Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon

by Joyce Carol Oates

  On her way back upstairs she realized that it was the eve of her (and her twin sister’s) thirty-seventh birthday.

  2

  The Birthday

  The door at the rear of the house opened, and closed. And there came Deedee’s uplifted voice in the kitchen, “Hi, Mom.”

  A voice that was bright and animated and girlish. Or meant to give that impression.

  It was 4:55 P.M. A darkening winter afternoon, mid-February. Deedee was just home from school, later than usual; Lily, who’d been feeling apprehensive through much of the day—not because it was her thirty-seventh birthday, she hoped—heard with relief her daughter enter the house by the rear door, stamp her boots clear of snow and ice, and enter the kitchen. In her cluttered workroom next to the kitchen, at her potter’s bench where she was modeling a clay vase, her fingers quick, deft, practiced in their instinctive motions, Lily could picture Deedee, flush-faced from the cold, dismantling her clumsy bookbag which she wore strapped to her back like a beast of burden, letting it fall onto the kitchen counter. As if in the girl’s familiar greeting Lily hadn’t detected a subtle note of adolescent sadness, hurt, resignation, and sensed it in the hurried, graceless tread of Deedee’s walk, Lily called out with equal brightness, “Hi, honey! Welcome home.”

  It was a familiar and reassuring exchange. Every afternoon when Deedee arrived home from school, when Lily was herself home. An exchange that had continued for years. And would continue for years. (Deedee was only a sophomore in high school.)

  Though long ago, in another lifetime it seemed, Lily had driven to pick up Deedee at school every afternoon, preschool and kindergarten; and the two of them stopped at a neighborhood dairy for their ritual of “afternoon tea.”

  In Deedee’s young, foreshortened memory, those days would seem very remote, indeed. “Afternoon tea” at Ewald’s Dairy—the kind of small islanded memory a mother vividly recalls. Her own happiness as a young mother.

  When Lily came into the kitchen, smiling, Deedee had already shrugged off her bulky sheepskin jacket and was peering critically into the refrigerator. Lily caught the jacket as it was about to slide from a chair onto the floor. “Hi, Mom, happy birthday,” Deedee said, humming to herself as she deliberated what, if anything, to eat. Deedee wore jeans, a loose-fitting sweater; she was a solid, compact girl, not fat, nor even plump, but rosy-fleshed, like, Lily thought, a girl Renoir might have painted. Deedee was a pretty girl but couldn’t bear being told so, at least not by her mother. A few weeks before, in her car, Lily had happened to see Deedee walking near the high school, a figure that appeared at first glance to be neither female nor male, in jeans, boots, the bulky khaki-colored jacket; the girl strode along with her head bowed, eyes downcast as if she were searching the snowy sidewalk for something precious. Deedee was resolutely alone and took no notice of a noisy group of boys and girls crossing the street near her, as they took no notice of her.

  Lily washed her hands at the sink and resisted touching Deedee where she stood slouched and sighing, leaning on the refrigerator door. Lily would have liked to smooth down the girl’s disheveled ashy-blond hair that looked as if it hadn’t been combed for days, but she knew better. She said, “You’ve already wished me a happy birthday, honey, and I love the card”—a large red construction-paper HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM! in the shape of a heart, which Deedee had made in obvious haste, now prominently positioned on a windowsill. Deedee said, taking out a can of diet Coke and a container of blueberry yogurt from the refrigerator, “Well, it’s a big day all day. And more to come.” There was something sweetly forced about these words as if Deedee’s mind were on other things and she was going through the motions of speaking to her mother.

  Even as Lily herself was distracted, edgy. Not knowing why.

  The ridiculous dream of the night before—she’d all but forgotten. She’d decided it had been the wind that caused it. But you can obliterate such trivial memories the way, with a few quick swipes of a kitchen sponge, you can clean a Formica-topped counter.

  Lily said, lightly, since these were dull-motherly, damning and familiar words, “Now, sweetie, don’t spoil your appetite, please. Your dad’s taking us all out to dinner.” Deedee sighed and rolled her eyes like a boy of twelve. Saying, “You kidding, Mom? Spoil my appetite?” She laughed as if the idea was preposterous. As if her appetite was deep and trackless as the Grand Canyon.

  “Now, honey.”

