Disclaimer: I don't own any characters from Stand By Me. However, I do own
evryone in this chapter. The book 'White Oleander' was a huge influence on
this first chapter. Um, I guess thats everything.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He came into our lives without a warning, Pete Greene. My mother and I laughed about him at first, the way he followed her to all her poetry readings, constantly trying to get her to go out with him. I knew from looking at him that he wasn't her type. She liked the shy blonde in the white tee shirt, who stood in the back watching her, helpless, intoxicated. After fifteen years as Camille's daughter, I could spot them in my sleep. Pete was different though. Stout around the middle, a dark red ponytail, freckles on his face and arms. When he approached her and struck up a conversation, I almost laughed out loud.
He stuck out his hand. "Name's Pete Greene. I really love your work." She shook his hand, not even looking into his face. "What're you doing after the reading?" He asked. My mother raised her blue eyes slowly.
"My daughter and I have a previous engagment." She told him, nodding towards the table where I sat, drawing a bonsi tree.
"After that." He persisted. I liked his self confidence. My mother simply shook her head.
"Come on, Storm." She called to me and I hurried towards her. I always came when my mother called.
I was often picked on about my name. Mother said that when I was born my eyes were the blu-black color of storm cloud, and she always loved when it stormed. The nurse almost refused to write it on my birth certificate.
"Give that baby a good christian name!" The nurse told her.
My mother told her it was none of her buisiness what she named her baby. The nurse rolled her eyes, but wrote it down, 'Storm Lynn Tessio'.
After the reading, we drove into the hill's then down towards the Vally for lunch. I always loved Southern California in the late Autum. When the rest of the nation was getting colder, we were still warm and sunny.
"Can you believe that man?" Mother asked. I was staring out the window, thinking about my drawing.
"Who?"
"That Greene man! The one who looked like a goat!" She said, hitting her palm on the steering wheel.
"Oh. What about him?"
"Storm! Weren't you listening to him? Expecting me to go out with him! Never date a man like that, who expects you to do things."
"Yes Mother." I always did what my Mother said. She had all kinds of her own rules and I followed them like religion.
_____________________________________________________________________
"I saw him again." Mother said to me a week later. "The Goat Man. I think he's following me."
She had just come home from work. She worked at a magizine called 'The Poetic'. She did most of her poetry readings on the weekends. "He was with that actress, Laurel Fintch. She was actually kissing that fat goat man! Can you imagine?"
I knew she couldn't. Beauty was one of her laws. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did it beautifully. If you weren't beautiful, you just didn't exsist. She had drummed that into my head from the time I was small. I had, of course, noticed by now that reality didn't conform to my mother's ideas.
She saw him again at her favorite artists' bar downtown. She saw him at at a party near Santa Monica. Wherever she went she went, she complained, there he was, the goat man.
I thought it was only coincidence, but one night at a performance space, near the pier, where we went to watch one of her friends recite poetry, I saw him too, a few rows behind us. He spent the whole time trying to catch her eye, but she refused to look at him. He waved at me and I waved back, low, so she wouldn't see me.
After it was over, I wanted to talk to him, but she dragged me out fast. "Don't encourage him." She hissed.
When he turned up at the annual publication party for 'The Poetic', I had to admit he was following her. It was outside, in an old hotel along the Strip. The women wore bare dresses, my mother like a moth in cream colored silk. I threaded my way to the food table, placing a few mini spring rolls on my paper plate, and there was Pete, piling his plate high with shrimp. He saw me and his eye swept the crowd for my mother. She was behind me drinking white wine and gossiping with Miles, the photo editor. She hadn't seen Pete yet. He started towards her and I was close behind.
"Camille," Pete said. "I've been looking for you." He smiled. Her eyes flickered cruelly over his brown tie, his mustard colored shirt, uneven teeth, a piece of shrimp clutched in his chubby hand. "I've been thinking about you."
"I'd rather you wouldn't." Mother said coolly. I felt her icy wind, but he didn't even seem to get a chill.
"I have something for you." He held out a small white envolpe. "For you and Storm."
I wondered how he knew my name and watched as she pulled two blue and white tickets out of the envolpe. "Just the concert." She told him. "No dinner, no dancing."
"Agreed." He replied, but I could see he didn't believe her. He didn't know her yet. It was gamelan concert at the art museum. Now I knew why she accepted.
How did he know all this about us? My name, where she worked, the exact right thing to propose? Had he hidden in the bushes outside our apartment? Bribed her friends, maybe?
