White Oleander - Janet Fitch [66]
I fell in love that cloudy afternoon. With the speed and the road and the spin of scenery like a fast film pan. I usually got carsick, but the pot lifted me out of it, and the road and the pines peeled away the gloom I’d been carrying around since the park, leaving nothing but the tenor song of the engine and the wind in my face, Olivia’s dished profile, her big sunglasses, Coltrane ’s “Naima” unfolding like a story on the CD player. The slut next door’s got a goddamn Corvette. And I loved Olivia for sharing it with me, this champagne pearl she’d brought up from the depths of the white sea.
We drove down Ventura, up Coldwater Canyon, the twists in the road like the rise and fall of Coltrane’s tenor sax. We were dancing it, embodying it as we climbed past overblown Valley ranch homes, white cinder block pierced ornamentally, black cypresses planted in unimaginative rows and geometrically trimmed, up over the top into Beverly Hills.
Now it was tree ferns and banks of impatiens and houses with two-story front doors, grass the radiant green of pool tables, the gardeners with blowguns the only humans in sight. We were entirely free. No children, no job, no foster mothers, just speed and our beauty and the soulful breath of Coltrane’s sax. Who could touch us.
She valet-parked at a hotel on Rodeo Drive, and we walked past the expensive shops, stopping to look in the windows. We went into a store so fancy it had a doorman. Olivia took a liking to a black crocodile bag, bought it with cash. She wanted to buy me something. She pulled me into a store that had nothing but sweaters, scarves, and knit hats. She held a sweater up against my cheek. The softness was startling. I realized I had not thought enough about the possibilities of physical reality.
“Cashmere.” She smiled, her overbite twinkling. “Like it?”
I sighed. I had seen the price tag.
“Good girl. But not peach.” She handed the sweater back to the shopgirl, an eighteen-year-old who smiled placidly. The store smelled of money, soft as a dream.
“Aqua is pretty,” the girl said, holding a cable knit sweater the color of spring.
“Too obvious,” I said.
Olivia knew what I meant. She found one in French blue, without cables, gave it to me to try on. It turned my eyes blueberry, brought out the rose in my cheeks. Yet in my drawer, it could pass for something from the Jewish Women thrift store. It cost five hundred dollars. Olivia didn’t blink as she counted out fifties and hundreds. “What’s real is always worth it,” she explained to me. “Look how it’s made.” She showed me the shoulders, the way they were knit together with a separate yoke instead of a seam. “You’ll wear it your whole life.”
What was real. That’s what I learned as we moved from shop to shop. The Georg Jensen silver bangle. The Roblin pottery vase. Stores like churches in worship of the real. The quiet voices as the women handled Steuben glass, Hermès scarves. To own the real was to be real. I rubbed my cheek against my sweater, soft as a blue Persian cat.
She treated me to lunch in a restaurant under yellow-and-white-striped umbrellas, ordered us a meal composed solely of appetizers: oysters, gravlax, carpaccio. Hearts of palm salad. She explained how each dish was prepared as she sipped a glass of cold white wine and tasted first one, then another, putting her fork down between bites. I’d never seen anything so elegant as Olivia eating. As if she had all the time in the world.
“Life should always be like this.” She sighed. “Don’t you agree? Like lingering over a good meal. Unfortunately, most people have no talent for it.” She pointed out my empty water goblet to the white-jacketed busboy. “As soon as they start one thing, they want it to be over with, so they can start on the next.” He got a pitcher and refilled the glass.
“I used to go with a man who took me to the finest restaurants in the city,” Olivia continued. “And after we’d eaten, he’d stand up and say, ‘Now where