The Prettiest Star

by Carter Sickels

  The umbrella I usually leave in the backseat is missing, so I make a run for it through the rain. The double automatic doors part, and I step into a world that is refreshingly clean and quiet and bright. I brush the rain off my shoulders, pat my hair. An instrumental song—the same Muzak we listen to at the office—pipes through the PA system, saxophone and strings coming from the ceiling, smoothing over everything like white frosting. I pull a cart free from the train of carts, flip down the red plastic flap. When he was little, Brian liked to sit here, his little legs dangling through the front slats. Shoppers would coo over him, and he made them laugh with his jabbering. He wasn’t shy like Jess, never hid his face.

  I start with the fruit and vegetables and make my way through the store aisle by aisle. Here, I feel better. Here, I could be anyone. The rows of canned vegetables, arranged like a colorful paint-by-number, relax my jittery mind. Yellow corn, green beans, dark green spinach. Everything neatly labeled, organized, ordered.

  An older, hunched gray-haired woman stops her cart next to mine, and reaches for a can of creamed corn, the loose skin under her thin arms quivering. She’s wearing blue jeans and tennis shoes. It always surprises me when I see an old woman wearing jeans.

  “Morning,” she says, then corrects herself. “Guess it ain’t morning anymore, is it?”

  She’s missing a few teeth, and I can’t help but think of Brian. He lost a bottom tooth—a central incisor. I offered him to take him in to see Dave, and Brian just shot me a look, embarrassed by my pathetic offer, which I know is coming too late.

  “Feels like morning,” I say. “It’s the rain.”

  “Shew, I’m glad it’s cooled off. I can’t abide that heat.”

  She looks familiar, but I can’t figure out where I’ve seen her. As I watch her go, a funny sadness comes over me. Granny Ada. My mother’s mother. I met her only once. We visited her at her home in the mountains of West Virginia. She smoked a pipe and wore a flowered shapeless dress, and held me in her lap and told me stories about fairies and magical creatures. I remember her kindness and warmth, how different she was from my mother who spent most of the trip staring at the patches of sky, beautiful and distant.

  I add things to the cart, cross them off my list. Lunchmeat for Travis, frozen dinners for Jess. For Brian, even though he hasn’t been eating much, ingredients to make his favorite meals, and bananas and yogurt for his special protein shakes. I keep adding things to the cart. I don’t want to leave.

  But I can’t stay here forever. I get in line behind the old woman who watches her items ring up, making sure she’s not being cheated, and set my groceries onto the conveyor belt behind the red plastic divider. Another shopper pulls her cart up behind mine. She also looks familiar—petite and compact with wavy brown hair and a smooth face, younger and thinner than me. I can’t think of her name, but she has a girl Jess’s age. They played softball together. What’s her friend’s name—Mary, or Molly? We’ve sat next to each other at softball games. Rhonda, I remember now. Rhonda Williams, Molly’s mother.

  She returns my smile, then her pretty lips twitch. I watch it happen: her sinking face, the flare of recognition and disgust.

  “Oh,” she says.

  That’s it. She says nothing else, just backs up and switches to the other line. My face pulses.

  As the old woman writes out a check, I pretend to be interested in the rack of magazines. Celebrities with perfect, dazzling smiles, whitened teeth—Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna, Michael J. Fox. Fashion tips, scandals, advertisements. A headline on one of the tabloids, even too trashy for Lettie, claims Jesus will return to Earth in a spaceship.

  Some of the letters to the editor were written by people I know. They said they wanted to protect the town and the children from this wicked disease. They said he was flaunting his homosexuality. They said we should be held responsible. I read each one in a blur of tears. One was from Sandy Nelson, who lives down the street from us. She said that my son should be arrested and thrown in jail. Our Pentecostal neighbors left a note in our mailbox reassuring us that they are praying for us, and the O’Malleys, who have always been kind, wrote a letter to the editor saying they are scared they could be infected too—by the ground water or sharing the same air.

  The clerk, chewing green gum, scans my groceries. The conveyor belt chugs along. “How are you, ma’am?”

  “Fine,” I say with a smile, and hand over a stack of coupons. “Just fine.”

