Janet Fitch's
White Oleander, which inspired me to write my story as a novel. I feel there is a sensual quality to her writing, and an invitation to read between the lines and go deep into the characters' interior with subtlety and nuance. I think there is a blend of style and voice in this opening page to her first novel, and the lens through which she sees the world is emotion.
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THE SANTA ANAS blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whispers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their 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 desert dryness lick 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 that things were back the way they had been, that Barry was still 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 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 wands 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 wined and sawed along my nerves. In the Santa Anas, eucalyptus trees burst into flames like giant candles, and oilfat chapparal 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."
"Baby-faced moon," I countered, my head on her knee.
She softly stroked my hair. "It's a traitor's moon."
