Love, Stargirl Page 19

  Only my flashlight lit the field on this moonless, cloudy night. For one last time I pulled the rope out from the croquet stake and planted the final marker. A dismal daylight came, but not the sun. Ninety-three million miles the sunlight traveled only to be blocked by clouds shrouding this hill on planet Earth. And so my final paddle placement, the most important placement of all, is imperfect. All I could do was eyeball the long arc of markers stretching from July to December and take my best guess at where the last one should go.

  I hate having to resort to guesswork. If my paddle placement is off, the whole thing is going to flop. The setup will be like those pinhole cameras for indirectly viewing an eclipse. The light from the rising sun—Please let there be a rising sun tomorrow— will strike the front panel of the Blackbone tent. The light will funnel through a little round hole in the panel and will fly through the tent as a golden sunbeam. It will land as a circular spot of sunlight—the Solstice Moment—on the back, black panel, hopefully in the center of the bittersweet wreath. But if the alignment of the tent-hole-to-backdrop is off, the sunbeam will miss the mark and go flying off to Route 113 and beyond, and we will all be staring at a black, blank wall.

  I sat down on the ground and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t get the weather and the paddle placement problem out of my head. My mind wash was a washout. When I finally gave up and opened my eyes, my upturned palms were wet from the first snowflakes. I turned west to send my final weekly message to you, my question, but I was so distracted I’m afraid it was garbled.

  So much for quiet contemplation.

  My father hurried through his milk route today, so that by early afternoon I was back on the hill helping him set up the tent. The snow was already up to our shoe tops. Off at the edge of the field the charred remains of the Van Burens’ house were turning white.

  We footed snow away and dug four pole holes. My father used a heavy hammer and a screwdriver to break the frozen ground. We pulled up the croquet stake, and that’s where the back wall of the tent went.

  There were five panels of Blackbone material: four walls and the roof. They were heavy and totally impervious to light. My mother had folded over the edges to resist tearing and had fitted the pole and stake rope holes with brass reinforcement rings. I don’t know how her sewing equipment managed to punch through that material.

  I myself can hardly build a sandwich, much less a tent, so I was only too happy to be a working grunt while my dad gave the orders. Plus, with the snow falling fat and furry, I worked to keep myself from bawling over the weather.

  “It’s a fast-moving storm,” my father kept saying. “It’ll be clear by tomorrow.”

  I didn’t believe him.

  I picked a spot on the front, east-facing panel, straight up from today’s marker. Using a cardboard cutout I had made at home, I traced a circle on the Blackbone with a yellow marker. A small circle, about the size of a golf ball. My father cut the hole out. He squeezed some plastic stuff around it so the edge wouldn’t fray. The sharper the circle, the better the sunbeam.

  The last thing I did was pull up the markers. They had done their job. They had led us to the spot.

  It was getting dark by the time we climbed into the milk truck for the short ride home. In the driveway my father said, “You go in. I’m going to shovel.” Which struck me as odd, because he teases our next-door neighbor Mr. Cantello about the folly of bringing out his shovel before snow has stopped falling. But I was in no mood for debate.

  The moment I opened the front door I smelled it, the scent I would know anywhere: cherry pipe tobacco. I screamed, “Archie!” and ran for the kitchen lights. There he was at the table with my mother, both of them grinning at me. I squeezed him until he begged for mercy. My pent-up emotions about tomorrow came gushing as tears of joy. I nuzzled my nose into his new white beard, which by now must be old stuff to you.

  Archie told me he had decided long ago to attend my Solstice. My parents had conspired with him to keep it a surprise. The first thing he noticed was that I wasn’t wearing my fossil necklace as a member in good standing of the Loyal Order of the Stone Bone. I told him I had surrendered it to a good cause on April Fools’ Day. “I’ll send you another,” he said. He squeezed my hand. “Señor Saguaro sends his regards”—and the lingering unsettlement of my cactus dreams vanished.

  We never left the kitchen. My parents sat with us for a while, then went to bed. Cinnamon meandered about the table, nosed into the tobacco pouch, and finally curled up to sleep on a place mat.

