White Oleander

6

THE NEXT SUNDAY, I slept too late. If only I hadn’t been dreaming about my mother. It was a sweet dream. We were in Aries, walking down the allee of dark cypress trees, past tombs and wildflowers. She had escaped from prison—she was pushing a lawnmower in front of the building and just walked away. Aries was deep shade and sunshine like honey, Roman ruins and our little pension. If I had not been hungry for that dream, for the sunflowers of Aries, I would have got up when the boys ran off into the wash.

But now I was sitting in the front seat of the Torino. Carolee groaned in the back, she had a hangover from doing drugs all night with her friends. Starr had caught her sleeping too. Amy Grant played on the radio, and Starr sang along, wearing her hair in a sort of messy French twist like Brigitte Bardot, and long dangling earrings. She looked like she was going to a cocktail lounge, and not to the Truth Assembly of Christ.

“I hate this,” my foster sister said in my ear as we followed her mother into church. “I’d kill for some ’ludes.”

The Assembly met in a concrete-block building with linoleum-tiled floors and a high frosted glass window instead of stained. A modern fruitwood cross loomed in front, and a woman with a puffy hairdo played the organ. We sat on white folding chairs, Carolee on my left, face dark with sullenness and headache, Starr on the aisle, glowing with excitement. Her skirt was so short I could see where the dark part of her pantyhose started.

The organ playing crescendoed and a man walked to the lectern wearing a dark suit and tie with shiny black shoes, like a businessman. I thought he would wear a graduation-type robe. His short, side-parted brown hair glistened like cellophane under the colored lights. Now Starr sat very straight, hoping he would notice her.

As he spoke, I was surprised that he had a sort of speech defect. He swallowed his l’s, so it came out “alyive” instead of “alive.” “Though we were dead in our error, He made us alive together in Christ. By the Cross, we have been saved. He lifts us up to the life . . . everlasting.” He raised his hands, lifting us. He was good. He knew when to build and when to let off, and when he got quiet, that’s when he came in for the kill, with big shiny eyes and little flat nose, and a lipless mouth so wide he looked like a Muppet, like his whole head opened and closed when he talked. “Yes, we can live again, even when we are dying of . . . the sin virus.”

Carolee shifted, making her chair squeak on purpose. Starr flapped her hand, nudged me and pointed at the Reverend, as if there was anything else to look at.

Reverend Thomas started telling a story of a young man in the sixties, a good-hearted boy, who thought he could go his own way, as long as he didn’t hurt anyone. “He met a guru who taught him to look for the truth within himself.” The preacher paused and smiled, as if the idea of truth within yourself was absurd, ridiculous, the red light warning of doom. “You are the judge of what is true.” He smiled again, and I began to see that he always paused to smile when he said something he disapproved of. He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he was smashing them.

“Oh, he was by no means alone in his philosophy at the time,” Reverend Thomas continued, his button eyes shining. “ ‘Do your own thing, man,’ was the wisdom of the day. If there was something you wanted, it was good, because you wanted it. There was no God, no dying. There was only your own pleasure.” He smiled at the word “pleasure,” as if pleasure was hideous, an abomination, and he felt pity for anyone who would be so weak as to value it. “And if anyone spoke of responsibility or consequences, they were held up to ridicule. ‘Lighten up, man. Don’t be square.’

“Yes, the young man had unwittingly contracted the deadly virus. It had infiltrated his heart, weakening the structure of his conscience, liquefying his judgment.” Reverend Thomas seemed positively overjoyed. “After a while, there just didn’t seem much difference between right and wrong.”

So how could the kid have ended up as anything but one of the Manson killers?

I had sunk back in my chair as far as Carolee by now, and Starr’s perfume and the hissing words of the Reverend were making me sick to my stomach.

