The Night of the Comet (18 page)

She saw this date as a kind of a test, not only for Megan but for the whole family. She spoke earnestly at the dinner table about the importance of making a good first impression. She suggested that Todd Picou
was just the beginning of a long line of beaux that Megan might expect to entertain as she grew older, and she explained how this date might be seen as practice for better, more serious dates in the future. “Everyone has to start somewhere,” she said. In town, she found occasion to mention my sister’s first date to old friends she saw in the grocery store or at the bank, and she managed to convey in the way she spoke about Todd Picou her opinion that while the Picous were perfectly decent and respectable people—she’d gone to high school with Todd’s father, after all—they really weren’t quite on the same level as the Broussards. Her daughter, she implied, could do better than Todd. This was just for fun.

A week before the dance, our mother brought Megan up to New Orleans for shopping and tea, “just us two girls.” When they got home, she had Megan model her new dress for me and our father, coming down the stairs like you’re supposed to do to show it off. The dress was knee length with poofy shoulders and a purple sash around the waist.

“We still have to find shoes,” our mother said, worriedly fluffing the skirt. “It’s not too long, is it? Do you like it?”

Our father whistled. “Man-oh-man, who is this pretty lady?” Even I had to admit that my sister looked good in the dress; she was suddenly taller and more graceful, more grown up, than the Megan I knew.

They got the shoes, they got everything ready. There were more phone calls to friends and relatives. On the day of the dance our mother made a plate of sandwiches, their crusts cut off, in case Todd was hungry when he stopped by to pick her up. (“He’s not going to be hungry,” Megan complained. “How do you know?” our mother said.)

Megan spent that afternoon strumming her guitar in her room, singing through all her songs, so I imagined, with special feeling. I had the idea she was rehearsing for him—that her dream was to play her guitar for Todd, sitting cross-legged on the grass with him while singing
“If you’re going to San Francisco …”

She got dressed early and came down to wait on the couch, sitting carefully so as not to wrinkle her skirt. She drank glasses of club soda to settle her stomach. Our father got the camera ready, and our mother chose the music that should be playing on the hi-fi when Todd came in, something young and jazzy and smart—“Take Five” with the Dave
Brubeck Quartet, for instance. (“You really don’t have to do that,” Megan protested.) Then we all tried to go about our usual business while we waited for Megan’s date to arrive. But our only business that night was waiting for Megan’s date to arrive.

By eight thirty, Todd still hadn’t come. Megan refused to phone him; she said she didn’t have his number anyway. Our father looked up the Picous in the phone book and said he would call him, then. Our mother, flustered and angry, put her finger on the cradle switch and said they would not stoop so low as to phone the Picous to beg them to send their son to our house. They fought about it over Megan’s head until she shouted for them to “stop! Stop! Just please stop it!”

And so we waited. And waited. Our father offered to take her to the dance himself. At nine thirty our mother served dinner. Megan didn’t want any, and she went upstairs to take off her dress. Our mother went up later to talk to her, and our father, to lend his support, put on an apron and washed the dishes.

For a day or two we moved about the house as if someone had died, everyone trying to be extra nice to Megan and watching her out of the corners of our eyes to see how she would hold up. Our mother offered bland reassurances and invented excuses for the boy: he probably just got cold feet, she said, or maybe he was sick and couldn’t get to a phone, but there were plenty of fish in the sea, and besides, who cared about a rotten kid like Todd Picou anyway?

But Megan was too smart to be consoled. She knew the truth, and nothing anyone said could change it: she’d been stood up on her first date. That was it. That’s what had happened. No further explanation needed. And if everyone would just stop talking about it, she’d appreciate it.

She got over it eventually, in a fashion. She went to school, did her homework, listened to music, and talked with her friends on the phone, like she always had. After several days had passed, though, I noticed she wasn’t singing in her room at night anymore. She kept going to her guitar lessons for a few weeks, but after a while she lost interest. She put the Harmony away in the back of her closet, and that was the last we saw of it.

That Christmas, she redecorated her room. She pulled down her ruffled pink curtains and replaced the matching pink bedspread with a psychedelic tie-dyed sheet. She tacked up a black-light poster on the wall above her Panasonic stereo:
LOVE
it said in fluorescent red-orange letters against a rusty blue background, the word shot through with bullet holes, as though the poster had been sprayed with a machine gun.

And while I couldn’t have said for sure that it was related, around this same time my sister began to gain weight. She threw off the frilly dresses our mother was still buying for her and began to wear big sloppy shirts with their tails untucked. She got round, oversized granny glasses, and she let her hair grow long so that it frizzed at the bottom, and before the school year was out, she barely resembled the girl I’d grown up with. Within a couple more years, she’d become the seventeen-year-old cynic who snuck cigarettes down by the water, the girl who chewed her nails and read
Ms
. magazine and serious-minded books with forbidding titles like
The Stranger
and
The Metamorphosis
, the one who spoke scathingly about all that southern belle–Miss Scarlett O’Hara–debutante crapola. The girl whose only wish was to flee.

And because of what? Because of one boy, one broken date? Surely there was more to it than that, but that’s what it looked like to me, anyway. Dashed hopes had ruined her life.

Or maybe, I considered further, maybe Todd Picou hadn’t ruined her life at all. Maybe he’d only given her the excuse to finally shrug off the expectations of our mother and become her own person. That disastrous first date experience had only knocked her life into focus, revealing, for better or worse, the true Megan, the one who had always been there.

