Star (4 page)
voice. She was holding her attention on me. "You do? That's good, because I don't," I said.
She just continued to stare, but I felt she was looking
at her own memories now, not mine. After a moment
she seemed to snap out of it and look down again. "Granny came by often to help out and
occasionally make us a real good dinner:' I continued. "She and Momma had some big fights, but Momma would wail and claim she was doing the best she could, deserted by a husband and left with two kids to
raise and support.
"'Why do you think that man left you?' Granny
would ask her and that would be the same as lighting
that wick again. Momma would go wild, her arms and
legs and even her head swinging so hard, I thought
they might just fly off her body and bounce against
the wall along with her screams.
"'How can my own mother blame me for that
rotten man? Why is it always my fault? He was the
one who made all them promises, wasn't he? I did the
best I could with the little money he brought us. Lots
a times he brought us nothin' because he was out of
work so much. It's no loss him bein' gone, no ma'am.' "On and on she would go and I'd listen and
wonder if she really believed the things she said.
Maybe her eyes saw differently. Maybe she was just a
step or two off-center and her world was running on a
different track, you know. She always looked so
satisfied with herself after one of those explosions of
temper, like she had made important points and shut
everyone up. That's when I began to understand what
was meant when someone said 'You're only fooling yourself.' Momma really was fooling herself. She truly believed she was the victim and not us, not even me and Rodney. We were . . . just unfortunate enough
to be born.
"Like I said, I guess no matter what your life is
like, you can get used to it and just accept things as
they are. Of course, I knew other girls my age didn't
have this kind of life. Oh, they helped out with their
little brothers and sisters, but their little brothers and
sisters didn't become their children. They still thought
about boys and parties and going to the movies and
having fun. I couldn't think of anything without
thinking about Rodney being a part of it. I didn't have
a night off, so to speak," I said. "I was afraid of
bringing anyone to my house. I didn't want my friends
at school to know just how bad things were for me
and for Rodney.
"Then," I said, taking a sip of water and
thinking for a moment, "then I got so I could live
through their stories. Their lives became my life. It
was easier to pretend, to imagine my name was Lily
Porter or Charlene Davis and in my mind go home to
their houses and live with their families.
"You're all looking at me like I was crazy.
Well, maybe I was for a while. Doctor Marlowe says
I'm not crazy now."
"No one's crazy here, Star. It's an inappropriate
word, a meaningless word," she said.
"Yeah, maybe, but I sure wasn't in my right
mind. I did some things," I said. After a moment, I
added, "Things I haven't even told you yet, Doctor
Marlowe.
"Whenever I met someone who didn't know
me, for example, I would give them a phony name,
one of the names of the girls I envied and I would talk
like I was Lily Porter or Charlene Davis, describing
their homes and their families as if they really were
mine.
"A couple of times, I went to Charlene Davis's
house, walked right up to the door, pretending I was
coming home. One time, I nearly got caught doing it.
Her sister Lori came up behind me without me
knowing and asked me what I was doing.
"'I was just going to see if your sister was
home,' I said. She looked at me sideways because she
knew I knew her sister was on the cheerleading team
and would be at practice. I made believe I forgot and
walked away quickly. When Charlene asked me about
it the next day, I said I was just in her neighborhood
and had to kill some time. She didn't believe me. They
all started looking at me as if I was funny.
"I couldn't help it. I wanted their lives so much
I'd follow their mothers around a supermarket,
pretending I was with them, buying food.
"You think I was pretty pathetic, don't you?" I
asked Jade.
"No," she said. "Really," she added, when I
looked skeptical. "I can understand not wanting to be
who you are. I've felt like that lots of times." "Me too," Misty said.
"Yes," Cat said. "Me too." She looked like she
meant it more than any of us. How could her story be
worse than mine? I wondered.
"There's more," I said, now willing to tell it all.
"One time I hurt my ankle in gym class and the
teacher sent me back to the locker room to get
dressed. I noticed Charlene's looker was unlocked and
I opened it and took her blouse."
