White Oleander - Janet Fitch [108]
We heard the hum of someone running a lawn mower down the street. The sweetness of jasmine took the rest of the air. She sighed, filling out ribs sharp as the blades of the mower. “But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?”
What answer could I give her? I’d been doing it for years. She was my life raft, my turtle. I lay down, put my head on her shoulder. She smelled of sweat and L’Air du Temps, but now dusty blue, as if her melancholy had stained the perfume.
“Anything can happen,” I said.
She kissed me on the mouth. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and I was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. I was confused, but not unwilling. I would have let her do anything to me.
She dropped back onto the pillow, her arm over her eyes. I raised up on one elbow. I didn’t know what to say.
“I feel so unreal,” she said.
She turned over, her back to me, her garnet heart pendant stuck to the back of her shoulder. Her dirty hair was heavy as a bunch of black grapes, and her waist and hip curved like a pale guitar. She picked up the strand of pearls and lowered it in a spiral on the bedspread, but when she moved it slid in toward her body, spoiling the design. She picked it up, tried again, like a girl picking petals off daisies, trying to get the right answer.
“If only I had a child,” she said.
I felt a twang on a rarely played string. I was well aware I was the instead-baby, a stand-in for what she really wanted. If she had a baby, she wouldn’t need me. But a baby was out of the question. She was so thin, she was starving herself. I’d caught her vomiting after we ate.
“I was pregnant once, at Yale. It never occurred to me that was the only baby I’d ever have.”
The whine of the lawn mower filled the silence. I would have liked to say something encouraging, but I couldn’t think of anything. I plucked the heart off her back. Her thinness belied her spoken desire. She’d lost so much weight she could wear my clothes now. She did when I was at school. I came home sometimes and certain outfits were warm, smelling of L’Air du Temps. I pictured her in my clothes, certain things she favored, a plaid skirt, a skinny top. Standing in the mirror, imagining she was sixteen, a junior in high school. She did a perfect imitation of me, the gawky teenager. Crossing her legs the way I did, twining them and tucking the foot behind the calf. Starting with a shrug before I talked, dismissing what I was about to say in advance. My uneasy smile, that flashed and disappeared in a second. She tried me on like my clothes. But it wasn’t me she wanted to be, it was just sixteen.
I watched the garden under the blinds, the long shadows cast by the cypress, the palm, across the textured green. If she were sixteen, what? She wouldn’t have made the mistakes she’s made? Maybe she would choose better? Maybe she wouldn’t have to choose at all, she could just stay sixteen. But she was trying on the wrong person’s clothes. I wasn’t anyone she ’d want to be. She was too fragile to be me, it would crush her, like the pressure of a deep wall dive.
Mostly she lay here like this, thinking about Ron, when would he come home, was there another woman? Worrying about luck and evil influences, while wearing talismans of her family past, women who did something with their lives, made something of themselves, or at least got dressed every day, women who never kissed a sixteen-year-old foster daughter because they felt unreal, never let the weeds grow in their gardens because it was too hot to pull them.
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It frightened me for Claire to bare her needs so openly. If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away. I didn’t need