Love, Stargirl

by Jerry Spinelli

  Nevertheless…

  There I was this morning, awake before dawn, thinking of my neglected calendar, feeling time rushing at me now—43 days till Winter Solstice—and so many things to do. The more I thought about it, the more I persuaded myself that I could sneak out to Calendar Hill and back into bed and my mother would never have to know. I put on my splint, put on my clothes, reached for my crutches—they weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere in my room. I opened my door, turned on the light, peeked down the hallway, limped to the bathroom. Nowhere. And then it hit me. I limped down to my parents’ room, opened the door. There they were, the crutches, snuggled under the covers with my mother. My laughter woke her up. “I’ll bet Dad loved this,” I said. I climbed in with her, the crutches between us, and we both slept through the sunrise.

  November 9

  Cinnamon is alive!

  Back home!

  He’s sitting on my shoulder as I write this, nibbling into my ear.

  It’s a twenty-pebble day!

  This morning I was on the sofa, doing the ankle exercises they showed me, when the doorbell rang. Two people stood on the porch. One was Arnold. The other was a woman I didn’t recognize. She was dressed smartly in a beige pantsuit and a pale green quilted jacket with a gray fur collar. Her dangling oval earrings were a mosaic of multicolored chips. Her hair was blond with darker streaks. She struck me as someone who is older than she looks. Her smile was dazzling and sure, as if she knew me.

  “Stargirl Caraway,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  She thrust out her hand. My right hand was occupied with a crutch, so I shook with my left.

  “I’m Rita Wishart.” She turned sideways and gestured behind her. “And I think you know my son.”

  I smiled, nodded. “I do. Hello, Arnold.”

  Arnold was dressed in his usual moss-green tasseled watch cap and navy peacoat.

  “Hello,” he said flatly.

  It was the first time I ever heard him say something other than “Are you looking for me?”

  I invited them in. It was cold outside. Winter is on the way. Standing smiling in the living room, I couldn’t imagine why they were here. Arnold was bulky and dark; his mother was tiny and bright.

  “Well, I can’t stay for but a minute,” Rita Wishart said. “I’m semi-retired, but I still do some real estate, and I’ve got a house to show this morning.” She took Arnold’s hand and squeezed it. “Arnold has something to show you.” Arnold was staring at something over my shoulder. “Arnold.”

  Arnold reached into a pocket of his peacoat, and when his hand came out it was holding Cinnamon. Cinnamon saw me and leaped onto my chest. He hung on to my shirt with his little nails. I yelped so loud Rita Wishart flinched. I grabbed him in both hands and we nuzzled and cooed shamelessly as if we were alone in the room. At the sound of my voice my mother came running, alarmed. “What happened?” Then she saw Cinnamon, and she went bananas too.

  I introduced everyone. Rita told us what had happened:

  Early on the morning of the fire, Arnold came walking by. (They live up off Route 113.) A few firemen were still there, dousing the charred, smoking remains. Arnold stopped to watch. He saw the cinnamon-colored rat in the mailbox. He picked it up and took it with him on his day-long, never-ending walk. He took it home and kept it in his room. Next day his mother blew a fuse when she discovered she had a rat in the house. But she quickly calmed down when she saw how clean and friendly it was, not to mention the pretty color. She suspected it was someone’s pet—Arnold had simply told her he found it—but she didn’t know what to do about it. Put up posters saying FOUND—PET RAT?

  And then she read the follow-up story about me in the Morning Lenape. She took the clipping from her handbag and showed us. “Haven’t you seen it?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  My mother looked a little sheepish. She said she saw it, then hid it from me. I could see why. The reporter had switched her focus from my “heroism” to my “anguish over the missing pet rat.”

  “I didn’t want to upset you any more than you already were,” my mother said.

  I glared at my mother. “And who told the reporter about Cinnamon?”

  My mother raised her hand meekly. “She doesn’t give up, that reporter. She called me when you were napping.”

  I scanned the story. It was surprisingly nice and gentle, considering how nasty I was to the reporter.