Sunday afternoons—I knew this because I accompanied her once—she’d take the Rambler and go for drives around town, her cigarette dangling out the window. Around and around she’d drive, in ever-widening circles beginning at the courthouse square and spiraling outward through neighborhoods and farms until, bored with herself and the driving and the awful music on the radio, she’d stop the car at the edge of a field at the farthest edge of the town and sit there staring out
at the road rolling north, as though readying herself for the day she might finally make her escape from the black hole of Terrebonne.

Behind me in her bedroom, I heard her record player start up. Electric folk music rattled out from her window, harsh and tinny sounding. She sang along in snatches, although you could hardly have called it singing. The words came out in whining, tortured phrases, like the song was being wrung from her throat:
“How does it feeeel?… on your own! … home! … stooone!”

I looked up across the water at the Martellos’ house, as grand and implacable as ever. A shadow moved behind the balcony doors of Gabriella’s room. The curtains suddenly parted to let in the afternoon light, and I felt a sharp tug in my chest as I saw a hand, a slender arm, a flash of dark hair.

Forget it, my sister might have warned me. Not worth it. Quit while you’re ahead.

Or, easier, she could’ve just turned and pointed to the poster in her room. That said it all:
LOVE
shot through with bullet holes.

IT
came to her in a dream, my mother claimed. One Friday night, without even thinking about our father’s labs or comets or anything like that, she went to bed and in her sleep she saw the whole thing as clearly as if it had already happened.

“A comet ball,” Megan said, in a tone that plainly said how idiotic she thought the idea sounded.

“Sure. Like a charity ball. Like what they do in New Orleans.”

Our father needed money for his labs, our mother explained. The school obviously wasn’t going to help. He’d have to raise the funds himself, and what better way to do it than with a party?

She went on to describe her vision to us over breakfast, painting a picture in the air with her fingers as she spoke: there’d be a band, dancing, lights in the trees … costumed waiters bearing silver trays of champagne glasses … couples strolling arm in arm along the waterfront.…

“Where do you propose that we hold such a ball?” my father asked.

“And who’s going to come?” Megan asked.

“We’ll do it at the Martellos’. They’ve got that great big gorgeous house right over there. Everybody’ll want to come,” my mother answered.

“Do the Martellos know this yet?” my father asked.

“Well, no, not yet. I just thought of it.”

“Let us know when you wake up,” Megan said, leaving the table.

But my mother stayed seated, fleshing out the idea and answering all my father’s objections. They could get the food and drinks donated and then charge a fee per couple. It shouldn’t be that difficult really, she said. People put on these kinds of charity events all the time. Why couldn’t they?

She phoned the Martellos that same afternoon to ask them about it. She spoke to Frank, he spoke to Barbara, and, surprising everyone but my mother, they agreed to host an event at their house. Frank said they were always looking for good charitable causes, and Barbara had been wanting to throw a party at their new house anyway. They’d be happy to help.

“See? I knew they would,” my mother said.

“And you’re going to organize all this?” my father said, peering at her over the newspaper.

“With their help, yes.”

He shrugged, as though to say,
I’m not really sure why you’re doing this or what’s come over you, but if you want to raise money for the school laboratories, be my guest
.

I knew my mother well enough to know she didn’t care about any school labs; she only wanted to have her ball. I supposed she might’ve been dreaming about just such a ball her entire life. It was a dream fueled by half-remembered scenes from half-read novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald; and pictures of feathered Mardi Gras kings and queens and their costumed courts that she’d seen in New Orleans newspapers; and scenes from the old Hollywood films she loved so much, where sleekly dressed movie stars spoke in vaguely British accents while descending grand sweeping stairways—all fantasies that for a woman stuck in a swampy southern town like ours must’ve seemed as remote and impossible as the stories of princes and princesses she’d heard as a child.
And yet, their impossibility never diminished the longing she felt to experience them herself. Now at last she would have her dream. She would conjure it up herself out of crêpe paper streamers, Christmastree lights, and the sheer force of her desire.

As for the Martellos, I was a little puzzled as to why they would agree to help. Maybe they really were interested in charitable causes, as Frank said. Maybe, as my mother once suggested, they were bored living all by themselves in that big house. Or maybe as newcomers to Terrebonne they were eager to make a good impression on the locals. But I couldn’t help but feel that what really moved them to act was the strange, compelling power of that blue ball of fire in the sky, the one that had cast its spell over our two families as we stood in the yard a month ago watching it with my telescope—the comet that even now I felt hovering over our town, making us all do things that we might not normally have done.

My mother got herself a notebook and began working with the Martellos to plan the party. They had their cause, their venue, their theme. For the date they settled on a Saturday between Thanksgiving and Christmas—a good time for charity events, said Barbara, who apparently knew about such things. Over drinks one evening at their house they drafted a notice for the newspaper. My mother brought it home and, still giddy from her rum and Coke, showed it to my father, who checked it with his red pen. He corrected her grammar, trimmed a few sentences, and added a paragraph about himself, so that it came out like this:

My father thought forty dollars was a lot to ask, but my mother disagreed, reminding him that if only a hundred couples came, he’d have four thousand dollars, less expenses, toward his science labs. Besides, she said, it was supposed to be a ball, not a barbecue. They didn’t want just anybody to show up; the forty-dollar ticket price would help keep away the riffraff.

My father remained skeptical. But almost as soon as the announcement appeared in the newspaper, we began receiving phone calls. Women telephoned from as far away as Schriever and Montegut and Lockport to ask if they, too, could come with their husbands. My mother was proved right.