The Stardust Lounge Read online

  I contend it must be different with a child.

  Maybe Stephen believes he is Henry Martin, or he is Odysseus duping the Cyclops, sneaking out of the cave wearing animal skins, crouching among the sheep herds as he leads his crew toward the ship; Stephen, my Ishmael, wild, street-smart, strident, swaggering, who has learned to use his anger and his terror like a weapon and won excellence in the bow shot.

  Now the phone rings. “Fuck you,” he greets me. Sirens close in again, recede.

  “Will you be home soon?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he spits, but the fight has gone out of him. He sounds so very tired.

  “Okay. Come on. Watch your back. I'll put on some coffee.”

  Fall, 1983

  We like to drive around. At the hour when fathers and mothers arrive home from work, at the hour when my own father used to pull into our driveway, the boys and I get in our car and set out on an adventure. We drive happily against traffic, the outbound lanes open to us.

  In Missouri and Iowa we drive into the country. The fields, spring through autumn, spin columns of dust in the wake of tractors. In winter, barn doors are shut against the cold. We imagine the animals feeding now. In their hair, coats, caretakers carry with them animal smells through screen doors and into kitchens.

  By November the fields are frozen, by January snow-covered, at this hour the furrows holding on to grates of light. The ponds are near circles of sky-colored light like windows shining out of the earth.

  Silos are lighthouses over still seas, the pig sheds scattered down the hillsides, houses washed out to sea.

  There are certain abandoned farms we find. Sometimes we stop and walk the grounds looking for horseshoes, bottles, sheep's wool to take home with us. If the places are deserted, we let ourselves in the house and walk around trying to pick up some sense of the ghosts whose shoes scored this green linoleum. Who once dragged a soiled hand along rose wallpaper all the way up the stairs? Whose rooms looked out on the road, and did they dream of traveling?

  As if the house were ours, we choose bedrooms, invent a life, invent our days. At upstairs windows we look out over miles of meadow and speculate on the hours of work required to keep up so many acres.

  Stephen loves the barns and wants to know what animals lived here. He gets down and smells the ground. “Horses” he says, “and lots of dogs.”

  In one house we find a growing chart for three children, their sizes penciled up along the threshold between the kitchen and what must have been a dining room.

  We lived in California long enough to chart eight years of Charles's height, the kitchen door frames in the years prior—Missouri, his birthplace, and then Texas—showing three and one respectively.

  Stephen's first height was recorded late—at the age of three—on the kitchen door frame of what is now his father's house.

  In the years 1982 to 1985 we live in Iowa. Many family farms have gone under, foreclosure signs leaning against stop signs along the highways.

  One farmhouse in particular we love to visit because on approach you can see through east front window to back west window to sky. When we approach the house at evening—huge, empty—the sun, framed and focused, flares like a furnace fed on stars.

  We can't say exactly what engages us. We describe it each time by simile. Stephen says it looks like going to heaven. Charles says that to live there must be like living on a train—Charles, who prefers to sleep on the living room couch with his shoes on.

  I've tried to be strict with him about this. “You're thirteen. It's not like you work the night shift. You need to sleep in a bed. In pajamas. Why don't you sleep in your bed?”

  “I need to be ready if anything happens,” he answers.

  “What could happen? Honey, you're safe here.”

  “I know I'm safe. It's you and Steve I'm talking about.”

  “We're safe too …”

  Charles looks at the floor.

  “Well, at least take off your shoes? It worries me.”

  “Can't do it, Mom,” he finishes with such authority that I let it go.

  But I move Steve's bed into the living room and each night, take to reading to him there. Charles pretends to study, but I can tell he enjoys the stories.

  Or he paints, having set up his easel by the west window, paints oil after oil of empty rooms, closed barbershops, gas stations, bus terminals, farmhouses whose windows you can see through to sky.

