Stella Descending Read Free Page A

up. You’ll have to go and look at that one, she’d say, so I would, and afterward I would tell her all about the three rooms and the balcony, and about the light.
    Bee is my little sister. She’s a quiet kid. Quiet, not stupid. She listens and she takes it all in. I tell her Mamma fell off a roof. Listen, Bee, I say. Mamma fell off a roof, Mamma’s falling still. She falls and falls and never hits the ground. That’s what we say. We say that Mamma is falling little by little, day by day, kind of in bits: first a finger, then an eye, and then a knee, and then a foot, then a toe, and then another toe. It takes longer that way. Not all of Mamma at once,
crash-bang-wallop
onto the ground. Mamma with her long fair hair, all mussed up. Mamma is beautiful. I mean was. I mean is, was; I don’t really know. She has one blue eye and one violet eye, burgundy toenails, yellow summer dress, and around her neck a silver locket that Granny left her. I was her daughter, the older one, and I am the one who painted her toenails burgundy. That was a long time ago. Mamma sat at one end of the white double bed, with two white pillows at her back, the window was open onto the garden, and the sun was shining. I sat at the other end, polishing her toes. That was when Mamma said, “I have the most beautiful feet in Scandinavia.” Just so you know. My mother, the dying, the dead, has the most beautiful feet in Scandinavia.
    A while ago, Mamma said to Martin, “If the whole thing weren’t so goddamn depressing, I ’d be laughing at you now.” And then she laughed.
    Sometime I’ll have to tell you about Mamma’s laugh. That, too, would come a little at a time. First a tiny chuckle, like one red marble rolling across the floor, then a slightly bigger marble, and then a whole bagful of marbles,
crash-bang-wallop,
all the marbles rolling across the floor at once.
    Outside this door everything’s in an uproar. In here it’s quiet. This is Bee’s room. I take off my shoes. We’re already dressed for the funeral, red summer dresses and white shoes. I wanted a black dress, but that idiot Martin said no. I lie down on the bed next to Bee, sniff her hair, her skin; “It’s okay,” I say.
    Bee doesn’t cry. She is very quiet. Plays with my hair a bit. I wish she would cry or something.
    I’m going to lie here for a while, next to Bee. “Shut your eyes,” I say. “She’s close by.”
    “Do you think so?” she whispers.
    “Put out your hand to her,” I say, “and she’ll give it a squeeze.”
    There are lots of things I don’t tell Bee. For example, (1) I have three boyfriends who are crazy about me; (2) Everything the minister says today will be a bunch of lies; and (3) In the depths of his dark heart, Martin, her father, our mother’s husband, furniture salesman and ostrich king, is actually a wicked sorcerer.
    So this is my story. There’s no happy ending. My mother is dead. I am fifteen. My name is Amanda. It means,
She who is worthy of
love.

Axel
    There are certain places where I feel at home. Perhaps “feel at home” is not the right way to put it; better to say there are certain places where I feel at home with myself. By which I mean, external landscapes that accord with my own inner landscape. I come to a place, and it feels as if I have been there a hundred times before. Everything fits: the proportions, the colors, the distances, the clear sky above, the light. I come to a place where I find I am breathing, that I can breathe, that I am in harmony with my surroundings. I can’t explain it any other way. It’s not something I have experienced often in my life. I am not usually in harmony with my surroundings. In fact, I detest my surroundings, and my surroundings detest me.
    Today I have to attend Stella’s funeral. After the funeral I will pick up my old blue Volkswagen Beetle, my third, from the repair shop. That Beetle is almost as rickety as I am, and like me it is constantly succumbing to a host of peculiar