White Oleander

24

I SAT UP in bed at one in the morning, cotton stuffed in my ears, as Rena and the comrades partied down in the living room. Just now, they were wailing along to an old Who record cranked so loud I could feel it right through the floor. This was why Rena liked it down here among contractors and bakeries and sheet metal shops. You could make all the noise you wanted. I was learning, everything on Ripple Street was rock’n’roll. Niki sang with three different bands, and Rena’s personal soundtrack consisted of all the big seventies rock she’d first heard on black market tapes in Magnitogorsk. I tried to recall the melodies of Debussy, the gamelan, Miles Davis, but the Who bass line pounded it right out of my head.

To me this rock was just more faceless sex in a man’s world, up against a concrete wall behind bathrooms. Give me a Satie tone poem like light on a Monet haystack, or Brazilian Astrud like a Matisse line. Let me lie down in a half-shuttered room in the south of France with Matisse and the soft flutter of heavy-feathered white doves, their mild calls. Only a little time, Henri, before Picasso will come with his big boots. We should take our afternoon.

I missed beauty. The Tujunga night with too many stars, Claire’s neck as she bent over me, checking my homework. My mother, swimming underwater in the pool in Hollywood, the melody of her words. All gone now. This was my life, the way it was. Loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.

Across the room, Yvonne’s bed was empty, she had left with someone at about eleven to go to a party across the river. I sat up in bed, drawing by lamplight, chasing an indigo line of oil pastel on violet paper with a whispery silver. It was a boat, a dark canoe, on the shore of a moonless sea. There was no one in the boat, no oars, no sail. It made me think of the sunless seas of Kublai Khan and also of my mother’s Vikings sending their dead out on boats.

I blew on my hands, rubbed them together. The furnace wasn’t working, Rena still hadn’t fixed it. We just wore sweaters all the time. “Cold?” she said. “In California? You joke.” They weren’t feeling it, out there braying to the records, drinking Hunter’s Brandy, some high-octane Russian specialty that tasted like vodka flavored with nails.

I looked around the cramped, crowded room, like the stockroom of a Goodwill store. I imagined what my mother would say if she could see who I was now, her burning little artist. Just another used item in Rena’s thrift shop. You like that lamp with the bubbled green base? Name a price. How about the oil painting of the fat-cheeked peasant woman with the orange kerchief? For you, ten dollars. A bouquet of beaded flowers? Talk to Rena, she’d let you have it for seven-fifty. We had a furry Oriental rug, and a solid oak table, only slightly tilted, along with five unmatched chairs, special today. We had an enormous tiki salad set, and a complete Encyclopedia Britannica from 1962. We had three matted white cats, cathair over everything, cat smell. All this, and an old-fashioned hi-fi in a fruitwood cabinet and a stack of records from the seventies higher than Bowie’s platform shoes.

And our clothes, Mother, how do you like our clothes? Polyester tops and lavender hiphuggers, yellow shirts with industrial zippers. Clothes floated around from closet to closet until we were bored, then we sold them and bought something else. You wouldn’t recognize the girl I’ve become. My hair is growing out, I found a pair of Jackie O sunglasses and I wear them all the time.

My clothes are gone, the rich orphan clothes from Fred Segal and Barney’s New York. Rena made me sell them. I’m sure you’d approve. We were unloading in the parking lot of Natalia’s Nails one Saturday. I was arranging coffee mugs when I saw Rena pulling my clothes out of a black plastic garbage bag. My French blue tweed jacket, my Betsey Johnson halter dress, my Myrna Loy pajamas. Hanging them on hangers on the rolling rack.

I snatched them off the rack, stood there shaking. She had gone through my drawers, my closet. “These are mine.”

Rena ignored me, shook out a rose-and-gray long skirt, pinned it to a hanger. “Why you need? Dressed best at Marshall High School? Maybe Tiny Thai, Trader Joe? Maybe Melrose Place call for you to be star?” She bent and took out an armful of my Fred Segal T-shirts, dumped them into my arms. “Here.” She put a roll of tape and a marker on top. “You name price, you keep money, ladno?” She kept pulling my things out of plastic garbage bags, hanging them up. Dove-gray high-waisted pants with an Edwardian jacket, a charcoal velvet collar. White shirt with ruffled front. My Jessica McClintock dress with the white cutwork collar.

“Not that,” I said. “Come on, have a heart.”

Rena squinted at me, blowing a strand of her matte black hair out of her face, exasperated. “You get good price for that. What you saving it for, tea with little Tsarevich Alexei? They shot him 1918.” She took the dress out of the bag, shook it and hung it back up. “Is fact.”

I stood there, my arms full of the silky T-shirts. Egyptian cotton. Sour pliers squeezed my throat, juicing it like a lemon. She couldn’t make me sell my clothes. That witch.

