I dust off my hands. My mouth tastes salty and dry. A sperm whale lifts its gigantic, wrinkled head out of the dark water, and then the screen goes to static. The tape ran out before the show ended. I curl my knees up to my chest, wrap my arms around them. Suddenly, I feel very small. I haven’t seen my brother since I was eight years old.
Sometimes Brian would let me come in his room and we’d listen to records and play Go Fish. Candles dripping wax. David Bowie singing about moonage daydreams and outer space and a starman. Thick, flowery scent of incense. Brian blew cigarette smoke out the cracked windows, talked about California, New York. Dream states, he said, where people went to be free.
After he left, my parents told me he was away at college. I didn’t know anyone who’d gone to college, and I believed them for a couple years—until my grandmother told me the truth: he’d gone to New York, which to most people in Chester made about as much sense as saying you were going to live on Mars. If you left, you’d meet the same fate as Major Tom in his tin can. There are other stories about him too.
When I was younger, I told kids at school about the movie stars and rock singers he hung out with, the parties, the money. I never knew any of this. I made up a life for him. I had to. Because he just disappeared. Like those missing kids on milk cartons. But nobody kidnapped him. He just went. My parents, except for those early lies about college, don’t talk about him. Nobody does except for my grandmother. She tells me stories about my brother and has never doubted one day he’d come back home.
The kitchen smells disgusting: baking meat and green beans boiled with onions and hambone. My mother stands at the counter tearing pale lettuce and dropping the pieces into a plastic bowl. She asks me to set the table and I get out plates for three. This is how it’s been for years, like I’m an only child, just like my mother.
We eat in the dining room, a little alcove outside the kitchen that opens into the living room. Sadie follows me around the table, tags jingling. She’s a mix of some kind of terrier and who-knows-what. The scruffy fur under her chin and belly has turned milk-white. I wonder if she’ll remember Brian. She used to be his dog, now she’s mine.
The front door opens and my father walks in. “How are my two favorite gals?” he says, which is what he always says when he gets home from work. Sometimes he sings, badly, lines from weird oldies, to make me laugh. “The Purple People Eater.” “Blue Suede Shoes.”
“It’ll be ready in about ten minutes,” my mother calls from the kitchen.
Because of my father’s silver hair, he looks older than my mother, but they were born the same year. He likes to joke that he started to go gray after meeting her. His mustache lifts as he smiles at me, and for a second, I wonder if she hasn’t told him. Then he asks, in a too soft voice, “How are you, hon?”
He knows.
“Fine,” I say.
He bends to remove his muddy boots and socks. Against the mossy green carpet, his bare feet look extra white, like thin loaves of bread. He wears dark blue pants and a matching shirt with his name stitched in red on the front pocket, a white T-shirt underneath. My uncles and cousins wear the same uniform. My brother probably would have worked for the electric company too, if he hadn’t escaped.
“You all right?”
“Yeah,” I say.
After my brother left, my father told me he’d be back soon. I think he believed this, for a while.
Occasionally, Brian would call, and make promises about visiting. But he never came back, not once. He forgets my birthday every year. The last time I talked to him was a couple of years ago, and it was weird, like talking to a distant relative I’d never met. Last year after his birthday, which my parents didn’t mention, I asked my cousin Gus if he thought Brian was dead.
A tremor in Gus’s soft round face. “What a question, Jess. No, he’s fine.”
I wanted to know how he knew. Gus hem and hawed, his face turning crimson, then he finally admitted he’d heard from Brian.
“He calls you?”
His eyes darted. “It’s been a while.”
“So he could be dead.”
“He’s not dead.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.” He held his eyes steady. “Jess, you’d know if he was dead.”
“How?”
“You just would. You’d feel it.”
All I felt was a dull hammering in my chest that grew fainter and fainter as time went by. How could I feel him when he was dead if I couldn’t even feel him when he was alive?
