Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (23 page)

     "One thing I still don't understand," another girl said, "is what was that bit about his grand movement. What's that?"

     "It's the same as his 'engine of love-assaults,'" Dee Dee said, and a few of the girls frowned. Only the oldest ones—Christine, Frizz, and Dee Dee—understood what
Fanny Hill
was really about, and even they were a bit vague on some points. But all the girls, down to the youngest, who was eleven, grasped the fact that it was about sex, and even though they couldn't quite picture what was going on, they were titillated all the same.

     But the Starlets club wasn't just about reading dirty books. It was also about experimenting with makeup, discussing fashions, giving one another perms, and sharing secrets, fears, and dreams. The club had its early beginnings four years ago, shortly after the pork chop incident, when Amber's popularity had begun to dwindle as the girls had gravitated toward Christine and Frizz. They began to gather in Christine's room, now that she no longer shared with Amber but with Frizz, and talk for hours after lights-out.

     On this rainy night, twelve girls were crowded into Christine's room, where the air was thick with the fragrances of cosmetics, perfume, nail polish, and Toni perm solution, all mingling with the pungency of burning candles. In an attempt to straighten Frizz's hair, Christine was rolling it onto huge brush curlers, using a hair straightener they had bought at Newberry's during one of the school outings to the city. While Frizz sat with a towel around her shoulders, munching from a giant box of Milk Duds, other girls were giving one another manicures and pedicures, inventing hair-dos, and trying on sheer nylon stockings, wearing gloves to keep from snagging them. They consumed potato chips and candy bars and Coca-Colas, all prohibited by the sisters. The club rule was that only luxuries, only forbidden things were allowed at Starlets meetings; anything the sisters permitted, such as writing letters, ironing, or mending, was outlawed. And so as the girls applied Coty, Maybelline, and Hazel Bishop products to their faces, or tried on jewelry and lingerie, they talked mostly about boys and sex.

     Lately they had been getting most of their information from Dee Dee, who was seventeen, like Frizz, and very worldly. She was the newest member of the club, having arrived at St. Bridget's only a few weeks ago from Philadelphia, where there was a popular local TV show called "American Bandstand."
The show sounded heavenly to the boy-starved girls of St. Bridget's who all wished they could go to a
real
school and dance the bunny hop on Friday nights with (gasp) boys.

     Dee Dee was deliriously daring because she had stitched down the pleats of her school uniform so that she practically wore a straight skirt. She also had a boyfriend back in Philadelphia with whom she had gone "all the way." While Dee Dee had never divulged the actual details of her intimacy with Chuck, the girls all imagined it must have been like something out of
Fanny Hill
, Dee Dee with her skirt over her head, Chuck coming at her with his "weapon."

     "What color is that?" one of the girls asked Mouse, who was putting on lipstick.

     "It's called Raspberry Torte," Mouse said in her funny little voice. "Do you like it?" She had applied it too thickly and it went outside the lip line; she was so small, and had such tiny features, that the effect was more clownlike than flattering, but she smiled so eagerly that they assured her it made her look like a movie star. She giggled and proceeded to apply more.

     What the girls liked best about these secret meetings was how good they always felt afterward. They came together to seek reassurance and approval from peers, to allay their adolescent fears and insecurities, to confirm to one another that they were
all right.
They all agreed that Christine Singleton, whom they affectionately called Choppie because of the pork chop incident when she had stood up to Amber, was the central force in Starlets. She had a way, the girls realized, of making them feel better about themselves. She wouldn't let any girl say "I'm dumb" or "I'm ugly." And if you really were dumb or ugly, she'd say, "Well, let's see if we can find a way to change that." Each new girl in the group would say that, after you got to know Christine, you forgot that she was so fat.

     "There's still something I don't understand about
Fanny Hill
," said a fifteen-year-old girl who was tweezing her thick eyebrows in the hopes of looking like Audrey Hepburn. "Why is the man's thing referred to as a pistol or a battering ram? And just what
does
he do with it, anyway?"