"Why?" Jade asked with a grimace.
"To wear it later, when I was alone at home in
my room. I pretended I was her and I lived in a nice
house with a real mother and a father. Her daddy
works for the city. He's some kind of traffic manager,
makes good money, and her mother always looks
stylish. They come to the basketball games and watch her cheer for the team. She's about my size, too, so the
blouse fit real good."
"What happened when she found her blouse
was missing?" Misty asked. "Did they accuse you?" "No. The teacher made everyone open her
locker and she looked in all of them."
"How come they didn't find it in yours? Where
did you put it?"
"I
didn't put it in my locker," I said. "I told you
I wanted to take it home with me so I hid it under my
skirt and no one dared look there. They just thought
someone had come into the locker room and robbed it.
Things like that had happened before. Charlene had to
wear her gym uniform top for the rest of the day. "About a month or so afterward, I brought it
back and left it on the bench near her locker.
Everyone thought it was weird. It was weird," I
admitted.
"No it wasn't," Cat piped up. Everyone looked
at her. She didn't hide her face this time.
"Why not?"
"I don't just want to be in someone else's
clothes; I want to be in their bodies," she confessed. Everyone was quiet. The air felt so heavy and
even with the lights, a thick shadow seemed to hang
over the ceiling and walls.
"Well," Doctor Marlowe said. "Why don't I go
check on the pizza for us? It's getting close to that
time."
She rose and looked at me.
"I guess you'll continue after lunch, right?" I nodded and she left us. As soon as she had,
Jade turned to me.
"I'm sorry I was nasty to you before," she said
and then quickly added, "and I'm not trying to show
you any pity so don't get mad at me."
"It's all right," I said. "About now, I could use
some, I suppose."
"I suppose we all can," Misty said.
"As long as we don't depend on it," I said. "It's
a little scarce outside this place. My granny says if
you wait too long for pity, you'll miss the train to
happiness."
They all smiled, even Cat. Everyone looked a
lot more comfortable. It was like we were all trying
each other on for size, making adjustments here and
there and finding ways to make it work.
"Your granny sounds like a wise old lady," Jade
said.
"She is. Well, I guess I am hungry," I said. "Least we'll get something out of this, lunch. I hope I
didn't spoil anyone's appetite."
"Not mine
1
" Misty blurted and put her hand
over her mouth.
And then we all laughed.
It felt good, like some of that sunshine after the
storm Granny always expected.
Doctor Marlowe had a table set up for us in her closed- in back patio. There were large windows facing the pool and yard and a sliding door. It was still raining lightly, the drops zigzagging to outline odd shapes on the glass. Birds flitted from tree to tree, probably excited by the sight of worms that had come out of the dampened earth. The birds were about to enjoy a little feast too, I thought. When I caught sight of my reflection in the glass, I saw I had a smile on my face. It happened so rarely these days, it took me by surprise and I touched my cheek as if to be sure it was me.
I don't often look at birds, I thought. I know they are there where we live with Granny, but I just don't take the time to notice or care. Here, with such beautiful grounds, bushes, hedges, flowers and a small fountain, I felt different, almost as if I was out of the city. I imagined it wasn't as big a deal for the others. They looked like they took it all for granted . . . big houses, birds, trees, flowers and fountains.
"Yes. I hated to see them go, but they were dying and had to be replaced."
"My mother doesn't know one flower or bush from the other on our property. She only knows they cost a lot," Misty muttered. "She deliberately got a new gardener recently who's more expensive." She smiled and added, "Because it's part of the agreement she has with Daddy that he has to maintain the property. That was one wham-barn of an argument-- the new gardener," she told us gleefully. She had a mischievous looking little smile on her face.
Sophie brought out a jug of lemonade and the pizzas. It occurred to me that if we weren't brought here by our parents, courts and schools, the chances of the four of us sitting around a table and having lunch together were almost as small as Granny winning the lottery. Maybe we had passed each other in some mall or in the lobby of some movie theater, but I was sure we had never looked at each other and actually seen each other. Up until now we were as good as invisible to each other.