My parents sit at either end of the table, across from each other, and I’m between them, facing the side window. Brian used to sit across from me. When he first went away my mother would sometimes forget and set his place, and the plate and silverware would just sit there all through dinner, like she’d left a place at the table for a ghost, and nobody would say a word about it. As time went by, I stopped noticing the empty chair. But today I can’t stop staring. Today Brian’s chair grows big as a sycamore tree.
“When did you find out he was coming back?” I ask.
My parents exchange a look.
“I talked to him,” my mother says evasively. “Not too long ago.”
My father reaches for the salt shaker and shakes it over his plate, and when he sets it down, he isn’t smiling, isn’t frowning either. More like his whole face forms into a tight question mark.
“We haven’t told anyone yet,” he says.
I ask if we should throw a party. I remember a movie about a long-lost brother who comes back home and his family and friends show up, laughing, crying, shouting, Welcome home, brother. Maybe he came back from a war, I can’t remember. What sticks out in my mind is the reunion scene, the movie star’s face wet with tears, his family forming a tight circle around him. His father tells him he thought about him every day, my son, my dear, dear son.
“I don’t think a party is a good idea,” my father says. He sets down his glass of milk, his face stiff with concentration, the way he looks when he is watching a close ballgame on TV, that and some other expression I don’t know.
“We want to keep this news to ourselves for now,” he says.
“Why?”
“Well, we just want to wait until he gets here. We want to be sure.”
“Because he might not come back?”
“He will. We’re just being cautious,” my mother says. “I didn’t want to keep any of this from you,” she adds, like she’s done me a big favor.
“What about Mamaw?”
“You know how she is,” my father says. “She’ll get too worked up. Let’s just wait to tell her after he gets here. Okay?”
My parents look at me with worried smiles. They want this to stay a secret. Just like when he left.
“Yeah, whatever.” I look down at my plate, the soggy, watery beans, the thick ketchup smeared over a gray slab of meat. “Can I be excused?”
“You’ve hardly eaten a bite.” My mother doesn’t like when she slaves over a meal all day and I don’t eat it, she tells me all the time.
“I’m not hungry.”
“What did I tell you? No snacks before supper.”
My father spears his fork into the little hill of green beans on his plate. “Let her go.” He presses his lips together, forces a smile. “It’s going to be okay, hon.”
I carry my plate into the kitchen. Without making any noise, I open the cupboard where my mother hides junk food and slide a Twinkie into the front pouch of my sweatshirt. The setting sun turns the trees in the woods behind our house a bright, spooky orange. My brother and I used to play in the woods. He built me a fort out of old tree limbs and scrap wood. He taught me how to skip rocks. He told me about the places in the world he wanted to go. I would have followed him anywhere.
I walk home the long way, listening to a mix tape on my Walkman, old and new stuff. “Live to Tell,” “Hold Me Now,” “What Have You Done Me Lately,” “I Would Die 4 U.” When I’m wearing the soft foam headphone
s over my ears, the voices carry me outside of dinky, dead-end Chester, outside of myself to some better place that’s big and goes on forever, like the ocean.
On the bridge I stop and look over. Five feet below Buckeye Creek cuts a jagged line through Chester, but it’s easy to forget it’s even here—it’s like a country road or the train tracks, the same old thing you see every day. Nothing ever happens in Chester. The dark greenish water sweeps twigs and a dented Pepsi can downstream.
“What are you doing?”
Brandy White and two girls who never talk to me cross the street. I press pause.
“Nothing,” I say, hoping they didn’t see me spit over the ledge like a boy. I feel self-conscious in my gray sweatpants. “I just had softball practice,” I explain.
The only reason I joined the team was to make my father happy. I used to do okay when I played summer league—nobody hit very well, and it didn’t matter if we won or not, the coaches always took us out for ice cream after. But in high school the girls play fast-pitch and they’re scary-serious. I rarely even swing, and if I do, I usually just smack air.
“Oh, that,” Brandy says.
Brandy is a cheerleader, not a jock. She wears tight icy-blue jeans, a turquoise shirt with the collar popped, ankle-high black boots. She’s with Steph Patterson and Angie Ray, juniors, who looked totally bored, like if I were to fall over the side into the creek they wouldn’t bat an eye. Brandy White and I used to be friends. She’s a couple years older than me, but that never mattered until high school.
