The Night of the Comet (10 page)

“Right. Then I met Alan. I was working at the McCall’s Rexall, he was a new teacher in town. Fresh from LSU. A city boy, smart as a … smart as a book.”

I’d heard the story of their meeting before in one version or another from both my parents. For me, it had always stood as a kind of lesson on the way love was supposed to work: for every boy, one special girl was waiting. She might be down the street, or in the next neighborhood, or even halfway around the world, but you could be sure she was there somewhere, waiting just for him—just as all those years ago, my mother had stood behind the counter of the McCall’s Rexall waiting for my father to walk in the door.

I prompted her to tell it again. “It was late at night. You were working all alone in the store.”

“He came in wearing his jacket and tie from school. He said he had a stomachache.”

“And he came back every night for a week.”

“He kept buying medicine. I think we went through every stomach medicine in the store before he finally asked me out.”

“And gradually you grew to like him.”

“Um hm.”

“Why?”

“Huh?”

“Why’d you like him?”

“What a question.” She blended the edges of the makeup into my skin with her fingertips, thinking. “I liked him … I liked him because he seemed nice, I guess. And smart. And neat. And determined. I liked his name, too: Alan Broussard. Very sophisticated.”

“And soon you were dating.”

“Soon we were dating. He came and met my parents, I went to Baton Rouge to meet his.” She grabbed a comb and went to work on my hair. “And then we got married. Just like that—
Ka-boom
. Crazy, huh? I was just nineteen years old, Alan was twenty-two. Practically kids. Not much older than you are now.”

“I think I’ve still got a few years.”

“Yes. Yes, I think you do.” She drew a careful part down one side of my hair. “For our honeymoon we took the Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The train left at midnight, and we almost missed it because Alan was arguing with the taxi driver about the fare—”

“You had to run to catch it—”

“We had a tiny cabin in the sleeper car—”

“He sneezed all night because of the dust, and you were afraid to walk between the cars. You rode for three days and three nights, and when you got to Hollywood, you stayed in an ugly motel on Sunset Boulevard.”

“Wowser, you remember it almost as well as I do. And then what happened? Turn this way.”

“You went sightseeing? You met some famous movie stars.”

“Not quite. We tried. That’s the part I wished had happened but didn’t.”

“You went to the observatory after that.”

“He had to see the Palomar Observatory. That was his big thing, the Palomar Observatory.”

I had always thought that this was the most romantic part of their story. I pictured my parents young and in love, standing side by side beneath an enormous telescope on a dark mountaintop as stars streaked overhead.…

“The observatory,” she said now. “Can you believe that? For a honeymoon?”

“You didn’t like it?”

She sighed through her nose. “I shouldn’t say I didn’t like it. I mean, sure, we had some fun times together.” She stood back and looked at her handiwork, frowning. “I just want to know who made the rule that you had to stop having fun once you got married.”

I barely had time to consider this before she said, “Here, take a look,” and stepped out of the way so I could see the mirror. She straightened my collar. “There you go. A handsome young man. She’d be crazy not to like you.”

“You’re just saying that because you’re my mother.”

“I’m not! Really. You’re a good-looking kid. You’re nice, you’re polite. Any girl would be lucky to have you for a boyfriend.” She brushed some dandruff off my shoulders. “You just need to put yourself out there a little more. Try not to be so shy. Take a chance now and then. Life only comes around once, you know.”

She rested her hands on my shoulders and found my eyes in the mirror. “Follow your heart. That’s what I always say. Follow your heart, and the rest will follow.”

The doorbell rang downstairs.

“Oh, god. Here they are.” She tugged at the hips of her skirt. “This looks ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

“I think you look good.”

“Aw, thanks, honey. I don’t get to hear that much anymore.” She shouted into the hallway, “Megan!” Then she stood up straight and pulled her shoulders back.

“What do you say? Are we ready for this?”

“HERE
he is. The famous Professor.”