  How a teenaged girl hurts her mother: by speaking crudely and disparagingly of herself.

  Deedee was an intelligent, sharp-witted girl; prone to irony, but also childlike, hopeful and sweet; an A student, well liked by her teachers; physically mature for her age yet in crucial ways immature. Her face was round, moon-shaped as her grandmother’s had been, with a small nose, rather small close-set eyes; inclined to plumpness; her pebble-blue eyes were shyly watchful, and to Lily beautiful. If only … Lily understood that Deedee ate compulsively to assuage her hurt feelings (mysterious hurts! high-school hurts! don’t inquire into them), and her compulsive eating, her ten pounds or so of extra flesh, intensified her susceptibility to hurt. Lily touched Deedee after all, drawing a hand along the girl’s arm as Deedee, with an impatient gesture, pried open the lid of the yogurt container. Deedee laughed and said, “Mom, your hand smells like clay.” Lily said, trying not to sound concerned, “You’re home from school a little late today, aren’t you? It’s almost five.” Deedee said, shrugging, “There was a yearbook staff meeting and half the kids were late and some didn’t show up at all, I was the only sophomore.” Deedee spoke with both resentment and pride. Lily said, “Try not to let them take advantage of you this year, sweetie,” recalling how in ninth grade, Deedee had been one to volunteer for class committees, editing the school newspaper, spending an entire day decorating the gym for the graduation dance to which she hadn’t gone. Defensively, Deedee said, “No one takes advantage of me, I do what I want. Anyway, Mom, you should talk—everybody in Yewville takes advantage of you.”

  Lily considered: was it true? She could always be counted upon to canvass for the local Red Cross chapter, and for the wildlife sanctuary; she was a perennially elected officer in the PTA; her numerous women friends were always calling her for favors, and rarely had time to reciprocate. For the past six years she’d been teaching pottery at Yewville Community College, for a small salary, working with her students many more hours than the course required; yet when there’d been an opening for a permanent instructor, at a higher salary, the director of the program, an affable longtime acquaintance of both Lily’s and Wes’s, had passed over Lily to hire a man. Wes and Deedee had been outraged on Lily’s behalf but Lily insisted she didn’t mind, truly. I love to teach, I love working with beginners but I’m just an amateur as a teacher and a potter. Truly, I wouldn’t have wanted the extra responsibility.

  Deedee had brought the day’s mail in with her, and was sitting at the kitchen table sorting through it. This, too, was a weekday ritual. “Doesn’t look like much,” Deedee said, pushing aside bills, flyers, advertisements; handing Lily several envelopes which Lily opened with childlike anticipation—birthday cards, from women friends and relatives mainly.

  Deedee said, “What’s this? We-ird.” She was squinting at a postcard.

  Lily’s heart leapt. Yet she asked calmly, “For me?”

  “For ‘Lily Donner.’ Like whoever sent it doesn’t know you’re married, even.”

  Yet whoever sent it, Lily saw, knew she lived at 183 Washington Street, Yewville, New York.

  Lily leaned over Deedee to examine the mysterious card with her. Neither could make out the signature which was in red ink, shaky as if it had been scrawled in a speeding vehicle or by a drunken person. Deedee said, “‘Far’—‘Farrer’?—no, that’s an S—‘Starer’? The last name looks like ‘Dwight.’”

  Lily said, “I don’t know any—‘Starer.’ I’m sure. Anyone named ‘Dwight.’”

  The postcard was an ordinary tourist’s card, a glossy photograph
of Death Valley in springtime: cactus flowers, sculpted and rippled sand dunes, a china-blue sky. No human figures in all that vastness. Deedee said, “Wow. I didn’t know Death Valley was so beautiful. We should go there sometime … It must be for your birthday, Mom. See, this looks like ‘Your Day, Lily’—then some words I can’t read—‘For this—these?—are the days of—regenance’—What’s ‘regenance’?”

  Lily was staring at the red-inked message. She could not decipher a word. “—‘vengeance,’” she said.

  Deedee read haltingly, “‘For these are the days of vengeance, that all things which are—willed—’”

  “—‘written.’”

  “—‘all things which are written may be’—what?—‘suselled’?—is that a word?”

  Lily said calmly, “—‘fulfilled.’ ‘For these are the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled.’”

