The Language of Stars

by Louise Hawes

  “Me?!” My part-time mother and full-time status chaser hadn’t left fantasyland, even though she’d finally committed herself enough to walk inside my room. “This isn’t for me, Sarah. It’s for you.”

  I wondered if she could have looked in a mirror then—if I’d dared hold one in front of her, whether she would have seen it. Hunger. I could have been a doctor’s wife, the hunger said. I could have had respect.

  * * * *

  Aunt Jocelyn loved to cook. She was good at it, a lot better than she was at keeping a job. She’d just lost her fourth one that year, and like always, it wasn’t her fault. “They tried to save money by hiring one person to do two jobs,” she told us over the grilled mahimahi with fennel marinade.

  I was late to dinner, so I reserved comment, digging into the goat cheese potatoes instead. Mom, as usual, wasn’t about to blame her baby sister for anything. “We’ll find something, honey,” she told Jocelyn, putting her fork down, patting my aunt’s perfectly manicured hand. “You need a position that will tap your full potential.” She sighed. “I just wish that slot at the magazine had worked out.”

  Jocelyn, a younger, softer version of my mother, minus the smarts, lit up. “But it did, Katie!” she told Mom. “After all, I met Kendall there.”

  “Kendall works in the mail room, sweetie.” Mom disengaged her hand from Jocelyn’s and returned her attention to the fish. “We can do much better than that.”

  A tiny flash of something contrary—was it pride?—narrowed Jocelyn’s eyes. “At least, he has a college education,” she told Mom. “At least, I’m not ashamed to be seen with him on the street.”

  My mother controlled herself at first, but I smelled frayed edges. “My mistakes are my mistakes, Jocelyn,” she said. “I don’t think this is the time or the place to discuss them.”

  “But Kendall isn’t a mistake!” My aunt was much better at pouting than arguing. She was on the verge of a sulk, all her light snuffed out.

  “A forty-eight-year-old gofer is hardly what I’d call a triumph, Jocelyn.” Mom lifted her napkin to her mouth, dabbing carefully to avoid getting lipstick on the cloth. “Especially when he’s so boorish he starts eating before everyone is even served.”

  Jocelyn put down her fork and jumped to the defense of the short, hairy guy who’d taken her to the movies a couple of times and who had managed to make it through a dinner just like the one we were having now. “Who are you to screen boyfriends, Katie?” There was a warning in her voice, a challenge I’d seldom heard. She must have really liked this one.

  “What are you saying, dear?” My mother’s tone was a warning, too. A warning Aunt J. either missed or ignored.

  “I’m saying that if I had a choice between a handsome physician and a deadbeat, dumb waiter, I sure wouldn’t pick Shepherd.”

  Even Jocelyn must have been surprised by what had come out of her mouth, because she sat, stunned and blinking, in the silence that followed her brave little speech. My guess is, she was willing every word back inside her mouth and down her throat.

  “Mom?” I tried to wake my mother from her trance, but she didn’t move. She simply sat there, staring at her sister, one hand just below the collar of her silk blouse, as if she wanted to make sure her body hadn’t floated away. “Mom?”

  My mother said nothing. At last, though, she took the napkin from her lap and put it gently on the table. She stood up, looked at Jocelyn with a cross between pity and outrage, then turned and left the room. We heard her go upstairs and walk down the hall toward her bedroom, but neither my aunt nor I tried to follow.

  I suppose I should have relished that moment. How often was perfect Aunt J. in the doghouse? Mom had been taking care of her baby sister since she was a kid herself, and even though they were both grown-ups now, she just couldn’t stop. So I should have been happy that, for once, things were Jocelyn’s fault and not mine. It didn’t work that way, though. Instead, all I felt was sad, like those mirror eyes.

  My aunt and I sat together, awkward in the silence Mom had left behind. I was the first one to talk. “I know about the doctor,” I said. If I couldn’t get the truth from Mom, I was determined to pump Jocelyn. “What was he like?”

  “Who knows?” Aunt J., it was clear, didn’t care at all about what effect her bombshell had had on me. “He was pretty quiet. Mostly what he did was stare at Kate.”

  “Was he really handsome?”

