by Cathy Holton
Candy, in those days, weighed one hundred ten pounds and had a mane of thick red-gold hair, but over the years she put on weight, so that by the time Stella started fourth grade she weighed close to two hundred and fifty pounds.
Stella used to try to imagine her father. She saw him as a tall, stately man with a ready laugh and a loving, protective manner. Sometimes she imagined him with a guitar strapped to his chest, and sometimes she saw him as a fireman or an astronaut or a fighter pilot. She practiced saying, My father says, or My father always lets me, or My father bought me a pony. There were other children without fathers, she wasn’t the only one, but they seemed a pathetic, slightly disreputable group and not one that Stella wanted to be part of. There was something precarious about her and Candy’s rootless existence, their sad female undergarments hung out to dry in rented bathrooms, their old car always breaking down and requiring the kindness of strangers. Without a male presence in their lives they seemed diminished, vulnerable. There was a void at the center of their small world. And yet the men Candy brought home were dull and useless imitations; they did little to fill that void.
Stella knew what poor people were, she had lived among them all her life, but with the innocence of childhood, she had never actually considered herself to be one of them. She had no one else to compare herself to. Traveling around L.A., attending schools in small dusty towns, she was simply the smart girl who did her homework and didn’t cause trouble in class. She never stopped to consider the socio-economic pecking order because L.A. was pretty much a level playing field – everyone subsisted on food stamps and welfare or, for the more fortunate, paycheck to paycheck.
Moving to Tuscaloosa in the fourth grade changed all of that. Stella attended a new elementary school in a high-achieving district she was not zoned for. Candy drove her every day to the edge of a prosperous-looking neighborhood and dropped her off, and Stella walked three blocks to catch the school bus. The school was large and bright and clean, and there were new textbooks and maps of the world in every classroom. The school library was a treasure trove and Stella immersed herself in Mary, Queen of Scots and Black Beauty, coming home every Friday with a backpack full of clean, shiny books so that Candy slapped her playfully on the rear end and said, “Lord, girl, you’re going to wear your eyes out.” She met a dark-haired girl in her class named Donna Shelby, and they became good friends.
In October, Donna invited Stella to her birthday party. It was to be held on a Saturday afternoon at Donna’s home. When Stella gave her the party invitation, Candy looked at the address, squinting her eyes against her drifting cigarette smoke, and said, “So you’re friends with a rich girl, huh?” They were living at the time in an unpainted Victorian house that had been cut up into four apartments, the kind of sad, bedraggled-looking place that had Stella driven by, she would have thought, Poor people live there.
In honor of the prestigious address on the invitation, Candy took Stella to the Wal-Mart and allowed her to spend more than a few dollars on a birthday present. Then she walked next door and borrowed a party dress from their neighbor, a divorced mother of three whose daughter had been appearing in pageants since she was two. Their apartment was crammed with trophies and sequined tiaras and pink sashes that read, Miss Celestial Queen or Miss Southern Belle Glitz. The daughter, the current reigning Miss Tallapoosa Depot Days, was named Madalyn and she had a closet filled with over four thousand dollars worth of pageant dresses and it was one of these, a blue satin number with a frilled, sparkly underskirt that Candy procured for Stella.
On Saturday morning, Candy drove Stella to the party. The neighborhood was even more impressive than the one where Candy dropped Stella off to catch the school bus. Looking out the streaked window at the two-story houses set on perfectly manicured lawns, Stella felt a tremor in the pit of her stomach. Although imposing, the houses were alike in their facades so that after a few minutes of driving and turning, Candy became hopelessly lost.
Two women were walking down the street toward them, and Candy leaned out the window and flapped her hand. “Excuse me! Woo-hoo, excuse me!”
“No,” Stella said. “Don’t.” She slid down in the seat. Her stomach hurt from the expansive quiet of the neighborhood and the realization that she and her mother didn’t belong here. The two women approached cautiously. Stella was acutely aware of Candy’s massive stomach swelling her Redneck Woman t-shirt, and their multi-colored Chevy Chevette, shaking and panting against the curb like an old dog.
