Starry Night (6 page)

“Who's adorable?” Dinah has ears for boy-talk like a bloodhound has a nose for a missing person.

“Wren's got a crush on a rock star in Oliver's room,” Reagan said, popping her head out of the bathroom.

“Reagan!” I looked at Padmavati like,
Thanks,
and she looked at me like,
What?

“That is just so wrong,” Dinah said, cracking up.

“Let's go to your mom's room and look at the dress,” Farah commanded.

“I'm doing my makeup,” Reagan called from the bathroom.

“I think I won't go into your mother's boudoir while she's dressing, thank you,” Charlie said, and pulled a math textbook out of his knapsack.

“
What is going on?
Who does Wren have a crush on?” Dinah whined, scrambling to follow Farah.

“Dinah, please—go downstairs and do something else! We have to
get ready.
”

“‘We have to get ready,'” Dinah mimicked, rolling her eyes and following May out the door, her blunt bob swinging. Dinah wasn't invited to the party.

 

11

Anytime someone compliments our house,
my mother mentions what a wreck it was when she and Dad bought it. My first memory is being held by my father and looking around the kitchen that had eggplant-colored wallpaper peeling off the walls and very heavy drapes the previous owners had left on the French doors to the garden outside. I must have been two years old. I remember the feeling of his scratchy tweed blazer on the bottom of my thighs and putting my hand out to touch the dust drifting around in the light coming through the French doors. The scattering of particles in air is called the Tyndall effect—I learned eleven years later in Mr. Chin's eighth-grade Earth Science class, but as a child I had no idea it was dust or particles, I thought it was just what light looked like up close. The glass in one of the panes was broken and Dad must have thought I was going for the sharp edge. He pulled my hand back and said, “Don't touch it, my darling, it will surely cut you.” Sometimes both my parents think I am going to do something dangerous when I am really just trying to touch the light.

Now the glass in the windows is clear and storm-proof, and the walls are a deep butter-yellow—“like Rome in an August sunset,” my mother often sighs. There are Persian rugs running down the halls, and under those rugs the beaten-up floors are made from smooth, wide wooden planks. Photographs and paintings hang on the walls from the floor to the ceiling, all mixed up. There is a picture of Oliver in his purple West Side Little League uniform, right next to a Sylvia Mangold drawing of a tree—a present my father gave my mother when I was born. In every room (including my parents' bathroom), deep, soft upholstered chairs and sofas are arranged so you can gather and talk, read, or take a nap—and you are encouraged to do all of those things. And on every side table are lamps with kraft-paper lampshades. All the lamps are different: eighteenth-century Dutch white and blue porcelain tabac jars, Italian owls from Siena, metal milk jugs found in barn sales, blown thick smooth Simon Pearce glass. It's a real mishmash, but the shades are exactly the same. “Having uniform shades saves this room from looking hodgepodge,” I can hear my mother saying. We don't have any overhead lighting because that is for hospitals and department stores—not for homes.

The real reason why we live in such a big house and have all those beautiful things is not only because my father has an important job, it's also because long ago, back in Holland, my great-grandfather made a boatload of money as a banker. That money is why we can live where we live in New York City, and why most of my family can work in the arts.

Mom was seated at her dressing table in a pale pink silk robe, getting her hair blown out by Dinah's hair-and-makeup person, Rachel. Hanging on the door of the closet was the red dress. Compared to the mayhem of my room, my parents' spacious creamy wall-to-wall-wool-sisal-carpeted room, with the whirring white noise of the hair dryer, was peaceful and calming. Even Farah and Vati quieted down when they came in. It was a sanctuary of grownup-ness.

“Do you girls want your hair done? I'm almost through here,” said Rachel, with a soft lisp from her tongue piercing.

