Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon

by Joyce Carol Oates

Lily explained that their father’s church had relocated to the village of Shaheen at the time of his retirement. It was in new, larger quarters—much had changed.

  Sharon protested, “I’ve always had this dream, Lily, of coming home. It’s kept me going. ‘In the valley of the shadow’ it’s kept me going. And now you say that our home is gone? And Daddy’s church? And Daddy himself—gone?”

  Sharon was staring at Lily with her bright, tear-glittering eyes, and Lily was staring at Sharon guiltily. Candlelight shimmered on the sisters’ taut, pale faces; the air was charged as if with static electricity. Lily murmured another time, “I’m sorry, Sharon,” and Sharon said in a wounded, wondering voice, “If only you’d told me, Lily, when the sale was. And when the funeral was, for Daddy. I would have done anything to get here, to see him one last time.”

  Wes said, delicately, that certainly Lily had informed Sharon of their father’s death; as of his long illness, and their mother’s. And certainly Lily had informed her of the sale of the Shaheen property.

  Sharon shook her head, as if not hearing. There was a tiny silver lighter in her hand, she lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. “How can Ephraim Donner be dead! He’s so alive in my heart. I see his face, I hear his voice. The kind of man Jesus would have been—if Jesus had truly lived.”

  There was a bitterness here that alarmed Lily, frightened her. She thought But you believe in Jesus, Sharon! Aren’t you the one of us who believes?

  Sharon said, “I always thought he would outlive me. All of you in Shaheen would outlive me. And of course ‘Deirdre’”—she turned suddenly, unexpectedly to Deedee, reaching out to seize the girl’s wrist—“would outlive ‘Starr Bright.’ For God will use me as His wrath and His scourge, and then He will abandon me—I know. ‘A sword shall pierce my soul.’”

  The Merricks were amazed. Sharon released Deedee’s wrist and lapsed into a brooding silence. She was smoking her ill-smelling cigarette as if it were her very breath.

  Lily saw that Sharon was genuinely upset; it was obvious she was unwell, and not altogether responsible for what she said; another time she began to apologize, and Wes interrupted, annoyed now at both Lily and Sharon, “Excuse me, Sharon, but one crucial fact you should know: your father’s estate, such as it was, was left to Lily.”

  Quickly Lily said, “Because, you see, Sharon, I was here—I’d been taking care of him. It hardly means that Daddy didn’t love you just as much as he loved me.”

  Sharon was staring at Lily with her teary, glassy eyes. A look that seemed to indicate Yes I want to believe you, yes please lie to me, how can you insult my intelligence by lying to me, you don’t know me at all. And still Wes was saying, more curtly than he probably wished to sound, he who avoided domestic confrontations however assertive he was with business associates, a man other men did not wish to cross, “As I said, Sharon, I happen to think I got a good price for the property. Maybe you’d like to examine the paperwork?”

  Sharon said, grinding out her cigarette in one of Lily’s fluted floral plates, “Thank you, no. I couldn’t bear it.”

  Through this exchange, poor Deedee had become increasingly uncomfortable. Now she said, in desperate good spirits, so that Lily’s heart went out to her, “Aunt Sharon, why don’t we drive out to Shaheen, too? Along the River Road? Now that it’s almost spring, the roads won’t be so bad. I used to love going out into the country when I was a little girl.”

  Quietly Sharon said, with a glance at Lily sharply reproachful as a flick of a whip, “That’s a kind, generous idea, Deirdre. But I doubt I’ll be in Yewville long enough.”

  Lily silently protested But you only just arrived yesterday, you can’t be thinking of leaving already!

  Suddenly, then, interrupting their meal, there was a knocking at the back door.

  “Who—is that? Don’t let him in—”

  It was probably just one of Wes’s workmen, dropping by the house instead of calling as they often did, but Sharon reacted violently, almost dropping her wineglass, cowering in her chair like a frightened child. Lily explained the circumstances; no reason to be alarmed; they could hear Wes open the door, speak with someone named Eddy; but still Sharon was trembling, and then rueful, defensive. When Wes returned to the table, apologizing for the interruption, Sharon remarked if this were Los Angeles or Miami he wouldn’t be so trusting about someone knocking at his door after dark, and Wes said, genially, “But this isn’t Los Angeles or Miami, it’s Yewville.”

