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Blue Stars
By Emily Gray Tedrowe St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 Emily Gray Tedrowe
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5458-1
CHAPTER 1
MADISON, WISCONSIN JANUARY 2005
Ellen Silverman adjusted the cookbook stand so she could see the page in between bursts of chopping vegetables. Beneath the spattered plastic shield was a new collection of essays about Edith Wharton she was to review. (It had been years since she'd needed to refer to a cookbook.) Each time she scooped a handful of peelings and carried them to the garbage can Maisie, their twelve-year-old golden retriever, lifted her head to assess her chances, dropping it back to her paws when Ellen returned to the counter. Black bean chili sputtered on the stove, a chocolate torte from the bakery was in the fridge, and after the salad was finished all she had to do was set the dining room table. Her daughter Jane's nineteenth birthday wasn't until the end of next week, but since her son Wes would drive back to school tomorrow, they were celebrating tonight. It was good luck that Michael was also free. His motley jobs—snowplow driver, parking lot security, landscape worker—made for an unpredictable schedule.
The holidays were over, which was a relief. She would have time to read, to work. But this winter was a hard one, with two bad blizzards already. Even now there was a foot of new snow on the ground and more to come tonight. And the war in Iraq, brutal and pointless ...
"Wharton's famous tableaux vivants scene, in which Lily's controlled stage fright rehearses the more intense fears to come, a cycle of terror revolving from loss of social status through loss of life—"
"Stage fright," murmured Ellen, wiping the paring knife on her apron. "Stage fright? She's happy as a clam, with everyone staring at her!" Maisie opened her eyes. Ellen leaned closer to the book, scanning the page. Hard to believe that a scholar (who was it, oh yes, the one from Iowa) could so mischaracterize one of The House of Mirth 's central scenes, even in a throwaway line unrelated to the essay's larger point. Ellen lifted the lid on the chili. She opened and closed the refrigerator door. Then she laid a dish towel over the salad bowl and went up the stairs to her study.
For the first time in longer than Ellen cared to remember, after four books, countless articles, and numerous presentations focused on Edith Jones Wharton, there was no project of her own under way or on the horizon. She'd come to a stopping place. She needed to look around. Hence, this minor book review, a bit of busywork taken on while Ellen adjusted to the discomfort of her freedom.
Maybe I should find something else, she thought, standing in the middle of her room, someone other than Edith, to write about. Unimaginable. She might as well become another person.
Ellen took down her reading copy, the compact off-white Penguin one (same as she'd owned as a girl) and found the right page even before she was seated in her armchair. Still in her apron, she read just enough to reassure herself that Lily was anything but nervous when she took her place in the gaudy party scene. Still, it was a potentially interesting notion—the idea that social fear and life-or-death fear were entwined, and often confused, within the novel's various performances. Ellen made a note on a pad on the side table before flipping back a few pages, to enjoy Lily's whirlwind preparations for the extravagant tableaux.
Some time later, a rhythmic scraping drew her attention out of the book. Outside, a familiar figure was shoveling off the side stairs. Ellen watched her ward—the young man who used to be her ward—fling snow left and right over the metal railing, working his way down the buried stairs she hadn't used in weeks. "Idiot," she whispered, heart full. He knew she used the front door when it snowed this much, but he was shoveling for Maisie, who reliably trotted to this entrance morning and night, baffled each time that Ellen tugged her away to the front. Ellen rose to go but stayed to watch as a slighter figure crept up on Michael from behind. Her daughter Jane, long tangled hair spilling out from under a felt hat, scooped snow off the bushes and packed it hard. Just as she pulled back to throw, Michael turned to whip a shovelful right at her face. He'd faked not hearing her approach. Janey's scream reached the rafters. She went to tackle Mike but he blocked her. Ellen watched for one more moment while he held her still, wiping snow from her face. Their laughter grew louder when she went downstairs and into the kitchen.
Now they'd let Maisie out, and she charged up and down the half-cleared stairs, deliriously. Jane grabbed the dog to give her a kiss and Michael wrestled her for a chance to pet Maisie. Ellen rushed over to the open door.
"You forgot to shut the door!" she shouted. Cold air along the kitchen floor. She blew kisses through the glass and mimed come in, it's freezing! They waved back and then ignored her. Jane stuck a handful of snow down Michael's collar; he lightly toppled her into a giant drift pile and then picked up the shovel.
Ellen pulled the door open a crack. "Don't worry about that, just come in and get warm!"
"I was warm until your bratty daughter showed up."
Jane pushed past him and flicked her snow-covered mittens his way. "Whiner."
"Baby."
"Suck-up."
"Jane, your boots!" Ellen dragged her in to a towel on the floor and backed away from the spray of cold snow.
Michael stuck his lip out and pretended to shiver. Jane pounded the glass door and shouted, "Break's over—get back to work! Earn your keep!"
"Jane!"
