ice cream tamer

They say there are three rules to good stargazing. Or tips, rather: dark skies, dark skies, and dark skies. And that’s why he is here, on top of a mountain, where the yellowy glow of streetlights and storefronts cannot reach. Here there are always dark skies, and tonight the clouds cover only the moon, leaving a dark theater of stars glowing in the blackness like punched out holes between him and God. He’s left the radio on in his car and windows down, but he’s lying in the cool outside, settled in a rock cleft in the center of this small valley, looking up.

First, Ursa Major as Big Dipper, burning hot on the left side of his view. Henry follows it to Polaris and then to Queen Cassiopeia, punished for her vanity, stuck upside down near her husband, King Cepheus. They hang there so quietly and so solemnly he can almost see them—cold and dark and blue and watching Henry the way he is watching them. Perhaps in some twist of space and time they are there, perched in lawn chairs with the finest gold and ruby decor in Aethiopia, and Cepheus is pointing at the Watching Boy, an arrangement of stars that is him, slung long and low between Dubhe and Solaris, a reclining boy with binoculars peering into the pools of time. And their daughter, the fair-haired Andromeda, will giggle when Cepheus tells her that someday she’ll be in the stars with her beautiful mother Cassiopeia. Henry smiles, laughing at himself as he watches this troubled family float above him in points of light.

He thinks of Annie now. He can almost see her because they were here, once, and King Cepheus’s family looked down on him sadly out of dead blue eyes for stars. She was wearing yellow and that necklace she wore when she was a bridesmaid for her sister, and her hair was straight, just the way he liked it, and she was laughing again at something he said.

“I just don’t know what to say,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what to say to you.”

“Why does anything have to be said? Why can’t we just sit here?”

Her legs are crossed and she is leaning on one hand, her silver watch caught shining at him from the crook of her wrist. He wants to say something different this time, because she’s here, looking at him with those eyes, and he wants to say whatever will make her stay. But it’s confusion in his mind, like the stars look now—a mess of points with no form, no lines, no Polaris and no constellation. And one of those stars is supposed to be his, but he can’t tell them apart anymore. They burn at him fiercely, a backdrop of dread and confusion behind her expectant look. “Henry?”

“I don’t know either.” 

He is thinking. What if you could do something differently? What if you could change it and make it the way it was supposed to be. Wasn’t there fate in the stars? Wouldn’t Romeo tell him to watch them more carefully, watch for clues and signs and a warning?

“You know how I feel,” he says at last.

“I know, I know. But what can I do? This is how I feel.”

“You can’t force it.”

Cepheus is looking at Watching Boy and tells Andromeda that Watching Boy once had a true love that he let slip away forever. “Why forever?” she asks. Practical and questioning, like her mother. “What’s forever?”

“Forever is as long as the stars, Andromeda. That’s why he’s there.”

Henry is telling Ann again about Andromeda tied to the rocks at the shore of Aethiopia, tied there to wait for the dragon of the sea. And Cassiopeia, sentenced to an upside down chair of torture, caught hanging with her vanity in a milky stream of light. And then, Cepheus, his constellation the crown—a symbol of his nobility, his dignity, his sadness. There is nothing the King can do to save them. “That’s like us,” says Henry. And he is watching her eyes. He’ll say something different this time. He’ll say something that will prove to her how much he cares, and she won’t wonder, and she won’t question, and above all, she won’t choose anyone but him.

“Hey? I have to go.”

 “Then we’ll go,” he says. She is crazy to wear sandals when it’s so cold outside, almost winter, but she does it because no one else does and it’s just her and she’s stepping over rocks back to the car. She pretends not to hear him, and he knows that they’ll drive in silence back to her house and she’ll disappear beneath the trees that tunnel the walk in front.

“I don’t know what to say.” she says.

He wants to tell her that Robbie doesn’t feel that way about her, and never will, because that’s what happens. He likes someone else. That’s what happens you know, he whispers at her as she glides underneath her canopy of trees at stage center. He doesn’t love you and I love you. But he doesn’t say it. He is lying in the cool outside, settled in a rock cleft in the center of this small valley, looking up.

Posted at 10:47pm and tagged with: prose, lit,.

“Is he dead?”

Mr. Torrey lay wrinkled into his faded towel. Dead?

He would have reached out his hand to assure the little girl of his life force, but feared it was too skeletal to be convincing. He thought of his own daughters, the little darlings, once sunny-eyed faeries, now weathered, weary mothers with girls of their own.

I should be dead, he whispered, but his voice was caught in the now overwhelming towel fronds. I should have been dead a long time ago, he continued, to no one in particular. He thought of how many times death brushes all those who live a long, full life, as he had.

He had once been hot-rodding in his Nova, cutting long, generous curves into a canyon road when his tire exploded and twisted him around and into oncoming traffic. Except there was no traffic; there was only an eerie hoot hoot from an owl hidden in the foliage overhead. He had even stared into the distant road a moment, expecting an 18-wheeler to obliterate him into a million car parts. It didn’t happen. He kaflumped all the way home to Maude’s strawberry rhubarb pie and marveled at a second chance to mix that sour red taste with a scoop of vanilla bean. He never mentioned it, of course.

