The Silver Star

by Jeannette Walls

  The girl got out of the car. She was a few years younger than me, thin with blond hair like her dad’s that came down to her shoulders, and she walked with a slight limp. Mr. Maddox put his arm around her. Liz and I said hi, and I smiled at Cindy. She said hi, but she didn’t smile back, just stared at us with the same blue eyes as her father’s.

  “Well, I might have some work for Tinsley Holladay’s nieces,” Mr. Maddox said. “I just might. Either of you ever been behind the wheel of a car?”

  “Mom has let me drive up and down the driveway,” Liz said.

  “Mom? That would be Tinsley Holladay’s sister.”

  “Yes,” Liz said. “That’s right.”

  “Charlotte Holladay, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Do you know her?” I asked.

  “Never met her, but I’ve heard of her.” He smiled again, and it seemed that what Uncle Tinsley said was true—everyone in town knew Mom’s story.

  Mr. Maddox had Liz get in the driver’s seat where Cindy had been. Liz had the privilege, he told us, of sitting behind the wheel of a Pontiac Le Mans, one of the classiest cars Detroit had ever turned out, but only the real buffs appreciated it, the suckers falling for the GTO just because it cost more. He had Liz turn the engine on and off, then operate the turn signal and tap the brakes while he had me walk around the Le Mans, checking all the lights. Then he told Liz to gun the engine. He checked the timing, adjusted the carburetor, tested the belts, and had me hold the funnel while he added oil. Cindy stood by silently, watching it all.

  Finally satisfied, Mr. Maddox stood up and slammed down the hood. “All tuned up and ready to go,” he said. “You girls are good at taking orders.” He pulled a wad of money out of his pants pocket and riffled through it. “Looking for something small, but all I have is tens and twenties,” he said. “Oh, here we go.” He pulled out two fives and passed one to each of us. “I think we can work together,” he said. “Come back Saturday after lunch.”

  “I told you we’d get jobs,” Liz said on the way home. She was practically crowing. “Didn’t I say that, Bean?”

  “Sure did. You’re always right.”

  Halfway back to the house, we passed the field with the two emus. Usually, they were out of sight or on the far side of the field, but now they were walking along the fence line right by the road.

  “Look,” I said. “They want to meet us.”

  “Mom would call it a sign,” Liz said.

  We stopped to watch the emus. They moved slowly and deliberately, their long necks swaying from side to side as they cocked their heads. They had curling turquoise stripes on the sides of their heads, tiny stunted wings, and big, scaly feet with these sharp-taloned toes. A gurgly drumming noise that didn’t sound like any birdcall I’d ever heard came from deep in their throats.

  “They’re so weird,” I said.

  “Beautifully weird.”

  “They’re too big to be birds. They have wings, but they can’t fly. They look like they shouldn’t exist.”

  “That’s what makes them so special.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When we showed up at the Maddoxes’ on Saturday, Cindy answered the door. I started to say hello, but she turned away and called out, “They’re here.”

  We followed Cindy into the house. The living room was filled with boxes and appliances, including a portable black-and-white TV on top of a console color TV. Both TVs were on and tuned to different stations, but the sound on the black-and-white TV was turned down. A pregnant woman with mousy blond hair sat on a black Naugahyde couch, nursing a large baby. She looked up at us and shouted, “Jerry.”

  Mr. Maddox came out of the back, introduced the woman as his wife, Doris, and gestured to us to follow him down the hall. One of the funny things about the Maddox house was that there wasn’t a single thing up on the walls: no pictures, no posters, no bulletin boards, no family photographs, no happy sayings or Bible verses, just these bare hospital-white walls.

  Mr. Maddox led us into a bedroom that had been converted into an office, with more boxes and putty-colored metal filing cabinets and a metal desk. He sat down behind the desk and pointed at two folding chairs in front of it. “Take a seat, ladies,” he said. He picked up a stack of folders, tapped them on the desktop, and slipped them into a drawer. “A lot of people work for me,” he went on, “and I always ask them about their backgrounds.” He was a foreman at the mill, he explained, but he also had outside business dealings that involved complicated and sensitive financial and legal matters. He needed to be able to trust the people who worked for him and had access to his home and this office, where he handled the outside dealings. In order to fully trust the people who worked for him, he needed to know who they were. Due diligence, he called it, standard operating procedure for savvy businessmen. “I can’t have some surprise come out and bite me in the ass after I’ve hired someone. It’s a two-way street, of course. Any questions about me or my qualifications as an employer?” He paused. “No? Well, then, tell me about yourselves.”

