The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  She got dressed early and came down to wait on the couch, sitting carefully so as not to wrinkle her skirt. She drank glasses of club soda to settle her stomach. Our father got the camera ready, and our mother chose the music that should be playing on the hi-fi when Todd came in, something young and jazzy and smart—“Take Five” with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, for instance. (“You really don’t have to do that,” Megan protested.) Then we all tried to go about our usual business while we waited for Megan’s date to arrive. But our only business that night was waiting for Megan’s date to arrive.

  By eight thirty, Todd still hadn’t come. Megan refused to phone him; she said she didn’t have his number anyway. Our father looked up the Picous in the phone book and said he would call him, then. Our mother, flustered and angry, put her finger on the cradle switch and said they would not stoop so low as to phone the Picous to beg them to send their son to our house. They fought about it over Megan’s head until she shouted for them to “stop! Stop! Just please stop it!”

  And so we waited. And waited. Our father offered to take her to the dance himself. At nine thirty our mother served dinner. Megan didn’t want any, and she went upstairs to take off her dress. Our mother went up later to talk to her, and our father, to lend his support, put on an apron and washed the dishes.

  For a day or two we moved about the house as if someone had died, everyone trying to be extra nice to Megan and watching her out of the corners of our eyes to see how she would hold up. Our mother offered bland reassurances and invented excuses for the boy: he probably just got cold feet, she said, or maybe he was sick and couldn’t get to a phone, but there were plenty of fish in the sea, and besides, who cared about a rotten kid like Todd Picou anyway?

  But Megan was too smart to be consoled. She knew the truth, and nothing anyone said could change it: she’d been stood up on her first date. That was it. That’s what had happened. No further explanation needed. And if everyone would just stop talking about it, she’d appreciate it.

  She got over it eventually, in a fashion. She went to school, did her homework, listened to music, and talked with her friends on the phone, like she always had. After several days had passed, though, I noticed she wasn’t singing in her room at night anymore. She kept going to her guitar lessons for a few weeks, but after a while she lost interest. She put the Harmony away in the back of her closet, and that was the last we saw of it.

  That Christmas, she redecorated her room. She pulled down her ruffled pink curtains and replaced the matching pink bedspread with a psychedelic tie-dyed sheet. She tacked up a black-light poster on the wall above her Panasonic stereo: LOVE it said in fluorescent red-orange letters against a rusty blue background, the word shot through with bullet holes, as though the poster had been sprayed with a machine gun.

  And while I couldn’t have said for sure that it was related, around this same time my sister began to gain weight. She threw off the frilly dresses our mother was still buying for her and began to wear big sloppy shirts with their tails untucked. She got round, oversized granny glasses, and she let her hair grow long so that it frizzed at the bottom, and before the school year was out, she barely resembled the girl I’d grown up with. Within a couple more years, she’d become the seventeen-year-old cynic who snuck cigarettes down by the water, the girl who chewed her nails and read Ms. magazine and serious-minded books with forbidding titles like The Stranger and The Metamorphosis, the one who spoke scathingly about all that southern belle–Miss Scarlett O’Hara–debutante crapola. The girl whose only wish was to flee.

  And because of what? Because of one boy, one broken date? Surely there was more to it than that, but that’s what it looked like to me, anyway. Dashed hopes had ruined her life.

  Or maybe, I considered further, maybe Todd Picou hadn’t ruined her life at all. Maybe he’d only given her the excuse to finally shrug off the expectations of our mother and become her own person. That disastrous first date experience had only knocked her life into focus, revealing, for better or worse, the true Megan, the one who had always been there.

  Sunday afternoons—I knew this because I accompanied her once—she’d take the Rambler and go for drives around town, her cigarette dangling out the window. Around and around she’d drive, in ever-widening circles beginning at the courthouse square and spiraling outward through neighborhoods and farms until, bored with herself and the driving and the awful music on the radio, she’d stop the car at the edge of a field at the farthest edge of the town and sit there staring out at the road rolling north, as though readying herself for the day she might finally make her escape from the black hole of Terrebonne.