  Archie loved looking at the kitchen wall and finding no clock there. “My kind of house,” he said. “I’m stuck back in the Carboniferous, anyway.” And he tossed his wristwatch into the wastebasket.

  He brought me up-to-date on happenings in Mica. He told me about the Ocotillo Ball last spring. “They did your bunny hop,” he said, “right off the tennis courts and into the darkness of the golf course. But they tell me it wasn’t the same without you. You’re becoming a kind of legend in those parts.”

  I waggled my fingers and ghosted my voice: “Ooooh…the mysterious visitor who came and went.”

  He laughed. “Don’t overrate yourself. Let me do that.”

  I struck a melodramatic pose. “When you speak of me, Professor, tell them, ‘She is just an old-fashioned girl.’”

  He laid his hand on mine. He smiled and nodded. “More than you know, my dear.”

  I think he was opening a door for me, but I wasn’t ready to go in.

  We talked and talked. Then, somewhere along the line, I became aware that the conversation had stopped and that Archie was staring at me with an imp in his eye.

  “What?” I said.

  He tamped tobacco into his pipe bowl and set another round of cherries on fire. “It’s not like you.”

  I was confused. “What’s not?”

  “Dishonesty.”

  As Betty Lou would say, befuddled. “Huh?”

  “By your standards, anyway.” He stroked sleeping Cinnamon. “Not like you to think or feel something for so long and not express it.”

  Uh-oh.

  I just stared at him for five or six eternities. I put out a wincey peep: “I’m scared.”

  He drew on his pipe and produced two gray, puffed words: “Don’t be.”

  I took a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll ask…What about Leo?”

  His smile erased my fears. “Leo,” he said—and it thrilled me just to hear him pronounce your name—“is fine. He talks about you…more than fossils!” We laughed at that. “He misses you. He’s maturing. He’s beginning to show signs that one day he may even deserve you.”

  He told me what I already knew from Dori Dilson, that you went with Dori to the Ocotillo Ball, not as boyfriend and girlfriend but as “friends of Stargirl.” He told me that you and Dori speak of going to Phoenix one day next summer, where you’ll stop and eat at the first silver lunch truck you come to.

  He told me you’re home from college now on your holiday break. He said you’re thinking of majoring in design. He said there are days when you just can’t go off to class without wearing the porcupine necktie I gave you.

  I was ravenous for information. I squeezed every drop I could out of Archie, squeezed him dry till he was nothing but rind. Which was when he raised his hand and said, “Okay—enough of that boy. What about tomorrow?”

  I showed him the guest list. “Wow,” he said. “Anybody not invited?”

  “It’s everybody whose name I know,” I told him. “And some I don’t.”

  His finger traced a name. “Dootsie. Your little friend?”

  “My best friend. She’s six.”

  He nodded, not surprised. I told him about Dootsie and Alvina and Betty Lou and Charlie and Arnold. I was going to update him about Perry and me—but I chickened out.

  “I’m afraid nobody will come,” I said. “I’m afraid half won’t come because they don’t care, and the snowstorm will keep the rest away—including the sun. And even if there is a sunri
se, I’m afraid it’s going to miss the target because I messed up the last marker.”

  He stared at me for a while, then said, “Finished?”

  I nodded.

  He wagged his head and chuckled.

  “Thanks for your support,” I said. I got up from my chair.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “Porch. Check the snow.”

  “Don’t.”

  The way he said it, I stopped. I sat back down.

  He looked at me across the table. “Silly worries don’t become you. Did I ever tell you about my pet peeve?”

  “No,” I said.

  “People who dress up their pets to look like Little Lord Fauntleroys or cowboys, clowns, ballerinas. As if it’s not enough just to be a dog or cat or turtle. Dressing up nature.” He spat smoke. “Bushwah.”

  “Bushwah?”

  “Profanity. Origin unknown.”

  His eyes bored into mine, willing his meaning into me. I can be pretty dense sometimes, but it was beginning to sink in. By the time I lay down to sleep, I was at peace. Archie has always had that effect on me. Just hearing him speak of you was the next best thing to having you at the kitchen table too—maybe, for now, even better. My anxiety about the weather had fled. And I had come to a decision about tomorrow.

