Starry Night

by Isabel Gillies

  “Floods aren’t good, Farah,” Vati said.

  “I know, but they are exciting.” Farah raised her eyebrows and winked at Vati.

  “You’re weird,” Vati said.

  “What are you going to wear, Wren?” Reagan said, checking her phone.

  “I don’t know. My mom said she had a plan.”

  “Sc-AIR-ree,” she sang.

  “Well, I know you all borrowed Farah’s mom’s dresses, but my mother didn’t want me to. She thinks Alix’s clothes are too sophisticated for a fifteen-year-old. I can’t help it. You know my mom. She’s uptight.”

  “Your mom is so not uptight, Wren,” Padmavati said, putting her hand out so we wouldn’t jaywalk across Central Park West.

  “I know she doesn’t look like that on the outside, but she completely is. I’m not even allowed to be on Facebook.”

  “Um, hello? She lets Bravo come into your house every week,” noted Farah.

  “And Oliver has dreads!” Vati said, releasing her arm when the light turned green. “I loooove the dress Alix lent me. It’s pink!” she said, crossing the street.

  “Dinah’s TV thing and Oliver’s dreads are totally different. Remember when she made me give back that little bracelet to Andrew Goodman in sixth grade?”

  “Oh yeah—what was up with that? It was weensy, and he was asking you out,” Farah said.

  “I know, but it was gold, and Mom thought it was inappropriate. She let me keep the Hershey bar he gave me with it.”

  “Oh god, she’s going to be home when we get to your house, right?”

  “Yes, Farah, Dinah has her show thing,” I said, and looked at my phone.

  “Wren! Just help me. How am I going to stay downstairs with your mother hysterically lurking around the set?” We were now two blocks away from my house. Farah’s sudden and obsessive application of the palest pink sparkly lip gloss every block was giving away the fact that she was about to see Tom-the-camera-guy. She took a deep cleansing breath in preparation.

  “Farah, we don’t even know if Tom-the-camera-guy will be shooting. And we have to get dressed anyway.” Farah had a massive crush on the DP (director of photography), Tom, who was so old. I’m pretty sure he was in his twenties.

  “Um, will Oliver be home?” Padmavati asked, with the subtlety of a ram. Padmavati has loved Oliver, my brother, since we were in kindergarten. Now that we are sophomores, she is absolutely sure she will marry him. We plan their wedding every time everyone sleeps over. Because she is Indian-American, in all likelihood some part of her wedding will be Hindi and traditional. Her husband might even ride in on an elephant, or maybe a horse. For the American half of the wedding she wants barbecue and coconut cake. Farah is the get-married-at-the-Carlyle-in-Carolina-Herrera-eat-filet-and-drink-champagne-wedding kind of girl. Reagan says she doesn’t want to get married because she doesn’t believe in true love or God or any institution really. Charlie blushes at any talk of weddings at all. Sometimes, when we talk weddings, we forget he’s there until he turns such a violent crimson color from embarrassment that he starts glowing.

  “I don’t know what you will do about Mom, Farah. She’s a fixture. And yeah, Oli will be home, Vati. He promised he would come home right after school so we won’t be late for the cars taking us to the mus-e-UM!” I said in a singsong crescendo.

  “Oh my god!!” Farah joined me in a shrill call to the wild. And then she said, “I want Tom to come with us. Would that ever happen?” She looked at me as seriously as she could, knowing full well how off-the-wall she was.

  “Oh, well, maybe … yeah, no,” I said, looking at her like she was insane because she was. “Farah—yuck! He’s so much older than you!”

  “Spencer Tracy was seven years older than Katharine Hepburn,” she shot back.

  “Who?” Reagan said. She was walking just ahead of us because four people can’t walk in a row down a side street in New York City. The sidewalks are too narrow.

  “What? How do you not know who Katharine Hepburn was?” I said. Reagan’s parents never make her watch black-and-white movies.

  “She was in only one of the greatest movies of all time, Reagan,” said Farah. “Gone with the Wind.”

