The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I’M going,” my mother announced that weekend, a note of defiance in her voice.

  She spent the morning making cupcakes, and in the afternoon she asked Megan to go with her to deliver an invitation to the Martellos. Megan didn’t want to. “Do this for your mother, Meg,” pleaded our father. “Just this once, okay?”

  As soon as they’d driven off in the car, I went upstairs to my room and uncapped the Celestron. In a minute they arrived at the Martellos’ house. My mother pulled up on the wrong side of the road and parked the Rambler at the curb near their driveway. She got out, straightened her clothes, and then led the way along the sidewalk carrying the cupcakes while Megan slumped behind her in a white peasant blouse, the two of them looking like villagers bearing gifts for a king.

  I swiveled the telescope and found Frank Martello sitting in his chair in their patio room. He was drinking a beer and watching a football game on TV, enjoying the kind of casually masculine Saturday afternoon leisure activity that my father never did. After a moment he raised his head, stood, and disappeared. Soon several pairs of legs appeared in the room, their bodies cut off from my view by the tops of the window frames. I recognized my mother’s and Megan’s legs. Barbara Martello was wearing a gold and paisley muumuu; her legs had a tanned, healthy, country club look. A blue-jeaned Gabriella joined them, and then she and my sister left, bringing the cupcakes to the kitchen, I assumed.

  Eventually the glass door slid open and the adults came outside onto the patio. Frank led my mother around the swimming pool, through the tall iron gates, and down the boardwalk to their boat dock, talking and pointing. Barbara followed them. As they spoke and gestured, I could almost read the words on their lips:

  I love your flowers.

  I want to put some up there, too, hang them from the lamp posts. We’ll bring the boat right up here.

  He thinks he’s going to keep a yacht here. He thinks we live on the Riviera.

  Sure. This goes straight out to the Intracoastal Waterway. You could take it all the way to the Keys. Are you and—What’s his name? The Professor? Alan?—are you and Alan much into fishing?

  Oh, no. We just sit at home. Look at the stars.

  My mother’s visit seemed to be going surprisingly well. She was right, the Martellos looked like friendly people, not at all snobbish. She shared a laugh with Frank and touched his arm. When Gabriella and my sister came out to join them, I tracked them with the telescope, their images bobbing in the lens. Gabriella was eating one of my mother’s cupcakes—a good sign, I thought. She and Megan stepped down to the dock, and then my sister abruptly swung her arm around and pointed across the water to our house.

  I jerked away from the telescope and pressed against the wall. Had they seen me? Could they see up here? I waited a minute or two before creeping back to the window. By then, everyone had disappeared from the Martellos’ yard. Soon I saw Megan and my mother returning to our car. I went downstairs to the kitchen, where my father was busy repairing the toaster at the kitchen table, took a cupcake, sat, and waited for the report.

  “They’re coming,” my mother said when she and Megan came in through the front door. “Frank said they’d be delighted to spend an evening with the famous scientist. They’ve seen your column, they know all about you.”

  My father barely looked up from the toaster. “Oh? That’s nice.”

  “You should see their house. Good lord. They’ve got about a dozen rooms downstairs. Frank’s got a billiard room with a fireplace and a whole bar set up in there, like something you’d see in a movie.”

  “I thought it was excessive,” Megan said, unwrapping a cupcake. “Why do you need a house that big for three people?”

  “But they’re nice, aren’t they? They’re a nice family,” my mother said.

  “Gabriella has her own powder room,” Megan said. “Can you believe that? A powder room. With a private phone line. Everything’s yellow.”

  Even as she criticized them, my sister sounded as impressed as our mother was by the Martellos and their fabulous wealth. They went on talking about the house, comparing notes on things they’d spotted during their walk-through. The dumbwaiter: Did Megan see that? Or what about the intercom system with the two-way speakers in all the rooms? And the grand piano, and the walk-in closets, and the whirlpool tub in the master bathroom? Barbara collected porcelain dolls from around the world that she kept in a glass display case. Frank had a wine cabinet with a humidor for his cigars. They had a two-car garage with two cars, Frank’s white Cadillac and a sky-blue Lincoln Town Car for Barbara. Frank’s workshop was as big as our living room and dining room combined, and upstairs there were two—two—extra guest rooms.

