Love, Stargirl (7 page)

Margie’s voice broke the spell: “Alvina. Back to work.”

Alvina grabbed her broom and headed for the kitchen in back.

May 31

When I tried to do my mind wash today, a smidgen of me would not evaporate away. It was those stone blue eyes behind the sunglasses and the lemon seed bouncing off my shirt. For today at least, I guess I flunked Elements of Nothingness.

June 4

FIELD TRIP:

MAIDEN’S LEAP

She stood here, the Lenape girl.

She was only thirteen or fourteen, the legend says.

Here on this high bluff overlooking the ramshackle remains

of the old steel mill

famous in the Revolution for making the best

cannon for George Washington’s army.

Of course it wasn’t a steel plant then,

just forest,

maybe rocks.

She stood here and then she jumped…

well, perhaps
leaped,
since this is a

poem and
leaped
feels more poetic

than
jumped.

In any case, down she went to her death,

thirteen-or fourteen-year-old Lenape girl,

because her father would not allow her to marry

the boy she loved.

Standing here, I wonder things.

I wonder if she started way back there and

came running and practically flew

off the edge.

Or did she come slowly, like a trickle of water

across a tabletop that seems to pause

at the edge, gathering itself

before spilling?

If she did stand here and wait—why?

What was she waiting for?

Was she giving time one last chance

to save her? Happiness one last chance

to happen?

Ha! Easier to rearrange the stars than

a father’s mind.

Did she look down?

Did she look out?

What did she see?

Did she see his face? The boy’s?

Did she see him wave to her, call to her

from far away? Did she see the two

of them running, laughing across meadows

of chicory and Queen Anne’s lace, flowers they knew

by other names?

And his name—did she say it?

Did she shout it from the blufftop to

all the earth below?

Or whisper it, for his ears only

to hear?

One thing for sure—it comes clearly now:

she was not looking down.

This I know.

June 5

Homeschool is out!

At high noon I celebrated by joining you for smoothies at the mall. Strawberry-banana, of course. Your favorite. We sat together at the last table and talked and sipped. I told you the latest with Dootsie. You brought me up-to-date on your friend Kevin and my friend Dori Dilson and our friend Archie. You told me you’re looking forward to summer vacation. You told me you applied to colleges in Pennsylvania, since now you know this is where I am. You said you think of me every day. You said you sometimes go out to the enchanted place in the desert and take off your shoes and sit there like we did that first time. Only you don’t meditate. You’re not at all interested in erasing your self or me. Oh no. Just the opposite. You close your eyes and you remember. You focus and you concentrate and you remember harder than you’ve ever remembered in your life, and pretty soon you’re sure you can feel me there, sitting cross-legged across from you, smiling at you, Cinnamon in the space between us. You experience me. You relive us. You’re so happy. And then so sad when you open your eyes and realize I’m not really there. That’s when you miss me the most. Desperately.

Tell me I didn’t imagine it, Leo. Tell me that even though our bodies were in separate states, our star selves shared an enchanted place. Tell me that right around noon today (eastern time) you had the strangest sensation: a tiny chill on your shoulder…a flutter in the heart…a shadow of strawberry-banana crossing your tongue….

Tell me you whispered my name.

June 12

Last night’s dream…

Milk run. Bottles rattle in the racks. Headlights swing through the darkness.
There…
someone in a Dumpster…head down, rummaging…looks up, eyes gleaming like a surprised fox’s…but it’s not that boy Perry…it’s you.

June 15

I keep thinking about Charlie at the cemetery. Sitting there day after day. Talking to Grace. Remembering. Dozing off. I think he must hate the absolute certainty: knowing that every time he awakes from a doze, she’ll be there. Every time he arrives in the morning with the aluminum chair, she’ll be there. She’ll never again be in the basement looking for the canned peaches. Never again out in the backyard chatting with Mrs. So-and-So, the neighbor. She’ll never be anywhere but
there.

