The Lucky Star

by William T. Vollmann

  Back to the lesbian’s mother, whose image to me then was as a noseless woman’s head of speckled clay, staring at what I could not know; by now the retired policeman’s amateur prosecution had traced her back to her own mother’s years when Indiana steel mills still smoked and flamed as if for all time, and the generation begotten by quietly married demobilized soldiers was in its own turn pairing off, happily disinterested in great causes, so that bungalows, duplexes and ranch homes swelled quickly up in the new thickets of opportunity called suburbs, budding off the latest attachments and releasing seeds of automobiles so that boys could go meet girls and have fun—kiss-kiss!—which goal derived from that dream long ago enacted by dead or silent uncles: the chimera of salvation from fear, which had been accomplished no less nobly than temporarily, for victory in time discredits itself not unlike defeat; survivors fatten and fail, laying burdens down; hence for the sons and brothers who had not, for instance, squatted in some jungle foxhole, counting the flashes of incoming Japanese shells, it seemed wonderful to turn away from everything but money and happiness. When their own trouble came, some blamed it on the money, and others on the happiness, but the white collar men who rode to work and back on commuter trains, and the stay-at-home wives in those mortgaged houses, never wondered which other lives they could have lived, because to ask would have been to advertise doubt, which is suspicious. Certain women blamed the men for leaving them too much at home, while some men disliked to find their wives resentfully stale in those little mortgaged bungalows that every year seemed less and less like castles, so that they joined secret lodges to worship the dove of Mary, the lily of Mary, or else, it being a decade too early to parachute into that doublepage spread of Natalie Wood who in a dark outfit posed behind the open door of her white Thunderbird (a present for her sixteenth birthday, paid for from her earnings, of course, and soon wrecked, after which she got a pink Cadillac), they simply stopped at a bar with colleagues, while on those same long, long days the newer wives might visit one another, waiting, complaining and confessing dreams that the radio had taught them. When all they needed to carry was a baby or two, those visits could still be enjoyed, but there came a time when babies grew into children, after which there were other babies, so that for years a mother’s entire time went for laundry, buying dinner and cooking dinner, with the children often sick or naughty or else fighting, and no comfort ever but the television: somewhere over the rainbow—until finally, thank God, the babies stopped coming, which meant the women were no good anymore; all the children were at school, which proved unexpectedly sad; the bungalows were sagging and one’s hair was greying, by which time visiting one’s good old gal pals was less fun than formerly, they too being worn out, excepting only those rare secret part-time wolf-wives who kept the thrill alive (I remember for instance a woman with bruise-colored eyeshadow who stared out from the police photograph: pretty and feral, young and reddish-blonde, blue-eyed, tight-lipped, leaning slightly forward as if to bite the officers as she had bitten her six-year-old daughter); and without children getting in the way, everything seemed too quiet; besides, those housewives’ thoughts had been interrupted so many times for so many years that it felt easier not to think. Besides, what was there to say? Shirley knew everything about Geraldine that Geraldine knew about herself. So they went shopping in their big cars, then watched the soap operas and the big bright shows whose heroines were all incarnations of one beautifully distraught soprano in her long white dress, after which it came time to set out snacks for the children and start making dinner. The children ruined life. Before they came, marriage had been exciting. Their husbands loved them more. It was pretty swell to greet them at the front door, perfectly made up, with a cold highball in hand and fresh lingerie under the welcome-home dress. But often now the husbands came home late, so that the highball was spoiled. And when they did arrive, they, too, were tired after a long day’s drudge. And the little brats always crying, couldn’t they shut up? Even in their secret societies of train, bar, office and Masonic lodge, the husbands never admitted how much they disliked their children. Once upon a time there had been just a husband coming home to a wife who adored him. Then suddenly the baby came, and the wife loved her husband less. She was always weary and angry. If the baby even whimpered once, that had to be attended to, but if a husband grumbled about his rights, well, you should see the wife put him in his place! Had the husbands confessed their jealousy, it would have sounded childish. So instead they stayed late together, telling jokes about the follies of women. After they got used to expecting little from their families, the colleagues they drank with all the time became their real brothers. Sometimes they joked about running away from their wives, seducing a secretary and doing it all over again. And the women kept dinner warm for them in the oven, wondering when they would get home.