  After some months, he begins to take off his shoes to sleep, though he sleeps fully clothed on the couch in Iowa, later England, and then Maryland. Finally in Boston he seems to make peace with a bed, probably because he chose a couch-bed for his room.

  His first autumn in Iowa Charles finishes about thirty paintings. We stretch the canvases ourselves, or when we can't afford canvas Charles gessoes over his earliest efforts, or over a fine piece of wood we've found on our adventures.

  The year before, Stephen and I moved from Columbia, Missouri, to the house on Market Street where I attend the Writers Workshop. Then Charles was hesitant to come with us. He chose to stay with his father and his father's new wife in the house we had moved to from California after eight years in the air force.

  It has taken coercing to get Charles to join us in Iowa City, coercing I feel guilt about. But I believe my boys should be with me. I believe that they should be together, and that they should be with me.

  Never mind that I have only a seven-hundred-and-forty-dollar-a-month teaching assistantship stipend for us to live on, a rented roof to put over our heads. The good news—no taxes will be taken out of my salary because even a year's earning keeps us below the poverty line.

  To get us started, pay for an apartment, and enroll Stephen in the Iowa City Montessori school, I receive some equity out of the Columbia house and I sell our micro bus for forty-five hundred dollars, the dealership throwing in a black 1970 Volkswagen Beetle. Charles calls it the getaway car.

  At the time of the move from Missouri to Iowa Charles is twelve. In the previous two years he has made the difficult transition from Southern California, where he's spent most of his childhood, to the middle of Missouri.

  Now I'm asking him to move again, this time without his father for whom he is named, and for whom he pined all the years of his father's flying out over the Pacific on months-long sorties in the air force.

  Charles is being asked to move away again in a tiny old car to which is attached a U-Haul trailer that slows our speed, even on the interstate, to twenty-five miles an hour.

  I have a poor memory for the year that Charles isn't with Stephen and me. I'm ashamed at our circumstances, at the wrecked marriage. When people ask if Stephen is my only son I say yes, dreading a muddled explanation as to why Charles doesn't live with us.

  Stephen misses his father and brother, too. So we begin weekend drives to meet halfway, Charles and his father coming as far as Bloomfield, Iowa, Stephen and I meeting them there on Friday evenings under the bank light on Bloomfield's small town square. We try to time those drives so that no one waits long, Stephen and I traveling south on two-lane back roads through Iowa farmland.

  In the warm weather we keep all the windows down, smell the livestock, the black earth, watch as great flocks of starlings, grackles, crows explode before us.

  In the tiny town of St. Francisville we pay a nickel to cross the bridge.

  If we arrive early, Stephen plays with his matchbox cars on the town green. In cold weather we stay in the car, the engine idling to keep the heat coming. When Charles and his father arrive, the four of us walk over to a cafe.

  The initial meetings are difficult. But they get easier. In spite of the problems that led us to divorce, Charles Senior and I have always liked each other. I'm glad to see him.

  We shake hands and take the son in our arms who lives with the other. Into our futures as the parents of our sons—the only children either of us will ever have—we seem to agree in silence that dignity and kindness, however strained, is the best course o
f action. There will be graduations, accidents, prizes, weddings, and funerals we are bound to attend in the other's presence because of our boys.

  The trauma of the divorce is behind us, not without leaving scars. But we figure, without saying so, that neither of us can extract the last thirteen years of our lives.

  We're part of each other, part of the other's youth. And the boys will grow into traits and habits resembling each of us—Charles will inherit my love of books and my bent toward brooding, his father's good nature and the Digges ego, Stephen my spontaneity, which can turn quickly to impulsiveness, his father's fair beauty and single-mindedness.

  During those first weeks and months in which we meet in Bloomfield, I suspect we find a way to continue to love the other in our children.

  Then under the bank light's dropping temperature we say good-bye, set out again in different directions. Sometimes Stephen and I take his brother with us back to Iowa City for the weekend. Sometimes Stephen goes with his dad, Charles with me, and still other times, Stephen goes back for the weekend with his father and brother.