  “Oh, I guess so.” Jocelyn shrugged, shaking off the long-ago doctor, Mom’s hurt, and her own part in what had just happened. Like a child, a forty-nine-year-old kid who could turn on a dime, she beamed. “But not as handsome as Kendall.”

  When I was much smaller, I used to think that if I tried extra hard, I could make my mother happy. But after a while I learned happy was a place she didn’t go. Which is why it was tough to imagine her in love. Satisfied. Not wanting, wanting.

  If you can love a doll so much

  it hurts,

  if you can will her torn dress whole,

  her streaked face clean,

  where’s the room in your new heart

  for a broken mother,

  a misplaced daughter,

  a fresh start?

  If you can weep onstage until

  you ache,

  for made-up love, a scripted slight,

  director’s loss,

  where are the tears in this first poem

  for a broken house,

  memories trampled,

  a way home?

  I Lose a Doll and Gain a Poem

  The first day of cleanup was mostly sweeping and bagging, not cleaning or building. Fry brought a tool belt and strapped it on as soon as we got to the cottage. But Whale Point’s shop teacher, who was in charge, made him take it off. “Be sure and bring it next time, hear?” Mr. Shettle, who’d worn a belt of his own, didn’t seem to notice Fry’s expression, the way it changed, stiffened as if he’d been hit. “We haven’t got near enough hammers. We could use hacksaws, too. You got some?”

  “Yes, sir,” Fry told him, those two words clipped and fast, as if it hurt to say them. It was beyond strange that he treated Mr. Shettle, who was small and short-tempered, with more respect than he gave almost anyone else at school. Thatcher was the same way. To see my confident, take-charge boyfriend and the human hulk both standing there, quietly waiting for instructions, mystified me. It was enough to conjure up a universal male club with secret rites and undercover bonding rituals involving levels, chisels, and mallets.

  “Let’s spread out and get some of this stuff ready for the dump.” Mr. Shettle passed around giant garbage bags and told us to fill them with “anything you can pick up or pry loose.” He assigned us to teams, and my male-club theory suddenly made a lot of sense, since all the girls ended up in teams by ourselves, and the boys were split up into all-boy groups. I didn’t mind; for once, I agreed with my mother about “distractions.” I’d need to focus really hard to get through this day—to look at the mess, to sort through the piles of soot-black junk, without tearing up.

  I had hiked out to the house a few times since the fire, but I’d never gotten past the cordons and barricades. The police had done everything but put up yellow crime-scene tape. And even if the tape wasn’t there, the crime was. Everywhere you looked, you could see things that made it hard to be you. To be one of the kids who had done this.

  The cottage walls were still standing, but the house was more like a hollow shell than a place you could live. You could see right through most of the rooms. In some of them, part of the roof was missing; in others, there was a giant hole in the siding, or the windows were gutted, their frames black and rotting, the glass gone. Rufus Baylor’s summer place was a dollhouse for real now, the kind where you could reach inside and move the furniture around.

  Only there was no furniture. Unless you counted what was underfoot. You had to walk carefully to avoid tripping over charred chair legs and mildewed couch cushions, empty drawers with crushed sides, and melted, twi
sty curtain rods. Every time I took a step, I heard a crunch or crackle, a squeak or a pop.

  But once you got used to all that crunching? It was quiet, too quiet. It wasn’t that you couldn’t hear kids in other rooms, already getting to work, talking and laughing. It wasn’t that Margaret and I were tiptoeing or whispering in our end of the living room. It’s just that there was a silence underneath all the bustle and movement. A kind of missing, an emptiness. As if what used to be there wanted a voice. As if it were trying to remind us of the noisy meals, the knock-knock jokes, the kids who had come in from the beach and tracked sand on the rug. There’s an old song about “the sound of silence.” That’s what I could hear if I stopped scooping up rusted springs and torn lampshades, if I just stood still.

  So I kept busy. And there was plenty to do. I was picking my way through what looked like a whole collection of melted records when Margaret called me over.

