Remembering Ingrid

#146: Excerpts from Janet Fitch's "White Oleander"

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"I saw the goat man again," she said.

"He stared at me the entire time," she said. "Barry Kolker."

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"I've been thinking about you," he said, coming closer.
"I'd rather you wouldn't," she said.
"You'll change your mind about me, " he said. He...put his arm around a pretty girl, kissed her neck. [Ingrid] turned away. That kiss went against everything she believed. In her universe, it simply would never happen.

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

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

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She took one look at him and closed her eyes. "That jacket is so ugly I can't even look at you. Did you steal it from a dead man?"

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That was Ingrid Magnussen. She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they'd been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T'ang Dynasty.

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...Barry told us of his travels in the Orient where we had never been. The time he ordered magic mushrooms off the menu at a beachside shack in Bali and ended up wandering the turquoise shore hallucinating Paradise. His trip to the temples of Angkor Wat in the Cambodian jungle accompanied by Thai opium smugglers. His week spent in the floating brothels of Bangkok. He had forgotten me entirely, was too absorbed in hypnotizing my mother (Ingrid). His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebes, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.

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She was breaking her rules. They weren't stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes.

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Something happened. All I remember is that the winds had started. The skeleton rattlings of wind in the palms. It was a night Barry said he would come at nine, but then it was eleven and he hadn't arrived.

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A half hour later she reappeared, stumbling out to the car, tripping over a sprinkler, as if she were blind. She got in and sat behind the steering wheel and rocked back and forth, her mouth open in a square, but there was no sound. My mother was crying. It was the final impossibility.

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Now I wished she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.

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"I should shave my head," she said. "Paint my face with ashes."
Her eyes were strange, circled dark like bruises, and her hair was greasy and lank. She lay on her bed, or stared at herself in the mirror.

"How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?"

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