  Such an arrangement is in place one autumn evening as Stephen and I drive south again to meet Charles and his father. We've set out later than usual. We're in a hurry. During the hilly climb out of Iowa City the car groans and backfires.

  Once we're on level ground it seems better, but at the main intersection in Ottumwa, about thirty miles from Bloomfield, the Volkswagen throws a rod and dies at the stoplight.

  In 1985 few people I know own telephone answering machines, and if they do, those early machines haven't the feature that make calling in to pick up messages possible. In the middle of traffic I put on the flashers and Stephen and I set off down the road.

  In a phone booth I find the number of a local garage, and once I know they're on their way to the car, dial Charles's number in Columbia. How I'm to pay for the tow and the repairs I haven't figured yet.

  I have to call, collect, Charles’ new wife, Terri, and I'm grateful to hear her voice as she accepts the charges.

  “Why don't you just rent a car?” Terri suggests when I tell her our circumstances.

  “I don't have a credit card,” I answer.

  “No credit card?”

  “No. Listen. Surely Charles will call when we don't arrive. Could I ask you to tell him where we are?”

  “Where are you?”

  I'm looking down the street. Everything is shut up, closed for the night. But about a mile down the road, back toward Iowa City, we'd passed a motel, its restaurant as I remember called the Stardust Lounge.

  “We'll be waiting at the Stardust Lounge.”

  “You're kidding.” Terri laughs.

  “Tell Charles it's right on the interstate beyond Ottumwa. Tell him to look for a pink neon sign with yellow stars …”

  Winter, 1991

  The first night I shadow Stephen, I watch his direction from our balcony, then tiptoe down the stoop into the brisk early December air. I keep the hood of his sweatshirt tied tightly, my hair tucked in a stocking cap underneath.

  At about a block's distance, hugging the stone wall down Winthrop Road, he heads toward the T-stop. I feel giddy and must suppress a nearly overwhelming urge to call out to Stephen, as if, outside the arena of our discord, we could meet and embrace, set out together in compatible alignment.

  As he boards a southbound train, I look at my watch: 12:45. I've planned badly. I have no money, no contingency plan for a taxi after the trains have stopped for the night, no way of knowing where he'll get off—though I suspect Hyde Park or Mattapan—and no idea of how I might change trains, board or exit without being discovered.

  Against my will something like admiration steals over me. How well Stephen has learned to navigate the night. He'd boarded that train with presence approaching dignity, offered his token to the conductor, and taken his seat like a veteran. Walking back up the hill I wonder at the chasm that has opened between us. How have we assigned each other so distinctly to different worlds? And is it, to Stephen, even personal? Or does it only become personal—and volatile—when I, assigned to represent the tedium of the day life, try to coax him back. It's fun out here in the dark, I agree. It's strange and awakening now to find my way through the cold past tomorrow's garbage pickup, past the almost salvageable chairs, an entire set of windows, an old doll house I am tempted to retrieve and take home.

  Fighting a temptation toward anger at Stephen's refusal to apply his mastery to anything but deviant activities, I remind myself to just observe for now. Observe and learn. I remember a passage from Jane Goodall's In the Shadow of Man, a passage I've written down in my journal: When the frustrations of being with individuals so dominant… become too great, the adolescent male [chimp] travels … frequently by himself… . This aloneness is quite deliberate…

  I've turned to many texts to try to learn how best to understand Stephen. Most if not all the psychology books are either briefly vague on adolescence, or they discuss the problem theoretically or in regard to two-parent families. There is a good deal of information on behavior modification, but none of the texts explain what it feels like to be an adolescent boy.

  I first read Goodall's accounts of her studies of chimpanzees years ago, sitting in the bleachers, watching Stephen's soccer practices. I'd written his name, Charles, and mine in the margins of the text as I'd read about the various behaviors of young chimps in relationship to their mothers, siblings, and the community at large.

