Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon by Joyce Carol Oates
Deedee laughed and said, “Oh, Mom. You say exactly the same thing every year.”
Lily protested, “I do? I don’t! Wes?”
Wes was whistling, pretending not to hear the question.
“Well,” Lily declared, “if I say it, I mean it.”
Deedee called back over her shoulder, halfway up the stairs, “And you say exactly that every year, too, Mom.”
The long day was nearly over: midnight.
Like making her way across the rock dam in the creek, stepping upon the shaky rocks one by one by one. Hoping she wouldn’t fall into the chill swift-flowing water.
No telephone call had come. No message on the answering service when they returned from the restaurant. Lily? Please call me, I’m in need of hearing your voice. Miss you.
And when Lily had called that time, several years ago on their birthday, dialing the number Sharon had left for her, the phone had rung and rung. Area code San Diego, California.
Eventually, a few days later, a man had answered. When Lily asked to speak with Sharon, the man uttered an obscenity and slammed down the phone.
Lily was lying in bed, pleasantly tired. Arms and legs outstretched as if she were falling upward through the night sky. Drifting, floating. Wide undulating planes of sleep appeared to her like a puddled meadow. Wes hadn’t come to bed again, apologized and kissed her and disappeared downstairs. And Lily lay in the big bed in the shadowy bedroom of the house she loved; the first house of her adult life; recalling with the vividness of a dream, how, after her father had died and the old farmhouse in Shaheen had been cleaned out (by Lily, mainly) from attic to cellar and the property sold, one rainy March day, ten-year-old Deedee snug in the crook of her arm, she’d settled into the sofa in the recreation room to look through the battered old photograph album Emmy Donner had kept.
Deedee was curious, of an age to be avidly interested in her mother’s girlhood. And, of course, she’d wanted to know about her mother’s twin sister who was “Aunt Sharon”—the glamorous and mysterious stranger. Aunt Sharon who’d promised to visit at Christmas, or for her and Lily’s birthday in February, or for a week during the summer; yet somehow never came to Yewville. At the last minute postponing her visit.
But why? Deedee wanted to know.
Professional commitments!
That was what Sharon told Lily, and that was what Lily had to tell her family.
How fascinated Deedee was by the early baby pictures. Dimpled baby girls, Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley. Newly born, in their proud young mother’s arms, like kittens whose eyes haven’t yet opened. Emmy Donner liked to tell of how Rose of Sharon had been born first, an hour before her sister; at six pounds, thirteen ounces she’d outweighed the other baby girl by eleven ounces. Rose of Sharon had kicked harder from the start and cried louder and fretted more and nursed more hungrily at their mother’s breast—More, more, more! For that was Rose of Sharon’s way and it seemed natural that everyone should wish to please her.
There were the twin sisters in their look-alike polka-dot playsuits and in their Sunday dresses handsewn by their mother. Ashy-blond Rose of Sharon smiling happily at the camera as if understanding already at the age of three how photogenic she was; how beautiful in the glassy eye of the camera. And there was Lily of the Valley whose hair was several shades darker, shading into brown; a sweet startled-looking child whose smile was shy and partly hidden by her hand.
Thirty years ago. And more. Deedee was staring, blinking in wonder. She said, “Oh Mommy, I wish I had a sister, like you did!” Lily thought sadly, I wish you did, too.
Somehow it hadn’t happened. Clearly, Wes hadn’t much wanted it to happen. A part of his soul numbed by whatever he’d seen, endured or done in Vietnam forever hidden from Lily as the dark side of the moon is forever hidden, inaccessible.
As Lily turned the pages of the snapshot album with Deedee, she felt a bittersweet ache of memory; and a stir of apprehension. It had been years since she’d seen most of these snapshots. How many times as a girl she’d paged through it, how carefully she’d maintained it as a teenager, and, after Sharon left home to become “Sherrill”—the high-fashion model—Lily had faithfully affixed snapshots and photos into place, in chronological order. She, Lily, was the keeper of the Donner family album. The one who will remember.
