Thirdly, I sent off the November payment for the house on the 7th of Nov. and has not yet received it. I suggested to the woman on the phone yesterday that perhaps I should stop payment on that check and send you another. She advised me to wait a few days.
In any case, I hope that this deed/divorce settlement which deeds the house IN MY NAME will allow us to get everything straightened out regarding my mortgage status and that in the future we can speak directly about said property.
Sincerely…
Dear Steve,
While I am away I am putting you in charge of several things.
1. Feeding and medicating of animals AT NIGHT. This means giving Buster a diazepam at dinner, and then REMEMBERING to give him one about 9 o'clock at night.
2. VERY IMPORTANTLY YOU MUST DEPOSIT MY PAYCHECK ON WED. Carol Ann is sending it FedEx on Tues. and I am asking you to take it through the drive-thru window at the bank and get it IN the bank as soon as possible.
You can do this quickly on Wed. after school after you have checked the mail. The deposit slip is in an envelope on the kitchen table.
If you are not sure what to do, just ask the lady at the window. Tell her you want to deposit this in your mother's checking account. She will help you!
3. You will be in charge of feeding cats each evening. Split one can of cat food on two plates with a handful of dry, and also give them a big bowl of half-and-half.
4. Late in the week I am putting you in charge of doing one or two loads of towels so that you will have some! Just wash, dry, and fold, put in linen closet.
5. Be prompt for Joanne. And VERY IMPORTANT—get to school on time!
We have used up all goodwill at ARHS. Let's get through these last weeks, okay??? Good!
Stardust / Photo by Stephen Digges
Today is Stephen's eighteenth birthday. Some time ago he twisted his thick blond hair into dreds. When he grew tired of the look, he asked me to help him comb it out, but no amount of detangler or cream rinse would loosen it.
The only thing to do was to shave his head. Now, a year later, his hair is long and full. He pulls it back in a pony-tail.
Stephen loves to sun himself. Even in late autumn, wearing his Walkman, his thermal underwear, coat, and boots, he'll sit out on the patio with his homemade reflector—a double album sleeve covered in tinfoil—and soak up the rays of the weak New England sun.
“He's crazy,” says Trevor as we sip coffee in the kitchen.
“A little,” I offer. “He was born in Southern California.”
In build and gesture Stephen resembles his father. He's about five feet ten and slim, muscular. By his eighteenth birthday he has recovered the energy and dimension that marked his childhood. He is boyish, temperamental, magnetic in his happiness and forbidding in his anger. His is a dynamic presence. He can slam a door like no other member of our household. Or he swoops in to pick me up and whirl me around the kitchen as he relays some happiness.
He is committed to our animals, whom he embraces and talks to and kisses without self-consciousness. He has an affinity and patience for the dogs and cats that do not always translate to humans. His play and affection for them is engaged and concentrated, and when he is finished, he is finished.
“Go see Mom,” he says with feigned enthusiasm as he slips away and heads down to his room in the basement.
Stephen hates television, popular music, brand-name clothing, affectation. He has a keen discernment of the gestures and speech in others, and bitterly attacks them when he senses that they are behaving, as he says, “phony.”
At school he does best in classes whose teachers he likes. It really doesn't matter what the subject is. And he does poorest when he suspects a teacher is condescending or coddling. In these cases he is too good at bringing them to bay, angering and exhausting them.
Stephen loves his body, loves working out alone— though not at a gym. Rather, he does pull-ups on the thick branch of the white pine out back. He has set a ladder against that tree and lashed it so that it will not give way. He climbs up high, then slips his legs through the rungs, and from a hanging position pulls himself up, his arms across his chest, his ponytail flying while below him the dogs circle, barking, and the cats perch on various rungs or on a tree limb, as if to lend him support.
He loves being clean and carries out lengthy rituals of skin and hair care, uses specified deodorants and colognes the rest of the household is not to touch. And by eighteen he has come to love to clean his room, loves to dust and vacuum and scrub. There is a sign on his door that insists that anyone entering must remove shoes. It is not a joke.
