Stargirl (9 page)

21

On weekends and after dinner, we delivered many potted violets. And CONGRATULATIONS! balloons. And cards of many sentiments. She made her own cards. She wasn’t a great artist. Her people were stick figures. The girls all had triangle skirts and pigtails. You would never mistake one of her cards for a Hallmark, but I have never seen cards more heartfelt. They were meaningful in the way that a schoolchild’s homemade Christmas card is meaningful. She never left her name.

But finally, after much pestering from me, she did tell me how she knew what was going on in people’s lives. It was simple, she said. She read the daily paper. Not the headlines or the front page or the sports page or the comics or the TV listings or the Hollywood gossip. What she read were the parts that most people ignored, the parts without headlines and pictures, the boondocks of the paper: the hospital admissions, the death notices, the birthday and wedding announcements, the police blotter, the coming events calendar.

Most of all, she read the fillers.

“I
love
fillers!” she exclaimed.

“What are fillers?” I said.

She explained that fillers are little items that are not considered important enough to be a story or to have a headline. They’re never more than one column wide, never more than an inch or two deep. They are most commonly found at the bottoms of inside pages, where the eye seldom travels. If the editors had their way, they would never use fillers. But sometimes a reporter doesn’t write quite enough words, and the story doesn’t reach all the way to the bottom of the page. The paper can’t have a blank space there, so the editor dumps in a filler. A filler doesn’t need to be “news.” It doesn’t need to be important. It doesn’t even need to be read. All it’s asked to do is take up space.

A filler might come from anywhere and be about anything. It might tell how many pounds of rice a typical Chinese person eats in a lifetime. Or say something about beetles in Sumatra. Or the filler might come from down the street. It might mention that so-and-so’s cat is missing. Or that so-and-so has a collection of antique marbles.

“I search through fillers like a prospector digging for gold,” she said.

“So that’s it?” I said. “You read the papers?”

“No,” she said, “that’s not all. There’s also the place where I get my hair cut. I always overhear good stuff there. And of course there’re bulletin boards. Do you know how many bulletin boards there are in town?”

“Sure,” I said facetiously, “I count them every day.”

“So do I,” she said, not kidding. “So far, I’m up to forty-one.”

Offhand, I couldn’t think of one, except the plywood roadrunner. “What do you learn from bulletin boards?”

“Oh…somebody just opened a business. Somebody lost a dog. Somebody needs a companion.”

“Who advertises for a companion?” I said. “Who needs one that bad?”

“Lonely people,” she said. “Old people. Just somebody to sit with them for a while.”

I pictured Stargirl sitting in a dark room with an old woman. I couldn’t picture myself doing the same thing. Sometimes she seemed so far from me.

We were passing Pisa Pizza. “There’s a bulletin board in there,” she said.

It was just inside the door. It was smothered with business cards and notices. I pointed to one that said “Odd Jobs—Ask for Mike,” call this number. “So what’s that tell you?” I said, with more challenge in my voice than I intended.

She read it. “Well, it could be that Mike lost his regular job and can’t find another, so he’s hiring himself out. Or even if he has a regular job, it’s not enough to make ends meet. He’s either not very neat, or he can’t afford a whole piece of paper. This is just a scrap.”

“So what would you do for him?” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know. My parents might have an odd job they need done. Or maybe I do. Or maybe I could just send him a card.”

“What kind of card would he get?”

“A Keep-your-chin-up card.” She poked me. “Hey, want to play a card game?”

I had a feeling she wasn’t talking about poker. “Sure,” I said.

She said she invented it. “All you need is your eyes and one other person. I pick somebody on the street, the mall, a store, wherever, and I follow them. Say it’s a her. I follow her for fifteen minutes, not a minute more. I time myself. The game is, after fifteen minutes of watching her, I have to guess what kind of card she needs.”

“But how can you get it to her?” I said. “You don’t know where she lives.”

“True. That’s as far as it goes. That’s why it’s just a game. It’s just for fun.” She snuggled into me. She whispered in my ear, “Let’s play.”

I said sure.

She said we needed a mall. I usually steered us away from the Mica Mall—too many silent-treatment MAHS kids hanging around there. We drove ten miles to the Redstone Mall. It was a Saturday afternoon.

We picked out a woman. Lime-green skort. White sandals. We guessed her age was early forties. She was buying a soft pretzel—regular, salted—at Auntie Anne’s. She carried the pretzel in a little white paper bag. We followed her into Suncoast Video. We overheard her ask for
When Harry Met Sally
. They didn’t have it. She passed Sonoma, then came back and went in. She wandered about, touching pottery with one fingertip, feeling surfaces. She stopped before the dinner plates. She lifted one with a French café painted on it. “Van Gogh,” Stargirl whispered. The lady seemed to think about the plate, even closed her eyes, holding it to her chest with both hands, as if feeling vibrations. But then she put it back and walked out. On to Sears. Lingerie. Bedclothes. I was uneasy, spying from behind a rack of frilly somethings. She was flipping through nightshirts when time ran out.