But I couldn’t stop the thought that, really, what exactly was I saving them for? When would I ever need a two-hundred-dollar Jessica McClintock dress again? It was a roast-goose-with-chest-nuts dress, Puccini at the Music Center, gold rims on china. I looked at Rena in her shiny red blouse, unbuttoned to the third button, high heels, and jeans. Niki, setting up kitchen appliances, magenta hair and black polyester. Yvonne, round as a watermelon in her purple baby doll dress with a swirl pattern from the sixties, sadly arranging the baby furniture, posing a worn teddy bear in the high chair.

Why couldn’t anybody ever hang on to anything? You never believed in sentiment, Mother, you saved only your own words, one picture of my grandmother and one of your 4-H cow. Only Claire could hold memory. It was the present that she couldn’t sort out.

“Someone gave it to me,” I finally said to Rena. “So?” Rena looked up from her hangers. “You’re lucky, someone gave to you. Now you sell, get money out.” I stood there, sullen, my arms still full of T-shirts. “You want car?” Rena said. “Artist college? You think I don’t know? How you think you pay? So this dress. Pretty dress. Someone gave. But money is . . .” She stopped, struggling to find the words, what money was. Finally, she threw her hands up. “Money. You want remember, so just remember.”

So I did it. I marked a price on my crimson velvet dream. I marked it high, hoping it wouldn’t sell. I marked them all high. But they sold. As the sun got warm, the hard bargainers left and the couples came, lazily, arm in arm, old people out for a stroll, young people. The T-shirts, the pants, the jackets went. But by afternoon, the crimson dress was still unsold. People kept asking Rena if it was really one hundred dollars.

“What she say,” Rena replied in her deep voice, implying helplessness.

“It’s a Jessica McClintock,” I said defensively. “Never been worn.” My mistake, for anticipating there would be a future, that the dream would just go on and on.

I could still remember how I looked in it when I tried it on at the store in Beverly Hills. I looked innocent, like somebody’s daughter, somebody’s real daughter. A girl who was cared for. A girl in that dress wasn’t a girl who had a beer and a cigarette for lunch, who lay down for the father on carpet pads in an unfinished house. It wasn’t a dress that knew how to make a living if it had to, that had to worry about its teeth and whether its mother would come home. When I showed it to Claire, she made me turn for her like a ballerina on a music box, her hands clapped to her mouth, pride flowing from her like tears. She believed I was that girl. And for a moment, so did I.

All day, I helped them on with it, slid the satin lining over their sweaty shoulders, zipped it up as far as it would go without straining. After the fifth woman had tried it on, I started not caring so much. At about three, a group of girls came around, and one of them kept looking at the red dress, holding it up to herself. “Can I try this on?”

I took the plastic off, slid the dress down her arms, over the pale downy hair, pulled it along her body, zipped the back as she held up her dark ponytail. It looked just right on her. As it had never looked on me. I’d never seen the girl before. She didn’t go to Marshall. She probably went to Immaculate Heart or the French School. A cared-for girl, someone’s daughter. I held it for her as she went to the 7-Eleven to call her mother. Fifteen minutes later, an attractive older woman showed up in a butter-yellow Mercedes, black linen slacks, suede moccasins with horse bit buckles. I helped the girl into the dress again, and the woman gave me the hundred, a single crisp bill. They were going to a cousin’s wedding in New York. The dress would be perfect. I could tell from the mother’s expression that she knew exactly what it was worth.

We went on until five, then started breaking it down, loading up the van and Niki’s pickup truck. All my things had sold. I sat on the fender of the van and counted my money. I’d made over four hundred dollars.

“See, not so bad,” Rena said, balancing a box of plates on her hip. “How much you get?”

I mumbled it, ashamed, but also a little proud. It was the first money I’d ever earned.

“Good. Give me hundred.” She held out her hand.

“What for?”

She snapped her fingers, extended her hand again.

“No way.” I held the money behind my back. Her black eyes sparkled with bad temper. “What, you think you sell all by yourself on streetcorner? You pay me, I pay Natalia, Natalia pays landlord, what you think? Everybody pay somebody.”

“You said I could keep it.”

“After pay me.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Niki said, looking up from where she was arranging cheap clothes on a blanket on the ground. “Go ahead and pay her. You have to.” I shook my head no.

Rena shifted the box to the other hip, and when she spoke, her voice was harsh. “Listen to me, devushka. I pay, you pay. Just business. When was last time you had three hundred dollars in your hand? So how I hurt you?”

