters in a liquor store parking lot to make a phone call. I felt like I was trading pieces of myself for hamburgers. Strips of my thigh to bait the hook. While we talked, I sketched naked Carnival dancers wearing elaborate masks.