The two women approaching were thin. They wore tennis shoes and jogging clothes. “Can we help you?” one of the women said in a tone indicating that she would rather not.
“Hey, y’all, we’re lost,” Candy said cheerfully. She held the birthday party invitation out the window and waved it. “We’re looking for 212 Persimmon Lane. The Shelby house. My daughter here, this is my daughter, Stella. Sit up and say hello, Stella. Well, anyway Stella’s been invited to the little Shelby girl’s birthday party and we’re just trying to find the house. Y’all wouldn’t happen to know the Shelby’s would you?”
The woman pointed at the end of the street. “Last house on the left,” she said.
Candy thanked them and they drove on. In the distance, the subdivision ended and Stella could see a series of wide, rolling fields and a lone chinaberry tree standing beside a small white house with a green barn out back.
Stella looked down at her blue-satin-encased lap. The frilled underskirt was beginning to raise a rash on her legs.
“I don’t feel good,” she said. “I want to go home.”
“Oh, no you don’t,” Candy said. “I paid good money for that birthday present. I drove you all the way out here. You’re going to the damn party.”
The girl who opened the front door had long blonde hair and a vacant, bored expression on her pretty face. Her eyes traveled from Stella’s shoes to her face and back down again. “Who are you?” she said.
“I’m friends with Donna. I’m here for the birthday.” The girl looked a lot like Donna and Stella guessed she must be a sister. In the background Stella could hear the Spice Girls singing Wannabe. Several loud giggles and shouts of excitement told her the party was already in full swing.
The girl frowned, staring at Stella’s dress. “You go to school with Donna?”
“Yes.”
“That’s weird.”
Behind her, Stella could hear the high-pitched whine of her mother’s car as it began its lumbering progress along the quiet street. Beneath the girl’s sharply inquisitive stare, Stella was self-consciously aware of the car, the ridiculous party dress, the cheap, badly-wrapped present in her sweaty hands. It was as if she had gone her whole life with a blindfold over her eyes and now it had been suddenly and irrevocably ripped away. Standing in the bright slanting sunlight in the prosperous suburban neighborhood, Stella saw herself now through Donna’s sister’s coolly discriminating eyes. She had thought she was one person and now she realized she was someone else. She stared at her feet, deeply and hopelessly ashamed.
“Is that your mother?” Donna’s sister said, her tone one of pitying amusement.
Stella shuffled her weight from one foot to the other. She didn’t look up.
“No,” she said.
Most of the other girls at the party were in her class at school. In the level democratic playing field of public school, Stella was friendly and popular. But here, with her new awareness of herself, she felt suddenly shy and awkward. The other girls crowded around her and said, not unkindly, “I love your dress.”
“It’s so shiny.”
“Is that a slip underneath?”
They were all wearing jeans and sweaters. She was the only one in a dress.
“Thank you for coming,” Donna said politely, smiling and taking the present from Stella. They were downstairs in the large walk-out basement that overlooked the sloping yard. A bank of white cabinets and bookshelves ran along one wall, faced by two leather sofas. Family photographs lined the crea
my yellow walls. It was the kind of room you might see on a television show, and looking around at the rugs and the books and the clean upholstered furniture, Stella realized she could never bring Donna home with her, she could never ask her to spend the night. The idea of exposing Donna to the drab, dreary interior of their cramped apartment when she was used to all this light and airiness was unthinkable.
They listened to music and played games under the careless supervision of Donna’s older sister, Cara. After awhile they went out into the yard and had pizza and soft drinks on a long table set up underneath the trees. Then they had cake and ice cream and Donna opened her presents. Stella waited in quiet anguish for Donna to paw through the stack of magnificently wrapped gifts to find her own meager offering – a book and a set of fizzy bath balls.
