Blue Stars (10 page)

When she paid the check, nearly half of it had been comped. She tried to thank Jim, but he shook it off brusquely. She left a big tip and said, “I’m just glad you didn’t make me relive high school.”

“Next time,” Jim said, meeting her eyes once.

7

Dear Mike,

There was one day when I got my first sense of the way you’d had to live, before you came to be with us. This was in fall of 2002, after the summer you and Wes worked for the park district. I’d noticed, of course, that you were crashing in the basement pretty regularly, after you and Wes hung out—or even after you’d be out with other friends. I knew you were careful to keep out of our way as much as possible. (Remember how you set an alarm and left before eight sometimes, even on Sunday mornings?) But that engine in your Ford Probe never failed to wake me up. I wonder now where you went then. I should have made it more clear that we wanted you to stick around, to have some pancakes at least.

Anyway, one day that fall, your senior year, I went down to the basement with a basket full of Wes’s and Janey’s laundry. Why I was still doing my sixteen-and fifteen-year-olds’ laundry is a good question. That day, for the first time, I decided to throw some of your things in the wash too. At first I hesitated, though—would you be offended? Would you think I was too forward, or meddling? Also, I have to admit, I wondered whether it would set a bad precedent. Would you expect me to keep it up?

I opened the closet door where you used to stash your stuff before we brought that dresser downstairs. What was I expecting? Probably a pile of dirty clothes on the floor or stuffed in a backpack. I liked the idea of you finding fresh clothes all folded up, the next time you came over. Instead I saw … well, I saw your setup.

On the floor of that storage closet were small bundles of tightly rolled and folded clothes. Arranged in seven piles, each had a T-shirt, a pair of boxers, socks bundled together, and maybe a sweatshirt stacked underneath. You had one pair of jeans, inside out, neatly rolled and lined up to the side. There was a pair of your sneakers. There was your football jacket. All of them rolled or tightly wrapped so as to take up as little space as possible.

And then there were the notes. Forgive me. I read them. I turned on the overhead light:
Mondays, 9/16 (wash 9/24), 9/23 (wash 9/24—shrunk! no dryer!), 9/30,
etc. You were keeping track of when you wore certain shirts—the PacWoman one, the flannel button-up, the rock concert one—because you owned so few. You notated which were clean, when you needed to wash your socks … you must have done it late at night. There was a plastic bag on the floor too, full of powdered detergent that you must have swiped from somewhere else (the school gym? a friend’s house?). You were so determined not to impose on us any more than you already had that you weren’t even using my detergent. You were carefully parsing out your clean clothes, making sure not to be seen in a shirt two days in a row, making sure to only run one load per week. And with these little notes that kind of broke my heart that afternoon.

Have you ever had the experience of flowing straight into someone else’s mind and heart? I sat on the floor in front of that closet and felt myself dissolve. For a few short moments I knew what it was like to be
you
, bouncing from house to house, hoarding and organizing your few, scattered possessions—essentially homeless. Proud and secretly afraid. Thick-skinned and confused, angry and grateful. Seventeen years old.

Although I’m embarrassed to write this, up until then, I thought you were my good deed. You know I worried you’d corrupt Wes, we’ve joked about that. I also liked to think of myself as a “cool mom”
—sure, no problem, enjoy my pullout couch.
I liked the way it made me look—the way
you
made me look: to Wes and Jane, to my friends, to myself. But I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t spend much time really feeling what life was like for you. When I did, thanks to a nosy laundry idea … well, it jolted me out of complacency. I didn’t run to get the guardian forms (you know that took a while for both of us to get our heads around), nor did I scoop up your clothes and find a better place for them than the floor of that old storage closet. After some time I quietly closed the door, leaving your system intact. Probably you didn’t notice any change in my attitude toward you. But you became more of a person to me that day.

This photocopy is a very short story called “The Huntsman” by Anton Chekhov. It’s barely four pages, don’t roll your eyes like that. On the one hand, nothing “happens” in this story, right? A hunter meets a peasant woman in the woods, they speak, he walks on. But then again … do you see the moment where his attitude shifts, regarding her? What makes him ask her “how do you live?” Why does he want to know?

