White Oleander

16

JOAN PEELER found me a new placement. The girls pointedly ignored me as Joan helped me carry my stuff out to her red dented Karmann Ghia with bumper stickers that said, Love Your Mother, Move to the Light, Friends Don’t Let Friends Vote Republican. Silvana sniffed that it was because I was white, I got special treatment. Maybe she was right. She probably was. It wasn’t fair at all. It wasn’t. But that March day, one of those perfect March days in L.A. when every photographer in town was out scrambling for shots of the city with a bluebird sky and white-capped mountains and hundred-mile views, I didn’t care why. All I cared was that I was leaving.

There was snow on Baldy, and you could see every palm tree on Wilshire Boulevard five miles away. Joan Peeler played a Talking Heads tape for the drive.

“You’ll like these people, Astrid,” she said as we drove west on Melrose, past body shops and pupuserias. “Ron and Claire Richards. She’s an actress and he does something with television.

“Do they have kids?” I asked. Hoping they didn’t. No more babysitting, or 99-cent gifts when the two-year-old gets a ride-in Barbie car.

“No. In fact, they’re looking to adopt.”

That was a new one, something I never considered. Adoption. The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box. I didn’t know what to think. We passed Paramount Studios, the big triple-arched gate, parking kiosk, people riding around on fat-tired bicycles. The longing in her eyes. “Next year, I’ll be in there,” Joan said. Sometimes I didn’t know who was younger, her or me.

I handled the word adoption in my mind like it was radioactive, saw my mother’s face, pulpy and blind in sunken-cheeked fury.

Joan drove through the strip of funky Melrose shops west of La Brea, with shops of used boots and toys for grown-ups, turned south onto a quiet side street, into an old neighborhood of stucco bungalows and full-growth sycamores with chalky white trunks and leaves like hands. We parked in front of one, and I followed Joan to the door. An enamel plaque under the doorbell read The Richards in script. Joan rang the doorbell.

The woman who answered the door reminded me of Audrey Hepburn. Dark hair, long neck, wide radiant smile, about thirty. Her cheeks were flushed as she waved us in. “I’m Claire. We’ve been waiting for you.” She had an old-fashioned kind of voice, velvety, her words completely enunciated, ing instead of in’, the t crisp, precise.

Joan carried my suitcase. I had my mother’s books and Uncle Ray’s box, my Olivia things in a bag.

“Here, let me help you,” the woman said, taking the bag, setting it on the coffee table. “Put that down anywhere.”

I put my things next to the table, looked around the low-ceilinged living room painted a pinkish white, its floor stripped to reddish pine planks. I liked it already. There was a painting over the fireplace, a jellyfish on a dark blue background, penetrated with fine bright lines. Art, something painted by hand. I couldn’t believe it. Someone bought a piece of art. And a wall of books with worn spines, CDs, records, and tapes. The free-form couch along two walls looked comfortable, a blue, red, and purple woven design, reading lamp in the center. I was afraid to breathe. This couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be for me. She was going to change her mind.

“There are just a few things we need to go over,” Joan said, sitting down on the couch, opening her briefcase. “Astrid, could you excuse us?”

“Make yourself at home,” Claire Richards said to me, smiling, reaching out in a gesture of gift. “Please, look around.”

She sat down with Joan, who opened my file, but she kept smiling at me, too much, like she was worried what I’d think of her and her home. I wished I could tell her she had nothing to worry about.

I went into the kitchen. It was small, tiled red and white, with a pearly-topped table and chrome chairs. A real Leave It to Beaver kitchen, decorated with a salt and pepper shaker collection. Betty Boops and porcelain cows and sets of cacti. It was a kitchen to drink cocoa in, to play checkers. I was afraid of how much I wanted this.

I walked out into the small backyard, bright with wide flowerbeds and pots on a wooden deck, a weeping Chinese elm. There was a flying goose windmill, and red poinsettia grew against the house’s white wall in the sun. Kitsch, I heard my mother’s voice in my ear. But it wasn’t, it was charming. Claire Richards was charming, with her wide love-me smile. Her bedroom, which backed up to the deck through open French doors, was charming. The quilt on the low pine double bed, the armoire, the hope chest, and the rag rug.

As I moved back into the hall, I could see them, heads together over the coffee table, looking at my file. “She’s had an incredibly hard time of it,” Joan Peeler was telling my new foster mother. “She was shot at one foster home . . .”

Claire Richards shook her head in disbelief, that anyone could be so awful as to shoot a child.