  “Gorgeous. Gorgeous home,” my mother said, finishing. She paused to catch her breath. I saw her eyes dart around our own shabby kitchen, through the doorway to our living room, fly around the walls in there, and come back to land on my father, who was bent over the toaster with the coils and burnt crumbs and pieces of tin junk scattered on the Formica tabletop.

  “Did you hear anything we just said? The Martellos are coming here next weekend.”

  “I heard. I heard! Good. Great. Frank has a workshop that’s as big as our living room and dining room combined. What do you want me to do about it?” He looked up, a screwdriver in one hand, his glasses slipping down his nose.

  My mother pressed her lips together. “Nothing. Nothing,” she said—and she was right. There was nothing he could do. What she wanted, it was clear, exceeded what he could give her. Her ambitions were bigger than the room, bigger than the house, bigger than him, even.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THAT same afternoon she began cleaning. She scrubbed the bathroom and kitchen. She stood on chairs and dusted the tops of window and door frames. She vacuumed the cushions on the sofa and rubbed furiously at a large gray stain on the Mexican rug in the living room, a stain that had been there so long that it seemed an indelible part of our lives, something that, like our own stubborn middle-class poverty, could never be fully erased, only endured.

  During the week she took the car and drove up to New Orleans and bought a new dress for herself, a shirt for me, and a dinner jacket for my father. She arranged with her old friend Dale Landry, a lawyer, to borrow his maid for the party. She had me trim the azalea bushes in the front yard, and she planted new mums around the back porch.

  She was at a loss over what to do about snacks until she saw a fondue set in the window of a local shop. Saturday afternoon before the party, she and Megan cut fruit and melted chocolate. She got my father to tend to the Sterno, and he spent some time experimenting with the flame and the baffle to find just the right temperature to maintain the chocolate at the proper viscosity.

  That evening, I went upstairs to get myself ready to meet the Martellos. I tried on my new shirt in front of the mirror. The fabric was a shiny polyester decorated with stars and planets—my mother’s idea, in keeping with the theme of the party. In her bedroom next door, Megan played her Roberta Flack album over and over, the songs of love and longing thumping softly through the walls in an artful echo of my own chaotic churn of emotions.

  Soon Gabriella would be standing inside our house. It was like my birthday wish come true, only the fulfillment of this wish left me more worried than happy. Her visit here was like a visit from a celebrity. Clearly, she didn’t belong in our home, with its worn-out orange sofa and broken linoleum floor and dirty Mexican rug. My mother had overreached in inviting them. So much could go wrong. I was tempted to lock myself in my room and not come out until the night was over and the Martellos had passed through and we could go back to being our normal sad selves again.

  Leaning in to the mirror, I discovered a small bump on my forehead. I prodded it with my fingertips. It was hard and painful to the touch, like a BB pellet stuck under my skin. Over the last half year my body had taken on a life of its own, erupting with new hair and smells and fluids. This, I supposed, was what our tea
chers meant when they talked about “life changes” and “maturation.” It sounded almost beautiful the way they described it, but it wasn’t; it was ugly and unpleasant. They should’ve just said “You become like werewolves,” and we would’ve had a better idea of what to expect from puberty.

  I went to work excavating the pimple. The trick, I knew, was to press low and wide of the center, dig in below the bump with my fingernails, and squeeze. The pimple burst, spitting a satisfying speck of white goo onto the mirror. But then I kept squeezing, thinking there must be more of it in there, until a bloody fluid oozed out. I stopped and fingered the spot, afraid now that I had done some serious damage. I found a Cub Scout neckerchief in my drawer and staunched the blood, but my clumsy operation had left a button-sized welt on my forehead. “Damn. Damn damn damn.”

