White Oleander

23

HER NAME was Rena Grushenka. In a week, she took me home in her whitewashed Econoline van with the Grateful Dead sticker in the back window, the red and blue halves of the skull divided down the middle like a bad headache. It was cold, raining, sky a smother of dull gray. I liked how she laid rubber in the parking lot. Watching the wall and wire of Mac dropping away out the window, I tried not to think too much about what lay ahead. We wandered through a maze of suburban neighborhood, looking for the freeway, and I concentrated on memorizing the way I had come—the white house with the dovecote, the green shutters, the mailbox, an Oriental pierced-concrete wall streaked with rain. High-voltage wires stretched between steel towers like giants holding jump ropes into the distance.

Rena lit a black cigarette and offered me one. “Russian Sobranie. Best in world.”

I took it, lit it with her disposable lighter, and studied my new mother. Her coal-black hair, completely matte, was a hole in the charcoal afternoon. High breasts pushed into a savage cleavage framed in a black crocheted sweater unbuttoned to the fourth button. Her dream-catcher earrings touched her shoulders, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of dreams might lodge there. When she’d found the freeway, she shoved a tape into the cassette deck, an old Elton John. “Like a candle in the wind,” she sang in a deep throaty voice flavored with Russian soft consonants, hands on the big steering wheel grubby and full of rings, the nails chipped red.

Butterflies suddenly filled the cab of the van—swallowtails, monarchs, buckeyes, cabbage whites—the fluttering wings of my too many feelings, too many memories, I didn’t know how Rena could see through the windshield for the heartbeat gossamer of their wings.

It was less than a year, I told myself. Eighteen and out. I would graduate, get a job, my life would be my own. This was just a place to live rent-free until I could decide what the next act was going to be. Forget college, that wasn’t going to happen for me, so why set myself up. I sure wasn’t going to let myself get disappointed again. I never let anyone touch me. Damn straight.

I concentrated on the shapes of the downtown towers as they emerged from the gloom, tops in the clouds, a half-remembered dream. We turned north on the 5, following train tracks around downtown, County Hospital, the warehouse area around the brewery, where the artists lived in their studios—we’d been to parties there, my mother and I, a lifetime ago, so long it seemed like someone else’s memory, a song I’d heard once in a dream.

Rena turned off at Stadium Way, and there were no houses now, just tangled green freewayside foliage and concrete. We paralleled the 5 for a while, then passed underneath, into a little neighborhood like an island below sea level, the freeway a wall on our left. On the right, through the rain-smeared windshield, street after street rolled by, each posted No Outlet. I saw cramped front yards, and laundry hanging wet on lines and over fences in front of Spanish cottages and tiny Craftsman bungalows, bars on all the windows. I saw macrame plant holders hanging from porches, children’s toys in bare-dirt front lawns, and enormous oleanders. Frogtown, the graffiti proclaimed.

We pulled up in front of a glum cocoa-brown Spanish bungalow with heavy plasterwork, dark windows, and a patchy lawn surrounded by a chain-link fence. On one side, the neighbors had a boat in the driveway that was bigger than their house. On the other was a plumbing contractor. It was exactly where I belonged, a girl who could turn away from the one good thing in her life.

“No place like home,” said Rena Grushenka. I couldn’t tell if she was being ironic or not.

She didn’t help me carry my things. I took the most important bags—art supplies, the Dürer rabbit with Ron’s money hidden behind the frame—and followed her up the cracked path to the splintered porch. A white cat dashed in when Rena opened the door. “Sasha, you bad boy,” she said. “Out screwing.”

It took a moment to adjust to the darkness inside the small house. Furniture was my first impression, jumbled together like in a thrift store. Too many lamps, none lit. A dark-haired plump girl lay on a green figured velvet sofa watching TV. She pushed the white cat away when it jumped in her lap. She glanced up at me, wasn’t impressed, went back to her show.

“Yvonne,” Rena said. “She got more stuff. You help.”

“You,” Yvonne said.

“Hey, what I say you? Lazy cow.”

“Chingao, talk about lazy.” But she pushed herself up from the too-soft couch, and I saw she was pregnant. Her dark eyes under the skimpy cover of half-moon plucked eyebrows met mine. “Have you ever came to the wrong place,” she said.

Rena snorted. “What you think is right place? You tell me, we all go.”

The girl gave her the finger, took a sweatshirt from the old-fashioned hatstand, lazily pulled the hood over her hair. “Come on.”

We went back out into the rain, a fine drizzle now, and she took two bags, I took two more. “I’m Astrid,” I said.

“Yeah, so?”