Does it make you wonder, Leo? Someday in the far future, when the Milky Way has turned another cosmic click, will someone carry a chair to your grave site and keep you company forever? Can you imagine someone loving you that much? Can I?

And I’m thinking maybe I did the donut thing all wrong. How was he supposed to know what was in the bag? Or that the donuts were for him? He probably thought it was just litter and in the name of Grace booted it away.

So this time I’ll do it differently. I got a small white wicker basket. I put in three donuts. I covered the donuts with plastic wrap so he could see what was there. I’ll sneak out early tomorrow morning, à la Dootsie, while it’s still dark, and leave the basket by the tombstone.

June 16

He took it!

I rode to the cemetery this afternoon. I was nervous. I pedaled around behind him. I kept my distance. At first I didn’t see it. Then I changed my angle—and there it was, the white basket, sitting in the grass beside his foot. He was nodding off, his chin in his chest. I was so happy I gave a little “Yippee!” as I pedaled away.

June 18

Here’s the new ad I put in the
Morning Lenape
today. I don’t know if he reads the paper. I decided it would be safer not to use names:

Every day he visits her,

talks with her,

sleeps with her.

June 21

Summer Solstice.

When you woke up this morning, dear Leo, the sun was directly above the Tropic of Cancer. You will never find it any farther north. This is the longest day of the year. From now until the Winter Solstice on December 21, each day will be a few minutes shorter than the one before. Today is the official beginning of summer.

In other words, it’s a holiday. Not a people holiday—a natural holiday. And who wants to celebrate a holiday alone? And since you’re not here, I thought:
OK—Dootsie.

When I told her about it last week, the first thing she said was, “Let’s get dressed up!” Amazing how this little kid is always one step ahead of me. We went to my mother’s workroom. My mother dove into the remnant pile of her recent costume-making jobs, stitched together some pieces, and voilà: Dootsie looking like she flew through a rainbow. As for me, I got out the buttercup dress I wore to the Ocotillo Ball. (You remember, don’t you? The ball you didn’t ask me to.)

I decided to do it, naturally enough, on Enchanted Hill. Dootsie stayed over at my house last night. My mother had told her parents what I had in mind. They had no problem with Dootsie sleeping over, but they were a little shaky on her going outside while it was still dark, even for such a short distance, even with me. So my mother volunteered my father.

“He’ll drive them in the milk truck,” she told them.

“Won’t he be late for work?” they said.

“It happens now and then,” she said. “The customers understand. Acts of God and nature. Snow. Ice. Crazy daughter.”

“Okay,” they said.

Dootsie was limp as a rag doll when I dressed her at 4:30 a.m. As usual, my mother came down to the porch, walkie-talkie in the pocket of her bathrobe. Turning on the porch light, I noticed that the porch light of our next-door neighbors, the Cantellos, was also on.

We loaded Dootsie and her little wooden wagon—the one that had carried Boss Queen in the parade—into the truck and rattled off to Enchanted Hill. A whole minute later my father parked the truck at the weedy edge of the field, near the white stucco bungalow, and carried the wagon and bath mat while I toted the little sleeper. The earth was lumpy as always, but softer now than during the winter. I didn’t use my flashlight. The quarter moon, and my father, were enough.

My father put down the wagon and stood beside me facing the horizon. It was still too dark to tell where earth stopped and sky began. He reached for my hand. He turned to us. He touched Dootsie’s face. He brought us into his arms and held us, Dootsie breathing so deeply between us it seemed she herself was generating the night. I felt his lips through my hair. He gave me a final squeeze on the arm and walked away toward the two red dots that marked the truck in the distance.

I sat down in the dark and cradled Dootsie like a baby, swinging her gently, humming a lullaby accompanied by the swish of our dresses rubbing together. When night began to fade in the east, I woke her. “Come on. Sunny Sun is coming. We have to be ready.” I stood her on her feet and forced her to walk around the field until she was fully awake.

“Where is it?” she said.