  The rain has stopped and the parking lot glistens in the sun. A bag boy packs the last of the old woman’s groceries in the trunk of her station wagon, and she sees me and waves me over. The boy gives the cart a running start then hops on and rides it across the parking lot.

  “I know who you are now,” she says. My body tenses. “You come into the filling station sometimes, over on 54?”

  Confused, I nod.

  “Marlboros, right?”

  The tight wires in my neck uncoil, and I’m surprised by my laugh. “That’s me.”

  “I’m Lucy Highsmith,” she says.

  She doesn’t know who I am.

  “Sarah,” I say. “Sarah Johnson.”

  The stranger’s name falls out of my mouth as easily as a recited prayer. The old woman’s pruned lips turn up, the wrinkles spray in a big smile.

  “Well, come by anytime, Sarah,” she says.

  For the first time in weeks, the aching stops. The buzzing quiets. I feel suddenly light, like I can walk away from all of this, that everything before this moment can be erased. I can be someone else.

  “I will,” I promise.

  “Do you need help?” Brian asks.

  “There are a couple more sacks, but I’ll get them.”

  “I can do it,” he says.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Brian carries a couple of the lighter grocery sacks into the kitchen, and then sits back down, already worn out. Lately, just walking up and down the stairs makes him short of breath.

  “Are you hungry? Want me to make you something?”

  He pushes his thinning hair out of his eyes. He needs a haircut, a shave. The gap in his mouth upsets me—he used to have such a pretty smile.

  “Maybe just a piece of toast.”

  I ask where Jess is and he doesn’t know—he thinks she went for a run, or maybe to hang out with friends. Does she have friends? I’ve tried to pry, but she doesn’t say much. What will happen when school starts, what will the kids say? She wants to move. Could we? Uproot ourselves, start some place new? Become the Johnsons? I feel a stab of guilt. Sarah Johnson. It isn’t telling a lie that stings, but the way it felt so right, so desirable to say a name that wasn’t my own, to deny my son.

  “I was thinking of making barbecue chicken for supper.” I drop a slice of bread in the toaster. “How does that sound?”

  “Whatever. I’m not really hungry.”

  In the last few months of my mother’s life, the weight slid off her until she was nothing but delicate bone. I remember her sitting up in her bed, so thin and pale and quiet—a strange queen on her throne, as fragile as a moth. I didn’t like to be near her. Even in her dying, she intimidated me with her austere silence.

  “I saw today’s letters to the editor,” Brian says.

  I get out the package of raw chicken, and feel suddenly queasy. Pale puckered flesh, the detached legs and wings laid out on a light blue Styrofoam container, sealed under plastic wrap.

  “You shouldn’t read them,” I say.

  Brian gazes out the window to the side yard where a robin stabs at the grass, lifts its head with a writhing worm pinched between its beak. “I didn’t think it would turn into all this,” he says.

  The toast pops up golden and crisp with a tinge of brown, just the way he likes it. Is he apologizing? He makes jokes about how ignorant Chester is, but I’ve seen his face crumple when the news comes on, his shoulders tense when the phone rings. I spread margarine on the slice and cut it into two triangles, the way I used to do when he was li
ttle.

  “You know how people are. They like to gossip.” I set the toast in front of him. Sometimes I forget how young he is, and other times I still think of him as a child with the whole world ahead of him.

  “I got a call today,” he says.

  “Brian, we’ve told you not to answer the phone.”

  “It wasn’t one of those.” He lifts one eyebrow. “It was On Location With Naomi.”

  I put my hand on my hip and look at him hard, thinking he’s joking. “What?”

  “You know, the TV show. Naomi wants to do a story about this.”

  “Honey, that was something pranking you.” The sudden panic fades, and I reach over to stroke his hair. “A mean joke.”

  He moves away from my touch. “It’s real. She wants to interview me,” he says, furious. “She wants my side. Our side.”

  When Brian was little, before I started working for Dave Green, before I had Jess, we’d spend the days together, just the two of us. I’d bake chocolate chip cookies, we’d watch Sesame Street. He liked to build towers out of wooden blocks. He danced around the house, spinning circles and falling on the floor, laughing. I only ever wanted to protect him. I don’t understand how things went so wrong. I lost him once, and now I’m going to lose him again.