"What?" Laughing, her daughter toed off her snow boots and shrugged out of her soaking coat with Ellen's help.
"Don't say that to him."
"Mom, relax."
"Why would you say that?" Michael's broad back, the muted scrape of his shovel.
"Mom! He knows I'm kidding. God, if there were any iota of truth to it, do you think I'd say it, even joking?" Jane twisted her hair into a rough knot and strode away, through the kitchen. Ellen held her dripping coat. Once again she wondered about the fault lines underneath the four of them. Michael was part of their family now, and had been for nearly five years—but even so ... Did he feel, somehow, that he had to shovel the walk? Did a joke like Jane's make him feel more welcome, or less? Did her own reaction make things worse, or worse in which ways? Text and subtext. Ellen hung up the coat and eyed Jane's damp sock prints as she went over to stir the chili. As usual, birthday or not, she and her daughter were off on the wrong foot.
* * *
It was hard to say exactly when Michael Cacciarelli became one of them. Was it the day he and Ellen had the notary sign the forms for Wisconsin petition for guardianship? Was it before that, when he was crashing on the basement couch? The day she gave him a set of keys? When he began to leave grocery money, a wordless ten or twenty, magneted to the fridge? The night he allowed Ellen to take him to the ER for the cut above his eye, the one his aunt's boyfriend gave him, the one that made him tell her everything?
Ellen's son Wesley met Mike during the summer before his senior year in high school; he was seventeen, Mike sixteen. A friend of Ellen's had gotten Wes a job with the city. It was a kind of youth program not really designed for bookish middle-class kids from the university neighborhood, but Ellen decided for reasons she couldn't really remember now (fear she wasn't exposing her son to more manly pursuits or the use of power tools at least) to sign him up. Wes gamely braved it all: the 5:00 a.m. honk of his crew outside; packing both a breakfast and lunch; and weathering what Ellen is sure must have been a fair amount of hassle from the rougher guys much more used to the work than slender, straight A's Wesley. They laughed about it now, with Wes in his first year of U.Chicago's graduate program for philosophy. But what had she been thinking?
"He's a good guy, Mom." That's all Wes could tell her, once he started hanging out with this new Mike she began to hear so much about that summer: Mike says, Mike once went to, Mike and I are going to ...
But Ellen didn't like it, Wes bolting dinner and hurrying to the beat-up two-seater idling at the curb. Where did they go? Just drive around, get pizza. Where does he live? Like on Hammersley or something, over in the Southwest side. And his parents? I don't know, Mom.
"So you're worried about ..." Her best friend Serena prompted. "Drinking, drugs?"
"No. I mean, maybe—but that's more a Janey worry. It's just ... well, he's never had a friend from a different school before!" Most of his Whitman friends were doing summer internships at the Capitol. "What was I thinking?"
"That you'd like him to make friends from different schools?" Serena had smiled gently, too kind to point out what they both understood: by "different school" Ellen meant "shitty neighborhood." So yes, a great part of her confusion about this Mike Cacciarelli came from the fact that he lived in the Southwest, a gritty part of town featured regularly in the Journal's articles on crime and racial tension. Ellen wasn't sure what to do, if anything. Not for the first time, she wished she wasn't alone in figuring it all out.
Her husband, Don, had died when the children were young. Why hadn't she remarried? It was a question asked, in varying forms and tones, by friends and family occasionally over the years, or by one man or another who clearly thought he had earned the right. Even the kids, once they were old enough, would ask. Ellen's answer—bright for friends and family, loving to her kids, stringent toward the man—was essentially the same. She had enough, in this life. Two lovely and complicated children, absorbing work, a creaky old house ...
As for love and sex? (Because that was what most people meant, after all.) Well, she had that too, not that it was anyone's business. For years she had been "dating" Paul West of the UW's Whitewater campus—a well-regarded Woolf scholar and a good friend to her children. They had meals together, they had sex, they often accompanied each other to weddings and department functions. But marriage ... no. Neither of them—as far as Ellen knew—had seriously considered it.
"Invite Mike for dinner," she finally told Wes. "He sounds great, and I want to meet him."
"Okay, sure. But Mom?" Wesley, thinking. "It doesn't have to be, like, a big fancy thing because I don't know if ..." He trailed off and Ellen read his mind: If it would make Mike feel uncomfortable, the way we are in our big house and everything. Oh, her sensitive beautiful boy, almost a man.
"No, we'll just grill burgers or something. Chips and soda."
The afternoon Mike first came over was utterly unexceptionable, although likely all of them wished they could remember the particulars more. Because soon after, it all began to change—their longtime unit of three altered its shape and became four. And Ellen, as it turned out, was changed most of all.