Brandy isn’t pretty—pug nose, thin lips—but she’s skinny and has big boobs and a loud, teasing laugh that calls the boys to her. Her hair is big too, reddish-blond, like a lion’s mane. She paints her nails dark cherry, and wears hoops the size of shower curtain rings in her ears. Her purple purse, with a bow tie on the front, looks new. I know it holds cigarettes and cinnamon gum and teal-colored mascara and tampons and notes from friends and notes from boys.
“We’re going to Rudy’s,” Brandy says. Then she surprises me. “Want to come?”
I should say yes, grateful she’s inviting me, but I know they are not going to Rudy’s to eat pizza—they’re going to meet up with boys, and they’ll joke and flirt in some language I don’t know how to speak.
“I can’t,” I say.
A horn beeps and we all turn, them with eager, flirty smiles, expecting a carload of boys. But it just happens to be my grandmother in her butterscotch Crown Victoria. The Queen’s Ship, my father calls it.
“Hey, girls.” She leans out the open window, cracking her gum. Her puffy, hard black hair sparkles in the sunlight. “How are you, Miss Brandy?”
“Good,” Brandy says, her face turning up in a big smile that might be real, or maybe not. Brandy’s aunt used to live next door to my grandmother, and whenever Brandy’s mother went on a tear—going out to a bar to look for a man, according to Mamaw—then Brandy would stay at her aunt’s, and come over to my grandmother’s to play. We’d read supermarket tabloids and try on Avon eye shadow and lipstick samples. Brandy wanted to be a model. The next Christy Brinkley.
“You girls want a ride?”
Brandy says no thanks, they’ll walk. She catches up to her friends, and I toss my duffle bag in the backseat and dust off the bottoms of my tennis shoes before I get in. My grandmother does not allow eating or drinking in the Ship, but she does allow herself to smoke. The inside smells just like her, cigarettes and hairspray and whatever Avon perfume she is wearing. They all have different names—Timeless, Candid, Here’s My Heart, Moonwind, Sweet Honesty—but smell about the same, so strong that if you stand too close when she sprays her neck, your eyes will water.
She’s wearing slacks and a pleated blouse, and clip-ons that look like big teardrops. I glance down at the navy one-inch heels, her going-out shoes.
“Why are you all dressed up?”
“Oh, I drove Helen over to Madison for her doctor appointment, and then we had lunch at this new Mexican place. Helen had never had Mexican before and she didn’t know what in the world to make of it. But she ate every bite. We had ourselves a big time.”
My grandmother is always chauffeuring somebody around, one of her church or bingo friends. She has never lacked for friends. I wonder if she was popular in high school, like Brandy White. Or like my mother, who was also a cheerleader.
“Honey, you could have gone with those girls,” she says.
“We’re not really friends.”
She clucks her tongue. “Why, I thought you was.”
“No, not really. Not anymore.”
I only have a few friends. They’re benchwarmers, same as me. We aren’t popular but we don’t get picked on either—nobody notices us, thank God. We eat lunch together and sometimes hang out after school, but we don’t trust each other with secrets the way best friends do. Today, I almost made the mistake of telling Molly Williams about my brother coming back, but then Coach Feldon hit a fly ball that went sailing over my head and that broke the spell.
“Well, it’s probably better you’re not friends. That Brandy always has been wild. Gets it from her mother.” Wrapped over the steering wheel, Mamaw’s fingers glitter, a rainbow of gems and stones. She says she feels naked without her rings, like going out without her face on. “Why don’t you come over to my house? I made coffee cake.”
I’m nervous I’ll spill the secret, but I can’t think of a good excuse. Plus, once my grandmother gets her mind set on something, there’s no changing it.
We sit in front of the TV with squares of coffee cake. My grandmother watches more TV than any grownup I know. She was one of the first in Chester to get a satellite dish, and the first in the family to own a VCR.