  “Sounds like the Bible. Who’s this ‘Dwight,’ Mom?”

  The words, solemn and pitiless, had seemed to issue from Lily’s throat without her volition. As if, after all, she was but a hollow reed.

  Lily said, without looking, “I can’t read the signature, honey. I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it’s a joke,” Deedee said suspiciously. “The postmark isn’t Nevada, see? It’s Missouri. Mailed two days ago.”

  Lily took the card from Deedee and stood staring at it, at the dreamlike lunar terrain of Death Valley which she had never seen in person. For a long moment she didn’t say a word; then, since Deedee was regarding her with frank curiosity, she said, “Yes. It’s a joke, probably.”

  Why! Why would you do such a thing.

  Why, after years of not writing, not calling. Never caring how I yearn for you just to know you’re alive.

  Why such a thing, at such a time.

  Our birthday.

  Quickly Lily hid away the postcard. As if it were something illicit, a secret; not taped to a wall of her workroom with dozens of other colorful cards but hidden meanly away in a drawer in a mess of pencil sketches, soiled rags. Where no one except Lily ever looked.

  She would not have mentioned it to Wes even as a curiosity except that, at dinner, in the restaurant to which Wes had taken her and Deedee to celebrate Lily’s birthday, Deedee brought it up. Saying suddenly, near the end of their meal, “Dad, did Mom show you the weird postcard she got today? Sort of a birthday card, with a Bible message. From Death Valley.”

  Wes had been enjoying the meal, and the evening; he was in a warm, expansive mood, ready to be entertained. “Postcard? Death Valley. No-ooo.” He smiled at Lily, curious. “Who do you know in Death Valley, Lily?”

  Lily said, “It—wasn’t from Death Valley, actually. Just a tourist card. Postmarked Missouri.”

  “Well, who do you know in Missouri?”

  “I was trying to think. A cousin, maybe. On my mother’s side of the family. The signature might have been her name …” Lily’s voice trailed off as if the subject, of so little importance, could not possibly be of interest to Wes.

  That morning, there’d been no sign of cigarettes, or drinking, in Wes’s office. Well, perhaps—a faint odor of smoke. Lily had not wished to go into the room and had in fact stood only at the doorway, peering inside. Spying on your own husband! How dare you. She was not a woman who snooped in another’s private quarters, she was not a mother who entered even her daughter’s bedroom when her daughter was gone. Wes had finally come upstairs at about 3 A.M. and he’d risen again at his usual hour of 7 A.M.; he laughed at Lily’s concern, saying he wasn’t a man who required more than a few hours sleep. He hadn’t lit a cigarette in Lily’s presence for weeks and, tonight, he was drinking only white wine, like Lily.

  If only Deedee didn’t persist! But she had an adolescent’s sly maddening instinct for pressing seemingly small matters that vexed her mother considerably, though Lily would never have let on. Deedee said, “Y’know, Mom, when I first saw that card, it’s weird somehow I thought it might be from Aunt Sharon. Today being your birthday, and all.”

  “Well, it isn’t.”

  Lily stared at her water glass, a crystal goblet in which ice was melting. She wondered if Wes and Deedee were thinking how odd, Lily hadn’t heard from her sister on their birthday. Lily had no idea where her sister was.

  Deedee was saying, “You haven’t heard from Aunt Sharon in a long time, I guess?”

  Lily said, calmly, “It hasn’t been that long. We spoke on the phone when—” trying to name a year, a date; a plausible recollection. “Sharon was involved with a dance troupe, in Miami, remember, and they were going on tour, I think to—Houston, Los Angeles. And after that—”

  Deedee was saying disapprovingly how “weird” it was she’d never seen her own aunt; her mother’s twin sister; how “weird” that Wes had never met his sister-in-law. “If Aunt Sharon’s pictures weren’t in that album, I’d wonder if she existed,” Deedee said. “That’s how weird it is.”

  Lily said, “Deedee, I wish you’d find another word instead of ‘weird.’ There must be plenty in the dictionary.”

  Deedee said, with the most innocent sly cruelty, “Those modeling photos are from a long time ago, Aunt Sharon was so beautiful and glamorous but she’d be kind of old now, I guess. She can’t still be dancing.”

  Lily laughed. “Sharon is exactly my age, as you know.”

  “Well.”