* * *
No one sat at the head of the dining room table. Ellen didn't like to, didn't like the feeling of separation from the kids. Occasionally she put Wes or Jane there, though mostly they ate in the kitchen. She had tried with Mike too, but he always refused, picking up his silverware and plate and moving around to the side. It never felt right to any of them. So there they were at Jane's birthday dinner: two and two, facing each other across candles and serving dishes and the ironed tablecloth. Ellen and Wes on one side; Mike and Jane on the other.
But on that night Ellen thought she might have liked to be at the head, with an outsider's perspective on this happy sight: three young adults, talking over each other and dishing up the food. After the last-minute rush to get it all out here, she would be content to simply sit for a moment and watch them. Wesley wore the gray shirt she'd given him for Christmas, and a new pair of glasses. A few nights ago he had appeared in the doorway of her study, on his way out to a movie. If you get a chance, he'd begun, overly casual. Would she mind taking a look at a file he'd just e-mailed her? Nothing major, just a draft of a paper he would give at a conference this spring, his first. If she had any comments, great, or just ... maybe she'd want to see it. I do, Ellen cried, delighted. I'll print it right now. Wes had failed to hide his proud smile, saying no big deal, no big deal and then hurrying away downstairs.
"Mom?" Jane was tilting the wine bottle her way.
"Just a little. That's enough, that's plenty." Ellen said nothing as Jane refilled her own glass with a generous amount of red wine. It was, of course, Jane's nineteenth birthday—and Ellen had never needed some arbitrary law dictating when it was appropriate for her children to drink, especially in her home. Still, it was just like Jane to go ahead like this, without checking.
The wine had brought a pretty flush to her daughter's cheeks. Her wide, open face never hid any trace of what she was feeling, and right now she was describing an internal argument in her animal rights group. Ellen studied her, curvy and passionate and messy, in a raggedy oversize sweater and half-braided hair. She willed herself not to come near any topic related to her younger child's life-in-flux. In a way, it was a relief, Jane's semester off college—for now—after the battles over her UW grades and dropped courses and eventual academic probation. Now she was living in a co-op house near campus and working as a receptionist at a veterinarian's office.
"I got her on my team," is how Mike put it, when he wanted to wind Ellen up. "Dropouts represent!"
"Dropping out?" she had retorted. "When were you in?" And instantly regretted it. Failing to get him to enroll was still painful.
But Mike had only grinned. "Boom! Ellen for the win!"
"So now they're threatening to back out, you know, like to leak the whole plan to the bloggers. I heard this one douche might even tell some guy he knows who works at Petco!"
Ellen tuned in late to Jane's story. "What plan?"
"Mom. What I just said."
"I mean, it is pretty harsh," Wes said. "You guys pretend to be on their side, but then you turn around and smear their whole business. How's that going to make them want to work with you again?"
"Fuck them," Jane said. "They buy from this puppy mill, we just know it. We do. So we infiltrate, and expose."
"Just like Buffy!" Mike said.
"I guess I should have bail money at the ready," Ellen said. "You and I are going to be on a first-name basis with the cops soon."
"Well, if you don't want me to call you, I won't," Jane flashed. "You're the one who teaches Civil Disobedience."
"Of course I want you to call me," Ellen said. "It's just that seeing those bruises ..."
"She did it to herself," Wes pointed out. This was last summer, when Jane and six others were arrested for chaining themselves to dog cages outside the Capitol. An Isthmus photo from the incident, two officers lifting a cross-legged Jane up from the grass—dog collar around her neck—was pinned to the bulletin board in her room upstairs. Passing through sometimes to open or close the shades, Ellen would stop to look at it. She knew that expression her daughter wore: determined, angry, you'll break before I do. She had known it since Jane was a toddler.
"Anyway, the chili is great, Mom. It's from one of my cookbooks, right?"
"Now why'd you have to go and remind us," Mike said, his spoon clattering down to his plate. "Food for freaks."
"Fly your freak food flag," Wes said. "Whoa. Try that one ten times fast."
"Freak flood fag. Fleak food flag. Freak frood—"
"Ignore them," Ellen said. "I don't think you miss the meat at all!" She did miss real stock, however; shiitake dashi left a sour aftertaste.
Snow continued to fall heavily; they could hear the groan of snowplows down the block. Classes began tomorrow. Ellen hoped the secretary would have her syllabi copied and ready. With no book project under way, just think how much time would be freed up to actually pay attention to her students. "Save room for cake," she said. Clink of flatware on plates.
"So, actually ..." Mike began, and they all looked up. "Okay, so the thing is—" Maisie's whine and scuffle. "I'll get her."
"It's fine. She just went a few minutes—"
But Mike had already jumped up, was off to the kitchen.
Ellen looked to Jane, who shrugged. Next to her, Wes broke his corn bread into small and smaller pieces.
"She didn't have to go after all," Mike said, with an invisible halo of cold as he sat back down. "Just checking out the snow."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blue Stars by Emily Gray Tedrowe. Copyright © 2015 Emily Gray Tedrowe. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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