We took the stuff to a room down a hall, across from the kitchen. Two beds, both unmade. “That one’s yours,” Yvonne said, dumping my bags onto it. “Don’t touch my stuff or I’ll kill you.” She turned and left me alone.

It was a mess without precedence. Clothes on the beds, the desk, piled up against the walls, pouring out the open closet. I’d never seen so many clothes. And hair magazines, photonovelas in shreds. Over her bed, Yvonne had pictures torn out of magazines, girls and boys holding hands, riding bareback on the beach. On the dresser, a Chinese paper horse with trappings of silky red fringe and gold foil guarded a bright yellow portable radio, a fancy makeup kit with twenty shades of eye shadow, and a picture of a young TV actor in a two-dollar frame.

I gathered the stuff off my bed, a wet towel, pair of overalls, pink sweatshirt, a dirty plate, and tried to decide which would be less offensive, throwing them on the floor or the other bed. The floor, I decided. In the dresser, though, she’d left two drawers empty, and there were a half-dozen free hangers in the closet.

I ordered my clothes into neat piles in my drawers, hung the best things, made the bed. There was no room for the rest. Don’t touch my stuff or I’ll kill you, she’d said. I’d spoken exactly those words myself. Now I remembered my room at Claire’s, seeing it for the first time and wondering how I would ever fill it up. She’d given me too much, I couldn’t hold on. I deserved this. I arranged my things in the shopping bags and slid them under the metal frame of the old-fashioned bed, all my artifacts. All the people I had been. It was like a graveyard under there. I hung the cartoon that Paul Trout had made of me over my bed. I never let anyone touch me. I wondered where he was now, whether I would ever hear from him again. Whether someone would love him someday, show him what beauty meant.

After I’d unpacked, I crossed the narrow hall to the kitchen, where Rena sat with another girl, her dark-rooted hair dyed magenta. Each had an open Heineken bottle and they shared a filthy glass ashtray. The counters were all dirty dishes and takeout debris. “Astrid. This is other one, Niki.” Rena turned to the magenta-haired girl.

This girl sized me up more carefully than the pregnant girl. Brown eyes weighed me to the tenth of an ounce, patted me down, checked the seams of my clothing. “Who hit you? ” I shrugged. “Some girls at Mac. It’s going away.” Niki sat back in her mismatched dinette chair, skinny arms behind her head. “Sisters don’t like white girls messing with their men.” Tilted her head back to sip from her beer, but didn’t take her eyes off me. “They give you that haircut too?”

“What, you’re Hawaii 5-0?” Rena said. “Leave her be.” She got up and fished another beer out of the battered refrigerator, covered with stickers from rock bands. A glimpse of the interior didn’t look promising. Beer, takeout cartons, some lunch meat. Rena held a beer up. “Want one?”

I took it. I was here now. We drank beer, we smoked black cigarettes. I wondered what else we did on Ripple Street.

Rena searched for something in the cabinets, opening and slamming the chipped beige doors. There wasn’t anything but a bunch of dusty old pots, odd glasses and plates. “You eat chips I buy?”

“Yvonne,” Niki said, drinking her beer.

“Eat for two,” Rena said.

Niki and Rena went off somewhere in the van. Yvonne lay on one side, asleep on the couch, sucking her thumb. The white cat curled against her back. There was an empty bag of Doritos on the table. The TV was still on, local news. A helicopter crash on the 10. People crying, reporters interviewing them on the shoulder of the freeway. Blood and confusion.

I went out onto the porch. The rain had stopped, the earth smelled damp and green. Two girls my age walked by with their kids, one on a tricycle, the other in a pink baby carriage. They stared at me, plucked eyebrows rendering their faces expressionless. A powder-blue American car from the sixties, somebody’s pride and joy, all shining chrome and white upholstery, roared by, the engine deep and explosive, and we watched it rise to the top of Ripple Street.

A crack opened in the clouds to the west, and a golden light washed over the distant hills. Down here, the street was dark already, it would get dark early here, the hillside across the freeway blocked the light, but there was sunlight at the high end of the street and on the hills, gilding the domes of the observatory, which perched on the edge of the mountain like a cathedral.

I walked toward the light, past businesses and little houses advertising child care, two-story fourplexes with wooden stairs and banana trees and corn growing in the yard, the Dolly Madison bakery. An electronics shop. A movie prop outlet, Cadillac Jack’s, a Conestoga wagon in its fenced lot. Salazar Mazda repair shop on the corner, where Fletcher Drive crossed the river.