Stargirl and I conferred in the corridor.

“Okay,” she said, “what do you think?”

“I think I feel like a stalker,” I said.

“A good stalker,” she said.

“You first,” I said.

“Well, she’s divorced and lonely. No wedding ring. Wants somebody in her life. A home life. She wishes she were Sally and her Harry would come along. She would make him dinner and snuggle with him at night. She tries to eat low-fat foods. She works for a travel agency. She took a free cruise last year, but all she met on the boat were creeps. Her name is Clarissa, she played the clarinet in high school, and her favorite soap is Irish Spring.”

I boggled. “How do you know all that?”

She laughed. “I don’t. I’m guessing. That’s what makes it fun.”

“So what card would you send her?”

She put her finger to her lips. “Hmm…to Clarissa I would send a While-you’re-waiting-for-Harry-be-good-to-yourself card. How about you?”

“I would send a”—I mulled over the phrasing—“a Don’t-let-Harry-catch-you-flicking card.”

Now it was her turn to boggle. “Huh?”

“Didn’t you see her pick her nose?” I said. “In Suncoast?”

“Not really. I saw her hand go to her nose, like she was scratching it or something.”

“Yeah, or something. She was picking, that’s what. She was quick and sneaky. A real pro.”

She gave me a playful shove. “You’re kidding.”

I held up my hands. “I’m serious. She was standing in front of the comedies. Her finger went in and when it came out there was something on it. She carried it around for about a minute. And then, just as she was leaving Suncoast, when she thought nobody was looking, she flicked. I didn’t see where it landed.” She stared at me. I raised my right hand and put my left over my heart. “No lie.”

She broke out laughing, so loudly I was embarrassed. She grabbed my arm with both hands to keep from collapsing. Mallwalkers stared.

We carded two others that day: a woman who spent her whole fifteen minutes feeling leather jackets—we called her Betty—and a man we called Adam because of his huge Adam’s apple, which we renamed Adam’s pumpkin. No more pick-’n’-flickers.

And I did have fun. Whether it came from the game or simply from being with her, I don’t know. I do know I was surprised at how close I felt to Clarissa and Betty and Adam after watching them for only fifteen minutes.

Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money. She was the Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there. Tossed to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench. Even quarters.

“I hate change,” she said. “It’s so…jangly.”

“Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?” I said.

“Did you ever see a little kid’s face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?” she said.

When her change purse was empty, we drove back to Mica. Along the way she invited me to dinner at her house.

22

Archie had claimed the Caraways were normal folks, but I still couldn’t imagine Stargirl coming from an ordinary home. I think I expected a leftover hippie scene from the 1960s. Make love, not war. Her mother in a long skirt with a flower in her hair. Her father’s face framed in muttonchop sideburns, saying “Groovy!” and “Right on!” a lot. Grateful Dead posters. Psychedelic lampshades.

So I was surprised. Her mother wore shorts and a tank top as she worked the pedal of a sewing machine with her bare foot. She was making a Russian peasant costume for a play to be presented in Denver. Mr. Caraway was on a stepladder outside, painting windowsills. No muttonchops; in fact, not much hair at all. The house itself could have been anyone’s. Glossy bentwood furniture, throw rugs over hardwood floors, Southwest accents: an Anasazi-style wedding vase here, a Georgia O’Keeffe print there. Nothing to proclaim, “You see? She came from
here
.”

Same with her room. Except for Cinnamon’s blue and yellow plywood apartment in one corner, it might have belonged to any high school girl. I stood in the doorway.

“What?” she asked.

“I’m surprised,” I said.

“At what?”

“I thought your room would be different.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know. More…you.”

She grinned. “Stacks of fillers? A card-making operation?”

“Something like that.”

“That’s my office,” she said. She let Cinnamon out. He scurried under her bed. “This is my room.”

“You have an office?”

“Yep.” She stuck her foot under the bed. When it came out, Cinnamon was aboard. “I wanted to have a place all my own where I could go to work. So I got one.”

Cinnamon scampered out of the room.

“Where is it?” I said.

She put her finger to her lips. “Secret.”

“Bet I know one person who knows,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Archie.”

She smiled.

“He was talking about you,” I said. “He likes you.”

“He means the world to me,” she said. “I think of him as my grandfather.”

My inspection yielded two curious items. One was a wooden bowl half filled with sand-colored hair.

“Yours?” I said.

She nodded. “For birds looking for nest materials. I put it out in the spring. Been doing it since I was a little girl. I got more business up north than here.”

The other item was on a bookshelf. It was a tiny wagon about the size of my fist. It was made of wood and looked like it might have been an antique toy. It was piled high with pebbles. Several other pebbles lay about the wagon wheels.

I pointed to it. “You collecting stones, or what?”

“It’s my happy wagon,” she said. “Actually, it could just as well be called an unhappy wagon, but I prefer happy.”

“So what’s it all about?”

“It’s about how I feel. When something makes me happy, I put a pebble in the wagon. If I’m unhappy, I take a pebble out. There are twenty pebbles in all.”

