Shake Down the Stars

by Renee Swindle

  I walk to the couch and sit directly between the girls, who continue their texting without missing a beat.

  “I guess you two know you’re staying here a couple of days?”

  No response.

  “Are you two listening to me?”

  “I’m listening,” Sophia says, eyes on her phone.

  Margot continues moving her thumbs at breakneck speed. “I am, too.” I try to grab the phone, but she’s too quick and pulls away. “Stop, Auntie P. You can be, like, so immature.”

  “So, who are you texting? What could possibly be so important?”

  “Nicole Liu,” says Margot.

  “And Ashley Mulligan-Peete. Nicole heard that Ashley kissed Brendan Richards, but it’s, like, so not true.”

  “Brendan is dating Nicole,” Margot offers.

  “You guys are ten! What do you mean by dating?”

  “Boyfriend and girlfriend. Now we have to tell her that Brendan didn’t cheat on her; we know Brendan, and he’s not like that.”

  “He’s one of our best friends.”

  “And he told us he’s been, like, so faithful.”

  “Isn’t that a lot of drama for fifth grade?”

  I watch their thumbs whiz across the keypads as they go about brokering peace accords between their posh friends. Tired of waiting, I snatch their phones and hold them high in the air.

  “Hey! You can’t do that!”

  “I just did. No phones today.”

  They start to protest, but ignoring them, I put the phones in my purse, go into the kitchen, and take out a broom and a cleaning rag. They stare up at me as though planning twin curses. “Time for a quiz. Sophia, do you remember what this is?” I hold up the broom and watch as she rolls her eyes. “Margot? Do you recognize this?” She crosses her arms dismissively. “If you haven’t figured it out, you two are helping me clean my apartment today. The entire apartment. Top to bottom.”

  They look at each other before returning to shooting their twin-powered glares on me.

  “Like, why don’t you have a house cleaner, anyway?” Margot asks.

  “Yeah, why don’t you just have somebody else clean this place?” Sophia adds.

  “Are you two going to pay someone to come and clean?” I ask, hand on hip.

  They look at each other: “We could!”

  “This isn’t about me, you two. It’s about you learning responsibility and how to take care of yourselves.”

  “Seems to me we’re taking care of you,” Margot says.

  I give Sophia the rag. She takes it apprehensively with her face turned away as though I’ve handed over a dead skunk.

  “Get up. We’re cleaning. This’ll be fun. I’ll even put on some Beethoven.”

  • • •

  “Oh God,” Margot says. “It gets worse.”

  My apartment is now officially spotless except for two full trash bags sitting in front of the door, waiting to be taken downstairs. We head for the bins out back. Mrs. Mathews calls down from her apartment window when she sees us, “Hey, you twins! How you durin’?”

  “Fine.”

  “You helpin’ your auntie with the trash?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ain’t that nice. You two sho ’nuff look alike. You ever get confused by who you is?”

  The girls stare up at her curiously.

  She eases herself farther out the window. “You know, Mrs. Sanders broke her hip. Yeah. Fell down, and it done broke something good. And you know Patrick got that new car. He’s leasin’ it. Gotta pay for it every month. Uh-huh.” We wait as she continues telling us the day’s news. All she needs is a ticker beneath her window announcing the stock market averages and Dow Jones returns. Her attention is diverted when her downstairs neighbor, Deborah, appears on the stoop. “Deborah, I know you hear your phone ringing in that apartment of yours. I know you hear it, ’cause I can hear it ringing myself! Why haven’t you picked it up?”

  “I knew I’d see you in a minute! What did you want?”

  “You coming over for dinner tonight?! Anthony is bringing the steaks!”

  Deborah and Mrs. Mathews continue shouting their conversation, and the twins and I are forgotten. I’m ready to suggest we go back inside, when two men pass pulling shopping carts filled with trash bags, each bag stuffed to capacity with cans and bottles. The carts are so full, the men use all their strength to make their way down the street. The taller one wears a towel around his head to keep the sun off his face. He could be a nameless drudge in any period stretching back to ancient days.

