The Night of the Comet (13 page)

“What?”

“With your sneaky telescope.”

“I wouldn’t—”

She pinched my arm. “I mean it. Don’t!”

I jerked away. “Ouch! That hurt.”

She laughed, and I rubbed my arm, surprised but also secretly thrilled. My skin tingled where she had pinched me, a small, hot burn—our first contact.

“SHOULD
be some good viewing next week, too,” my father said, rocking on the balls of his feet.

The Martellos stood in the yard as our family crowded together on the front porch to see them off. Crane flies bounced off the yellow light bulb overhead. Down at the side of the porch, a cockroach inched along the wall of the house, and I wondered for a second if it was the same one I’d seen earlier, following us outside in one last attempt to ruin our evening.

My father promised Frank that he would come over tomorrow to take a look at his fountain; there was some electrical problem with the pump that he thought he might be able to fix. My mother repeated an invitation for the Martellos to come and visit us again. They were welcome anytime, anytime at all, she said. Just give a shout; we were always here, just across the water. In reply, Frank reached up and, in a teasing show of gallantry, kissed the back of her hand.

“Goodness, I feel like Juliet,” she said, and my father, hugging himself, chuckled and slapped his own arms.

Barbara was already walking away across the yard. “Frank? Are you coming?”

My parents shouted more pleasantries as the Martellos headed to their car, their words trailing off into unfinished promises and gestures. Megan and I exchanged goodbyes with Gabriella until, reaching the road, she pivoted ballet-like on her feet. The streetlight shone on the glossy white finish of their Cadillac. I was reminded of the gulf between us, and as they receded from our porch and approached their car, they seemed not to diminish but to grow in size and stature until, opening the car doors and waving to us one last time, the spell that had cast us as equals was broken and they were revealed once again as our rich, distant neighbors. The whole evening was already beginning to feel like a dream—an unlikely visit to our home by a family of Roman-sized gods.

Standing in the open rear door of the car, Gabriella suddenly shouted, “Hey, Junior.” I jerked my head up. “You are the comet!”

Then she dropped down inside the car, smiling, and closed the door. The headlights came on, the tires crunched on the gravel shoulder, and the night closed behind them as the Martellos drove away.

My parents were talking and cleaning up in the living room when I carried my telescope in through the back door and up the stairs.

“We should invite other neighbors over, too,” said my father. “People like this sort of thing.”

“See, I told you,” said my mother. “Didn’t I tell you? There’s no reason why we can’t be friends. They’re our neighbors, after all, just—”

“—real friendly, real ordinary folks. No, no. You’re right.”

“All you have to do is ask, right? I’m mean, we can’t expect—”

“—can’t expect them to ask us, I know.”

“I mean, it’s only polite that we should invite them first. We’re the locals, after all, they’re the newcomers.… I think they had a good time, don’t you? That Frank, he’s a wild one.”

“Are you taking Christine home or am I?”

I shut my door, turned off the light, and set up the Celestron at the window. I scanned the back wall of their house and found again what I believed to be her bedroom. The light was on but the curtains were closed behind the French doors. I adjusted the focus and waited.

Nothing happened for some time. Other lights came on and went off in their house. My parents’ muffled voices seeped up through the floor as they continued to talk downstairs. Then there was a movement behind one of the French doors, the curtain was pulled aside, and suddenly there stood Gabriella. She hesitated a minute, looking out through the glass. Then she fiddled with the door, opened it, and stepped out onto her balcony.

She was wearing a ruffled yellow nightgown and her hair was pulled back from her neck. She rested her hands on the edge of the balcony and looked down into their patio, the light from the swimming pool casting wavering diamonds across her face and body. Slowly she raised her eyes and looked across their lawn down to the black water gliding between our yards. I could see past her into her room. It was like peering into a dollhouse; every object, every piece of furniture within had the charmed and distinct preciousness of a miniature: her yellow canopied bed, her vanity desk with its mirror and stool, a painted trunk, a nightstand with a lamp with a flowered shade. And in the foreground was Gabriella herself, standing on the balcony in her yellow nightdress, an exquisite doll come to life. My mouth felt dry; I could barely swallow.

She abruptly raised her face toward our house. I didn’t think she could see me—my room was dark and the distance between us was too great—but I didn’t dare move. I froze, holding my breath as I watched her through the scope. She lingered for a moment, as if she were remembering something. The corners of her lips rose slightly. Then she stepped back into her room, closed the doors, and drew the curtains shut.

I went to bed filled with a hot, restless energy. I couldn’t sleep. I had witnessed something significant: she had smiled. Gabriella had smiled, and in that smile, a whole universe was born—stars and planets, galaxies and solar systems, blooming like flowers in the sky.

The Monday morning after our stargazing party, my mother, her face still puffy from lack of sleep, came out to the front step to see me and Megan off to school.

“Have fun!” she shouted, her voice cracking.