  “Don’t you want this to go away?”

  He takes a bite of toast, crumbs falling.

  “That’s what you and Dad want,” he says. “What everybody wants—for me to go away.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Don’t worry. I hear you loud and clear.”

  I snap on yellow cleaning gloves and flick the light switch. The room is dank, musty, empty. Brian went over to Lettie’s to watch television, and he’ll probably stay a few more hours. His safe place. As I turn the window crank, the pane of glass slowly pushes outward. On the wall behind Brian’s bed hang the pictures of his friends, all men. Maybe they’re all sick too, or maybe—the thought is a sliver of glass under my skin—they’re all dead. I step around stacks of records to get a closer look of a snapshot of him with his friend standing on a city bridge, arms flung around each other, the sun setting behind them, a pink light. Two men, smiling. Happy. One black, one white. Only one alive.

  I strip the bed and pick up a damp towel and clothes from a pile on the floor. Brian thinks I’m racist, but that’s not it. Is it? I knew black people when we lived in Columbus. Kids in school, families in the neighborhood. It’s not that he’s black, but that this, all of this, was not what I ever imagined for my son. That’s what I tell myself. But maybe Brian is right. I can’t help but think that if Brian had never met him, he’d still be healthy, he’d be okay.

  My hands sweat inside the rubber gloves. There are accidents, Travis says. Open sores, cuts. Better safe than sorry.

  To tell his side on TV. Would people feel sympathetic? Would they think, Yes, this is a young man, a son, a brother, a cousin, a neighbor? The show is popular. Real stories, real lives. Lettie and Jess watch it religiously.

  As I walk out of Brian’s room, my face peeking over the bundle in my arms, Travis comes downstairs, heading out to the garage.

  “You’re home,” I say.

  “Sorry I’m late. I had some things to finish up at work.”

  I don’t even know why he still bothers with the lies. Where does he go? Not to his favorite bar with his brothers. They are not speaking. He says the guys at work are talking, doesn’t tell me what they say, what it’s like for him. He drives around or goes to Madison, where there are more bars to choose from, where nobody knows him. Maybe he has also made up a name, an alias.

  “I need to talk to you,” I say.

  He follows me into the utility room. Sometimes, I catch Brian looking at his father, longing for his attention, just like when he was little, but Travis can’t see past his own hurt and guilt and sadness. He can’t articulate any of those feelings to me, but I know, deep down, how much he loves his son—he must.

  I pour out a cup of powdered detergent and tell him about the TV show. Travis stares at me like I’ve gone insane.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your mom watches it.”

  His face flattens. He doesn’t want to be here anymore. Maybe it’s not even about Brian. Maybe it’s about me.

  “That’s a really bad idea.”

  “That’s what I thought too,” I said. “But I’ve been thinking. Maybe it could help.” I want to believe, like Lettie, that people don’t hate us, that one day they’ll feel bad about what they’ve said and done. “Maybe it’ll help put a stop all the ugliness.”

  Travis’s mouth twists, his jaw pushes out. He’s too tall for this small space, a hulking mass of muscle and fear.

  “No,” he snaps. “No way.”

  I close the washing machine lid, turn the dial. Click, click, click. We have hardly spoken of that day, but I’ll never forget. My shivering son. People staring. The laughter. The police. My hands can’t breathe, too hot and slick in the gloves. We stood there, we did nothing.

  “Tell him no,” Travis says.

  I tug at one of the gloves, the rubber clinging to my fingers. “I’m not wearing these things anymore. It’s stupid. It makes him feel bad, and it’s stupid.”

  “It was just a precaution,” he says in a thin, tight voice.

  “I knew it was wrong, but I went along with it.”

  I yank at the yellow fingers, and when I finally free my hands, I hurl the rolled up gloves onto the floor. Travis walks out, a door slams. My freed fingers look like pink, clammy worms. I pick up the towel, the sheets, and a wrinkled blue T-shirt and hold them in my bare hands. I remember the softness of his tiny head when he was born, his little feet and hands, how he clung to me. The faintest hint of cologne, the smell of bark and something spicy and male, but more than that—sickness. The smell of sickness that cannot be washed away.