The bathroom would be my favorite room, I could tell that already. Tiled aqua and rose, the original twenties ceramic, a frosted glass enclosure on the tub, a swan swimming between cattails. There was something deeply familiar about the swan. Had we lived somewhere with swan-etched glass like this? Bottles and soaps and candles nestled on the bath tray that stretched between the two sides of the tub. I opened containers and smelled and rubbed things on my arms. Luckily the scars were fading, Claire Richards wouldn’t have to see the glaring red weals, she seemed the sensitive type.

They were still discussing my case as I moved to the front bedroom. “She’s very bright, as I’ve said, but she’s missed a lot of school—all the moving, you understand—” “Maybe some tutoring,” Claire Richards said. My room. Soft pine twin beds, in case of sleepovers. Thin, old-fashioned patchwork quilts, real handmade quilts edged in eyelet lace. Calico half curtains, more eyelet. Pine desk, bookcase. A Dürer etching of a rabbit in a neat pinewood frame. It looked scared, every hair plain. Waiting to see what would happen. I sat down on the bed. I couldn’t picture myself filling this room, inhabiting it, imposing my personality here.

Joan and I said our tearful good-byes, complete with hugs. “Well,” Claire Richards said brightly after the social worker had gone. I was sitting next to her on the free-form couch. She clutched her hands around her knees, smiled. “Here you are.” Her teeth were the blue-white of skim milk, translucent. I wished I could put her at ease. Although it was her house, she was more nervous than I was. “Did you see your room? I left it plain so you could put your own things up. Make it yours.”

I wanted to tell her I wasn’t what she expected. I was different, she might not want me. “I like the Dürer.”

She laughed, a short burst, clapped her hands together. “Oh, I think we’re going to get along fine. I’m only sorry Ron couldn’t be here. My husband. He’s in Nova Scotia shooting this week, he won’t be back until next Wednesday. But what can you do. Would you like some tea? Or a Coke? I bought Coke, I didn’t know what you’d drink. We also have juice, or I could make you a smoothie—”

“Tea is fine,” I said.

I NEVER SPENT more time with anyone than I spent with Claire Richards the week that followed. I could tell she’d never been around kids. She took me with her to the dry cleaner’s, the bank, like she was afraid to leave me alone for a moment, as if I were five and not fifteen.

For a week, we ate out of paper cartons and jars with foreign writing on the labels from the Chalet Gourmet. Soft runny wedges of cheese, crusty baguettes, wrinkly Greek olives. Dark red proscuitto and honeydew melon, rose-scented diamonds of baklava. She didn’t eat much, but urged me to finish the roast beef, the grapefruit sweet as an orange. After three months with Cruella, I didn’t need urging.

We sat over our living room picnics and I told her stories about my mother, about the homes, avoiding anything too ugly, too extreme. I knew how to do this. I told her about my mother, but only the good things. I wasn’t a complainer, I wouldn’t end up saying bad things about you, Claire Richards.

She showed me her photo albums and scrapbooks. I didn’t recognize her in the pictures. She was very shy, I could hardly imagine her in front of an audience, but I saw from her albums that in character, she didn’t even resemble her normal self. She sang, she danced, she wept on her knees with a veil over her head. She laughed in a low-cut blouse, a sword in her hand.

“That’s Threepenny Opera,” she said. “We did it at Yale.”

She was Lady Macbeth, before that the daughter in ’Night, Mother. Catherine in Suddenly, Last Summer.

She didn’t act much anymore. She slid her garnet heart pendant along its chain, tucked it under her ripe lower lip. “I get so tired of it. You spend hours getting ready, drag yourself to the call, where they look at you for two seconds and decide you’re too ethnic. Too classic. Too something.”

“Too ethnic?” Her wide pale forehead, her glossy hair.

“It means brunette.” She smiled. One front tooth was crooked, it crossed just slightly over the other one. “Too small means breasts. Classic means old. It’s not a very nice business, I’m afraid. I still go out, but it’s an exercise in futility.”

I wiped the last of the Boursin cheese out of the container with my finger. “Why do it then?”

“What, and give up show business?” She laughed so easily, when she was happy, but also when she was sad.

THE NEW Beverly Cinema was right around the corner from her house. They were playing King of Hearts and Children of Paradise, and we bought a giant popcorn and laughed and cried and laughed at each other crying. I used to go there all the time with my mother, but the movies were different. She didn’t like weepy films. She liked to quote D. H. Lawrence: “Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got.” Hers were grim European films—Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bergman—films where everybody died or wished they had. Claire’s movies were lovely dreams. I wanted to crawl inside them, live in them, a pretty mad girl in a tutu. Gluttonous, we went back and saw them again the next night. My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.

