The Evening Star Page 5

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “Where is what, Hector?” Aurora asked, exasperated by his lack of reaction.

  “The place you mentioned,” the General said. “I think you mispronounced it Isn’t it in the Maldives, or somewhere?”

  “I pronounced it quite correctly—it’s scarcely a hard word,” Aurora said. “T-h-e-r-a-p-y. Therapy. And it isn’t in the Maldives, it’s in the Medical Center.”

  “Oh, therapy,” the General said.

  Then the concept sank in, and his jaw dropped. “Therapy?” he said. “You mean you want us to see a psychiatrist?”

  “Correct,” Aurora said. “In fact I was thinking we might want to try psychoanalysis. I wouldn’t be surprised if a little psychoanalysis had a good effect on our quarrels.”

  “You’ve lost your mind,” the General said. “I’m eighty-six years old. What goddamn good would it do for me to be psychoanalyzed now?”

  “For one thing it’s said to be quite good for one’s memory,” Aurora said. “I’ve concluded recently that we have a memory problem. Half of our quarrels start because we disagree in the area of memory. I remember things correctly and you remember things incorrectly, and the next thing you know we’re quarreling. Psychoanalysis might prompt you to remember much more accurately than you do now and I don’t see why we shouldn’t try it.”

  “I remember things incorrectly?” the General said. “Who is it that’s always forgetting where she put her car keys or her earrings? You must have lost a thousand earrings just in the years I’ve known you.”

  “Hector, I won’t stand here and listen to your exaggerations,” Aurora said. “You’ve heard my conclusions and I mean to implement them. I intend to have us in analysis so quick it will make your head swim.”

  “It won’t be a new feeling,” the General said. “You make my head swim every day.”

  “Excuse me, Hector, you know how I hate to bicker on an empty stomach,” Aurora said. In the course of her shower she had somehow gone from full to empty, and could hardly wait to taste the gumbo. Without giving Hector Scott a chance to issue further complaints, she sailed downstairs to start carrying up the dinner.

  5

  While the General and Aurora were having their discussion, Rosie, in the kitchen, had been trying to help Melanie get a grip on herself. For starters, she made her a chocolate milkshake and slipped a couple of raw eggs in it. When left to herself, Melanie’s diet seemed to consist mostly of potato chips and Diet Pepsi, not exactly ideal fare for a mother-to-be. Rosie seized any chance to improve it.

  “Weren’t Bruce’s parents both drunks?” she asked. Melanie sat, or rather slumped, at the table, smoking and looking desperately unhappy.

  “They go to AA,” Melanie said. “Bruce doesn’t even live with them now. He lives with his new girlfriend.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about the new girlfriend,” Rosie said. “The fact that he’s got one might be a blessing in disguise.”

  “Easy for you to say, you’ve got a boyfriend,” Melanie said, annoyed. People were always telling her she ought to be glad she had lost Bruce.

  “I have got C.C., but that don’t mean you can’t do a lot better than Bruce,” Rosie said. “Anybody that would beat up a pregnant woman is a good person to stay clear of, if you ask me.

  “He didn’t really beat me up, he just shoved me, and I fell over a chair,” Melanie said. “I was upset when I told you he beat me up.”

  Although she hated Bruce at the moment, she didn’t like to hear Rosie criticize him. Neither Rosie nor her grandmother understood anything about her life, and it irked her when they made criticisms.

  “Getting shoved down could be the first step in getting beat up,” Rosie said. She was in no mood to relent where Bruce was concerned. “Once men start shoving you around they don’t know when to stop.”

  “Did your husband beat you?” Melanie asked. She could only dimly remember Rosie’s husband, who had died about the same time as her mother. Her main memory was of the man’s stomach, which was huge.

  “Not on your life, he didn’t,” Rosie said. “I told him while we were engaged that if he ever raised his hand to me I’d kill him. He only hit me once, and that was self-defense.”

  “Self-defense?” Melanie asked, interested. In her memory the man had been almost a giant—at least his stomach had been as big as a giant’s. Why would he have needed to hit a tiny woman in self defense?