He was late the night of the concert. Forced to wait, my mother made small jerky movments with her arms and hands. We were waiting for him in the forecourt of the museum.
"Late. How despicable. I should have known. He's probably off rutting in the fields with some other goats. Remind me never to make plans with quadrupeds."
I noticed she didn't call it a 'date'. That, at least, comforted me. She still had on her work clothes, though she'd had time to change. Men admired her, smiled, and stared. She stared back, her blue eyes burning, un til they grew awkward and turned away. A tall balding man commented on how pretty I was, how my long blonde hair was like cornsilk, how much I looked like my mother. I started to thank him, but she pulled me away.
" How many times must I tell you, Storm? Never say thank you when complimented." She scolded. How could I have forgotten? It was one of her biggest laws.
I saw Pete across the plaza, heading towards us. He smiled, flashing the wide gap between his two front teeth. "Sorry I'm late. Traffic was murder."
My mother turned away from him. Only peon's made excuses for themselves, she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.
When the concert was over Pete asked my Mother and I out to eat.
"I never eat." Mother snapped at him. I was hungry, but once my Mother took a position, she never wavered from it. So we went home, where I ate tuna out of a can and Mother wrote a poem about shadow puppets and the gods of chance. I tried to read some of it over her shoulder. Something about love and being guilty.
She started to see him more and more as the months passed and fall faded to winter. I'd never seen my Mother like this. I thought about her list of laws. Never say thank you; never explain; never let a man stay the night. She was breaking all of them.
In the mornings he would lay on her bed with her and they'd speak to me as I dressed for school, the room full of the scent of their lovemaking. I drew pictures of them together and practiced asking Pete if I could call him Dad.
I had never had a father. I got up the nerve to ask Mother about him once, I must have been in the third grade. She had just picked me up from school and in class that day we had discussed fathers. I hadn't thought much about him before then.
"Where's my father?"
She downshifted the car irritably. "You have no father." She said.
"Everyone has a father." I replied. "So where is he?"
"Father's are irrelevent. Believe me, you're lucky. I know, I had a father. Just forget it." She turned on the radio and I never asked again.
I found my birth certificate though, and under father it said 'Dalson, Lucas. No middle name.' I didn't know why I didn't have his last name or where he was from. I was to scared to ask. I found a picture a few years later, of the two them on the beach. She looked like a goddess in her long summer dress, and he was extremly handsome. They looked more like brother and sister than anything, but I knew who he was because it was written on the back of the photo.
It was like I was blind and she was telling me 'sight doesn't matter. You're better off not seeing.' I started watching father's, in the stores, on the playground. I liked how they always seemed to know what to do. They were like docks, something you could always anchor to. If you had a father, you weren't drifting. I prayed Pete Greene would be that man.
Then, something changed. As quickly as he came into our lives, he was gone. He stopped calling, cancelled dates. A tone I had never heard before crept into my Mother's voice. It was like the edge of a saw. I was always on eggshell's around her. She just snapped.
"I should shave my head and paint my face with ashes." She told me.
Her eyes were strange, circled dark like bruises, and her hair was greasy and lank. She lay in her bed, or stared at herself in the mirror. "How can I shed tears for a man that I never should have allowed to touch me in anyway?"
She didn't go back to work. She wouldn't leave the darkened apartment, except to go down to the pool, where she sat for hours, staring into the warm water. I knew I was suppose to go to school, but I couldn't leave her alone, not like that. Traunt officers came to our door, but we never answered. The neibours, who hadn't seen us emerge for weeks, told them we moved. We both stayed indoors, eating all the canned food in the apartment, then, when that ran out, eating rice and oatmeal. I vowed I would never fall in love. I hoped Pete died a slow and painful death for what he was doing to my mother.
A red moon rose downtown, red from the fires burning to the north and out in Malibu. It was early January, the season of fire and we were trapt in the heart of the burning landscape. Ashes floated in the pool. We sat on the roof in the burnt wind.
"This ragged heart." Mother said, pulling at her kimono. "I should rip it out and bury it for compost."
I wished I could touch her, but she was in her own isolation booth, like on Miss America. She couldn't hear me through the glass. I rubbed her back and then headed back to our apartment to sleep. If I had realized this was the last time she would have speak to me, I would've stayed with her all night.
Mother was still sleeping when I woke up the next morning. I went into the kitchen and found a box of stale cereal to eat. After a while, I decided to check on her. The room was dark gray, with no light penatrating. It smelled stale. She had her arm flung over the pillow. Her mouth was open, but she was making no sound.