  I heard my mother coming up the stairs. She checked next door with my sister first. “Oh, Megan. You’re not going to wear that, are you?” she said, her voice dripping with disappointment. They argued for a minute, my mother complaining, as she always did, about Megan’s clothes, her hair, her room, her general disregard for manners and appearances, before giving up and coming to my room. She knocked.

  “Are you almost ready? The Martellos will be here soon.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you wearing your new shirt? Can I see?” She opened the door. “Hey, that looks good.… Oh, no. What happened, honey? Was that a pimple?” She reached to touch it. I flinched.

  “Ouch. Don’t.”

  “You sure made a mess of that.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “Oh gee, and your new girlfriend’s coming over.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend. Where’d you get that idea? I don’t even know her.”

  “Say ‘yet.’ ”

  “What?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend yet.”

  “I doubt if she’ll ever be my girlfriend.”

  “Hey, show a little confidence. Wait a minute.” She ducked next door to Megan’s room and returned with some rubbing alcohol and makeup. She pulled my chair around. “Sit.”

  She bent in and cleaned the spot on my forehead. Then she applied flesh-colored makeup with a tiny brush, narrowing her eyes and pressing her lips together as she worked. Silver hoop earrings rocked back and forth on either side of her face. With her orange minidress and buckled high-heeled shoes, she looked awkward and young. I could almost see her as the teenage girl she must’ve once been—the pretty, preening daughter of Bob and Dot Simoneaux, an only child, slightly spoiled, romantic and willful. “Terrebonne’s undiscovered star,” my father used to tease her.

  “Did you ever have boyfriends? I mean, before Dad.”

  “Sure. I was quite popular once, believe it or not. Dale Landry—you know him, don’t you?—he was one of my boyfriends, before I met your father. We used to go out. He had the raciest car in Terrebonne, a snazzy silver Corvette. Gosh, that was fun.”

  She talked about how they would go cruising around town, down to the courthouse square. Everyone would be out, boys leaning against their cars, couples strolling arm in arm, old folks sitting on the benches beneath the oak trees. Those were the days, she said.

  “But then you met Dad in the drugstore.”

  She laughed—not a happy laugh, exactly, but one you might use in talking about an embarrassing incident from your past.

  “Right. Then I met Alan. I was working at the McCall’s Rexall, he was a new teacher in town. Fresh from LSU. A city boy, smart as a … smart as a book.”

  I’d heard the story of their meeting before in one version or another from both my parents. For me, it had always stood as a kind of lesson on the way love was supposed to work: for every boy, one special girl was waiting. She might be down the street, or in the next neighborhood, or even halfway around the world, but you could be sure she was there somewhere, waiting just for him—just as all those years ago, my mother had stood behind the counter of the McCall’s Rexall waiting for my father to walk in the door.

  I prompted her to tell it again. “It was late at night. You were working all alone in the store.”

  “He came in wearing his jacket and tie from school. He said he had a stomachache.”

  “And he came back every night for a week.”

  “He kept buying medicine. I think we went through every stomach medicine in the store before he finally asked me out.”

  “And gradually you grew to like him.”

  “Um hm.”

  “Why?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why’d you like him?”

  “What a question.” She blended the edges of the makeup into my skin with her fingertips, thinking. “I liked him … I liked him because he seemed nice, I guess. And smart. And neat. And determined. I liked his name, too: Alan Broussard. Very sophisticated.”

  “And soon you were dating.”

  “Soon we were dating. He came and met my parents, I went to Baton Rouge to meet his.” She grabbed a comb and went to work on my hair. “And then we got married. Just like that—Ka-boom. Crazy, huh? I was just nineteen years old, Alan was twenty-two. Practically kids. Not much older than you are now.”

  “I think I’ve still got a few years.”