  “Yeah, I discovered he was screwing a slut,” Rosie said. “I tried to stab him with a butcher knife. He beat me off and then one of his own friends stabbed him with a butcher knife anyway—Royce nearly died that time.”

  “Why did his friend stab him?” Melanie asked. A few minutes before she had wanted to die; she was convinced she would never be attractive or happy, and that no one would ever love her as much as Bruce had, when they first met. But now she felt a little better. She was thinking of asking Rosie for another milkshake.

  “The friend that stabbed him had been screwing the same slut,” Rosie said.

  “I guess I shouldn’t call her a slut,” she added more gently, after a moment’s reflection. “She visited Royce in the hospital—it could be she was just crazy about him. When he died she called and asked if she could come to the funeral.”

  “Did you let her?” Melanie asked.

  “Yeah, I let her,” Rosie said. “I thought it was nice manners on her part to call and ask, even if she did wreck mine and Royce’s marriage.”

  “I don’t think you would really have stabbed your husband,” Melanie said. “May I have another milkshake?”

  “Just because I’m small don’t mean I’m harmless,” Rosie assured her. “I would have killed Royce right there in the bathroom if he hadn’t punched me in the snoot.”

  Melanie tried to imagine Rosie stabbing her fat husband with a butcher knife, but she couldn’t. Then she tried to imagine herself stabbing Bruce with a butcher knife because he had decided to live with Beverly, a girl who had once been her best friend.

  Neither of her imaginings worked. Rosie and her grandmother couldn’t get it through their heads that she still loved Bruce. She had cried for a week when he started living with Beverly, but that hadn’t made her want to stab him. She didn’t even stop loving him, mainly because she suspected that he didn’t really like Beverly that much. The real trouble was that Beverly’s folks were too rich. They were so rich they had given Beverly a Ferrari for her birthday.

  Bruce’s big weakness was sports cars. He had hardly said two words to Beverly before she got the Ferrari, but a week later they were living together. Bruce just wasn’t the sort to pass up a chance to drive a Ferrari. Unfortunately he wasn’t as good at driving sports cars as he thought he was, and had had an accident almost at once. The accident was basically just a fender bender, but Beverly’s parents promptly freaked out—they didn’t like Bruce anyway, and had given Beverly strict orders not to let him drive the Ferrari. They started yelling at Bruce. They told him he had ruined an eighty-thousand-dollar car, and that he had to pay for every cent of the damage or else go to jail. Bruce didn’t even have a job at the time—how could he pay for an eighty-thousand-dollar car, or even one fender of one? Plus, Beverly was real spoiled and expected Bruce to take her dancing or to nice restaurants at least five or six times a week. Bruce was happy just eating pizza and didn’t have the kind of money it took to take Beverly out every night. The only way he could get that kind of money was to be a dope hauler, running loads of pot up to Fort Worth or Dallas; but Bruce really didn’t like being a dope hauler because of the possibility of being caught, sent to prison, getting raped, and dying of AIDS.

  He had just come by her apartment to borrow twenty dollars from her, but Melanie knew he meant to spend the money on Beverly, which was why she got so mad. She freaked out and started yelling at him, which scared him so badly he shoved her over the chair. Bruce wasn’t nearly as tough as he pretended to be.

  “Don’t, I’m going
to have a baby,” Melanie said. That had been enough to calm Bruce down. The shove really wasn’t that big a deal, and she had begun to regret even mentioning it to Rosie.

  Besides, she didn’t feel all that bitter toward Bruce; she felt bitter toward Beverly’s parents. Didn’t they know a Ferrari would attract a lot of attention? Beverly herself didn’t even much like cars, but she had tiny tits and knew perfectly well that having a Ferrari would make it easier for her to get boyfriends.

  Had it not been for the Ferrari, Melanie reasoned, Bruce would never have left her, and she wouldn’t have lost her self-esteem. If she hadn’t lost her self-esteem, she would never have slept with either Koko or Steve. Koko had been her best friend for years; he was a sweet Thai boy, just your basic pal, someone who was always there in emergencies and a great person to listen to music with or just hang out with when there was no emergency. It had not been entirely right to sleep with him, she wasn’t that attracted, but Koko was, and now he was madly in love with her. Also, it had increased the confusion about whose baby it was she was pregnant with. The fact that Steve had happened to come home from college just when she was at her very lowest ebb increased this confusion still more. Steve was just your basic spoiled-rotten yuppie brat. Melanie had dated him for a month or two in high school. He popped into town pretty much at the exact moment she hit bottom; she felt so desperate for someone to be with, even if it was just for five minutes, that she slept with Steven too.