"Mother?" I put my face right in hers. She smelled like sherry and something metiallic. I put my hand on her shoulder and shook her gently. She didn't move.
"Mother?" She didn't do anything. The hair stood up on my arms and neck. I couldn't hear her breathing. "Mother?"
I shook her again, but her head just flopped over. "Mother? Mom? Wake up! Please, wake up! Please!" I lifted her by her shoulders and let her drop. "Mother!!" I screamed in her face, hoping she would open her eyes, hoping she would tell me to stop yelling. I put my hands on her chest, feeling for her heartbeat, listening for her breathing. Nothing.
I searched the bedside table, the floor. On the far side, I found an open bottle of pills and an empty bottle of sherry. The pills had spilled out onto the floor, small pink tablets. Butalan, the label said. Do not take with alcohol. Do not opperate heavy machinery.
The sounds I was making were no longer even screams. I wanted to throw something into the eye of God. I threw the kleenex box. A brass bell. I knocked a lamp of the nighttable. I ripped the blinds off the windows and the room blinked bright with sunlight. I took a shoe from the foot of the bed and smashed it through the window. I cut my hand, but didn't even feel it. I picked up Mother's hair brush from her vanity and threw it like a baseball into the round mirror.
I was exhausted and I couldn't find anything else to throw. I sat back down and took her hand. It was so cold. I put it against my hot, wet, cheek, trying to warm it up. I brushed her waist length, white blonde hair, the same shade and length as mine, away from her face.
If only I had known, Mother. My beautiful, fucked up Mother. I lay my head on her chest, where there was no heartbeat. My face next to hers, breathing in the breath that was no longer there. I held her hands, so cold and chapped. I turned them over and kissed her palms. God, she was so pale. I picked up the squarish, white bottle of pills. It practically glowed in my hands. Now I saw this was not just a bottle, it was a doorway. A doorway out of your problems. All you had to do was crawl through the neck of the bottle and it was all over. You were done and you could cash in your chips. How could she do it? How could she?!
She lay with her mouth forming a perfect 'O' on the blue pillowcase. I rubbed my face on the silkiness of her kimono, a kimono Pete had gotten her. I stared at it, hating the brightness of it, the cheery red. How could he buy her red? She hated red. Pete never really knew her, and yet, because of him, she was dead. She had left me, without even saying good bye. Just like Pete Greene never said goodbye to her. I was alone.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He came into our lives without a warning, Pete Greene. My mother and I laughed about him at first, the way he followed her to all her poetry readings, constantly trying to get her to go out with him. I knew from looking at him that he wasn't her type. She liked the shy blonde in the white tee shirt, who stood in the back watching her, helpless, intoxicated. After fifteen years as Camille's daughter, I could spot them in my sleep. Pete was different though. Stout around the middle, a dark red ponytail, freckles on his face and arms. When he approached her and struck up a conversation, I almost laughed out loud.
He stuck out his hand. "Name's Pete Greene. I really love your work." She shook his hand, not even looking into his face. "What're you doing after the reading?" He asked. My mother raised her blue eyes slowly.
"My daughter and I have a previous engagment." She told him, nodding towards the table where I sat, drawing a bonsi tree.
"After that." He persisted. I liked his self confidence. My mother simply shook her head.
"Come on, Storm." She called to me and I hurried towards her. I always came when my mother called.
I was often picked on about my name. Mother said that when I was born my eyes were the blu-black color of storm cloud, and she always loved when it stormed. The nurse almost refused to write it on my birth certificate.
"Give that baby a good christian name!" The nurse told her.
My mother told her it was none of her buisiness what she named her baby. The nurse rolled her eyes, but wrote it down, 'Storm Lynn Tessio'.
After the reading, we drove into the hill's then down towards the Vally for lunch. I always loved Southern California in the late Autum. When the rest of the nation was getting colder, we were still warm and sunny.
"Can you believe that man?" Mother asked. I was staring out the window, thinking about my drawing.
"Who?"
"That Greene man! The one who looked like a goat!" She said, hitting her palm on the steering wheel.
"Oh. What about him?"
"Storm! Weren't you listening to him? Expecting me to go out with him! Never date a man like that, who expects you to do things."
"Yes Mother." I always did what my Mother said. She had all kinds of her own rules and I followed them like religion.
_____________________________________________________________________
"I saw him again." Mother said to me a week later. "The Goat Man. I think he's following me."
She had just come home from work. She worked at a magizine called 'The Poetic'. She did most of her poetry readings on the weekends. "He was with that actress, Laurel Fintch. She was actually kissing that fat goat man! Can you imagine?"