  “What?” Full stop from me. “Farah, Scarlett O’Hara was not played by Katharine Hepburn, it was … oh gosh, well, whatever, it wasn’t her.”

  “You guys are missing the point. First of all, Katharine Hepburn was in, like, ten of the greatest films of all time. My mother has all of them on her iPad and we watch them in bed. And,” Farah said, clearly trying to have the last word, “Spencer Tracy was older than Katharine Hepburn and he was married to someone else and he and Katharine still had one of the greatest love stories of all time.”

  “But I bet Katharine Hepburn wasn’t in tenth grade, Farah,” Padmavati noted.

  “Seal is eleven years older than Heidi Klum,” Farah hissed.

  “THEY BROKE UP!” Padmavati and Reagan roared in unison.

  “Vivien Leigh!” I yelled. “Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O’Hara … Jeez.” I can never get names until at least ten minutes after I need them. It’s one strain of my other learning disorder: dysnomia. I have that along with the dyslexia, dysgraphia, and a dollop of ADD. I do eventually get it right, it just takes me longer than most people.

  “Oliver is only seventeen … perfect,” Padmavati mooned dreamily. Reagan turned away from Vats and rolled her eyes secretly at me. Padmavati’s love for Oliver was sadly one-sided.

  As we arrived at my house, I saw Charlie standing on the fourth step of our brownstone’s staircase holding up the dresses that Farah’s mother, Alix, must have just dropped off. His arm looked like it was shaking, either because of the weight of the garment bags or because he was afraid of having them touch the ground. Charlie was already dressed for the party in a brown velvet suit, a French-blue button-down shirt, and his favorite purple tie that he can’t wear to school. (At St. Tim’s you have to wear jacket and tie. Beat-up blue ties, not slick purple silk ties.)

  “I’m going to drop these!” he teased in a quivering voice, teetering on the step and making us run up the stairs to relieve him of the finery.

  “Thaaaank you, Charllleeeee,” Vati and Farah chanted, taking the bags from him.

  “Good boy,” said Reagan, patting his head like a dog as he handed the last dress over. Charlie rolled his eyes at me and reflattened his hair.

  “Hey, Wrenny,” he said.

  “Hey, Charlie. I like your tie,” I said, because I knew it would make him feel good after Reagan treated him like a dog.

  “Purple is the color of royalty,” he said proudly.

  “Right. What were you doing with all those dresses?”

  “Farah’s mom spotted me down the block on my way to your house, and without even asking me, she hurled these out the car window and zoomed away. I think I heard her saying ‘Thank you, dahhhhling’ as she went back to her phone call.”

  “Oh. She’s a trip,” I said.

  “No kidding.” He pointed at me with his index finger held out like a gun.

  Charlie and I walked up the remaining six stairs, following the girls. When we reached the landing they moved aside for me to open the outermost door with my key.

  “Why didn’t you just ring the bell?” I asked Charlie.

  “I was scared I’d mess up a take like I did the last time they were shooting here.”

  About a week before, we were watching Dining with Dinah being shot and the theme from Twilight came blaring out of Charlie’s phone. It totally blew the take of Dinah showing off her golden-brown sear of a tilapia filet she was frying, mortifying Charlie and aggravating the crew that we worshipped because they were straight out of NYU film school and lived in Brooklyn. We think Brooklyn is so cool even though we haven’t been there very much. But if you are a teenager growing up in Manhattan, you are supposed to like Brooklyn and want to live there when you get out of college. You can hardly read an issue of New York magazine that doesn’t have a stor
y about some bearded guy making artisanal pickles in Gowanus.

  “That was horrible.” When Charlie says “horrible” it sounds like “whore-i-bul.” It’s a lingering effect from his speech impediment and although it bothers him, I think it’s so cute.

  “Hurry, Wren, it’s freezing out here!” Farah whined as I fiddled with the key, which always sticks in the lock.

  It was cold. Colder than it had been all fall. It was that wind. That sharp, serious wind that makes the reservoir freeze and tells you with a discomforting certainty that there are forces greater than yourself in this world. Big ones. Ones that you better pay attention to.

  Forces that can change the course of your life.

