White Oleander - Janet Fitch [9]
All that weekend, she didn’t say a thing about her date with Barry, but she wrote poems and crumpled them up, threw them at the wastebasket.
IN THE ART ROOM, Kit proofread over my mother’s shoulder, while I sat at my table in the corner, making a collage about Chekhov, the lady with the little dog, cutting out figures from discarded photographs. Marlene answered the phone, covered the receiver with her hand.
“It’s Barry Kolker.”
Kit’s head jerked up at the sound of the name, a marionette in the hands of a clumsy puppeteer. “I’ll take it in my office.”
“It’s for Ingrid,” Marlene said.
My mother didn’t look up from her layout sheet. “Tell him I don’t work here anymore.”
Marlene told him, lying like oil.
“How do you know Barry Kolker?” the editor asked, her black eyes big as olives.
“Just someone I met,” my mother said.
That evening, in the long summer twilight, people came out of their apartments, walked their dogs, drank blender drinks down by the pool, their feet in the water. The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue. My mother knelt at her table, writing, and a slight breeze brushed the wind chimes we’d hung in the old eucalyptus, while I lay on her bed. I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I wished a thousand-year sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like the sleep over the castle of Sleeping Beauty.
There was a knock on the door, wrecking the peace. Nobody ever came to our door. My mother put down her pen and grabbed the folding knife she kept in the jar with the pencils, its dark carbon blade sharp enough to shave a cat. She unfolded it against her thigh and put her finger to her lips. She clutched her white kimono, her skin bare underneath.
It was Barry, calling her. “Ingrid!”
“How dare he,” she said. “He cannot simply appear on my doorstep without an invitation.”
She jerked the door open. Barry was wearing a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and carrying a bottle of wine and a bag that smelled of something wonderful. “Hi,” he said. “I was just in the neighborhood, thought I’d drop by.”
She stood in the doorway, the open blade still against her thigh. “Oh, you did.”
Then she did something I would never have imagined. She invited him in, closing the knife against her leg.
He looked around at our big room, elegantly bare. “Just move in?” She said nothing. We had lived there over a year.
THE SUN was hot through the screens when I woke up, illuminating the milky stagnant air wrapped like a towel around the morning. I could hear a man singing, the shower pipes clanking as he turned the water off. Barry had stayed the night. She was breaking her rules. They weren’t stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes. I stared at her as she dressed for work, waiting for an explanation, but she just smiled.
After that night, the change was startling. Sunday, we went together to the Hollywood farmer’s market, where she and Barry bought spinach and green beans, tomatoes and grapes no bigger than the head of a thumbtack, papery braids of garlic, while I trailed behind them, mute with amazement at the sight of my mother examining displays of produce like it was a trip to a bookstore. My mother, for whom a meal was a carton of yogurt or a can of sardines and soda crackers. She could eat peanut butter for weeks on end without even noticing. I watched as she bypassed stands full of her favorite white flowers, lilies and chrysanthemums, and instead filled her arms with giant red poppies with black stains in the centers. On the walk home, she and Barry held hands and sang together in deep croony voices old songs from the sixties, “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” and “Waterloo Sunset.”
SO MANY THINGS