  “Look!” She was standing by the fireplace. Or by the mound of bricks that used to be the fireplace. She had opened her black garbage bag beside a heap of splintered two-by-fours, their sides and edges eaten away, turned black. She pointed to the jagged, random nest they made; sticking out from its center was a small arm and hand. I nodded. Gingerly, Margaret pulled it out and held up a burned doll.

  I left the congealed 45s with their charred labels (“Baby, Don’t Be That . . . ,” one said; “How Can I . . . ,” another asked), and went to look at the doll. It wasn’t Florinda Dear, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking of her when I saw the matted hair, the ruined dress. And even though she was a mess, a much more hopeless case than my water-soaked doll, I said it. “Don’t throw her out,” I told Margaret.

  Where had she come from, that hopeless case? Whose had she been? Did Nella love her? Or one of the other little girls around the marshmallow fire? For no good reason, a nursery rhyme popped into my head:

  London Bridge is falling down,

  Falling down, falling down.

  London Bridge is falling down,

  My fair lady.

  Margaret handed me the doll now, and I considered her broken face, one eye open, the other closed. The bottom half of her dress was burned away, an accidental miniskirt that exposed her skinny bare legs. “Nice threads,” I told her, hoping Margaret didn’t think I was a lost moron for talking to dolls.

  Instead, my new friend smiled at me, then at the tiny figure in the torn dress. “No, really,” she assured the doll. “It’s not a look everyone can carry off.” She narrowed her eyes, put her hands on her hips, deciding. “But it’s definitely you.”

  Something clicked then, some thin latch that shut out worry, made me know I’d live through this cleanup. I was liking Margaret more and more. “Do we dare name her?” I asked. “Or is it like a stray you might not keep?”

  “You mean we shouldn’t get too attached?” Margaret studied the doll again. “She looks like she’s had a rough life. What do you think about Janis?”

  “For Janis Joplin?” It was perfect, actually. Those crazy eyes, the wild hair. I smoothed the doll’s skirt, combed her singed curls with my finger, then sat her on top of the chimney bricks, where she could watch us work:

  Build it up with wood and clay,

  Wood and clay, wood and clay,

  Build it up with wood and clay,

  My fair lady.

  The two of us had finished picking up the whole living room by the time Mr. Shettle called a break. We’d each stuffed and tied three bags, and we were ready to start sweeping. It felt good to see how much the room had changed. The charcoal smell was still everywhere, though, filling the whole house with the unmistakable scent of smoldering ashes. The party was over, but eau de stupid stunt lingered on.

  Still, the floor was finally bare, and with a little soap and water, the walls and what was left of the ceiling might lose the coat of grime that covered them. It made me happy to have worked so hard, and I liked the idea of maybe showing our poet what we’d accomplished, once we’d plastered the walls and repaired the roof.

  Margaret and I high-fived Janis and went outside to where the guys had been working. It was clear we weren’t the only ones who’d made progress. The whole yard was cleared of the junk that had covered it when we arrived. The porch floor had been propped up, the drive had been raked, and tarps had been thrown over the worst holes in the roof. “It’s going to be a tough job,” Fry told us, shading his eyes to stare at the blue plastic on top of the house. He sighed after he said it, trying not to sound as if he was looking forward to it.

  The guy from the county (who did take roll, by the way) had set up a tub of bottles and ice by the front door, and everyone kind of congregated around it, as if we didn’t want to get too far from the cool. We were all panting and filthy, but there were enough self-satisfied grins and high fives going on to make it plain most of us felt pretty good about what we’d accomplished. I wanted to tell Fry about the old records I’d found, but he and H and two other boys were already deep into hard-core tool talk. I heard words like “plumb line” and “joists” and “slump” and“rebar.” Margaret and I made bored faces over our ginger ale, then headed for the sandwich line. (Who knew a ham sandwich could taste so good or seem so small?)

  After lunch, the girl-boy thing happened again, but this time we changed places. Most of the girls were assigned to trim hedges outside, while two teams of boys poured plaster for a project Mr. Shettle wanted finished in the dining room. Margaret and I worked with one of the perfect-hair girls Fry used to hang with in his BS days. She was a lot less perfect than I remembered, and a lot more fun than I expected. She pulled her hair into a tight bun, jammed it with a pencil so it would stay, and wielded an electric trimmer like she’d been doing it all her life. Margaret and I stuck to clippers, but called her in whenever we needed extra power. We’d almost wrestled the hedges down to eye level when somebody inside the cottage either dropped something very heavy or fell over their own feet. There was a yell, and then it got much too quiet.