At night I lay awake in my bed with the white eyelet ruffle, looking at the Dürer rabbit. It was bound to turn wrong. Joan Peeler was going to tell me it was just a mistake, that they’d changed their minds, they wanted a three-year-old. They’d decided to wait another couple of years. I worried about Claire’s husband. I didn’t want him to come home, take her away from me. I wanted it to always be like it was, the two of us in the living room eating pâté de foie gras and strawberries for dinner and listening to Debussy records, talking about our lives. She wanted to know all about me, what I was like, who I was. I worried, there wasn’t really much to tell. I had no preferences. I ate anything, wore anything, sat where you told me, slept where you said. I was infinitely adaptable. Claire wanted to know things like, did I like coconut soap or green apple? I didn’t know. “No, you have to decide,” she said.

So I became a user of green apple soap, of chamomile shampoo. I preferred to have the window open when I slept. I liked my meat rare. I had a favorite color, ultramarine blue, a favorite number, nine. But sometimes I suspected Claire was looking for more than there was to me.

“What was the best day of your life?” she asked me one afternoon as we lay on the free-form couch, her head on one armrest, mine on the other. Judy Garland sang on the stereo, “My Funny Valentine.”

“Today,” I said.

“No.” She laughed, throwing her napkin at me. “From before.”

I tried to remember, but it was like looking for buried coins in the sand. I kept turning things over, cutting myself on rusty cans, broken beer bottles hidden there, but eventually I found an old coin, brushed it off. I could read the date, the country of origin.

“It was when we were living in Amsterdam. A tall thin house by the canal. There was a steep twisted staircase, and I was always afraid of falling.” Dark green canal water and rijsttafel. Water rats as big as opossums. The thick smell of hashish in the coffeehouses. My mother always stoned.

“I remember, it was a sunny day, and we ate sandwiches of raw hamburger and onions, standing up at a corner cafe, and my mother sang this cowboy song: ‘Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies.’ ” It was the only memory I had of Amsterdam being sunny.

Claire laughed, a sound like bells, drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them, gazing at me in a way I could have bottled and stored like a great wine.

“We sat in the sun overlooking the canal, and she said, ‘Look, Astrid, watch this.’ And she waved at the people passing by on a glass sightseeing boat. And all the passengers waved back. They thought we were Dutch, see, welcoming them to our city. That was my best day.” The sun and the herring gulls and all those people waving, thinking we were from there, that we belonged.

At the other end of the couch, Claire sighed, unfolding her legs, smiling nostalgically. She didn’t see who I had been then, a thin, lonely child, warmed by the mistaken thought that I belonged. She saw only the childish fun.

“You’ve been everywhere, haven’t you.”

I had, but it hadn’t done me much good.

THE DAY Ron was expected home from Nova Scotia, Claire threw out all the take-out packages, cleaned the kitchen, and did three loads of laundry. The house was fragrant with cooking and Emmylou Harris sang something about bandits in Mexico. Claire had rubber gloves on, she was pulling meat off a chicken that was still hot, wearing a red-and-white-checked apron and lipstick. “I’m making paella, what do you think of that?”

It made me anxious. I liked the way it was, we’d settled into a routine, and now it was being thrown off by the part I didn’t yet know, the part that could change everything for me. Already I resented her husband, and I hadn’t even met him. But I vacuumed the living room, helped her make their bed with fresh sheets printed with falling roses, red and white. “Red and white are the marriage colors,” Claire explained.

She opened the French doors to the garden, blooming vibrantly in the April sun. Her hands lingered and smoothed the white quilt. I knew she wanted to be in this bed with him, making love with him. I secretly hoped he would miss his plane, get into an accident on the way to the airport. I was unnerved by her tremulous anticipation. She reminded me of a certain kind of rose she grew in the garden, called Pristine. It was white with a trace of pink around the outside, and when you picked it, the petals all fell off.

I didn’t know why he had to come back now. I was having such a good time. I’d never been such a source of interest. I certainly didn’t want to share this with some husband, some Ed on the couch. Even an Uncle Ray would upset the wonderful balance.

At about six, his car pulled up in the driveway, a small silver Alfa Romeo. He got out, slung a hanging bag over his shoulder, removed a duffel and an aluminum briefcase, the gray of his hair catching the late sun. I stood uneasily on the porch as she ran to him. They kissed, and I had to look away. Didn’t she know how easily this could go bad, wasn’t she afraid?

