White Oleander - Janet Fitch [62]
Looking back at me was a thirty-year-old hostess at Denny’s. Anything else I can get you, hon? I could feel this vision burning itself into my soul, burning away Deneuve and Dietrich like acid thrown in my face. The woman in the mirror would not have to orchestrate three different lovers. She would not dance on rooftops in Mexico, fly first class to London over the pole. She was in for varicose veins and a single apartment with cat litter and Lana Turner movies. She would drink by herself with tomatoes dying on the windowsills. She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I’m so lonely, so desperate. I’ll give you whatever you want.
SCHOOL LET OUT at the end of June under a marine layer heavy as wet towels. The pencil-gray days were broken only by the blue flowers in Olivia’s yard. I babysat, ran errands, reread A Spy in the House of Love. I longed to see Olivia, but Marvel kept me working. If I so much as walked outside, she gave me four other things to do. Sometimes I’d see Olivia picking herbs in her garden, and our eyes would meet, but she gave no indication she knew me. She would have been a good secret agent, I thought, and tried to do the same, but after a while, I wondered if it was a good act or if she had forgotten me entirely.
Dear Astrid,
The all-prison issue of Witness is out, you must buy it, they printed my whole poem. It ran seven pages, illustrated with photographs by Ellen Mary McConnell. The response has been tremendous. I had them include a brief note in which I humbly mentioned that gifts of stamps, books, and money would be deeply appreciated.
Already I’ve made new fast friends. For instance, the delightful Dan Wiley, #M143522, a strong-arm robber serving twelve years at San Quentin. Dan the Man, as he calls himself, writes almost daily, a series of rough-trade fantasies in which I am the starring player. The best to date is one in which he sodomizes me on the hood of his ’72 Mustang while watching the sun go down over Malibu. Doesn’t that sound romantic? Did it have a hood ornament that year?
A woman just had the Collected Anne Sexton sent. Hallelujah. Finally something else to read. The only books in the prison library without heaving bodices on the covers are a large-print edition of War and Peace and a tattered Jack London. Arf. Arf.
Of course, this admirer also had to send a sheaf of the most dreadful po-e-tree for my approval. She lives on a farm in Wisconsin, some sort of aged hippie commune, where she spins her own sheep. How could anyone who loves Sexton produce work so unrelievedly bad? I am Womannn, hear me Roarrr. So just roar, please, it would be far less embarrassing for all concerned.
However, she believes me to be a prisoner of the patriarchy, a martyr in my own small way. So long as her solidarity includes gifts — power to the people. Free Huey! Free Ingrid Magnussen.
Not one word about me. How are you, Astrid? Are you happy? I miss you. It seemed like years since she ’d considered the possibility of losing me. I’d returned to the shadows. My job once again was to share in her triumphs, to snicker at her unfortunate admirers with her, a sort of pocket mirror and studio audience. I realized I was exactly where she wanted me, safely unhappy with Marvel Turlock, a prisoner in turquoise, brewing into an artist, someone she might want to know someday. When all I wanted was for her to see me now, the way she saw me that day at the prison. To want to know me, what I thought, how I felt.
I wrote to her about Olivia, about another way to be in the world. I inserted drawings of Olivia, lying on the couch pulling magic out of the air. You’re not the only beauty in the world, Mother. There is burnished teak as well as alabaster, rippling mahogany as well as silk. And a world of satisfaction where you found only fury and desire. The world parts for Olivia, it lies down at her feet, where