White Oleander - Janet Fitch [126]
“You’ll like it with us, Astrid,” Ann said, her clean white hand on my arm.
She smelled of Jergens hand lotion, a pallid pink sweetness, not L’Air du Temps or Ma Griffe or my mother’s secretive violets, a scent which for chemical reasons could only be smelled for a moment at a time. Which do you like better, tarragon or thyme? All that was a dream, you couldn’t hold on, you couldn’t depend on frosted glass birds and Debussy.
I looked at Bill and Ann, their well-meaning faces, sturdy shoes, no hard questions. Bill’s graying blond crew cut, his silver-rimmed glasses, Ann’s snip-and-curl beauty shop hair. This was attainable, solid and homely and indestructible as indoor-outdoor carpeting. I should have been grabbing it. But I found myself pulling away from her hand.
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe them. I believed everything they said, they were a salvation, a solution to my most basic lack. But I recalled a morning years ago in a boxy church in Tujunga, the fluorescent lights, chipped folding chairs. Starr charmed as a snake while Reverend Thomas explained damnation. The damned could be saved, he said, anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love.
I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life. It wasn’t like I didn’t know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and ever-present loss. But I knew I would never go to Bill with a troubling personal matter, a boy who liked me too much, a teacher who scolded unfairly. I had already seen more of the world, its beauty and misery and sheer surprise, than they could hope or fear to perceive.
But I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They were blind sleepwalkers on tightropes, fingers scoring thin air. So I let them go, got up and walked away, knowing I’d given up something I could never get back. Not Ann and Bill Greenway, but some illusion I’d had, that I could be saved, start again.
So now I sat at the tables again, waiting for my next interview. I saw her, a skinny brunette in dark glasses, she was taking a shortcut across the wet lawn, sinking into the just-watered turf in high heels, not caring she was ripping up the grass. Her silver earrings flashed in the January sun like fishing lures. Her sweater fell off one shoulder, revealing a black bra strap. She lost a shoe, the earth sucking it right off her foot. She hopped back on one leg, and mashed her bare foot angrily in. I knew already, I’d be going with her.
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