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Chapter 1

The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of
the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders
thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green
leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I.
I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof
and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light
of the three-quarter moon.

"Oleander time," she said. "Lovers who kill each other now will
blame it on the wind." She held up her large hand and spread the
fingers, let the wind trace itself through. My mother was not
herself in the time of the Santa Anas. I was twelve years old and I
was afraid for her. I wished things were back the way they had
been, that Barry was here, that the wind would stop blowing.

"You should get some sleep," I offered.

"I never sleep," she said.

I sat next to her, and we stared out at the city that hummed and
glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine,
holding its secret like a poker hand. The edge of her white kimono
flapped open in the wind and I could see her breast, low and full.
Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife.

I rested my head on her leg. She smelled like violets. "We are the
wands," she said. "We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual
over the sentimental."

"The wands," I repeated. I wanted her to know I was listening. Our
tarot suit, the wands. She used to lay out the cards for me,
explain the suits: wands and coins, cups and swords, but she had
stopped reading them. She didn't want to know the future
anymore.

"We received our coloring from Norsemen," she said. "Hairy savages
who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. We
are the ones who sacked Rome. Fear only feeble old age and death in
bed. Don't forget who you are."

"I promise," I said.

Down below us in the streets of Hollywood, sirens whined and sawed
along my nerves. In the Santa Anas, eucalyptus trees burst into
flames like giant candles, oilfat chaparral hillsides went up in a
rush, flushing starved coyotes and deer down onto Franklin
Avenue.

She lifted her face to the singed moon, bathing in its glowering
beams. "Raven's-eye moon."

"Ritz cracker moon," I murmured, my head on her knee.

She softly stroked my hair. "It's a traitor's moon."

In the spring this wound had been unimaginable, this madness, but
it had lain before us, undetectable as a land mine. We didn't even
know the name Barry Kolker then.

Barry. When he appeared, he was so small. Smaller than a comma,
insignificant as a cough. Someone she met at a poetry reading. It
was at a wine garden in Venice. As always when she read, my mother
wore white, and her hair was the color of new snow against her
lightly tanned skin. She stood in the shade of a massive fig tree,
its leaves like hands. I sat at the table behind stacks of books I
was supposed to sell after the reading, slim books published by the
Blue Shoe Press of Austin, Texas. I drew the hands of the tree and
the way bees swarmed over the fallen figs, eating the sun-fermented
fruit and getting drunk, trying to fly and falling back down. Her
voice made me drunk — deep and sun-warmed, a hint of a
foreign accent, Swedish singsong a generation removed. If you'd
ever heard her, you knew the power of that hypnotic voice.

After the reading, people crowded around, gave me money to put in
the cigar box, my mother signed a few books. "Ah, the writer's
life," she said ironically, as they handed me the crumpled fives
and ones. But she loved the readings, the way she loved long
evenings with writer friends trashing more famous poets over a
drink and a joint, and hated them, the way she hated the lousy job
she had at Cinema Scene magazine, where she pasted up the copy of
other writers paid fifty cents a word to bleed their shameless
clichŽs, their stock nouns and slack verbs, while my mother
could agonize for hours over whether to write an or the.

As she signed her books, she wore her customary half-smile, more
internal than outward, having a private joke while she thanked
everybody for coming. I knew she was waiting for a certain man. I'd
already seen him, a shy blond in a tank top with a bead-and-yarn
necklace, who stood in the back, watching her, helpless,
intoxicated. After twelve years as Ingrid's daughter, I could spot
them in my sleep.

A chunky man, his dark hair pulled back in a curly ponytail, pushed
in, offered his book to be signed. "Barry Kolker. Love your work,"
he said. She signed his book, handed it back to him, not even
looking into his face. "What are you doing after the
reading?"

"I have a date," she said, reaching for the next book to
sign.

"After that," he said, and I liked his self-confidence, but he
wasn't her type. He was chubby, dark, and dressed in what looked
like a suit from the Salvation Army.

She wanted the shy blond, way younger than her, who wanted to be a
poet too. Of course. He was the one who came home with us.