*   *   *

Surprisingly, you didn’t have to do much differently when mailing a letter to Iraq than when you mailed one to your mother in her retirement home one county away. At first, Ellen hadn’t believed the post office worker who shrugged off her inquiries about special stationery, stamps:
Just put the FPO address on it
, she was told,
and a regular old thirty-seven-center.
But a few minutes of searching online confirmed that. So she typed on her computer, printed off on copy paper, and folded the pages inside a plain white number ten envelope. It was strange to see those letters to PFC Michael Cacciarelli in a stack of Ellen’s other correspondence on the hall table, waiting to go out. Same postage, same appearance. Like we might be tricked, Ellen thought, into forgetting how far away these soldiers are.

Mike had been gone just over a month. “Over there.” Any week now would tip the scales—this would be the longest she, or any of them, had gone without seeing him. All they knew was that he was in Anbar Province; although that, Wes said, meant nothing. “It’s a catchall term for the western area, full of Sunni militia. Where they send almost all the Marines. It’d be like saying you live in the Midwest, Mom. Almost impossible to guess which city.”

Ellen understood this and didn’t. She knew that Wes and Jane were in more contact with him, had talked to him more before deployment, were more clued in. She didn’t ask and they didn’t tell, an old pattern left over from the days when Mike’s whereabouts would have upset her, so were deliberately withheld. Actually, Ellen thought, back then her kids underestimated her quite a bit. Maybe they imagined that Mike’s drinking and fighting and general troublemaker lifestyle were too much for their ivory-tower mom to handle. Or that she’d never spent time around drugs herself (she came of age in the
1960s,
for Pete’s sake). Or that Janey’s own phases of secrecy and excess hadn’t schooled Ellen in both steely resolve and a Zen-like not-clinging-to-expectations. In a way, she encouraged that “don’t tell Mom” three-against-one setup when Mike was living with them. She loved their growing closeness; she wanted Mike to have allies his own age. And she had enough trust in the surprising force of their own relationship—hers and Mike’s—that she could allow the division between them.

Also, the guilt. She and Mike had an unspoken agreement about their closeness. Neither of them alluded to so many conversations—those late-night talks while watching TV, the things they told each other driving around Madison—when the others were around. One morning at breakfast, Jane had gone from bleary to animated over her mug of tea, reading an article out loud, the idiotic story of a criminal who “butt-dialed” 911 while robbing a liquor store. Ellen watched in amazement—and quickly followed suit—as Mike listened carefully, even asking a few laughing questions, as if the whole thing were new to him. When in fact the night before she and he had caught a segment about it on the late-night news, which even included audio of the recorded call. But he pretended, and so she did.

Maybe Mike was embarrassed, later, about how much time they’d spent together. Or maybe he didn’t want Wes and Jane to feel weird about it, to get territorial. So why did Ellen go along? Why did she always feel she was keeping something from Wes and Jane? Part of it was not wanting the inevitable taint of sex to cloud the air. She knew how it looked—a lonely older woman, a young attentive man. As a longtime teacher, Ellen had had her fair share of classroom crushes. She wasn’t unfamiliar with the ego boost and inward thrill that an attractive, interested student could provide. But it wasn’t that. Or, it was more than that.

Over the weeks he’d been gone, her letters to Mike had taken on an importance that was hard to shake. Ellen worked on them constantly, essays she composed and revised over the course of a feverish three or four or five days. She discarded the hysterical style of that first letter, in which she’d foolishly tried to convince him to go AWOL. (Why had she thought that would work on him?) What she was going for now: a lifeline made of literature, a rescue built of the only power Ellen believed in. The study’s once-organized bookshelves became messy and caved in, so many volumes pulled out, scanned, discarded. How to find the right text for a boy (a man, a man, she knew she was meant to think of him that way) who’d barely squeaked through a mediocre high school? How to find the words (others’ and her own) that would keep him tied to humanity, to himself? That would save his soul—for her aim in these letters was nothing less.