From the bridge, the view opened to the river, warmed in the last light like a gift, streaming between bruised gray clouds. The river ran under the road, heading for Long Beach. I rested my arms on the damp concrete railing and looked north toward the hills and the park. The water flowed through its big concrete embankments, the bottom covered with decades of silt and boulders and trees. It was returning to its wild state despite the massive sloped shore, a secret river. A tall white bird fished among the rocks, standing on one leg like in a Japanese woodcut. Fifty views of the L.A. River.

A horn honked and a man shouted “Give me a piece of that” out of a car window. But it didn’t matter, nobody could stop on the bridge anyway. I wondered if Claire was here, if she could see me. I wished she could see this crane, the river bottom. It was beautiful and I didn’t deserve it, but I couldn’t help lifting my face to the last golden light.

THE NEXT DAY Rena woke us before dawn. I was dreaming I was drowning, a shipwreck in the North Atlantic, it was just as well to wake up. The room was still dark, and freezing cold. “Workers of the world, arise,” Rena said, banishing our dreams with the smoke of her black cigarette. “You got nothing to lose but Visa Card, Happy Meal, Kotex with Wings.” She turned on the light.

Yvonne groaned in the other bed, picked up a shoe and threw it halfheartedly at Rena. “Fuckin’ Thursday.”

We dressed with our backs to each other. Yvonne’s heavy breasts and lush thighs were startling in their beauty. I saw Matisse in her lines, I saw Renoir. She was only my age, but by comparison I had the body of a child.

“Gonna report that puta to the INS. Kick her ass back to Russia.” She pawed through the piles of clothes, pulled out a turtleneck, sniffed it, threw it back. I stumbled down the hall to wash my face, brush my teeth. When I came out, she was already in the kitchen, pouring coffee into a battered Thermos, stuffing handfuls of saltines in a bag.

In the cold darkness, clouds of white vapor escaped from the tailpipe of the Ford panel van, ghostly in its whitewash, which didn’t entirely conceal the gray bondo underneath. In the big captain’s chair, Rena Grushenka smoked a black Sobranie with a gold tip and sipped coffee from a Winchell’s slotted cup. Rolling Stones played on the tape deck. Her high-heeled boots tapped time on the dash.

Yvonne and I climbed into the back and closed the doors. It was dark and smelled of moldy carpet squares. We huddled together on the ripped-out carseat against the far wall. Niki got in the front and Rena slammed the three-on-the-tree shift into place. “Find ’em, don’t grind ’em.” Niki lit a Marlboro, coughed wetly and spat out the window.

“I quit smokin’ for the baby, but what’s the damn point,” Yvonne said.

Rena found first, and we lurched into the stillness of Ripple Street. The orange streetlights illuminated the quiet neighborhood, the air perfumed caramel and vanilla by the night shift at the Dolly Madison bakery. I could hear the trucks pulling up to the loading bays as we ascended from the river bottom. A deep truck horn honked, and Rena fluffed her tangled black hair. Even at five in the morning, her shirt was already unbuttoned, her cleavage heightened severely by a Fredericks push-up bra. She sang along with the tape in her good alto voice, about how some girls give you diamonds, some girls Cadillacs. Her Jagger impersonation was impressive.

We turned left on Fletcher, past the Mazda repair and the Star Strip, our van rattling like cans in the moist darkness. We went under the 5 and crossed Riverside Drive, fragrant with hamburgers from Rick’s. She turned left at the Astro coffee shop, its parking lot half-full of police cars. She spat three times out the window as we passed by.

Then we began to climb, up into a neighborhood of narrow streets, houses crowded along steep slopes wall to wall, stucco duplexes and nondescript boxes, occasionally an old Spanish-style. Stairs on the uphill side, carports on the downhill. I knelt between the captain’s seats for the view. I could see the whole river valley from here—headlights of cars on the 5 and the 2, the sleeping hills of Glassell Park and Elysian Heights dotted with lights. Vacant lots full of wild fennel, ferny and licorice-smelling in the dewy darkness. The smell mingled with the mold of the van and cigarettes and the reek of leftover alcohol. Rena flicked her cigarette out the window.

Yvonne snapped on the interior light and flipped through a water-bloated Seventeen magazine. The blond girl on the cover smiled bravely, although clearly dismayed to have found herself in such circumstances. I looked at the magazine over her shoulder. I could never figure out where they found all those happy, pimpleless teens. Yvonne paused at a picture of a girl and a boy riding a fat horse bareback on the beach. “Did you ever ride a horse?”

“No. I went to the racetrack once.” Medea’s Pride at five-to-one. His hand on her waist. “You?”

“I been on the pony ride at Griffith Park,” Yvonne said.

“Over there,” Rena pointed.