  3

  The lesbian’s mother was born into one of those families. Being there was not as bad as remembering it, because at that time the prefabricated little houses that all faced each other were still new. Those lost memories which might as well have been lovely irregular coins with images of vulvas, insects and hydras I now dribble again through my fingers:

  Now tell me this: What do you want to do when you grow up to be a great big girl?

  I want to be a singer, Mr. Beery. And I’d like to act, too.

  Now the little lady standing here beside me isn’t exactly a celebrity yet. She’s only twelve years old.

  Judy was actually thirteen. And this radio show was already so ancient that they rebroadcast it only late at night, in that silence between the return of the jury and its pronouncement of verdict, when frogs sang in subdivisions and middle-aged mothers imagined being teenagers again.

  Wait until you hear her sing. All right, Judy, whip along!

  And Judy sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

  Judy Garland, child wonder of the screen. She’s the cutest little dancer and blues singer that’s ever been seen or heard. She is only thirteen.

  She was fifteen, in fact, and the years kept wounding all the sentimental women who wished that they had married someone else.

  4

  The lesbian’s mother yearned to be another person. Any real goddess’s love for us would have known that our love for her was never meant to be permanent; once she had taught us how to love, she needed to go away and die, to give us hope of adapting to dimness and darkness, so that we could love each other. Not being a goddess, this person tried to be a 1950s nymphet in saddle shoes and a button-down cardigan sweater. She wanted to be the girl whom everyone loved.

  Once she found herself to be a woman, she rose up and looked about her at the brightly inescapable question: How long had she been living in this way, which was so different from what she had expected? She answered: As long as she could remember. (I envision a marble female head with orange tear-stains on its cheek.)

  Without compassion the next question illuminated her: Would her loneliness continue forever?

  To save her, a man named Mr. Strand proposed marriage.—I do, she said. And just as we place the rings, watches and other such relics of murder victims in numbered envelopes, next affixing counterpart numbers (usually engraved on metal plates) to each corpse, so he attached a token of rescue to her finger. Kissing him, she went into the bedroom, closed the door, sat on the bed for a moment, then rushed into the bathroom and vomited.

  5

  Once the lesbian came along, once upon a long ago happily ever after time among the Mission style houses of Vallejo, California, during the era of what the retired policeman referred to as crime control, which terminated among those dreamy 1970s Mardi Gras balls whose most perfect princess might wear her feather dress up tight against her neck (along for example with wide feather earrings and platinum bangs pulled down just over her eyes, and why not, just because one can, long dark eyelashes?), the Strands christened her Karen, contentedly unaware of what she would become. (The Lotu
s Sutra relates that at eight years of age the daughter of the Dragon King became a Buddha; do you suppose that disgusted her dragon family?) Until then, like Judy Garland, she was a child star. In other words, she who was born to be loved resisted her destiny until she had been broken to it like a horse.

  She was a laughing little baby who delighted her grandparents; they clapped their hands and sang to her; to her parents they said: That kid has it all!—Why she presently became watchful nobody thought to wonder; she was a good little girl who could be safely left alone, so the grandparents began saying that she had sense. When her parents realized that this child might be beautiful, they felt proud, even self-proud, as if they had bestowed extra effort upon her conception, and perhaps they loved her better than before; of course they also turned anxious, for we found it eternally profitable to purvey news of rape and child abduction. (The transwoman enjoyed it when her master told her what each murderess wore at her sentencing; sometimes he could even show her pictures.) A little girl learned early to watch out; her mother turned unkind eyes on strangers who merely smiled at her child star.

  Well, how are Judy Garlands perfected? There are so many ways to be good! You may remember how the ghost of the Queen of Spain persuaded the youngest of three sisters first to lure in the young man for the love of whom the Queen had died and gone to hell, next to poison him and then to lock him in a secret chest beneath the Queen’s flaming-eyed corpse, which the girl faithfully did—yes, she was good!—as a result of which she and her two elder sisters grew rich and lived happily ever after.—Karen was schooled in another sort of goodness.