Luckily, in prison, the young man had a revelation. He realized he was a part of a raging epidemic of the sin virus, and through another inmate discovered the Lord and the life-giving serum of His Blood. Now he was preaching to the other inmates and doing good works among the hopeless. Although he was twenty-five years into a life sentence, his life was not a waste. He had a reason for being, to help others, and bring the Good News to people who had never looked an inch beyond their own momentary desires. He was redeemed, a new man, reborn in the Lord.

It wasn’t hard for me to imagine the Manson kid in prison, his hardness, his warped thinking, a killer. Then something had happened. A light had come on, which let him see the awful reality of his crime. I imagined his agony, when he saw what a monster he had become and knew that he had ruined his life for nothing. He could have killed himself, how very close he must have come. But then came the ray of hope, that there might be another way to live, some meaning after all. And he prayed, and the spirit came into his heart.

And now, instead of living out his years as a walking corpse in San Quentin, hating and more hate, he had become someone with a purpose, someone with the light within him. I understood that. I believed it.

“There is an answer to this deadly epidemic laying waste our vital substance,” Reverend Thomas was saying, lifting his arms, like an embrace. “A powerful vaccine for the devastating infection within the human heart. But we have to recognize the danger we are in. We have to accept the grave diagnosis, that by acting upon our own desires instead of following God’s plan, we have become infected by this terrible plague. We have to receive the knowledge of our responsibility to the heavenly power, and our own vulnerability.”

Suddenly, a scene that I had kept at bay all these months came flooding in. The day I’d phoned Barry to warn him, and then hung up. I could feel the weight of the receiver as I put it on the cradle. My responsibility. My infection.

“We need Christ’s antibodies, to overcome this contagion within our souls. And those who choose to serve themselves instead of the Heavenly Father will experience the deadly consequences.”

It wasn’t surreal anymore. What Reverend Thomas was saying was true. I had contracted the virus. I had been infected all the while. There was blood on my hands. I thought of my beautiful mother, sitting in her tiny cell, her life at full stop. She was just Jike the Manson kid. She didn’t believe in anything but herself, no higher law, no morality. She thought she could justify anything, even murder, just because it was what she wanted. She didn’t even use the excuse of who was she hurting. She had no conscience. I will not serve. That’s what Stephen Dedalus said in Portrait of the Artist, but it meant Satan. That’s what the Fall was. Satan would not serve.

An old lady stepped forward from the choir and began to sing, “The blood that Jesus shed for me, way back at Calvary” and she could really sing. And I was crying, my tears coming down. We were dying inside, my mother and I. If only we had God, Jesus, something larger than ourselves to believe in, we could be healed. We could still have a new life.

IN JULY, I was baptized into the Truth Assembly of Christ. It didn’t even matter that it was Reverend Thomas, how fake he was, how he looked down Starr’s dress, the way his eyes fondled her when she walked up the stairs in front of him. I closed my eyes as he laid me back in the square pool behind the Assembly building, my nose filling with chlorine. I wanted the spirit to enter me, to wash me clean. I wanted to follow God’s plan for me. I knew where following my own would get me.

Afterward, we went out to Church’s Fried Chicken to celebrate. Nobody had ever given me a party before. Starr gave me a white leatherette Bible with passages highlighted in red. From Carolee and the boys I got a box of stationery with a dove in the corner, trailing a banner in its beak that said, “Praise the Lord,” but I knew Starr must have picked it out. Uncle Ray gave me a tiny gold cross on a chain. Even though he thought I was nuts to be baptized.

“You can’t really believe in this crap,” he whispered in my ear as he helped me put the necklace on.

I held up my hair so he could fasten it. “I’ve got to believe in something,” I said, low.

His hand rested on my neck, warm, heavy. His good plain face, sad hazel eyes. And I realized he wanted to kiss me. I felt it inside me. And when he saw that I felt it, he reddened and looked away.

I prayed for her redemption. She took a life because someone humiliated her, hurt her image of herself as the Valkyrie, the stainless warrior. Exposed her weakness, which was only love. So she avenged herself. So easy to justify, I wrote to her. It’s because you felt like a victim you did it. If you were really strong, you could have tolerated the humiliation. Only Jesus can make us strong enough to fight the temptations of sin.