  Sweaty and covered with scratches, Margaret and I told Hella Hair, whose name was actually Cathi with an i, that we were turning in our trimmers. She waved, adjusted her protective goggles, and went back to work. We walked around to the back of the house, avoiding the boarded-up door and the sagging front steps. We peered into the dining room through a cavernous hole that had once been the back window. It turned out someone inside had dropped something, all right—a bucket of plaster . . . from a ladder. It had landed on one of Thatcher’s friends, and sent him sprawling. He was a tall, quiet boy who hardly ever spoke in class, but always laughed at Thatcher’s jokes. Now he sat up slowly, as if he couldn’t believe what had happened. When he stood, though, he started shaking himself like a wet dog. Only this dog scattered plaster, not water drops. He wasn’t quite as big as Thatcher, but he came close. Soon all the boys in the room were speckled with white goo. And all of them were laughing. So was Mr. Shettle. “It was an accident,” he said, sounding a lot more relieved than angry. “The best kind.” He threw the dog boy a towel. “The kind where no one gets hurt.”

  Margaret and I were about to move on to phase two, and trade in our trimmers for brooms and mops, when I glanced at the fireplace. It was empty. There was no sign of our doll. We walked right through the window that had become a door. “Where’s Janis?” I asked.

  H, who had run for the exit when the plaster started flying, shrugged.

  “What?” Fry joined us.

  “The doll,” Margaret told him. “We left a doll right on top of those bricks.” She pointed to the pile of cinders and bricks.

  “Was that what it was?” Fry shook his head. “I threw it out.”

  I stared at the brick pile, at the high point where I’d perched Janis. Our really, truly, if somewhat disheveled, dollhouse doll. She was meant to watch us work. She was meant to see her house come back to life.

  “Sorry, babe,” Fry told me, easing his arm around me. “I thought it was just some trash someone had forgotten.�
� He grinned at us both. “What do you think?” he asked. “Pretty good, huh?” Now it was his turn to point.

  Why did I feel so angry? So hurt? It shouldn’t have mattered. The doll did look like leftover garbage, the souvenir of a party no one wanted to remember.

  “See? Right where the ceiling meets this wall?” Fry was still pointing, still waiting.

  “It just looks like a bunch of plaster,” Margaret told him, following his glance.

  “Bunch of plaster?” H sounded outraged.

  “That,” Fry corrected her, “just happens to be the finest mud and tape inside corner job ever.”

  Both boys stared in wonder at the fresh patch of plaster that ran along the ceiling. They did everything but salute that shiny white seam.

  “Do you know where you threw her?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “The doll,” I told Fry. “The trash you cleaned off the fireplace.” Those mismatched eyes. That crazy hair.

  He finally tore his attention from the sacred seam. “No, but it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Shettle already had someone drive the bags to the dump.”

  Tiny hands, tiny feet. I grabbed two brooms from the corner, handed one to Margaret. “Let’s go,” I told her.

  Fry nodded toward the bucket and trowels on the floor. “We could sure use some help right here,” he told us.

  “We can’t,” I said. Did the dump compact trash or burn it? Did it matter? “We’ve got a lot more work to do.” Too late to be sorry now.

  I followed Margaret back out the window/door.

  Wood and clay will wash away,

  Wash away, wash away.

  Wood and clay will wash away,

  My fair lady.

  * * * *

  Our first official day of summer vacation started with rain. And wind. Lots of both. Since the beach was definitely not in the forecast, Fry suggested we celebrate by movie hopping. There were three action films (Fear Ride, Dillinger v. the State, and Don’t Call Me, all starring no one you ever heard of in scenes you’d wish you could forget) at the multiplex, and he wanted us each to buy a single ticket, then sit through all three movies. “We’ll be watching crimes on screen,” he told us, “while pulling one off in real life.” He grinned at me, as if I’d understand. “Method acting, right?”