  Liz and I looked at each other. She started hesitantly explaining the part-time jobs we’d held, but Mr. Maddox also wanted to know about our backgrounds, our schooling, our chores, Mom’s rules, Mom herself. Mr. Maddox listened intently, and the moment he sensed Liz was being evasive about something, he zeroed in with pointed questions. When Liz told him that some of the information was personal and irrelevant, he said that lots of jobs required security clearance and background checks, and this was one of them. He would treat everything we told him with the utmost confidence. “You can trust Jerry Maddox,” he said.

  It seemed impossible not to answer his questions. The funny thing was, nothing seemed to surprise or disturb him. In fact, he was sympathetic and understanding. He said Mom sounded like a talented and fascinating individual, and he confided that his own mom was a complicated woman herself—very smart, but boy, did she run hot and cold, and when he came home at day’s end, he never knew whether he was in for a hugging or a whipping.

  That really got us talking, and soon Mr. Maddox had wormed the whole story out of us—Mom taking off, the bandersnatches, the cross-country bus trip. He wanted to know exactly why Mom had left and exactly why she’d had a meltdown, so I ended up telling him about Mark Parker, the boyfriend who kind of, sort of didn’t really exist. I also told him how we’d dodged the odious Perv in New Orleans, thinking that the way Liz and I had handled it would impress him.

  That was the very word he used. “I’m impressed,” he said. He was leaning back with his hands clasped behind his head. “I like people who know how to deal with difficult situations. You’re hired.”

  So that was how Liz and I began working for the Maddoxes.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I worked mostly for Doris Maddox. She had light freckles, and eyebrows and eyelashes that were completely white, and she kept her mousy blond hair in a short ponytail. She was a few years younger than Mom and was the sort of woman Mom would have said could be quite pretty if she’d just fix herself up a little, but she wore a faded cotton housedress and walked on the backs of her bedroom slippers like it was too much trouble to get them all the way on her feet.

  In addition to her daughter, Cindy, Doris had two boys—a toddler, Jerry Jr., and Randy, the baby. She was pregnant with her fourth child and spent most of her time sitting on the couch, watching TV—game shows in the morning, soap operas in the afternoon—while smoking Salems, drinking RC Colas, and nursing Randy. When Mr. Maddox was in the room, Doris said very little, but once he’d left, she became more talkative, mostly complaining about the morons on the game shows or the sluts in the stories, as she called the soap operas. She also complained about Mr. Maddox, how he was always telling her what to do and staying out all hours with God knows who.

  Doris had me take care of Randy when she wasn’t nursing him, and also look after Jerry Jr., who was three. My duties included changing their Pampers and heating Randy’s little jars of Gerber baby food and Jerry Jr.�
��s SpaghettiOs—that and baloney-and-cheese sandwiches were all he would eat—as well as running to the store for Doris’s RCs and Salems. I also washed and folded the clothes, cleaned the bathroom, and mopped the floors. Doris told me I was a good, hard worker because I was willing to get down on my hands and knees to scrub. “Most whites just won’t do that, you know.”

  Mr. Maddox was infatuated with the latest gadgets and high-tech gizmos and the house was full of trash compactors, air sanitizers, vacuum cleaners, popcorn poppers, transistor radios, and hi-fi systems. Most of the boxes throughout the house contained appliances, though a lot had never been opened. The family had two dishwashers because Mr. Maddox had decided that was more efficient. You could be using one set of dishes while the other was being washed, he said, then load the empty washer and take the clean dishes from the other washer right to the table without having to waste time putting them away in the cupboard.