How could I tell her? What about my feelings, I wanted to say, except what was the point? With her it was all just money, and things that could be traded for money. She’d stolen something from me, and even got me to do the selling for her. I couldn’t help wondering what you would do, Mother. It didn’t apply. I couldn’t imagine you at the mercy of Rena Grushenka, in the parking lot of Natalia’s Nails, selling your clothes, crying over a dress. I didn’t know what else to do, so I held out the hundred, the red dress hundred, and she snatched it from my hand like a dog bite.

But as I sat in bed, listening to the noise and laughter and occasional crash from the living room, I knew that even you had to pay someone now, for your pot and your inks and the good kind of tampons, dental floss and vitamin C. But you would come up with a compelling reason, a theory, a philosophy. You’d make it noble, heroic. You’d write a poem about it, “The Red Dress.” I could never do that.

Out in the living room, someone put on an old Zeppelin album. I could hear them singing along in their thick accents, the churning of Jimmy Page’s guitar. It was four in the morning and I could smell melting candle wax, dripping in great pools on the tables and windowsills. I didn’t need Claire’s candle magic book to see burning house written there. It was why I slept in my clothes, kept my shoes by the bed, money in my wallet, most important things in a bag by the window.

You’d think they’d try to get some sleep—the next day we were going to the flea market at Fairfax High, to sell our sambo statuettes made of bottlecaps, trays painted with botanical nightmares, never-worn baby clothes, and all the moldy Reader’s Digests. But I could tell, they wouldn’t sleep until Monday. I hoped I wouldn’t see anyone I knew.

I turned over the page, started another canoe. Silver on black. The door opened, Rena’s friend Misha stumbled in, posed, playing air guitar along with Jimmy, his plump red lips like an enormous infant’s. He was practically drooling. “I come to see you, maya liubov. Krasivaya devushka.”

“Go away, Misha.”

He staggered over to my bed, sat down next to me. “Don’t be cruel,” he sang, like Elvis, and bent to drool on my neck.

“Leave me alone.” I tried to shove him off, but he was too big and loose, I couldn’t find anything solid to push against.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t do nothing.” He lay down on the bed next to me, spread out like a stain. The alcohol reek was a miasma, it reminded me that there were snakes that stunned their prey with their breath. “I am only so lonesome.”

I called for help, but no one could hear me over the music. Misha was heavy, he rested his head on my shoulder, slobbering on my neck. His weepy blue eyes so close, one heavy arm around me.

I hit him, but it was no use, he was too drunk, my fist bounced off his flesh, he couldn’t feel anything. “Misha, get off me.”

“You’re so beautiful girl,” he said, trying to kiss me. He smelled of vodka and something greasy, someone must have brought a bucket of chicken.

My knife was just under my pillow. I didn’t want to stab Misha, I knew him. I’d listened to him play bottleneck guitar. He had a dog named Chernobyl, he wanted to move to Chicago and be a blues guitarist, except he didn’t like cold weather. Rena gave him this haircut, the bangs slightly crooked. He wasn’t a bad man, but he was kissing my closed mouth, one hand groping under the blanket, though I was fully dressed. His fumbling hand found nothing but vintage polyester.

“Love me a little,” he begged in my ear. “Love me, devushka, for we all going to die.”

Finally, I got a knee up and when he shifted I hit him with my drawing board and slid out of bed.

In the living room, most of the people were gone. Natalia was dancing by herself in front of the stereo, a bottle of Bargain Circus Stoli clutched by the neck in one hand. Georgi was passed out in the black armchair, his head leaning against its fuzzy arm, a white cat curled in his lap. A cane chair was knocked over, a big ashtray lay facedown on the floor. A puddle of something glistened on the scarred leathertop coffee table.

Rena and her boyfriend, Sergei, lay on the green velvet couch, and he was doing it to her with his ringers. Her shoes were still on, her skirt. His shirt was open, he had a medallion on a chain that hung down. I hated to barge in, but then again, Misha was her friend. She was responsible.

“Rena,” I said. “Misha’s trying to get in bed with me.”

Four drunken eyes gazed up at me, two black, two blue. It took them a moment to focus. Sergei whispered something to her in Russian and she laughed. “Misha won’t do nothing. Hit him on head with something,” Rena said.

Sergei was watching me as he kneaded her thigh, bit her neck. He looked like a white tiger devouring a kill.

When I went back into my room, Misha had passed out. He had a bloody cut on his head from where I hit him. He was snoring, holding my pillow like it was me. He wasn’t waking up anytime soon. I went to sleep in Yvonne’s empty bed. The stereo stopped at five, and I got a restless hour or two of sleep, dreaming of animals rummaging through the garbage. I was awakened by a man pissing in the bathroom across the hall without closing the door, a stream that seemed to last for about five minutes. He didn’t flush. Then the stereo came back on, the Who again. Who are you! the band sang. I tried to remember, but I really couldn’t say.