The Night of the Comet (9 page)

My mother dismissed this outright as a ridiculous idea. “You can’t be serious, can you? Invite the Martellos to come here and play with your telescope?”

“Sure. Everybody likes that kind of thing. A stargazing party.”

“A stargazing party. Where’d you get that idea? Good lord. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.” She shook her head at my father’s hopelessness. “A stargazing party.”

But later that same night, after she’d cleared the table and cleaned the kitchen and put away the dishes, she said that it might not be such a bad idea after all.

I looked up from my homework, my father looked up from his papers, not quite sure what she was talking about.

“I mean, why shouldn’t we be friendly?” she said, standing in the doorway with a dish towel in her hands. “They’re our neighbors, after all. Junior and Gabriella are in the same grade. You’re her teacher. Why wouldn’t they want to come over? People are people.”

My father could set up his telescope—or rather, my telescope—in the backyard. They’d call the Martellos over, have cocktails, sit for some snacks and chitchat, and then we’d all go out and look at the comet. It could be fun. Just a small, informal affair with the two families, a chance to get to know one another. A stargazing party.

“Sure. Sounds fun,” my father said, and bent back to his work.

She looked to me. “What do you think? Should I invite them?”

“Why not?” I said—although privately, I doubted the Martellos would want to have anything to do with us.

I was only fourteen, but even I understood that people who lived in Beau Rivage Estates didn’t socialize with people who lived in our neighborhood. They joined the country club in Thibodaux, and played golf and tennis, or went fishing at their weekend homes on Grand Isle. The waterway between our houses marked a boundary as clear as the one between white and black, rich and poor. It was just like at the school yard, only with adults: the Martellos had their circle, my parents had theirs, and the two were never meant to overlap.

But regardless, over the next few days, my mother began making plans. There was some back and forth on the date. My father insisted that the viewing conditions had to be good. My mother said that it had to be on a weekend. He said you couldn’t negotiate with a comet; it was guided by its own immutable laws, laws that human beings might never completely understand but about which we could at least make informed guesses. He checked with the LSU Astronomy Department, did some calculations, and proposed a Saturday in October when the comet should be visible as it crossed into the constellation Libra.

“I’M
going,” my mother announced that weekend, a note of defiance in her voice.

She spent the morning making cupcakes, and in the afternoon she asked Megan to go with her to deliver an invitation to the Martellos. Megan didn’t want to. “Do this for your mother, Meg,” pleaded our father. “Just this once, okay?”

As soon as they’d driven off in the car, I went upstairs to my room and uncapped the Celestron. In a minute they arrived at the Martellos’ house. My mother pulled up on the wrong side of the road and parked the Rambler at the curb near their driveway. She got out, straightened her clothes, and then led the way along the sidewalk carrying the cupcakes while Megan slumped behind her in a white peasant blouse, the two of them looking like villagers bearing gifts for a king.

I swiveled the telescope and found Frank Martello sitting in his chair in their patio room. He was drinking a beer and watching a football game on TV, enjoying the kind of casually masculine Saturday afternoon
leisure activity that my father never did. After a moment he raised his head, stood, and disappeared. Soon several pairs of legs appeared in the room, their bodies cut off from my view by the tops of the window frames. I recognized my mother’s and Megan’s legs. Barbara Martello was wearing a gold and paisley muumuu; her legs had a tanned, healthy, country club look. A blue-jeaned Gabriella joined them, and then she and my sister left, bringing the cupcakes to the kitchen, I assumed.

Eventually the glass door slid open and the adults came outside onto the patio. Frank led my mother around the swimming pool, through the tall iron gates, and down the boardwalk to their boat dock, talking and pointing. Barbara followed them. As they spoke and gestured, I could almost read the words on their lips:

I love your flowers
.

I want to put some up there, too, hang them from the lamp posts. We’ll bring the boat right up here
.

He thinks he’s going to keep a yacht here. He thinks we live on the Riviera
.

Sure. This goes straight out to the Intracoastal Waterway. You could take it all the way to the Keys. Are you and—What’s his name? The Professor? Alan?—are you and Alan much into fishing?