     While an animated discussion broke out, with all sorts of outrageous speculations put forth by the innocent girls of St. Bridget's, Frizz sighed,
popped a Milk Dud in her mouth, and said, "I'm never going to get involved with men. I'm going to have a career."

     "Of course you are," Christine said as she squirted solution on a hank of Frizz's hair and rolled it around a curler. "I have every confidence in you."

     Frizz raised the hand mirror to her face and frowned at the helmet of brush curlers on her head. "If I could just do something about this hair!"

     "We'll figure something out. If this doesn't work, maybe something else will."

     "I wish I were a blonde," Dee Dee said as she applied a fresh layer of polish to her toenails. "Like Marilyn Monroe. I tried dyeing my hair once and my mother nearly killed me."

     "Put lemon on your hair and stand out in the sun," one girl offered. She had purchased some long, dangly earrings at Woolworth and was turning her head this way and that to see how they caught the candlelight.

     "How about just bleach?" Mouse offered.

     "Peroxide," said another.

     "Marilyn Monroe's hair isn't naturally blond. How does
she
do it?"

     "I would give
anything
to look like her," little Mouse said wistfully, shifting her attention away from her heavily rouged lips to her hair, which was, no denying it, a mousy brown.

     Christine was reminded then of Amber, who had been naturally blond and the envy of the school. Christine recalled the night she had gotten out of bed to go to the bathroom and had found Amber bent over one of the toilets, vomiting. "Are you sick?" she had asked, and Amber had shot back, "Shut up and don't be so ignorant." And then she had done an astonishing thing. She had stuck her finger down her throat. "Why are you making yourself throw up?" Christine had asked, and Amber had said, "You don't expect me to be fat like you, do you?" And Christine had thought in shock, She would rather be sick than look like me.

     She wondered now, as she rolled the last prickly curler into Frizz's hair, if Amber was happy. She had graduated a year ago. To everyone's surprise, her mother had come to the ceremony, a slender, elegant woman who had arrived in a Rolls-Royce with a crest on the door, and the nuns had addressed her as "Countess." So Amber hadn't been lying after all, and
the girls' envy had increased, although Christine thought that Amber had looked unhappy as she rode away from the school.

     Mouse said something funny, and all the girls laughed. When Christine saw how Mouse beamed at the attention, she thought how different the pixyish girl was at these secret meetings from the rest of the time. During the day, Mouse was so quiet you forgot she was there. Her self-esteem was so low that, at twelve, her shoulders were already curving inward toward her chest, like a little broken bird. Mouse was one of the many girls at the school who was an inconvenience to her parents and who had been put away here so they could get on with their lives.

     It was Mouse who had given the club its name. When she joined a year ago, shortly after she came to St. Bridget's, it had taken her a long time before she got up the nerve to even talk. While the others freely expressed their secret desires and dreams, Mouse had sat huddled in a corner, like a dog that had been whipped. But finally, one night, with encouragement from the others, she had squeaked out her private dream: "To be a starlet." And so that's what they were called, from then on.

     "Well?" Frizz said when the last curler was in.

     "The instructions say we wait thirty minutes."

     "This stuff stinks. Do you think it'll work?"

     "You are going to look
dynamite.
"

     Christine was trying to cheer her friend up because of what had happened that afternoon.

     "I can't face her alone," Frizz had said that morning, referring to her mother, who was making one of her rare visits. "Please come with me and be my moral support. I know why she's here. It's because I graduate soon, and I just know what she's going to say. Please help me convince her to let me go to New York and study drama."

     Christine had agreed to go because she had met Mrs. Randall several times before, and she knew the kind of effect the woman had on her daughter. And also because Christine believed strongly in Frizz's dream to go on the stage. She thought her best friend had natural talent; Frizz was uninhibited and liked to entertain, and St. Bridget's own drama instructor, a lay teacher from Marin who came in to teach twice a week, had said that Frizz
had real potential and that she should pursue theatrical study. But Mrs. Randall wouldn't hear of it. People who worked in theater, she declared, were among the lowest of society's classes, and she wasn't going to see her daughter get involved with such riffraff. Unfortunately, Frizz's real father had died years ago, and Mrs. Randall had gotten married again to someone who distanced himself completely from anything involving the girl. So there was no one Frizz could appeal to.