“Oh, I love The Golden Compass!” Donna said and hugged Stella. She made Stella sit next to her while she opened the rest of her gifts, including a watch, and a jewelry box with a tiny unicorn on its lid that twirled slowly to the haunting strains of Wind Beneath My Wings. Stella was fascinated by the unicorn and she turned the box over and rewound it several times as Donna continued to open her presents. On the last winding the mechanism stuck, and twisting the key hard, Stella was horrified to find that it had snapped off at the base. She looked up guiltily but Donna wasn’t paying attention, she was exclaiming over another gift. Silently, Stella turned the jewelry case over and slid it back into its box.
She felt sick to her stomach the whole rest of the party. If she thought Candy would come and get her, she would have gone to the phone and called her. As it was, she sat quietly, smiling and red-faced, while Donna opened the rest of her gifts. She had amassed a mountain of presents and with any luck, she wouldn’t notice the broken jewelry box until long after the party was over.
Cara came around with a black garbage bag and began to collect the paper plates and napkins. Stella jumped up to help her.
“Thanks,” Cara said, thrusting the bag at Stella. She turned around and walked off. Late afternoon sun slanted through the tall trees shading the lawn. A breeze ruffled the leaves, lifting Stella’s hair off her sweating face. She glanced anxiously at the house, hoping the party was almost over.
“Who broke this?”
Everyone stopped talking and stared at Donna who sat holding the jewelry box in one hand and the broken key in the other.
The girls looked at one another across the long table.
“Stella Nightingale broke it,” Abby Reynolds said.
“No, she didn’t,” Donna said.
“Yes, she did. I saw her.”
Donna looked at Stella. “Did you break this?” she said.
Stella shook her head. “No,” she said.
Donna got up and left the table, followed by Abby and a clump of girls. They walked across the lawn and into the house. The few who were left looked at each other and giggled nervously. Faintly, in the distance, Hanson was singing Thinking of You and in the deep blue autumn sky, a faraway jet left a fleecy trail. Stella went around the table throwing away cans of soda and paper plates covered in half-eaten mounds of cake and melted ice cream. Some of the girls got up to help her. When they had finished, one of the girls took the garbage bag up to the garage. Stella hesitated, and then walked across the yard and into the house where Donna stood in the corner with a group of furiously whispering girls.
“I’m sorry,” Stella said. “I have to go home early. I’m not feeling too good.”
“Thanks for coming,” Donna said. She leaned over and brushed Stella’s cheek with cool, dry lips.
When she got to the basement stairs, Stella glanced behind her. Donna stood with her eyes down, listening as Abby hissed in her ear.
Stella went into the kitchen and called her mother and told her the party had ended early. She stood for awhile at the kitchen sink, looking down at the girls on the lawn. Donna’s mother was having a drink in the soaring living room as she walked through. Stella thanked her and told her she had to go home early, and Donna’s mother, glancing at her dress, murmured unconvincingly, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll wait outside,” Stella said.
“Is your mother coming? I’d like to meet her. I’ve never met your mother.”
“She has to work,” Stella said. “My baby sitter is coming to pick me up.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Shelby smiled coldly. She sipped her drink. “Where does she work? Your mother, I mean.”
“In a dress shop.”
“Which one?”
“I’m not sure.” Stella began to back toward the foyer. “Goodbye,” she said.
Mrs. Shelby got up and followed her. Stella opened the front door and stepped out onto the tall bricked stoop. Mrs. Shelby stood in the opened doorway behind her, her drink nestled in her hands. Faintly, in the distance, Stella could hear the squealing fan belt of the Chevette as it made its way through the maze-like subdivision.
“Where did you say you lived?”
“Thank you for having me,” Stella said. “I had a very nice time.”
The squealing was louder now. Mrs. Shelby’s dark eyes left Stella’s face and peered into the distance.
“Isn’t that your mother now?”
“No,” Stella said.