I knew she couldn't. Beauty was one of her laws. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did it beautifully. If you weren't beautiful, you just didn't exsist. She had drummed that into my head from the time I was small. I had, of course, noticed by now that reality didn't conform to my mother's ideas.
She saw him again at her favorite artists' bar downtown. She saw him at at a party near Santa Monica. Wherever she went she went, she complained, there he was, the goat man.
I thought it was only coincidence, but one night at a performance space, near the pier, where we went to watch one of her friends recite poetry, I saw him too, a few rows behind us. He spent the whole time trying to catch her eye, but she refused to look at him. He waved at me and I waved back, low, so she wouldn't see me.
After it was over, I wanted to talk to him, but she dragged me out fast. "Don't encourage him." She hissed.
When he turned up at the annual publication party for 'The Poetic', I had to admit he was following her. It was outside, in an old hotel along the Strip. The women wore bare dresses, my mother like a moth in cream colored silk. I threaded my way to the food table, placing a few mini spring rolls on my paper plate, and there was Pete, piling his plate high with shrimp. He saw me and his eye swept the crowd for my mother. She was behind me drinking white wine and gossiping with Miles, the photo editor. She hadn't seen Pete yet. He started towards her and I was close behind.
"Camille," Pete said. "I've been looking for you." He smiled. Her eyes flickered cruelly over his brown tie, his mustard colored shirt, uneven teeth, a piece of shrimp clutched in his chubby hand. "I've been thinking about you."
"I'd rather you wouldn't." Mother said coolly. I felt her icy wind, but he didn't even seem to get a chill.
"I have something for you." He held out a small white envolpe. "For you and Storm."
I wondered how he knew my name and watched as she pulled two blue and white tickets out of the envolpe. "Just the concert." She told him. "No dinner, no dancing."
"Agreed." He replied, but I could see he didn't believe her. He didn't know her yet. It was gamelan concert at the art museum. Now I knew why she accepted.
How did he know all this about us? My name, where she worked, the exact right thing to propose? Had he hidden in the bushes outside our apartment? Bribed her friends, maybe?
He was late the night of the concert. Forced to wait, my mother made small jerky movments with her arms and hands. We were waiting for him in the forecourt of the museum.
"Late. How despicable. I should have known. He's probably off rutting in the fields with some other goats. Remind me never to make plans with quadrupeds."
I noticed she didn't call it a 'date'. That, at least, comforted me. She still had on her work clothes, though she'd had time to change. Men admired her, smiled, and stared. She stared back, her blue eyes burning, un til they grew awkward and turned away. A tall balding man commented on how pretty I was, how my long blonde hair was like cornsilk, how much I looked like my mother. I started to thank him, but she pulled me away.
" How many times must I tell you, Storm? Never say thank you when complimented." She scolded. How could I have forgotten? It was one of her biggest laws.
I saw Pete across the plaza, heading towards us. He smiled, flashing the wide gap between his two front teeth. "Sorry I'm late. Traffic was murder."
My mother turned away from him. Only peon's made excuses for themselves, she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.
When the concert was over Pete asked my Mother and I out to eat.
"I never eat." Mother snapped at him. I was hungry, but once my Mother took a position, she never wavered from it. So we went home, where I ate tuna out of a can and Mother wrote a poem about shadow puppets and the gods of chance. I tried to read some of it over her shoulder. Something about love and being guilty.
She started to see him more and more as the months passed and fall faded to winter. I'd never seen my Mother like this. I thought about her list of laws. Never say thank you; never explain; never let a man stay the night. She was breaking all of them.
In the mornings he would lay on her bed with her and they'd speak to me as I dressed for school, the room full of the scent of their lovemaking. I drew pictures of them together and practiced asking Pete if I could call him Dad.
I had never had a father. I got up the nerve to ask Mother about him once, I must have been in the third grade. She had just picked me up from school and in class that day we had discussed fathers. I hadn't thought much about him before then.
"Where's my father?"
She downshifted the car irritably. "You have no father." She said.
"Everyone has a father." I replied. "So where is he?"
"Father's are irrelevent. Believe me, you're lucky. I know, I had a father. Just forget it." She turned on the radio and I never asked again.
I found my birth certificate though, and under father it said 'Dalson, Lucas. No middle name.' I didn't know why I didn't have his last name or where he was from. I was to scared to ask. I found a picture a few years later, of the two them on the beach. She looked like a goddess in her long summer dress, and he was extremly handsome. They looked more like brother and sister than anything, but I knew who he was because it was written on the back of the photo.
