The Stardust Lounge

by Deborah Digges

  Against my attempts to rearrange our lives to minimize his brother's absence, it was as if Stephen decided to represent physically the emptiness he felt, and punish or deprive himself for the pain it caused.

  “Be real,” he'd mumble when I suggested how much fun the two of us could have.

  “Well, we'll find a way. Honey, look at me. We'll be all right,” I'd offer. That autumn an aspect of Stephen's character surfaced, as intensely dark as was the light we'd known him by.

  “Stephen, you burn so bright!” we'd say when he was younger.

  As an infant, Stephen smiled for the first time for his brother. But it wasn't just a smile. Stephen's face lit up in a wide grin. As Charles again and again brought his seven-year-old-face close to his three-week-old brother's, Stephen gurgled, struggled with laughter.

  Stephen so captivated us that I forgot the tub water I was running for Charles. Not only did it spill over, but as Stephen smiled and shrieked, water poured down the stairs of our California condominium.

  Eleven years later, as suddenly as that first brilliant smile, Stephen had gone dark. He behaved as if he were in mourning: for the loss of the brother who could make him wriggle with laughter, for the threeness of our family, and perhaps for what—as he moved into adolescence—he intuited as the end of childhood.

  Even the clothes he chose to wear to school were dark— gray or black sweatshirts, black jeans. Day in, day out, his colorful skateboarding T-shirts, his bright jackets stayed in the drawer as he wore black, brown, black, gray, black.

  What might help? How about someone besides Mom to talk to? A therapist named Mike. How about a new skateboard? In spite of the landlords’ complaints, we actually built a four-foot-ramp for it in our living room. And how about trips to see his brother, his grandparents, his cousins? All of the above, none of the above, some—.

  Through the autumn of 1988 there were fewer and fewer moments of closeness between Stephen and me. I felt like Chekhov's darling, Olga, whose obsessive doting on the boy Sasha pushed him further and further away.

  “You must try to do your lessons well, darling. Obey your teachers.”

  “Oh leave me alone,” Sasha said.

  “Sa-a-sha!” she called after him

  Where do the guns come from, into the hands of boys like Stephen, boys who for reasons as various and unique as the boys themselves have fallen into that well between the living and the dead world, who have not yet made the leap, as others have, over the gulf, boys who are grieving, bored with the old games, who have been left behind, lost in grief, isolated and angry. And dangerous in their confusion.

  “It's easy to get a gun,” Stephen says to me over the phone several nights after my trip to Amherst. He knows his future has once again been placed in my hands. If I don't allow him back to Massachusetts, he may be sent to military school. Perhaps for this reason he is forthcoming.

  “It's easy. Mom, listen. People just have ‘em. The right people. Kids know who to go to.”

  “But where do they get them?” I ask.

  “They case cars and houses and steal them. Mom, there are lots of guns out there. All kinds. Sometimes dealers send runners to states where the gun laws are easy. The runners buy the guns and drive them back. Kids have fake IDs that say they're old enough. Or they get them at gun shows. There was a gun show here last weekend. I could buy one in Missouri if I wanted. No problem.”

  “But don't parents find them? Doesn't somebody keep tabs? Don't the gun dealers double-check?”

  “Mom. Get real. Where have you been? They don't care. They just want their money. Besides, if you get busted you just wait a little while. If you've got the money you can always find someone who'll sell you another one.”

  When we hang up, I dial a realtor in Amherst. My conversation with Stephen incites the old panic, but I'm thinking hard. I'm beginning to piece together an idea. Maybe I can't stop Stephen's access to guns, not here in Boston, or Missouri, or Amherst. Nor can I take his grief away. But there might be something I can help him to do.

  In my readings of late on children and criminal behavior, I've come across studies that show that kids who are cruel to animals are likely to grow up to commit murder. The statisticians explain that such children lack all empathy for other living things. They cannot identify with the pain they cause. It is likely they have been, themselves, severely abused. But not always. The clinical term for these children is attachment disorder.