Oh, no. We just sit at home. Look at the stars
.

My mother’s visit seemed to be going surprisingly well. She was right, the Martellos looked like friendly people, not at all snobbish. She shared a laugh with Frank and touched his arm. When Gabriella and my sister came out to join them, I tracked them with the telescope, their images bobbing in the lens. Gabriella was eating one of my mother’s cupcakes—a good sign, I thought. She and Megan stepped down to the dock, and then my sister abruptly swung her arm around and pointed across the water to our house.

I jerked away from the telescope and pressed against the wall. Had they seen me? Could they see up here? I waited a minute or two before creeping back to the window. By then, everyone had disappeared from the Martellos’ yard. Soon I saw Megan and my mother returning to our car. I went downstairs to the kitchen, where my father was busy repairing
the toaster at the kitchen table, took a cupcake, sat, and waited for the report.

“They’re coming,” my mother said when she and Megan came in through the front door. “Frank said they’d be delighted to spend an evening with the famous scientist. They’ve seen your column, they know all about you.”

My father barely looked up from the toaster. “Oh? That’s nice.”

“You should see their house. Good lord. They’ve got about a dozen rooms downstairs. Frank’s got a billiard room with a fireplace and a whole bar set up in there, like something you’d see in a movie.”

“I thought it was excessive,” Megan said, unwrapping a cupcake. “Why do you need a house that big for three people?”

“But they’re nice, aren’t they? They’re a nice family,” my mother said.

“Gabriella has her own powder room,” Megan said. “Can you believe that? A
powder
room. With a private phone line. Everything’s
yellow
.”

Even as she criticized them, my sister sounded as impressed as our mother was by the Martellos and their fabulous wealth. They went on talking about the house, comparing notes on things they’d spotted during their walk-through. The dumbwaiter: Did Megan see that? Or what about the intercom system with the two-way speakers in all the rooms? And the grand piano, and the walk-in closets, and the whirlpool tub in the master bathroom? Barbara collected porcelain dolls from around the world that she kept in a glass display case. Frank had a wine cabinet with a humidor for his cigars. They had a two-car garage with two cars, Frank’s white Cadillac and a sky-blue Lincoln Town Car for Barbara. Frank’s workshop was as big as our living room and dining room combined, and upstairs there were two
—two
—extra guest rooms.

“Gorgeous. Gorgeous home,” my mother said, finishing. She paused to catch her breath. I saw her eyes dart around our own shabby kitchen, through the doorway to our living room, fly around the walls in there, and come back to land on my father, who was bent over the toaster with the coils and burnt crumbs and pieces of tin junk scattered on the Formica tabletop.

“Did you hear anything we just said? The Martellos are coming here next weekend.”

“I heard. I heard! Good. Great. Frank has a workshop that’s as big as our living room and dining room combined. What do you want me to do about it?” He looked up, a screwdriver in one hand, his glasses slipping down his nose.

My mother pressed her lips together. “Nothing. Nothing,” she said—and she was right. There was nothing he could do. What she wanted, it was clear, exceeded what he could give her. Her ambitions were bigger than the room, bigger than the house, bigger than him, even.

THAT
same afternoon she began cleaning. She scrubbed the bathroom and kitchen. She stood on chairs and dusted the tops of window and door frames. She vacuumed the cushions on the sofa and rubbed furiously at a large gray stain on the Mexican rug in the living room, a stain that had been there so long that it seemed an indelible part of our lives, something that, like our own stubborn middle-class poverty, could never be fully erased, only endured.

During the week she took the car and drove up to New Orleans and bought a new dress for herself, a shirt for me, and a dinner jacket for my father. She arranged with her old friend Dale Landry, a lawyer, to borrow his maid for the party. She had me trim the azalea bushes in the front yard, and she planted new mums around the back porch.

She was at a loss over what to do about snacks until she saw a fondue set in the window of a local shop. Saturday afternoon before the party, she and Megan cut fruit and melted chocolate. She got my father to tend to the Sterno, and he spent some time experimenting with the
flame and the baffle to find just the right temperature to maintain the chocolate at the proper viscosity.