It was like I was blind and she was telling me 'sight doesn't matter. You're better off not seeing.' I started watching father's, in the stores, on the playground. I liked how they always seemed to know what to do. They were like docks, something you could always anchor to. If you had a father, you weren't drifting. I prayed Pete Greene would be that man.
Then, something changed. As quickly as he came into our lives, he was gone. He stopped calling, cancelled dates. A tone I had never heard before crept into my Mother's voice. It was like the edge of a saw. I was always on eggshell's around her. She just snapped.
"I should shave my head and paint my face with ashes." She told me.
Her eyes were strange, circled dark like bruises, and her hair was greasy and lank. She lay in her bed, or stared at herself in the mirror. "How can I shed tears for a man that I never should have allowed to touch me in anyway?"
She didn't go back to work. She wouldn't leave the darkened apartment, except to go down to the pool, where she sat for hours, staring into the warm water. I knew I was suppose to go to school, but I couldn't leave her alone, not like that. Traunt officers came to our door, but we never answered. The neibours, who hadn't seen us emerge for weeks, told them we moved. We both stayed indoors, eating all the canned food in the apartment, then, when that ran out, eating rice and oatmeal. I vowed I would never fall in love. I hoped Pete died a slow and painful death for what he was doing to my mother.
A red moon rose downtown, red from the fires burning to the north and out in Malibu. It was early January, the season of fire and we were trapt in the heart of the burning landscape. Ashes floated in the pool. We sat on the roof in the burnt wind.
"This ragged heart." Mother said, pulling at her kimono. "I should rip it out and bury it for compost."
I wished I could touch her, but she was in her own isolation booth, like on Miss America. She couldn't hear me through the glass. I rubbed her back and then headed back to our apartment to sleep. If I had realized this was the last time she would have speak to me, I would've stayed with her all night.
Mother was still sleeping when I woke up the next morning. I went into the kitchen and found a box of stale cereal to eat. After a while, I decided to check on her. The room was dark gray, with no light penatrating. It smelled stale. She had her arm flung over the pillow. Her mouth was open, but she was making no sound.
"Mother?" I put my face right in hers. She smelled like sherry and something metiallic. I put my hand on her shoulder and shook her gently. She didn't move.
"Mother?" She didn't do anything. The hair stood up on my arms and neck. I couldn't hear her breathing. "Mother?"
I shook her again, but her head just flopped over. "Mother? Mom? Wake up! Please, wake up! Please!" I lifted her by her shoulders and let her drop. "Mother!!" I screamed in her face, hoping she would open her eyes, hoping she would tell me to stop yelling. I put my hands on her chest, feeling for her heartbeat, listening for her breathing. Nothing.
I searched the bedside table, the floor. On the far side, I found an open bottle of pills and an empty bottle of sherry. The pills had spilled out onto the floor, small pink tablets. Butalan, the label said. Do not take with alcohol. Do not opperate heavy machinery.
The sounds I was making were no longer even screams. I wanted to throw something into the eye of God. I threw the kleenex box. A brass bell. I knocked a lamp of the nighttable. I ripped the blinds off the windows and the room blinked bright with sunlight. I took a shoe from the foot of the bed and smashed it through the window. I cut my hand, but didn't even feel it. I picked up Mother's hair brush from her vanity and threw it like a baseball into the round mirror.
I was exhausted and I couldn't find anything else to throw. I sat back down and took her hand. It was so cold. I put it against my hot, wet, cheek, trying to warm it up. I brushed her waist length, white blonde hair, the same shade and length as mine, away from her face.
If only I had known, Mother. My beautiful, fucked up Mother. I lay my head on her chest, where there was no heartbeat. My face next to hers, breathing in the breath that was no longer there. I held her hands, so cold and chapped. I turned them over and kissed her palms. God, she was so pale. I picked up the squarish, white bottle of pills. It practically glowed in my hands. Now I saw this was not just a bottle, it was a doorway. A doorway out of your problems. All you had to do was crawl through the neck of the bottle and it was all over. You were done and you could cash in your chips. How could she do it? How could she?!
She lay with her mouth forming a perfect 'O' on the blue pillowcase. I rubbed my face on the silkiness of her kimono, a kimono Pete had gotten her. I stared at it, hating the brightness of it, the cheery red. How could he buy her red? She hated red. Pete never really knew her, and yet, because of him, she was dead. She had left me, without even saying good bye. Just like Pete Greene never said goodbye to her. I was alone.