Seeing Stars (27 page)

“I’ve never heard of turkey bacon.”

“Someone’s bad idea,” Hugh said. “But it’s good for us, so we eat it. There are days when I miss fat more than I miss sugar. Here’s a lesson for you: keep an eye on your weight. Not that I imagine you’ll have any problems.”

Allison opened the package of turkey bacon and rummaged around in the cupboards until she found a pan. “Nah, I could eat like ten Twinkies and a whole pizza and I’d still be skinny. We’re both thin, me and my mom.”

“Lucky you.”

“Mimi’s fat, though.”

“I saw that.”

“I’m trying to get her to go on a diet, but she sneaks stuff. Like she’ll wait until she thinks we’re asleep and then she’ll bake a whole batch of Pillsbury crescent rolls and eat them all herself. She’s got high blood pressure, too. If it’s quiet you can hear her breathing and stuff. Wheezing.”

“That’s not good,” said Hugh.

“I
know
.” Allison turned the bacon strips with a fork.

Hugh ladled batter onto his skillet. Impulsively he said, “Do you really like this acting stuff? The whole Hollywood bit?”

“Of course.”

“So do you think you’ll be a big star one day?”

“I have to be.”

“Why?”

“I just do.”

“That’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself,” Hugh said, surprised. Allison looked back at him strangely. “No?”

She shrugged.

“Tell me about Bethany. Is she good?”

“She’s pretty good. She could be better, though.”

“Really?”

“Yup. She just needs more practice. You can tell she still gets nervous and stuff.”

“Okay.” Hugh stacked finished pancakes on top of a plate with a paper towel on it, and put the plate in the oven so they’d stay warm. Then he spooned out more batter.

“Do you
really
like being a dentist?” Allison asked.

“I do. Very much.”

“Yeah, well, you guys have a high suicide rate, though. Dentists.”

“We do?”

Allison nodded. “I read that once in a magazine.”

“Huh.” Hugh flipped four pancakes, two at a time. “Well, I can’t speak for all dentists, of course, but the ones I know seem pretty well adjusted.”

“Yeah, but still.” Allison sniffed at the bacon. “So this smells okay. I mean, not like real bacon, but it smells pretty good.”

“What did you say your father does?” Hugh asked.

“I don’t have a father,” Allison said matter-of-factly.

“Oh. That’s tough,” said Hugh, and meant it.

Allison shrugged. “Yeah. I have a stepfather.”

“Do you?”

“His name is Chet. He owns oil rigs or oil wells or barrels or something. My mom likes him for his money, but he’s not that nice to her. He makes her ask permission before she uses his stuff. Like the last time I was home he yelled at her for borrowing this junky old sweater of his that he probably wouldn’t even be caught dead in. She said it was just a stupid sweater, and he called her the C-word, and then he didn’t talk to us for like five days.”

“Ow,” said Hugh.

“I told her we should’ve kept our apartment just in case, but she said it was too expensive. Which it wasn’t, because it was a dive.”

“Oh?” Hugh was at a loss.

“But I’m not around that much anymore, anyway,” Allison said bluntly. “He pays for me to stay with Mimi.”

“So I gather. Don’t you miss home?”

“Nah. It’s not like here.”

“
Here
here?”

“You know—this.” She spread her arms wide. “You’re like the perfect family.”

He looked to see if she was mocking him, but if she was, she wasn’t showing it.

“Anyway,” she said, tapping the bacon strips with her fork, “These are done.”

“Okay,” said Hugh.

I
T WENT LIKE THAT ALL WEEK: TO
R
UTH’S LASTING SURPRISE
, Allison was a perfect houseguest, blending in, picking up after herself, tidy to a fault—no child should be that dialed into her own care and maintenance—and offering to do dishes and other household chores that Ruth could get Bethy to do only by hitting her over the head with them. Who’d have thought the girl would be a
good
influence? As a reward, Ruth took them to the top of the Space Needle and for a ferry ride so Allison could see killer whales, and then for lunch in Friday Harbor. Another afternoon she dropped the girls at Bellevue Square, the Seattle area’s most upscale mall, where they wanted to go even though it had exactly the same stores as the Beverly Center in Hollywood. Bethany bought a flippy little skirt that Ruth thought was a tad too short, and Allison bought a silk scarf that Ruth thought no fourteen-year-old should have wanted. As it turned out, she didn’t: she presented it to Ruth as a gift that evening at dinner.

“Oh, honey,” Ruth said in dismay. “You shouldn’t spend your money on me.”