I lay on my mattress on the screen porch and waited for him to
leave, watching the blue of the evening turn velvet, indigo
lingering like an unspoken hope, while my mother and the blond man
murmured on the other side of the screens. Incense perfumed the
air, a special kind she bought in Little Tokyo, without any
sweetness, expensive. It smelled of wood and green tea. A handful
of stars appeared in the sky, but in L.A. none of the
constellations were the right ones, so I connected them up in new
arrangements: the Spider, the Wave, the Guitar.

When he left, I came out into the big room. She was sitting
cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook
with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. "Never let a man stay the
night," she told me. "Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night
magic."

The night magic, it sounded lovely. Soon I would have lovers and
write a poem after. I gazed at the white oleanders she had arranged
on the coffee table that morning, three blossoms representing
heaven, man, and earth, and thought about the music of her lovers'
voices in the darkness, their soft laughter, the smell of the
incense. I touched the flowers. Heaven. Man. I felt on the verge of
something, a mystery that surrounded me like gauze, something I was
beginning to unwind.

All that summer, I went with her to the magazine. She never thought
far enough ahead to put me in a Y program, and I never mentioned
the possibility of summer school. I enjoyed school itself, but it
was torture for me to try to fit in as a girl among other girls.
Girls my own age were a different species entirely, their concerns
as foreign as the Dogons of Mali. Seventh grade had been
particularly painful, and I waited for the moment I could be with
my mother again. The art room of Cinema Scene, with its ink pens
and a carousel of colored pencils, table-sized paper, overlays and
benday dots, border tape, and discarded headlines and photographs
that I could wax and collage, was my paradise. I liked the way the
adults talked around me; they forgot I was there and said the most
amazing things. Today, the writers and the art director, Marlene,
gossiped about the affair between the publisher and the editor of
the magazine. "A bizarre bit of Santa Ana madness," my mother
commented from the pasteup table. "That beaky anorexic and the
toupeed Chihuahua. It's beyond grotesque. Their children wouldn't
know whether to peck or bark."

They laughed. My mother was the one who would say out loud what the
others were thinking.

I sat at the empty drafting table next to my mother's, drawing the
way the venetian blinds sliced the light like cheese. I waited to
see what my mother would say next, but she put her headphones back
on, like a period at the end of a sentence. This was how she pasted
up, listening to exotic music over headphones and pretending she
was far away in some scented kingdom of fire and shadows, instead
of sitting at a drafting table at a movie magazine pasting up actor
interviews for eight dollars an hour. She concentrated on the
motion of her steel X-acto knife, slicing through the galleys. She
pulled up long strips that stuck to the knife. "It's their skins
I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which
I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness."

The writers laughed, uneasily.

Nobody took any note when Bob, the publisher, came in. I dropped my
head and used the T square, as if I were doing something official.
So far he hadn't said anything about my coming to work with my
mother, but Marlene, the art director, told me to "fly low, avoid
the radar." He never noticed me. Only my mother. That day he came
and stood next to her stool, reading over her shoulder. That day he
just wanted to stand close to her, touch her hair that was white as
glacier milk, and see if he could look down her shirt. I could see
the loathing on her face as he bent over her, and then, as if to
steady himself, put his hand on her thigh.

She pretended to startle, and in one spare movement, cut his bare
forearm with the razor-edged X-acto.

He looked down at his arm, astonished at the thread of blood that
began to appear.

"Oh, Bob!" she said. "I'm so sorry, I didn't see you there. Are you
all right?" But the look that she gave him with her cornflower eyes
showed him she could have just as easily slit his throat.

"No problem, just a little accident." His arm bore a two-inch gash
below his polo shirt sleeve. "Just an accident," he said a bit
louder, as if reassuring everybody, and scuttled back to his
office.

For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade
of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body
against the uncanny blue sky. We ate yogurt from cartons and
listened to Anne Sexton reading her own poetry on the tape deck in
her scary ironic American drawl. She was reading about being in a
mental home, ringing the bells. My mother stopped the tape. "Tell
me the next line."

I liked it when my mother tried to teach me things, when she paid
attention. So often when I was with her, she was unreachable.
Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that
flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under in the
first concentrated rays of the sun.

I didn't have to grope for the answer. It was like a song, and the
light filtered through the sycamore tree as crazy Anne rang her
bell, B-flat, and my mother nodded.