  Lily felt a stab of pity for her sister. Neither Wes nor Deedee knew what she knew: that Sharon believed herself pursued—“stalked.” She tried to imagine what it would be like, to be so panicked at the sound of someone knocking at the door; to be always so vigilant, nervously alert.

  Someone is after me. A man. Death.

  Lily contemplated Sharon, wondering if her story was true. Obviously, her emotion, her panic were genuine; the evening before, when Lily had held Sharon in her arms, comforting her, there was no doubt in her mind that something had happened to Sharon, to rouse her to such terror. But since she’d been a child Sharon had always exaggerated fears; embellished incidents to make her life more intriguing. Sometimes Lily thought it was unconscious, sometimes it seemed fully conscious. Sharon’s clouded blue eyes demanding Believe me! or I’ll know you don’t love me.

  Though there had been times, in high school for instance, when Lily had suspected that Sharon hadn’t confided in her; hadn’t told all there might have been to tell. Hiding away in a locked bathroom crying, and, in the night, prowling the house in secret … Something had happened between Sharon and her boyfriend Mack Dwyer, and out of hurt pride, or shame, Sharon had told no one about it. Not even her twin sister.

  It was just “nerves,” Sharon said, the way she’d reacted to the knocking at the back door; truly, she was fine. She insisted upon helping Lily and Deedee clear the table for coffee and dessert, but she was unsteady on her feet and, in the kitchen, had to lean against a counter until a wave of dizziness passed. Lily wanted to say Why didn’t you eat more, and drink less? Lily was annoyed, too, when Sharon declined the cherry cobbler Deedee had prepared for them, saying with a shudder she’d as soon eat broken glass as so many calories. Lily saw the look on Deedee’s face: it would seem to her, and perhaps it had been intended to be, an allusion to her weight.

  And wasn’t there a not-so-subtle dig here, too, in Lily’s side? How can you, this girl’s mother, allow her to be even a few pounds overweight? I would never allow it.

  Back in the dining room, Wes asked Sharon when she was scheduled to begin teaching in Pasadena. She looked at him so blankly he corrected himself—“Or is it Seattle? The dance school Lily mentioned.”

  Sharon said slowly, “I might not, after all. Might not go back. I’m on my way to—Manhattan. An old friend. We’ve both had heartbreak.”

  Deedee glanced at Lily, perplexed. Earlier that evening as the three of them had worked in the kitchen, quite enjoying themselves, Sharon had impulsively invited Deedee to fly out and stay with her when she got settled “on the West Coast.”

  Deedee said, uncertainly, “I guess you travel a lot, Aunt Sharon?” and Sharon said, “As long as I don’t mind being manipulated by agents demanding fifteen percent of my income, I travel constantly.” Wes asked, “When can we see you and your dance troupe perform, Sharon?” and again Sharon stared at him blankly, and Lily quickly intervened, “Sharon’s dance troupe is disbanding, unfortunately.” Sharon said, shrugging, “Disbanded, to be precise. Which is just as well. I’m ready to move on. The so-called glamor professions use women like Kleenex, then toss them aside. Exactly like Kleenex.” She paused, reaching for another cigarette. “I knew Margaux Hemingway. We weren’t close but we’d worked together on several shoots. She couldn’t deal with it—the glamor, the excitement, and men—and what comes after. I survived because—I wasn’t quite as successful.” Her voice trailed off as she smiled mysteriously, recalling memories best unspoken.

  Deedee, who�
�d read about Margaux Hemingway in People and had seen some morbid film clips on TV, asked Sharon what the former model and actress had been like, and Sharon said that Margaux had had her weaknesses like everyone else but lacked the strengths others had. Deedee asked, “Was it suicide, how she died?” and Sharon said bitterly, “It’s always suicide, Deirdre,” and Wes said, an edge of annoyance to his voice as before, as if he wanted to protect his daughter from such cynicism, “What do you mean by that, Sharon?” and Sharon said, “If they don’t commit the act themselves, they drive you to it,” and Wes said, “Who?” and Sharon said, almost spitting out the words, yet with satisfaction, grim pleasure, “Pigs and fornicators. Emissaries of Satan. ‘He hath led me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.’”

