Starry Night

by Isabel Gillies

  “There are so many turtles in here, sleeping now of course,” Nolan said, ripping into the tinfoil over the french fries. Steam came out as he grabbed a fry and folded it into his mouth. He sucked in cold air to try to cool it before it scorched his tongue.

  “It’s snowing,” said Vati, standing up on her rock and looking into the sky.

  “I thought it would snow!” I put my hand up in the air. Crazy little white flakes were zooming though the sky in no particular direction, not even down. It was the first snow of the winter, and I guessed it hadn’t gotten the hang of falling right onto the ground to make a blanket.

  “I wonder if it’s going to be a really snowy year.” Oliver put his face up into the whirling flurries. “Last year it only snowed four inches total.”

  “Yeah, but the year before, we had three snow days. Remember the one we all spent at your house?” Vati said hopefully, looking at Oliver.

  “No, I don’t remember that.” He looked at her. “You were there that day?” He reached out and touched a long loop of hair falling down her back.

  “Yeah,” Vati said sweetly. “I’m there a lot.”

  “You want to go up and look at the view?” Oliver pointed up to the tower from which you can see the whole park. “Maybe we can catch a snowflake on our tongues.” Vati stood up, gave me an over-the-moon look, and started climbing after Oliver and his dreads.

  “Bring the fries!” he called. She scampered back and took a tinfoiled bundle, flashed me the biggest shit-eating grin ever, and ran after him without looking back.

  “Hi,” Nolan said to me as he set his guitar down on the ground.

  “Hi,” I said back. “I still don’t get how that happened.”

  “I don’t think he knew she liked him,” Nolan said, and sat down on the rocks.

  “How could that be?” I sat down too.

  “People don’t assume beautiful girls are in love with them.” He took a sip of a soda that Oliver and Vati had left with the other order of fries.

  “I guess, but she was seriously obvious! He’s so smart so I assumed that he was just, well, ignoring her.”

  “Just because you are smart at math doesn’t mean you are smart about girls. Has he ever had a girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, he went out with this girl Samara last year.”

  “Samara Levin?” He handed me the soda.

  “Yeah!” I took a sip. (I totally took note of the fact that we were sharing a straw.)

  “She’s in my class,” he said.

  “She is?”

  “Bronx Science is huge. I don’t know her that well, but Oliver once mentioned her in passing so that must be her.”

  “They went out for a long time, like months. He was quiet about it though. She didn’t come over much. I don’t even know why they broke up.”

  “She’s quiet. Maybe she was too quiet. Maybe he’s more into a girl who skips, like Vati,” he said, in a way like he just got people.

  “I’m going to get in a lot of trouble. Again.” My hands were getting cold on the wet paper cup, so I balanced it on the rock and tucked my fingers into my jacket.

  “Then let’s get you home. I just wanted to see you. And I wanted to play Cupid.” He smiled and pointed up at Vati and Oliver, who were leaning over the edge of the castle looking like a twenty-first-century teenage fairy tale.

  “Are you going to Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving?” I asked, a little boldly, as it was still a couple of weeks away.

  “Yeah, I’m going to see my pop and stepmom and the kiddo.”

  “Oh yeah, Bruno?”

  “Correct. He is funny. I’m teaching him how to play the ukulele,” he said proudly.

  “’Cause it’s small?” I asked.

  “Small and cool,” he said, and air-ukuleled.

  “I think I’ll be released by Thanksgiving, if I don’t get grounded until New Year’s because of today.”

  “Today won’t be a problem. Oliver and I have a plan.”

  “You do? What is it?”

  “Oliver already texted your mom saying he picked you up from school to help you with your math.”

  “You guys planned that?” He was killing me.

  “Yeah. She already texted back to bring you straight home, but he texted back that if he was going to help you it would have to be at the coffee shop so he could eat.”

  “Oh my god, she worships him! Because that is sort of a sketchy plan, but whatever, if she bought it.”

  “Yeah, but I think you’ll be all right. I think she fell for it.”

  I looked at his guitar.