"Always learn poems by heart," she said. "They have to become the
marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your
soul impervious to the world's soft decay."

I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in
the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked
it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel
happy in the good potter's hand.

In the afternoon, the editor descended on the art room, dragging
scarves of Oriental perfume that lingered in the air long after she
was gone. A thin woman with overbright eyes and the nervous
gestures of a frightened bird, Kit smiled too widely in her red
lipstick as she darted here and there, looking at the design,
examining pages, stopping to read type over my mother's shoulder,
and pointing out corrections. My mother flipped her hair back, a
cat twitching before it clawed you.

"All that hair," Kit said. "Isn't it dangerous in your line of
work? Around the waxer and all." Her own hairstyle was geometric,
dyed an inky black and shaved at the neck.

My mother ignored her, but let the X-acto fall so it impaled the
desktop like a javelin.

After Kit left, my mother said to the art director, "I'm sure she'd
prefer me in a crew cut. Dyed to her own bituminous shade."

"Vampire 'n' Easy," Marlene said.

I didn't look up. I knew the only reason we were here was because
of me. If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have to take jobs like
this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea,
dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a
brand.

That night she went out by herself. I drew for an hour, ate a
peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich, then drifted next door to
Michael's, knocked on the hollow door. Three bolts fell back. "It's
Queen Christina." He smiled, a gentle soft man about my mother's
age, but puffy and pale from drinking and being inside all the
time. He cleared a pile of dirty clothes and Variety from the couch
so I could sit down.

The apartment was very different from ours, crammed with furniture
and souvenirs and movie posters, Variety and newspapers and empty
wine bottles, tomato plants straggling on the windowsills, groping
for a little light. It was dark even in the daytime, because it
faced north, but it had a spectacular view of the Hollywood sign,
the reason he took it in the first place.

"Snow again," he said along with Garbo, tilting his face up like
hers. "Eternal snow." He handed me a bowl of sunflower seeds. "I am
Garbo."

I cracked seeds in my teeth and flicked off the rubber sandals I'd
been wearing since April. I couldn't tell my mother I'd outgrown my
shoes again. I didn't want to remind her that I was the reason she
was trapped in electric bills and kid's shoes grown too small, the
reason she was clawing at the windows like Michael's dying
tomatoes. She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I
was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was
a steel dress.

"What are you reading these days?" I asked Michael. He was an
actor, but he didn't work that much, and he wouldn't do TV, so he
made most of his money reading for Books on Tape. He had to do it
under a pseudonym, Wolfram Malevich, because it was nonunion. We
could hear him every morning, very early, through the wall. He knew
German and Russian from the army, he'd been in army intelligence
— an oxymoron, he always said — so they put him on
German and Russian authors.

"Chekhov short stories." He leaned forward and handed me the book
from the coffee table. It was full of notes and Post-its and
underlines.

I leafed through the book. "My mother hates Chekhov. She says
anybody who ever read him knows why there had to be a
revolution."

"Your mother." Michael smiled. "Actually, you might really like
him. There's a lovely melancholy in Chekhov." We both turned to the
TV to catch the best line in Queen Christina, saying along with
Garbo, "The snow is like a white sea, one could go out and be lost
in it . . . and forget the world."

I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes
trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in
furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to
roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple. My deepest fear was that
someday she would find her way back there and never return. It was
why I always waited up when she went out on nights like this, no
matter how late she came home, I had to hear her key in the lock,
smell her violet perfume again.

And I tried not to make it worse by asking for things, pulling her
down with my thoughts. I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and
complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always
mortified. Didn't they know they were tying their mothers to the
ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?

But how I envied the way their mothers sat on their beds and asked
what they were thinking. My mother was not in the least bit curious
about me. I often wondered what she thought I was, a dog she could
tie in front of the store, a parrot on her shoulder?

I never told her that I wished I had a father, that I wanted to go
to camp in summertime, that sometimes she scared me. I was afraid
she would fly away, and I would end up alone, living in some place
where there were too many children, too many smells, where beauty
and silence and the intoxication of her words rising in air would
be as far away as Saturn.