She wrote back, a quotation from Milton, Satan’s part in Paradise Lost:

UNCLE RAY was teaching me to play chess from a book, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. He had taught himself in Vietnam. “I had a lot of time to kill there,” he said, running his fingers over the peaked hat of the white pawn. He’d carved the set there, Vietnamese kings and Buddhas for bishops, horses with sculpted cheeks and combed manes. I couldn’t imagine the months it must have taken him, patiently carving with a Swiss Army knife while all the bombs blasted around him.

I liked the order of chess, the coolness of reason, the joy of its patient steps. We played most nights when Starr was at AA or CA meetings or at Bible study, while the boys watched TV. Uncle Ray kept a little pipe of dope next to him on the arm of the chair to smoke while he waited for me to make my move.

That night the boys were watching a nature show. The littlest one, Owen, sucked his thumb, holding his stuffed giraffe, while Peter twined a bit of his hair around his finger, over and over again. Davey narrated the show for them, pointing to the screen.

“That’s Smokey, he’s the alpha male.” The light from the screen reflected in his glasses.

Uncle Ray waited for my move, looking at me in a way that made my heart open like a moonflower—his eyes on my face, my throat, my hair over my shoulders, changing color in the TV lights. On TV I saw the white of snow, the wolves hunting in pairs, their strange yellow eyes. I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.

“Oh, don’t,” Owen said, clutching his giraffe with the broken neck as the wolves leapt on their deer, pulling it down by the throat.

“It’s the law of nature,” Davey said.

“There, look at that.” Ray pointed with the black bishop he was moving. “It’s like, if God saved that deer, he’d starve the wolf. Why would he favor one person over another?” He had never quite resigned himself to my becoming a Christian. “The good don’t get any better a break than anybody else. You could be a fucking saint, and still, you got the plague or stepped on a Bouncing Betty.”

“At least you have something larger to fall back on,” I said, touching the cross around my neck, zipping it back and forth along the chain. “You have a compass and a map.”

“And if there’s no God?”

“You act as if there is, and it’s the same thing.” He sucked at his pipe, filling the room with its skunky smell, while I examined the board. “What does your mother have to say about that?” he asked.

“She says, ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ ”

“My kind of woman.”

I didn’t say that she called him Uncle Ernie. Through the screen door, the summer crickets sang. I flicked my hair behind my shoulders, moved my bishop to queen’s knight 3, threatening his knight. I sensed how he looked at my bare arm, the shoulder, my lips. To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful. I had never been beautiful before. I didn’t think it went against Christ. Everybody needed to feel love.

We heard the crunch of Starr’s Torino turning into the yard, car tires in the gravel, earlier than she normally came home. I was disappointed. Ray paid attention to me when she was gone, but when she came home I went back to being just one of the kids. What was she doing home so early anyway? She usually stayed out until eleven, drinking coffee with the addicts, or discussing Matthew 20 verse 13 with the old ladies at the church.

“Shit.” Uncle Ray quickly pocketed his stash and small pipe just as the screen door swung open and the bug zapper zapped a big one at the same time.

Starr stopped for a second at the door, seeing us, and the boys sitting on the couch, mesmerized by the TV. Then it was like she was confused to find herself home so soon. She dropped her keys and picked them up. Uncle Ray watched her, her breasts practically coming out of the scooped neck of her dress.

Then her smile came on, and she kicked off her shoes and sat on the arm of his chair, kissed him. I could see her sticking her tongue in his ear.

“Was it canceled?” he asked.

It was my move, but he wasn’t paying attention.

She draped herself over his shoulder, her breast squashed into his neck. “Sometimes I just get so tired of hearing them complain. Taking everybody else’s darn inventory.” She picked up my remaining white knight. “I love this,” she said. “Why don’t you ever teach me, Ray baby?”

