by Lisa Samson
Larkspur assumed that role years ago though, not long after Newly arrived.
Oh, the parent-teacher conferences I endured, the comments on the bottom of report cards.
“Lark seems bored.”
“Lark could do so much better if she applied herself.”
“Lark is a bit of a loner but participates quite well during playtime.”
“Cheerful but quiet, Lark is very well behaved. Could work harder during class time.”
She should have achieved every inch of Newly’s success. More so, actually, without the albino aspect working against her. I remember the day Charles and I waved good-bye when she left for Brown. Unable to stomach the thought of her leaving home by plane, Jimmy Percy drove her all the way to Rhode Island. Prisma found the perfect mate in Jimmy, I tell you. I probably should have gone too, but Larkspur’s eagerness to be out of the house, up at the dorm, and leaving it all behind, had her fairly shaking with excitement. I really thought she’d appreciate our extending her some independence. Charles didn’t think it was right. He wanted to get in the Bentley with them and make a fine day of it. “Come on, Les,” I can still remember him saying. “We’ll have us a grand day out.”
Grand. Grand. Charles loved that word.
Larkspur sent me a lot of letters from Brown, actually. Which surprised me. She told me all about her classes and her grades and the boys who asked her out. Not one word about Bradley del Champ, whom she had been dating for over a year. So much promise there—studies in music and singing, the student concerts and women’s field hockey. Not to mention what she used to look like in those days all fixed up with her hair so long and thick. Pretty, feminine clothes. But she had to go and fool around with that Bradley del Champ. All it takes is one.
Tomorrow is going to be busy. The fashion show for cystic fibrosis at the Hillendale Country Club begins at eleven. And I must remember to check the silent auction for stocking stuffers for Sweet Pea and Larkspur. Yes, I’m early in thinking about Christmas, but that’s just the way I am. When somebody cooks and cleans for you, you must fill your life with something. Riding next, then my appointment with Dr. Medina, my cardiologist. I suppose he deserves to know about that little blackout incident a week ago. But then he’ll insist on the ridiculous catheterization procedure that Prisma calls a Roto-Rooter, giving me no comfort whatsoever. And then dinner at home with all of us girls. I mustn’t forget to tell Prisma to buy some more lime sherbet for Larkspur and call the health insurance company to see if payment has been made for next year. And for heaven’s sake, if I fail to get some yarn and start knitting again, I deserve whatever’s coming to me! Too many years have passed since my hands busied themselves like that. I wonder if Larkspur remembers those sweaters I used to make for her? It took me forever to learn that cable knit stitch, but she always admired cable knit as a little girl.
Does she still prefer cable knit?
For heaven’s sake, I have no idea!
Flannery
I HAVE TO SAY I’M SORT OF A HIT AT STARBUCKS. I’ve already developed myself a cool little following of high-school boys who trample all over the hems of their pants. The manager feels relieved to have someone back there who actually knows how to smile. Sometimes workers in coffee bars can be so uppity. Like, if you’re so cool, then why are you fixing beverages for $6.50 an hour? Nobody really chooses that for a life, do they? I do have to say that for the most part, my coworkers are pretty cool.
So June is almost over now, and two months remain until I have to start my master’s in Fine Arts at the Institute. My paintings arrived a few days after the fire. I still like them, which is a relief. Sometimes when you’re away from your work for a while, you come back to it and go, “Whoa! Yuck!” And other times you say, “Wow. That’s pretty cool. Even cooler than I remembered. I can’t believe I actually did that.”
My high-school stuff all fit into the yuck category once I got over myself my junior year of college. Burned to a crisp, which is GREAT! Good riddance to bad rubbish, as Grandy would say. It’s sort of sad to think about our little house all gone now.
All these thoughts and more like them buzz around my head as Prisma and I drive back in the Duster to that corner on Bayonne tonight.
I reach for her hand. “It just looks so wrong, sort of like a black moon crater there, like a puckered kiss mark made by a vampire or something.”