Out the window, the glow of the Hollywood sign was slightly blurred
with June fog, a soft wetness on the hills raising the smell of
sage and chemise, moisture wiping the glass with dreams.

She came home at two when the bars closed, alone, her restlessness
satisfied for the moment. I sat on her bed, watched her change
clothes, adoring each gesture. Someday I would do this, the way she
crossed her arms and pulled her dress over her head, kicked off her
high heels. I put them on, admiring them on my feet. They were
almost the right size. In another year or so, they would fit. She
sat down next to me, handed me her brush, and I brushed her pale
hair smooth, painting the air with her violets. "I saw the goat man
again," she said.

"What goat man?"

"From the wine garden, remember? The grinning Pan, cloven hooves
peeping out from under his pants?"

I could see the two of us in the round mirror on the wall, our long
hair down, our blue eyes. Norsewomen. When I saw us like this, I
could almost remember fishing in cold deep seas, the smell of cod,
the charcoal of our fires, our felt boots and our strange alphabet,
runes like sticks, a language like the ploughing of fields.

"He stared at me the entire time," she said. "Barry Kolker. Marlene
says he's a writer of personal essays." Her fine lips turned into
long commas of disapproval. "He was with that actress from The
Cactus Garden, Jill Lewis."

Her white hair, like unbleached silk, flowed through the boar
bristle brush.

"With that fat goat of a man. Can you imagine?" I knew she
couldn't. Beauty was my mother's law, her religion. You could do
anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you
did things beautifully. If you weren't, you just didn't exist. She
had drummed it into my head since I was small. Although I had
noticed by now that reality didn't always conform to my mother's
ideas.

"Maybe she likes him," I said.

"She must be insane," my mother said, taking the brush away from me
and brushing my hair now, bearing down on the scalp hard. "She
could have any man she wanted. What could she possibly be
thinking?"

She saw him again at her favorite artists' bar downtown with no
sign by the tracks. She saw him at a party in Silverlake. Wherever
she went, she complained, there he was, the goat man.

I thought it was only coincidence, but one night at a performance
space in Santa Monica where we went to watch one of her friends
beating on Sparkletts bottles and ranting about the drought, I saw
him too, four rows back. He spent the whole time trying to catch
her eye. He waved at me and I waved back, low, so she wouldn't
see.

After it was over, I wanted to talk to him, but she dragged me out
fast. "Don't encourage him," she hissed.

When he turned up at the annual publication party for Cinema Scene,
I had to agree that he was following her. It was outside in the
courtyard of an old hotel on the Strip. The heat of the day was
beginning to dissipate. The women wore bare dresses, my mother like
a moth in white silk. I threaded my way through the crowd to the
hors d'oeuvres table, quickly loaded my purse with things I thought
could stand a few hours unrefrigerated — crab claws and
asparagus spears, liver in bacon — and there was Barry,
piling a plate with shrimp. He saw me, and his eyes immediately
swept the crowd for my mother. She was behind me, drinking white
wine, gossiping with Miles, the photo editor, a gaunt,
stubble-chinned Englishman whose fingers were stained with
nicotine. She hadn't seen Barry yet. He started through the crowd
toward her. I was close behind him.

"Ingrid," Barry said, penetrating her circle of two. "I've been
looking for you." He smiled. Her eyes flicked cruelly over his
mustard-colored tie hanging to one side, his brown shirt pulling at
the buttons over his stomach, his uneven teeth, the shrimp in his
chubby fist. I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn't
seem to feel the chill.

"I've been thinking about you," he said, coming even closer.

"I'd rather you wouldn't," she said.

"You'll change your mind about me," he said. He put his finger
alongside his nose, winked at me, and walked on to another group of
people, put his arm around a pretty girl, kissed her neck. My
mother turned away. That kiss went against everything she believed.
In her universe, it simply did not happen.

"You know Barry?" Miles asked.

"Who?" my mother said.

That night, she couldn't sleep. We went down to the apartment pool
and swam slow quiet laps under the local stars, the Crab Claw, the
Giant Shrimp.