A snapshot of the white-painted woodframe country church, the First Church of Christ of Shaheen, and Reverend Ephraim Donner and his wife Emmy on the concrete front steps their arms around each other’s waist squinting in the sun. A snapshot, not a very focused one, of the church interior; twelve-year-old Lily self-consciously seated at the aged foot-pedal organ in a stiff-starched pink Sunday dress, black patent-leather shoes and white anklet socks, and her tall lanky father beside the organ holding a hymnal aloft. Poor sweet Daddy who’d been minister of that backcountry church for thirty-one years. Smiling into the camera as if into the eye of God. Always know you are loved, children. Always in His heart. Here, a picture of twelve-year-old Sharon in a pink dress identical to her sister’s yet somehow prettier, and her black patent-leather shoes shinier, and her white anklet socks whiter. Rose of Sharon with wavy pale-blond hair to her shoulders, widened blue eyes clear as glass and a sweet rosebud mouth pursed in the very act of singing. Like an angel she stood at the front of the church, the youngest member of the choir. Joyously they sang Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so. While at the organ, pumping away at the wheezing foot-pedals, Lily lost her place hearing her sister’s uplifted soprano voice penetrating the thicker, earthbound voices of the others. The congregation loved her, the elderly women moved to tears and the men staring open-mouthed. The other members of the choir deferred to the minister’s daughter Rose of Sharon as an angel possessed of a God-given talent, and did not envy her.
As Lily deferred to her sister, too. Not out of envy but out of admiration.
Though knowing a Rose of Sharon very different from the shining blond angel-child the congregation beheld.
You’re my slave you have to do what I say. And never never tell.
It was a miracle, a mystery—where the Donner twins’ musical talent came from. Lily could pick out tunes at the organ without having had a lesson; after a few lessons from a neighbor, she could play the instrument—adequately enough to accompany the choir. (Not that she had any real talent, of course. Not for playing a keyboard instrument!) And Sharon had a naturally sweet, thrilling soprano voice. It was thin, breathless, inclined to waver and lacked resonance—but no one in the Shaheen area would notice.
Ten-year-old Deedee was intrigued by the numerous snapshots and newspaper clippings heralding Sharon’s success, at the age of thirteen, in the STARR BRIGHT PRESENTS AREA YOUTH TALENT SEARCH 1972. Here, stuffed into the album, too many for all of them to be neatly pasted in, were dozens of pictures from that time: Sharon in a blue taffeta dress and high heels, thin and elegantly graceful as a long-legged bird, poised on a brightly lighted stage singing beside a piano at which a girl, her accompanist Lily, sat unobtrusively; Sharon being presented with a first-prize silver plaque and a gift certificate by the bronze-blond amply proportioned Miss Starr Bright, a middle-aged “media personality” of glamorous pretensions; Sharon wiping tears from her eyes, smiling at flashing cameras. What excitement! To have won first prize in the annual Starr Bright talent search! Miss Starr Bright had been hostess of a Buffalo television program for children popular in western New York in the 1960’s and early 1970’s and each year, with much publicity, she oversaw a “talent search.” The competition was limited to children between the ages of eight and fourteen; Sharon, at thirteen, had entered just in time.
She’d won the silver plaque, and a gift certificate for $200 from one of the prestige Buffalo department stores, and of course she’d won local acclaim, publicity. Deedee didn’t inquire what the cash prize was, any American child in the media era understands that winning is in itself the prize. And there was pretty Sharon Donner, daughter of Reverend and M
Lily recalled how she’d been terrified, at the piano. She’d practiced the accompaniment to “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” a hundred times yet at the crucial moment she came close to panicking, depressing keys timidly, missing notes, striking a flat instead of a sharp, but hurtling on, scarcely daring to breathe, as her amazing sister faced the audience beyond the blinding stage lights—more than one thousand people!—and sang, sang as if her heart were in the simple, sentimental words; as if, offering herself so, no panel of judges and the heavily made-up ex-“chanteuse” Miss Starr Bright could deny her victory. I prayed to win, and I made myself win. We both won, Lily!