  “Will you sing me a song? Since I won’t see you at the concert tomorrow night?”

  “Oh, hell yeah.” He reached over and pulled his guitar case close to him. Watching him undo the case and cradle the instrument in his lap, you could tell he had made that same motion many times before. Second nature.

  His fingers found the strings easily and he started playing the song I had heard the night before in my room, but it was softer, acoustic, and right in front of me.

  “Wake me in the morning, Daddy, when the big old sun shines in the sky. We’ll go outside, take a ride, and wait for breakfast to come.”

  The song is about a boy and his dad on a Saturday. It’s as simple and particular as coffee and doughnuts, or baseball. It’s a love song, I guess. Not that it’s about romantic love, but when you listen to it, you feel love. You can hear it in his voice. Deep, rich, aching love.

  “Are you sad your parents are divorced?” I asked, when he strummed the last strum. He looked up at me smiling.

  “No, not really.” He played a few more notes like he was finishing his thought musically. Then he strummed a flourish of notes, showing off.

  “Life is weird, you know? It doesn’t always go in a straight line, and then”—he was still playing a little—“you have to figure out how the bent-up line you got works.”

  “Yeah, I get that. Do you miss him though?”

  “Sure, I miss him a lot. A lot of the time I feel like there’s a part of me that’s waiting for … me.”

  I must have looked confused.

  “What I mean is, well, sometimes I think what hurts, or feels complicated, is that I feel him missing me. Like we have to meet each other on the other side of something.”

  “The other side of what?”

  “Just the other side. Maybe of the divorce. I’m not sure when divorces end.”

  I reached out and cupped my hand around his warm cheek. He tilted his head and let its weight rest on me, closing his eyes for just a minute.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. He opened them back up and lifted his head.

  “No, no, it’s all good. It’s just life. It’s what songs and books are written about and movies are made about, it’s love, you know? It’s just love being love.”

  “But it sounds hard and sad.”

  “Sometimes love is hard and sad.”

  The crazy mixed-up snow started scurrying through the air again. It didn’t look like it would snow in earnest, not yet. It was just the beginning of winter.

  34

  I worked hard for the next two weeks. Dinah shot two episodes of Dining with Dinah in one day in preparation for Thanksgiving. Farah didn’t come over to see Tom-the-camera-guy, and I had no idea if that was because she had bigger fish to fry or because I was grounded and she wasn’t allowed to come over. Something made me think she wasn’t into Tom-the-camera-guy anymore.

  I didn’t get my phone back, my parents didn’t lift the punishment, and Nolan didn’t show up after school again. It was too risky. We got away with the Belvedere Castle day, but barely. Oliver told me he thought Mom knew something was up. And then she was on me like white on rice every day after that about homework. I did discover a wonderful thing right in our house though: another working landline and a solid telephone that connected into the wall with a spiral cord and had a dial. It was my grandmother’s and it’s been in our living room for as long as I can remember, but
I had sort of forgotten about it. It’s creamy yellow and heavy. The thing must weigh ten pounds. I never thought it worked because, well, it looked so old I thought it was an antique or something. I knew we had landlines in the kitchen and in my parents’ room, not that anyone used them so much. My mother kept the old phone in the living room because, she once told me, she could still detect the smell of her mother’s Chanel No. 5 perfume on the receiver.

