The Stardust Lounge
Read The Stardust Lounge Online
Authors: Deborah Digges
Acclaim for Deborah Digges's
The Stardust Lounge
“
The Stardust Lounge
is shocking, touching, funny, and beautifully written. For anyone concerned with teenage rebellion, anyone who plans a family, anyone who loves children and animals—this book is a must. I was caught up in the drama; I could not put it down.”
—Jane Goodall
“Well crafted, quite stunning at times.… So idiosyncratic and strangely moving that if it were fiction it would seem contrived beyond critical description.”
—
The Washington Post
“[One] of the best confessional memoirs this year.”
—
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A wrenching memoir about the things that mothers and children will do to, and for, one another, written with a poet's eye for resonant images.”
—
Booklist
“Deborah Digges has written a memoir so powerfully charged and exquisitely textured that I found it transcended its medium and drew me unequivocally into its world, as only the best books do.”
—Nicholas Christopher
“The rest of the world may suffer from blindness and prejudice toward the most interesting children and animals but Digges sees them clearly, likes them for what they are and refuses to abandon them to a hostile world. If everyone could be the kind of parent that she is the world would be a far better place.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Deborah Digges
The Stardust Lounge
Deborah Digges is the author of the memoir
Fugitive Spring
and three award-winning volumes of poetry. Her poetry appears regularly in
The New Yorker
and other publications. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Frank.
Also by Deborah Digges
POETRY
Vesper Sparrows
Late in the Millennium
Rough Music
Ballad of the Blood
—
The Poems of
Maria Elena Cruz Varela
(translations)
MEMOIR
Fugitive Spring
FOR FRANK
and in memory of my father
There are no laws in the air.
Stephen on the stoop, 1991
Summer, 1983
Midday, midsummer. Iowa City. Stephen and I are waiting for our clothes to dry at the Bloomington Street Laundromat. Charles is away at summer camp.
When we arrived at the laundry, unloaded our baskets, and hauled them inside we heard something familiar, the clear, resonant sound of a cello, a young man practicing while his clothes go through the washer and dryer.
The first time we discovered the cellist at the Laundromat this past fall, twelve-year-old Charles had been undone with excitement. “Mom,” he'd whispered to me, “this is a painting! I've got to do some sketches!”
As the cellist plays, the few of us here are listening
—
the attendant, an older couple passing through. In the parking lot their Air stream trailer glints in the sun. Its license plates read
Idaho.
Just outside the entrance five-year-old Stephen enacts a game in which, from time to time, he whirls and crouches,
brandishing his favorite blanket at an imaginary foe. A flock of sparrows anting in the dust nearby rises and circles and resettles each time he sweeps close to them.
I fold the boys’ bright shirts and shorts, our old, comfortable towels, mismatched socks, an ordinary activity made sacred in light of the music. The cellist plays through to the end of a piece. Then he sets his instrument aside and unloads his clothes from the dryer.
As I ready to carry our baskets to the car, the woman of the Airstream trailer comes over to me and touches my arm.
“Is that your little boy?” she asks, nodding toward Stephen, who kneels now, quiet in the strangeness of the silence the music created. He stares toward the sparrows taking wings full of dust into their feathers.
“Yes,” I answer. “His name is Stephen.”
“He's
—”
She stops. “There is something special about him, isn't there? I've been watching him. May I lay my hand on his head? “
I must look confused, because the woman offers quickly, “My husband and I are both professors of parapsychology. We study psychic phenomena. We've been traveling across country on a lecture tour. Now we're on our way home
…”
“I see,” I offer, trying to hide my skepticism.
“My name is Beth. What's yours?”
“Deborah.”
“Is it all right if I touch him?”
“If Stephen doesn't mind.”
“Stephen? “ the woman says softly as she moves toward him and kneels. “Stephen, my name is Beth.” She places her hand on his head.
“Hi, Beth,” Stephen says easily. “I'm Thteve.” He smiles, revealing his missing teeth as he looks into her face.
As I see it, the stars were once nameless, and the days and the months of the year. Then they had many names, the names we gave them and forgot and misremembered. They fell in and out of their own timing, the seasons particular to the angle of the light, the pitch of the planet
—
by the laws of gravity earth's one moon decided the tides.
Maybe with people it is different. Certain people emanate something other, some newness, time or timelessness. They enlighten or shadow others. It is in them and little gets in its way.
So it is with a woman named Beth and a child with a lisp who calls himself Thteve at the threshold of the laundromat one summer day in Iowa, a moment I'll remember, a moment so many others will fall into to lose themselves or find direction.
Beth is kneeling. She is laying her hand on my son's blond head and nodding. “Oh, yes,” she says as she smooths his hair and stands. She touches my arm. “Deborah
—
your Stephen? He'll know a higher turn in the spiral.”
Stephen in Iowa, 1983
Thirteen-year-old Stephen has run away again. He's out there somewhere with his gang, all of them dressed for the dark in black-hooded sweatshirts, oversized team jackets, ball caps, baggy pants that ride low on their hips. Inside their pockets they hold on to guns, switchblades. Recently Stephen has shaved part of his right eyebrow.
It's about 4:00 A.M., late September. I'm in my study on the east side of our brownstone apartment house in Brookline, Massachusetts, three stories above the street.
Maybe Stephen can see that my study light is on. I imagine him looking up from one of the condemned train cars’ shot-out windows in the rubble field not far from us, looking up to this coin of light like a lighthouse beacon in one of my mother's favorite hymns.
But Stephen would protest he is no flailing ship. He is Henry Martin, the youngest of three brothers in the Scottish ballad I used to read to him, Henry Martin,
who became the robber of the three, having drawn the losing lot.
But as fate would have it, Martin was good at pirating—brutal, unequivocal, the beloved captain of a ship that cruised the shoals off Britain, pillaging shipwrecks and intercepting inbound merchant vessels.
All night in Boston sirens close in, scale back. We are as far north as we have ever been, the light here opening on a series of stingy, frigid days, shutting down suddenly.
Maybe the cops have picked Stephen up, in which case I will hear something soon. More likely he has fallen asleep on the floor of someone's room. It might be hours before I hear from him. He has run enough times that I know he will call. He hates himself for having to, but he can't help it. When he hears my voice he will be profane.
It's cold in my study, cold throughout our rooms. Stunningly beautiful is our apartment, but cold, often barely fifty-five degrees. But cold as it is, the oil bills are enormous, midwinter, half my salary.
I'd build a fire but this would mean my taking the back stairs to the yard, opening a common door. We are in enough trouble. Our landlords, who live below us, call often these days to tell Stephen to turn down the rap music. And sometimes he brings his gang home, ten or more boys stomping up the front flight of stairs.
Then there are the shouting matches between Stephen and his older brother, between Stephen and his stepfather, Stan, who visits when he can, these days about every third weekend.
And there are the shouting matches between Stephen and me. They get us nowhere despite my wailing, begging,
and then my sudden turns from despair to fury that find me chasing after him down the stairs, out the double doors and over the back wall, up the eighty or so steps to the car.
At forty I am amazed at my speed, my skill. But Stephen is faster. Just recently he has outgrown me by a few inches. By the time I reach the landing lot, he and my car are gone.