He had been deathly ill once. This was before Maude and before the Nova, actually. Newly awash in a sea of blinking freshman at Rutgers, he had been talked into some brightly colored seafood at an Orientation Banquet. The sandy, silky stuff slipped into his throat and closed it off and threatened his very life. He was too poor and too proud for a doctor, even then. He determined to beat it back with the strength of his own immune system. He remembered his bedsheets: light blue, pale, wrinkled and creviced as he coughed and gagged and sweated and rolled and whimpered and cursed the fish in the sea. He had never discovered what it was, that sickly sweet conch-shell-shaped Capricorn of bland madness. At last, after an amount of time now forgotten to him, he emerged triumphant, showering on shaky legs, nibbling at buttered toast, sipping grape juice and blinking bloodshot eyes, reclaiming the spaces of his apartment for the menial uses he had grown to miss.

He supposed he had nearly died of a broken heart, too, waiting for Maude to write that letter. They had walked out of Funny Girl arm in arm, a magic web spun for them by the incomparable Omar Sharif (though he’d liked him more in Lawrence of Arabia) and Barbara Streisand, his Fanny, his funny girl. Here was his Fanny too, he realized, sunk low in the theater, his dry hands shaking as he finally took her hand, made contact with feeling, contact beyond the handshakes and back-pats and slight elbow-touches of all awkward, early courtship. Impossibly speechless as they nervously laughed down the long, hedged walkway to her front door, he went home that night and wrote a too-honest declaration of his true feelings, though Maude would tell friends at her Tupperware parties that she already knew from the first look of his “stormy eyes.” At least it wasn’t sweaty hands she remembered, he would say, and the plastic bowls would shake with laughter.

Mr. Torrey was in dangerous territory now; the sun was beating a hot spot onto his head that seemed to spotlight the membrane—the very cells—that stored the memory of her death in his gray matter like a caged bird. He had wandered too close and now he was there: the starchy sheets, the acid smell, the snaking tubes of all sizes, the liquid bag, tight and heavy with a thick liquid cocktail of chemical ooze. After she went in the night, he correctly answered Jeopardy!’s final question (he mumbled it even now) that went, “Among the many movies that have premiered here at Radio City Music Hall was the 1962 film based on a novel by Harper Lee”. She always said Jeopardy! was too easy. That she could have been one of them. They had driven to the St. Louis audition to give it a shot, but she changed her mind at the very last moment.

Posted at 11:40am and tagged with: lit, prose,.

They watched him watch the window.

“What’s he looking at?”

“I don’t know. The city.”

They could see him resting his chin on the windowsill and whispering into his long fingers.

“The city? He’s never seen the city.”

“Exactly.”

He was counting buildings. They stood tall and gray and quiet as far as he could see. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten, he breathed, and closed his fingers into fists and started over. He thought if he could just look between the buildings and find a hole small enough to look past the city, he would see his old house with the old trees and the old leaves.

When they had moved, when the car was burdened with all the possible luxuries of modern life, when they locked the door and at last walked out into the sudden rain, he had stepped on one of the leaves from the tall red-leafed tree watching the roof of the house and sniffed back a sudden scent of tears. There was a tire swing in the back that he wished he had left swinging, swinging back and forth so he could have seen it from the side of the house as they pulled out. But the picture framed in the back window was just the red-pink leaves resting on the roof. He had to imagine the tire swing swinging. He had never had any friends. Just the tree and the tire swing.

When Mom had shown him his new room, he could only see the great tall window at one end, without drapes or decoration, and the gray buildings and he saw under the window a crack in the wall and a hole in the wood floorboards. He sighed and put his hands in his pockets.

“Did you know you can grow a tree from a seed this big?” Grandpa had said, before he went away to heaven. James had put both his hands in Grandpa’s and pressed the seed into his fingertips.

“That’s it?” he asked with big eyes.

“That’s it.”

He had put it in that little fifth pocket where Grandpa had told him all seeds should go. “Mom says you have a green thumb.”

He laughed. “Do I?”

“Mom says.” But when Grandpa held his thumbs out, they looked old and brown and waxy.

“She just means I can grow things.”

When Mom and Dad left him alone in his new room, he fished the seed out of his little fifth pocket where Grandpa had told him all seeds go and knelt and flattened himself against the wood and dropped his seed into the hole under the crack in the wall.

At first there was only a tiny green tendril, curled lovingly over the lip of the floor knot, a single paper-thin leaf drinking in a whole window pane full of gorgeous yellow-glowing sunlight. Surprised, he had tucked the leaf back in and moved his wood chest over it. But when he closed his eyes that night, he saw the leaf under the floorboards, caught reaching up for a sunlight that would never reach down, caught between spider webs and the insect corpses of the underground. He shivered and caught his breath and scrunched his legs up to keep his feet under the blanket. And the next morning he pushed the chest aside and knelt and flattened himself against the wood and put his eye to the knot, and when he saw what he saw there, under the floorboards, he blinked.