I counted three on the shelf. “So there’re seventeen in the wagon now, right?”

“Right.”

“So that means, what, you’re pretty happy?”

“Right again.”

“What’s the biggest number of pebbles ever in the wagon?”

She gave me a sly smile. “You’re looking at it.”

It didn’t seem like just a pile of pebbles anymore.

“Usually,” she said, “it’s more balanced. It hangs around ten, a couple to one side or the other. Back and forth, back and forth. Like life.”

“How close to empty did the wagon ever get?” I said.

“Oh…” She turned her face to the ceiling, closed her eyes. “Once, down to three.”

I was shocked. “Really? You?”

She stared. “Why
not
me?”

“You don’t seem the type.”

“What type is that?”

“I don’t know…” I groped for the right words.

“The three-pebble type?” she offered.

I shrugged.

She picked up a pebble from the shelf and, with a grin, dropped it into the wagon. “Well, call me Miss Unpredictable.”

I joined the family for dinner. Three of us had meatloaf. The fourth—guess who—was a strict vegetarian. She had tofu loaf.

Her parents called her “Stargirl” and “Star” as casually as if she were a Jennifer.

After dinner we sat on her front step. She had brought her camera out. Three little kids, two girls and a boy, were playing in a driveway across the street. She took several pictures of them.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked her.

“See the little boy in the red cap?” she said. “His name is Peter Sinkowitz. He’s five years old. I’m doing his biography, sort of.”

For the tenth time that day she had caught me off guard. “Biography?” Peter Sinkowitz was coasting down his driveway in a four-wheeled plastic banana; the two little girls were running, screaming after him. “Why would you want to do that?”

She snapped a picture. “Don’t you wish somebody came up to you today and gave you a scrapbook called ‘The Life of Leo Borlock’? And it’s a record, like a journal, of what you did on such-and-such a date when you were little. From the days you can’t remember anymore. And there’s pictures, and even stuff that you dropped or threw away, like a candy wrapper. And it was all done by some neighbor across the street, and you didn’t even know she was doing it. Don’t you think when you’re fifty or sixty you’d give a fortune to have such a thing?”

I thought about it. It was ten years since I had been six. It seemed like a century. She was right about one thing: I didn’t remember much about those days. But I didn’t really care either.

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. And anyway, don’t you think his parents are doing that? Family albums and all?”

One of the little girls managed to wrest the banana roadster away from Peter Sinkowitz. Peter started howling.

“I’m sure they are,” she said, snapping another picture. “But those pictures and those moments are posed and smiling. They’re not as real as this. Someday he’s going to love this picture of himself bawling while a little girl rides off on his toy. I don’t follow him around like we did Clarissa. I just keep an eye out for him, and a couple of times a week I jot down what I saw him doing that day. I’ll do it for a few more years, then I’ll give it to his parents to give to him when he’s older and ready to appreciate it.” A puzzled look came over her face. She poked me with her elbow. “What?”

“Huh?” I said.

“You’re staring at me really funny. What is it?”

I blurted, “Are you running for saint?”

I regretted the words as soon as they left my lips. She just looked at me, hurt in her eyes.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to sound nasty.”

“How did you mean to sound?”

“Amazed, I guess.”

“At what?”

I laughed. “What do you think?
You
.” I laughed again. I stood before the steps, facing her. “Look at you. It’s Saturday. I’ve been with you all day, and you’ve spent the whole day doing stuff for other people. Or paying attention to other people. Or following other people. Or taking pictures of other people.”

She looked up at me. The hurt was gone from her eyes, but not the puzzlement. She blinked. “So?”

“So…I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Sounds like you’re saying I’m obsessed with other people. Is that it?”

Maybe it was the angle, but her fawn’s eyes, looking up at me, seemed larger than ever. I had to make an effort to keep my balance lest I fall into them. “You’re different,” I said, “that’s for sure.”

She batted her eyelids and gave me a flirty grin. “Don’t you like different?”

“Sure I do,” I said, maybe a little too quickly.

A look of sudden discovery brightened her face. She reached out with her foot and tapped my sneaker. “I know what your problem is.”

“Really?” I said. “What?”

“You’re jealous. You’re upset because I’m paying all this attention to other people and not enough to you.”

“Right,” I sniffed. “I’m jealous of Peter Sinkowitz.”

She stood. “You just want me all to yourself, don’t you?” She stepped into my space. The tips of our noses were touching. “Don’t you, Mr. Leo?” Her arms were around my neck.

We were on the sidewalk in front of her house, in full view. “What are you doing?” I said.

“I’m giving you some attention,” she cooed. “Don’t you want some attention?”

I was losing my battle for balance.

“I don’t know,” I heard myself say.

“You’re really dumb,” she whispered in my ear.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Why do you think there’re eighteen pebbles in my wagon?” And then the last remaining space between our lips was gone and I was falling headlong into her eyes, right there on Palo Verde after dinner. And I can tell you, that was no saint kissing me.