“
Yes
, girls—you should take advantage of
marvelous
Rachel and have her do something fantastic with those locks,” Mom called over the hair dryer, signaling to Rachel in the mirror that her hair was done and to wrap it up. I lay down across the bottom of my parents' bed to stare at the dress. I would never flop on their pillows that were plumped to perfection by Hailey, our housekeeper. I had been taught that lesson a thousand times. I'm not sure my mother has a harsher bark for someone who messes up the pillows, but like May, I am always allowed to sit or lie on the goose-feather duvet folded at the foot of the bed. The hair dryer came to a stop.

“It gets more beautiful every time I look at it!” my mother said, getting up from her little upholstered dressing-table chair and gliding over to the dress.

“I know. I can't believe it.” Flashes of Nolan in the doorway assaulted me. I felt like I had to squeeze my stomach.

“It's a rocking dress,” said Rachel.

“It's huge!” said Padmavati, as she sat in my mother's chair and considered her hair. Rachel swept Vati's long black hair up in both her hands and twisted it into a chignon. Vati smiled.

“I wish I was Indian. Look at this hair!” Rachel tumbled Vati's heavy, thick hair in her hands like every strand was solid gold. She practically put her face in it and rubbed it all around, looking like she might weep. “Hair like this is the reason I get up in the morning to do my job.”

“Put the dress on!” Farah flopped next to me, dangerously close to the plumped pillows, and pinched my butt. My mother clapped her hands like a preschooler and reached over to take the dress off the hanger. Farah leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I bet Mr. Music Man is gonna
love it
,” so I smacked her on the bottom as I sat up on my knees.

“Shouldn't I take a shower or something first? I feel so dirty and yucky.”

“No, no, you can quickly try it on to see if it fits and then take a shower. Don't you want Rachel to do something with this?” Mom came over and took a handful of my unbrushed hair and held it up to Rachel, who looked over with bobby pins clenched in her teeth and raised her eyebrows.

“No, no, I'm going to wash it and then let it dry with that stuff in it so it curls a little. It will be fine, Mama.”

“Up to you,” she sang in an I-don't-think-you-are-making-the-right-choice voice.

“It's my hair,” I sang back to her. We looked at each other in a standstill.

She tweaked my nose. “Okay, Wrenner. Take off those clothes.”

I undid my uniform skirt in the back and wiggled out of it so I was standing in my leggings. I pulled off my sweater and tank top at the same time and threw them on the bed. Then Farah pulled them apart and folded each one properly. She could work at the Gap. I was wearing a camisole top with a bra thing in it. I really don't have enough boobs to wear a real bra. Truthfully, it felt awkward standing there, like a little girl in a dressing room with her mother trying on school clothes.

And that is probably why I blurted out, “Mom, how does Oliver know that guy in his room?”

My mother, who had taken down the dress and was looking at it as if she was remembering herself wearing it, turned to me and said, “He is quite something, right? Did you meet him? He just came home with Oliver today, just walked right in as if he had been here all his life. I've never seen him before. I guess they met at a party or something? He goes to Bronx Science—which is
impressive
, sort of the Harvard of high schools. His name is … wait, it's like a girl's name.”

“Nolan!” Farah and Padmavati hooted in unison.

“Shhh! Oh my lord, what if he hears you!” I said, blushing like crazy. My mother looked at the girls and me like she was in on something. She sort of giggled and put her hand over her mouth, which she then uncovered to whisper, “He's coming to the party tonight!”

“Oh my god.” Now I felt out-of-control-dumb, standing there talking with my mother about boys in my leggings, which you should never really be in without a long shirt on unless you are in a yoga class.

“Mom, just—”

“Did you meet him, Wrenny?”

“Yes, Vati and I did. It's no big deal, we just saw him for a second.” (God, why did I even say anything?)

“Who is he?”
Mom said, like she was asking the universe.

“He's in a band!” Padmavati said, as Rachel wove a braid in the front of her head that looked very fashion forward.

“Oh my god—why are we all freaking out about a freaky band boy upstairs in greasy Oliver's room? Yuck,” Farah said, and hoisted herself up from the bed. “I'm going downstairs to get some almonds, I have low blood sugar.”

“I'm sure the crew has left already,” I said, totally catching her drift that she was going to see if Tom-the-camera-guy was still around.