Of course, that wasn’t true. Deedee would hardly have thought so, staring at the numerous pictures of Sharon, reading through a batch of yellowing news clippings.
Deedee was equally fascinated by the snapshots that followed: lovely blond Sharon as a high school cheerleader, her hair in a sleek pageboy, a slim vibrant girl in a navy blue jumper and long-sleeved white blouse, the white terrycloth letters Y H S on her chest. By this time, the sisters were bussed into Yewville with other country children to attend school, a distance of eleven miles; seeming even longer on unpaved back-country roads; yet it was a place Sharon seemed precociously to know, and to thrive in, while Lily held back self-consciously, shy and overwhelmed at first. She was hurt when their new classmates inquired were they really twins? twins? but understanding the skepticism. They never wore matching clothes any longer, nor would Sharon allow Lily to wear her hair in a style resembling her own. If Sharon wanted shoulder-length hair, Lily had to keep her hair cut short; if Sharon decided she wanted her hair trimmed, Lily would have to let hers grow. And don’t hang around me for God’s sake like some sad little puppy dog. And if you can’t find anyone decent to eat lunch with sit alone and keep your dignity! For Sharon hadn’t time for Lily, at school. She’d quickly become one of the popular girls at Yewville High. Elected to the varsity cheerleaders when she was only a sophomore. Dating the school’s most popular boys—including Mack Dwyer the senior football-basketball star whose well-to-do father owned Dwyer’s Realty. Of course the Donners would not have approved of “dating” but Sharon—and Lily—conspired to keep them blissfully ignorant: Sharon simply stayed overnight at the Yewville homes of her girlfriends who were also popular, and also “dated.” Somehow Sharon managed to win her parents’ grudging permission to attend school dances, assured that these dances were rigorously chaperoned; there were several photos of such festive occasions, Sharon in gauzy prom dresses with spaghetti straps, Sharon posed smiling beside six-foot Mack Dwyer in a white dinner jacket, his arm around her bare shoulders. Their eyes blazing up in the camera’s flash. Deedee asked, “Was he Aunt Sharon’s boyfriend?” and Lily said, hesitantly, for she recalled that Sharon’s relationship with Mack had gone mysteriously bad, and abruptly, “Not the only one, but the main one.” Strange for Lily to encounter Mack Dwyer, now known as Michael Dwyer, in Yewville, and to realize that he, the former high school star, was now a man in his forties: still a “popular” personality, if shallow; his athlete’s muscle lapsed into flesh, his still-handsome face stippled with tiny broken capillaries, the sign of a problem drinker; or one who’d been, as Lily had heard, a problem drinker until recently. “He’s real good-looking, I guess,” Deedee said, crinkling her nose, “but I don’t like him.”
Most of the remaining pages of the album were given over to Sharon’s “professional” career as a model—interspersed, of course, with family snapshots of Lily and the elder Donners and other relatives and members of the First Church of Christ, at which Deedee scarcely glanced. Lily didn’t blame the child: how ordinary, how uninteresting everyone else appeared, set beside glamorous “Sherrill.” Sharon’s modeling career began shortly after she won the Starr Bright competition: she was hired to appear in newspaper advertisements for the larger downtown Buffalo department stores, modeling “junior” clothes. Lily recalled the excitement of seeing her sister Sharon in these full-page ads in the Buffalo Evening News—the excitement of the telephone ringing, always ringing for Sharon. When she was seventeen, Sharon signed on with a Manhattan modeling agency; became “Sherrill”—sometimes with a last name, more often not; and, overcoming the Donners’ objections, she quit high school, became a full-time model and moved to Manhattan. For the first year, things seemed to be going wonderfully well; Sharon claimed to be earning as much as $1000 a day, a figure almost unbelievable back in Shaheen. Then, suddenly, when Sharon was nineteen and on a shoot for Vogue in Mexico, she disappeared for four months; “drifted off” with a wealthy American man she’d met there; the agency hinted that drugs were involved; and “Sherrill” never returned to professional modeling again.
“Gee, Mom. Aunt Sharon is really pretty.”
