The Stardust Lounge Read Free

something, in thrall to its dangerous joy.
    What if Stephen
is
a Henry Martin, in the end an outlaw? If he is, do I stop loving him? And how do I go about withdrawing my love? It appears that is what humans do in crisis. We pull away. Stan and I have done it. We are doing it now. We don't touch, make love, laugh.
    I contend it must be different with a child.
    Maybe Stephen believes he is Henry Martin, or he is Odysseus duping the Cyclops, sneaking out of the cave wearing animal skins, crouching among the sheep herds as he leads his crew toward the ship; Stephen, my Ishmael, wild, street-smart, strident, swaggering, who has learned to use his anger and his terror like a weapon and won excellence in the bow shot.
    Now the phone rings. “Fuck you,” he greets me. Sirens close in again, recede.
    “Will you be home soon?”
    “Maybe, maybe not,” he spits, but the fight has gone out of him. He sounds so very tired.
    “Okay. Come on. Watch your back. I'll put on some coffee.”

Fall, 1983
    We like to drive around. At the hour when fathers and mothers arrive home from work, at the hour when my own father used to pull into our driveway, the boys and I get in our car and set out on an adventure. We drive happily against traffic, the outbound lanes open to us.
    In Missouri and Iowa we drive into the country. The fields, spring through autumn, spin columns of dust in the wake of tractors. In winter, barn doors are shut against the cold. We imagine the animals feeding now. In their hair, coats, caretakers carry with them animal smells through screen doors and into kitchens.
    By November the fields are frozen, by January snow-covered, at this hour the furrows holding on to grates of light. The ponds are near circles of sky-colored light like windows shining out of the earth.
    Silos are lighthouses over still seas, the pig sheds scattered down the hillsides, houses washed out to sea.
    There are certain abandoned farms we find. Sometimes we stop and walk the grounds looking for horseshoes, bottles, sheep's wool to take home with us. If the places are deserted, we let ourselves in the house and walk around trying to pick up some sense of the ghosts whose shoes scored this green linoleum. Who once dragged a soiled hand along rose wallpaper all the way up the stairs? Whose rooms looked out on the road, and did they dream of traveling?
    As if the house were ours, we choose bedrooms, invent a life, invent our days. At upstairs windows we look out over miles of meadow and speculate on the hours of work required to keep up so many acres.
    Stephen loves the barns and wants to know what animals lived here. He gets down and smells the ground. “Horses” he says, “and lots of dogs.”
    In one house we find a growing chart for three children, their sizes penciled up along the threshold between the kitchen and what must have been a dining room.
    We lived in California long enough to chart eight years of Charles's height, the kitchen door frames in the years prior—Missouri, his birthplace, and then Texas—showing three and one respectively.
    Stephen's first height was recorded late—at the age of three—on the kitchen door frame of what is now his father's house.
    In the years 1982 to 1985 we live in Iowa. Many family farms have gone under, foreclosure signs leaning against stop signs along the highways.
    One farmhouse in particular we love to visit because onapproach you can see through east front window to back west window to sky. When we approach the house at evening—huge, empty—the sun, framed and focused, flares like a furnace fed on stars.
    We can't say exactly what engages us. We describe it each time by simile. Stephen says it looks like going to heaven. Charles says that to live there must be like living on a train—Charles, who prefers to sleep on the living room couch with his shoes on.
    I've tried to be strict with him about this. “You're thirteen. It's not like you work the night shift. You need to sleep in a bed. In