White Oleander - Janet Fitch [164]
Well, anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon’s charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cézanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them.
BUT THAT NIGHT I dreamed the old dream again, of gray Paris streets and the maze of stone, the bricked blind windows. This time there were doors of glass with curved art nouveau handles, they were all locked. I knew I had to find my mother. It was getting dark, dark figures lurked in the cellar entrances. I rang all the buzzers to the apartments. Women came to the door, looking like her, smiling, some even called my name. But none of them was her.
I knew she was in there, I banged on the door, screamed for her to let me in. The door buzzed to admit me, but just as I pushed it in, I saw her leaving from the courtyard gate, a passenger in a small red car, wearing her curly Afghan coat and big sun-glasses over her blind eyes, she was leaning back in the seat and laughing. I ran after her, crying, begging.
Yvonne shook me awake. She took my head in her lap, and her long brown hair draped over us like a shawl. Her belly was warm and firm as a bolster. Through the strands of her hair wove the colored strands of light I still saw, cast by a kid’s carousel bedside lamp I’d scavenged on trash day. “We get all the bad dreams, ese,” she said, stroking my wet cheek with the palm of her hand. “We got to leave some for somebody else.”
30
THE MATERNITY WARD of Waite Memorial Hospital reminded me of all the schools I’d ever gone to. Sand-textured walls painted the color of old teeth, lockers in the hall, linoleum floors dark and light brown, acoustic tiles packed with string. Only the screaming up and down the halls was different. It scared me. I didn’t belong here, I thought, as I followed Yvonne down the corridor. I should be going to third period, learning something distant and cerebral, safely tucked between book covers. In life, anything could happen.
I brought all the things we’d learned to use in baby class, the tennis balls, the rolled-up towels, the watch, but Yvonne didn’t want to do it, puff and count, lie on the tennis balls. All she wanted was to suck on the white terry cloth and let me wipe her face with ice, sing to her in my tuneless voice. I sang songs from musicals I used to watch with Michael — Camelot, My Fair Lady. I sang to her, “Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you,” that Claire had once sung on the banks of the McKenzie. While all around us, through the curtains, women screamed in their narrow labor beds, cursing, groaning, and calling for their mothers in ten languages. It sounded like the laboratories of the Inquisition.
Rena didn’t stay long. She drove us there, dropped us off, signed the papers. Whenever I started liking her, something like this happened.
“Mama,” Yvonne whimpered, tears rolling down her face. She squeezed my arm as another contraction came. We’d been here for nine hours, through two shifts of nurses. My arm was bruised