Farah winked at me—“We'll see”—and flounced out of the room.

Mom looked at me like,
Huh?
She had no clue about Farah's burning desire for Tom-the-camera-guy. She turned her attention to the dress, which was getting too heavy for her to hold up off the floor. “Well, let's get this going—oh my goodness, look how great this thing is.”

Mom laid it down like it was my wedding dress and took it off the quilted hanger. Then she unzipped it on the bed. “Come and help me, Vati.” Rachel quickly tucked a bobby pin into Padmavati's braid, fastening it to her head, and released her to help my mother. Vati and Mom maneuvered the dress around to the foot of the bed where I was standing and I took the camisole off. I am trying to get relaxed about being naked in front of my mother—post-puberty—but I haven't quite gotten there yet. It's like, in growing, I did something without her and she's dying to know about it. Sometimes I can feel her checking out my development. I guess she grew me in the first place, so she's interested, but
yuck!
I left my leggings on. Like ladies in waiting, my Mom and Vati crouched down before me, protectively holding the bodice so I could step into the dress that was pooled on the floor like an enormous fallen parachute. I put my feet carefully through the top and steadied myself on Padmavati's and Mom's shoulders so I wouldn't fall. Slowly they stood up, lifting and fitting around my waist, up and over my breasts. Then Mom zipped up the back. I could feel she was being careful not to catch my skin in the zipper's teeth. The dress fit perfectly. I picked up the skirt and went over to the full-length mirror. My hair, even though the wind had made it look like I'd slept in a barn, was almost to my waist and was doing something good that made me reconsider the shower. My mother stepped into the mirror's reflection.

“Oh, Wren. I feel like I'm going to cry. Look at you.” She came up behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. “You look like a
dream
, Wren. It fits you so beautifully.” She slowly spun me around and inhaled as if she had just seen Christmas tree lights being turned on. “Let me get my phone. Dad will want to see you. He gave me that dress, you know, picked it out himself.” She left the frame of the mirror and Vati came in. “Wow, Wren. You look amazing. You look like a princess or a Southern belle or something—like Scarlett O'Hara.”

“It's so pretty, right?” My hand drifted down and felt the fine weave of the silk that I had touched so many times before, sitting on the floor of my mother's closet.

“I think tonight's going to be particularly amazing, Wren.” Vati's eyes shone as much as her smile. “And think about it”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“
he's
going to see you in this.”

 

12

Farah was still downstairs
or somewhere else in the house when Vati and I took the dress and her new hairstyle back up to my room.

“Vati.” I was holding the dress in my arms like I was carrying a wounded soldier, but I managed to reach out and grab her sweater with a few fingers before she went up the last three stairs to my door. “I'm having a weird fantasy.”

“Oh yeah? That's okay.”

“You know when you said,” I whispered, even though I could hear Reagan and Charlie doing some kind of rap from my bedroom, “
he
will see me in it?”

“Yeah, totally. He will, like, soon,” Vati said, standing up on her tiptoes and lifting her eyebrows at the same time.

“I know, but here's what I'm imagining. I am imagining myself walking up the Met steps like Lady Diana Spencer walked up the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral before she got married to Prince Charles.”

“You mean Kate Middleton and William?”

“No, noooo. His
mother.
”

“I didn't see that wedding.”

“I know—nobody did, it was like thirty years ago, but Mom made us watch it the night before Kate and William got married. She said you couldn't watch one without the other.”

“I didn't know that,” she said, like she had missed that day in class.

“Yeah, well, personally, I liked Lady Diana's dress better than Kate's,” I said. Vati's eyes widened.

“Because it had such a big skirt and she wore a
big time
tiara,” I said.

“I don't remember Kate Middleton's tiara.”

“Right—it was like a sparkly headband. She was trying to be understated, but if you are going to marry the future king of England, let it rip, right? Diana's was like six inches high.”

“Kate is so cool.” Vati sighed.

“I know, but the point is, I'm thinking, what if Oliver and Nolan leave for the party before we do?”