  Brian

  July 30, 1986

  So, I still haven’t called back the producer, or the assistant, or whoever was calling on behalf of Naomi. I don’t know how they tracked me down. When I told Mamaw, she gasped. You have to do it, she cried. My land, this is so exciting!

  I told her it’s not a good idea, which is what my mother told me.

  My grandmother clucked her tongue. Naomi will tell the truth, and people will change their minds, she said. They’ll see how they’ve been doing us wrong. Why, this could get the story all over America!

  Just what my parents want. Not only will everyone know I have AIDS, but they’ll know I’m gay too. Nobody wants to acknowledge I have AIDS because then they have to think about how it’s transmitted. They have to think about body parts and sex. They have to think about men fucking men, men loving men.

  My mother thinks, hopes, prays, or whatever, that if we hold our breaths this will pass over like a storm cloud. Meanwhile, letters to the editor. Prank calls. Last night a carload of teenage boys slowed down outside our house, screaming out the windows, maybe the same ones who were at the pool. Faggot, AIDS, queer. My mother washed dishes, ignoring them. Jess ran upstairs and locked herself in her room. My dad stayed in the garage, transistor radio tuned to a Reds game. Disembodied sports announcer voices murmuring through the walls. I used to be able to speak that language.

  Maybe I still do. There were times in New York, especially after Shawn died, that I’d feel the pull, a forgotten part of me waking up, and I’d take the train out to Coney Island to the batting cages. My body remembered. The twist of my torso, the reach of my arms. The loose, strong swing of the bat, the satisfying thunk. Buzzing lights. The whoosh of the pitching machine. The net rising all around and above me, taking each hit. The repetition gave me some kind of peace.

  The body remembers more than the heart.

  Now, my body is weak and everything makes me tired. Even holding my camera is difficult. I mostly just use the tripod. My grandmother bought me a bunch of VHS tapes, so I don’t have to worry about running out. I could sit here and just run
my mouth for hours. Not censor a goddamn thing. Record myself looking worse and worse. Yesterday, I woke up flushed and feverish, and stayed in bed until the evening. My joints hurt. I try not to cry. I stay down here, hidden.

  But look at me. Rotting from the inside. I lost a goddamn tooth, look. When I woke up, I tasted blood. It sat on my pillow, a brown, hideous kernel.

  I need to get out. Do something normal. Go for a drink. Talk to someone. Who? Not a single teammate has looked me up. No classmates. Gus—nope. I had this stupid idea that when I came back, he would be my anchor. To think that he still might be hanging out with Josh Clay—it’s a slap in the face. Fuck him, fuck everybody in this town.

  You know who I’m going to call? Where is my little phonebook—here it is. A, A, A. There he is—Andrew. Why not? What do I have to lose?

  August 1, 1986

  I’ve got a lot to tell you, dear old diary. Maybe I’m spilling too much. But, listen:

  Today, I felt better than I have in weeks. I shaved, cleaned up my neck, trimmed my hair. I changed out of my sad sweatpants, and put on pressed jeans and a button-down shirt. Tried to look presentable.

  My mother let me use her car. It felt good to get behind the wheel, driving away from Chester. On a straight patch of road I hit the gas, passing the homes of families I used to know. The late afternoon sun hung low in the sky, turning the fields a flat yellow.

  I was right on time. Andrew walked out of the mall’s revolving doors, looked around with irritation, like he’d been set up—it’s happened to him before. Then he saw me. How I wished Annie could have met him. He looked like a Broadway queen. His blousy slacks, rayon shirt with different blocks of colors—purple, pink, brown, peacock blue. Puffy hair. A loud, gold-faced wristwatch with a bright pink band. Fairy, faggot, sissy. He’s heard it all before, I’m sure.

  Long day? I asked.

  Didn’t sell hardly a thing, the ladies around here are so cheap, he says. He cocked his hip. Want to get something to eat?