The Silver Star (2 page)

Mom was a singer, songwriter, and actress. She had never actually been in a movie or made a record, but she hated to be called “aspiring,” and truth be told, she was a little older
than the people described that way in the movie magazines she was always buying. Mom’s thirty-sixth birthday was coming up, and she complained that the singers who were getting all the
attention, like Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell, were at least ten years younger than her.

Even so, Mom always said her big break was right around the corner. Sometimes she got callbacks after auditions, but she usually came home shaking her head and saying the guys at the studio were
just tire-kickers who wanted a second look at her cleavage. So while Mom had her career, it wasn’t one that produced much in the way of income—yet. Mostly we lived on Mom’s
inheritance. It hadn’t been a ton of money to begin with, and by the time we moved to Lost Lake, we were on a fairly tight budget.

When Mom wasn’t taking trips into L.A.—which were draining because the drive was nearly four hours in each direction—she tended to sleep late and spend the day writing songs,
playing them on one of her four guitars. Her favorite, a 1961 Zemaitis, cost about a year’s rent. She also had a Gibson Southern Jumbo, a honey-colored Martin, and a Spanish guitar made from
Brazilian rosewood. If she wasn’t practicing her songs, she was working on a musical play based on her life, about breaking away from her stifling Old South family, jettisoning her jerk of a
husband and string of deadbeat boyfriends—together with all the tire-kickers who didn’t reach the boyfriend stage—and discovering her true voice in music. She called the play
“Finding the Magic.”

Mom always talked about how the secret to the creative process was finding the magic. That, she said, was what you needed to do in life as well. Find the magic. In musical harmony, in the rain
on your face and the sun on your bare shoulders, in the morning dew that soaked your sneakers and the wildflowers you picked for free in the roadside ditch, in love at first sight and those sad
memories of the one who got away. “Find the magic,” Mom always said. “And if you can’t find the magic,” she added, “then make the magic.”

The three of us were magic, Mom liked to say. She assured us that no matter how famous she became, nothing would ever be more important to her than her two girls. We were a tribe of three, she
said. Three was a perfect number, she’d go on. Think of it. The holy trinity, three musketeers, three kings of Orient, three little pigs, three stooges, three blind mice, three wishes, three
strikes, three cheers, three’s a charm. The three of us were all we needed, Mom said.

But that didn’t keep her from going out on dates with tire-kickers.

Over the next
few weeks, Mom kept talking about how Mark Parker had “discovered” her. She said it as a joke, but you
could tell it actually had a sort of fairy-tale quality that appealed to her. It was a magic moment.

Mom began taking more trips into Los Angeles—sometimes for a day, sometimes for two or three—and when she came back, she was gushy with Mark Parker stories. He was an extraordinary
guy, she said. He was working with her on the score for “Finding the Magic,” tightening the lyrics, pushing her on the phrasing, and polishing the arrangement. Mark ghosted a lot of
lyrics, she told us. One day she brought home an album and pulled out the liner notes. Mark had circled the lyrics of a love song and had scrawled next to them, “I wrote this about you before
I met you.”

Arrangement was Mark’s specialty. On another day Mom brought back a second album, this one by the Tokens, with their hit recording of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Mark had done
the arrangement for the song, she explained, which had been recorded a couple of times without taking off. At first the Tokens didn’t want to do Mark’s version, but he talked them into
it and even sang some of the backup vocals. You could hear his baritone on the harmonies if you listened closely.

Mom was still pretty for a mom. She had been homecoming queen at her high school in Virginia, where she’d grown up, and you could see why. She had large hazel eyes and
sun-streaked blond hair that she kept in a ponytail when she was at home but combed out and teased up when she went to Los Angeles. She’d put on a few pounds or so since her high school days,
she admitted, but she said the weight gave her a little extra cleavage, and a singer could never have too much in that department. If nothing else, it got you callbacks.

Mark liked her curves, Mom told us, and after she began seeing him, she started looking and acting younger. Her eyes were animated when she came home, describing how Mark had taken her sailing
or made her poached scallops, and how she had taught him to dance the Carolina shag. Mom’s name was Charlotte, and Mark had invented a cocktail for her with peach schnapps, bourbon,
grenadine, and Tab that he called the Shakin’ Charlotte.