Deedee’s words were hushed, in awe. As she contemplated the glossy glamor stills, now almost thirty years old. And the faded pages from Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Mademoiselle. Sometimes Sharon was hardly recognizable, elaborately made up, with dyed hair, or wearing a wig; a lovely slender girl’s body encased in stunning, expensive, sometimes ludicrous clothes. Staring at this fairy creature, Deedee could have no idea, of course, of the heartbreak Sharon had caused in the Donner household; and of the havoc, eventually, in her confused life. Nor was Lily likely to tell Deedee.
The last photo of Sharon—“Sherrill”—had been taken sometime in 1978. A dreamy-eyed blonde with ivory skin, full sensuous mouth and size-four figure in crepey-black sexy clothes. Look at me! Love me!
“Is that all?” Deedee asked, disappointed.
“I’m afraid it is, honey.”
There were no photos of “Sherrill” following the collapse of her modeling career. Her subsequent career as a singer-dancer, about which Lily knew very little, was not represented at all.
It had taken most of the morning to sort through the stuffed photo album and by the time Lily and Deedee had finished, Lily was feeling ill. Why have you done such a thing, shown these pictures to Deedee? Risking so much, you must be mad.
Long afterward, Lily was appalled at her own behavior. She couldn’t comprehend it, for she might have simply hidden the album away as her mother had done, at the back of a closet, and never looked at it again.
When at last Wes came quietly to bed, after 2 A.M., Lily woke confused and asked him who’d telephoned, and Wes said no one, no one had telephoned, and Lily said, I thought I heard the phone ring, and Wes said no, sweetheart, you’ve been dreaming, and his weight in the bed beside her, his arm slung over her and his warm mouth in her hair were a part of the dream, the most precious part.
3
The Arrival
Here is how it happened, six weeks later on a brightly sunny cold afternoon in March.
Deedee was leaving the high school, walking with two girlfriends, when she happened to see, idling in the crescent-shaped asphalt drive in front of the building, a taxi: an unusual sight in Yewville, where there was a single taxi company, and not much demand for its services. And Deedee noticed, in the rear window of the taxi, just as the door was being pushed open, a face that was familiar to her—as familiar somehow as her own, and her mother’s; yet a stranger’s face, a face of strange, ravaged beauty, partly obscured by oversized sunglasses with very dark lenses. The woman removed the sunglasses as if to see Deedee more clearly. Her eyes were artfully made up, beautiful though ringed with shadows, fatigue. The woman’s hair was pale, platinum blond, drawn back severely from her face into a chignon; her skin was ivory-pale, with a faint sallow sickly cast, as if she were only just recovering from an illness. Deedee might have estimated the woman was in her late twenties or early thirties, for any age beyond twenty is mysterious and “old” to a fifteen-year-old. Yet the woman was striking, stylish: her mouth was bei
“Geez,” one of Deedee’s friends whispered, “—who is she?”
“Not anybody’s mother, from around here.”
The woman had stepped out of the cab and was approaching Deedee and the other girls, but was looking only at Deedee; staring at Deedee with a strange, unnerving intensity. At last she said, “Deirdre—?” Her voice was hoarse, like a voice unused for a long time.
“Y-yes?”
“You know me, Deirdre—don’t you?”
Deedee stared. Her face had begun to burn as if with fever.
Shyly she said, “Is it—Aunt Sharon?”
The woman in black gave a little cry, a half-sob, and came quickly to embrace Deedee, who stood unresisting, astonished, too taken by surprise to return the embrace. Dazed, she smelled the woman’s strong perfume, sweet like overripe peaches, and a harsher chemical scent she could not know was the odor of bleached hair.
The woman stepped back from Deedee, smiling in triumph. “Yes! ‘Aunt Sharon.’” Her eyes were delicately netted in blood. There were fine, near-invisible white lines in her forehead. Now Deedee could see that the woman was older than she’d seemed—obviously, Lily’s age. And how like Lily she did look, in fact, except her features were more dramatic, exaggerated; as if Lily’s pleasant plain-pretty face had been sharpened, given more definition, “beautified.”