Stephen loves his camera, an old Pentax that his brother gave him. Using black-and-white film, he sets up for himself different projects, carries them out and develops the film in his darkroom. At a garage sale he found an enlarger, and the necessary pans, bins, and chemicals. He is unequivocal about not being disturbed, disappearing for hours to reappear with photos of the sky and clouds, train tracks, abandoned barns and warehouses, or various and prolific studies of weeds in winter. He says his subject is “light.”
A year older than Trevor, Stephen acts as big brother, often explaining to me his analyses of Trevor's behaviors.
“Trev's a man of few words,” Stephen says when I express worry over Trevor's silences. “He's not mad. He's just thinking. If you try to make him talk, he freezes. It's like when his therapist comes over. The living room,” he laughs, “is completely silent! Or you hear the guy mumbling on—you hear the sound of questions—'blah, blah, blah, blah? Silence! That's Trevor, Mom. That's his way.”
That's his way… that's her way … Stephen has introduced this phrase to the rest of us. It means there are certain things that can't be changed about a person, and if this is so, then one must accept it, work around it, and/or ignore it. It's a phrase that preserves one's dignity, or the dignity of another, in the face of criticism.
While Stephen walked the dogs one afternoon, a school official who lives down the street confronted him.
“I need for you to know,” she said, “that I have called the Department of Youth Services to say that yours is an unfit house for a foster child.”
Stephen was distracted by trying to keep the dogs from peeing or pooping in her yard, a travesty she recently complained to the boys about. And he was struggling with tact, with maintaining a decorum. Not too long ago he might have told the woman to go fuck herself. These days he works at being what he calls a citizen, not necessarily because it's the right thing to do, but because, as Ed has suggested to him, “you have less to carry around.”
“How do you know it's their poop?” he had asked, a question she considered insolent.
“I've studied the configurations,” she answered. “I know your dogs’ feces from all others …”
Stephen put the dogs on leashes as she continued.
“Trevor was one of my advisees before he was sent away. Long before you knew him. He needs discipline, structure. And if your mother won't tell you, I will. You two can't be out in the yard shouting and wrestling with these dogs at midnight. Nor should Trevor be shooting baskets when he's supposed to be in school.”
“He doesn't like school much,” Stephen offered, trying to restrain the dogs, unused to leashes in the first place.
“Doesn't like school?” She shook her head. “Your mother should be attending the parent-training lectures at the high school.”
“Mom talks to Ed,” Stephen answered.
The woman clicked her tongue.
“Tell your mother that I will be looking for her on Monday evening. We have a guest speaker from the organization Tough Love.”
“I'll give her the message.” Stephen released the dogs who tore down the street, leashes flying. “But I doubt she'll come. It's not her way…”
As Stephen recounts the story to us at his birthday dinner, he is by turns furious and laughing as he reconsiders the conversation.
“Did she call DYS?” Trevor asks.
“If she di
d, I haven't heard about it,” I say. “I don't think there's anything to worry about.”
Indeed, the Department of Youth Services rarely calls and more rarely returns my phone calls. Trevor's advocate, a young man named Will, sounds harried and exhausted when I speak with him. When he makes a date with Trevor to go buy clothes or spend some time together, he usually has to break it.
Once Trevor and I drove out to Springfield for an evaluation. We followed complicated directions to the center, a tired series of low, sixties-style institutional outbuildings, the dead lawns the same color as the yellow brick offices. As we walked across the grass toward an entrance, we were greeted by shouts from the barred windows on the second story, boys incarcerated there, as Trevor once was, who pressed their hands and faces to the wire.
“That's the dayroom,” Trevor said as we made our way up the sidewalk. “Also the classroom, also the cafeteria.”
“Get it,” I answered. “Do you know any of the guys?”
“Probably,” he said. And then, “Let's get this over with.”