*   *   *

One night when he was on leave from base, about a week before he was flown to Al Asad, Mike came to dinner. It was just the two of them; Ellen made meat loaf with extra ketchup and bacon slices on top. Maybe he was nervous and couldn’t wait, or maybe he wanted to get it over with, but before they’d even finished eating, Mike took out a folder he’d brought.

“You’re not going to like this,” he said. “But procrastinating will just make it worse, so…”

The same phrases she’d used to get him to tackle overdue homework assignments!

Mike said, “So this is, like, my will.”

Ellen wiped her hands on her rough linen napkin and took the sealed envelope. “I’ll keep it in the file cabinet in my study, with the other papers.” Their guardianship forms; her own will; all the kids’ medical and identification files.

“A few other papers: copy of the deed to my car. I sold it last week, but just in case the guy turns out to be a douche. This one’s my credit card info, my bank account numbers.”

She accepted the pieces of paper one at a time as he handed them to her. In the kitchen above their round wood table, an overhead lamp draped them both in soft light; NPR murmured from an upstairs radio, where she’d forgotten to turn it off. This big, dear young man was here, was so physically
here,
in existence, in his faded black White Sox T-shirt and cheap deodorant fumes, that it seemed impossibly wrong to be planning for a theoretical time when he might not be.

Ellen pulled a brochure out of the stack of papers he was sorting through.
Letters to Your Service Member.
She skimmed the advice that came in boxes next to photographs of beaming parents, arms slung around uniformed young men and women.
Receiving a letter from home is the best part of a soldier’s day. Take care that your words ENCOURAGE and UPLIFT him or her. Leave out all complaints and worries. Remind your soldier that YOU ARE PROUD of him or her, and that YOU BELIEVE IN THE GOOD WORK he or she is doing. Below is a sample letter you may wish to …

“This is embarrassing. I’m actually embarrassed on the military’s behalf.”

Mike peered over the page. “Whatever, they just give us all this crap.”

“Do they actually think parents will copy a preset letter written by some functionary? To mail to their child? I thought propaganda was meant for the enemies.”

“Toss it. Now, this is—”

“And this capitalization … What are we, morons? I know you don’t expect me to write how I BELIEVE IN THE GOOD WORK you’re doing.”

Mike sighed and tried to tug the brochure away from her. “Letters are overrated anyway. That’s like, a holdover from World War II. ‘Dear Mother, Though the bombs are falling, I can picture our farm…’” He snickered.

Ellen yanked it back. “Don’t joke about that. Don’t say letters aren’t important! Of course I’m going to write you—we all are. And you’d better write
back,
” she said, wishing she hadn’t brought it up. A fearful memory of Mike dragging his feet about even the most undemanding compositions …

“Right. Pages and pages about Maisie and Edith Wharton. And am I staying out of trouble.”

“What—what would you like me to write about?” A sudden shyness fell between them.

He swirled the last inch of beer around in his beer bottle. “Whatever. Just—you do your thing. I’ll write back, obviously.” He glanced up at Ellen.

“I want to write something you’ll look forward to. Not some pro forma thing about the weather.”

“Tell me, like…” He shook his head.

“What?”

“Stories about you guys. About us.”

Ellen held back her excitement, a dozen questions:
Old stories? New ones? Those you know, or…?
He was staring hard at the papers in front of him. She wouldn’t push it, but an idea bloomed. What she could do, with writing, for him.

“What’s this?” She unwrapped a piece of red felt cloth, rolled into a tube. It was a banner about a foot long, attached to a wooden dowel with a gold tasseled cord. On its front, a white velvet rectangle with a blue star in its center. Included in the packet was a suction cup hook and a piece of paper:
Rules for Proper Display of Service Flag.
“I see I’m supposed to hang this in the front window.” Ellen tried to picture herself doing that. And if anyone noticed it—the postman, the cleaning woman—would they even know what it meant?
Outdated and maudlin,
she thought, repulsed.

“I don’t know what all this crap is, I’m just supposed to give it to you. Junk it for all I care. What else? Oh, right. They want us to hand over copies of birth certificates and Social Security cards, so…”