Mrs. Shelby gave her a cool, dejected look. A scent of ripe apples wafted across the lawn. Ludicrously, considering the time of the day and the urban splendor of the neighborhood, Stella could hear the distant crowing of a rooster.
Her friendship with Donna Shelby never recovered. Someone told the principal that Stella was illegally attending school in a district she didn’t live in and Candy had no choice but to pull her out and switch schools. Three years later, Stella ran into Donna at a middle school football game. The small town where Stella currently lived was playing against Donna’s school team. Donna was standing with a group of girls when Stella walked by and saw her.
“Donna!” she said, waving. “Hey.”
Donna’s eyes settled on her for a moment and then shifted indifferently to a point just beyond Stella’s shoulder. Stella dropped her hand and walked on.
Behind Donna, one of the girls said loudly, “Oh my God. Who was that?”
“No one,” Donna said.
Alice was in a jolly mood when she got back from lunch with her friends. She chattered on while Stella walked behind her, silent and brooding. Alice seemed to sense that she had offended Stella and she went out of her way to be charming and penitent. Or maybe it was just Stella’s imagination. Maybe she wanted Alice to feel guilty for the way she had been treated in front of Alice’s friends.
That night at supper, Alice turned to her and said, “Did you grow up here?”
“I’m from Alabama, Alice. You know that.”
“Do I?” The old woman lifted a forkful of egg salad and chewed slowly, staring at the wall. She had awakened from her nap in a dazed, pensive mood and had spent the entire afternoon in her room watching the golf channel.
Stella picked up her peanut butter sandwich and then set it down again. “You told me when you hired me that you felt sorry for me, being from Alabama.”
“That sounds like me.” Alice continued to stare at the wall, chewing staunchly. She seemed lost in her own thoughts, lifting her fork from her plate to her mouth with almost mechanical precision. After awhile she glanced at Stella and said, “Do your parents live here?”
“My parents are dead. I’m an orphan.” Stella wasn’t sure why she had said this; it had just come tumbling out.
Alice put her fork down and turned her head slowly. She rested her faded blue eyes on Stella. “An orphan,” she said. “How terrible.”
She had said it because she wanted to give Alice a jolt. She was glad to see it had worked. “You get used to it,” she said flatly.
“Did you tell me before that your parents were dead?”
“No.”
“I think I would have remembered that.” There was a long period of silence, during which they both stared at the
wall, eating steadily. “Family life is complicated,” Alice said finally. She had finished and she stacked her silverware on her plate. “It’s wonderful to be loved but it can be confining, at times, too. You’re never your own person; you constantly have to live up to someone else’s expectations of who you should be.”
Stella got up and took the dishes to the sink.
Alice said, “There’s always an element of disappointment when someone you love let’s you down. The deeper your love, the deeper your disappointment. I should know. I raised three sons. And I was the daughter of an overbearing mother.”
“Do you want some ice cream?”
“No. Thank you.”
Stella turned on the hot water and filled the sink.
“Holidays can be trying,” Alice said. “All those past hurts and grievances bubbling to the surface. I used to dread Thanksgiving, all of us gathered around a long table, trying not to bring up anything painful. Trying not to air the family dirty linen.” She continued to stare at the wall and then, without warning, she chuckled, her thin shoulders shaking. The overhead lights glinted off her scalp, pink and fragile as a baby’s. “Adeline used to say her favorite Christmas lights were the tail lights of her children driving away.” She pushed her chair back.
Stella went over and began to untie Alice’s bib.
Alice said, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“Two little brothers.”
“But who raised you?”
“Foster parents,” Stella said, feeling a grim satisfaction in saying it, not just in the lie itself but in the idea of the lie. She had often practiced using it; it carried a disturbing, undeniable weight that always brought people up short. How shocking to imagine what went on behind closed foster home doors. Shocking and terrible. But not nearly as terrible as what went on behind closed family home doors.