A gray texturecoat house had black plastic bags plumped next to the trash. Rena stopped and Niki jumped out, cut the tab of one with a pocketknife. “Clothes.” She and Yvonne handed the bags up to me in the back. They were heavier than I’d thought, must have had appliances in the bottom. Yvonne lifted them easily, she was strong as a man. Niki swung the bags, a practiced move.

“I’m so tired,” Yvonne said, as we started off again. “I hate my life.” She filled the coffee cup, gulped it down, filled it again and handed it to me. It was instant, hot and too strong.

Behind the wheel, Rena dragged on her cigarette, she held it like a pencil. “I told you get rid. What you need baby? Cow.”

Rena Grushenka. Rock music and American slang both twenty years out of date, discount Stoli from Bargain Circus. She trained her black magpie eyes on the curb with its neatly arrayed trash cans and recycling bins. She could see in the dark with those eyes. This morning she wore a necklace of silver milagros, arms, hands, and legs. You were supposed to pin them to the velvet skirts of the Virgin to pray, but to Rena they were just pawned body parts.

“Hey, turnip people,” she called out the window as we squeezed past an old Cadillac double-parked, a Mexican couple emptying somebody’s recycling. Bagged cans and bottles crammed their trunk and backseat. “Dobro utro, kulaks.” She laughed with her mouth wide open, her gold inlays glinting.

They stared at us without expression as we clattered by.

Rena sang along with Mick in her thick accent, tapping on the blue steering wheel with the inside of her ring, craning her neck in and out like a chicken. She had a deep voice, a good ear.

Niki yawned and stretched in the other captain’s chair. “I need a ride back to work sometime to pick up my truck. Werner took me to his place last night.” She grinned her lop-toothed smile.

Rena sipped from her Winchell’s cup. “The knackwurst.”

“Four times,” Niki said. “I can hardly walk.” Werner, supposedly a German rock promoter, came to the Bavarian Gardens, where Niki worked three nights a week, though she wasn’t twenty-one. She had a fake ID from one of Rena’s friends.

“You should bring knackwurst. I got to meet.”

“Fat chance of that,” Niki said. “He gets one look at you bitches, he’ll be on the first plane back to Frankfurt.”

“You’re just afraid he’ll see you’re a man,” Yvonne said.

Their talk went on like this, ceaseless as waves. I leaned on my forearms against the oxidized blue console between the front seats. Before me lay a collage of debris, like a forest floor: empty black Sobranie packages, fliers in Spanish, a little brush full of black hair, a key ring with a blue rubber coin purse, the kind you squeeze on the sides and the mouth opens up. I played with it, making it sing along to the tape.

The sunrise was a pale rubbing along the eastern horizon, gray-white clouds like scumbled pastels, a sponge-painted sky. Gradually, the manmade features of the landscape receded—the train yards, freeway, houses, and roads—until all that remained was blue hills backlit by dawn light, red over the ridge-line. It was a set for a western movie. I could almost see the arms of giant saguaro, the scurry of coyote and kit fox. The Great Basin, Valley of Smoke. I held my breath. I wished it could always be like this, no people, no city, just rising sun and blue hills.

But the sun cleared the ridge, returning the 2 and the 5, early traffic moving downtown, truck drivers heading to Bakersfield, thinking about pancakes, and us in the van on garbage day.

We continued to sift the city’s flotsam, rescuing a wine rack and a couple of broken cane-bottom chairs. We took on an aluminum walker, a box of musty books, and a full recycling bin of Rolling Rock empties that sharpened the mold smell in the back. I pocketed a book about Buddhism, and one called My Antonia.

I liked these winding streets and hillside spills of bougainvillea, the long flights of stairs. We drove by the house where Anaïs Nin lived, and I had no one to point it out to. My mother used to like to drive by the places famous writers lived in L.A.—Henry Miller, Thomas Mann, Isherwood, Huxley. I remembered this particular view of the lake, the Chinese mailbox. We had all her books. I liked their titles—Ladders to Fire, House of Incest—and her face on the covers, the false eyelashes, her storybook hair coiled and twisted. There was a picture of her with her head in a birdcage. But who was left to care?

We stopped for doughnuts, startling a convention of parking lot pigeons that rose in a great flickering wheel of dark and light grays, taking the stale morning sun on their wings, the freshness already bled from the air. Yvonne stayed in the van, reading her magazine. The girl at the counter at Winchell’s rubbed sleep from her eyes as Rena, Niki, and I came into the shop. Rena bent over the glass case in her cherry-red pants, giving an on-purpose bust-and-rump show for the homeless men and mental patients from the nearby board and care, cruelly flaunting what they couldn’t have, and I couldn’t help thinking of Claire when the bum smelled her hair. We ordered our doughnuts, jelly-filled, custard, glazed. Rena had the girl refill her coffee cup.