  The Merricks regarded Sharon with perplexity—was she joking? Or was she, uttering these strange, archaic words, deadly serious? Lily could not recognize the Bible verse, assumed it must be the Old Testament. There was a pale glisten to Sharon’s skin and her beautiful dissatisfied mouth twisted downward in derision.

  Lily thought to turn the conversation to another, more positive direction. “You’ll love teaching, Sharon. Working with others is so rewarding! I was shy at first, but I’ve come to love my night class at the community college.”

  Deedee said, “Mom’s students love her, too. They keep signing up for the course semester after semester, even the ones who can’t ‘pot’ worth a darn.”

  Coolly Sharon said, “But my teaching will be different from yours, Lily. The Pasadena School of Dance is a professional school. We only accept talented students, only about fifty percent of our applicants; not just anyone, like a community college.”

  Lily might have been expected to feel insulted by this offhand remark, but instead she found herself laughing. How like Rose of Sharon, who’d pretended to be Lily’s older sister in high school, insisting upon differentiating between them. Lily said agreeably, “No, my students aren’t greatly talented as potters but they try. And I’m no genius, myself.”

  Deedee objected, “Mom, you’re good. Mom made this vase here, Aunt Sharon, it’s cool, isn’t it?”

  It was a slender, tubular ceramic vase of the color and sheen of mother-of-pearl, placed on the center of the dining-room table, containing the beautiful white and red roses.

  Sharon touched the vase with her forefinger, almost in doubt.

  “It’s very—professional.”

  “But to achieve this single vase,” Lily said, “I had to make, and discard, probably two dozen. That isn’t very professional.”

  Through the meal, Lily had been noticing how her husband and her daughter were gazing at her sister. With what intense, unwavering interest. Had either ever looked at her in quite that way? Even when Wes’s love for her had been new, even when Deedee had been a baby? Lily was sure she wasn’t jealous. Never could she be jealous of her twin sister. For what was Sharon but a blond Lily, a far more beautiful and mysterious Lily?

  They talked of classes; of Deedee’s high school, which had been, of course, Lily’s and Sharon’s high school, twenty years before; of teachers who’d retired, or died; of names, nicknames—“I wish I wasn’t called ‘Deedee,’” Deedee said suddenly, to her parents’ surprise. “I hate that silly name.”

  Lily said, hurt, “But, Deedee—it’s a sweet name—”

  “It is not, Mom. It’s a silly name.”

  Wes said, “Since when?”

  “I don’t know since when. Since always.”

  There was an awkward silence. Sharon said, carefully, “But the name ‘Deirdre’ is beautiful, I think. If I had a daughter—I’d like to have named her ‘Deirdre.’”

  Deedee frowned. “You think so, Aunt Sharon? ‘Deirdre’? Isn’t it kind of weird?”

  “Certainly not. It’s Irish, it’s like poetry. ‘Deir-dre.’ Yes, it’s beautiful.”

  This seemed to have settled the issue with Deedee, at least for the moment. Lily felt dazed, tricked; as if, under cover of caressing her, Sharon had pinched her, hard. If I had a daughter. I’d like to have named her “Deirdre.”

  In fact, Lily, her mother, and her father had named the baby Deirdre, after a distant relative of Lily’s mother. Sharon who was “Sherrill” had had no interest in naming the baby, had never responded to news of the baby’s name at all.

  As if sensing the drift of Lily’s thoughts, seeing the vexed expression on her face, Sharon said, reaching over to take Lily’s hand and squeeze it, “Lily, I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here. Thank you, all of you—for your hospitality. It’s as if I was dead and now—I am alive.”

  Though she was looking very tired; there was a feverish edge to her voice. When Lily protested that she was exaggerating, she said, “No, it’s true. I’ve been tormented, and put to the test; I’ve been made to pass through ‘the valley of the shadow’; but I think I’ve come out on the other side now. Somehow you, Lily, here in Yewville, kept me alive. All these years. Even when I seemed to have lost you.”

  “Lost me? What do you mean?”

  “Or maybe you lost me. Temporarily.”

  Wes said, “Sharon, you know you’re welcome to stay with us as long as you like. If you need a quiet place to rest, to relax—”

  Sharon laughed sharply, but her manner was flirtatious. “Is that a gentlemanly way of telling me I look tired, Wes? Sick?”

  “Of course not. But—”

  “But I am, of course—a little tired. I’ve been working hard. I’ve been run to earth.”