My mother bent over her drafting table, cutting type without a
ruler in long elegant strokes. "This is Zen," she said. "No flaw,
no moment's hesitation. A window onto grace." She looked genuinely
happy. It sometimes happened when she was pasting up just right,
she forgot where she was, why she was there, where she'd been and
would rather be, forgot about everything but the gift of cutting a
perfectly straight freehand line, a pleasure as pure as when she'd
just written a beautiful phrase.

But then I saw what she didn't see, the goat man enter the
production room. I didn't want to be the one to ruin her moment of
grace, so I kept making my Chinese tree out of benday dots and
wrong-sized photo stills from Salaam Bombay! When I glanced up, he
caught my eye and put his finger to his lips, crept up behind her
and tapped her shoulder. Her knife went slicing through the type.
She whirled around and I thought she was going to cut his liver
out, but he showed her something that stopped her, a small envelope
he put on her table.

"For you and your daughter," he said.

She opened it, removed two tickets, blue-and-white. Her silence as
she examined them astonished me. She stared at them, then him,
jabbing the sharp end of her X-acto into the rubbery surface of the
desk, a dart that stuck there for a moment before she pulled it
out.

"Just the concert," she said. "No dinner, no dancing."

"Agreed," he said, but I could see he really didn't believe her. He
didn't know her yet.

It was a gamelan concert at the art museum. Now I knew why she
accepted. I only wondered how he knew exactly the right thing to
propose, the one thing she would never turn down. Had he hidden in
the oleanders outside our apartment? Interviewed her friends?
Bribed somebody?

The night crackled as my mother and I waited for him in the
forecourt of the museum. Everything had turned to static
electricity in the heat. I combed my hair to watch the sparks fly
from the ends.

Forced to wait, my mother made small, jerky movements with her
arms, her hands. "Late. How despicable. I should have known. He's
probably off rutting in some field with the other goats. Remind me
never to make plans with quadrupeds."

She still had on her work clothes, though she'd had time to change.
It was a sign, to indicate to him that it wasn't a real date, that
it meant nothing. All around us, women in bright summer silks and a
shifting bouquet of expensive perfumes eyed her critically. Men
admired her, smiled, stared. She stared back, blue eyes burning,
until they grew awkward and turned away.

"Men," she said. "No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines
he is somehow worthy."

I saw Barry across the plaza, his bulk jolting on his short legs.
He grinned, flashing the gap between his teeth. "Sorry, but traffic
was murder."

My mother turned away from the apology. Only peons made excuses for
themselves, she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.

The gamelan orchestra was twenty small slim men kneeling before
elaborately carved sets of chimes and gongs and drums. The drum
began, joined by one of the lower sets of chimes. Then more entered
the growing mass of sound. Rhythms began to emerge, expand, complex
as lianas. My mother said the gamelan created in the listener a
brain wave beyond all alphas and betas and thetas, a brain wave
that paralyzed the normal channels of thought and forced new ones
to grow outside them, in the untouched regions of the mind, like
parallel blood vessels that form to accommodate a damaged
heart.

I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the
dark screen of my eyelids. They took me away, spoke to me in
languages that had no words for strange mothers with ice-blue eyes
and apartments with ugly sparkles on the front and dead leaves in
the pool.

Afterward, the audience folded its plush velvet chairs and pressed
to the exits, but my mother didn't move. She sat in her chair, her
eyes closed. She liked to be the last one to leave. She despised
crowds, and their opinions as they left a performance, or worse,
discussed the wait for the bathroom or where do you want to eat? It
spoiled her mood. She was still in that other world, she would stay
there as long as she possibly could, the parallel channels twining
and tunneling through her cortex like coral.

"It's over," Barry said.

She raised her hand for him to be quiet. He looked at me and I
shrugged. I was used to it. We waited until the last sound had
faded from the auditorium. Finally she opened her eyes.

"So, you want to grab a bite to eat?" he asked her.

"I never eat," she said.

I was hungry, but once my mother took a position, she never wavered
from it. We went home, where I ate tuna out of a can while she
wrote a poem using the rhythms of the gamelan, about shadow puppets
and the gods of chance.

Excerpted from WHITE OLEANDER © Copyright 2011 by Janet
Fitch. Reprinted with permission by Warner Books, an imprint of
Hachette Book Group USA. All rights reserved.

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