WE ATE PAELLA outside on the patio under a string of lights shaped like chili peppers, Emmylou singing in the background, the sweetheart of the rodeo. Mosquitoes whined. Claire lit citronella candles, and Ron told us about the assignment he’d gone to Halifax to film, a story about a haunted bar. He was a segment producer on a show about the weird and occult. Evidently the ghost nearly smothered a customer to death last year in the men’s room.

“It took us three hours to get him back in there. Even with the film crew, he almost chickened out. He knew it was going to try to finish him off.”

“What would you have done if it had?” Claire asked.

Ron stretched his legs out on the bench in front of him, hands clasped behind his head. “I’d have sicced the Tidy Bowl man on it.”

“Very funny.” Her face was the shape of a perfect candy-box heart, but there was a haze of mistrust over her features.

“I could try Vanish.”

As they joked, I tried to see what Claire found so great about him. He was attractive but not stunning—medium height, trim, small features, closely shaven. He brushed his steel-gray hair back without a part. He wore rimless glasses and his cheeks were rosy for a man’s. Hazel eyes, hands smooth with trimmed nails, smooth wedding band. Everything about Ron was smooth, calm, underplayed. He told a story, but it didn’t matter if we liked it or not, not like Barry, looking for applause. He didn’t overwhelm you. He didn’t seem to need anything.

She took his plate, scraped the scraps onto hers, stacked it underneath, reaching for mine. “If you don’t watch out, you could be the one to vanish.” She said it lightly, but the timing was off.

“The La Brea Vortex,” he said.

The phone rang and Ron went through the open French doors to answer it. We saw him lie down on the white quilt, pick at his toenails as he talked. Claire stopped clearing the table, and her face blurred, resolved, blurred. She stood at the picnic table fiddling with the plates, with the scraps and silverware, trying to hear what he was saying.

He hung up and came back to the table. Her shadows swept back by his sun.

“Work?” Claire asked, as if it made no difference.

“Jeffrey wanted to come over and talk about a script. I said no.” He reached out and took her hand. I couldn’t stand to see how she flushed with pleasure.

Now he remembered that I was still there, playing with some saffron rice from the paella on the tabletop, making an orange spiral. “We’ve got some catching up to do.” He was so smooth. I could imagine him getting some lonely Ouija board reader to confess her conversations with the dead husband on camera, holding her gnarled hand in his smooth one, the smooth gold wedding band, his calm voice saying, “Go on.”

She talked some about what we’d been doing, that she’d signed me up at Fairfax High, that we’d gone to the movies and a jazz concert at the art museum. “Astrid’s quite an artist,” she said. “Show him what you’ve been doing.”

Claire had bought me a set of Pelikan watercolors in a big black case, a book of thick-textured paper. I’d been painting the garden, the droop of the Chinese elm, the poinsettias against the white wall. Spires of delphinium, blush of roses. Copies of the Dürer rabbit. Claire practicing ballet in the living room. Claire with a glass of white wine. Claire, her hair up in a turbaned towel. I didn’t want to show them to Ron. They were too revealing.

“Show him,” Claire said. “They’re beautiful.”

It irked me that she wanted me to show him. I thought they were something between us, from me to her. I didn’t know him. Why did she want me to? Maybe to prove they’d made the right decision in taking me. Maybe to show what a good job she was doing with me.

I went and got the big pad, handed it to Ron, and then went out in the dark garden and kicked the heads off the stray Mexican evening primroses that crept into the lawn. I heard him turning the pages. I couldn’t watch.

“Look at this.” He laughed. “And this. She’s a natural. They’re terrific,” he called out to me in the dark. I kept kicking the heads off the primroses.

“She’s embarrassed,” Claire said. “Don’t be embarrassed, Astrid. You have a gift. How many people can say that?”

The only one I knew was behind bars.

A cricket or night bird was making squeaky sounds like a hamster going around a wheel. On the patio, under the chili lights, Claire described making the paella, as if it were a Keystone comedy, working up an enthusiasm that made my stomach ache. I looked at Ron, in his white shirt washed with a trace of pink-orange from the lights, laughing along with her. His arms crossed behind his head, his pleasant face laughing, his clean foot in its sandal perched on his jean-covered knee. Why don’t you go away, Ron? There were witch doctors waiting to be interviewed, tortilla miracles to be documented. But the sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.

“Astrid, are you still there?” Claire called out to me, peering into the darkness.

“Just thinking,” I said, pulling a sprig of mint from under the hose bib, crushing it in my hand. Thinking that tonight they would lie together in the pine bed with the rose sheets, and I would be alone again. Women always put men first. That’s how everything got so screwed up.