“It’s coming,” I told her. The sky in the east was gray now, the little stucco bungalow was coming into view. I pointed. “See? Keep watching.” I straddled the wagon behind her. “See?” I whispered in her ear. “It gets lighter and lighter. The colors change…see…see…”

I said no more. We watched the sky turn from pearly gray to powder blue…and
there…
out beyond, 90 million miles beyond, a brightening, a mist of lighter light, a puff…
there…now!…
and suddenly I was up and running, as I realized I was on the wrong end of the sled, I was missing something maybe even grander than the sunrise itself. I ran straight for the sun. I didn’t worry about Dootsie, because I knew she never even noticed that I had left the wagon. Then I turned and looked back and saw…and that’s as far as words will take me. So I’ll fall back to this: I saw a little girl in a wooden wagon, her dress spilling colors over its sides, staring at the rising sun as if it were the very dawn of creation. As I walked toward her I had no urge to turn around and see the sunrise myself, for I was already looking at everything I needed to see. She never moved as I came closer and closer, until I could see the growing glint of the rising sun doubled in her eyes.

I resumed my seat on the wagon behind her. Halfway born, the sun lost its edge and its orange and flooded the east with blinding yellow. I picked her up and propped her on my shoulders, the proper place to greet the sunrise. I looked to the edge of the field—the milk truck was gone. I walked her around. Neither of us wanted to leave. Only the sun inching up from the horizon gave hint that time was passing. As we meandered, she said my name three times:

“Stargirl?”

“Yes?”

“That was better than TV.”

“It was.”

“Stargirl?”

“Yes?”

“Does the sun do that every day?”

“Yes.”

“Stargirl?”

“Yes?”

“Every day is sun day.”

All dressed up for Summer Solstice—it seemed a waste to just walk straight home. So I walkie-talkied my mother and told her we were taking the long way. At first the streets were empty, except for the drivers delivering copies of the
Morning Lenape.
The folded papers seemed to leap on their own from the car windows. By the time the sun sat atop the chimneys, school buses were rumbling past and women in robes and slippers were slinking forth to pick up their papers. We waved to everyone we saw. I wondered what they thought: a big girl pulling a little girl in a wagon, both dolled up as if going to a prom or wedding. I like to think we gave them a happy start to the longest day.

June 28

It was more like a mind rinse than a mind wash at Enchanted Hill this morning. I couldn’t stop remembering, even refeeling, the magic of last week, of Dootsie’s eyes. I sense the wonder still haunting the hill, hungry for more eyes.

June 29

I got a letter from Archie today. I miss him a lot. Some of my happiest memories are of sitting with Archie on his back porch, rocking in the chair, gazing at the purple Maricopas through his pipe smoke (don’t you love that cherry smell?), talking his ears off about you. He liked you—I didn’t allow him not to—but even then I could tell he had his doubts about my choice of boyfriend. You remember how crushed I was when nobody showed up to greet me after I won the oratorical contest—well, that was nothing to how bad I felt when I saw his reaction to my trading in Stargirl for conventional Susan. The look in his eyes when I told him—that was maybe the low point in my life. I hope I never hurt anyone like that again. Even so, he wanted to blame you. He believed you pressured me to betray myself. I tried to tell him no, it was my choice. I was a big girl and I knew what I was doing; it was no crime to be popular. He pretended to understand and accept, because he loved me that much, but he would never call me Susan, and I never saw him happier than the day I told him I had decided to become Stargirl again.

As for you, I think he feels conflicted. He wants to like you. He does like you. You get automatic points for being the boy in my heart. And he knows that the better part of you didn’t give up without a fight. On the other hand, I think he still secretly blames you for my self-betrayal. He doesn’t think you’re—in his word—“ready” for me. He says in his letter he deliberately threw you off the trail by telling you we moved to Minnesota, not Pennsylvania. I had to laugh at that.

He tells me you still attend meetings of the Loyal Order of the Stone Bone. He tells me that he showed you my “office” in his toolshed. (I was hoping he would.) He says you were properly impressed. He says you appeared to be truly touched. He says there may be hope for you after all.