  During my groundation, I was looking for a John Singer Sargent art book for inspiration. He painted a million portraits, really beautiful ones. Not so many self-portraits, but there’s one I like a lot. When I look at that painting all I can think is, That guy looks like he can paint. He painted really beautiful portraits of wealthy people living during the Gilded Age, around the late 1800s, early 1900s. They’re not just stiff, jacked-up images of people who could afford to have their portraits painted with their horses and dogs. Sargent must have seen beyond their social standing, or just ignored it for a while to capture these small, human gestures. There is one with a girl slightly lifting her shoulders, her hands clasped together. It looks like the party is about to begin. She could be any girl about to go to any party. Her dress—actually all the dresses they wore—are to die for. Especially the creamy white diaphanous ones. I can’t believe people dressed like that. Sometimes I wish we still dressed like that now. Not fancy so much, just that we could wear long gowns, not these stupid shorts that are entirely too short. Anyway, when I was in the living room, I spotted the old phone on a footstool in the corner, obscured by a pile of books and a big planted palm. Almost as if I thought it might give me an electric shock, I picked up the smooth receiver carefully, and slowly put it up to my ear. It felt cool and weighted in the most satisfying way, as if I was holding a sack of sand. I did smell the faint, powdery perfume, and there was a dial tone. So starting that night, after I was sure everyone was in their rooms, I would tiptoe down the stairs, curl up in my mother’s deep armchair, take the note Nolan gave me with his home number on it, and dial one number at a time, by the light of the street lamp coming in the window. Nolan never failed to pick up and then we would talk, sometimes for hours. I would do my math homework with him. I would read a problem to him and then we worked through each step together until it was solved. He always had the answer way before me, like he could see it without going through the process. But he waited for me, and when I got stuck he was there on the other side of the line to tell me in his adorable voice what to do.

  One night after we got off the phone, it must have been around eleven, I was making my way back up the stairs and Dad was standing one flight up, in his long gray bathrobe with dark red piping.

  “Just get off the phone?” The hallway lights that recede into the ceiling were dimmed low. His voice is so deep he doesn’t really have to whisper to be quiet.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. I didn’t want my mother to hear me.

  “Mom and I know you are talking to Nolan. We can hear your feet creeping by the door.”

  “Oh. Really? Well, I was trying to be quiet.” I put my hand on the ball at the end of the banister and sort of yanked it. “I’m getting my work done … I haven’t seen him or anything.” I so thought I was about to get reamed.

  “We know everything you do,” he said like Big Brother.

  “Well, it’s horrible not having a phone,” I said, still in a defensive whisper. “I feel so out of the loop. I don’t really know what’s going on with my friends, I am missing stuff, I feel alienated and left out and it’s horrible.” I pouted.

  “But you only choose to call him on the real phone? Not Farah, or Padmavati? Or Charlie? Reagan?”

  “No…” I only really wanted to talk to Nolan.

  “I remember being on the phone with Selina Morton when I was at the University of Chicago.”

  “Who is that?”

  He sat down on one of the steps leading up to my room, so I climbed up a few stairs and sat next to him.

  “She was a wonderful girl I went out with in college. She went to Amherst in Massachusetts.” He said “Amherst” like it was exceedingly impressive. Dad paused for a second, looking up into the air like he was picturing her. I tried to picture her too, and all I could come up with was Emma Stone. “It was a long-distance love. We must have spent a million dollars on the phone.”

  “What?”

  “No, I just mean, we ran up our parents’ credit cards with our phone charges. Hours and hours. I talked to her on the pay phone in my dorm hallway.”

  “It’s fun talking on the phone,” I said, feeling like maybe this was going to be a good talk. “I always thought that phone in the living room was an antique that didn’t work.”

  “It is practically an antique but it certainly does work. Mom insisted we have it hooked up even though no one ever uses it. It reminds her of her mother.”

  “I know. She told me she thinks it smells like Granny.”

  “Yes, Lillian wore Chanel No. 5. It’s a rather strong scent, so I’m sure the phone does still smell like her.” I smiled. So did he. I think he was remembering my grandmother, who got her PhD in poetry when she was like fifty, and she needlepointed everyone in our family their own Christmas stocking. I remember she made these tiny butter cookies with raspberry jam. I could eat a million of them. “And it is fun to talk on the phone. You can get lost, no? Lost in conversation,” he said.

  “Yeah, you really can.” I think I sounded a little moony.

  “You can’t do that on a cell phone—get lost. They weren’t set up for real talking.” We sat there for a moment. I could hear the faint sound of the television my mother was watching in their bedroom.

  “Dad, I know that Nolan kind of screwed up at the start, you know, at the party. But I think you would really like him.” I looked at my father to see if he was mad. But he was sort of smiling, like he was really listening to me, so I kept going. “He’s different than anyone I’ve ever met. He reads a ton of books and he plays music and he also kind of reminds me of you, sort of.” I looked at him again to see if he was appalled.