  Mr. Maddox was always thinking like that. He’d figure out more efficient and improved ways of doing things, then order everybody to do it his new way. That was why he’d been hired at the mill, he told us, to increase efficiency. He’d had to kick some butt to do it, but he’d kicked the butt, and it had gotten done.

  Mr. Maddox was fascinated by the law. He subscribed to several newspapers and clipped out articles about lawsuits, bankruptcies, swindles, and foreclosures. His side dealings included buying up and renting out old millhouses. He had several houses on one street and was trying to get the town to change its name to Maddox Avenue. He also had a business loaning money to millworkers who needed to get to the next paycheck, and from time to time, he said, he was forced to take legal action against people who owed him money or were trying to stiff him or thought they could play him for a fool.

  A lot of Mr. Maddox’s business dealings required meetings. While I stayed at the house helping out Doris, Liz accompanied Mr. Maddox in the black Le Mans to collect rents and take meetings at bars, coffee shops, and offices, where he introduced her as his personal assistant, Liz Holladay of the Holladay family. Liz carried his briefcase, passed him documents when he asked for them, and took notes. Back at the house, she would file paperwork, call to set up his appointments, and answer Mr. Maddox’s phone. He told her to tell everyone who called that he was in a meeting, so he could dodge the people he didn’t want to talk to and impress those he did.

  We never worked regular hours. Instead, Mr. Maddox would tell us when he’d need us next. And we never received regular pay. Mr. Maddox paid us what he thought we deserved depending on how hard we’d worked that day. Liz thought we should be paid by the hour, but Mr. Maddox said in his experience, that encouraged laziness, and people were more motivated to work hard if they were paid by the job.

  Mr. Maddox also bought us clothes. We showed up for work one morning, and he presented each of us with a pale blue dress, saying they were a bonus. A week later, he actually took Liz to the store and had her try on several outfits before choosing the one he liked best.

  We didn’t have to wear the pale blue dresses every day, only when Mr. Maddox told us to. I didn’t particularly like the dress, which felt like a uniform. I would rather have gotten my bonus in cash, but Mr. Maddox said since I was working in his house and Liz was representing him in meetings with his business associates, we needed to dress in a way that he felt was appropriate. And, he added, the cost of the clothes was more than any cash bonus he would have given us, so we were coming out ahead. “I’m doing you a big favor here,” he said.

  One thing about Mr. Maddox, he always made it darned hard to argue with him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We hadn’t been working for the Maddoxes long when it dawned on me that Doris and the kids hardly ever left the house except to go into the front yard. Some days I’d sit on the front steps watching Cindy, Jerry Jr., and Randy and studying the extensive hubcap collection that hung on the chain-link fence. There was something hypnotic about those rows and rows of hubcaps—shiny and bold, like shields, with spokes or arrowheads or sunburst patterns—and when they caught the sun, they were almost blinding.

  The funny thing was, even when the kids were out in the yard, they didn’t really play. They just sat on the grass or in the plastic toy cars bleached by the Virginia sun, staring straight ahead, and I couldn’t for the life of me get them to pretend to drive or even make car noises.

  But they didn’t even go into the yard that often. One reason was because Mr. Maddox and Doris had a fixation about germs and bacteria. That was why they were always having me scrub down their walls, floors, and countertops and why they had more cleaning products than I knew existed: ammonia, Clorox, Lysol, different cleaners for carpets, leather, glass, wood, sinks, toilets, upholstery, chrome, brass, even a special aerosol spray to remove stains from neckties.

  Cindy Maddox was the most obsessed with the idea of contamination. She wouldn’t eat her food if other food had touched it. The grease from the burger wasn’t allowed to run onto the potatoes, the canned corn couldn’t bump up against the meat loaf, and she wouldn’t eat eggs at all because the white and the yolk had shared the shell. Cindy didn’t like her toys to be touched, either. Most of her dolls were still in their boxes, lined up on a shelf in her room, staring out from behind the cellophane.