As she flips channels, I look through her most recent National Enquirer. She’s been buying these for years. Brian used to read them aloud to me in a dramatic storytelling voice, weaving tales of plastic surgery, drug addiction, and divorce.
“Oh, goody, it’s almost time for Naomi,” my grandmother says, and turns to channel 7.
On Location With Naomi is one of our favorite shows. It’s a talk show, like Sally Jessie Rafael or Phil Donahue, except that Naomi Cook travels to different places around Ohio to talk to people with a good tear-jerker story to tell, like women who finally broke free of abusive husbands, kids with brain tumors, or criminals who turned their lives around. My grandmother says one day the show will go national. “She’s going to be big,” she says. “Just you wait.”
Naomi, who my grandmother says must use good moisturizer because she is almost fifty and doesn’t have any wrinkles, always begins the show at the studio. She stands in the center of a stage wearing a milk-white double-breasted jacket with square shoulders, and matching pleated pants with a wide wrap belt. Her red hair lifts a few inches off her head and frames her face like a fluffy cat.
“Today, we talk to a mother of three who lost practically everything. She was a Girl Scout troop leader, a PTA member. And she was addicted to barbiturates.” Naomi raises her eyebrows. “What happened? Where will she go from here?”
“Ooh, this makes me think of that Rutherford woman up in Clark County. Naomi ought to do that story. I’m going to tell her about it.” Mamaw calls Naomi’s “Do You Have a Story to Tell” line regularly, but Naomi so far hasn’t taken any of her tips.
“Jess, did you hear a word I just said?”
“What? Yeah.”
“You’re acting funny.”
I can’t stop thinking about Brian. His picture on the mantle looks right at me, like he’s trying to tell me something. Mamaw has family pictures all over—my aunts and uncles, and tons of cousins and second cousins, and old people I can’t tell apart. But this one of Brian, stuck in a fussy gold frame, is front and center. Mamaw has never said Brian is her favorite grandchild, but we all knew. Here, he looks like a movie star from the ’70s. Jean jacket, big-collar shirt with the top three buttons undone, and long feathered hair that he and my dad used to fight about. Brian inheri
ted our parents’ good traits—our father’s blue eyes, our mother’s high cheekbones. A thin silver chain hits his bare chest where his shirt opens in a V. I wonder what he looks like now.
Friends of the drug-addicted PTA mother tell Naomi they never would have expected this of her. “She’s a good woman,” they say. When Naomi interviews her, the woman dissolves into a crying mess. People always cry on her show.
As the credits roll, Mamaw suggests we sit on the porch to watch the world go by. There isn’t much to see. Two shirtless guys bend over the hood of a red Trans Am, a cluster of empty beer cans at their feet, and a little boy with a dirty face rides a girl’s bike up and down the sidewalk. Across the street, stooped, balding Betty Russell, in a housedress and slippers, sweeps her porch with a straw broom.
“How are you doing, Betty?” Mamaw calls.
“Can’t complain,” she hollers back. “What about you?”
“No worse for the wear,” she says. My grandmother wouldn’t ever go out in public if she were to go bald. Not without a wig or a scarf.
“There was one of them NOVA programs on the other night, did you see it?” she asks.
I tell her I taped it. She lights a cigarette. She doesn’t know what to make of me, wanting to be a marine biologist. “Why in the world would you want to be down there with them sharks and such?” she says. “They’ll eat you alive.” She doesn’t understand, but says she’s proud. “You’re smart, like your brother.”
I used to think I’d get a job at SeaWorld, so I could train killer whales. There is a SeaWorld, if you can believe it, in Ohio—it’s up north, near Cleveland. My parents and grandmother took me for my twelfth birthday. We sat three rows from the front, and when Shamu, a 5,300-pound killer whale, leapt out the water, Mamaw screamed. Water splashed all over us. I’d never seen anything so perfect. But something about it bothered me too—a whale confined to a pool, taught to do tricks. Mamaw tried to make me feel better about it. She said the whales were well cared for.
The Prettiest Star Page 4