White Oleander - Janet Fitch [32]
God, it was so hot. I opened the zipper of the sleeping bag, lay on top of the hot flannel.
And she didn’t even hide it, she wasn’t that Christian. Always the shortest of shorts, the tightest of tops. You could see where her jeans crept up inside her labia. I wanted someone to want me that way, touch me the way Uncle Ray did her, like Barry and my mother.
I wished Carolee were there. She would make funny comments about the headboard or joke about Uncle Ray having a heart attack — he was almost fifty, for Christ’s sake, lucky if he didn’t die with his boots on. He met Starr at the club when she was still waitressing, and what kind of sleazy guys went to places like that anyway. But Carolee was never home at night anymore. She climbed out the window as soon as Starr said good night and went to meet her friends in the wash. She never invited me to come with her. It hurt my feelings, but I didn’t like her friends much — girls with mean laughter and boys with shaved heads, awkward and boasting.
I stroked my hands under my nightgown and felt the different skins against my fingertips — the hair on my legs, the smoothness between my thighs, and the slippery, fragrant skin of my private parts. I felt the folds, the peak, and thought of rough hands with missing fingers tracing all the secret places. On the other side of the pressboard wall, the headboard banged.
MY MOTHER sent me a reading list that summer with four hundred books on it, Colette and Chinua Achebe and Mishima, Dostoyevsky and Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. I imagined her lying in bed reciting their names like a rosary, running her tongue over them, round as beads. Sometimes Starr took us to the library. She waited in the car and gave us ten minutes to get our books or she’d leave without us. “I’ve got the only book I need, missy,” she said.
Davey and I grabbed our books like Supermarket Sweep while Peter and Owen wistfully hovered near the library grandpa who read stories to kids. It had been better when Ray was home — he would drop us off, go have a few beers, and pick us up an hour or two later. Then the little boys would listen to the grandpa’s stories as long as he held out.
But now Ray had a job doing finish carpentry in a new subdevelopment. I was used to him being home all day and missed him. He hadn’t had steady work since he ’d quit his job as the shop teacher at the high school over in Sunland. He’d gotten into a fight with the principal when he wouldn’t stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance at assembly. “I fought in fucking Vietnam, got a fucking Purple Heart,” he said. “What did that asshole do? Went to goddamn Valley State. What a goddamn sterling hero.”
The owner of the development lived in Maryland and didn’t care about the Pledge of Allegiance. Ray knew someone who knew the subcontractor. So I was stuck at the height of summer in the trailer watching Starr knit a gigantic afghan that looked like a rainbow threw up on it. I read, drew. Ray bought me some kid’s watercolors from the drugstore and I started painting. I stopped trying to persuade my mother to accept Jesus. It was hopeless, she would have to come to it herself. It was God’s will, like Dmitry in The Brothers Karamazov, one of the books from her reading list.
Instead of letters, I sent her drawings and watercolors: Starr in shorts and high heels, watering the geraniums with a hose. Ray drinking a beer, watching the sun set from the porch. The boys wandering the wash in the warm tender nights with flashlights, surprising a horned owl. Ray’s chess