White Oleander - Janet Fitch [84]
“You’ll like these people, Astrid,” she said as we drove west on Melrose, past body shops and pupuserias. “Ron and Claire Richards. She’s an actress and he does something with television.”
“Do they have kids?” I asked. Hoping they didn’t. No more babysitting, or 99-cent gifts when the two-year-old gets a ride-in Barbie car.
“No. In fact, they’re looking to adopt.”
That was a new one, something I never considered. Adoption. The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box. I didn’t know what to think. We passed Paramount Studios, the big triple-arched gate, parking kiosk, people riding around on fattired bicycles. The longing in her eyes. “Next year, I’ll be in there,” Joan said. Sometimes I didn’t know who was younger, her or me.
I handled the word adoption in my mind like it was radioactive, saw my mother’s face, pulpy and blind in sunken-cheeked fury.
Joan drove through the strip of funky Melrose shops west of La Brea, with shops of used boots and toys for grown-ups, turned south onto a quiet side street, into an old neighborhood of stucco bungalows and full-growth sycamores with chalky white trunks and leaves like hands. We parked in front of one, and I followed Joan to the door. An enamel plaque under the doorbell read The Richards in script. Joan rang the doorbell.
The woman who answered the door reminded me of Audrey Hepburn. Dark hair, long neck, wide radiant smile, about thirty. Her cheeks were flushed as she waved us in. “I’m Claire. We’ve been waiting for you.” She had an old-fashioned kind of voice, velvety, her words completely enunciated, ing instead of in’, the t crisp, precise.
Joan carried my suitcase. I had my mother’s books and Uncle Ray’s box, my Olivia things in a bag.
“Here, let me help you,” the woman said, taking the bag, setting it on the coffee table. “Put that down anywhere.”
I put my things next to the table, looked around the lowceilinged living room painted a pinkish white, its floor stripped to reddish pine planks. I liked it already. There was a painting over the fireplace, a jellyfish on a dark blue background, penetrated with fine bright lines. Art, something painted by hand. I couldn’t believe it. Someone bought a piece of art. And a wall of books with worn spines, CDs, records, and tapes. The free-form couch along two walls looked comfortable, a blue, red, and purple woven design, reading lamp in the center. I was afraid to breathe. This couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be for me. She was going to change her mind.
“There are just a few things we need to go over,” Joan said, sitting down on the couch, opening her briefcase. “Astrid, could you excuse us?”
“Make yourself at home,” Claire Richards said to me, smiling, reaching out in a gesture of gift. “Please, look around.”
She sat down with Joan, who opened my file, but she kept smiling at me, too much, like she was worried what I’d think of her and her home. I wished I could tell her she had nothing to worry about.
I went into the kitchen. It was small, tiled red and white, with a pearly-topped table and chrome chairs. A real Leave It to Beaver kitchen, decorated with a salt and pepper shaker collection. Betty Boops and porcelain cows and sets of cacti. It was a kitchen to drink cocoa in, to play checkers. I was afraid of how much I wanted this.
I walked out into the small backyard, bright with wide flowerbeds and pots on a wooden deck, a weeping Chinese elm. There was a flying goose windmill, and red poinsettia grew against the house’s white wall in the sun. Kitsch, I heard my mother’s voice in my ear. But it wasn’t, it was charming. Claire Richards was charming, with her wide love-me smile. Her bedroom, which backed up to the deck through open French doors, was charming. The quilt on the low pine double bed, the armoire, the hope chest, and the rag rug.
As I moved back into the hall, I could see them, heads together over the coffee table, looking at my file. “She’s had an incredibly hard time of it,” Joan Peeler