Your Eyes in Stars (4 page)

E
LISA AND
I were as unalike as grapes and walnuts. Elisa was affectionate, calling me
Süsse
and always reminding me how glad of our friendship she was. I was my mother’s daughter, as demonstrative as a stone. Close as I could come to showing her my feelings was sometimes calling Elisa dear heart, in a teasing tone.

She was the only person in my life who called me Jessica. She had told me that I wasn’t a Jessica at all, but I should always call myself that. “When the person becomes dear, then the name does too,” she said.

She had talked me into letting my hair grow longer. I drew the line at manicures.

“All right, but I wish you would stop biting your nails, Jessica. I love to give manicures. One day perhaps I may become a manicurist.” She was always saying what she would perhaps become: a teacher, a rich man’s wife, a translator, a poet.

Elisa loved poetry, one American poet especially, named Sara Teasdale.

“Never heard of her,” I’d said. I hadn’t heard of her because I didn’t read poetry, except for the Burma Shave ads along the road:

One day Elisa said, “Listen to what Sara Teasdale wrote.

“That’s how I want to feel someday about someone,” Elisa said.

“I like poetry better when someone reads it,” I said.

“Don’t you want to feel that way about someone someday?”

“I have to think about that.”

“What is there to think about?”

“Nothing. Everything. I’m just getting used to talking about ideas that usually stay in my head. Sometimes I don’t even know they’re there. Then something makes me see them.”

“Sara Teasdale killed herself,” Elisa said.

“She did not.”

“She did too.”

“Daddy told me if anyone thinking about suicide could shut his eyes and see how he would turn out if he stayed alive, no one would ever do it.”

“Oh, I believe that too. And I believe a lot of people have suicidal thoughts,” Elisa said. “Why do you blush?”

“I’ve thought of doing it. Sort of.” I was expecting a reaction, a cry of No!, wide eyes, at least a raised eyebrow.

“Sort of? I’ve thought of jumping! Every time we went somewhere high, like the Eiffel Tower. You know, in Paris? I’d look down and say to myself, ‘Jump, Elisa!’”

“I know the Eiffel Tower is in Paris. I might not go places, but I know about them!”

“Jumping, drowning, shooting yourself if you can find a gun,” said Elisa. “I think anyone in her right mind thinks about doing it at some point. I believe we all have inside lives as well as outside ones. Sometimes the inside life takes over.”

“Is that what happened to Sara Teasdale?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she believed something about her life was worse than it really was.”

“She probably had dark thoughts,” I said.

“I used to have dark thoughts,” she said.

“About what?”

“About never belonging anywhere, missing Germany, never having a real home.”

“You had a life instead.”

“I didn’t have friends until you. I never even petted a cat the way I pet your Mugshot. I still hardly ever see my father, and he is the most important person in my life…. What are your dark thoughts about?”

“I miss Elmira, New York.”

“What do you miss about it?”

“Myself. I was myself there. When we moved here, we
found out all the prison kids went to Cayuta High West. I think they didn’t want us at East.”

“I don’t have such dark thoughts since I met you,” said Elisa.

“Me neither since you waltzed across the street.”

A
GOOD MANY
Cayutians had summer homes on the lake. They lived there from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Some places were shacks, unheated, with outdoor plumbing, and others were grander. Our family could never move there summers because my father had to be in his home at the bottom of Retribution Hill, on call if anything went wrong at the prison.

We could look up and see the prison and hear it. There were shouts from the yard where men recreated. There was always a band rehearsal and the sound of individual band members practicing the drums or the saxophone—whatever instruments they played. Those times prisoners cut our lawn or put on the storm windows, I wasn’t allowed to talk to them or even appear when they were there.

This warm day in the middle of June, Elisa and I were at my house, making egg-and-olive sandwiches for a picnic. Elisa had brought the bread and olives across the street
while I hard-boiled the eggs. I had made a batch of chocolate nut fudge, a treat Elisa liked.

Many of our classmates had moved to Cayuta Lake for the summer with their families. I remembered past summers I’d skulked around feeling sorry for myself. I had the idea not going to the lake summers was just another way of not being part of things. I wasn’t part of things anyway, but I used to think maybe going to the lake could change that.

Now Elisa and I reveled in the idea we had the neighborhood and Hoopes Park to ourselves.