Allison looked crushed. “I thought you’d like it. It’s for Hanukkah.” The holiday had begun several days ago, and each evening they’d been lighting candles in Ruth’s favorite pewter menorah and the girls had each received small gifts: plush slipper-socks with pictures of dogs on them that vaguely resembled Tina Marie; gift certificates for a new Game Boy game apiece; packs of lip gloss in different flavors like bubble gum and cotton candy; matching, hand-carved dreidels made of horn.

Now Bethy told Ruth loyally, “It’s from Gucci, and it took her forever to pick it out.”

Hugh shot Ruth a look across the table:
For God’s sake, keep it.

“It might be the most beautiful scarf I’ve ever seen,” Ruth told her sincerely, because it was true, and wrapped the silk around her throat.

Allison beamed and said, “I know some other ways you can tie it, too.”

Ruth didn’t doubt that for a minute.

To Hugh she presented a calfskin wallet, and then, when they all got up to clear the table, she approached Ruth shyly and gave her a long, tight hug, and then gave Hugh a chaste kiss on the cheek. In their bedroom that night, Ruth and Hugh agreed that the girl’s transformation was nothing short of astonishing.

B
UT BY THE END OF THE WEEK, THE GIRLS HAD FINALLY
begun to wear on each other, so when a neighbor called to see if Bethy could babysit for the afternoon, Ruth suggested that she say yes. Allison stayed behind at the house and helped Ruth unload the dishwasher.

“I think you two have done very well together,” Ruth said. “A week’s a long time.”

“Yeah,” Allison sighed. “Plus she’s younger than me.”

“You’ve been a good role model for her,” said Ruth, because, surprisingly, it was true. “That’s the thing about being an only child. There’s nobody to learn from.”

“I’m an only child,” Allison pointed out.

“Well, you seem to have a natural sense of the world.”

Allison nodded. “I read a lot of magazines.”

Ruth ran her dish towel around the lip of a casserole to dry it before putting it away in the sideboard. “Do you think you’re pretty?”

If Allison thought this was a strange question—as strange a question as Ruth herself thought it was; it had just popped out—she didn’t show it. She just said, matter-of-factly, “I think I’m beautiful.
Hillary’s
pretty.”

“I’d think it would be hard to be beautiful,” Ruth said, wiping down the sink.

“Sometimes,” said Allison. “People want stuff from you.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. They want you to like them and pay attention to them. It’s like if they can’t be beautiful, too, they can borrow some of it by being around you.”

“I guess I can see that.”

“Mostly I don’t mind, though. I’m used to it.”

R
UTH HAD AGREED THAT THEY COULD USE THE SILVER FOR
the rest of Allison’s visit. Allison loved knowing they were eating off precious metal, plus the silver made every meal a festive occasion, even breakfast, when, except for the morning they had pancakes, she and Bethany usually ate cereal and bananas by themselves because they got up so late. Allison always sat in the chair that looked out the bay window into the tiny backyard—the garden, Ruth called it, even though in Allison’s opinion it wasn’t much of a garden, more like a patch of grass the size of Mimi’s dining room table with big, spindly rhododendrons all around it, plus a few rosebushes and some kind of shrub that Allison didn’t recognize but Ruth said was gorgeous when it flowered in the summer. Whatever you called it, the garden was pretty even now, when it was dripping wet. Lots of birds came to use the birdbath and eat seeds from a feeder shaped like a mansion. You never saw little birds like these in LA, or maybe there was just too much else going on for you to pick them out. Allison thought it might be nice to be a bird living here, where all you had to worry about was whether the people remembered to put out enough seeds. From what Allison could see, Ruth always put out plenty—or now Allison did, since Ruth had given her permission. These were fat little birds; you could tell they’d always been well fed. The birds around their house in Houston—well, Chet’s house—didn’t look fat and content the way these birds did. They looked skinny and anxious, like they couldn’t count on things. Her mother had never put out a bird feeder in her life.

If she were Bethany, she’d never leave this place, not even for LA. Why would you? You got to eat off nice dishes that all matched; you got good night kisses, and several times a day someone asked you if you needed anything, and if you said yes (which Allison rarely did), that person usually got whatever you needed: a warmer sweater, a fresh diet soda, a hug. When someone called your name here, it was often followed by a term of endearment: honey or sweetie. People called you names like that in LA, too, but they didn’t convey love, just prompts. “Go over there, honey, and read that line again,” or “Thank you, sweetheart, you can go.”

Maybe Allison wasn’t being fair, though. Her mother used to call her baby sometimes. “Baby, I’m going to go out for a little while. Make sure you keep the door locked.” Now Chet-the-douche called her mom baby and no one called Allison anything at all.

She had told Mimi that, and Mimi had just shrugged and said, “Well, you’re here now, so.” Mimi wasn’t much for terms of endearment, but she cared about Allison, which Allison knew, so it was okay.

