White Oleander - Janet Fitch [22]
“Well, you will. Lord, once you hear that man, you’ll be saved on the spot.”
Carolee lit a Marlboro, lowered the back window. “That phony-ass con. How can you swallow such shit.”
“He who believeth in me, though he was dead, yet he will live, and don’t you forget it, missy,” Starr said. She never called us by our names, not even her own children, only “mister” or “missy.”
She was taking us to the Clothestime in the next town, Sunland, she wanted to get me a few things for my new life. I’d never been into a store like that. My mother and I got our clothes on the boardwalk in Venice. Inside the Clothestime, colors assaulted us from every side. Magenta! they screamed. Turquoise! Battery acid! under the flicker of fluorescent lighting. Starr filled my arms with clothes to try on, herded me into a dressing room with her, so we could continue our chat.
In the cubicle, she wriggled into a tiny striped minidress and smoothed it over her ribs, turning to the side to see what it looked like in profile. The stripes widened and tapered over her breasts and bottom like op art. I tried not to stare, but how could you not be astounded. I wondered what Reverend Thomas would think of her in a dress like that.
She frowned, pulled the dress over her head, and hung it back up. It still was stretched to fit her figure. Her body in the small dressing room was almost too much to bear. I could only look at her in the mirror, her breasts falling out of the top of her under-wired brassiere, the cross hiding between them like a snake in a rock.
“Sin’s a virus, that’s what Reverend Thomas says. Infecting the whole country, like the clap,” she told me. “They’ve got clap now you can’t get rid of. Sin’s just exactly the same. We ’ve got every excuse in the book. Like what difference does it make if I shovel coke up my nose or not? What’s wrong with wanting to feel good all the time? Who does it hurt?”
She opened her eyes wide, I could see the glue on her false eyelashes. “It hurts us and it hurts Jesus. Because it’s wrong.” She said it soft and sweet, like a nursery school teacher. I tried to imagine what it was like working in a gentleman’s club. Walking naked into a room full of men.
She tried on a pink stretchy dress, rolling it down over her hips. “It’s a virus that eats you up from the inside out, you infect everything around you. Oh, wait till you hear Reverend Thomas.”
She frowned at the dress in the mirror, the way it looked in the back, it was so tight it rose up between her legs. “This would look better on you.”
She stripped it off and handed it to me. It smelled of her heavy perfume. Obsession. When I took off my clothes, she looked at my body closely, like she was trying to decide if she wanted to buy it or not. My underwear was torn. “You’d better start wearing a bra, missy. Thirteen years old, I should say. I had my first bra in the fourth grade. You don’t want ’em hanging to your knees when you’re thirty, do you?”
Thirteen? The shock of it made me drop a stack of clothes off the hook. I thought back through the past year. My mother’s trial, all the sessions and questions, medication and caseworkers. Sometime in there I’d turned thirteen. I had crossed a frontier in my sleep, and nobody had woken me to stamp my passport. Thirteen. The idea so stunned me I didn’t even argue when Starr insisted on buying me the pink dress to wear to church, and two bras so they wouldn’t hang down to my knees when I was thirty, and a package of panties, some other things.
We went next door to Payless for shoes. Starr took a sample red high heel down from the display and put it on without a sock, stood on it, smoothed her shorts over her hips, cocked her head to one side, made a face, and put it back on the stand. “I mean, I really thought like that. Who cares if I stick my tits in some stranger’s face? It’s nobody’s business but mine.”
Carolee whispered, “Mother, please shut up. People are staring.”
Starr handed me a pair of pink high heels that would match my dress. I tried them on. They made my feet look like Daisy Duck’s, but Starr loved