My mother tucks me in at night then climbs atop the sheets.
“What story would you like to hear tonight?” She asks me.
“Étoile!” I say, because it is always Étoile. Obligingly, my mother begins.
“Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Étoile. She lived in a small village in France, but she dreamed of the big, wide world. Every evening after her Mom said goodnight to her, Étoile would sneak out onto the roof and stare up at the stars for which she was named. She would wish and wish and wish to be teleported somewhere else, and the stars would answer her. Where does Étoile wish to go tonight?”
“Morocco!” I shout with glee.
“Étoile wishes to go to Morocco and with one big flash, she is in the Sahara Desert. Her little blue nightgown is fluttering in the wind, when two traders pass by on horseback.
‘Why hello, little girl,’ they say. ‘Where did you come from?’
‘From Paris!’ Says Étoile. And this, too, is the magic of the stars. Wherever Étoile goes, she is granted knowledge of the language. The traders laugh and laugh. How did this little girl get all the way here from Paris, they wonder. But no matter, they scoop her up onto their horses and give her a ride home. Their wives crowd around the little girl, stuff her full of Zaalouk and CousCous. They take her to the market and Étoile is amazed! She has never seen so many colors, bright textiles and stained glass lanterns. The street is full of life and possibility. Étoile eats so many wonderful foods, and she falls asleep with a full belly. In the morning, the traders teach her how to ride horses and they trot through the desert. The night sky is like nothing she has ever seen before. She spends many wonderful days like this, until one day it is time to go home. She looks up at the sky, and she closes her eyes and makes her wish. When she wakes up, it is in her own bed. Until the next adventure.”
“Mama, why does Étoile always have to go back?” I ask.
“Because her mommy would miss her. All adventures have to end one day.”
“How does Étoile know when it’s time to go home?”
“Because she listens to her heart,” my mother says, with certainty.
&
My mother was a rare book dealer. Her speciality was books by artists, with a special interest in French Avant-garde. A childhood in Paris inspired her first catalogue- The American Livre De Peintre. Her clients were museums and academics, Russian oligarchs and celebrity dermatologists. One day, Interpol arrived on our doorstep to inquire about stolen artworks that she had been approached to sell. She was in the shower, so I answered the door, standing on my tiptoes to reach the knob. My mother came down the stairs quickly, thin shoulders wrapped in a chiffon robe. She served them coffee and blueberry muffins, and they left, assured of her innocence and a little bit in love with her, lingering as she shook their hands goodbye.
&
Étoile is in Barcelona. She wanders through the cobblestone maze of the Gothic district. She runs through the Passion Facade, prays in the Sagrada Familia, stuffs herself full of Pinxtos and tapas.
&
My father likes to tell the story of when he first brought my mother home to meet my Bubbe. She lit up the musty Sheepshead Bay apartment building. My Bubbe kvelled over her Chanel wristwatch, with diamonds instead of numbers. Her waist was small and tight in her DKNY skirt-suit. While Bubbe made unsubtle inquiries about my mother’s straight nose and light-skin, my mother explained that her father had recently retired from Bard College and that her mother worked as a librarian in California. Her last name – Phillips – was given to her grandparents at Ellis Island. She had forgone Yeshiva, but they had faithfully lit a menorah every year. Poppe nodded approvingly in the corner. When they sat to eat she blushed as she stumbled over the Hamotzi, but my grandparents were too smitten by then to notice.
When the night came to an end, my grandmother grabbed my father by the wrist as she led them out the door.
“That woman is too good for you,” Bubbe whispered into his ear, “And you’re sure she’s Jewish?”
After the divorce, my father tells this story more and more. His voice breaks when he gets to the last part. When he told my Bubbe about the divorce she looked at him with disgust.
“What did you do?” She asked.
David is the man my mother left my father for. My father tells me this through tears as he drives me to my elementary school. David is a rich man, not a good one, but I haven’t learned this yet.
&
Étoile wears a pink dress on her pilgrimage. She walks for what seems like a very long time, past cows and llamas and tourists who ask to take her photo. At the summit, the Tian Tan Buddha smiles down. Incense is burning all around her.