The Stadlers were renting the Sontag house indefinitely, paying twenty dollars a month. Tom Sontag had taken a job as a bull, hired by the railroads to toss off hoboes. Gertie Sontag had been living all winter in their summer camp, which had coal heat and no indoor plumbing. The Sontags were in bad shape, since Tom Sontag had worked for years at Joystep Shoes. Now he was doing work he was ashamed of, often hurting badly the men he threw from the trains.

Whenever Elisa came over to our house, she would wear things that matched perfectly and white things that were beyond white, they were so clean and pressed. She always wore her grandmother’s small gold dachshund pin. Her nails were never chipped. She had her own favorite
American perfume too. Evening in Paris. She said she just liked the name. “Someday,” she said to me, “we will go together on a visit to Paris, high up in the Eiffel Tower.” She said there was an outside elevator. “You go up at a slant,” she said.

“Not me,” I said. “I won’t go up in anything that’s at a slant.”

“You will get over it for Paris!”

“Not even for Paris.
Pas du tout!
” I was trying out what little French I knew. I liked the idea of dropping a foreign word into a sentence as Elisa did.

We were always laughing and squealing, and that morning my mother came from reading
Picture Show
on the sun porch and stood in the kitchen doorway, watching us. She had on one of her flowery silk housecoats, her auburn hair pulled back behind her head and held with a white ribbon.

I was embarrassed by my mother’s reading material. Never mind the books under her mattress. Even though I read them, I believed that my real reading material—the bestsellers sent from book clubs, and the novels I checked out of the library—made up for my dips into my mother’s trash.

On rare occasions I’d seen Elisa’s mother in the library, although Mrs. Stadler darted from view when she saw me.
I asked the librarian what kinds of books she read, and I was told that she was learning English by reading the poet T. S. Eliot.

Elisa looked up from the sandwiches we were making and said, “I didn’t see you standing there, Mrs. Myrer.”

“How are you, Elisa, and how is your family? In all this time your mother and your father have not come across to visit.”

Elisa skipped past that comment by saying, “My mother wonders why you feed the tramps.”

“I didn’t think your mother had any curiosity about us.”

“Your tramps come to our house.”

“They aren’t our tramps. We don’t own them!” I said. “We always erase the chalk marks they make in front of our house, so other tramps don’t know we give handouts.”

“Then there must be a grape vineyard,” said Elisa, “because tramps are in the neighborhood.”

“She means a grapevine,” I told my mother.

Elisa said, “My mother says, ‘Who knows what kind of people they are?’”

“They are people down on their luck,” said my mother.

“They’re not just in our neighborhood. I saw one up in Hoopes Park last week,” I said.

I’d almost forgotten that there was this tramp shuffling along in clothes too big, out of place in the rock garden,
where I liked to go. At first I thought it was Crazy Carl Plum, the backward son of the town funeral director who played jacks sometimes in the garden. But this man had a small, long brown dog with him he led on a piece of rope. I had never seen such a skinny, undernourished creature.

The tramp must have come from Railroad Woods, near the tracks, where Richard said there was a hobo camp. Last winter he took gloves and scarves to them, and leftovers from the Nolan refrigerator.

I’d called after the tramp, “Don’t you feed your dog?”

“Mind your beeswax!” he’d shouted back. Then he’d dragged the poor dog across the gravel, muttering at him, “Come on, you stupid animal!”

If I had told my mother about the way he’d treated the dog, she would have marched to that spot instantly and stayed there, hoping to catch this man. She would have scolded him, shaking a finger at him, telling him she would report him to the SPCA if he didn’t take better care of his dog. That was one thing I liked about her. She stuck up for cats, dogs, birds. She wouldn’t even kill a spider in our house.

Another thing about my mother I liked was the way she treated Myra from Elmira. Sometimes I’d see Myra waiting for the bus back to Elmira, wearing Mother’s worn-out sling pumps with bobby socks, or sporting on a sweater some five-and-dime rhinestone pin Mother had tired of,
which Myra wore scrubbing floors. Working alongside each other hanging clothes or doing dishes, they gossiped together about Hollywood stars, and my mother occasionally invited her into the backyard on summer afternoons for a glass of iced tea.

“Poor Myra!” said my mother once. “That’s what happens when you give your most valuable possession away to some sweet-talker. No one buys the cow when they can get the milk free.”

“Was Daddy a sweet-talker?” I asked her.

She waved her hand at me as though she were waving away flies.