But as it turned out, the officials we were to see had either left for the day or couldn't be found.
“We have an appointment with Will,” I'd said to a man, maybe a guard or a cop, who smoked a cigarette just outside the front door. “Here.” I showed him the form with the date and the time written in.
“I don't know what to tell you,” he said. “You could try that building over there.” He pointed across the complex.
One by one, Trevor and I were sent to this building or that. After about an hour, we gave up. “You go ahead to the car,” I said to Trev, who was tired, irritated, and embarrassed. “I'll write a note and leave it for Will.”
Trevor and I were here for this appointment, I wrote on the back of the form. We wanted you to know that we were here and ready for the evaluation. Trevor is doing well. He has just finished courses at Greenfield Community in preparation for his GED… . Please call us when you get this so that we may reschedule
The night of Stephen's birthday dinner—some months after our visit to Springfield—I watch Trevor's worried expression relax as we look at each other and remember our trip to DYS.
“Don't worry,” I repeat and wink at Trevor.
“No, don't worry.” Stephen passes the tacos. “I mean, what's she gonna say?” Stephen affects a woman's voice, pitching his own into a high whine. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Will. Trevor and Stephen are having too much fun … I personally witnessed them rolling around in the leaves when they were supposed to be raking them … I personally witnessed them breaking their rakes … I heard them singing ‘Happy Birthday’ … I saw the configurations …” —Stephen nearly spits food as he laughs—”of their dogs’ bowel movements in my yard …”
“Who you gonna tell.” Charles coins the phrase we've adopted in the event that someone begins to whine.
“Right!” Stephen reaches across the table to punch Trevor on the shoulder. “Who you gonna tell?” He grins, and we answer in unison, “Your guidance counselor?”
At eighteen Stephen loves the girls and the girls love him. He's had a series of girlfriends with whom, in front of all to see, he is affectionate and playful. The school has called to say that he and so-and-so are being much too amorous in the halls, engaging in kissing as one or the other goes off to class, etc. He and the girl have been called into the principal's office.
Stephen is passionate in his defenses to his teachers and to me. He is in love. Why should he behave as if he weren't?
“They're so uptight!” he explodes one night when I report that the girl's parents have called. “Man, I'm from California! Don't forget that, Mom. I was born in California. And don't forget that not so long ago right here they were burning witches. Yep. Just a couple of generations back, the ancestors of my teachers were burning witches. I get it. I do.”
Stephen once showed a discernment about sex, however, when Mugsie gave birth to her kittens. She chose as the birth site a space under a low table covered by a sheet in Stephen's basement room. Stephen was awakened by the mewing of the first two kittens and he slipped upstairs to alert me.
“How wonderful,” I'd said. “I'm coming down.”
“Wait,” said Stephen. “I need to prepare you. Mom, I feel terrible.”
“Why?”
“Well, Mugsie is having her kittens on my stash of Playboys. I hide ‘em under that table … I never thought she'd choose that spot. It doesn't seem right to me for her to be giving birth on pictures of a bunch of naked women …”
“Don't worry. Mugs doesn't know the difference. She obviously feels safe in your room, right there under that table near your bed. She feels safe and she doesn't read …”
“Don't look at the pictures,” he instructed me as we descended the stairs to his room.
“It's nothing I haven't seen before …”
“Mom!” Stephen drew away to reprimand me. “It's not the right thing for a mother to see.”
For a quarter of our lives together we were lost to the other. Now an intimacy goes with us. Stephen sounds breathless when he calls my name and I answer in kind, as if the world retains something of the vastness across which we once saw the other disappearing.
When I wake at six each morning, there is often a note slipped under my door from Stephen. Sometimes the notes read: Good morning, Mom. I hope you had a good night's sleep.
Other times his notes request that I type the last half or proofread a paper he has written, due today, that he has left on my desk. In exchange for the favor he offers that he will walk the dogs this evening.