  “Well, we have plenty of room,” Wes said, gesturing expansively. His cheeks were flushed from the wine, the good food, the intense conversation, so unlike the Merricks’ usual dinners at home. “As Lily has told you, I’m sure.”

  Lily was still smarting, her heart pounding uncomfortably in her chest. If I had a daughter. I’d like to have named her “Deirdre.” She wasn’t quite sure what Wes and Sharon were talking about, and why Deedee was looking on with a wide, hopeful smile, the feathery-glinting Navajo necklace around her throat.

  Lily had put on the Navajo bracelet, but it weighed so heavily on her wrist, and hadn’t seemed quite appropriate for the occasion, so she’d removed it again. To wear another time, perhaps teaching her potting class. Her students, most of them adult women, would notice and admire it at once.

  This? A present from my sister.

  Oh, yes. I have a sister. I haven’t mentioned her?

  A twin. But not identical.

  Dinner was over, it was nearly nine o’clock. Yet no one seemed eager to leave the table. As if the Merricks’ strange, mysterious visitor, that fever-glow to her face and eyes, held them captives; willing captives. Sharon had been answering questions of Deedee’s about her modeling career, about “Sherrill”; now suddenly she smiled, and said, “Oh, Lily—remember ‘Starr Bright’? She started it all.”

  How odd, that Sharon had spoken that name several times since her arrival in Yewville. That transparently phony, showbiz name. Lily would not have wished to confess how she’d come to dislike the woman who called herself “Starr Bright,” finally. That vain, self-promoting and bossy Buffalo TV personality who’d been fired from her job for driving while intoxicated, filed a lawsuit against the television station which she’d eventually lost, and ended her days, as Sharon probably didn’t know, in a Buffalo detox center where she’d died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of fifty-seven.

  Her real name had been “Stella Breznick.” She’d never married, had no children.

  Lily said of course she remembered “Starr Bright”—how could she forget the woman who after all had changed their lives? But Deedee insisted upon knowing more about Starr Bright; and Wes, though he’d grown up in Yewville, claimed to know nothing at all about her; so Sharon spoke animatedly, amusingly—“A busty blond Liz Taylor was what she tried to be, but she never got beyond The Starr Bright Hour on Saturday mornings, for children. Remember, Lily, how we’d write for tickets, weeks ahead of time? The tickets were free to children
, but you had to reserve them. It was a long drive for us, thirty miles from Shaheen, and the studio audience had to be seated an hour before the show began. Daddy drove us a few times, and once or twice Momma, and what a treat it was! Except, having to get there so damned early, still you had to wait in line—”

  With a startling vehemence Lily said, “Yes, and once inside the studio you’d wait, and wait—”

  “—and the younger children would get restless, have to be taken to the bathroom—”

  “—and everyone was so excited, but time seemed to stop—”

  “—just waiting, and waiting—”

  “—and finally Bessie the Cow would come out on stage, and we’d all scream—”

  “—and the Ducklings and Goslings chorus, they were actual children, in costume—”

  “—and Louie the Lion—”

  “But still you’d be waiting, and waiting—”

  “—because the show didn’t actually begin until Starr Bright appeared, it was part-taped, and part-live—”

  “—and always they’d say ‘just a few more minutes, boys and girls’—”

  “—‘Starr Bright will be with you soon’—”

  Sharon jumped to her feet, and pulled Lily from the table to join her, and the two women began singing, in mock child-voices, arms around each other’s waist, the simple nursery-rhyme tune, the theme song of The Starr Bright Hour, which Lily would have sworn she hadn’t known, had long forgotten.

  “Starr Bright will be with you soon!

  Starr Bright will be with you soon!

  Starr Bright, Starr Bright!

  Starr Bright will be with you soon!”

  Lily was laughing giddily, seeing in Wes’s and Deedee’s faces a single expression of amazement, that she, Lily, wife and mother, was behaving in such a way. Well, then, you don’t know me, do you! No more than you know my sister Rose of Sharon do you know me, Lily of the Valley. But abruptly then her laughter stopped, she felt weak, sickened; frightened; the way Wes and Deedee were staring, as if they scarcely recognized her, trying to smile, to see the joke. It came to Lily in a wave of panic that something terrible would happen, she was powerless to prevent it.