  Just thinking about the fix she was in made Melanie feel tired—so tired she would have liked to sleep for a week. Often she would sleep through most of the week—heavy sleeps that lasted ten or twelve hours at a stretch. In her view there was no reason not to sleep: she didn’t have a job, and had dropped out of her media studies program because she was too fat and not pretty enough to be an anchorwoman—for years being an anchorwoman had been her secret dream—and Bruce only came to see her when he had had a fight with Beverly, or needed money, or maybe just wanted to smoke a joint with his old girlfriend.

  “Do you ever hear from your father?” Rosie asked. If ever there was a child who could use a father’s attention, it was Melanie, but Rosie was under no illusions that Flap Horton, Melanie’s father, would come through with very much attention, very much money, or very much anything. Flap taught English literature in Riverside, California; Melanie adored him and had hoped at various points to be allowed to go to school in Riverside, and perhaps even live with her father, but it was one of those things which was just not coming to pass. Lately, as far as Rosie could tell, Flap had stopped giving Melanie any encouragement at all—very few rays of light came from his direction.

  In the first few years after Emma’s death, Flap had tried hard to be a decent father to Melanie and the boys, but then he remarried and acquired three stepchildren; he and his new wife had a child of their own, and Flap’s attention had drifted away—farther and farther away from the children he had had with Emma.

  To an extent, Rosie was not disposed to blame him too much. No one could pay attention to everything they were supposed to pay attention to; her own record as a mother had not been spotless. Two or three of her own children had not really received the level of attention a child should get, and she knew it. But at least she had managed to focus on them in emergencies or in periods of profound need. Melanie was in just such a period at that moment, and Flap, it seemed to Rosie, was doing a very poor job of focusing.

  “He never calls,” Melanie said bitterly. “He said he’d help me pay for my car, but he never sent the money. Teddy was sort of interested in going back to school this semester, but Daddy never sent him the tuition money either.”

  “I’m sure your granny would pay for Teddy’s tuition,” Rosie said. “Teddy’s and yours too. She’d love to see both of you kids in school.”

  “I know, but Daddy says he’ll do things, and then he doesn’t do them,” Melanie said. “He always sounds like he means to, but then nothing ever comes in the mail. He doesn’t really love us now—he just thinks we’re a lot of trouble. He’s never even been to see Tommy since Tommy got sent to jail.”

  “Out of sight, out of mind,” Rosie said, imagining how nice it would be if Tommy were sitting at the kitchen table with them just then. More than any of Emma’s children, Tommy haunted her—haunted her so profoundly that she rarely allowed even a wistful daydream about him to slip into her consciousness. She couldn’t afford such daydreams—they soon would be followed by many sad, guilty thoughts. Though she faithfully accompanied Aurora to the prison in order to drive her home, she could rarely psych herself up enough to actually go into the bleak visitors’ room and see Tommy. Most of the time she sat in the car, feeling like a sick, cowardly rat. She felt as if she were letting both Tommy and Aurora down. After all, Aurora hated going there, too, and came out destroyed; yet, time after time, month after month, Aurora went in, whereas Rosie only managed to psych herself up that high two or three times a year, though she loved Tommy every bit as much as Aurora did.

  “Daddy liked me when I was little,” Melanie said. “He gave me books to read. Now he never sends me books. He never sends me anything. I wish my mom hadn’t died.”

  Melanie could only dimly remember her mother, but she did have a memory or two of her mother combing her hair, and she thought she remembered her mother singing songs to her. Mainly, though, she remembered that when her mother was alive she and her brothers had never felt alone—and now they did.