     As they had sat in the sunshine on the convent lawn, with the salty smell of the bay occasionally whispering through the trees, Christine could see where her friend had gotten her personality. Frizz's mother was a flamboyant woman who wore bright red lipstick, furs, diamonds, and who looked at her watch a lot. It struck Christine that Mrs. Randall seemed slightly embarrassed by her daughter, although she couldn't guess why. Frizz's Aunt Lois had also come, a quiet, plain woman who sat with her hands folded in her lap as if she were attending a church service.

     "You can't come and live with us," Mrs. Randall had said. "Our apartment is just too small and your stepfather wouldn't like it. We have our social life to think of. You simply wouldn't fit in. I should think you would jump at your Aunt Lois's generous offer to take you in after you graduate."

     "But Aunt Lois lives on a farm, Mama," the seventeen-year-old had said. "I don't
like
farms."

     "Well, you're hardly in a position to choose, are you? You can't stay at St. Bridget's after you graduate. Where would you go?"

     "I want to go to New York, Mama. I told you. I want to study the theater."

     "And I've already told you that that is out of the question. And I must say that you're acting very ungrateful. Lois is being kind, and you don't seem to appreciate it."

     "Please, Mama—"

     "It's settled, my dear girl, and that's that."

     As she watched Christine apply the last of the lotion to the curlers, Frizz said, "I visited my Aunt Lois once, when I was eleven. In her way, she is kind and gentle, but she's so God awful quiet. She doesn't even have a radio in her house. She bakes all day long, or sews, or knits, and then sells the stuff at the
local church bazaar. That's what she'll try to turn me into. Can you
see
it? I would die of boredom!"

     "Your mother can't make you do it, can she?" Christine asked. "After all, you'll be eighteen by then."

     "Oh, Choppie, I'm not strong like you. I can't stand up to her."

     "Sure you can," Christine said with a smile. "You've just got to believe in yourself. You've always got to have hope."

     Christine's own hope came from the letters her father sent regularly each month.

     They arrived from exotic places, such as London and Stockholm, and they were always full of vivid descriptions, especially of the food: "I have discovered the delight of snails, Dolly. And frog legs, if you can imagine it! Loaded with garlic and swimming in butter. I'm collecting recipes, and someday I'll cook these marvelous dishes for you." Johnny always put postcards in with the letters, and once in a while a souvenir—a theater stub from London, a ticket to a museum in Rome. Christine had decorated the wall beside her bed with them, creating a colorful collage of foreign scenes and monuments.

     She wrote faithfully back to him, addressing the letters to a post office box in nearby Marin, because he had given up the apartment in the city. She told him about her classes, her favorite subjects, the fun she and Frizz were having, about Starlets and all her friends.

     The letters had helped the months drift into years, until before she knew it she was celebrating her sixteenth birthday under St. Bridget's roof. She had hoped her father would come then, but he had written from Holland, including a bag of tulip bulbs, which she had given to the convent gardener. Nonetheless, a bouquet of flowers and a box of candy did arrive at the school on the day of her birthday, from a florist in San Francisco, and a card, written by someone else, that said, "Happy sixteenth, Dolly, from your loving daddy." She wished he would telephone just one time, or that there was a number where he could be reached. In four years, she had not once heard the sound of his voice.

     As she looked back over her time at St. Bridget's, she was surprised to see how comparatively easily, after those first troubled months, she had
adjusted to convent life. When she wrote to her father that she had been put on a diet and that the carrot sticks were making her ill, Johnny had sent instructions to the school that his daughter was to eat the same food as everyone else. Solace in one form at least had returned to her life, and the best nights were when macaroni and cheese was served, or fried chicken, or mashed potatoes and gravy, because these brought comfort.

     But mostly, Christine's adjustment to life at the school, and her happiness over the past four years, had been because of her friendship with Frizz.