  Behind me in her bedroom, I heard her record player start up. Electric folk music rattled out from her window, harsh and tinny sounding. She sang along in snatches, although you could hardly have called it singing. The words came out in whining, tortured phrases, like the song was being wrung from her throat: “How does it feeeel?… on your own! … home! … stooone!”

  I looked up across the water at the Martellos’ house, as grand and implacable as ever. A shadow moved behind the balcony doors of Gabriella’s room. The curtains suddenly parted to let in the afternoon light, and I felt a sharp tug in my chest as I saw a hand, a slender arm, a flash of dark hair.

  Forget it, my sister might have warned me. Not worth it. Quit while you’re ahead.

  Or, easier, she could’ve just turned and pointed to the poster in her room. That said it all: LOVE shot through with bullet holes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  IT came to her in a dream, my mother claimed. One Friday night, without even thinking about our father’s labs or comets or anything like that, she went to bed and in her sleep she saw the whole thing as clearly as if it had already happened.

  “A comet ball,” Megan said, in a tone that plainly said how idiotic she thought the idea sounded.

  “Sure. Like a charity ball. Like what they do in New Orleans.”

  Our father needed money for his labs, our mother explained. The school obviously wasn’t going to help. He’d have to raise the funds himself, and what better way to do it than with a party?

  She went on to describe her vision to us over breakfast, painting a picture in the air with her fingers as she spoke: there’d be a band, dancing, lights in the trees … costumed waiters bearing silver trays of champagne glasses … couples strolling arm in arm along the waterfront.…

  “Where do you propose that we hold such a ball?” my father asked.

  “And who’s going to come?” Megan asked.

  “We’ll do it at the Martellos’. They’ve got that great big gorgeous house right over there. Everybody’ll want to come,” my mother answered.

  “Do the Martellos know this yet?” my father asked.

  “Well, no, not yet. I just thought of it.”

  “Let us know when you wake up,” Megan said, leaving the table.

  But my mother stayed seated, fleshing out the idea and answering all my father’s objections. They could get the food and drinks donated and then charge a fee per couple. It shouldn’t be that difficult really, she said. People put on these kinds of charity events all the time. Why couldn’t they?

  She phoned the Martellos that same afternoon to ask them about it. She spoke to Frank, he spoke to Barbara, and, surprising everyone but my mother, they agreed to host an event at their house. Frank said they were always looking for good charitable causes, and Barbara had been wanting to throw a party at their new house anyway. They’d be happy to help.

  “See? I knew they would,” my mother said.

  “And you’re going to organize all this?” my father said, peering at her over the newspaper.

  “With their help, yes.”

  He shrugged, as though to say, I’m not really sure why you’re doing this or what’s come over you, but if you want to raise money for the school laboratories, be my guest.

  I knew my mother well enough to know she didn’t care about any school labs; she only wanted t
o have her ball. I supposed she might’ve been dreaming about just such a ball her entire life. It was a dream fueled by half-remembered scenes from half-read novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald; and pictures of feathered Mardi Gras kings and queens and their costumed courts that she’d seen in New Orleans newspapers; and scenes from the old Hollywood films she loved so much, where sleekly dressed movie stars spoke in vaguely British accents while descending grand sweeping stairways—all fantasies that for a woman stuck in a swampy southern town like ours must’ve seemed as remote and impossible as the stories of princes and princesses she’d heard as a child. And yet, their impossibility never diminished the longing she felt to experience them herself. Now at last she would have her dream. She would conjure it up herself out of crêpe paper streamers, Christmastree lights, and the sheer force of her desire.

  As for the Martellos, I was a little puzzled as to why they would agree to help. Maybe they really were interested in charitable causes, as Frank said. Maybe, as my mother once suggested, they were bored living all by themselves in that big house. Or maybe as newcomers to Terrebonne they were eager to make a good impression on the locals. But I couldn’t help but feel that what really moved them to act was the strange, compelling power of that blue ball of fire in the sky, the one that had cast its spell over our two families as we stood in the yard a month ago watching it with my telescope—the comet that even now I felt hovering over our town, making us all do things that we might not normally have done.

