White Oleander - Janet Fitch [40]
Ray looked sad right then, like someone was dying, his back pressed against the smudged window. “I never wanted this to happen,” he said.
“You’re a liar, Ray,” I said.
Then he was kneeling in front of me, his arms around my hips, kissing my belly, my thighs, his hands on my bare bottom, fingers in the silky wetness between my legs, tasting me there. My smell on his mouth as I knelt down with him, ran my hands over his body, opened his clothes, felt for him, hard, larger than I’d thought it would be. And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.
8
ALL DAY AT SCHOOL, and in the Ray-less afternoons down the wash, or at dinner with Starr and the kids, or when we watched TV at night, Ray was my only thought, my singular obsession. How soft his skin was, softer than you’d think a man’s skin could be, and the thickness of his arms, the sinews tracing along his forearms like tree roots, and the sad way he looked at me when my clothes were gone.
I sketched the way he looked nude, gazing out the window after we’d made love, or lying on the pile of carpet padding he’d dragged into the corner of the new bedroom. On our afternoons we ’d lie on those pads, our legs entwined, smooth over hairy, his fingers lightly covering my breast and playing with my nipple, making it stand up like a pencil eraser. I hid the drawings in the box with my mother’s journals, a place Starr would never think to look. I knew I should throw them out, but I couldn’t bear to.
“Why are you with Starr?” I asked him one afternoon, tracing the white scar under his ribs where a Vietcong bullet had left its mark.
He ran his fingertips over my ribs so the goose bumps came up. “She’s the only woman who ever let me just be myself,” he said.
“I would,” I said, doing the same on his balls with the back of my fingernails, making him jump. “Is she good in bed, is that it?”
“That’s personal,” he said. He covered my hand with his and held it to his groin. I felt him growing hard again. “I don’t talk about one woman to another. That’s plain bad manners.”
He ran his finger between my legs, into the wet like silk, then put his finger in his mouth. I never imagined it would be like this, to be desired. Everything was possible. He pulled me on top of him and I rode him like a horse in the surf, my forehead against his chest, riding through a spray of sparks. If my mother were free, would this be one of her lovers, filling me up with his stars? And would my mother watch me the way Starr did, realizing I was no longer transparent as an encyclopedia overlay?
No. If she were free, I wouldn’t be here. She would never have allowed me to have this. She kept everything good for herself.
“I love you, Ray,” I said.
“Shhh,” he said, holding my hips. His eyelids fluttered. “Don’t say anything.”
So I just rode, the ocean spray tingling all over me, the tide rising, filled with starfish and phosphorescence, into the dawn.
STARR’S EDGINESS spilled over, mostly at the kids. She was accusing her daughter of all the things she wanted to accuse me of. Carolee barely ever came home, she went dirt biking with Derrick in the afternoon, the drone of the bikes like a nagging doubt. When I wasn’t with Ray, I stayed at school or went to the library, or hunted frogs with the boys as the Big Tujunga’s winter flow slowly dried up into rivulets and muddy pools. The frogs looked like the mud and you had to be very still to see them. Mostly I just sat on a rock in the sun and painted.
But one day I came home from the wash to find Starr curled up on the porch swing, her hair in hot rollers, wearing a blue blouse tied up tight under her breasts and tiny cutoffs that bunched up at her crotch. She was playing with the kittens the cat had had under the house that spring, fishing for them with ribbons Davey had tied to a stick. She was laughing and talking to them, it wasn