***
David shoves me against the wall. The radiator digs into my back, and I will bear a mark for years afterwards, though it is not his fault my skin scars easily. My mother watches from down the hallway. I call out for her until my voice is raw, until David releases my wrists and I crumple against the floor.
&
Étoile runs a finger along the ruins of Chichén Itzá. She tries to imagine those who came before her, cranes her head to hear their footsteps run across the sprawling courtyard. The air is empty, except for the wind blowing through the grass.
&
My mother doesn’t know the difference between a Cabernet and a Malbec.
“She sure is lucky she’s pretty,” David says as he wraps an arm around her waist.
&
Étoile examines a Pollock at the Tate. It is hard to tell the difference between talent and a man with an overabundance of paint and confidence, she thinks.
&
I want to take something from David, and settle on his Bourbon. It is what he loves the most. I take a swig and it burns the back of my throat. Everything melts out around me. I relish refilling the expensive bottle with water.
&
Étoile is in Amsterdam. Houseboats line the canal. Women dance in dimly lit windows after dark. Étoile walks for miles and miles, along cobblestone streets littered with whippet canisters and condom wrappers. Nobody says a word to her.
&
Clarence takes my hand and leads me across the river bank. Dom is the only one who says anything.
“Nobody’s gonna stop them?” He shouts. “Can’t you see this shit’s not right?”
The other boys are sprawled in the grass, too brained on Evan Williams and bad weed to care much about the fourteen-year-old girl they only met two months ago. All we have in common is bad habits anyway. In the end, even Dom lets us go.
Clarence tells me to lie down and he kisses me. It’s my first kiss, and something about the weight of his tongue ages him, makes me acutely aware of the decade between us. The taste of Black’N’Mild’s on his lips doesn’t blend with the residue of cheap liquor in my throat and I feel sick. I try to get up and he places a hand on my stomach. “Stay here a little while, baby. There are things I want to teach you.” His hand slides down my body and I stare at the sky, waiting for the sun to set.
&
Étoile wishes to be among the stars. She worries she has gone too far this time, asked for too much. But then she is floating up, flying through the cosmos. She rises up and up and up, the Earth becoming small and inconsequential beneath her feet.
&
My Grandmother was told she could not bear children. She proceeded to give birth to three daughters, each a year apart. This is where my mother first learned that we may negotiate the limitations of our bodies. When my mother was pregnant with me, she was three weeks past her due date and I was in breach. When her doctor tried to schedule her for a cesarean, she marched straight out of their Upper West Side office and down to a basement apothecary in Chinatown. They gave her sticks of moxie, thick incense that she was instructed to stuff between her toes while doing a headstand. By the end of the night, I had flipped myself headfirst inside of her. By the end of the week, her water broke.
When my mother was first diagnosed, she sent her tumor to a laboratory in New Mexico. It was given pills and poisons, gentle words and sound baths, and pharmaceutical cocktails. In New York City, a doctor on Madison avenue administered the same treatments to my mother. She came back from her first session with a CD of Tibetan Singing bowls. She listened to it until she could not walk anymore, at which point my aunt packed her into a taxicab and took her to the hospital. When the doctor at Sloan Kettering looked at her files she shook her head sadly.
“If only she had made it to me three months ago.”
&
The first time her boyfriend hits her, they are in a hotel room in South Carolina. Étoile is only surprised it took this long. Étoile worries that the concierge will say something about the purple-pink flecks sprouting above her cheekbone. When they checked in, she’d raised an eyebrow at Étoile’s ID, glared at the gray hair in the boyfriend’s beard as she handed them their keys. But when the elevator opens at the lobby, the shift has turned over and the young man at the front desk only nods as they pass him by. They have come here to see the eclipse, to watch the night sky go black and swallow them whole. To see darkness with no stars is something Étoile would travel to the ends of the Earth for.
&
Cocaine is a hell of a drug, I think as I survey the damage. I float above myself, taking in the bashed-in windshield, the glass littering the Stop’n Shop parking lot.
My mother is shriveled in the passenger seat, head raw and stubbled. Her custom wig is still two weeks backordered. The screaming has subsided, and we are both parched.