  My mother got herself a notebook and began working with the Martellos to plan the party. They had their cause, their venue, their theme. For the date they settled on a Saturday between Thanksgiving and Christmas—a good time for charity events, said Barbara, who apparently knew about such things. Over drinks one evening at their house they drafted a notice for the newspaper. My mother brought it home and, still giddy from her rum and Coke, showed it to my father, who checked it with his red pen. He corrected her grammar, trimmed a few sentences, and added a paragraph about himself, so that it came out like this:

  Comet Ball Is Announced

  Mr. and Mrs. Frank Martello, together with Mr. and Mrs. Alan Broussard, are announcing a party to raise money to refurbish the science laboratories at Terrebonne High School. THE COMET BALL, to be held Saturday, December 8, will feature music, dance, refreshments, and diverse entertainments. It promises to be the gala charity event of the season.

  Mr. and Mrs. Martello, well-regarded newcomers to the community, will host the party at their residence in Beau Rivage Estates. Helping to organize the event is Mrs. Lydia Simoneaux Broussard, of Terrebonne. Mrs. Broussard says, “This Comet Ball is a great way not only to have fun, but also to raise money for a good cause.”

  Alan Broussard, familiar to readers of this newspaper from his weekly Groovy Science column, reminds us that the comet to which the event refers is Comet Kohoutek, due to light up our skies with a spectacular cosmic display at Christmastime.

  Tickets are $40 per couple, and will be available for purchase prior to and at the event. For details, please contact Mrs. Lydia Broussard …

  My father thought forty dollars was a lot to ask, but my mother disagreed, reminding him that if only a hundred couples came, he’d have four thousand dollars, less expenses, toward his science labs. Besides, she said, it was supposed to be a ball, not a barbecue. They didn’t want just anybody to show up; the forty-dollar ticket price would help keep away the riffraff.

  My father remained skeptical. But almost as soon as the announcement appeared in the newspaper, we began receiving phone calls. Women telephoned from as far away as Schriever and Montegut and Lockport to ask if they, too, could come with their husbands. My mother was proved right.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” she said. “People are dying for this kind of thing.”

  She agreed with Barbara, she said. The problem with Terrebonne was that there were just too few entertainment opportunities available for people with more sophisticated tastes. We might as well have been living in a jungle. There was no real social calendar to speak of; all we had were fishing rodeos, and oil company picnics, and those horrible, bloody, Cajun courirs de Mardi Gras, with drunken men on horseback flinging half-dead chickens in the air. Really, what chance did a lady have to get dressed up and put on her good jewelry and socialize in polite company? Without even quite knowing it, everyone had been waiting for an event exactly like this one.

  But they would have to hurry; they needed a band, a caterer, bartenders, decorations. She and Barbara swapped ideas over the phone like two high school girls planning for a prom. Barbara had seen some cute Chinese lanterns in New Orleans they might be able to use. Frank was asking around town about the food and drinks. One day my mother rode with Barbara to Thibodaux in her Town Car to browse for party supplies. They stopped afterward for lunch at the Thibodaux Country Club, and telling us about it over dinner, my mother found opportunity to repeat the phrase “lunch at the club” several times. They ran into Connie Delaney there, of Connie’s Gifts and Flowers, who agreed to do the flower arrangements. People were already talking about it, Connie had said. Everyone who came into her shop wanted to know who was going and what they should wear.

  “Isn’t that exciting?” my mother said, gripping her fork and knife. Her enthusiasm had a wild, stubborn quality about it, as if now that she had gotten a foot up on the ladder of society, she would hang on for all she was worth.

  She began to spend more and more time with the Martellos. She would take off in the car in the afternoon, drive across the bridge to Beau Rivage Estates, and not return home until the evening. She sat making phone calls with Barbara in their patio room, or they drove up to Thibodaux, where after running errands they stopped off at the club or visited Frank’s condo for “a little rest and relaxation,” as my mother called it. Removing her scarf as she came in the front door, she talked breathlessly about who else they had lined up to volunteer this or that service.