My father twitched and grinned as Frank Martello came in and shook his hand. Standing under the low ceiling of our house, blocking the narrow doorway, Frank appeared larger than I’d expected. He wore a beige safari suit over a white shirt with an oversized watch on one wrist. Barbara stood beside him smiling politely, stealing uneasy glances around our front room. She had on a stylish-looking black cocktail dress with a strand of white pearls around her neck. For the introductions, Gabriella slid up between her parents and stood with her hands cupped below her waist and her hair draped forward over her shoulders. Then Megan and I were obliged to come forward, too, so that we were lined up facing one another, the Martellos and the Broussards, like rival teams before a game. Seeing my mother standing barelegged and nervous in her orange minidress, and my father shifting and sniffing in his new checked dinner jacket, and Megan in her bell-bottoms and frizzy hair and worn-out denim jacket, and myself in my psychedelic polyester shirt that suddenly didn’t look so cool anymore,
I was certain that in any kind of competition, according to any kind of rules, the Martellos would win, hands down.

My mother led everyone the two steps into the living room, conducting herself with an awkward formality. She indicated where each person should sit and made showy requests to Christine, our borrowed maid: “Christine, could you take Mrs. Martello’s purse?” “Christine, I forgot to put out the nuts. Would you mind looking after that?”

My father took drink orders and then repeated them, pointing to each person in turn. “We’ll get to work on that pronto!” he said, and backed into the kitchen, where he’d set up a corner of the counter for his bartending. I could see him in there checking recipes in a guidebook and measuring out jiggers and ponies as carefully as if he were conducting a laboratory experiment.

Frank settled back on the couch and stretched his arm along the top of the cushions. His shirt collar flared opened over the top of his safari jacket and his sleeves were rolled up, showing skin that was the same golden shade as his daughter’s. Barbara sat well forward with her hands clasped together on her knees, as if she was uncomfortable sitting on our dirty sofa and meant to signal that their visit here was only temporary, that any minute they might be called away to more important engagements. I spotted a brown cockroach crawling slowly along the top of the wall above their heads, and I prayed that no one else would see it.

My mother began by apologizing for not inviting the Martellos over sooner; she followed up with some small talk about the weather, and then the Martellos’ new home, and the neighborhood. As though to draw out our families’ connections, she reminded everyone that Gabriella and I were in the same grade at school. She appeared to be taking her role of hostess very seriously; she sat carefully upright, smiling stagily and speaking in full, deliberate sentences, as if she were reenacting a scene that she’d been rehearsing in her mind for a long time.

Frank, more at ease, turned to me and Megan, still standing there, and said loudly: “So! Tell us about yourself. What do kids your age do for fun in Terrebonne?”

I looked to Megan. My sister, as starstruck as I was by our guests, spoke about activities that we rarely participated in but that sounded
exciting. We went to football games, she said, or to parties with friends or boating on the lake. She claimed to especially like water-skiing, which surprised me because I didn’t know she’d ever done that.

Barbara said that they’d never tried water-skiing, but they’d recently taken up snow skiing, out in Aspen, and she asked if we had ever tried that. “Oh, but you should,” she said when we shook our heads. “We just love it. It’s the best thing. Gabby can tell you all about it.”

Gabriella, standing beside my sister, agreed that snow skiing was wonderful, she loved it, she couldn’t wait to go again.

My mother, flinging herself back into the conversation, said that she had always wanted to try snow skiing herself, and that she kept asking Alan to take us, but we never managed to find the time. “He’s just so busy with his work,” she said, nervously smoothing the hem of her skirt. “Especially now, with the comet and all.”

“Speak of the devil,” Frank said, and sat up as my father carried in drinks on a tray.

“At your service.”

My father served the drinks around, apologizing fussily. He’d had to substitute bourbon whiskey for rye whiskey in Frank’s Manhattan. He explained how there was an element of chemistry involved in bartending. You couldn’t just throw things together at random; different liquors reacted to one another in certain ways in certain combinations. You might be able to approximate the result with substitute liquors, but without the proper ingredients, you could never expect to produce the perfect cocktail.

“We don’t need a lecture, Alan!” my mother said, and laughed tensely. “Just give us our drinks.”