Her gaze is fixed straight ahead of her as she whispers, “I don’t have the energy to save us both.”
&
Étoile is wound tight inside her sleeping bag. Wind whips against her cheeks. She is afraid she might blow away into the cold desert night. The stars in Utah are like nothing she has ever seen before. She can see the milky way every night here, a smudge across the cosmos.
&
It is my uncle who calls. I realize when the phone rings that I had been waiting for this ever since the first doctor’s appointment, since over a year before when my mother first mentioned a headache.
“It’s time,” he says.
“Does she want to see me?” I ask.
He sighs, “We are past all that now. She doesn’t have a choice.”
&
Étoile looks at the vermillion cliffs, the rainbow stairwells of Bryce Canyon. Étoile reconsiders her beliefs on Heaven.
&
The social worker at the hospice center asks if there is anyone my mother might like me to call. These are the sorts of questions my mother can no longer answer herself. I call her Reiki coach, because we haven’t spoken in many months and I am not certain of her current perspectives on God. The Reiki Coach answers on the fourth ring. She tells me she won’t be able to make it.
“I’m sorry your mother couldn’t heal herself in time.”
&
Étoile is not sure if she is more in love with Alaska or with the lumberjack who holds her snugly in their little log cabin. She cannot separate the two. Étoile doesn’t know which lucky star to thank for bringing her here, so she thanks them all. Everytime she steps outside she finds the night sky ablaze, auroras dancing their way across the dim horizon.
After he comes back from his hunt, Étoile watches as the lumberjack slits the backstrap clean off a moose carcass, handling it with the same delicateness he employs when he holds her at night. It is a marvel, the tenderness of his calloused fingers. Étoile wonders if she has found her home.
“I want to show you something,” she whispers to the lumberjack one night, leading him outside. She presses a finger to his chin, tilting his head skyward. She wraps her arms around him. She wishes with all her might, but when her eyes open, her hands are empty. Her chest heaves. How foolish she was. She wishes herself back to their cabin again and again, but she will always find it empty. She cannot change the nature of her gift.
&
I return to my mother’s apartment to gather a few things. A shawl, a silk pillowcase, a children’s book she used to read to me at night. She will not know they are there; may not know I am there either. My mother’s refrigerator is full of scoobies. They are brown and gangrenous, tendrils reaching to the outer edges of their jars.
&
Étoile is in the Amazon Rainforest, choking on her own vomit. The syrup-y residue of the Ayahuasca cloys at the back of her throat, gagging her until nothing is left. She is an empty vessel waiting to be full again. The Maestro rubs her belly while her daughter sings away the bad spirits that dance around the Maloka. Étoile is so grateful to these women who can see the darkness which surrounds her. She wasn’t crazy. She tries to tell them, but her tongue is too wrapped up around itself.
“Nosotros te ayudaremos. Serás libre,” the maestro hushes Étoile as she pounds at her navel, “Serás libre.”
&
My mother was a small woman. I watched other women admire and envy her for it, but I knew her body was a hard won thing. She weighed herself three times a day, never missed a Jane Fonda session or took a bite of dessert. I look at her now, shrunken in a hospital bed. The results are undeniable.
&
Étoile is at the bottom of the world. Of all her wishes, Antarctica was the boldest. For a thousand miles, all Étoile sees is white. She spends her days shoveling and on good days her body aches enough to silence her mind. Most nights are peaceful.
In a faraway land, it is the nine-year anniversary of her mother’s death. Étoile’s tears freeze to her lover’s chest as she sobs in their small tent. He is a good enough man and Étoile is grateful for any warmth in this cold place. The sun never sets here, and she has not seen a star in many months. Étoile is not sure how she will ever make it home again.
&
I climb into my mother’s hospital bed, wrap my fingers around her narrow hand and begin.
“Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Étoile. She lived in a cottage by the Seine. Her mother loved her very, very much. And Étoile loved her, too. But Étoile longed for adventure, and every night after her mother tucked her into bed Étoile would stare up out of her window and wish upon the stars to be taken far, far away. Where does Étoile wish to go tonight, Mama?”
“Mama?”
Photo by Derek Oyen on Unsplash