  My father followed her from room to room, the newspaper dangling from his hand, trying to keep up. He asked questions and tried to offer suggestions. The decorations, for instance. If they were going to have a comet theme, he might have some ideas for that. They could do something with lights, something to suggest stars and planets, maybe? Those kinds of touches were important, my father said. Maybe he should come over and talk to Frank about it.

  My mother rolled her eyes. He really didn’t need to worry himself, she told him. She and the Martellos had everything under control. My father could talk it up with the other teachers at school if he wanted, but really, there wasn’t much for him to do.

  At night when we were all getting ready to go to bed, my mother would still be up chatting in a whisper on the phone. She giggled and spoke in coded language, like a schoolgirl. “She did not!” she would say. “Well, you just tell her it’s none of her business.”

  My father frowned behind his glasses, his face pinched and impatient. “Are you going to talk all night?”

  “In a minute!” she answered.

  He would close their bedroom door behind him, slamming it hard so that the walls shook and the living room windows rattled in their frames, prompting Megan to turn to me with raised eyebrows, as though to say, Do you see this? Do you see what’s happening here?

  What I saw was a growing rivalry between my parents, something I’d never noticed before but that manifested itself now in slammed doors, and muttered asides, and muffled arguments heard through the floor of my bedroom as my mother came and went on her various errands. But why it should appear now, I didn’t know, and not knowing this, I turned to the comet. And then, as the comet winked and sparkled provocatively in the lens of my telescope, it became perfectly obvious to me: my mother was jealous of my father’s comet, and like a jealous lover, she retaliated.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  IT was only 160 million miles away now, fast approaching Earth’s orbit. Day by day, my father relayed the latest news to us at school. Operation Kohoutek, set up b
y NASA, was coordinating the activities of hundreds of scientists around the globe. All the major telescopes, from Mount Palomar’s 200-inch Hale on down, were on line to track it. Planes were being equipped with infrared telescopes to fly into the upper atmosphere to photograph it. Balloons would carry aloft packages of instruments to measure X-rays and gamma rays. Mariner 10, the Orbiting Solar Observatory 7, and Pioneer 8 were all set to gather additional data, and the launch of Skylab 3 had been delayed in order to bring the astronauts in for a close-up view of Kohoutek as it swept around the Sun.

  Though as yet invisible in the sky without a telescope, the comet was everywhere in the media by now. It had made the cover of Time, and there were features in Popular Science, Newsweek, National Geographic. “The Comet of the Century,” they called it. “The Christmas Comet.” “Kohoutek Cometh!” My father clipped all of these stories and taped them to a display board he set up in the lobby at school, under the heading “Countdown to Kohoutek.”

  “Got you a little bulletin board going there,” Coach DuPleiss teased. But even he paused to read the headlines. “Seriously—we don’t have anything to be afraid of, do we?”

  The school astronomy club, which my father moderated, and which until recently had only four members, enjoyed an upsurge in popularity. They switched from monthly meetings to weekly ones, and a dozen students would gather after school in my father’s classroom to rap with him about the stars. He sat informally on his desk, swinging his legs, and entertained them with stories of the more spectacular and terrifying comets in history. There was the Great Civil War Comet, for instance, that appeared over the Battle of Shiloh spurting flaming red jets from its head. Or the Comet of the Black Death that swept across the sky like a sword during a plague that wiped out half the population of the world. Or the famous Cheseaux Comet of 1744, whose tail split into six rays that fanned out across the horizon and then lingered for months, terrorizing cities all across Europe and driving men mad. Donati’s Comet, the most beautiful comet of them all, hung in the sky for an entire year, expelling a series of shroudlike comas, like a woman casting off veils. Comet Encke dropped a piece of itself that exploded over Siberia with a blast a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that flattened Hiroshima. The Star of Bethlehem: a comet? Could’ve been. Some scientists said it was.