  DTS: 1

  December 23

  It’s over.

  It will never be over.

  Two mornings have already passed since then. They just don’t stop coming, do they?

  Archie walked to the hill with me and Cinnamon under the Solstice stars—yes, the sky was clear! Snow lay over the earth like piled moonlight. My parents were already there. My mother was knocking snow off the roof panel with a broom—“It was sagging bad”—and my father was slicing through a side panel with a box cutter. “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I saw your guest list on the kitchen table,” he said. “No way you were going to fit them all inside.” So he was cutting out the two side panels of Blackbone, so there wouldn’t be an “inside” for people to be left out of. I was tempted to say we’d be lucky to fill half the tent, but I didn’t.

  Archie’s pipe flared: firelight on moonlight on snowlight. “Could read a book out here tonight,” he said.

  “If the night’s not dark,” I said, “how can we have a proper sunrise?”

  He scowled at me. “There you go again, worrywart.”

  “Sorry.” I smacked my hand.

  My father was nearly finished cutting out the side panels when we heard a voice: “Stargirl!”

  I didn’t have to look. “That,” I told Archie, “would be Dootsie.”

  In the distance silhouetted figures were moving across the snow. Two of them, adult-size, were walking, one pulling a sled. On the sled was a huddled shape that I assumed must be Dootsie—except that it was too big to be just her. Then the huddled shape split and Dootsie came running through the snow and suddenly I gasped and tears came because I knew who the remaining huddled shape must be. I ran to meet Dootsie and scooped her up and ran to the sled. Somewhere in the bundle of blankets two moonlit eyes peeped out. “Is that you in there, Betty Lou?” I said.

  Came a tiny, trembly voice and a frosty puff: “Yes.”

  “Did Dootsie barge into your house this morning and drag you out of bed and make you come here?”

  “Yes.”

  Dootsie piped: “I did! I did!”

  “Do you wish you were back in your house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you feel unsafe?”

  “Yes.”

  Dootsie stuck her face into the bundle. I heard her muffled voice: “Don’t worry, Betty Lou. We won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “Pull her there,” I said to Mr. and Mrs. Pringle, pointing to the two-sided tent. “Give her the best seat.”

  As they pulled the sled away, other figures were appearing at the edge of the field, wading through the snow:

  Alvina and her little brother, Thomas, and their parents.

  Arnold and Tom and Arnold’s mother, Rita. Tom was in Arnold’s coat pocket. I lifted the flap of my coat pocket to introduce Cinnamon to Tom, and next thing I knew Cinnamon was joining Tom in Arnold’s pocket. Arnold was tickled, so I let them be.

  Ike the bike-and-mower man.

  My porch light neighbors along Rapps Dam Road.

  The reporter from the Morning Lenape.

  A gaggle of boys, Alvina’s tormentors, including the blond-haired one she beat up at the Dogwood Festival and whose picture hangs on her bedroom door.

  The Honeybees.

  Margie.

  Charlie.

  And then a couple that had me stumped. Even from a distance I could tell they were old. They clung to each other as they made their way slowly through the snow. When I saw their faces I remembered them from somewhere—and then I knew. The Huffelmeyers of the Friday milk route: 1 qt buttermk, 1 qt choc. They were much younger in most of the pictures in the dining room. It was as if they had walked out of a family album. They saw me and came right up. I was looking down on both of them. Mr. Huffelmeyer said, “Is this your idea?”

  “It is,” I said. “I’m the Solstice girl. I’m the milk girl too. My father drives the dairy truck.” I pointed at them. “Fridays. Two-fourteen White Horse Road. One buttermilk, one chocolate.”

  “Glory be,” said Mrs. Huffelmeyer.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said. “I’ve been wondering for months.”

  Mr. Huffelmeyer nodded. “Shoot.”

  “Who gets the buttermilk and who gets the chocolate?”

