Backward-Facing Man (3 page)

It was Stardust's belief growing up that her mother paid too much attention to mundane things. Lorraine was meticulous about matching dry cleaning receipts to monthly invoices. She pored over the maintenance log to her Plymouth Duster, producing a spreadsheet that required updating every three thousand miles. She was as scrupulous about buying Stardust school supplies and a few new outfits each season, even if they were from a thrift store, as she was about telling her daughter to avoid people who claimed to know her. In Stardust's opinion, her mother experienced pleasure in one of two ways: planning or taking vacations.

As a loan officer, Lorraine got a week's paid vacation for every three years of service, and when she wasn't working, she fantasized, obsessed, researched, and eventually took great pleasure deciding whether to head to the tropics or visit museums, whether to accrue her time or take it as it came, whether to go alone, take Stardust, or wait until she met someone special. Over the years, she kept these romantic connections private. What Stardust knew, she learned from things her mother left around the house—movie ticket stubs, toll booth receipts, scribbled notes, and objects: garden tools, sheet music, a soprano recorder, a set of dead weights. On rare occasion, one of Lorraine's dates would show up at the door, but for the most part, Stardust met her mother's paramours in photos—grimacing on a burro in the Grand Canyon; sweating on the steps of Tulum; wincing from the spray at Niagara Falls—looking out from the album with impatience, as though the fun part of the trip was over and they could see the little girl staring at the pages of the album, eager to get her mother back. Lorraine would stand behind the couch, holding a gin and tonic in her slim fingers, giving them names like Big Foot, Fast Eddie, and Dimwit Dave, poking fun and purposefully playing down their importance to her only child.

When she was little, Stardust asked questions. “What was he like, my dad?” “Where is he now?” “Will I ever meet him?” Occasionally, she made reckless guesses, hoping to tease something out of her mother. “He was moody, just like me, right, Mom?” and “He wasn't very nice to you, was he?” after which Lorraine sighed, as if her time in Boston was just a silly lapse between Catholic school and this predictable and perfunctory life she now inhabited. Once, about a year after she got her period, Stardust became more aggressive. They were on their way home from a school dance and the air was redolent with wisteria. “Were there so many, you can't even narrow it down?” Stardust said, her face flush from making out with some boy. “I can assure you,” Lorraine snapped, staring into the night, “it's of no consequence to either of us now.” Thereafter, Stardust pretended not to care.

In her forties, Lorraine became interested in spirituality and the so-called New Age, whose products were popping up in health-food stores and in yoga studios, and for the first time, Stardust noticed her mother's sadness. It surfaced unexpectedly—as Lorraine was peering into the mirror, applying clay from the Dead Sea, looking up from her meditation as Stardust burst into the house, or as the two of them were driving somewhere and a long song by Procol Harem or The Doors came on the radio. There was just the briefest loss of composure, followed by an arching of her eyebrows, which Stardust interpreted as self-doubt and, in her judgment, made Lorraine more human and therefore more lovable. To the young woman who believed her mother tried to keep too tight a grip on things, the crystals and the cards with the affirmations and the workshops were a welcome change.

When Stardust graduated high school, Lorraine took the two of them to London, where they shared a tiny hotel room, drank Cosmopolitans, and saw shows, sometimes two in a day. They rode the double-decker buses from Carnaby Street, where the hippie boutiques first opened with their racy fashions, to the London Tower, where Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, awaited execution, and for a few days, the two of them giggled like boarding-school girls away together over winter break. One night, Lorraine told Stardust she was the most beautiful and talented daughter a mother could have asked for, but she said it with unexpected intimacy and with such fervor that she frightened her daughter. Once they got home, Lorraine returned with furious determination to her job at the bank and to housekeeping—having the curtains in the living room dry-cleaned and shoving their pictures into photo albums—her face tightening and her eyes gray and unfocused. It seemed to Stardust that the emotion Lorraine expressed overseas had been a fluke, or a breach in an otherwise impenetrable wall.

