The Stardust Lounge (24 page)

School sucks that houses their days, children in the throes of adolescence that does violence to the body and soul, that is the world changing while they are not, or vice versa, the world in wrong alignment. How to navigate the chasm?

Both Trevor and Stephen made it through, each in his way. After our battling the administration as we futilely tried to see to his advancement, Trevor made the decision to drop out of high school. He successfully took his GEDs in the fall of his sixteenth year and began junior college. Taking a job at a Caribbean restaurant in Amherst, he moved out of our house to share an apartment with friends in June of 1996, the spring of Stephen's graduation. The following fall, Stephen began a B.F.A. in photography in New York City.

We celebrated Stephen's graduation. His father and grandparents flew in from Missouri, and Stanley came up from Maryland. Charles, who had moved back to Russia in January of 1996 to work as a journalist, returned to see his brother graduate. Charles brought with him many friends who had known Stephen in Brookline, and who,
over the years, came to understand the portent of the event.

Trevor returned for the celebration, bringing with him jerk chicken and beans for the party we threw the next day. My sister Eve drove up from Connecticut to help prepare for the all-day event we planned for Stephen, his guests, and his friends.

A subtext of possibilities went unspoken. But the alternative story with its different trajectory ghosted, even intensified our celebration. It offered that Stephen's graduation from high school was not
the
moment that he and we who loved him had been waiting for.

Rather, it was
a
moment, like so many others, which made one kind of future more immediately accessible than another. We were not unaware of the other grueling, even tragic alternative. Inside that alternative we glimpsed ourselves as flat, dismissible characters—the helpless single mother and the rebellious teen—roles reinforced by a culture pointing fingers at us, roles that separated a son from his mother and isolated us in our confusion.

That culture judged me harshly while it allowed my young son, lost in adolescent grief, easy access to guns. Stephen's graduation from high school exemplified our tenuous connection to a system that insisted on itself as the only way, though we knew it was not the only way at all. Trevor had taught us that, and Eduardo, and our animals.

Under the circumstances, Zeek's mother's pleas in District Court that day, pleas for the judge to take him— yes—put him in jail
or he'll be dead before his sixteenth
birthday
…, might be a way, too, to see a child safely through the dark regions of adolescence.

I follow the dogs into the woods toward the river, meeting as we go other dogs and their people, meeting kids, who in spite of the warmth, wear ball caps and huge jackets over their baggy jeans. It's midday, a weekday. They've probably skipped school. The boys stop to watch my dogs dive into the river to retrieve the sticks I throw. They hold cigarettes down close to their sides, wary that I might be someone they know, or someone who knows them.

“Want to throw one?” I offer.

“Na-a,” one answers, taking a nervous drag from his smoke. But they linger awhile watching the dogs run headlong into the water to leap and swim, then charge up the hill to drop the sticks at my feet, eager, shaking water everywhere as they insist on another plunge.

Where have the kids to go, anyway? The day is huge, full of distance and light, all the leaves down, and time seems odd inside such brilliance, something at its peripheries insisting, parents, teachers, cops at the edge of the light, but just now at the edge merely. Such light burns out memory, burns out the autumns of their childhoods, what that felt like. And what now feels like they scrawl across the asphalt.

What now will feel like later is as hard to say.

And as for how later will look back at now—who knows? The jury, as my sister and I used to say to each other, is still out. Indeed it is out—the jury is having dinner in a restaurant, then going to the opera, or it has boarded a plane, or it loads its trunks onto a ship, drags
great “Bon Voyage” wreaths up the gangplank, then appears at the rail to wave back at us as the ship backs out of the harbor.

The jury is blessedly out on all of us, and if and when it comes in with its verdict, let's hope that we've grown up, that we've escaped, somehow, that we've beat it into years in which life appears to make sense, years in which we finally, for the first time, catch up to ourselves, and that the charges brought against us long ago, in that other life—that other strange life in which we were a blur to ourselves and to the ones who loved us—are forgivable.

The dogs run off into the wide lap of the hillside, chase squirrels up trees then dash into underbrush. Now Rufus is the oldest among the three, fit and healthy at eight years old. Buster died a few years ago, and G.Q. They lie buried in our yard in Amherst.

Last summer Charles gave me my shepherd-husky mix, a stray female I named Annie. And Max the dalmatian was Stephen's gift to me just after Buster died. Max had belonged to the super of Stephen's apartment building in New York. After Stephen's first year in school he moved out of the dorms and into Alphabet City. His super bought the dalmatian as a puppy for his daughter, but the dog grew up, as dalmatians tend to do, big and unruly and loud. His barking and whining from the basement troubled Stephen. He convinced the super to let him take Max home to Amherst.

As for our cats, Frank and I have Einstein and Vasco with us in Worcester, the other four living in Amherst. Those four were born in the house and grew up hunting
the woods behind. Sybil is among them. Frank and I drive out from Worcester several times a week. We are together now. Often the cats come in through the kitchen window to greet us and to partake in our refilling of their huge vats of cat food. Sometimes we find mice, voles, bits of wing on the kitchen floor.

I say good-bye to the kids who still stand, awkward, smoking, shifting their weight from one foot to the other.

“Nice dogs,” one of them says to me.

“Thanks,” I answer. “You guys be good.”

They shrug as they head up the steep path toward the street, then down the wide drive, perhaps over their own handiwork. They wear that slump-shouldered luckless look I recognize, but when Max dashes back to circle and sniff them, their faces wake to a boyishness and one of them turns to wave to me.

In that gesture I see him so completely that I glimpse my Stephen. The day I took him to college we waited in lines, dragged his trunk up to his dorm room, made up his bed. And then he was ready for me to go. He walked me down to the car, double-parked on a busy street.

“Now don't forget to take your vitamins,” I'd said.

“Don't worry, Mom …”

“And you know, take it easy, take it slow …”

“I'll be fine …”

“This is New York,” I'd warned.

“I know!” He'd grinned.

Stephen opened the car door for me. We hugged one more time and then he dashed back across the street.

“Be careful on the way home!” he called above the traffic as he turned to wave to me.

“And Mom!” he shouted, breaking into a wide grin, shaking his head at my tears. “You'll be okay, Mom!” he called. “Take good care of the animals! And Mom, listen! Thanks for a wonderful childhood!”