“I’ll be your guinea pig, Professor. Let’s see how you did.” Frank had thick sideburns that extended low alongside his ears, giving him a rugged, commanding appearance; he was the type of man you instinctively looked to for the final word on anything. We all watched him bring the glass to his lips, watched his throat move. My father waited for the verdict.

“That’s not bad. Not bad at all. Man, that’s got a kick,” Frank said, and my father wagged his head in pleasure.

DRINKS
delivered, we children were free to go. My sister brought Gabriella up to her room to listen to records. I slunk off to the kitchen, then went outside and checked on my telescope in the backyard, then wandered upstairs. Megan’s bedroom door was closed, but I could hear the two girls in there talking and listening to music. I dropped down on my bed and leaned against the wall. It didn’t seem fair that my sister should have stolen Gabriella away so quickly like that. They weren’t even in the same grade. What could they have possibly had in common?

I picked up a book and tried to read. It was a science-fiction novel I’d been enjoying lately, a terrific, strange story about war and time travel and four-dimensional aliens, but I couldn’t lose myself in the words, not tonight with Gabriella right next door. I let the book fall on my chest. Gradually, as if by accident, I turned my head until my ear was pressed against the wall beside my bed. I heard Joan Baez singing and my sister speaking. I strained to make out what she was saying, but it was like trying to find shapes in clouds.

My sister, I imagined, would’ve been trying to educate Gabriella about music, and Bob Dylan and the origins of the folk movement in Greenwich Village. I knew the talk; I’d heard it plenty of times myself. So much of the music they played on the radio was just awful, Megan would say. People here didn’t even know good music when they heard it; you couldn’t even find any good records here. All the decent music got left behind somewhere on the other side of Nashville. By the time it trickled down to us here in no-man’s-land, all that was left were the Osmonds, and the Carpenters, and Tony Orlando and Dawn, and all that other insufferable sugarcoated crap. If you really wanted to hear good music, she’d say, becoming insistent and superior as she did whenever she talked about it, if you really wanted to meet the cool people, you had to go to the source: New York City. That’s where she’d be right now if she had any choice in the matter. You could bet that as soon as she was old enough to travel on her own, she’d be out of here, away from these dismal swamps and the redneck boys with their Camaros, and the empty-headed girls who dated them and married them and wanted nothing more than to raise their own litters of more redneck boys and girls.…

I gave up and pulled away from the wall and gazed out the window. From my bed I could see the thin crescent moon hanging low in the sky. It looked like a tilted bowl filled with a bright, silvery liquid, ready to overspill. The sight of it gave me a strange, aching emptiness. As though the moonlight had rendered the walls of our house transparent, I could picture Gabriella sitting on the floor of my sister’s room, not two feet away. She was listening politely to my sister, nodding her head in time to the music while turning over an album cover in her hands. Her luxurious hair fell around her shoulders. She was so close that I might have reached out and stroked her hair, taken hold of her hand.…

I groaned, grabbed a pillow, squeezed it to my chest, and rolled back and forth on my bed while whispering her name:
Gabriella. Gabriella. Gabriella
.

After a while I lay still. I turned my head on the mattress and let my eyes roam around my room. I’d tidied it up that afternoon on the off
chance that she might want to visit me here. I wondered what Gabriella would think, seeing my room. I followed the slope of the low ceiling down to my desk. There were my schoolbooks, a wooden ruler, a metal compass.
A studious boy
, she might think.
An intelligent boy
. Opposite my bed was my bookcase, with my plastic model airplanes and old marble collection on top. The books were arranged on the shelves from the oldest at the bottom to the newest on top, like strata of the Earth: from
Winnie the Pooh
up through
Treasure Island
to
Huckleberry Finn
, to
The Hobbit
, to
Lord of the Flies. A serious boy
, she would think.
A thoughtful boy
.

Hidden behind the bookcase—she wouldn’t have been able to see this—were old issues of my sister’s
Seventeen
magazine. I’d stolen stray copies over the years, desperate to understand more about the mysterious world of women: bra sizes, tampons, electric leg shavers. “Are You a Flirt?” the story headings read. “First Date Do’s and Don’ts”; “What Do Boys Want?”