Instead of going to college with her classmates who graduated with honors, Stardust took a job as a waitress and then as a carpenter's assistant, an attendant on a psychic hotline, a mystery shopper, an aerobics teacher, a nanny, and a telemarketer. She read in long penitent jags that kept her up nights, wondering when, and then whether, her mother would insist she go to college. The following Christmas, Stardust vacationed in Jamaica with friends, and in the spring, she moved into her own apartment that, in the beginning, felt like an adventure with strange overnight guests, diet pills, and sprawling disorder. But it quickly soured. Stardust was feeling neither beautiful nor talented, and by the next fall, she'd moved back in with her mother. There were the same kinds of odd jobs. A year passed, then another, then another.

 

Lorraine continued to travel. She swam with dolphins in the Keys, she went to Whistler in British Columbia with the credit union ski club, and she took a bicycle trip in Spain. After getting a home computer, Lorraine began corresponding with people online; shortly thereafter, literature came in the mail describing the Great Barrier Reef, Mount Fuji, the Galapagos Islands. One August, Lorraine attended a New Age workshop in Washington, D.C. The following spring, she drove to a yoga retreat in Massachusetts. Just before Christmas, 1998, Lorraine bought polypropylene long johns and wraparound sunglasses. She ordered an aluminum contraption with ski boots and ropes and channels that she wrestled with each night until she was sweaty. While Stardust called strangers at dinnertime extolling the virtues of cheap long-distance carriers, Lorraine read how to melt snow for water and avoid hypothermia.

In the spring, Lorraine began training more rigorously, stepping across their little patch of grass at dawn to stretch her calf and thigh muscles, adjusting her hair in the reflection of a car window, then jogging up the street with its matchbox row houses and their little squares of fenced-in yards. By then, Stardust had given up trying to make sense of her mother's life—running, working, dating her boss, and tapping out e-mails to strangers. She was busy extricating herself from a nowhere romance with her boyfriend, Mick, an occasional auto mechanic and self-declared clairvoyant she'd known from the neighborhood, and the two of them would have long arguments late into the night on the phone.

For a while, Stardust and Lorraine communicated in notes on little scraps of paper. “Mom. Does med. insurance cover b-control?” Stardust scribbled on the back of a ticket stub from a Prince concert. “Pls. pick up the dry cleaning before Friday,” Lorraine scratched out on a direct-mail postcard about vitamin supplements and colon cleansers. But underneath the irritation was affinity—the kind of bond between mother and daughter so deep it can be ignored for long periods of time.

Over Thanksgiving, Lorraine's training intensified. Instead of turkey, she and Stardust had protein shakes. On Black Friday, Lorraine went to the Y, and when she got home, she kept flexing little plastic hand springs while watching TV. The next morning, Stardust read, “Am planning a trip to Switzerland. Went for ice crampons. Back in an hour.” The following week, Stardust quit telemarketing and took a job selling memberships to a fitness club, working mostly nights and weekends on commission. Finally, after picking a fight with Mick, she decided not to see him again. In early December, Lorraine's and Stardust's schedules became completely opposite. On the back of a catalogue advertising vocational schools, Stardust wrote, “Mom—Carmine's brother died. The funeral's tomorrow. Do you have anything black?” On the back of a home pregnancy kit, Stardust wrote, “Went to Elizabeth's for the weekend. Be back Monday.”

Stardust found Lorraine's itinerary on the dining room table a week before she left. She'd known for months that her mother was going away, but details of the trip kept slipping her mind. There was a flight to Zurich and a small group with an enthusiastic leader. There was a sponsoring organization that had something to do with friends of the earth. It turned out Lorraine would be gone for almost three weeks over the holidays with a group of people she'd met online in a specially arranged cyber-event—a pair of empty-nesters from Arizona, a philatelist from Connecticut, an Indian doctor, a young graduate student, and two middle-aged men taking a break from their jobs as commodities traders. Each of them was drawn to the expedition by the desire to cross over into the new millennium in an exotic and exciting place. Stardust read an e-mail to her mother describing the interior of the ski lodge where they'd gather, check their gear, and acclimate to the altitude. Lorraine responded that the details seemed perfect. She was completely absorbed. “You realize that my trip ends after New Year's, which means I'll be away for Christmas,” Lorraine told Stardust one Sunday night.