Not everything about Mark was perfect, however. He had a dark side, Mom explained. He was moody, like all true artists, but then so was she, and their collaboration had its share of stormy
moments. Sometimes late at night Mom called Mark—she had paid up the disputed charges, so we had phone service again—and Liz and I could hear her yelling into the receiver, saying
things like “That song needs to end on a chord, not a fade-out!” or “Mark, you expect too much of me!” These were creative differences, Mom said. Mark was ready to produce a
demo tape of her best songs to play for the big labels, and it was natural for artistic types to have passionate disagreements as a deadline approached.

I kept asking Mom when Liz and I were going to meet Mark Parker. Mom said that Mark was very busy, always jetting off to New York or London, and didn’t have the time to come all the way
out to Lost Lake. I suggested that we drive into Los Angeles some weekend to meet him, but Mom shook her head. “Bean, the truth of it is, he’s jealous of you and Liz,” she said.
“He told me he thinks I talk about you girls too much. I’m afraid Mark can be a little possessive.”

After Mom had been seeing Mark for a couple of months, she came home to tell us that, despite his hectic schedule and his possessiveness, Mark had agreed to come out to Lost Lake to meet Liz and
me the following Wednesday after school. The three of us spent Tuesday evening furiously cleaning the bungalow, stuffing junk in the closet, scrubbing the rings of grime off the kitchen sink and
the toilet, moving Mom’s purple butterfly chair to cover the spot where she’d spilled tea on the rug, wiping around the doorknobs and the windowsills, untangling Mom’s wind
chimes, and scraping the odd dried bit of Chew-and-Spew from the floor. As we worked, we sang “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” We joined in on the lyrics together, “In the jungle, the
mighty jungle . . .” Then Liz did the “o-wim-o-weh o-wim-o-weh o-wim-o-weh” chorus, Mom hit the “a-wooo-wooo-wooo” high notes, and I chimed in with the bass:
“ee-dum-bumbuway.”

The next day, as soon as school was out, I hurried back to the bungalow. I was in sixth grade, in the elementary school, and Liz was a freshman in the high school, so I always
got home first. Mom had told us Mark drove a yellow Triumph TR3 with wire wheels but the only car parked in front of the bungalow that afternoon was our old brown Dart, and when I got inside, I
found Mom sitting on the floor, surrounded by a mess of books, records, and sheet music that had been pulled from the shelves. She looked like she’d been crying.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He’s gone,” Mom said.

“But what happened?”

“We got into a fight. I told you he’s moody.” To lure Mark to Lost Lake, Mom explained, she had told him that Liz and I would be spending the night with friends. Once
he’d arrived, she’d told him there had been a slight change of plans, and Liz and I were coming home after school. Mark exploded. He said he felt tricked and entrapped, and he stormed
out.

“What a jerk,” I said.

“He’s not a jerk. He’s passionate. He’s Byronic. And he’s obsessed with me.”

“Then he’ll be back.”

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “It’s pretty serious. He said he was leaving for his villa in Italy.”

“Mark has a villa in Italy?”

“It’s not really his. A movie-producer friend owns it, but he lets Mark use it.”

“Wow,” I said. Mom had always wanted to spend time in Italy, and here was a guy who could jet over there whenever he felt like it. Except for the fact that he didn’t want to
meet me and Liz, Mark Parker was everything Mom had ever wanted in a man. “I wish he liked us,” I said, “because other than that, he’s too good to be true.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom pulled up her shoulders and stared at me. “Do you think I’m making it all up?”

“Oh, not for a second,” I said. “Making up a boyfriend would be just too kooky.” But as soon as the words came out of my mouth, it occurred to me that Mom was, in fact,
making it all up. My face suddenly felt hot, like I was seeing Mom naked. Mom and I were looking at each other, and I realized she could tell that I knew she had made it up.

“Screw you!” Mom shouted. She was on her feet and started yelling about everything she’d done for me and Liz, how hard she’d struggled, how much she’d sacrificed,
what an ungrateful couple of parasites we were. I tried to calm Mom down, but that made her angrier. She never should have had kids, she went on, especially me. I was a mistake. She’d thrown
away her life and her career for us, run through her inheritance for us, and we didn’t even appreciate it.

