White Oleander

Claire was supposed to go to an audition. She had told Ron she would, but she had me call in and say she was sick. She was soaking in the bathtub with her lavender oil and a chunk of amethyst, trying to soothe her jagged edges. Ron was supposed to be home on Friday, but something came up. His trips home were handholds for her, so she could swing from one square on the calendar to the next. When he said he was going to come home and didn't, she swung forward and grasped thin air, fell.

I intercepted a letter from prison from my mother to Claire. In it, my mother advised a love potion to put in his food, but everything in the formula she sent looked poisonous to me. I drew a picture over her letter, a series of serpentine curves speared by an angle, put it in a new envelope and sent it back to her.

In the living room, Claire played her Leonard Cohen. Suza

I kept drawing my face.

19

BY APRIL, the desert had already sucked spring from the air like blotting paper. The Hollywood Hills rose u

Claire brought out the jewelry she kept in the freezer and dumped it onto her bed, a pirate's treasure, deliciously icy. Freezing strands of green jade beads with jeweled clasps, a pendant of amber enclosing a fossilized fern. I pressed it, cold, to my cheek. I draped an antique crystal bracelet down the part in my hair, let it lap on my forehead like a cool tongue.

"That was my great-aunt Priscilla's," Claire said. "She wore it to her presentation ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, just before the Great War." She lay on her back in her underwear, her hair dark with sweat, a smoky topaz bracelet across her forehead intersected by an intricate gold chain that came to rest on the tip of her nose. She was painfully thin, with sharp hipbones and ribs stark as a carved wooden Christ. I could see her beauty mark above the line of her panties. "She was a field nurse at Ypres. A very brave woman."

Every bracelet, every bead, had a story. I plucked an onyx ring from the pile between us on the bed, rectangular, its black slick surface pierced by a tiny diamond. I slipped it on, but it was tiny, only fit my smallest finger, above the knuckle. "Whose was this?" I held it out so she could see it without moving her head. "Great-grandmother Matilde. A quintessential Parisie

The garnet choker, icy around my neck, was a wedding present from her mill-owning Manchester great-grandfather to his wife, Beatrice. The gold jaguar with emerald eyes I balanced on my knee was brought back from Brazil in the twenties by her father's aunt Geraldine Woods, who danced with Isadora Duncan. I was wearing Claire's family album. Maternal grandmothers and paternal great-aunts, women in emerald taffeta, velvet and garnets. Time, place, and personality locked into stone and silver filigree.

In comparison to this, my past was smoke, a story my mother once told me and later denied. No onyxes for me, no aquamarines memorializing the lives of my ancestors. I had only their eyes, their hands, the shape of a nose, a nostalgia for snowfall and carved wood.

Claire dripped a gold necklace over one closed eye socket, jade beads in the other. She spoke carefully, nothing slid off.

"They used to bury people like this. Mouths full of jewels and a gold coin over each eye. Fare for the ferryman." She drizzled her coral necklace into the well of her navel, and her pearl double strand, between her breasts. After a minute, she picked up the pearls, opened her mouth and let the strand drop in, closed her lips over the shiny eggs. Her mother had given her the pearls when she married, though she didn't want her to marry a Jew. When Claire told me, she expected me to be horrified, but I'd lived with Marvel Turlock, Amelia Ramos. Prejudice was hardly a surprise. The only thing I wondered was why would she give her pearls.

Claire lay still, pretending to be dead. A jeweled corpse in her pink lace lingerie, covered with a fine drizzle of sweat. I wasn't sure I liked this new game. Through the French doors, in the foot of space showing under the blinds, I could see the garden, left wild this spring. Claire didn't garden anymore, no pruning and weeding under her Chinese peaked hat. She didn't stake the flowers, and now they bloomed ragged, the second-year glads tilting to one side, Mexican evening primroses a

Ron was away again, twice in one month, this time in Andalusia taping a piece about Gypsies. Out combing the world for what was most bizarre, racking up frequent flier miles. If he wanted to see something weird and unca

Suddenly, she was gagging on the pearls. She sat up, retching. The jewels fell from her body. She pulled the strand of pearls from her mouth, catching it in her hand. She was so pale, her mouth seemed u

She reached back for my hand, her nails dirty, tips small and sensitive as a child's, the rings incongruous as gumball machine prizes. I took her hand. She brought my hand around to her face, pressing its back against her wet cheek. She was burning up. I rested my face on her shoulder, her back was like fire. "Ron'11 be back soon," I tried to reassure her.

She nodded, head heavy on her slender neck, like one of her drooping tulips, the knobs of her spine like a diamondback's rattle. "It's so hot already. What will I do when summer comes?"

She was all skin and nerves, no substance, no weight. She was her own skin kite, stretched before dry violent winds.

"We should go to the beach," I suggested.

She shook her head, fast, as if a fly had landed on her. "It's

not that."

I was sitting on one of the jewels, it was digging into my hip. I freed one of my hands and reached under myself, pulled it out. It was an aquamarine, big as an almond in the shell. Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren't worth as much. It was the emerald that didn't break that was the really valuable thing.