  “Why are people always pulling shopping carts around here?” Sophia asks.

  “Yeah. What’s in them?” Margot asks.

  “They collect empty bottles and cans and take them to the recycling center.”

  “Why?” Sophia asks.

  “They get money for each can. That’s how a lot of people get money.”

  “Really?”

  They silently watch the men trudge up the street as if seeing ghosts.

  While I sometimes bemoan their upbringing, I can’t blame them for the limitations of their ivory-tower existence. I rest my hands on their shoulders. “We should get back inside and wash up. You two hungry yet?”

  “I am,” Sophia says. “What about Osento?”

  “I’m tired of Osento,” Margot says. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  I think of the wad of cash upstairs but then realize I don’t want anything more than a burrito and chips. “You know,” I say, “there’s a perfectly good taqueria up the street. Why don’t we just go there?”

  “What’s a taqueria?” they say in unison.

  Oh. My. God.

  • • •

  Hours later, we’re having dessert at Benoit, a French restaurant in the city. The taqueria went over surprisingly well for lunch, but after spending the day at the Academy of Arts and Sciences and Golden Gate Park, the girls wanted their typical four-star prix fixe meal for dinner. They each order dessert in perfect French. San Francisco Stargazers meets the third Saturday of every month at Pacific Point, and since we’re already in the city, I’m thinking that it would be nice to stargaze with someone other than myself. Only problem, the girls have never warmed to stargazing no matter how many lessons I’ve given, and I can’t imagine them jumping up and down with glee if I suggest spending an hour staring at the stars before heading home.

  I wait until half of their dessert is finished and the sugar has kicked in before broaching the subject. “Hey, you two, I just thought of something fun we could do.”

  “No,” Margot says.

  “We are not watching Star Trek again,” adds Sophia.

  “I wasn’t going to ask you to watch Star Trek, smarty pants. I realized something.”

  They exchange dubious glances.

  “SF Stargazers meets tonight. Isn’t that great?”

  “No,” Margot says, continuing to eat.

  “We don’t want to go.”

  “Oh, come on. They meet at the beach and they always have hot chocolate, and they tell great stories. You don’t even need to bring a telescope! People just show up! Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  “No.”

  Margot says, “If I had my phone back, now that would be fun.”

  “But it’s a full moon tonight and with the fancy scopes they have, we’ll be able to see every crater and nook.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “No, thank you. Hailey liked telescopes, not us.”

  Margot shoots Sophia a look, and she immediately gazes down at the table. “Sorry.”

  I’m not sure how much the girls remember about Hailey; since I stopped talking about her long ago, I know I haven’t helped matters. Now I worry that all that’s left of her memory is a mystery cousin they hardly remember and a tragedy surroundin
g their aunt.

  Deacon Morris said once that when you hide pain, it only shows up later in one form or another, just more virulent. He says it’s best to deal with it straight on and with honesty. I think of this as I look at them.

  “It’s okay that we talk about her, you know. It’s my fault for making you think otherwise.”

  “It won’t make you sad?” Sophia asks.

  “To some degree, I’m sure. But it’s important. I don’t want you to forget her.”

  “She looks cute in her pictures.”

  “Yeah, she was. She was really smart, too. Like you two.”

  “Do you think you’ll have more kids?”

  Margot bumps Sophia’s elbow and glares.

  “It’s okay, Margot. I want you both to feel free to ask me anything—about anything. I’m always here for you, okay?”

  They nod. I look at Sophia. “I can’t imagine having another child.”

  “Maybe one day you will,” Margot says.

  “You shouldn’t, like, be so alone,” Sophia adds. “Sometimes you seem lonely.”

  “I’m working on that.” I smile. “Which is another reason it would be great to see my old friends at SF Stargazers.”

  “Ha-ha,” Sophia says. “Not going to happen.”