  “As soon as I read it,” said Rita, “I knew who the rat belonged to.”

  By now my mother and I were practically watering the rug with our happy tears.

  “Please!” Rita laughed. “You’ll get me started. I can’t have my mascara running in front of a client. Come on, Arnold.”

  As they headed for the door, I held out Cinnamon to Arnold. With the tip of his chubby index finger he stroked Cinnamon’s head. I handed Cinnamon to my mother and hugged Arnold. He stood stiff as a stone but I didn’t care. I pressed my face into the dark wool of his peacoat. I looked into his eyes, which still couldn’t seem to find me. “Thank you, Arnold,” I said. “If it wasn’t for you, Cinnamon would have been an owl’s dinner. You saved him.”

  Rita opened the door. “We’re going to the pet shop at the mall tomorrow. We’re going to get him his own.” She took his hand and led him onto the porch. “Aren’t we, Arnold?”

  My mother and I and Cinnamon stood in the doorway and watched them go. Then I called Dootsie to tell her the news.

  November 13

  I’m off the crutches. Off the splint. My ankle color is down to an ugly yellow. I do my exercises every day. Sometimes I still cough when I take a real deep breath. Or laugh. And I’ve been doing a lot of laughing since Cinnamon came home. I can walk as long as it’s not too far. And bike.

  I went to Margie’s. She had the newspaper story taped in the window.

  “Take it down,” I told her.

  “Mind your own business,” she told me. “This is my store.”

  Neva the new helper wore a beige maternity jumper and looked bigger than ever, if that was possible. She smiled when she saw me and ushered me to a seat and took my jacket off and asked me a million questions about the fire and all. Later I whispered to Margie, “She’s not shy anymore.” Margie chuckled. “She won’t shut up.”

  Margie forced a dozen donuts on me. Free. “Speed up your recovery,” she said.

  I visited Betty Lou. We hugged and cried like long-lost sisters.

  I pedaled to the cemetery to visit Charlie. Just seeing that red and yellow plaid scarf cheered me up. I had given Betty Lou half the donuts. I handed the rest to Charlie. He put in his hearing aid and shaded his eyes and squinted up at me. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Me what?”

  “In that fire. You were the kid.”

  I held out my wrists to be cuffed. “Guilty.”

  He wagged his finger at the gravestone. “See? I told ya. It was the girl with the funny name.” He looked up at me. “What’s it again? Moon—?”

  “Stargirl.”

  “Yeah, see? Stargirl. I told ya.”

  He offered me the chair, but I sat on the ground beside him. We talked. Or rather, he talked. About Grace. About how they met when they were six over a fish. In those days there was a fish market where the dollar store is now. They were both there with their mothers. And both mothers wanted the same fish. Charlie remembers it exactly: “It was a halibut. From Alaska.” But both mothers were so nice that each insisted the other take it.

  “You take it.”

  “No, you.”

  Until that moment, they had all been strangers to each other.

  While the fishman stood there in his white apron, the mothers kept trying to outnice each other.

  “You take it.”

  “No, you.”

  Charlie chuckled every time he said this. Even his chuckle was gruff.

  Finally, Grace, who was tiny and squeaky, threw both hands in the air and brought the store to a standstill
with a thundering bellow: “I’ll take it!”

  As Charlie said this he rose from his chair and threw his hands in the air. The cemetery rang with our laughter.

  As he settled back into his chair, wiping the laughter from his eyes, he said, “So Grace’s mother got the fish.”

  I didn’t think. I didn’t mean to be impertinent or to step on his line. It just came out:

  “And you got the girl!”

  His head swung to me. The grizzle on his face sparkled like angel fleece. Leo, I have never been smiled at so.

  He talked on for hours in that gruff voice of his. He told me he and Grace have a daughter. That’s how he gets to the cemetery and back home—his daughter drives him on her way to and from work. He told story after story about him and Grace. They were married at eighteen. Fifty-two years together.

  No…sixty-four, if you start with the halibut.

