The Sisters Montclair (16 page)

“I’m friends with Donna. I’m here for the birthday.” The girl looked a lot like Donna and Stella guessed she must be a sister. In the background Stella could hear the Spice Girls singing
Wannabe
. Several loud giggles and shouts of excitement told her the party was already in full swing.

The girl frowned, staring at Stella’s dress. “You go to school with Donna?”

“Yes.”

“That’s weird.”

Behind her, Stella could hear the high-pitched whine of her mother’s car as it began its lumbering progress along the quiet street. Beneath the girl’s sharply inquisitive stare, Stella was self-consciously aware of the car, the ridiculous party dress, the cheap, badly-wrapped present in her sweaty hands. It was as if she had gone her whole life with a blindfold over her eyes and now it had been suddenly and irrevocably ripped away. Standing in the bright slanting sunlight in the prosperous suburban neighborhood, Stella saw herself now through Donna’s sister’s coolly discriminating eyes. She had thought she was one person and now she realized she was someone else. She stared at her feet, deeply and hopelessly ashamed.

“Is that your mother?” Donna’s sister said, her tone one of pitying amusement.

Stella shuffled her weight from one foot to the other. She didn’t look up.

“No,” she said.

Most of the other girls at the party were in her class at school. In the level democratic playing field of public school, Stella was friendly and popular. But here, with her new awareness of herself, she felt suddenly shy and awkward. The other girls crowded around her and said, not unkindly, “I love your dress.”

“It’s so shiny.”

“Is that a slip underneath?”

They were all wearing jeans and sweaters. She was the only one in a dress.

“Thank you for coming,” Donna said politely, smiling and taking the present from Stella. They were downstairs in the large walk-out basement that overlooked the sloping yard. A bank of white cabinets and bookshelves ran along one wall, faced by two leather sofas. Family photographs lined the creamy yellow walls. It was the kind of room you might see on a television show, and looking around at the rugs and the books and the clean upholstered furniture, Stella realized she could never bring Donna home with her, she could never ask her to spend the night. The idea of exposing Donna to the drab, dreary interior of their cramped apartment when she was used to all this light and airiness was unthinkable.

They listened to music and played games under the careless supervision of Donna’s older sister, Cara. After awhile they went out into the yard and had pizza and soft drinks on a long table set up underneath the trees. Then they had cake and ice cream and Donna opened her presents. Stella waited in quiet anguish for Donna to paw through the stack of magnificently wrapped gifts to find her own meager offering – a book and a set of fizzy bath balls.

“Oh, I love
The Golden Compass
!” Donna said and hugged Stella. She made Stella sit next to her while she opened the rest of her gifts, including a watch, and a jewelry box with a tiny unicorn on its lid that twirled slowly to the haunting strains of
Wind Beneath My Wings
. Stella was fascinated by the unicorn and she turned the box over and rewound it several times as Donna continued to open her presents. On the last winding the mechanism stuck, and twisting the key hard, Stella was horrified to find that it had snapped off at the base. She looked up guiltily but Donna wasn’t paying attention, she was exclaiming over another gift. Silently, Stella turned the jewelry case over and slid it back into its box.

She felt sick to her stomach the whole rest of the party. If she thought Candy would come and get her, she would have gone to the phone and called her. As it was, she sat quietly, smiling and red-faced, while Donna opened the rest of her gifts. She had amassed a mountain of presents and with any luck, she wouldn’t notice the broken jewelry box until long after the party was over.

Cara came around with a black garbage bag and began to collect the paper plates and napkins. Stella jumped up to help her.

“Thanks,” Cara said, thrusting the bag at Stella. She turned around and walked off. Late afternoon sun slanted through the tall trees shading the lawn. A breeze ruffled the leaves, lifting Stella’s hair off her sweating face. She glanced anxiously at the house, hoping the party was almost over.

“Who broke this?”

Everyone stopped talking and stared at Donna who sat holding the jewelry box in one hand and the broken key in the other.

The girls looked at one another across the long table.

“Stella Nightingale broke it,” Abby Reynolds said.

“No, she didn’t,” Donna said.

“Yes, she did. I saw her.”

Donna looked at Stella. “Did you break this?” she said.