  Margot continues staring at me.

  “You want to ask something else, sweetie?” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “Go ahead. Like I said, you can ask anything you want.”

  “Can we, like, have our phones back now? It’s been, like, forever.”

  • • •

  I use Mark Warner’s homemade telescope to gaze at the moon. He made the telescope himself over a period of three years and even made his own equatorial mount. The girls and I came to the agreement that I could stargaze for one full hour if I returned their phones. They now sit on the beach next to a fire someone has made, roasting marshmallows and talking with another girl their age and her younger brother. We adults go about stargazing. There are roughly ten of us out tonight. I recognized most of them when we arrived, and I was greeted as though I’d been gone for only a couple meetings instead of nearly five years.

  SF Stargazers isn’t a social group in the usual sense. Even when I attended regularly, we rarely discussed our personal lives and tended to stick with those topics we couldn’t talk about with non-stargazers—topics we were hungry to discuss, such as trips to various observatories, certain star findings, or telescope modifications and additions. That’s what makes the group so special. We know absolutely nothing about one another, yet we feel grateful for friends who speak the same language.

  I’m especially happy to see Mark tonight. A regular Carl Sagan, Mark has always been able to answer any question I’ve thrown at him. He has every right to be proud of his telescope, a DS 3 with ultra light and lots of power. It’s no wonder it took him three years to build. His telescope has such a long range I should probably seek out clusters and constellations, but Mark seems to understand my fascination with the moon tonight and tells me to take as long as I want. Which I do. It’s a perfectly clear sky and nice to be able to inhale the smell of the ocean as I stare at the moon’s craters and shadows, ridges and crooks and hills. “It’s gorgeous,” I murmur.

  “She sure is,” I hear Mark say. “Can’t beat Earth’s satellite for beauty. Her face is bruised from the meteoroids that banged her up after the original big bang, but she looks just fine to me.”

  I pause long enough to smile up at him. He holds a cup of cocoa in his hands and wears a fleece jacket and his trusty binoculars around his neck. His silver hair blows in the wind. “Glad you’re back,” he says, which for a nerdy stargazer like himself may as well be a confession of complete love and adoration.

  “Glad to be back,” I say with a smile.

  He looks up through his binoculars. “My biggest dream is to go to the moon and set up my telescope and look at Earth. I want to see how she’d look through my viewfinder.”

  “I like that idea.”

  I gaze through the telescope again. I’d always thought I’d bring Hailey to one of the meetings with me when she was old enough. I would have loved for her to meet Mark and to have shown her off. She would have liked Mark’s idea of going to the moon with a telescope.

  I imagine her now, older even—twenty, thirty—her shoes covered in moon dust as she sets up her telescope and stares down at Earth. And hell, since it’s my fantasy, I imagine she finds me through her viewfinder, and I find her through mine. We smile at each other and laugh and wave. The thought that she might find me here, some two hundred fifty thousand miles away, makes me feel less lonely, more appreciative even. I know Hailey would want me to enjoy my time here on Earth, to make the most of it. Earth is a lovely little planet, after all, with its perfect mix of air and water, gravity and sky, spinning forever and ever eastward on its axis, tiny as a pebble, suspended in a sea of black.

  fourteen

  Coco, all three hundred–plus pounds of her, takes two steps forward. Her buttocks undulate beneath her cotton top; her calf muscles quicken and relax. What are clunky, ugly shoes for the rest of us may as well be ballet slippers for her, as she extends a dainty, pointed foot before each step. The noise of the bowling alley recedes as one of Tchaikovsky’s drippingly romantic violin concertos swells behind her. She then swings her arm back, and we watch the ball catapult down the lane and hit the pins in an explosion of white and black.

  Another strike.

  Clem and I don’t bother applauding. Coco’s strikes are now legend and all but expected.

  “I think we’ve been duped,” Clem says.

