White Oleander - Janet Fitch [158]
I gazed down at my drawing of Rena, dotted with water from the sprinkler. Really, I didn’t even like drawings. When I went to the museum, I looked at paintings, sculptures, anything but lines on a piece of paper. It was just that my hand needed something to do, my eye needed a reason to shape the space between Rena and the sprinkler she had running and her wobbly-legged table of rusted white diamond mesh that held one drink and an ashtray. I liked the way the tabletop echoed the black diamonds of her bikini and the chain-link fence, how the curve of her tumbler was the same as the curve of her raised thigh and the taller man’s arm draped over the fence, and leaves on the banana tree at the Casados’ house across the street.
If I didn’t draw, what reason would there be for the way the light fell on the scallop of tiles on the Casados’ roof, and the lumpy tufts of lawn, the delicate braids of green foxtails soon to go brown, and the way the sky seemed to squash everything flat to the earth like an enormous foot? I’d have to get pregnant, or drink, to blur it all out, except for myself very large in the foreground.
Luckily I wasn’t in the classes where they talked about college. I was in the classes where they told us about condoms and bringing guns to school. Claire signed me up for all the honors classes, but I couldn’t hold on. If she were alive, I might have tried, followed up, asked for a scholarship, I would know what to do. Now all that was slipping away.
On the other hand, I still went to school, did the work, took the tests. I was going to graduate, for all that meant. Niki thought I was an idiot. Who would know if I went or not, who would care? But it was still something to do. I went and drew the chair legs, the way they looked like the legs of water striders. I could spend an hour exaggerating the perspective of all the desks diminishing toward the blackboard, the backs of heads, necks, hair. Yolanda Collins sat in front of me in math class. I could gaze at the back of her head all period long, the layers of tiny braids laced together in designs intricate as Persian rugs, sometimes with beads or cord woven in.
I looked down at the pad in my hands. At least I had this diamond-shaped pattern, the trapezoid of the gate. Wasn’t that enough? Did there have to be more?
I looked at Rena, slathering on her Tropic Tan, baking to medium-well in the blistering sun, happy as a cupcake in frilled paper. “Rena, you ever wonder why people get out of bed in the morning? Why do they bother? Why not just drink turpentine?”
Rena turned her head to the side, shaded her eyes with her hand, glanced at me, then went back to sunny-side up. “You are Russian I think. A Russian always ask, what is meaning of life.” She pulled a long, depressed face. “What is meaning of life, maya liubov? Is our bad weather. Here is California, Astrid darling. You don’t ask meaning. Too bad Akhmatova, but we got beach volleyball, sports car, tummy tuck. Don’t worry, be happy. Buy something.”
She smiled to herself, arms down at her sides, eyes closed, glistening on her chaise lounge like bacon frying in a pan. Small beads of water clung to the tiny hairs of her upper lip, pooled between her breasts. Maybe she was the lucky one, I thought, a woman who had divested herself of both future and past. No dreams, no standards, a woman who smoked and drank and slept with men like Sergei, men who were spiritually what