White Oleander - Janet Fitch [99]
“You want to know about my mother?” I took a gray ribboned notebook, opened it, and handed it to Claire. “Here. Read it.”
She took her hands down, her eyes puffy and red, her nose running. She hiccupped and took it from me. I didn’t have to look over her shoulder. I knew what it said.
Spread a malicious rumor.
Let a beloved old person’s dog out of the yard.
Suggest suicide to a severely depressed person.
“What is this?” she asked.
Tell a child it isn’t very attractive or bright.
Put Drano in glassine folded papers and leave them on streetcorners.
Throw handfuls of useless foreign coins into a beggar’s cup, and make sure they thank you profusely. “God bless you, miss.”
“It’s not real, though,” Claire said. “It’s not like she actually does these things.”
I only shrugged. How could Claire understand a woman like my mother? She would write these lists for hours, laughing until tears flowed.
Claire looked at me hungrily, pleading. How could I stay angry with her? My mother had no idea what my favorite food was, where I’d live if I could live anywhere in the world. Claire was the one who discovered me. She knew I’d want to live in Big Sur, in a cabin with a woodstove and a spring, that I liked green apple soap, that Boris Godunov was my favorite opera, that I was afraid of milk. She helped me pack the papers back into the box, shut it, and put it under the bed.
18
RON AND CLAIRE were fighting again in their room. I could hear it as I lay in my bed, the rabbit crouching on my wall, his ears erect and trembling. Claire wanted Ron to quit his job, find something to do that didn’t involve cattle mutilations or witchcraft in the Pueblos.
“What do you want me to do, wash dishes?” It was rare to hear Ron raise his voice. But he was tired, just back from Russia, he hadn’t expected a fight. Usually it was a home-cooked meal and kisses and clean sheets. “I’m earning a living. It’s just a job, Claire. Jesus, sometimes I just don’t know what goes on in your head.”
But it was a lie. What Ron did was peddle fear. There was quite a market, it seemed. Everywhere, people were frightened. Threatening shapes lurked at the edges of vision, in the next car, at the ATM, maybe waiting for them in the hall with a .38. There was poison in supermarket toothpaste. Ebola, hepatitis C. Husbands disappeared on the way to the liquor store. Children showed up dead in ditches without their hands. The picture was pulled away from the frame, the outlines were gone. People wanted monsters and ghosts and voices from beyond the grave. Something foreign, intentional, not senseless and familiar as a kid getting shot for his leather jacket.
That’s what Ron supplied. Fear in a frame. Aliens are always preferable to confused, violent acts. It was a career steeped in cynicism, pumped through with hypocrisy.
Her voice in reply was like bending sheet metal.
But I could understand him word for word. “What, you think I come off a fourteen-hour day, jetlagged, at some spoonbending convention in Yakutsk, ready to party? Hey, wow, bring on the bimbos! Maybe you should try getting some work, and remember what it’s like to be wiped out at the end of a day.”
I felt his words burn her flesh like a lash. I tried to hear what she was saying, but her voice faded to a murmur. Claire couldn’t defend herself, she curled up like a leaf under a glass.
“Astrid doesn’t need you waiting with the milk and the cookies. Jesus, Claire! She’s a young woman. I think she’d like spending a few hours by herself. Maybe make some friends of her own if you’d give her a chance.”
But I did need her, Ron. Nobody ever waited for me when I got home from school — and never milk. He didn’t even know that much. I mattered to her. Couldn’t he understand what that meant to me, and to her? If he cared, he would never say such things to her. How dare he pretend that he loved