Stella shook her head. “No,” she said.

Donna got up and left the table, followed by Abby and a clump of girls. They walked across the lawn and into the house. The few who were left looked at each other and giggled nervously. Faintly, in the distance, Hanson was singing Thinking of You and in the deep blue autumn sky, a faraway jet left a fleecy trail. Stella went around the table throwing away cans of soda and paper plates covered in half-eaten mounds of cake and melted ice cream. Some of the girls got up to help her. When they had finished, one of the girls took the garbage bag up to the garage. Stella hesitated, and then walked across the yard and into the house where Donna stood in the corner with a group of furiously whispering girls.

“I’m sorry,” Stella said. “I have to go home early. I’m not feeling too good.”

“Thanks for coming,” Donna said. She leaned over and brushed Stella’s cheek with cool, dry lips.

When she got to the basement stairs, Stella glanced behind her. Donna stood with her eyes down, listening as Abby hissed in her ear.

Stella went into the kitchen and called her mother and told her the party had ended early. She stood for awhile at the kitchen sink, looking down at the girls on the lawn. Donna’s mother was having a drink in the soaring living room as she walked through. Stella thanked her and told her she had to go home early, and Donna’s mother, glancing at her dress, murmured unconvincingly, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“I’ll wait outside,” Stella said.

“Is your mother coming? I’d like to meet her. I’ve never met your mother.”

“She has to work,” Stella said. “My baby sitter is coming to pick me up.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Shelby smiled coldly. She sipped her drink. “Where does she work? Your mother, I mean.”

“In a dress shop.”

“Which one?”

“I’m not sure.” Stella began to back toward the foyer. “Goodbye,” she said.

Mrs. Shelby got up and followed her. Stella opened the front door and stepped out onto the tall bricked stoop. Mrs. Shelby stood in the opened doorway behind her, her drink nestled in her hands. Faintly, in the distance, Stella could hear the squealing fan belt of the Chevette as it made its way through the maze-like subdivision.

“Where did you say you lived?”

“Thank you for having me,” Stella said. “I had a very nice time.”

The squealing was louder now. Mrs. Shelby’s dark eyes left Stella’s face and peered into the distance.

“Isn’t that your mother now?”

“No,” Stella said.

Mrs. Shelby gave her a cool, dejected look. A scent of ripe apples wafted across the lawn. Ludicrously, considering the time of the day and the urban splendor of the neighborhood, Stella could hear the distant crowing of a rooster.

Her friendship with Donna Shelby never recovered. Someone told the principal that Stella was illegally attending school in a district she didn’t live in and Candy had no choice but to pull her out and switch schools. Three years later, Stella ran into Donna at a middle school football game. The small town where Stella currently lived was playing against Donna’s school team. Donna was standing with a group of girls when Stella walked by and saw her.

“Donna!” she said, waving. “Hey.”

Donna’s eyes settled on her for a moment and then shifted indifferently to a point just beyond Stella’s shoulder. Stella dropped her hand and walked on.

Behind Donna, one of the girls said loudly, “Oh my God. Who was that?”

“No one,” Donna said.

Alice was in a jolly mood when she got back from lunch with her friends. She chattered on while Stella walked behind her, silent and brooding. Alice seemed to sense that she had offended Stella and she went out of her way to be charming and penitent. Or maybe it was just Stella’s imagination. Maybe she wanted Alice to feel guilty for the way she had been treated in front of Alice’s friends.

That night at supper, Alice turned to her and said, “Did you grow up here?”

“I’m from Alabama, Alice. You know that.”

“Do I?” The old woman lifted a forkful of egg salad and chewed slowly, staring at the wall. She had awakened from her nap in a dazed, pensive mood and had spent the entire afternoon in her room watching the golf channel.

Stella picked up her peanut butter sandwich and then set it down again. “You told me when you hired me that you felt sorry for me, being from Alabama.”

“That sounds like me.” Alice continued to stare at the wall, chewing staunchly. She seemed lost in her own thoughts, lifting her fork from her plate to her mouth with almost mechanical precision. After awhile she glanced at Stella and said, “Do your parents live here?”