Seeing her standing there in her old pink bathrobe, clutching her coffee cup, I couldn’t help but think that she would have gladly run down the steps and joined us if she could, so forlorn and abandoned she looked just then. Megan and I waved, got on the bus, and soon enough I forgot all about her, back there at home doing whatever she did all day while we were at school: cleaning up after breakfast, making our beds, sorting through the laundry, cooking our dinner …

But then again, later that week while sitting at the table doing my homework, I happened to look up and see her in the kitchen washing up after dinner. Her eyes drifted out the window above the sink, across the water to the Martellos’ house blazing with light on the other side of the bayou, and she forgot the plate she was drying in her hands and stood there as though mesmerized.

What, I wondered, could she have been thinking? What made my mother so obviously unhappy with her life? Because now, more and more, I began to see evidence of her dissatisfaction everywhere I looked: it was in the way she hungrily scanned her horoscope at the breakfast table in the morning, and the way she called goodbye to us as we set off to school, and the way she sighed out loud every time she stepped through the front door into our living room.

Sometimes late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I would come downstairs to find her asleep in front of the TV, a half-finished drink tilting precariously in one hand. On the screen would be an old black-and-white movie, the kind where glamorously dressed couples were always strolling through plantation gardens and twirling parasols. I’d slip the glass from her fingers, sniff it, and dump it in the sink.

“Let’s go. Time for bed,” I’d say, urging her up from the sofa.

“Is that—? Oh, I’m sorry, sweetie. I just … What time is it?”

“Bedtime.”

Had she always been this way? Or was it only now, with my own growing distraction, that I started to notice something similar in her?

Back in my room, I turned once more to the stars for answers. I didn’t need a telescope; all I needed was a dark room, a quiet house, and a window. I rolled my head on my pillow and squinted up at the scattered lights outside until I found again that chink in the sky between the stars. In my dreamy half sleep I could see, as though it were a movie projected on the rear wall of heaven, a picture of my mother as she once had been.

Yes, look: there she was, sitting on the living room floor of her parents’ house, having a tea party with her favorite doll, Missy. Her father had made the miniature table and chairs himself; her mother had sewn her dress, a fancy yellow costume trimmed with lace and tulle.

“Now, Missy,” I could hear my six-year-old mother saying. “Don’t
slump over in your chair like that. Would you like some more tea? Yes? Just a little? Okay, I’ll pour it for you.”

The tea was warm water colored with blackstrap molasses. The dessert was day-old bread, toasted with butter and sugar and cut into small squares, “tea cakes,” her mother called them.

Little Lydia Marie prattled on: “I think it’ll be a gorgeous day, don’t you, Missy? Oh, yes. Gorgeous. What would you like to do today? Would you like to ride ponies? Wouldn’t that be fun? Oh, yes. We can ride ponies. Would you like to see my pony? I have a lovely pony. What’s your pony’s name? My pony’s name? My pony’s name … is Esmerelda. Esmerelda! What a gorgeous name for a pony! Oh yes, I think so, too.…”

Although she never admitted it herself, I believed my mother had always felt special—like she was destined for great things in her life, even though there was nothing in her childhood that might have promised her that.

Of the Terrebonne of her youth, she would most often remember the oyster shell roads, and the four paved blocks of downtown, and the smelly municipal dump that always seemed to be on fire, blowing black smoke over the ramshackle houses and shops and fishing piers that made up her hometown. And water, water everywhere. The ground squished beneath your feet whenever you stepped out of doors. Wooden planks were laid all around just so you could walk to the post office and back without drowning, and when it rained too much, she said, their neighbors would tie their boats up right to their porches.

Her parents were “not well off,” as she would delicately describe them later. Her father, Robert Simoneaux—my Paps—had grown up in Terrebonne, trapping for fur and tending to his family’s small holdings of oyster beds. When the oil companies started poking around in south Louisiana, he was one of their first guides, leading the surveyors
through the maze of swamps and bayous that were like his own backyard to him. Her mother, Dorothy Connor—my Grams—was from a large family of Irish Catholics who’d come south to help build levees and dig canals. Lydia Marie (born under the Sun in Aries, the Moon in Libra, and Venus in Pisces, “a very favorable alignment,” she would claim), inherited her father’s dark eyes and her mother’s fair skin and red hair—features that set her apart from her playmates and made her feel, even as a child, distinguished.

Her father used to chuckle to see little Miss Lydia holding up the hem of her dress as she stepped carefully through the mud in their backyard. “Dainty as a princess,” he teased her—but the phrase, he could tell, appealed to her. She refused to go barefoot, like the other neighborhood kids did, and would cry inconsolably if she got dirt on her clothes. Even at six years old, she began to complain that her mattress was too hard for her, that her friends were too rough, that even her parents should have been somehow better than they were. Sometimes she would stamp her foot and demand the impossible: “But why
can’t
I have a pony?” And her mother and father would have to explain again how poor they were, how they couldn’t afford this or that luxury, and the young Lydia would go to bed sobbing, mashing her face into her too-hard mattress and feeling, in a vague but powerful sense, the tragic unfairness of the world.

Nevertheless, my poor mother-to-be might’ve adapted easily enough and gone through life without any higher aspirations than those of her girlfriends, had it not been for a visit one Christmas to New Orleans and an unexpected encounter there. It was an event that she would tell about for years to come, repeating it so often that, for her and her listeners both, it began to take on the charmed and slightly unreal aspect of a fairy tale.