That evening, I went upstairs to get myself ready to meet the Martellos. I tried on my new shirt in front of the mirror. The fabric was a shiny polyester decorated with stars and planets—my mother’s idea, in keeping with the theme of the party. In her bedroom next door, Megan played her Roberta Flack album over and over, the songs of love and longing thumping softly through the walls in an artful echo of my own chaotic churn of emotions.

Soon Gabriella would be standing inside our house. It was like my birthday wish come true, only the fulfillment of this wish left me more worried than happy. Her visit here was like a visit from a celebrity. Clearly, she didn’t belong in our home, with its worn-out orange sofa and broken linoleum floor and dirty Mexican rug. My mother had overreached in inviting them. So much could go wrong. I was tempted to lock myself in my room and not come out until the night was over and the Martellos had passed through and we could go back to being our normal sad selves again.

Leaning in to the mirror, I discovered a small bump on my forehead. I prodded it with my fingertips. It was hard and painful to the touch, like a BB pellet stuck under my skin. Over the last half year my body had taken on a life of its own, erupting with new hair and smells and fluids. This, I supposed, was what our teachers meant when they talked about “life changes” and “maturation.” It sounded almost beautiful the way they described it, but it wasn’t; it was ugly and unpleasant. They should’ve just said “You become like werewolves,” and we would’ve had a better idea of what to expect from puberty.

I went to work excavating the pimple. The trick, I knew, was to press low and wide of the center, dig in below the bump with my fingernails, and squeeze. The pimple burst, spitting a satisfying speck of white goo onto the mirror. But then I kept squeezing, thinking there must be more of it in there, until a bloody fluid oozed out. I stopped and fingered the spot, afraid now that I had done some serious damage. I found a Cub Scout neckerchief in my drawer and staunched the blood, but my clumsy operation had left a button-sized welt on my forehead. “Damn. Damn damn damn.”

I heard my mother coming up the stairs. She checked next door with my sister first. “Oh, Megan. You’re not going to wear that, are you?” she said, her voice dripping with disappointment. They argued for a minute, my mother complaining, as she always did, about Megan’s clothes, her hair, her room, her general disregard for manners and appearances, before giving up and coming to my room. She knocked.

“Are you almost ready? The Martellos will be here soon.”

“Okay.”

“Are you wearing your new shirt? Can I see?” She opened the door. “Hey, that looks good.… Oh, no. What happened, honey? Was that a pimple?” She reached to touch it. I flinched.

“Ouch. Don’t.”

“You sure made a mess of that.”

“I know. I know.”

“Oh gee, and your new girlfriend’s coming over.”

“She’s not my girlfriend. Where’d you get that idea? I don’t even know her.”

“Say ‘yet.’ ”

“What?”

“She’s not my girlfriend
yet
.”

“I doubt if she’ll ever be my girlfriend.”

“Hey, show a little confidence. Wait a minute.” She ducked next door to Megan’s room and returned with some rubbing alcohol and makeup. She pulled my chair around. “Sit.”

She bent in and cleaned the spot on my forehead. Then she applied flesh-colored makeup with a tiny brush, narrowing her eyes and pressing her lips together as she worked. Silver hoop earrings rocked back and forth on either side of her face. With her orange minidress and buckled high-heeled shoes, she looked awkward and young. I could almost see her as the teenage girl she must’ve once been—the pretty, preening daughter of Bob and Dot Simoneaux, an only child, slightly spoiled, romantic and willful. “Terrebonne’s undiscovered star,” my father used to tease her.

“Did you ever have boyfriends? I mean, before Dad.”

“Sure. I was quite popular once, believe it or not. Dale Landry—you know him, don’t you?—he was one of my boyfriends, before I met your
father. We used to go out. He had the raciest car in Terrebonne, a snazzy silver Corvette. Gosh, that was fun.”

She talked about how they would go cruising around town, down to the courthouse square. Everyone would be out, boys leaning against their cars, couples strolling arm in arm, old folks sitting on the benches beneath the oak trees. Those were the days, she said.

“But then you met Dad in the drugstore.”

She laughed—not a happy laugh, exactly, but one you might use in talking about an embarrassing incident from your past.