His notes alert me to observations he has made about the animals. Dear Mom, I wanted you to know that Buster came down in the kitchen last night while you were asleep. He seemed twitchy so I gave him a Valium. Or, Dear Mom, Sybil came down into my room! Or, Sunny didn't come home last night…
Once, when I was dating a man Stephen disliked, he left me a note that read, Mother, to what chasm has your soul descended?
Sometimes Stephen's notes go on for pages, his cramped, all-caps printing swimming before my eyes. He is worried about Trevor, or he and his girlfriend have had a fight. Or he's read or heard something he remembers in the night: Mom, my teacher told me the greatest thing—if we seal all the windows in the house—really seal them up so no light gets through—we can actually turn the house into a camera. Isn't that the greatest?! Let's do it tomorrow …
The morning of his eighteenth birthday his note reads, Dear Mom, I know I won't be 18 until 3:07 P.M. (12:07 California time), but way to go, Mom! You had a handsome, brilliant, smart, stylish, amazingly exceptional baby boy!”
Christmas night 1995. Clear. Very cold. We've driven beyond the thin lights of Amherst into the country where the stars have such presence they scare the atmosphere. I'm thinking of the ancients who divided the night sky into the zodiac, like the twelve tribes of Israel. It's as if the stories that overlay the stars, like Jacob's curses and blessings of his sons, were attempts to measure human terror against a vast and unpredictable future.
The catalogue at the end of Genesis I once memorized to win a prize at Sunday school comes back to me:
Reuben, thou art my first born, my might, and the beginning of my strength… Simeon and Levi are brethren: instruments of cruelty are in their habitations… Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse's heels, so that the rider shall fall backward…
I've been waiting in the car for over an hour for Trevor, who has brought Christmas gifts to his mother, his younger sister and brothers. After walking him to the door and saying hello, I withdrew from the first reunion between Trev and his family. Trev touched my arm as I turned to go.
“Wait, please,” he'd asked. “Don't leave.”
“I'll be waiting in the car,” I promised.
Keeping the engine running for the heat, flipping through radio stations, I listen here and there to carols, silly Christmas rock and roll, check my impatience with the idea th
at things must be going well, better than Trev expected.
Trevor's sadness and his silence have seemed to me nearly mythic at times. Never to learn a coherent narrative of his life before he came to live with us, I piece it together through the cold files of DYS, through witness and intuition, this combination of sources creating a tremendous need to try to protect him, act as his advocate and interpreter with the world, with school officials who have written him off, the probation officer who dispassionately checks off the date and enters another appointment, even the court-mandated therapist who comes to the house.
His approach is to try to be Trev's “pal,” an affectation I could tell him will never work with this boy. Still, he persists, his “Hey, fellas” and his mixed metaphors and sports jargon booming throughout our rooms.
“The ball's in your court, man. Now it's up to you. You're a lucky fella, dude. Go for it. Whaddya say?”
Silence.
And yet more often now Trevor's beautiful deep baritone resonates as, alone in his room, he sings songs he has composed, his hands light on his drum. Other times Stephen creates back beats and mixes on his synthesizer over which Trevor freestyles.
Say that it's late. The backpacks full of schoolbooks sit unopened by the door. But I resist interrupting them, dragging them back to tasks and assignments that make them both feel like failures. Listening at the top of the basement stairs, I dwell in the heartbeat rhythms and the sweet sadness of the voice that gives them life.
Since Trev came to live with us I've thought about the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son. I dig out my Bible to reread the story. But it's unsatisfying. In no way do I imagine that our house is like the house of the father. Nor is Trevor's fate like the Prodigal Son's. Trev's inheritance is one of longing. Can such an inheritance be squandered?
And where is the mother in the story? Doesn't she have a place in the house of God? How would her presence change things? Is she implicit in the psyche of the father who so generously calls his son home? When was she lost in the translation? I want to ask the translator. I want to touch the words in which she lived.
The Stardust Lounge Page 13
