White Oleander - Janet Fitch [16]
“How much?”
“Eighty dollars, miss.”
“Eighty.” My mother hesitated. Eighty dollars was food money for two weeks, eighty dollars was two months’ worth of gas for the car. What could be worth eighty dollars, that we drove down to Tijuana to buy?
“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s get in the car and just drive. Let’s go to La Paz.”
She looked at me. I’d caught her by surprise, so I kept talking, thinking maybe I could get us back onto some planet I recognized. “We could take the first ferry in the morning. Can’t we just do that? Drive to Jalisco. San Miguel de Allende. We could close our accounts, have the money wired to the American Express, and just keep going.”
How easy it could be. She knew where all the gas stations were from here to Panama, the cheap grand hotels with high ceilings and carved wooden headboards just off the main plazas. In three days we could put a thousand miles between us and this bottle of disaster. “You always liked it down there. You never wanted to come back to the States.”
For an instant, I had her. I knew she was remembering the years we had spent down there, her lovers, the color of the sea. But it wasn’t a strong enough spell, I wasn’t a word spinner like her, not good enough, and the image faded, returning to the screen of her obsession: Barry and the blond, Barry and the red-head, Barry in a seersucker bathrobe.
“Too late,” she said. She pulled out her wallet, counted four twenties onto the counter.
AT NIGHT she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots of a vine with white trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors’ fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet spinach-green stuff into somebody else’s dumpster. She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon.
“WHAT’S DMSO?” I asked Michael one night when she had gone out. He was drinking scotch, real Johnnie Walker, celebrating because he’d gotten a job at the Music Center in Macbeth, though he couldn’t call it that, it was bad luck. All the witches and stuff. You were supposed to call it the Scottish play. Michael was taking no chances, it had been a year since he’d done anything but Books on Tape.
“People use it for arthritis,” he said.
I leafed through a Variety and tried to ask casually, “Is it dangerous?”
“Completely harmless,” he said. He raised his glass and examined the amber liquor, then sipped slowly, his eyes closing in satisfaction.
I hadn’t expected good news. “What’s it for, then?”
“It helps drugs absorb through your skin. That’s how the nicotine patch works, and those seasickness patches. You put it on and the DMSO lets it get through your skin into the blood-stream. Marvelous stuff. I remember when they used to worry that hippies would mix it with LSD and paint the doorknobs of public buildings.” He laughed into his drink. “As if anybody would waste their acid on a bunch of straights.”
I LOOKED FOR the bottle of DMSO. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I looked under the kitchen sink and in the bathroom, in the drawers — there just weren’t many places to hide things in our apartment, and anyway, hiding things wasn’t my mother’s style. I waited up for her. She came back late, with a handsome young man whose dark curls trailed halfway down his back. She held his hand.
“This is Jesus,” she said. “He’s a poet. My daughter, Astrid.”
“Hi,” I said. “Mom, can I talk to you for a second?”
“You should be in bed,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She smiled at Jesus, let go of his hand, and walked me out onto the screen porch. She looked beautiful again, no circles under her eyes, hair like falling water.
I lay down in my bed and she covered me with a sheet, stroked my face. “Mom, what happened