  They laughed, harder than I might have thought folks their age could without breaking into pieces. “Both of us,” said Mrs. Huffelmeyer. “We mix them. It’s our big treat.” She twirled her finger in the air. “Whoopee.”

  “We thank you for the good service,” said her husband. “And your father.”

  “No,” I said, “thank you. For letting us into your home. Thank you for trusting us.”

  I held out my hand to shake, but they were having none of it. Only long, hard hugs would do. I ushered them to a spot next to Betty Lou.

  I kept looking out for Perry. Why wasn’t he showing up? The crowd was getting bigger by the minute. My father was right—they were already spilling out of the tent’s dimensions. Had I said something to offend him when we met on the street a week ago? Was he miffed over my reaction to Dootsie’s tattoo? Did he give up on girls who won’t become Honeybees?

  The sky was pearly gray in the east when I saw the flashing lights of the police car. I met the policeman halfway across the field.

  “You in charge?” he said.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  He looked over my shoulder at the crowd. “What’s going on?”

  “Winter Solstice,” I said. “We’re here to watch the sunrise.”

  He looked at me.

  Behind me, Margie’s voice: “Hey, Mike.”

  The policeman nodded. “Margie.”

  “Problem?”

  “Public gathering? Permit?”

  Margie laughed. “This is not a demonstration. Nobody’s disturbing the peace. We’re here to watch a sunbeam, Mike. A sunbeam.”

  She took his arm and led him toward his car. “Let’s turn those lights off and you can join us.” And that was that with the law.

  And then I saw Perry—Perry and tiny blue-blanketed Clarissa in his arms and their mother, Neva. I looked at the eastern sky. Sun mist drifted above the treetops. “Hurry!” I called. “You’re almost late.” I practically dragged them along. I put them up front, next to the Huffelmeyers.

  Still they kept coming, many of them faces I did not recognize. All the while Dootsie and Alvina were handing out yellow sunburst buttons. We were well beyond the invited number now, the number of buttons I had told them to make, yet the buttons kept coming. I thought of the miracle of the fishes. I found out later that Alvina had bought more yellow foam sheets and pins on her own and had kept making butto
ns. “You’re so dumb,” she said. “I knew it was gonna be mobbed.”

  It was time. I walked through the trampled snow to the people. I stood at the front tent panel. Everyone was looking at me and the panel with the round hole and the eastern sky beyond. I moved forward toward the back panel. The crowd gave way. I couldn’t believe so many had come. I had offered no explanation or persuasion on the invitations. I assumed that, except for Perry and Archie and a few others, most of them knew little if anything of the astronomical realities that called us to this place at this time. Yet here they were. And I must tell you that others were there too: the Lenape maiden and the boy she fell for and Grace, Charlie’s Grace, and many more, many more than a camera could ever see. So many, and I couldn’t have said why.

  I stood before the back panel. Some were still facing away, eastward. “Look this way,” I said. “The hole will squeeze the first light of winter into a beam that will land”—I took a deep breath and pointed—“here.”

  Then I stepped aside—and that was all I did. I had decided the night before, after talking with Archie, that there would be no performance, no ceremony. I would not wear special clothes. I would not sing. I would not dance. I had torn up the poem I had written, left the bittersweet wreath and ukulele at home. I would not dress the dog. I would let nature speak for itself.

  When I think back on it, I’m not sure which was the highlight for me—the sunrise itself or the moments before. I stood to one side, next to Archie, Betty Lou’s sled in front of me. I would never have guessed that so many people could be so silent. It was more than the absence of sound. It was a presence. An expectation. A reverence. All of us staring at the blank tent wall, the black curtain that would not uncover the show but would become the show itself, staring, waiting, as pure a waiting as I’ve ever known. I never had the sense that it arrived—it was simply not there, and then it was there: a long thin stem of light the width of Dootsie’s little wrist, a thin golden gift from the sun come 93 million miles to mark a perfect golden circle on the Blackbone panel. Gasps erupted behind me. The circle blurred as tears filled my eyes. Someone sobbed, “Oh my.” Someone cried softly, “Beautiful!” Many of us could have reached out and touched the golden stem. No one did.