“I did once,” he said in a murmuring, tender voice, turning his head and kissing her breast, right in front of me. “Don’t you remember? You got so mad you turned the board over.” He plucked the knight from her hand and put it back down on the board. King 5.

“That was in my drinking days,” she said.

“ ‘Can white mate in one move?’ ” he repeated out of the Bobby Fischer book.

“One move?” she said, tickling his nose with a strand of her hair. “That doesn’t sound too exciting.”

White knight to king’s bishop 6. I rode the delicately carved knight into place. “Mate.”

But they were kissing and then she told the boys to go to bed when they were done and led Uncle Ray back to her bedroom.

ALL NIGHT LONG as I lay in my sleeping bag with its bucking broncos and lariats, I heard their headboard smacking the wall, their laughter. And I wondered whether real daughters were jealous of their mothers and fathers, if it made them sick to see their fathers kiss their mothers, squeeze their breasts. I squeezed my own small breast, hot from the sleeping bag, and imagined how it might feel to another hand, imagined having a body like Starr’s. She was almost a different species with her narrow waist, her breasts round as grapefruit, her bottom round like that too. I imagined taking off my clothes and having a man like Uncle Ray look at me the way he looked at her.

God, it was so hot. I opened the zipper of the sleeping bag, lay on top of the hot flannel.

And she didn’t even hide it, she wasn’t that Christian. Always the shortest of shorts, the tightest of tops. You could see where her jeans crept up inside her labia. I wanted someone to want me that way, touch me the way Uncle Ray did her, like Barry and my mother.

I wished Carolee were there. She would make funny comments about the headboard or joke about Uncle Ray having a heart attack—he was almost fifty, for Christ’s sake, lucky if he didn’t die with his boots on. He met Starr at the club when she was still waitressing, and what kind of sleazy guys went to places like that anyway. But Carolee was never home at night anymore. She climbed out the window as soon as Starr said good night and went to meet her friends in the wash. She never invited me to come with her. It hurt my feelings, but I didn’t like her friends much—girls with mean laughter and boys with shaved heads, awkward and boasting.

I stroked my hands under my nightgown and felt the different skins against my fingertips—the hair on my legs, the smoothness between my thighs, and the slippery, fragrant skin of my private parts. I felt the folds, the peak, and thought of rough hands with missing fingers tracing all the secret places. On the other side of the pressboard wall, the headboard banged.

MY MOTHER sent me a reading list that summer with four hundred books on it, Colette and Chinua Achebe and Mishima, Dostoyevsky and Anai’s Nin, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. I imagined her lying in bed reciting their names like a rosary, running her tongue over them, round as beads. Sometimes Starr took us to the library. She waited in the car and gave us ten minutes to get our books or she’d leave without us. “I’ve got the only book I need, missy,” she said.

Davey and I grabbed our books like Supermarket Sweep while Peter and Owen wistfully hovered near the library grandpa who read stories to kids. It had been better when Ray was home—he would drop us off, go have a few beers, and pick us up an hour or two later. Then the little boys would listen to the grandpa’s stories as long as he held out.

But now Ray had a job doing finish carpentry in a new subdevelopment. I was used to him being home all day and missed him. He hadn’t had steady work since he’d quit his job as the shop teacher at the high school over in Sunland. He’d gotten into a fight with the principal when he wouldn’t stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance at assembly. “I fought in fucking Vietnam, got a fucking Purple Heart,” he said. “What did that asshole do? Went to goddamn Valley State. What a goddamn sterling hero.”

The owner of the development lived in Maryland and didn’t care about the Pledge of Allegiance. Ray knew someone who knew the subcontractor. So I was stuck at the height of summer in the trailer watching Starr knit a gigantic afghan that looked like a rainbow threw up on it. I read, drew. Ray bought me some kid’s watercolors from the drugstore and I started painting. I stopped trying to persuade my mother to accept Jesus. It was hopeless, she would have to come to it herself. It was God’s will, like Dmitry in The Brothers Karamazov, one of the books from her reading list.