“It's all right, Mom,” Stardust said. “It's not like we had plans.” The Nadias had little extended family, and Lorraine had long given up visiting her cousins. In retrospect, Stardust was sorry she didn't question her mother's preoccupation with winter camping or her determination to get in shape, to hike and cross-country ski, or to sleep outside in the cold, but at the time, she had such a sad, heavy feeling about her own life—her stuckness, her peripatetic work history, her inability to cross into the realm of mature adulthood where accomplishments and careers and long-term alliances marked a person's progress toward achieving her dreams—that she almost preferred being alone.

Lorraine, who had never been waifish, was cut, buff, and lean as her trip approached. The week before she left, she said things to her daughter like “I feel like I'm finally in my body” and “I'm living my highest choice.” The morning she left, mother and daughter met briefly in the hallway. Lorraine had just showered and was humming quietly. Her skin had developed a rosy sheen from the conditioning, and her face glowed in anticipation. A bluish mist enveloped her. Stardust stumbled sleepily toward the bathroom, smiling as she passed. Lorraine looked more like a spirit guide than her mother. A few minutes later, while Stardust hung between sleep and wakefulness, Lorraine sat down on her bed, smelling like patchouli oil and shampoo. She brushed her lips against her daughter's forehead and nuzzled her. “You
know
I love you, honey,” she said softly. “Godspeed.” That was her last word.
Godspeed
.

 

When Stardust woke, she set a radio on the sink and ran the shower hot, looking at herself until the mirror clouded over. There were tiny cracks in the skin in the corners of her mouth. In her eyes, which were deep brown, she could see little spears of yellow. Wisps of shoulder-length hair, streaked blonde, framed her face, which was round until it came to a soft point at her chin. She moved her lips, forming a seductive pout. The overall impression she gave was one of balance, proportion, and intelligence. Yet approaching thirty, she felt disconnected from the person she wanted to be. It was almost the end of the millennium, and she felt stuck in somebody else's life.

Exiting the house, she walked down Medley Street, past the reindeer statues, the frost-covered patches of lawn and the wrought-iron-fence outlines, the nativity scenes and mailboxes in the shape of barns, children on their way to parochial school. She followed Appleberry, past Atomic Tires, and across Street Road, where she entered the 7-Eleven, put a dollar on the counter, and took a paper from the stack. Back home, she made coffee and sat down with a fresh sheet of paper and a pen at the breakfast table until she'd made a list of her achievements; trying to make the last few jobs sound better than they were. Retail clerk became “senior merchandiser,” taxi dispatcher became “logistics engineer,” and psychic hotline operator became “customer satisfaction rep.” It was not what anyone would consider a power résumé, but it was enough to justify quitting her job. She was good at quitting things.

That afternoon, with the help of a guy at the copy shop, she entered her achievements into a preset format and printed her résumé on fancy white bond. There were about a dozen administrative ads in the
Inquirer
with the words
Center City
buried in the copy. By the following Thursday, seven days after her mother had left for Switzerland, Stardust had submitted fourteen résumés, had received callbacks from four human resource managers, and had two invitations for interviews.

She dressed carefully in one of her mother's dark suits and took the train into town. The first was an insurance company near Independence Mall. The second was a radio station near Rittenhouse Square, in one of several high-rises that faced the park. On her way back to the train, a chiseled boy in a sentry uniform, white gloves, and a fitted maroon jacket in front of the Ritz-Carlton smiled and held open the door. The lobby was splendid—its understated opulence, its openness, the huge bouquets of fresh flowers set on marble tables. On a whim, she asked a desk clerk with an Australian accent whom she might talk to about employment and then took a seat in the atrium to fill in the application.

It was just a few days before Christmas, and the storefronts and sidewalks were jammed with men and women exuding that curious blend of holiday hope and distress. To celebrate her first
real
job interviews, Stardust ordered a drink. The sun had long ago set behind the skyscrapers, and the lights in the lobby had a warm glow. A middle-aged man in his forties wearing a dark suit and expensive loafers came over and sat down at a table next to hers. He arranged a leather pouch and cell phone in front of him and ordered a drink for himself. He asked how her holiday shopping was going. He explained that he was in Philadelphia helping a client complete a merger before the New Year. They agreed enthusiastically that the holidays could be dismal, and that there was little point in working so hard for money if one had no time or energy to spend it. They had another round. Stardust confessed to not having dinner plans. A couple hours later, she agreed to a nightcap in his room.