White Oleander - Janet Fitch [82]
“You should take in girls,” I heard her tell her friend Constanza one day while I was polishing the silver. “It’s easy money. You can remodel. I’m remodeling the bathroom next.”
I polished the intricate coils of the fork handle with a toothbrush. I’d done it yesterday, but she didn’t like that there was still tarnish in the crevices, so I had to redo them. I would have liked to plant it in her gut. I could have eaten her flesh raw.
Finally in the darkness of March, after weeks of near-daily phone calls, Ms. Cardoza dumped me and I got a new caseworker, an angel of the Lord called Joan Peeler. She was young, wore black, and had long hair dyed rock ’n’ roll red. She had four silver rings on each hand. She looked more like a poet than a government drone. When it was time to go for our visit, I asked if she knew any coffeehouses.
She took me to one on Vermont. We ducked in past a few outside tables occupied by shivering smokers trying to stay dry, and into the warm, humid interior. Immediately, I was overcome by memories, the black walls and fragrance of hippie soup, the table by the cash register cluttered with handbills and flyers and free newspapers. Even the laughably ugly paintings in thick pigments seemed familiar — green women with long breasts and vampire teeth, men with baroque erections. And I could remember my mother’s voice, her irritation when the roar of the cappuccino machine interrupted her reading, her books stacked on the table where I drew and took the money when someone bought one.
I wanted her back. I was overwhelmed with a need to hear her low, expressive voice. I wanted her to say something funny and cruel about the art, or tell a story about one of the other poets. I wanted to feel her hand on my hair, stroking me while she spoke.
Joan Peeler ordered peach tea. I took strong coffee with cream and sugar and the biggest pastry, a blueberry scone shaped like a heart. We sat at a table where we could see the street, the funereal umbrellas, hear the soft hiss of cars through puddles. She opened my case file on the sticky tabletop. I tried to eat slowly, to enjoy the buttery biscuit and the whole blueberries, but I was too hungry. I finished half of it before she even looked up.
“Ms. Cardoza recommended you not be moved,” my new caseworker said. “She says the home is perfectly adequate. She says you have an attitude problem.”
I could picture her writing it, Ms. Cardoza, her skin muddy with makeup applied like cake frosting. She never once took me out for a visit, always spent the whole time talking to Amelia in Spanish over plates of butter cookies and yerbabuena tea in matching flowered cups and saucers. She was so impressed by Amelia and the big house, the sparkling silver. All that remodeling. She never wondered where the money came from. Six girls bought a lot of remodeling, even antiques, especially if you didn’t feed them.
I glanced up at a drippy, heavy painting of a woman lying on a bed, her legs spread, snakes crawling out of her vagina. Joan Peeler craned her neck around to see what I was looking at.
“Did she say why I asked to be moved?” I licked powdered sugar off my fingers.
“She said you complained about the food. And that Mrs. Ramos restricts use of the telephone. She found you bright but spoiled.”
I laughed out loud, pulled up my sweater to show her my ribs. The men across the aisle looked too, a writer with a portable computer, a student making notes on a legal pad. Seeing if I’d pull it up any higher. Not that it mattered, I didn’t have much on top anymore. “We’re starving,” I said, covering myself again.
Joan Peeler frowned, pouring tea through a wicker strainer into a chipped cup. “Why don’t the other girls complain?”
“They’re afraid of a worse placement. She says if we complain she’ll send us to Mac.”
Joan put her strainer down. “If what you say is true and we can prove it, she can have her license revoked.”
I imagined how it would really play. Joan started her investigation, got transferred to