“My parents are dead. I’m an orphan.” Stella wasn’t sure why she had said this; it had just come tumbling out.

Alice put her fork down and turned her head slowly. She rested her faded blue eyes on Stella. “An orphan,” she said. “How terrible.”

She had said it because she wanted to give Alice a jolt. She was glad to see it had worked. “You get used to it,” she said flatly.

“Did you tell me before that your parents were dead?”

“No.”

“I think I would have remembered that.” There was a long period of silence, during which they both stared at the wall, eating steadily. “Family life is complicated,” Alice said finally. She had finished and she stacked her silverware on her plate. “It’s wonderful to be loved but it can be confining, at times, too. You’re never your own person; you constantly have to live up to someone else’s expectations of who you should be.”

Stella got up and took the dishes to the sink.

Alice said, “There’s always an element of disappointment when someone you love let’s you down. The deeper your love, the deeper your disappointment. I should know. I raised three sons. And I was the daughter of an overbearing mother.”

“Do you want some ice cream?”

“No. Thank you.”

Stella turned on the hot water and filled the sink.

“Holidays can be trying,” Alice said. “All those past hurts and grievances bubbling to the surface. I used to dread Thanksgiving, all of us gathered around a long table, trying not to bring up anything painful. Trying not to air the family dirty linen.” She continued to stare at the wall and then, without warning, she chuckled, her thin shoulders shaking. The overhead lights glinted off her scalp, pink and fragile as a baby’s. “Adeline used to say her favorite Christmas lights were the tail lights of her children driving away.” She pushed her chair back.

Stella went over and began to untie Alice’s bib.

Alice said, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“Two little brothers.”

“But who raised you?”

“Foster parents,” Stella said, feeling a grim satisfaction in saying it, not just in the lie itself but in the idea of the lie. She had often practiced using it; it carried a disturbing, undeniable weight that always brought people up short. How shocking to imagine what went on behind closed foster home doors. Shocking and terrible. But not nearly as terrible as what went on behind closed family home doors.

“How awful for you.” Alice heaved herself up, grasping the handles of her walker. She blinked several times, the corners of her mouth drooping. She looked frail and helpless, and seeing this Stella was seized by an inexplicable desire to wound her.

“Life is hard for a lot of people,” she said stoutly.

It was time someone shook the old woman out of her complacency, reminded her how the less-fortunate lived. There was something in Alice’s self-satisfied demeanor, her naive belief in good fortune and fairness that made Stella want to tell her dreadful, shocking things. How do you live to be ninety-four and manage to avoid the unpleasantness of life?
By being fucking lucky
, she thought. By being born to the right mother. Life was nothing more than a crap shoot.

The phone rang suddenly, startling them both. Alice sat back down and leaned across the desk to answer it.

“Hello?” she said. “Hello?”

Stella turned around and went over to the sink to wash the dishes.

“Who is this?” Alice said irritably. “My grandson, Tim? Oh hi, Tim, how are you?” Her tone changed, became warm and friendly. “Well, you’re a sweet boy to call. Yes, I’m sitting here with what’s her name.”

Stella squirted dish soap into the sink and foamed it with the sprayer attachment.

“Yes, I’ve got a new caretaker. That’s right.” She laughed. “Another one.”

While Alice talked to her grandson, Stella washed and dried the dishes. Then she put them away and wiped down the counters and the stove.

Alice said, “You say hello to what’s her name. Your wife. She’s a real sweet girl and you need to be good to her.” There was a moment’s quiet and then Alice said,

“Okay, honey. ‘Bye.” She hung up the phone.

Stella walked across the room and stood in front of the walker, facing Alice. She folded the dishtowel carefully in her hands. “Why’d you call me what’s-her-name?” she said.

Alice looked up at her in some confusion. “Did I?” she said.

“Yes. You did.”

“Well, I don’t know why.”

“Don’t you know my name?”

“Martha.”

“No, Alice, not Martha. My name’s Stella.”

“Oh, Stella, I’m so sorry!” She put her hand to her mouth and her face changed, becoming pink and remorseful. She looked so distressed that Stella was instantly ashamed of bullying her, of trying to make Alice feel in some way responsible for her own unhappiness and insecurity.