  Stephen's problem is different in kind, though the statistics are a clue for me. He has never been abused. On the contrary, much loved, perhaps even overly deferred to. He seems to suffer from detachment disorder; i.e. the world is dying away from him, deanimating, but he still feels alive to it. He is mad at it because it won't play anymore, or offers to him the same old games, games he has outgrown and tired of. Still, what else is there? He is mad at himself for still wanting to play

  From my reading I remember that one way in which professionals report some success in treating children with attachment disorder is by supervising their care and training of animals. Children are put into direct and intense contact with one particular dog, or a particular horse. They are solely responsible for taking care of the animal's needs. They feed and water, walk and groom their animal, keep daily journals, discuss behaviors, progress.

  I set up an appointment with the realtor for next Sunday regarding a particular house that caught my eye in my travels, hang up, and lie back in bed. Stephen once had such affection for his hamster Fergie. How he loved and fussed over the little animal. And then when Fergie died, Stephen was indifferent toward the replacement, poor little what's-his-name.

  Stephen was afraid to love the second hamster because, as he had learned—just at the onset of adolescence, when the world had stopped playing, when the world had abandoned him who still wanted and needed to play—that with love comes loss, and with loss comes grief. Grief hurts. Some people give up to it, some fight it. Grief makes Stephen want to hurt back.

  “It wasn't a real gun,” he'd said.

  “But she thought it was,” I'd offered.

  “Well, she's stupid then,” was his reply.

  Stephen's sadness belongs to him, and the way out of it. Much as all of us have tried, we cannot take it away. His sadness has stranded him. He is alone and can't cross over. But what if Stephen could feel empathy for something again? Maybe through empathy, he might find his way. Then and only then would his need subside, his need to taunt the world with a gun.

  Portrait Essay

  Eighth Grade English

  (Columbia, MO)

  My brother moves quickly, with purpose. He always seems to have a piece of useful knowledge for those who will listen. Strands of his long brown hair often fly with his words as he explains something. Peering over the tortoiseshellframes of his circular glasses at you, he checks to see how attentive you are to his words.

  I see no physical resemblance to myself when I look into his face, but I know that my brother's eyes see things in a similar perspective to my own. He needs to document moments—/ through my camera and he through his writing and painting.

  Before he went to college, he used to paint in his room, all night sometimes, images flying from his fingertips. By about 3:00 A.M. the paint would be thick in his hair, and whispers of color smudged his cheeks and neck. He looked like an ancient medicine man. The brush was his wand and remedy.

  He would often wear suits to school, in a ragged style that was all his own—like they had been draped over him at the last minute before some important business meeting. Dabs of paint brightened the black pin-striped pants and ruined the businessman look. But that's exactly what he liked about it.

  If he wasn't painting he'd be reading things like Karl Marx, James Joyce, or John Cheever, or looking at books about painting by David Hockney and Edward Hopper. On these days I learned the most.

  When I came in from skating, he would invite me into his oil- and turpentine-scented room, the odor stinging my nostrils,
caking a taste in my mouth. He would explain whatever it was that was registering in his brain at that time in a way that I was able to understand fully, simply because he has always understood me. Our blood runs deep like that.

  Now that he is in college, his hair is wild, parted in the middle. A sleek ponytail mass hangs down to his shoulder blades. He's recently grown a goatee that gives him a Euro-look, a look that I never knew could exist inside our family's physical feature gene pool.

  He and I are seven years apart, but a good history outweighs any sort of awkwardness that might arise when we encounter each other now, along with the fact that he is my older brother.

  Grade: D—

  Mr. Digges, the assignment was a seven- to ten-page essay, including research, on a prominent American.

  Portrait of Charles / Photo by Stephen Digges

  Missouri. The late seventies. My mother, my five sisters and I walk together, shifting babies on our hips. We make our way along the fence to the one cherry tree in our apple orchard.