"I wasn't sure if everyone liked pizza," Doctor Marlowe said as she took a seat. "It's just a good bet."
"I eat everything," Misty said.
It was something I would have expected Cat to say. She was the one who looked like she could afford to shed some pounds. However, when she ate, she ate like a mouse, nibbling with hesitation like she thought she was going to be caught doing something illegal.
"Of course, my mother thinks that's terrible," Misty continued. "She has this list of foods she pinned on the wall in the kitchen. She calls it her
Ten Most Wanted No-Nos
because they will wreak havoc on your complexion and make you fat. Pizza is at the top of the list," she said, and bit into her piece with added pleasure.
"Momma gave my brother Rodney leftover pizza for breakfast sometimes," I said.
"You're kidding. For breakfast? Did she at least give him a daily vitamin?" Misty asked.
I looked at her as if she was crazy.
"You look pretty good. What's your brother's health like?" Jade asked.
Doctor Marlowe sat back and ate her piece quietly with a tight smile on her lips. It made me feel like we were all being taped for some psychological study she was doing.
"Granny calls him a beanpole. He's almost as tall as I am already. He looks like my daddy more than he does Momma. He's a good boy, shy and quiet, too quiet for his teachers. He's not doing so good in school:'
"Well," Jade corrected.
"What?"
"He's not doing so well in school."
"Yes, Miss Perfect," I said. "He's not doing so well. Maybe, if you got the time, you can come over and tutor my brother."
Cat stopped chewing and looked from Jade to me, anticipating more nasty words.
"I'm sorry," Jade said. "It's a habit, correcting people. When I do it to my mother, she gets all flustered. And maybe I will," she added.
"Will what?" Misty asked.
"Tutor her brother. I've done it in school as part of the Big Sister program."
"Sure," I said. "Only, I won't hold my breath."
"People do help each other sometimes," Jade said, "no matter what you think."
"Right," I said. "Look how much we're already helping each other?'
She smirked. Maybe we couldn't be friends after all, I thought. Maybe we were what Granny called Momma and Daddy: Oil and Water.
"I hope you girls will eat all this. I don't want to have it in the house. It's too tempting," Doctor Marlowe said. She looked at Cat, who was
encouraged to take a real bite.
"Where's Emma today?" Misty asked. I wondered if, like me, she was imagining Emma eating it all. Doctor Marlowe's sister was twice her width.
"She's a little under the weather. She has bad sinus trouble, especially on days like this," Doctor Marlowe explained.
"How long have you and Emma lived in this house?" Jade asked her.
"I've been here all my life. My situation after my parents divorced was a little different from your situations. My sister and I lived with my father because my mother wanted it that way."
"Why?" Misty asked first.
Cat looked up with interest, probably just as eager as the rest of us to know more about the person who was supposed to bring us to all the important answers about ourselves.
"My mother was more into her career than into being a wife and a mother. I suppose that contributed to why they got a divorce in the first place, not that I'm suggesting for one moment she couldn't or shouldn't have had a career."
"So you lived here with your father?" Jade asked. "Yes, and then Emma returned about twentytwo years ago after her divorce," she said.
"So actually you've lived in the same house all your life?" Misty asked
"Yes."
"What did your daddy do?" I asked. Since everyone else was badgering her with questions and she wasn't refusing to answer, I thought I might ask something too.
"He was a corporate attorney and my mother taught Drama-speech at UCLA," she revealed. "I saw her often, more often after I had gone to college."
"Are they both dead?" I asked.
"My father is," she said. "My mother is at an adult residency now. She suffers from Alzheimer's disease. You all know what that is?"
"You forget everything," Misty said.
"What a good idea," Jade quipped. Everyone stopped eating and looked at her. She shrugged. "If we could forget everything and then start over like a blank cassette, I mean."