My mother wasn’t up for many heart-to-heart talks about the facts of life. If I’d listened only to her, I’d still think babies came from long-legged large white wading birds with red beaks.

My mother finished the discussion about tramps by asking Elisa, “Hasn’t your mother ever known someone who’s down on his luck? We’re in the middle of a depression, in case she doesn’t know that.”

Elisa said, “My mother says Americans encourage lawbreakers with their movies.”

“We’re not talking about lawbreakers,” said my mother. “We’re talking about homeless people…. Are those eggs from our refrigerator?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Surprise, surprise,” said my mother.

“Elisa brought the bread and olives.”

“And the lettuce and the mayonnaise,” said Elisa.

I knew my mother thought Elisa was using me.

One day I asked my mother what I could possibly have that Elisa would want. She had an answer without even thinking about it. “Someday ask yourself what a bright, attractive girl is doing with someone younger and from people she deems not good enough to introduce to her own family. Maybe the answer to that is someone likes being superior to someone else. Someone likes to lord it over someone else.”

“I tell her things about people. That’s what she likes.”

“
Pffft.
What do you know about people?”

But that morning Mother had something up her sleeve, because she had that certain sugary tone to her voice. “Where are you going for your picnic, girls?”

“The backyard,” I said.

My mother looked at Elisa with one of her crooked smiles and said, “Oh, is the picnic in your backyard, Elisa?”

“Not over there,” said Elisa. “This yard.”

“I am afraid that’s not possible,” my mother said.

“We always picnic here,” I said, though this was to be only our second picnic.

“Not today! You know how your father feels about your being anywhere near one of the prisoners,” said my mother.

Elisa’s eyes grew large with excitement, and she said something in German I’d heard her exclaim before. She was probably cussing. Sometimes German wasn’t that far from English, and I understood: words like
Hure
and
Sau
and
mein Gott
.

“Is there a prisoner coming?” she asked.

“There is a prisoner already here,” my mother answered. “The Bugle Boy.”

Elisa ran to the window near the dinette. “Can I see him?”

“You’re not supposed to see him. He’s cleaning out the shed with my husband.”

I said, “How come Daddy let him be off grounds so soon? I thought an inmate wasn’t supposed to get any away time until he’d been here a year.”

“If you ask me, rules don’t apply to that boy,” said my mother. “Daddy lets him get away with murder.”

Elisa and I giggled at that, and my mother got red. “You know what I mean. He’s Daddy’s pet.”

Elisa was at the window. “Jessica…I see him! I see him.”

I followed her to the dinette window.

“Look!” Elisa said. “The prisoner’s playing with the stray cat.”

“The prisoner loves that little stray,” said Mother. “I’ve looked out to see him holding it and talking to it like it was a baby. You girls come away from there now.”

Elisa and I couldn’t see the prisoner’s face well. He was wearing the blue cap with the white
B
on it. Only band members had the
B
on their caps. He had the peak pulled down over his eyes. We just had a side view of him. He looked very thin and young. He looked like a kid.

My father was sitting on the wooden garden bench while Slater Carr stood talking to him. The kitten was rubbing its face against the prisoner’s pants leg.

“We have to call the SPCA to come for the kitty,” my mother said, getting to her feet. “I’ll see if I can capture it.”

She started out the kitchen door, saying over her shoulder, “You girls stay put! You’re not even supposed to look at anyone from The Hill.”

That was the moment the small wire-haired brown dog appeared, running at the kitten, which headed for the nearest tree. I ran out to stop the dog, and Elisa followed.

My mother turned around and held up both hands, like a traffic cop rerouting cars. “Go back!” she shouted at Elisa and me.

“My heart beats rapidly,” said Elisa. “We almost saw Slater.”

“I thought you didn’t fancy criminals.”

“You have made Slater intriguing to me,” said Elisa, “and he’s a musician too. He killed only one person, Jessica.”

“Most of our murderers killed just one.” I’d never told her Slater was an accomplice, not a murderer. I figured my story of a crime of passion was more intriguing than the truth, and the truth wouldn’t change anything now.

“But Dillinger killed more than one,” she answered.

“He’s different. He’s a bank robber.”

“I think Slater would be better for you to think about than John Dillinger.”

“
You
think about him,” I said. “I give him to you.”

A time would come when I would remember saying that to Elisa and regretting it with all my heart.