  No…sixty-eight, if you add the time since she came to the cemetery.

  Like Neva, Charlie wouldn’t shut up. As he jabbered on, I began to understand that he was doing more than talking, more than simply remembering. He was reliving, in a way that can only be done by sharing with someone else. And he was granting me the highest honor of all: he was introducing me to Grace.

  When I got up to leave, it was a long time before he let go of my hand. I took the empty donut bag with me. I wanted to remember the day.

  O = (A)431 Ringgold(F)

  November 15

  No fight this time. My mother trundled groggily down the stairs and huddled into the rocking chair on the porch. I put a blanket over her. The days are getting colder.

  The porch lights along Rapps Dam Road lit my way to Calendar Hill. The field was especially dark this morning, only a blade of moon showing. I called my mother—“Stargirl has landed. Over and out”—and aimed the flashlight toward the ruins of the Van Burens’ house, but it didn’t reach. The ground was bumped and crunchy. I was beginning to wish I had brought a crutch.

  Caught in the light beam, the almost-completed quarter circle of white spatula paddles seemed otherworldly, like an artifact from aliens or ancient ancestors. I’ve been numbering the markers with a felt-tip pen. I had gotten up to #15 before the fire. Allowing for the three-week gap, I had #19 in my pocket. I went to the last marker. I knelt beside it. I aimed the light at it, at both sides. Something was wrong. I expected to see #15, but there was no number at all. I looked at the one before. Same thing—no number. Same thing with the next one back. Only when I turned the light on the fourth marker from the end did I see my last number: 16.

  What was going on? Had someone been planting markers in my absence? Obviously—but who? My mother! I was about to walkie-talkie her when I heard a voice out of the darkness: “Don’t homeschool heroes sleep at night?”

  Perry.

  He walked into the flashlight beam.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  He held up a spatula. “Same thing you are.”

  I aimed the light at the unnumbered markers. “You did this?”

  He shrugged. “Somebody had to.”

  “You knew how?”

  “It’s not rocket science.”

  He turned on his own flashlight. Our beams merged. Time passed. Stars moved.

  He laughed.

  “What?” I said.

  “You. You’re standing there with your mouth hanging open, like I have three heads or something.”

  “I just can’t believe you did this. Especially—”

  “—since I didn’t show up last time?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Long story.” He turned off his light. He turned around. “Sky’s gray. We better do it.”

  I turned off my light. He pulled the rope out from the stake. I handed him my garden trowel, which I bring now that the ground is getting harder. We stood there shoulder to shoulder, looking east. At the first glimmer of sun he dug the hole and I planted my marker. When I stood up my hair brushed his chin, he was so close. Everything was falling at my feet—the trowel, his marker, the rope. And that’s when he did it—he kissed me. There on the arc’s end of my calendar, on the forty-sixth Thursday of the year, the three hundred and nineteenth morning, thirty-six days till Winter Solstice. Many girls have been romanced under the moon, and I don’t mean to say moonlight is overrated, but few I think have known the magic of a sunrise kiss.

  We held hands as we walked across the field. At Route 113 we turned in opposite directions and headed for our homes.

  November 18

  Dear Leo…

  That’s how I was going to start today’s entry; then I realized it sounds too much like “Dear John.” So scratch that.

  It’s Sunday afternoon. I’m sitting on the porch with a sweater on. They call a day like this Indian summer. I wonder what the Lenape called it.

  I’m looking down the road. I can see just a corner of the field. I can’t see the Van Burens’ charred ruin. They’re allowed to rebuild if they want, but they haven’t decided yet. In the meantime, they’re living in a trailer in a relative’s driveway.