Prisma nods and looks at the moon. “Desolation.”
“I know.”
“You doing okay with all of this, Baby Girl?”
We still hold hands.
“Sort of. I mean, I haven’t really lived at home for four years.”
“But all your stuff.”
“All the important stuff I shipped.”
Prisma shakes her head. “It’s just sad, isn’t it? That house sure wasn’t much, but it did have a spindled front porch. And I do love a spindled front porch. You got your camera, baby?”
“Just a disposable one. That is one thing actually I regret losing in the fire, my camera.”
So I take a picture of it for future artistic reference.
“These things are mile markers in our lives, Baby Girl. It’s good to have a record of a happening that changed things for good.”
“You think that’s what’s happening?”
“It sure wasn’t a garden variety electrical fire, I can tell you that. Jesus is afoot.”
I sure hope she’s right. And if Jesus is getting Mom’s attention, dear Lord, I pray He’s giving her ears to hear as well, because my mom is sure stuck in her own little insulated world.
“Let’s go now, baby. This is making me too sad.”
I put my arms around Miss Prisma. “I’m with you.”
So we drive back to Greenway and see Asil’s light on in the little turret in the apartment over the garage, and Prisma had left her desk lamp on in her room behind the kitchen, and it just seems inviting and right. It feels like coming home.
Lark
REMEMBER AUDREY HEPBURN in Sabrina? I tried to achieve that look as a youngster—pretty and thin—and if I failed to get it then, well, a middle-aged Audrey Hepburn seems unattainable. The small, slight thing weighs the scale in my favor, that waifish wispiness. However, what rendered Audrey ethereal just proclaims a woman like me insignificant and undernourished.
Mother thinks I’m trying to make myself as unattractive as possible because I wear so much polyester. Of course, if I found myself in a sudden sky’s-the-limit mode, now that youth’s blush has faded, I’d be a butterfly woman in flowing rainbow silks, soft and fluttery. An artistic beauty with a gleaming black bob, Egyptian eyes, and exotic slippers on my feet. That might bring back the roses. But, too short for that, I’d look downright silly in such a getup, seated at my bench at St. Dominic’s. Like a character in some way-off-Broadway production. Perhaps I’d even be mistaken for a small transvestite. If only Mother had imparted her feminine ways.
Unfortunately, due to my current financial ineptness, Mother’s hand-me-downs, which are much too long to begin with, constitute my narrow wardrobe.
As it stands, even in Mother’s conservative, tasteful clothes, I’ll be laughed right out the door at the 3 B’s. Since the fire, I travel to St. Dominic’s just for mass, bless Prisma, who goes Saturday nights and all three masses on Sunday so I can pull up in her Duster and not that Bentley.
But today she said she wouldn’t mind running to Frank’s Nursery and Craft up the road in Parkville because Mother declared some homemade summer wreaths for the outside doors of Stoneleigh House a needful thing. I just needed to haunt the old neighborhood, play in the silence of the church, practice, and feel. Just feel. I feel sorry for people who don’t have music to express their emotions.
Prisma dropped me off by the chain-link fence surrounding St. Dominic’s schoolyard. “I’ll be back in three hours. That long enough?”
I nodded.
“Okay. I’m going to Harold’s to get fresh produce, and I’m also going to stop and get
some scrapbook pages for your mother. You need anything at the craft store?”
“Not unless you see something you think I should take up as a hobby, Prisma.”
And I shut the car door. She zoomed off. Now, why did I offer such an open, cavalier invitation? I imagined Prisma sailing down the craft store aisle, an intrepid explorer in search of the perfect pastime for a troubled soul.
I could only pray it had nothing to do with plastic needlepoint sheets. That particular craft would, indeed, send me over the edge.
Playing the organ for a long spell always makes me thirsty, so I decided to pop down the block into the 3 B’s for a carry-out cup of tea.
I love the 3 B’s. No ants here. Not anymore.
