White Oleander by Janet Fitch

Author:Janet Fitch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780759568174
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2011-10-28T01:41:53+00:00

I WENT TO art class one evening, and we waited for Ms. Day, but she didn’t show up. One of the old lady students drove me home. I opened the door, hung with a Christmas wreath with little candied pears and porcelain doves, expecting to find Claire in the living room, reading one of her magazines and listening to music, but she wasn’t there.

I found her sitting on my bed, cross-legged, reading my mother’s papers. Letters from prison, poet’s journals, personal papers, all fanned out around her. She looked pale, absorbed, biting the nail of her ring finger. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I was outraged, I was scared. She shouldn’t have been reading those things. I needed to keep them separate. I didn’t want her to have anything to do with my mother, anything I couldn’t control. And now she ’d gone and opened the box. Like Pandora. Letting out all the evil. They were always so fascinated by Ingrid Magnussen. I felt myself retreating again, into her shadow. These were my things. Not even mine. I trusted her.

“What are you doing?”

She jumped, throwing the notebook she was reading into the air. Her mouth opened to explain, then closed. Opened again. No sound came. When she was upset, she couldn’t say a thing. She tried gathering the offending materials with trembling hands, but they came in too many shapes, they scattered under her awkward clutchings. Defeated, she let them fall, closed her eyes, covered her face with her hands. She reminded me of Caitlin, who thought we couldn’t see her if she couldn’t see us. “Don’t hate me,” she said.

“Why, Claire? I would have shown you if you had asked.”

I started to collect the notebooks, rice paper bound in string, Italian marbleized notebooks, Amsterdam school copybooks, smooth-bound, leather-bound, tied with shoelaces. My mother’s journals, my absence written in the margins. None of this was about me. Even the letters. Only her.

“I was depressed. You were gone. She seemed so strong.”

She was looking for a role model? I almost had to laugh. Claire admiring my mother made me want to slap her. Wake up! I wanted to scream. Ingrid Magnussen could damage you just passing by on the way to the bathroom.

And now she’d read the letters. She knew that I’d refused to discuss her with my mother. I imagined how it must have hurt her. Now I wished I’d thrown them out, not lugged them around like a curse. Ingrid Magnussen. How could I explain? I didn’t want my mother to know about you, Claire. You’re the one good thing that ever happened to me. I didn’t want to take any chances. How my mother would hate you. She doesn’t want me to be happy, Claire. She liked it that I hated Marvel. It made her feel close to me. An artist doesn’t need to be happy, she said. If I were happy, I wouldn’t need her, she meant. I might forget her. And she was right.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.