"You don't have to forget the past," Doctor Marlowe said softly. "What you've got to learn to do is handle it, live with it, put it in perspective, keep it from permitting you to have a future.
"After all, that's what we're here to do," she concluded.
No one responded. We continued eating instead, each of us hoping she was right. Misty and Jade got into a conversation about clothes and Misty admitted she had some very nice things to wear when she wanted to, but just felt more comfortable in jeans and T-shirts.
From the way the others acted when Doctor Marlowe offered to show us the rest of the house when we finished eating, I gathered they, like me, were brought only to the office before this. She took us to the living room first and explained some of the paintings her father had purchased in Europe years and years ago. She told us he favored the
Impressionists and one of the paintings was an authentic Monet. I didn't know anything much about art, but I saw that Jade was impressed.
One picture caught all our interests. It was a painting of a little girl, maybe seven or eight, standing by a pond and looking at her own reflection in the water.
"My father liked this one a great deal, too," Doctor Marlowe said, standing behind us. "He told me that to him it was as if the little girl realized for the first time that she was really beautiful."
"That's not supposed to be the first time she'd seen herself, is it?" I asked.
"I don't think so, no."
"Maybe nobody told her she was pretty and so she thought she wasn't," Misty said.
"And she didn't dare hope otherwise," Jade added.
"Maybe they told her she wasn't pretty and she knew they were liars," Cat interjected with more anger in her voice than we had heard before. Misty shifted her eyes to look at her. Jade kept staring at the picture, but nudged me. I looked at Cat. She had her teeth clenched and her eyes looked like they had a little candle behind them.
"Does the painting have a name?" Misty asked.
"It's called
Reflections in a Pond,"
Doctor Marlowe said.
"That's it?"
"Sometimes, things are nothing more than what they are," Doctor Marlowe replied.
"If that were the case all the time, you'd be out of work," Jade quipped.
Doctor Marlowe laughed hard. She really roared. It brought smiles to all our faces. I felt so light and happy that I almost didn't want to go back to the office and tell the rest of my story. I knew what that was going to do to our merry mood.
But that's what we had come here to do and anyway, everyone expected it. We all went to the bathroom and then settled back in the office.
"I really appreciate how smoothly things are going here. Thank you, girls," Doctor Marlowe said after we were seated. Then she turned to me.
Here I go again, I thought. It was like getting on a roller coaster.
"I keep saying things got worse after this and worse after that," I began, "so you probably all think it was about as bad as it could be, but it wasn't. It got worse again when Momma got a boyfriend.
"I knew she was going out with different men from time to time, but she never brought anyone home with her before Aaron Marks. He was someone new to the neighborhood and One-Eyed Bill's, which is where they met, of course.
"I gotta say that I never thought Momma was faithful to Daddy when they were together anyway. Whenever Daddy went off on a job that took a few days, I had the feeling Momma was with someone. She'd never admit it to me, of course, but you hear things on the street, hear talk and whatnot and just pick up on it if you wanted to be smart enough.
"Momma'd be with me and meet some girlfriend from One-Eyed Bill's and they'd get to talking and laughing and I could read between the lines that Momma went off with someone, maybe even just to his car behind the bar or something. I was worried she'd get some disease or get pregnant with some other man's baby, but I was afraid to say anything.
"If I looked suspicious or surprised, she'd just say, 'You know Shirley was fooling. She doesn't mean half of what she says, Star. Don't you go saying anything to your Daddy or Granny, hear?'
"If I didn't answer she'd slap me on the arm or shoulder until I turned to her and cried, 'What?'
"'When I'm talking to you, I expect you to say something. You understand what I told you?'
" 'Yes,' I'd cry.
"'Well, you just don't make any trouble for me. I got enough trouble-without you making any,' she'd say and mumble the rest of the way home.
"I know it sounds like we never had any mother- daughter talks like you all probably have had with your mothers, but we did. Not toward the end, of course, but before things got so bad so that I couldn't look at her, much less talk to her."