  8

  “Girls!”

  My mother twirled around at the sound of the door closing. She rushed at us, kissing and saying hello, taking our backpacks off—a vestige of when we were ten. May skidded around on the wooden floor and leaped up on our legs, imitating my mother. The house smelled like curry.

  “Hi, guys!” Dinah called from the kitchen, where she was sitting on the counter next to the stove surrounded by Bravo people. “We’re done!” She thinks the whole world revolves around her show, and actually, in our house she’s not wrong.

  “Oh, my darlings—feel you!” My mother had both hands on Padmavati’s cheeks. “You are frozen, come in, come in, we just finished. Whoosh—that wind came in with you! Charlie darling, close the door! Let me help you all with these dresses. Look at these garment bags!” She lifted her eyebrows like some big fun was inside them. “Go put them upstairs, everyone!” She made a shooing motion upward. “We have to get going! The cars will be here right at six-fifteen. Dad is meeting us there. He’s been there all day. I had to bring his evening clothes over because he ran out of time. Are you hungry? What time is it? Already quarter to five!” She frantically turned her attention back to the set.

  Through the huge double doorway between the entrance hall and the open kitchen, you could see the BlackBerry-checking producers sitting on the vanilla-pudding-yellow sofa that sits at the far end of the room, nestled in the bay window. Beyond them the crew, dressed in dingy worn-in T-shirts and carpenter pants, were packing up lights and hauling cords around. Leading the charge was Tom-the-camera-guy. Farah spotted him as soon as she walked in the door. She threw her garment bag over the banister. “I’m going to say hi to Dinah!” she said, as if she had been longing to see Dinah all day. Please.

  Padmavati and Reagan also draped the garment bags they were holding over the banister and, with Charlie, went to poke around the kitchen for the leftovers of whatever Dinah had made. She has to prepare at least three or four servings of whatever they are shooting, so if one gets ruined they have backup. It looked like my mother was about to oversee the producer, who was giving final notes to Dinah, but she twirled around again, took my hand, and led me away from everyone to the stairs.

  “Wrenny.” She looked like she had something biggish to tell me. I got nervous for a second. I don’t always know when I have done something wrong. Once when I was little I thought it would be cool to make stained-glass windows, so I used colored Sharpies and drew what looked like stained glass all over my real glass windows. My mother hit “a ten.” A ten is when she really loses it. She looks insane, screams things like “What in god’s name is the matter with you!” Fire comes out of her nose. And then she calms down and cries and feels so terrible for what she said when she was in a ten. She went to a shrink about it and he said she couldn’t do that, he said it was against the law, so now if one of us inadvertently enrages her, she tries to go to her bedroom until she is at a three or four. That time when I drew stained glass all over the windows, she hit a ten, but later, when she was at a three, she said it was actually beautiful and wept that I was a genius.

  “You know what I thought?” my mother said.

  “No—am I in trouble?”

  “No, oh heavens no! Why do you say that, sweetheart? Do I look mad?” Sometimes my mother does look mad when she isn’t. Like, sometimes she will taste soup or an éclair and her face contorts so you think she is about to say, “Oh disgusting—it’s inedible!” And out of her mouth will come “Oh good lord, this is possibly the best thing I have ever eaten.” She has big bursts of either love or anger, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which one will be coming at you.

  “No, forget it, I just—what were you going to say?”

  “You know my red Oscar de la Renta dress?”

  Of course I knew this dress. The greatest piece of fabric hanging in my mother’s closet is a muted poppy-red strapless Oscar de la Renta silk taffeta floor-length gown that she wore to the first gala she and my father went to when he had just become director of the museum. The dress is as old as I am and since I was a little girl I would sneak into my mother’s cedar closet to find it. I would sit at the bottom of the dimly lit closet that smelled like earthy warm juniper and like my mother, because of the faintest hint of orange blossom left over on the clothes. I’d carefully leaf, one by one, through pants, kilts, and kaftans until I got to that beautiful red dress that lives in the back. I would run my fingers along the bottom of its finely sewn hem and picture my mother dancing in it with my father, who looked so handsome in his evening clothes and slicked-back jet-black hair. The dress has a huge skirt made with yards and yards of light, swishing, crinkly silk that almost forces you to dance and spin around. I’ve tried it on before for fun, years before it would actually fit, and every time the dress takes me away to someplace I have never been—balls in London, Bette Davis movies, the Oscars.