Instead of letters, I sent her drawings and watercolors: Starr in shorts and high heels, watering the geraniums with a hose. Ray drinking a beer, watching the sun set from the porch. The boys wandering the wash in the warm tender nights with flashlights, surprising a horned owl. Ray’s chess set. The way he studied the board, fist under chin. The paloverde trees in the cool of early morning, a rattlesnake lying across a rock at full length.

I painted pictures for everybody that summer, lizards for Peter and children riding white giraffes and unicorns for Owen, raptors for Davey, both perched and in flight, from pictures in magazines: golden eagles, red-shouldered hawks, peregrine falcons, elf owls. I painted a head-and-shoulders portrait of Carolee for her to give to her boyfriend, and some for Starr, angels mostly, Jesus walking on water. Also her in different poses, wearing a bathing suit, in the style of World War II poster girls.

Uncle Ray just wanted a picture of his truck. It was an old Ford, high and aqua green, with a feather roach clip hanging from the rearview mirror, and a bumper sticker that said, This Property Protected by Smith & Wesson. I painted it against the mountains in the clear morning, aqua and salmon and pale blue.

THE SUMMER climaxed in Santa Anas like nothing I’d ever seen before. Fire came up over the ridges and burned down the flanks of the mountains a mile away. This was no mere smudge on the horizon with miles of concrete separating you. We could see a thousand acres burning off the Big Tujunga. We kept our things packed in Ray’s truck and in the trunk of the Torino. The winds blew like hurricanes and the burn area was being reported in square miles and there were riots down in the city. Uncle Ray took to cleaning his guns on the patio after work, as the ash from the fires sifted a fine powder over everything. He handed me the small gun, a Beretta. It was like a toy in my hand. “Want to shoot?”

“Sure,” I said. He never let the boys touch his guns. Starr hated to even look at them, though now the riots were going on, she’d stopped asking him to get rid of them. He took a can of green Rust-Oleum and spray-painted a human figure on a board, and for fun made it carrying a TV. He set it up against an oleander at the far end of the yard. “He’s taking your TV, Astrid. Plug him.”

It was fun, the little Beretta .22. I landed four out of nine shots. He put tape over the bullet holes so I’d know which were old, which were new. I got to try all the guns eventually—the rifle, the short-nosed .38 Police Special, Smith & Wesson, even the twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. I liked the Beretta best, but Ray insisted the Smith & Wesson was the thing to shoot, it had “stopping power.” He’d put it in my hands, showing me how to sight it, how to squeeze the trigger with my mind. The .38 was the hardest of the four to shoot and be accurate with. You had to use both hands, and keep your arms very straight, or it came back and hit you in the face.

Each gun had a purpose, like a hammer or a screwdriver. The rifle was for hunting, the Beretta for potentially touchy situations—a bar, a meeting with the ex, a date, what Ray called close-in work. The shotgun was for home protection. “Get behind me, kids!” he’d say in a grandmothery voice, and we’d all run behind him as he demonstrated, spraying the oleanders with buckshot.

And the .38? “Only one reason for a thirty-eight. And that’s to kill your man.”

I felt like an Israeli girl soldier, in shorts and the hot wind, sighting down the barrel of the rifle, holding the .38 with both hands. It was a strange feeling, him looking at me as I aimed. I found I couldn’t quite lose myself in the target. His eyes split my attention between the C in Coke and my awareness of him watching me.

And I thought, this was what it was like to be beautiful. What my mother felt. The tug of eyes, pulling you back from your flight to the target. I was in two places at once, not only in my thought, my aim, but my bare feet on the dusty yard, my legs growing stronger, my breasts in the new bra, my long tanned arms, my hair flowing white in the hot wind. He was taking my silence but giving me something in return, a fullness of being recognized. I felt beautiful, but also interrupted. I wasn’t used to being so complicated.