“I can’t stand being here!” she screamed. “I’ve got to get away.”

I was wondering what I could say to smooth things over when Mom grabbed her big handbag off the couch and stormed out, slamming the door behind her. I heard her gun the Dart, then she drove
away, and except for the gentle clinking of the wind chimes, the bungalow was silent.

I fed Fido, the little turtle Mom had bought me at Woolworth’s when she wouldn’t let me get a dog. Then I curled up in Mom’s purple butterfly chair—the
one she liked to sit in when she was writing music—staring out the picture window with my feet tucked up beside me, stroking Fido’s little head with my forefinger and waiting for Liz to
get home from school.

Truth be told, Mom had a temper and was given to her share of tantrums and meltdowns when things got overwhelming. The fits usually passed quickly, and then we all moved on as if nothing had
happened. This one was different. Mom had said things that she’d never said before, like about me being a mistake. And the whole business about Mark Parker was epically weird. I needed Liz to
help sort it all out.

Liz could make sense of anything. Her brain worked that way. Liz was talented and beautiful and funny and, most of all, incredibly smart. I’m not saying all that just because she was my
sister. If you met her, you’d agree. She was tall and slender with pale skin and long, wavy reddish-gold hair. Mom was always calling her a pre-Raphaelite beauty, which made Liz roll her eyes
and say it was too bad she didn’t live over one hundred years ago, in pre-Raphaelite days.

Liz was one of those people who always made grown-ups, particularly teachers, go slack-jawed and use words like “prodigy” and “precocious” and “gifted.” Liz
knew all these things that other people didn’t know—like who the pre-Raphaelites were—because she was always reading, usually more than one book at a time. She also figured out a
lot on her own. She could do complicated math calculations without pencil and paper. She could answer really tricky brainteaser-type riddles and loved saying words backward—like calling Mark
Parker “Kram Rekrap.” She loved anagrams, where you rearranged the letters of words to make different words, turning “deliver” into “reviled” and
“funeral” into “real fun.” And she loved spoonerisms, like when you mean to say “dear old queen” but instead say “queer old dean,” or when “bad
money” comes out as “mad bunny” and “smart feller” turns into “fart smeller.” She was also a killer Scrabble player.

Liz’s school let out only an hour after mine, but that afternoon it felt like forever. When she finally arrived at the bungalow, I didn’t even let her set her books down before I
started pouring out every detail of Mom’s blowup.

“I just don’t understand why she would make up all this Mark Parker stuff,” I said.

Liz sighed. “Mom’s always been a bit of a fibber,” she said. Mom was all the time telling us things that Liz suspected weren’t true, like how she used to go foxhunting
with Jackie Kennedy in Virginia when they were both girls, or how she’d been the dancing banana in a cereal commercial. Mom had a red velvet jacket and liked to tell the story of how, when
June Carter Cash had heard her play in a Nashville bar, she joined Mom onstage and they sang a duet together that brought the crowd to its feet. June Carter Cash had been wearing the red velvet
jacket, and right there onstage she gave it to Mom.

“It didn’t happen,” Liz said. “I saw Mom buy that jacket at a church tag sale. She didn’t know I was watching, and I never said anything.” Liz looked out the
window. “Mark Parker is just another dancing banana.”

“I really blew it, didn’t I?”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Bean.”

“I should have kept my big mouth shut. But I never really said anything, either.”

“She knew you knew,” Liz said, “and she couldn’t handle it.”

“Mom wasn’t just making up a little story about some guy she met,” I said. “There were the phone calls. And those liner notes.”

“I know,” Liz said. “It’s kind of scary. I think she’s gone through about all of her money, and it’s giving her some sort of a nervous breakdown.”

Liz said we should clean up the place so that when Mom came back, we could pretend the whole Mark Parker mess had never happened. We put the books back on the shelves, stacked the sheet music,
and slid the records into their jackets. I came across the liner notes where Mark Parker had supposedly written to Mom: “I wrote this about you before I met you.” It was flat-out
creepy.

We expected Mom
to come back that night or the next day, but by the weekend, we still hadn’t heard from her. Whenever I
started to fret, Liz told me not to worry, Mom always came back. Then we got the letter.