  “I think it will fit you now.” Her eyes welled up with tears.

  “Oh, Mom, I would love to wear it!” As if this was what she knew and hoped I would say, she opened her mouth and smiled, nodding her head. “I know, right? Isn’t it a marvelous idea?” She was now sort of laughing and crying at the same time, as if I had achieved something. My mother has a huge mouth and cries very easily. My father says she looks like Carly Simon. She has a lot of hair and big teeth. I was looking at that big mouth and all those teeth when suddenly my stomach contracted to the size of a walnut. I had always wanted to wear that dress, but now that the moment was here, a bajillion questions raced through my mind. Was I nervous to wear the dress? Was I old enough to wear the dress? Would it really fit? Was I pretty enough to wear a dress like that? Would wearing a dress like that change me? I felt like Laura in Little House on the Prairie when she was getting dressed on her first day as a teacher. With one single costume change she went from a buck-toothed little girl with braids in an apron to a real-life woman with her hair in a bun, a proper calico dress like Ma’s, and a look on her face that said she meant business. I was going to wear the red dress. Once I wore that dress, I would never again be the girl who hadn’t worn it yet.

  One flight above, as if he had been cued, Oliver turned on his music. (He actually probably had been cued. The show’s assistant director texts us when it is okay to make noise and when it’s not.) The tightly wound, rhythmic thumpings of Eminem made their way down the stairs from the second floor and it felt exactly how I was feeling inside. It was as if I had my very own sound track. Rap has a kind of battle cry about it. Eminem tends to scare me—he’s so angry. I’m more of a Kelly Clarkson/Beyoncé gal, and I even like country because of Sugarland. But that evening the muffled pounding was appealing.

  “Guys!” I called to my friends, who were spooning mouthfuls of rice and soupy yellow chicken curry into their mouths from one big flame-red Le Creuset pot on the stove. “Let’s go get ready.”

  9

  Like a herd of goats, we galloped up the familiar stairs to my room on the fourth floor.

  My parents, Oliver, Dinah, and I live in a five-story brownstone my parents bought when my father became the museum’s director. One of my mother’s favorite things to say about it is “It’s too much house, but we thought we would need to entertain more for David’s job and the children could be upstairs.” She stops talkin
g and does this fluttering thing with her hands indicating that we would all be up “there” somewhere and they would be downstairs amusing the art world. Then she pushes her hands away from her in a whooshing motion, like all of that was garbage, and says, almost showing off about the closeness of our family, “But we are always piled in this kitchen whether there is a party going on or not, so we didn’t end up needing all the floors.”

  Oliver’s room is on the second floor, where the living room is. To Padmavati’s dismay, the door was shut. The muted music was the only way you would know he was in there.

  Vati looked at me with a sad-dog face.

  “Oh, all right,” I whispered to her. Reagan, Farah, and Charlie passed us and continued up to the third floor, where Dinah’s and my parents’ bedrooms are, then the fourth, where my bedroom is. And the fifth floor is just a tiny landing that has a door to the roof, which we are forbidden to go on.

  I knocked loudly. Nothing. I knocked again. He usually opened it just a crack so I wouldn’t know whatever he was doing in his room. He was in a “private stage,” my mother would say, as she reminded Dinah and me to respect it and not bother him. Maybe he was masturbating. Gross.

  I knocked for the third time and the door opened, and a guy that totally wasn’t Oliver was standing there.

  “Oh—hi, um—”

  Oh my god, what-the-fluke is going on? This was no random friend of my brother’s, this was—he was in a whole other category. He was extraordinary.

  “Hi, I uhh—” I am stammering. I’m disoriented. I actually heard Padmavati take a sharp breath in as if she had seen Justin Timberlake.

  “Um, I—” I continued pathetically.