There were two leaves now, and they were reaching towards the wall underneath where a glob of sunlight was dribbling out like honey. The light-green tubed tendril unwinding itself towards the glow. There was something about it that James thought was beautiful.

From underneath the floorboards, one could see the single eye in the hole shut tight, and James imagined the tall pale window pane framing a great swaying tree, once a fledgling vine, now coming up out of the floorboards like a dream from Dr. Suess. And he had put it there with his own fingers, pushed it into the thick brown gnarled knot in the floor beneath the window and tamped it down with one of Mother’s silvery-shiny forks that only guests could use.

Posted at 11:21am and tagged with: prose, lit,.

He could make out strange shapes in the fuzzy blackness: the old pipe radiator looking melted to the wall, shifting drapes, the clutter of books and trinkets and papers. His right hand was trembling again, fluttering ever so slightly. The doctors couldn’t tell if anything was wrong or not. But he could tell. He held his hand to his head and felt the blood pumping through his palms. It was warm.

He could hear his mother coughing in the room below. She didn’t look right anymore. Her eyes were wide and afraid and her hair was tossed and her body was lumpy and large. Her feet turned out from the heels she had worn these long years. She didn’t look right. She always sat at the dinner table now, where she could see the TV, and where she could see Pat. She fretted. Her eyes fretted at him quietly, great and wide as they were. He was afraid of her now. He was afraid he would see her die. Would she moan and whimper and suffer away? Would she pass out and lay on the kitchen carpet? He was afraid of that.

His father chided her. She fretted and he chided. His Dad had wrinkled, small eyes and a big nose and red cheeks. He wore the old derby hats and used a cane. When he came back from fiddling in the garage, from whatever he did there, he would sit on the couch in the living room and chide. He would chide and she would fret and Pat would lay on the couch and listen to them.

“Rose! Come over here.”

His mother never left the dinner table.

“Rose come up here!”

Pat would yell down the stairs. “Ma!”

“Pat?”

“Ma, Dad’s calling you!”

“Yes?”

“Come over here!” And so on.

They were watching the Whammy game show and it made Pat nervous to watch it. To him, everyone got Whammied and there was no way around it. His mom had said he should go on and try for something big, but Pat was sure he’d get a Whammy. Everyone always did.

In the dark, in the crinkly dimness, Pat would sometimes see things. Shapes and maybe letters. It made his chest tight and he would ball his fluttering hand up over his heart and close his eyes and still he could see them.  It made him afraid enough to cry. The wetness on his face as his eyes opened and shut. 

Posted at 11:59pm and tagged with: prose, lit,.

A moment before that moment, she would be free as a bird, unhitched and unclaimed. Then the moment—a ring, a kiss, an official declaration. And then the moment after, lost to all other men, she would be jealously guarded, prettily distant, mapped and properly documented, with a certificate and everything. All in just a few moments, just past Exit 221.

He thought of how she would think of him in that middle moment. She would blink her eye just so and a little blue tear would drop and dry in an instant, but that tear would be for him. No one else would see it—not  the lavishly dressed guests, not the photographer in her small business suit, not their fawning parents, now crying, now smiling, now crying and smiling at once. And not her husband, tall, blond, irresponsibly muscular, for he would close his eyes and draw her in and crush her soul into his. She would be all his, and all not Darby’s.

He would not allow it.

The car was his mother’s and it was new. There was no thump thump bang like his rusty Datsun. No, mother’s car fairly flew between the painted lines, and in the driving rain and deep darkness, his headlights reached out and warded off his darker dreams. The winter before, she had been all his, wrapped up in his scarf, making snow angels, baking cookies, wearing his mittens. He had held back her hair when she threw up, just like in the movies. Was the favorite of her little sister, the receiver of Mom-made cookies, and the Only Boy Who Dad Ever Liked.

And then: the drive-in! There was one newly built on the edge of town, the only one in the whole world, it seemed. “The drive-in, Darby!” Oh, yes, the drive-in. He remembered like he was there. He rolled through the tollbooth in his Datsun, drifted silently into a far away parking spot, and killed the engine. Before them was an audience of metallic beetles glinting under a silver screen. No one watches a movie at the drive-in! No one! And he turned and looked directly at her mouth while she watched. The ribbon in her hair matched her dress. He thought of tender smooches.

“I can’t hear. Shouldn’t the radio be on?”

He found the muffled static voices on the dial. “Do you want to watch?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” she breathed. The screen was lit large and bright before them. He sat defeated. She teased the ribbon from her curls and draped it with a feminine arm out the window. Clearly, he couldn’t watch the movie. Instead he watched her sidelong and saw the flicker of moving images refracted and painted on her smooth white face. There was a shuffle of gravel and a face appeared at the window at the very tip of that very feminine arm.

“Did you drop this?” There was a man crouched at her eyes, dangling a ribbon.

“Oh! Yes,” she said. Embarrassed.

Darby cleared his throat. “Thank you.”

He handed the ribbon over. She was smiling much too much, he saw, and he felt as far away from them as he did the silver screen.

Posted at 12:00am and tagged with: lit, prose,.