  Among other similarities, the strong, solitary bond between a mother chimp and her offspring—independent of the adult males in the community—seemed pertinent to us. Just as the adult males live in wide orbit around female chimps and their young, so the boys’ father and stepfather have always lived on the far edges of our lives.

  My boys’ father flew planes in the air force. We lived parallel to the base's east-west runway, the huge C-141's taking off and landing morning, noon, and night. Stephen was born into a family in which, from the day he entered the world, he watched his father come and go.

  My marriage to Stan is in many ways no different. For five of our six years together, we've maintained two residences, he living and working in Maryland and I in Boston.

  Sitting high in the bleachers over Brookline's playing fields, watching my small son run with his teammates, knowing my older boy painted or read at home, I had starred a passage: The behavior of some human males is not so different from chimpanzee males as might be expected. In the Western world, at any rate, many fathers, even though they may be materially responsible for their families’ welfare, spend much time away from their wives and children—often in the company of other men…

  Goodall's writings about the chimps at Gombe helped me come to terms with and value my singleness. Invested with a more anthropological and philosophical view of our one-parent household, I attempted to peel away the many-layered fiction of American family life and the eighties consensus view that single mothering was somehow a new and aberrant condition.

  When did men not go to sea, to war, set out on seasonal hunts, get lost, die of smallpox, malaria, die in the woods with handwritten wills frozen to their chests? When did they not board ships for a new world, secure a place on a wagon train going west? Were the months-, often years-long absences irrelevant to their children's lives? Sanctioned or not by traditional values, isn't absence still absence? And through those absences, who fed the children, sang to them? Under whose single care might we document that we grew?

  As Stephen enters such a troubled adolescence, I've found myself poring over Goodall's book once more in regard to the behavior of adolescent chimps: Adolescence is a difficult and frustrating time for some chimpanzees just as it is for some humans. Possibly it is worse for males

  in both species…One of the most stabilizing factors for

  the adolescent male may well be his relationship to his mother… .

  A few nights later, the door softly closes and I pull on again the black sweatshirt and pants f
rom Stephen's drawer. Just now he and I are almost the same height and weight. I've tucked some money in my sock, but tonight Stephen cuts down the terraced steps toward Washington Street and past the T-stop. He wears his backpack and I can hear the ball bearings rattling in the paint cans as he bounces down the long flight of stairs.

  I follow him at a distance along Beacon, he on one side of the street, I on the other. I keep to the shadows of the awninged storefronts. To my relief Stephen is listening to his Walkman, which gives me greater ease in my movements. I can follow a bit closer without worrying that he'll hear me.

  At the same time the fact of his rather distractedly bouncing down the street makes me evermore protective. Someone could jump him and he'd never know what hit him. I scan the streets, the openings to the many alleys. Stephen leads toward Boston. As I dart and stroll, hesitate when he is too clearly in view, I feel a strong pull toward home. Does Stephen feel anything like it? He certainly doesn't appear to.

  We are almost to Fenway when he cuts left onto St. Mary's Street. At the corner two kids about his age step out of the convenience store. Stephen stops and removes his headphones. There's an exchange. On the spot I decide that if violence erupts, I'll blow my cover, step in.

  Though I know I can't stop a fight all by myself, I'm banking on the surprise factor, pulling off my hood and cap, shaking out my hair to reveal myself as mother on the

  scene…When he is attacked… there is little a mother can

  do, but she usually hurries to see what is going on, and may utter waa barks in the background… .

  But the boys join Stephen as they make their way behind the apartments, stopping at a fence to toss part of a Slim Jim to a dog. Maybe the boys feed the dog to keep him from barking. Stephen kneels a moment. He reaches his fingers through the wire mesh fence and scratches the animal on his head. Then the boys head off again toward Commonwealth, cross the viaduct, and disappear. Crouching along the rail, a few cars whizzing by beneath, I follow.