  Coco walks back and takes a slow, meditative pull from her root beer. She was chatty and gregarious before walking through the doors of Albany Lanes, but as soon as she took her personal ball—gold and pink and engraved with her initials—from her personal bag—also gold and pink with Hot Coco embroidered at the top—she was all business, leaving Clem and me regretting the ten-dollar bet to the first-place winner.

  She checks the monitor now. Her score so far is 130. Clem has forty points; I have thirty-two. Since we three started to bond over punch at the mourners’ group, Clem and I have been trying to convince Coco to spend time with us. For weeks, we suggested dinner or lunch or even tea and cookies, but Coco always said no. That was until last week when Clem asked, “Isn’t there anything you’d want to do? I know for myself it’s no good staying in the house all the time. Piper and I are up for anything. You’ll have a lot of fun.” Clem looked at me expectedly and I gave a firm nod. “Yeah, just last night Clem convinced me to watch The Notebook for the first time. Let me tell you, nonstop excitement.” I pretended to put my finger down my throat.

  Clem gave me a look. “We’d love to see you outside of this here rec room, Coco. Isn’t there anything you’d like to do?”

  And that was when Coco said slowly, “Let’s go bowling.”

  Coco sits next to me and wipes her hands with her special towel while Clem stands and readies herself. “Remember to keep your eye on the center line in that floor,” Coco advises.

  “I am tryin’!”

  Clem brings her ball to the tip of her nose and gives her ass a wiggle. She wears tight white pants and a tight pink shirt. She’s wearing makeup now, and her hair, dyed to resemble the dark red of her youth, is pulled back by a floral scarf. Clem, it turns out, is a babe.

  Our neighbor has certainly taken a liking to her. George is a potbellied man the next lane over, and he can’t help but stare with his bottom lip hanging open every time she takes a turn. His friend, Leonard, apologized for his behavior, explaining that George is recently divorced. But George, who’s in his late fifties and roughly the same age as Clem, seems to think that because, like Clem, he’s also from South Carolina and lived in a town only ten miles from where she grew up—(“You grew up in Jarvis? You don’t say! Do
you know a fellow by the name of Randy Truss?” And Clem’s cool response, “Can’t say that I do”)—he has every right to ogle and flirt.

  “You need help with that ball, girl?” he says, watching her.

  “I never needed no help with balls,” Clem retorts.

  “I bet you don’t.” He grins at Leonard who, embarrassed, goes for the fries he’s eating.

  “Let her alone now,” Coco admonishes. “You know better than to break a bowler’s concentration.”

  “Hell, she’s breaking mine in those tight pants of hers.”

  Clem shakes her ass again and trots down the lane. We watch the ball fly straight up in the air and crash-land on the seamless wood floor before it rolls into the gutter.

  George says, “Impressive.”

  “Oh shut up, you,” Clem snaps.

  He laughs, heaves himself up from his chair, and gets his ball. A few steps and—strike. He turns and smiles at Clem. “Why don’t you let me give you a lesson or two?”

  Clem holds her ball near the tip of her nose as she waits to take her second turn. “I doubt there’s anything of relevance that you can teach me.”

  “Wanna make a bet?”

  “Try to throw with more force,” Coco offers.

  Clem straightens her shoulders and back. She takes concentrated steps toward the pins, but as soon as she releases the ball, it shoots backward, flying straight toward me. I hear Coco shout, “Duck!” and cross my arms in front of my face, hoping I come out alive. When I hear a loud thud, I slowly open my eyes and watch Clem’s ball roll past my foot.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” she says with a scowl.

  “Pins are in the opposite direction!” George laughs.

  “If you’d shut your trap, I’d be able to concentrate!”

  “Ever think of joining a league, girl?” he says as Clem retrieves her ball. “You got talent!”

  “I sure wish you’d hush up!”

  Coco and I exchange looks. “Go on,” she says to me. “Show ’em what you got.”

  I manage to knock down eight pins between my two turns. Then Coco’s up—all grace and beauty on a bowling alley floor. Even George is mesmerized.