  “Yes. Yes, I think you do.” She drew a careful part down one side of my hair. “For our honeymoon we took the Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The train left at midnight, and we almost missed it because Alan was arguing with the taxi driver about the fare—”

  “You had to run to catch it—”

  “We had a tiny cabin in the sleeper car—”

  “He sneezed all night because of the dust, and you were afraid to walk between the cars. You rode for three days and three nights, and when you got to Hollywood, you stayed in an ugly motel on Sunset Boulevard.”

  “Wowser, you remember it almost as well as I do. And then what happened? Turn this way.”

  “You went sightseeing? You met some famous movie stars.”

  “Not quite. We tried. That’s the part I wished had happened but didn’t.”

  “You went to the observatory after that.”

  “He had to see the Palomar Observatory. That was his big thing, the Palomar Observatory.”

  I had always thought that this was the most romantic part of their story. I pictured my parents young and in love, standing side by side beneath an enormous telescope on a dark mountaintop as stars streaked overhead.…

  “The observatory,” she said now. “Can you believe that? For a honeymoon?”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  She sighed through her nose. “I shouldn’t say I didn’t like it. I mean, sure, we had some fun times together.” She stood back and looked at her handiwork, frowning. “I just want to know who made the rule that you had to stop having fun once you got married.”

  I barely had time to consider this before she said, “Here, take a look,” and stepped out of the way so I could see the mirror. She straightened my collar. “There you go. A handsome young man. She’d be crazy not to like you.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re my mother.”

  “I’m not! Really. You’re a good-looking kid. You’re nice, you’re polite. Any girl would be lucky to have you for a boyfriend.” She brushed some dandruff off my shoulders. “You just need to put yourself out there a little more. Try not to be so shy. Take a chance now and then. Life only comes around once, you know.”

  She rested her hands on my shoulders and found my eyes in the mirror. “Follow your heart. That’s what I always say. Follow your heart, and the rest will follow.”

  The doorbell rang downstairs.

  “Oh, god. Here they are.” She tugged at the hips of her skirt. “This looks ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

  “I think you look good.”

  “Aw, thanks, honey. I don’t get to hear that much anymore.” She shouted into the hallway, “Megan!” Then she stood up straight and pulled her shoulders back.

  “What do
you say? Are we ready for this?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “HERE he is. The famous Professor.”

  My father twitched and grinned as Frank Martello came in and shook his hand. Standing under the low ceiling of our house, blocking the narrow doorway, Frank appeared larger than I’d expected. He wore a beige safari suit over a white shirt with an oversized watch on one wrist. Barbara stood beside him smiling politely, stealing uneasy glances around our front room. She had on a stylish-looking black cocktail dress with a strand of white pearls around her neck. For the introductions, Gabriella slid up between her parents and stood with her hands cupped below her waist and her hair draped forward over her shoulders. Then Megan and I were obliged to come forward, too, so that we were lined up facing one another, the Martellos and the Broussards, like rival teams before a game. Seeing my mother standing barelegged and nervous in her orange minidress, and my father shifting and sniffing in his new checked dinner jacket, and Megan in her bell-bottoms and frizzy hair and worn-out denim jacket, and myself in my psychedelic polyester shirt that suddenly didn’t look so cool anymore, I was certain that in any kind of competition, according to any kind of rules, the Martellos would win, hands down.

  My mother led everyone the two steps into the living room, conducting herself with an awkward formality. She indicated where each person should sit and made showy requests to Christine, our borrowed maid: “Christine, could you take Mrs. Martello’s purse?” “Christine, I forgot to put out the nuts. Would you mind looking after that?”

  My father took drink orders and then repeated them, pointing to each person in turn. “We’ll get to work on that pronto!” he said, and backed into the kitchen, where he’d set up a corner of the counter for his bartending. I could see him in there checking recipes in a guidebook and measuring out jiggers and ponies as carefully as if he were conducting a laboratory experiment.