Outside, a man squatted by the door, in his arms a tray of ladybugs in plastic bubbles.

“Ladybug,” he half sang. “Laaaady-bug.”

He was a small man, wiry, of indeterminate age, his face weathered, his black beard and long ponytail shot with gray. Unlike most street people, he didn’t seem drunk or insane.

Rena and Niki ignored him, but I stopped to look at the red specks crawling in the bubble. What was the harm in being polite. Anyway, I’d never seen anyone selling ladybugs as a profession.

“Eats the aphids in your garden,” he said.

“We don’t have a garden,” I said.

He smiled. His teeth were gray but not rotten. “Take one anyway. They’re lucky.”

I gave him a dollar and he handed me the ladybugs in their plastic bubble, the kind rings and trolls came in in the twenty-five-cent gumball machines.

In the van we lingered over our fried dough and caffeine. Flakes of sugar fell on our clothes. The worst thing about Ripple Street was the food. We ate takeout every night. At Rena’s, nobody cooked. She didn’t even own a recipe book. Her battered recycle bin pans were coated with dust. Four women in one house and nobody knew how to do anything, no one wanted to. We just called Tiny Thai. For people who would stop for empty beer bottles, we pissed all our money away.

As we drove to the other side of the lake, I turned my plastic bubble over, slowly, watching the ladybugs run to stay upright. They were healthier than you’d think. Caught this morning. I imagined the ladybug man’s patient blue eyes searching the dewy fennel for the red dots.

Throw it back, Claire had said. It’s so alive.

But they were lucky, that’s what the ladybug man said.

From between the captain’s seats, I could see Silver Lake in its nest of hills reflecting the cloudless sky. It reminded me of a place in Switzerland I went once with my mother. A mountain dropping right down into the lake, the town on the slope. There were camellias and palm trees and tall narrow shutters, and it had started to snow as we ate lunch. Snow on the pink camellias.

Now we were on the good side of the lake. We gazed longingly at the big houses, Spanish, Cape Cod, New Orleans, in a morning scented bready-sweet from the big carob trees. Imagining what it would be to be so real. “That one’s mine,” Yvonne said, pointing to the half-Tudor with the brick driveway. Niki liked a modern one, all glass, you could see the fifties-style lamps against the ceiling, a Calder mobile. “I don’t want any junk in my house,” she said. “I want it stripped. Chrome and black leather.”

As we switchbacked up the hill, we passed a house where someone was practicing the piano before work. It was a Spanish-style place, white with a tile roof and a live oak in the tiny front yard behind a wrought iron fence. It looked so safe, something that could hold beauty like a pool glinting with trout.

Rena noticed me watching it pass. “You think they don’t got problem?” Rena said. “Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.” She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. “We are the free birds. They want to be us.”

We stopped before a house perched way on top of the hill, they had stuff at the curb. I jumped down, got the baby gate, the high chair with blue food-mottled pads, the playpen and the bouncer seat. Yvonne’s eyes turned dark when she saw what I was handing her. Her high color bleached to beige, her mouth pressed together. She grabbed the chair and threw it in the back, more roughly than necessary.

She curled up on the carseat when we were moving again, picked up her Seventeen and turned pages, her hands trembling. She closed the magazine and stared at the girl on the cover, a girl who had never been pregnant, never had a social worker or a filling. Yvonne stroked the water-wavy cover. I could tell, she wanted to know what that girl knew, feel how she felt, to be so beautiful, wanted, confident. Like people touching the statue of a saint.

“You think I’d look good blond?” Yvonne held the cover up next to her face.

“It’s never done me much good,” I said, rotating the lady-bugs, making them run.

I saw Claire’s face on the banks of the McKenzie, pleading with me to let the fish go. It was the least I could do. I would have to make my own luck anyway. I leaned out behind Niki and opened the bubble into the wind.

IT WAS quarter to eight when we pulled up in front of Marshall High. My eighth school in five years. The front building was faced with elaborate brick, but temporary trailers flanked it on every side. Yvonne lowered her head over the magazine, embarrassed to be seen. She had just dropped out of school this winter. “Hey,” Rena called to me as I got out of the van. She leaned across Niki, holding out a couple of folded bills. “Money makes world go around.”

I took the money and thought of Amelia as I shoved it in my pocket. “Thanks.”

Niki sneered at the kids sitting on the wall, finishing their cigarettes before class. “School sucks. Why don’t you blow it off? Rena doesn’t care.”

I shrugged. “I’ve only got one more semester,” I said. But truthfully, I was afraid to have one less thing in my life.