  Considering the times, not to mention their socioeconomic class, her mother dressed her dazzlingly. She could not help longing for the triumph when her daughter would be the prettiest; and there was even the time when she took her to the beauty parlor to get turned into a blonde, just for fun, although the family really couldn’t afford it, and Karen looked so cute reading a comic book with her baby face titanically helmeted by the electric dryer.

  When, as grew necessary most of the time, her husband left them alone in that old Mission style house with the green, green lawn, the mother sometimes helped herself to chemical improvements. Other mothers did it—women she knew, who felt bored and abandoned; in those days the doctors wrote prescriptions when a housewife complained of feeling fat and sluggish. These pills came in different colors, and they were inexpensive. When certain wives got together, pills brightened an afternoon watching the children at the playground, or a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey party where someone’s little boy kept getting bullied, or the shared cocktails at naptime when they whispered to each other thrilling tales of adultery and divorce.

  The girl began to grow up just a little. The neighbors still called her their little child star. You could almost call her the talk of Triumph Drive. Sometimes her father and her uncle sat in the back yard of that Mission or maybe not quite Mission style house with the red brick stairs, complaining about welfare and crime, while her mother nursed a martini in the living room, smiling at the shadowed face of the beautiful soprano. That’s how I see Hollywood, said Judy Garland, as the place that gives everybody a chance. The conductor kept waving his dowsing-rod as if he had extra joints in his neck and shoulders. The next door neighbor slammed a window shut, but Karen’s mother was humming her way along ledges of white and gold, while the soprano glided through orchestra music, haunted by the faraway tenor, stretching out her pink hands, caressing herself, knitting her brows, embracing pillars, opening her mouth so prettily. Smiling, Karen’s mother poured more gin into her glass to celebrate that reddish-golden fruit on white trees glinting in stage-light.

  It grew dark outside. Through the sliding glass door Karen, who sat still on her bed, hugging a plushy zebra toy with magic powers, could hear her father open two more beers. She heard the men clink cans together.—Down the hatch, said her father.—Her uncle, who had been an old man as long as she could remember, had shipped out from Guadalcanal with dengue fever. His latest affliction was the Japanese family that had bought the corner store: Slanteyes out of America! And he retold Karen’s father (the child could hear every word) exactly what he had seen and smelled after the Japanese had machine-gunned Australian nurses on Banka Island and bayoneted hospital patients on the Malayan Peninsula. Karen tried to sing a song to her zebra. It was very hot; the bougainvillea was growing up against the house again.

  Unappreciated at work, her father came home angry. Her uncle knew what to do about that, because sometimes after too many recon patrols the regimental surgeon used to take a hard look, slip a fellow a bottle of gin and some little white pills, oh, God, those sweet little white pills, and say: This’ll settle you down.—So Karen’s uncle stopped by with rye whiskey; the child could hear two drinks getting poured. Her mother turned up the television. It was oh, so cool and pleasant in the living room with the curtains drawn and nothing allowed but singing, dreaming, hoping and wanting. The girl tried to sing to her zebra, but the television was louder. Then came another back yard gift: a manly bottle of pills.

  Karen’s uncle was doing pretty well. In the back yard he explained to Karen’s father how the Japanese would pretend to surrender and then reach for their grenades. That was why you could never trust a goddamn slant. He described what Japanese looked like once they died of blackwater fever. Sometimes he dreamed about a certain Japanese who had wrapped himself around a grenade and tapped it until the fuse went off. That night in his sleep he heard again the screams of a sick Japanese when the boys were shooting him in his hammock. When he woke up, he remembered that he had given his pills to Karen’s father, so he blew his brains out.

  6

  Karen’s father threw the white pills in the garbage. He started drinking more.

  As for Karen’s mother, she occasionally swallowed a pink pill or two whenever she felt especially alone. It felt lonelier than before with her little girl in kindergarten, and sometimes ever so tiring when her little girl came home; sunny afternoons daunted her, especially when followed by the possibility that her husband might be disagreeable. And there never stopped being laundry to fold and drag upstairs, with dinner and breakfast to think about, and she felt so unloved!