  Cindy was the only Maddox kid who was school-age. Her parents homeschooled her, however, because Doris was afraid she’d catch germs. Cindy hadn’t done well on the last exam she’d been given, so even though it was summer, she had schoolwork. But Cindy wasn’t really interested in learning, and Doris wasn’t really interested in teaching. The two of them usually sat on the Naugahyde couch, watching TV together. Sometimes Doris had Liz or me read to Cindy. Cindy loved being read to. She also loved the way Liz would change the ending to a story if Cindy found it upsetting, having the little match girl survive instead of freezing to death, or saving the one-legged tin soldier and the paper ballerina rather than letting them wind up in the fire.

  Doris wanted me to tutor Cindy, who knew how to read on her own but didn’t seem to enjoy it. One day I had her read aloud from The Yearling. She made it through a chapter just fine, but when I asked her what she thought of it, she went completely blank. I asked her a few more questions and realized she didn’t understand a darned thing about what she’d just read. She had no problem with the individual words but couldn’t string them together to mean anything. She treated the words like she did her food, keeping each one separate.

  I was trying to explain to Cindy how words depended on other words for their meaning—how the bark of a dog is different from the bark of a tree—when I heard Mr. Maddox start shouting at Doris in the bedroom. He was going on about how she didn’t need any new clothes. Who was she trying to impress? Or was she trying to seduce someone? I looked at Cindy, who acted as if she didn’t hear anything at all.

  Mr. Maddox came into the living room carrying a cardboard box and he handed it to me. “Put this in the Le Mans,” he said.

  Inside the box were Doris’s three faded housedresses and her one pair of street shoes. Doris appeared in the hallway in her nightgown. “Those are my clothes,” she said. “I don’t have anything to wear.”

  “They’re not your clothes,” Mr. Maddox told her. “They’re Jerry Maddox’s clothes. Who bought them? Jerry Maddox. Who worked his butt off to pay for them? Jerry Maddox. So who do they belong to?”

  “Jerry Maddox,” Doris said.

  “That’s correct. I just let you wear them when I want. It’s like this house.” He swung his arm around. “Who owns it? Jerry Maddox. But I let you live here.” He turned back to me. “Now go put that box in the car.”

  I felt like I was being drawn into the middle of the fight. Since I worked mainly for Doris, I glanced at her to see what she wanted me to do, half expecting her to tell me to give her the box. She was just standing there looking defeated, so I carried the box out to the breezeway and put it in the backseat of the Le Mans.

  As I closed the car door, Mr.
Maddox stepped outside. “You think I was being hard on Doris, don’t you?” he said. “Not for nothing. She’s one of those people who needs to be disciplined.” Doris was fast when he first met her, Mr. Maddox went on. She wore too much makeup, her skirts were way too short, and she let men take advantage of her. “I had to step in to protect her from herself. I still do. If I let her go out whenever she wants, she’ll fall back into her old ways. Without her clothes, she can’t go out. If she can’t go out, she can’t get in trouble. I’m not being mean. I’m doing it for her own good. You see?”

  He was looking at me with that direct fixed stare. I just nodded.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Mr. Maddox had said he didn’t need me working for Doris the next couple of days, but he wanted Liz to come back, so the following morning, I rode my Schwinn over to the Wyatts’ to see if Joe was up to a little fruit scavenging.

  Joe was finishing breakfast. Aunt Al made me a plate, too—gravy over biscuits and eggs fried in bacon fat until they were crispy as french fries. She poured Joe a cup of coffee, which he drank black, and asked if I wanted some.

  “Ugh,” I said. “Kids don’t drink coffee.”

  “ ’Round here they do,” Joe said.

  Aunt Al gave me a cup of milk, then added a little coffee and two heaping teaspoons of sugar. “Try this,” she said.

  I took a sip. The milk and sugar cut the bitterness of the coffee, making it like a soda-fountain drink with a tiny kick.

  “Did you all ever find yourselves any work?” Aunt Al asked.

  “Sure did,” I said. “Your boss at the mill, Mr. Maddox, he’s our boss, too, now. He hired me and Liz to work around his house.”

  “Is that a fact?” Aunt Al set down her coffee. “I’m not too sure how I feel about that. Jerry Maddox can ride people hard. Sure does at the mill, where they all hate him. My Ruthie used to work for that family, but she just finally couldn’t take it anymore. And she gets along with everyone.”