  Rosie had to gulp and blow her nose. She turned to the sink and began to wash a dish that was already perfectly clean in order to have a moment in which to master her emotions. Emma Horton, the children’s mother, Aurora’s daughter, had been Rosie’s favorite person, more beloved to her in some ways than her own exceedingly difficult children. Melanie looked almost exactly as Emma had looked when she was a teenager; sometimes the mere sight of Melanie caused sorrow to well up in Rosie, forcing her to gulp and blow her nose and wash perfectly clean dishes, until it subsided.

  She knew quite well that she and Aurora had done their best by Emma’s children; she suspected that their best was a good deal better than many other people’s best—and yet she also knew that it hadn’t been enough. Tommy and Teddy were cripples, in their different ways, and Melanie was sad.

  Still, sad was different from broken, she reflected. Melanie wasn’t broken. She would soon be having a baby, and a nice little fat baby might make a huge difference in Melanie’s life.

  “We better take dinner upstairs,” she said, remembering her duty. “Your granny and the General need to eat on time. It’s when they get too hungry that they have their biggest fights.”

  Just as she said it, Aurora walked into the kitchen. Her eyes immediately lit on Melanie’s cigarette.

  “Melly, I do wish you’d not smoke,” she said. “It can’t be good for little Andy.”

  Melanie gave Rosie a guilty look and stubbed out the cigarette.

  “I was nervous,” she said. “Do I really have to name him Andy if he’s a boy?”

  “No, dear, of course not, you can name him Plato or Aristotle, if you prefer,” Aurora said, hugging her sad-looking granddaughter. “It’s just that I’ve always wanted an Andy in my life, and none has ever come my way.”

  Actually, Melanie loved the name—she just wished she had thought of it instead of her grandmother. Her grandmother was always taking over—it left very little for the rest of them to do.

  “I’ve been dreaming of twins lately,” Rosie commented. “It might be twins. Wouldn’t that be fun, having twins running around the house?”

  “Or it might just be a girl,” Melanie said. “If it’s a girl I want to name her after Mom.”

  “Oh,” Aurora said. She had been lifting the gumbo off the stove—the thought of Emma coming round again threw her off so much that she almost dropped the pot. Rosie took it just in time.

  “Don’t you like that, Granny?” Melanie asked. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  “Yes, dear,
” Aurora said, but in a very different voice from that she would have hoped to project. The thought that she might soon have a great-granddaughter bearing the name of her daughter jerked at her heart; she was afraid to say more for fear that what would come out would be the voice of an old woman.

  “Oh, well, I like to be surprised, myself,” Rosie said. Aurora’s moment of shock had not been lost on her. “I’d take an Andy or an Emma, either one.”

  “Of course, so would I,” Aurora said, recovering. “But that’s a very nice thought, Melly—appropriate, too. I think we should adopt it. If a girl emerges, we’ll name her Emma.”

  “How’s the General?” Melanie asked, getting up to help carry the dinner.

  “Very quarrelsome, as usual,” Aurora said. “Could you carry the gumbo? You’re the youngest and strongest. Rosie and I will hobble along with the rest.”

  “Sure, do you have a Pepsi?” Melanie asked, as Rosie began to cut the bread.

  6

  After dinner, Rosie and Melanie hung around for a while, playing dominoes with the General over the din of CNN. Encouraged by Rosie, the General had become a news junkie too. Following the news with Rosie allowed him to demonstrate his superior knowledge of world affairs—superior not merely to Rosie’s but also to that of a long parade of reporters and analysts who pontificated night after night about things the General felt he understood far better than they did.

  “Yes, the war clouds are gathering,” he said, after consuming a nice chunk of walnut cake. “Russia’s going to go for sure, and I think China might go.”

  “Go where, Hector?” Aurora said. He was always saying that the war clouds were gathering, a phrase which for some reason irked her.

  “China’s a rather populous country,” she added. “Where could it possibly go?”

  “Well, civil war could break out,” the General said. He had spoken rather automatically, and now regretted it. He did not in fact think China would go, but then again it might, and what did Aurora know about it, anyway? They had visited China together, and, except for a few art-historical high spots, Aurora had scarcely noticed the country. In Beijing she had complained because there were too many bicycles and no way to make them stop so she could cross the street; her mood had only improved once they got back to Hong Kong, where she could shop all day.