  Your Mommy loves you, she kept saying to the little girl.

  The child nodded.

  Won’t you give Mommy a kiss?

  I don’t like that game.

  What do you mean, you don’t like it? Why don’t you like it?

  No, Mommy; I don’t like it.

  But Mommy loves you! Don’t you love Mommy?

  No.

  Why, you bad girl! Mommy’s going to spank you.

  No!

  You come here right now. Mommy needs to spank you.

  But when she had caught the shrieking child and pulled down her panties, an unexpected excitement infused the jaded mother.—Who can blame her? Consider the case of Shirley Temple, whom they called “Little Miss Miracle”: Even the department store Santa Claus in Los Angeles, once he got her on his lap, wanted that child star’s autograph.—And Karen’s little buttocks were so smooth and pink—so fun to squeeze whenever she wasn’t slapping them.

  There came to be times when she just loved to slip her hand down inside her daughter’s underwear. Had she owned a little puppydog that tried to get away, she might have yanked it by the leash, so it would learn to mind; something like that most definitely needed to be done to Karen! And if the naughty child complained or tried to twist out of her grip, then the mother, all the more rejected and unloved, might pinch rather sharply, in order to carry her lesson. She so much wanted Karen to be a good girl! But Karen didn’t love her. She didn’t love her own mother! This much she sometimes let drop to other dissatisfied wives, at which they (secretly appalled) agreed: They’re all brats.

  One time she overheard the girl saying to one of her little friends: I like my Daddy better than my Mommy.

  Thi
s seemed to the mother the most painful and untoward thing that she had ever experienced. She felt that she could never love her child in the same way again. Too humiliated to tell her husband, and therefore all the more isolated, she swallowed more pills.

  Eventually she said to herself: Well, if that’s how she’s going to be, I can certainly do what I want.

  7

  It was not at all the case, at least not at first, that touching the child’s vulva brought her gratification, but because the girl had been so strictly toilet trained, she knew her little peepee to be a nasty place, and it shamed her if anyone even saw it. Well aware of this, the mother found occasion to dominate her precisely there, poking, grabbing, inserting and hurting, all the while insisting: Mommy loves you.

  No! Let go of me—

  Then you really don’t love Mommy. Say you love me. Say it right now.

  The girl did her best never to think about those times, which might or might not have led to her becoming shyer and quieter, and somehow less beautiful than her parents had thought. Sitting up in bed, with her sweater pulled tight across her chest and her long hair lank, she stared like a sick child. By now her plushy zebra had grown ratty and smelly, so her mother threw it out.

  8

  Losing his job gentled her father. He loved Karen more and more. She wanted to do whatever he did.

  9

  The girl’s biography requires mention of the fat tabby cat named Princess who mostly hid, and who for the first three years after they had taken her in from the street would hang limp and silent in anyone’s arms, so that they called her brain damaged; the next phase was when she grew confident enough to hide, which was how she lived out most of her life, but when Karen sat all by herself in the kitchen, Princess sometimes glided to the doorway, then, after she had decided that it might be safe, slid across the linoleum floor and under the table, looking silently up at the child with her somewhat wolflike greenish-yellow eyes. Formerly she had meowed for food, but if Karen set down a tiny scrap of fat or cheese she would simply look at it. Raising her voice, Karen’s mother said: Don’t ever do that again. All you’ve done is make a mess.—But when the mother was away, Karen would go into the laundry room where Princess watched from on top of her artificial tree, then drop a tidbit into the metal bowl. And Princess would watch. As soon as Karen had left the room, the cat would plop fatly down to the floor and gobble up that treat. In time she picked up sufficient courage to descend while Karen was still in the room. And so the time came when Princess would stalk all the way to the kitchen and look up at Karen, coldly, lovelessly waiting for something good to fall her way, which she would eat without apparent fear, or interest in Karen—until footsteps approached; then the creature would rush back to the laundry room, at which Karen must pick up the food and rub the grease off the floor with her napkin before her mother could punish her.