  We pass the beehives, the rich summer foliage. On her walks, our mother has discovered that this year the tree has produced thousands of plump cherries. She wants us to pick as many as we can and take them home with us to make pies.

  Our older children run out ahead to explore the barn. At this time my five sisters and I have eleven children— seven boys and four girls, in ages from about twelve to infancy. In the years to come there will be six more children born to the Sugarbaker women.

  Because we have been to church, we are wearing dresses, pale yellow, blue, white. We know ourselves to be strong and attractive. There are ten years between the oldest sister, who is thirty-five, and the youngest, who is twenty-five.

  In her late sixties, our mother looks years younger. She is among the tallest of us at five feet, ten inches. We are attentive to her now in ways we never imagined.

  Our bare legs sweep the grasses as we shift babies on our hips or set them down to toddle along, our blond to light brown to chestnut hair combed back with our fingers, hair the color of our children's, our nieces and nephews. We are versions of one another, versions of the ancestors.

  As we walk we compliment each other on how well we look, how Connie has lost weight after the birth of her Tom, how beautifully Rena has fixed her hair—many tiny braids swept up in a bun, and will she show us how it's done?

  We have time before we put lunch on the table, and then all of us will be leaving, returning home with our husbands and children to Illinois, Florida, California, Washington, D.C., and Minnesota. Connie and her husband and two boys will drive home to St. Louis.

  The fact of the cherries and whether they make it home with us is irrelevant. Our mother wants us to pick cherries together and we want her to have the pleasure of the memory. She'll write her sister about it, describe it in the evening to our father. Plastic bags in her hands, she is delighted, a bit breathless as she leads the way to the tree.

  We have many questions for her and for each other regarding our children, their quirks and behaviors. Charles's teacher has expressed concern that he prefers to play alone rather than with the group, prefers reading to sports. Rena worries that her baby, Geneva, so named for our mother, doesn't yet sleep through the night.

  Mother's concern is generous and devout. Listening to her advice we hear how cared for we were as children. Her tone is one we recognize and fall into. It is an aria, a fugue, a round that returns sympathy for discernment. We know it like birdsong, like water filling a sink, dishes as they are washed and stacked, and the smell of Jergens lotion.

  “Charles is a thinker,” she tells me, “like his grandfather. I see no problem with his playing alone, as long as he has friends.”

  “He does,” I say. “Lots.”

  “Well, that's fine, then, darling. Remember your brother Paul—well you wouldn't. He's so much older than you, but as a little guy he, too, was quiet, loved playing alone and reading just like Charles. Sometimes I wept at how good he was. And look at him!”

  Mother beams at the thought of her second son. “He's doing so well. Why he's chief of surgery now. And how he loves his daughters …”

  “Charlie!” Mother calls my son from the group. “Will you pick some cherries for Grandma?”

  “Sure,” says nine-year-old Charles.” He blushes and begins to pick cherries, eager to please his grandmother and happy to be singled out.

  As he works, Mother points out the plumpest cherries to him and smooths his hair. “He'some,” she whispers and winks at me.

  Now mothers ourselves, my sisters and I see her in a new light. We are beginning to understand her life as our mother, her enthusiasm and courage, her sacrifices. We are learning through her advice and care of our own children, and we dismiss what we once perceived as her injustices toward us. Indeed we agree that she acted in ways she believed to be best for us.

  Telephoning long-distance, we say to each other, “How did Mom do it?” As we speak we remember our emotional, spirited, smart-mouthed selves, the six of us laughing, carrying on, playing at high volume the Beatles or Joan Baez in our suite at the opposite end of the hall from our parents’ bedroom.

  There we experimented with makeup—purple eye shadow, midnight blue eyeliner we'd bought against orders at Woolworth's, or we read aloud to each other from the romance comics we'd smuggled in.