  “Does he?” He sounded interested, not offended.

  “Yeah, you know how you see everything in a big way, like how you don’t really care about details?”

  “I beg your pardon, my life is a clutter of details.”

  “No, I know, but Mom’s the one who is so specific and who focuses on every little thing. You, well, think about it, you run a museum, you see history and the future every day. That’s like the big picture, you know?” He nodded and smiled. I can amuse Dad if I concentrate.

  “And that is what Nolan is like? He’s a big-picture thinker?”

  “Yeah.” I smiled. “I think he really is.”

  “You have a sweet look on your face when you talk about him.”

  I put my head into my father’s shoulder. “I really like him a lot.”

  “Well.” He put his arm around me and pulled me in closer. “That is good, Wrenny. That is very good.” He kissed me on my head. “That is what is supposed to happen to a lovely, big-picture-thinker girl like you.”

  “Oh, Dad.” I pushed in harder, not knowing if I was embarrassed or thrilled.

  “Now go to bed, lamby. All this phoning will exhaust you. And we can’t have that. Not right before Thanksgiving.”

  35

  Thanksgiving is my absolute favorite holiday, because of food of course, and the general feel-good vibe that pervades everything from school assemblies to the Thanksgiving episode of Modern Family.

  An extraordinary part of that particular Thanksgiving was that Vati and Oliver were transforming into a couple, for real. She had become, in a matter of days, a fixture in the house, so much so that my mother invited Vati and her mother, Dipa, to have Thanksgiving lunch with us. Oliver was not only thrilled, but he was acting like it would be the weirdest thing in the world not to have Vati. “Vati and I were thinking of going to a movie after Thanksgiving … Vati’s mom said she would bring pecan pie so…” We this, us
that, I’m telling you, life did a complete 180 there. But this is what I think: I think that there is a gigantic music studio soundboard in heaven. Angels—I picture them like the music tech guys you see in “the making of” videos—manipulate this huge soundboard controlling where people on Earth move, what decisions they make, what they think about, what they pay attention to. I imagine some angel dude in front of a massive golden mixing console kept Oliver’s head in the sands about Vati for years and years so they wouldn’t hook up randomly at age thirteen. But then finally the time was right for the angel to fade a dial in, so now they are high school sweethearts, and then maybe they’ll be college sweethearts, and then possibly they might, maybe (please oh please), get married one day. I can’t help it, I jump ahead, I’m impulsive—it’s the ADD, or maybe this is just a good idea.

  * * *

  Thanksgiving is also Dinah’s day to shine.

  “Vati—Vati—Padmavati! No! No no no no no. You can’t cut the fennel in such large chunks. And look at these, they are slivers! No, they must be uniform, like this.” Dinah pushed Vati away from her cutting board, took the knife from her, and systematically sliced the white bulb into perfect one-inch fennel wedges.

  “Dinah, you are a tyrant, man. Padmavati is only trying to help.”

  Oliver stepped in, coming to his lady’s defense. “I like it when some parts are burnt.”

  “We aren’t roasting this fennel, Oliver, we’re braising it in milk. You don’t want to have some pieces that are mushy nothings and some that are as hard to bite into as a tree root in Central Park, do you?”

  “Sorry, Dinah,” Vati said, and smiled at Oliver knowingly, like, Oh, Dinah, you little culinary lunatic.

  “Should I baste, Dine?” I said from my perch on the island.

  “Yes! Baste the turkey now, and then set the timer for ten more minutes, so you don’t have to keep asking me. I have to poach the pears and that will take all my concentration.”

  The doorbell rang. May erupted in barks and skidded to the door.

  “Oh my goodness, who could that be?” yodeled my mother as she ran down the stairs in her bathrobe and with rollers in her hair. “It’s only nine-thirty. God almighty, it smells divine down here. Is it the wine delivery? Oh, hell’s bells, I’m running out of time!” She tucked her robe more closely around her and opened the door.