  The three of them laughed. Deedee was, as often at mealtimes, showing off partly to amuse Wes; it was playful enough, but exasperating.

  If I can get through this day, help me God, I will be fine. This is a dangerous day.

  Wes was saying, “If I’d known, Lily, when I first met you, that you had a twin sister, I’d possibly have been intimidated. There’s something strange about falling in love with a person who’s actually two.”

  I am not two! I am one.

  Deedee giggled mischievously. “‘Strange’? We-ird.”

  Lily sighed, and tried to laugh; but it was painful to laugh; it sometimes happened that Wes and Deedee ganged up and teased her, and what more appropriate occasion than her birthday? She had to be a good sport. And Deedee was trying to be earnest, serious—“But, Dad, Mom and Aunt Sharon don’t look like twins, judging by the photos. They aren’t identical, they’re only ‘fraternal.’ I mean ‘sororal,’ if that’s a word.”

  It was a word, yes. A rarely used word. Lily had once looked it up in the dictionary, out of curiosity.

  But she didn’t say so, now. She said, an edge in her voice to show she was getting annoyed, “I think it’s time for dessert. This is a school night for Deedee after all.”

  “Oh, Mom. It’s your birthday.”

  “I’ve had plenty of birthdays. And I hope I’ll have plenty more.”

  The evening had gone well. Better than Lily might have anticipated. She would have preferred to make dinner for them at home, of course; nothing made Lily happier than their domestic, cozy evenings; her most peaceful time of day. Especially if she’d been working intensely in her workroom, or at the college; if Wes didn’t come home late from a work site, and wasn’t distracted. Why do others make more of our birthdays than we do, ourselves? Lily wondered. Do they need to prove they love us, again and again?

  She was smiling of course. She’d been smiling for hours. At the house, Wes and Deedee had given Lily their presents: a delicate heart-shaped locket on a thin gold chain, from Wes, who gave Lily jewelry every year oblivious of the fact that Lily rarely wore any jewelry apart from her wedding band and wrist-watch; an immense clay pot of dusky-pink begonias for the window-bench of Lily’s workroom, already crowded with plants, from Deedee. But Lily had been very pleased, and touched. She’d hugged and kissed both husband and daughter and stammered, “I—I love you!” and Wes and Deedee had been embarrassed and assured her they loved her, too.

  You see how happy we are. My husband, my daughter.

  It had been one of the surprises of her life, and one of the greatest blessings. How, when
she and Wes had met, and had begun to see each other, he hadn’t been jealous of her past; of what he would have been justified to perceive as her past. She was a young woman with an eighteen-month baby and no husband nor even the melancholy tale of a failed marriage; yet Wes had said simply Tell me what you feel comfortable telling me, Lily. No more. And so, hesitantly, feeling her way, for until that moment she hadn’t rehearsed what she might say, how? she would attempt to explain her peculiar circumstances, she said He—Deirdre’s father—isn’t anyone I know—really. Her heart had pounded with the audacity of her words, not a lie yet how far from the truth. It was a—mistake she said. And Wes startled her by laughing. Gently he said Look, Deirdre isn’t a mistake, is she? and Lily said No! and Wes said So you would not want him, the father, erased from your life, right? and Lily said, contrite, No.

  She’d known how she had loved Wes Merrick, then. A man so very different from her father; yet, like Ephraim Donner, a man of surpassing dignity, integrity.

  A man with a beautiful soul.

  During dessert, Lily was beginning to get drowsy. Wes and Deedee laughed, chattered. She had the idea they were oddly protective of her.

  Across the crowded dining room was a frosted mirror on a wall and in this mirror the Merrick family was reflected in shimmering ghostly images. Lily had been watching half-consciously. As the wine went to her head—but she’d had only two glasses, hadn’t she?—or three?—the reflections of the tall broad-shouldered man, the woman in a red dress and the teenaged girl became more seductive. Lily could not see their features clearly but they were obviously attractive, happy people. They belonged together, they were a family.

  You see?

  No, no!—Lily wasn’t drunk.

  Maybe just slightly giddy and extravagant blinking tears from her eyes kissing Deedee goodnight at the foot of the stairs and calling out so that Wes, hanging coats in the hall closet, could hear. “This was my most wonderful birthday ever! Thank you so much, both of you.”