Now, for the first time during her visit, Allison had the house to herself. Bethany was next door babysitting, Hugh was off drilling teeth, and Ruth had run out to the grocery store. Allison walked from room to room, running her hands over things: the backs of the living room chairs and sofa, the top of the TV, the simple dressers in Ruth and Hugh’s room. She lay down on the bed, on her back, looked at the ceiling, and thought, “This is what they see when they go to bed at night,” and it sounded safe and serene. At Chet’s house, bedrooms were places where you closed your eyes and tried not to hear things like the headboard knocking rhythmically against your wall or your mom shouting, “You goddamn son-of-a-bitch bastard.” The odd thing was, Allison could never make out what Chet said back. Maybe he didn’t say anything at all. Sometimes Allison thought she’d rather hear
something
, even if it was loud or violent, than emptiness into which she couldn’t follow them. She’d even tiptoed from her room down the hall to their closed door once and tried to see through the space between the hinges, but she must have made a noise because Chet, pissed off, had yelled her name, and she’d gone back to the guest room.

She opened a jar of moisturizer on Ruth’s bureau and sniffed. It smelled like Ruth. She liked that smell, though it wasn’t sexy in any way, just clean and comfortable. She put some on her finger and worked it into her hands, then sniffed. It still smelled good, but it didn’t smell like Ruth anymore, just like Allison.

She opened some of the bureau drawers. Most of the clothes were ugly, boring women’s clothes, like big white panties and bras that must have been a D or even a double-D cup. Allison was never going to need a D cup; her boobs were on the small side, and so were her mother’s; and since she’d had her period for a couple of years already, they probably weren’t going to grow much more. Her mother had looked at them once and said, “Good thing you weren’t planning on making a living as a stripper, honey, because you don’t have the tits for it. Nice legs, but no tits.”

Someone like Ruth would never say
tits
.

In the bathroom, Allison looked for a razor, but found only an electric shaver. She’d been thinking about cutting again. She liked it here a lot, but she’d be leaving pretty soon, and cutting always made her feel much calmer. It had started in Texas a year ago, when Chet had yelled at her mother for spending too much money on Allison’s clothes. They hadn’t even spent that much, and what they had spent had been at Target: some socks, a new pair of jeans, a jacket. All of it had cost less than a hundred dollars, but Chet had freaked out anyway, making a huge deal out of examining each item on the receipt before getting right into Allison’s mom’s face and saying, “You don’t spend my fucking money on her without asking me.” He hadn’t cared at all that Allison had been right there in the room.

Later that day, when her mom had left to go drinking with her best friend, Shelley, Allison had gone swimming topless, though she couldn’t say why, except that it had something to do with Chet’s being such a prick, and her wanting to get back at him somehow.

So from the side of the pool’s shallow end—the end closest to him—she’d reached back and untied the strings holding up her wet bikini top, which came away with a faint sucking sound. She’d balled up the top and slapped it onto the concrete apron of the pool, right near his feet. He’d been pretending to read the Sunday paper, but she knew full well that what he was really doing was watching her as she swam a few slow laps. He watched her all the time, with those hooded eyes and slack mouth. So she pulled herself out of the pool and walked right past him,
slowly
, into the cabana—that’s what he called it, only it was more like a converted garage with cheap, thin carpeting—and he followed her. He came up behind her and without saying a word he put his hands on her breasts—not gently, not at
all
gently—and yanked her backward. She’d felt his hard-on against her. He’d forced her against him with one arm while he yanked his pants down with the other, and then he spun her around. She had just enough time to see his erection—a horrible, red, veiny thing—before he locked his mouth over hers in a kiss that burned like acid. Then he hooked her behind the knee with his foot and she folded up like she was hinged, dropping onto the carpet. He was on the floor, too, right on top of her, and he shoved his cock at her over and over—and it hurt, it hurt a
lot
—until he broke through and drove all the way up inside her, right up to the hilt of him like a knife. She would swear she heard her hymen tear, though it probably wasn’t possible. She could feel the cheap indoor-outdoor carpet scraping away skin on her lower back as he drove into her over and over; and then he must have come, because he stopped and slackened abruptly on top of her, suddenly so heavy she couldn’t breathe. She started pushing at his shoulders so he’d get off her, get
off
. He rolled away but reached out to stroke her cheek, except she slapped the hand away. Then he got up and she got up, too; and he pulled his clothes into place but she just
stood
there, thinking that she didn’t want to put her bathing suit back on because it would be cold and wet and it would sting the rug burn on her back. When he finished with his clothes and brought his face toward hers she thought he was going to kiss her again, but instead he brushed her cheek with his cheek lightly, lingeringly, which gave her goose bumps, and whispered, “If you ever tell a living soul, I will know and I will kill you.”