Deke Babachakos waved from the grill. “Hi, sweetheart!” He reminds me of a used-car salesman from the sixties with his slicked-back, receding hair, his loud shirts, and his too-tight pants. Born and bred in Miami, Florida, once a cook to the mob in a club restaurant with gold lamé drapery behind the stage, Deke lit up a cigarette despite the Maryland nonsmoking laws. “Got a guy on the inside that tells me when the Health Department is comin’ over,” Deke explained.
Yeah right, Deke.
Last week he asked, “How you doin’ since the fire, Lark?”
I said fine.
Deke never brings up the same thing twice if it’s your thing. So he started right into the obvious topic at hand, something he and Babe thought worthy of prior discussion. Bared by his smile, his gold tooth gleamed in his hound’s-tooth face, a beacon of dental self-expression. The custom trim on his ’75 Lincoln Continental glimmers gold, as well. “What’re you gonna do with your lot there in Hamilton, sweetheart? Gonna sell it?”
Babe Babachakos, Deke’s wife, the chain-smoking waitress, jumps right on in. “Of course she isn’t. Right, Lark? I can think of a thousand reasons you’d be crazy to start over anywhere else.”
Babe fluffed up the part of her fluorescent red Mrs. Frankenstein hair that crackles out of the top of her waitress cap. Actually the feline older face, childlike and kind, supporting all that hair gentles the monstrous coiffure. And the way Babe lines her eyes like Endora on Bewitched lends her a nostalgic air. “I’d bet money you’ll rebuild a house right there. The lot’s already paid for. You’ll have insurance money, right? So it will just be a matter of finding the right house for the lot. And since the land is already free and clear, you can go extra nice with the kitchen. There are a billion reasons.”
“Just don’t go and name them all, Babe, okay?” Deke scratched the little bowling ball belly, the only body-extra the man possesses, that slowly accumulates beneath his full apron. From what Babe says, he never did sport a derriere, even when they met at fifteen down at an Orioles game in the hot dog line.
Babe shook her head, pointed up, then crossed herself. “By the way, I lit a candle for you at church this morning.”
“Thank you, Babe.”
“Glad to do it.”
Deke grabbed a pot of hot water from the Bunn. “Your usual tea, hon?”
“Yeah, thanks. I’m going to go practice at church.”
He grabbed a plastic foam cup. “So, what’re you gonna do about Hamilton, Lark? Stayin’ or goin’?”
“Man, Deke! How do I know? The truth is, I haven’t thought much about it yet. Look at me! I’m sitting here in a periwinkle boiled-wool skirt of Mother’s. Do you really think I care right now about the house?”
That sounded good, right? I mean, people would think me a nut case if they realized how much I really did care.
“Okay, okay.” He stubbed out his smoke in the ashtray hidden behind this crazy statue of a Hawaiian hula girl. “Now see, I have an idea. You can just throw out everything Babe here has said—”
“Deke!”
“Well, sure, hon. You know Lark’s been fond of Harford County for a while now. Right?” He hoisted his brows in my direction, full with the winds of expectation. “Right?”
I shrugged. They always placed me in the middle. Without any kids, they distribute all those latent parental urges right on my shoulders. As if I’m capable of bearing something like that. Ha! Little do they really know me.
“Come on. It’s true,” he said. “You were telling me in May that you love Bel Air.”
“Yeah, I guess. I’d like a bungalow right in the town. Like my house now.”
“But you could build that on your lot in Hamilton!” Babe said with triumph. “Or buy another bungalow right here. There somethin’ wrong with us that you need to go traipsing all the way to godforsaken Harford County?”
Deke laughed.
“Who the heck would build a new house in Hamilton?”
I wasn’t about to tell them I had let the homeowner’s insurance lapse. Any of their plans seemed silly and reminded me of my own foolishness. I vowed to utter not one word. He shook his head and jerked a thumb at his wife. “You gotta love Babe.”
What a woman. She speaks her heart.