  As I sit here on the porch I’m getting a new appreciation of my mother’s experience every Thursday morning. She watches me—her daughter, her only child—walk away from her down the corridor of porch lights. She sees me grow dimmer and dimmer until I almost vanish into the darkness beyond the last pool of light—almost, because she still sees the small, reassuring flicker of my flashlight. The flicker swings in her daughter’s hand as she crosses Route 113 and onto the field. And then the flicker too disappears as she heads for the calendar. A moment of anxiety, of loss, then the walkie-talkie comes suddenly to life and it’s her daughter’s voice, perfectly ordinary, no hint of having just flirted with oblivion, her daughter’s at-once ordinary and irreplaceable voice saying: “Stargirl has landed. Over and out.”

  Do I seem like I’m rambling? I am. For three days now I’ve been rambling, tumbling, skittering, like the leaf I’m watching gust along the street. The gust has been my feelings, and they’ve been blowing me every which way, and now I think, at last, they have let up and let me settle down to earth and find the words to tell it all. Which, really and simply and finally, is this: I still love you. I don’t love Perry.

  YOU: I’m surprised.

  ME: You’re not the only one.

  YOU: Considering what you’ve been saying lately.

  ME: I know.

  YOU: Care to fill me in?

  ME: Well, the most obvious thing is that if you had been here all along, it would have been no contest from the start. But…you are there and he is here, and, as Betty Lou said, I’ve been lonely and vulnerable. She also told me to inhabit my moments, to live today, to embrace the uncertainty, the mystery of Perry. So I guess that’s what I did the other day on Calendar Hill. I plunged into the moment. I let myself drown in it. The setting, the sunrise—talk about a moment! Who could resist? And that moment just went on and on for the rest of that day and into the next. But then I began to notice a funny thing. The moment began to fray at one end and disengage itself from one of its major parts—namely, him, Perry—until there was a clear space between them: the moment here, Perry there. They were not one and the same. And I began to feel again something that I had been only dimly aware of before. It was a small, surprising sense of disappointment even as he was kissing me, but the violins were so loud that at the time I could hear nothing else. Now that disappointment was returning, and with it the realization that the magic had come only from the moment, not from him. It was different with you, Leo. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same. The setting never mattered. On the sidewalk in front of my house, at the enchanted place in the desert, walking the halls at school—wherever I was with you, I heard violins.

  YOU: Wow. I don’t know what to say. I don’t deserve you.

  ME: You’re right, for once.

  YOU: After all that, how can I not love you back?

  ME: Beats me. />
  YOU: OK, I’m saying it: I love you.

  ME: No! I don’t want to hear it. Not that way. I never want to hear those words unless they’re coming from your lips. The flesh-and-blood you, not the fantasy you.

  YOU: I thought you wanted me to say it. You’re not making sense.

  ME: The heart makes no sense.

  YOU: So what do you want from me?

  ME: The answer is in your question—I want it from you. I want you to say the words because they’re flying out of your mouth, because you can’t possibly stop them, not because I led you to the brink of them. And I want to know that they’re being said to me. To me. Not to some girl in the movies or a book. Not to some idea of Girl that you’ve picked up along the way from other boys and other girls. To me. Stargirl. Do you know me, Leo? Really know me?

  YOU: You’re making it hard to say yes.

  ME: OK, short course, pay attention…Susan Julia Pocket Mouse Mudpie Hullygully Stargirl Caraway 101. She dreams a lot. She dreams of Ondines and falling maidens and houses burning in the night. But search her dreams all you like and you’ll never find Prince Charming. No Knight on a White Horse gallops into her dreams to carry her away. When she dreams of love, she dreams of smashed potatoes. She loves smashed potatoes, and she dreams that she and Starboy are eating smashed potatoes, possibly on a blanket at a deserted beach, and as Starboy digs in for another scoopful, he drops the spoon and his mouth falls open (showing some smashed potato goop, but she finds it cute), and he looks at her in a way she’s never been looked at before—he sees her!—and she can practically see the words boiling up inside him—they’re upstoppable!—and here they come, gushing over the smashed potatoes: “I love you, Stargirl!” They just keep coming as potato flecks fly—“I love you, Stargirl! I love you, Stargirl!”—like a cereus blooming not once but over and over a thousand times in a single night.

  You understand what I’m saying, Leo?