  Among our unmade beds, clothes thrown everywhere, empty soda bottles spoiling our antique dressers, the youngest were eager guinea pigs for the oldest, who permed our hair to frizz and once bleached mine pumpkin-orange.

  Sometimes we talked disparagingly about our mother. “She's so old-fashioned,” we'd say, “so fundy” we'd add, using a term we'd coined to describe the fundamentalist Christians at our church whom we judged to be hopelessly “out-of-it,” overly religious people; “in la-la land!” we'd laugh.

  “We should take her shopping,” one of us would say.

  “She's started to wear those ugly, loose, fundy dresses. And her hair!”

  “Someone should talk her into coloring it.”

  “Maybe she'd be less strict with us!”

  “Less out-of-it!”

  And sure enough, after much thought and, as she would emphasize, “prayer,” our mother, to please us, would submit to our ambitions, let us bring clothes we had picked out for her from the department store “home on approval.”

  Then in the afternoons when the youngest were down for naps, she tried them on for us as we nodded, marveled and fussed over her, or stood back and shook our heads.

  Sooner or later she let us cut her long graying hair and color it with Clairol. She let us apply makeup to her face, pluck her eyebrows—”Not too much! Your father will have a fit!”—and touch her long eyelashes with brown mascara.

  Sooner or later she allowed Gena a two-piece bathing suit. “No bikinis!” she called as Gena headed out the door to buy it. “And I have to see you in it here, before you go out of this house!”

  Mother let me keep not just one but two stray dogs, let Connie and Beth cut their waist-long hair, let Rena wear a strapless formal, Eva the pearls my father had given my mother for the prom.

  “How did she put up with us?” we ask each other, having just endured, ourselves, some minor crisis with one of our own children. As we say it, we know that the fact of her patience, her silence, her worry, her willingness to listen, and most of all, her passionate engagement with us will be the quality we must now emulate.

  And so, like her, we become fierce mothers, mothers who plot and gauge, who measure and consider, who call one another for advice, reporting on a book or an article we've read, some insight we've had, each of us offering experiences in order to help our sisters.

  Like our mother, we believe ourselves to be wholly capable. We exude an earnest, youthful confidence, a satisfaction as we tell one another how well this or that turned out—the birthday party, the camping trip, the teacher's conference, the math tutor, the bedtime problems.

  Our children are
the heroes and heroines of our narratives. We defer to them, to their intelligence, judgment, their abilities to adapt or stand up for themselves, and as we defer to them, we take pride in our direction.

  We do not forget to tell one another, “You did just the right thing. That was smart! Good for you!” And we wait to hear such praise heaped upon ourselves.

  We believe, as our mother, that we are doing it right, that we are good mothers doing the right things for our children. Perhaps we are even a bit smug about the ways in which our young children are prospering. Love is enough. Love is a compass that will show us true north. So we navigate by the stars.

  We say to ourselves, “Of course!” when some crisis resolves. “Of course!” As we say it we hear our mother's voice piously quoting from the Old Testament, “Bring a child up in the way that he should go and in the end he will not depart from it.”

  In Brookline, many years from our walk to the cherry tree, things begin to go wrong with my Stephen. I talk to my mother and my sisters. As always they listen, consider, offer advice. Yes, they agree that maybe a private school is a good idea.

  “Yes,” my mother says. “You're doing the right thing.”

  But when the troubles exacerbate, when I begin to suspect drugs and guns, when Stephen's withdrawal becomes so profound he refuses to speak to me, eat at the same table, when he exhibits behavior I never imagined from one of my children, I call my mother and sisters less and less, then not at all.

  My reports of Stephen's behavior have begun to shock them to silence. I hear their restraint. In their silence I believe that I am hearing their judgment of my son and me.

  No, they have never experienced anything like this. How can they help? Would it help if they visited, or maybe I should send Stephen to them for a week or so. But in these offers I think that I detect caution in their voices, which I interpret as fear. I imagine them wondering how a visit from this wild nephew might affect their household.