“It would be much simpler my way,” Babe said. “You know you and that quiet life you lead.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
Deke reached behind him, nabbing two packets of sugar.
“I’ll take sweetener,” I said.
“Suit yourself.”
Babe sat beside me and lit up a cigarette.
Deke snapped the lid on my tea and slid it over. “Maybe you should enter a nunnery. You’d never have to set foot on the street again.”
The nun thing. Again?
Babe turned on her stool, grinding out a laugh that all of Maryland could hear, then hacked her post-laugh smoker’s cough. “There’s the Carmelite’s place right out there on Seminary Avenue.”
Deke said, “Would make things easier in the long run and get you out of Guilford all the sooner.”
“Oh, come on, you guys. Give me a break.”
“You got it.” Deke pretended to karate-chop my arm.
Off to church now. Off to absorb the almost holy silence of a quiet, de-peopled sanctuary. Off to absorb the caressing notes of the sacred tunes that lift me beyond my unholy self.
Oh, Jesus, I prayed that night after a nice meat loaf supper at home, Obviously my previous path has been tried, found wanting, and cast into the flames. I’m trying to be thankful in all things here—for the beautiful roof over my head, Prisma’s good food, the delightfulness of Flannery—but all I can do is yearn for my own little place again.
And yet, heaven is my ultimate home. Is my longing really for that and not a place of my own?
While I had God’s ear, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to pray that the meat loaf contained only traces of hormones.
The prayer line rang.
“Prayer lady,” I answered.
“Hi there. I saw your ad in StarTrackz magazine. You for real?”
“I sure am.”
Prisma had arranged for the installation of the toll-free line in my bedroom and in the small den tucked off the family room. My father’s old haunt—oak-paneled, naturally. Gloomier than Queen Victoria. Unable to face that room this evening, I lay back against my bed pillows and crossed my ankles. She also got me a headset. Which I love. And it freed up my hands for the Christmas stocking project she discovered at the craft store. Which I don’t love. Whoever heard of embroidering with ribbon?
“So, like, you just pray for people?” The caller’s voice jerked me back to the present.
White male, under thirty. Sounded blond, but one never knows.
“And with people, if they like.”
“Right here on the phone?”
“It’s what I do.”
“Dude.”
Make that under twenty-five.
“So what’s on your mind? You want to give me a name to call you by?”
“Butch. It’s my real nickname.”
Yeah, right. No problem.
“So what can I pray about, Butch?”
“Well, see, I think I’m gonna make it big in music, see.”
&nbs
p; “What do you play?”
“Bass guitar.”
“Great.”
“Oh yeah. Keeps it all going, ya know?”
“Sure.”
“Anyway, it’s like this, my mom is big-time into God, you know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Right, like you are, I guess.” Butch chuckled high in his throat. “I mean you wouldn’t pray with people if you didn’t think God was listening.”
Sometimes I stay silent.
“Right, so anyway, it’s my mom. She can’t stop crying. Says all sorts of things about how I’m going to be sucked into that world like it’s a big pit of quicksand and I’ll never get out. I try to say things like, ‘Whoa, Mom, you raised me better than that,’ which I think is a pretty good comeback, but she takes this list she’s made up of stars and musicians that have become what she calls dissipated. She says, ‘All of these people were innocent babies at one time.’ ”
“Uh-huh?”
“So like, I know she’s right about that. And well, I don’t know what I’m asking you to even pray for.”
“Your mother’s blessing?”
“Maybe. And like, what if she’s right?”
“About the quicksand?”
“Yeah. You know. Is it worth it?”
“Hey, I’m not a pastor.” I sought to warm up my voice, trying to ease things up a bit. “I’m just a prayer lady. Those are questions you’ll have to answer on your own.”
“Then I don’t even know what to ask you to pray for.”
I fiddled with a length of burgundy ribbon. “Can I make a suggestion?”
“Yeah. I’m feeling kinda lost. You know.”
“I do. Why don’t we pray that God will give you a venue to use your talents and protect you from harm?”