I paused and turned to Misty.
"I remember yesterday how you kept asking how two people who were supposedly in love could suddenly hate each other so much. What happened to all the nice things they said to each other and the nice things they did together? I thought about that too and one day, when Momma was sober enough and being nice to Rodney, I asked her something like that.
"I said, 'You loved Daddy once, didn't you, Momma?'
"
`So?' she said.
"'I was just wondering why you stopped, is all,' I said. I didn't want to spoil her good mood, so I spoke softly and looked down quickly.
"'Because he's not the man I fell in love with,' she said. 'He fooled me is what happened. When we were first going together, he used to tell me how different he was and how different things were going to be for us. We're not going to be like these poor, drifting folks around us. We're going to build a real home.
"'He was going to have his own company and I'd be a lady in style. I'd have my own car and we'd have a nice house and on and on he'd go with that web he was spinning to trap me good. That's what he did. I gave myself to him expecting he'd live up to those promises. Every one of them turned out to be just a lot of hot air and when I asked him what happened to all those promises, he said he's doing the best he could, to be patient.
"'"Be patient? I'm growing old being patient," I told him. Then he'd clam up the way he often did and pretend I wasn't in the room. He could be so
infuriating. You know that. You've seen him like that.'
"'Maybe he was trying,' I risked saying. She didn't get mad. She laughed.
"'Yeah. Look around you at the palace he built. Men,' she said, 'are born liars. Don't believe a one.'
"She looked down at Rodney playing with his toy truck on the floor and shook her head.
"'They're so sweet when they're little boys and then something happens to them. They let their thing take over and run their lives and ruin ours,' she said.
"I knew what she was saying, but I just didn't believe she was saying it. Momma and I never really had a heart to heart about sex and stuff. She just assumed I'd learn it like she did, from girlfriends. I guess when your hormones screamed, it was all supposed to just pop into your head and you'd know what to do and what not to do. Most girls didn't know what not," I said. "At least, most I knew:'
"My mother didn't exactly offer me any sage advice," Jade said.
"Excuse me?"
"Womanly wisdom," she muttered with that corkscrew smirk of hers.
"Oh. We got taught stuff by the school nurse, of course. She even gave girls sanitary napkins. I remember when I first started getting cramps, I complained to Momma and she just handed me one and told me to wear it just in case.
"'In case?' I asked her.
"'Well, look at you,' Momma declared, 'you about to bust out, aren't you? Welcome to woman's misery.'
"That was about all she told me about it. I learned the rest from girlfriends and the nurse's pamphlets. Then one day when I was nearly thirteen it just happened. It was like an explosion inside me. I got this terrible cramp which about folded me over. I couldn't move without the pain. The nurse came down to the classroom to help me back to her office. I saw the other girls laughing behind my back and some of the boys, too, but I was suffering too much to care.
"She had me rest and called home. Momma answered and after the nurse told her about me, Momma said, 'Well, what am I supposed to do about it?'
"The nurse told her she should come for me, but she claimed she couldn't because Rodney was home sick, which I had a feeling was a big fat lie. She was probably with someone and drinking. When I was able to get up and about, I went home myself and discovered I was right.
"That was the first time I met Aaron Marks. The music was loud. They had been drinking gin. Momma was wearing only a slip. When Momma saw I had entered, she stopped dancing with Aaron and wobbled for a moment and then laughed.
"'This here's my daughter, Star. She started the monthlies today.' She lifted a glass full of gin and added, 'Let's toast to her happy days.'
"I didn't take much of a look at Aaron Marks that first time. I was so embarrassed, I just made a dash for my bedroom and slammed the door. I heard them laughing and drinking. When Rodney came home, they were in Momma's bedroom. I hurried out and brought him into my room and told him to just stay there. He cried because he had to go to the bathroom so I had to let him out and he heard Momma's laughter and went to her room. The sight of another man in bed with her just put the freeze in his face.