AFTER MY WEEK alone with Claire, I reluctantly returned to school, to finish out tenth grade at Fairfax High. I was happy enough not to have to go back to Hollywood, where they had seen me eating out of the garbage. This was a whole new start. At Fairfax I was blissfully invisible again. I came home from school each day to find Claire waiting for me with a sandwich and a glass of iced tea, a smile, questions. At first it seemed weird and unnecessary. I had never come home to someone waiting for me before, someone looking forward to the sound of my key in the door, not even when I was a child. It felt like she was going to accuse me of something, but that wasn’t it. She wanted to know about my composition on Edgar Allan Poe and my illustrations on the chambers of the heart and the circulation of the blood. She was sympathetic when I got a D on an algebra test.

She asked about the other kids, but I didn’t have much to tell. At the best of times, I was never very sociable. School was a job, I did it and left. I had no intention of joining the Spanish club or Students Against Drunk Driving. I even passed by the stoner crowd without a glance. I had Claire now, waiting for me. She was all I needed.

“Did you have a nice day at school?” she’d ask, drawing up a chair at the little red-and-white kitchen table.

She had some mistaken notion that Fairfax was like high school where she grew up in Connecticut, despite the clear presence of metal detectors at every entrance. I didn’t tell her about the free-for-alls on the school yard, muggings on the bus. A girl burned a cigarette hole into the back of another girl’s shirt at nutrition, right in front of me, looking at me, as if daring me to stop her. I saw a boy being threatened with a knife in the hallway outside my Spanish class. Girls talked about their abortions in gym class. Claire didn’t need to know about that. I wanted the world to be beautiful for her. I wanted things to work out. I always had a great day, no matter what.

ON SATURDAY, Ron mowed the lawn, cutting the heads off the primroses, and then settled into reading some scripts. We had lox and bagels for breakfast, and Claire went to her ballet class. I sat with my paints next to Ron at the table. I was getting used to him. He didn’t try to be any friendlier than I wanted.

“How does Claire seem to you?” he asked all of a sudden. He looked at me over the tops of his glasses like an old man.

“Fine,” I said.

But I had some idea what he was talking about. Claire paced at night, I heard her bare feet on the floorboards. She talked as if silence would crush her if she didn’t prop it up with a steady stream of sound. She cried easily. She took me to the observatory and started crying in the star show. The April constellations.

“You have my pager number, you know. You can always reach me.”

I kept painting the way the poinsettia looked against the white wall of the house. Like a shotgun blast.

CLAIRE PUSHED back the muslin curtain, glanced out at the street. She was waiting for Ron. It was still light out, moving toward summer, a six o’clock honeyed twilight.

“I think Ron is having an affair,” she said.

I was surprised. Not at the thought—I knew the reason she would stop talking when he was on the phone, the way she would gently probe him to discover his whereabouts. But that she would say it aloud indicated a progression of her doubts.

I thought about Ron. His smoothness. Sure, he could get women anytime he wanted. But he worried too much about Claire. If he was messing around, why would he care? And he worked hard, long hours, always came home tired. He wasn’t that young. I didn’t think he had the energy.

“He’s just working,” I said.

Claire peered out into the street from behind the curtain. “So he says.”

“HAVE YOU seen my keys?” Ron asked. “I’ve looked everywhere for them.”

“Take mine,” Claire said. “I can have another set made.”

“Yeah, but it bugs me that I’m losing things. They’ve got to be around here somewhere.”

He took Claire’s keys, but it bothered him. He was a highly organized man.

One day, I saw Claire take a pen from Ron’s inside jacket pocket, slip it into her jeans.

“Have you seen my Cross pen?” he asked a few days later.

“No,” she said.

He frowned at me. “Did you take it, Astrid? Tell me the truth, I won’t be upset. It’s just things are disappearing and it’s driving me crazy. I’m not accusing you of stealing them, but did you borrow it and not put it back?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to rat on Claire, but I didn’t want him thinking I was stealing from him either. I would do anything not to lose this placement. “I didn’t take it, really. I wouldn’t.”

“I believe you,” he said, running his hand through his silver hair. “I must be getting senile.”

“Maybe it’s poltergeists,” Claire said.

When Claire went out for an audition, I searched the house methodically. Under their bed I found a box painted red and white and decorated with pieces of broken mirror. Inside, it was also red, and full of the things that he’d been missing—an army knife, a watch, his stapler, scissors, keys, nail clippers. There was a Polaroid of them laughing, and two Polaroids glued together face-to-face, I couldn’t pry them apart. A magnet hung from the lid of the box, and a steel plate was glued to the bottom. I could feel the tug of the magnet as I replaced the lid.