Shooting Stars 01 Cinnamon (2 page)

"That wasn't very nice," she said. I turned and glared at her.
Everyone who knows us and who has seen our house thinks the spirits inside the house will eventually drive us all mad. They think it's haunted. They call it "The Addams Family House." The outside is so dark and it does have this foreboding presence. I actually believe Daddy is ashamed of his house. Grandmother Beverly certainly didn't want him to buy it, but that was one time Mommy won out over her when it came to having Daddy decide something. Mommy was determined.
It's a grand Second Empire Victorian house about ten miles northwest of Tarrytown. New York. The original owner was a former Civil War officer who had served under General Grant. His name was Jonathan Demerest and he had five children, two boys and three girls. Both his wife Carolyne and his youngest son Abraham died of smallpox less than a year apart. Their graves, as well as Jonathan's, are on our property, up on a knoll from where you could once see miles and miles in any direction. At least that's what Mommy claimed. She said when they first moved into the house, the forest wasn't anywhere as (Frown as it is today: of course. there weren't all those houses in one development after another peppering the face of the landscape like pimples.
"It was a peaceful place, a wonderful place to be buried." she told me. "It still is. actually. Maybe I should be buried here, too," she added and I cried because I was only nine at the time and I didn't want to hear about such a thing as my own mother's death.
"We all die. Cinnamon," she said with that soft, loving smile that could always bring my marching heart back to a slow walk. She would touch my cheek so gently, her fingers feeling like a warm caressing breeze, and she would smile a smile full of
candlelight, warm. mesmerizing, "It's not that bad when our time comes. We just move on." she said looking out at the world below us as if she already had one foot in the grave. "We just move on to somewhere quieter. That's all."
"Quieter? How could it be any quieter than this?" I wondered aloud.
"It's quieter inside you," she replied. I didn't understand what that meant for years, but now I do.
I really do.
Anyway. Mommy told me she had fallen in love with our house before she had fallen in love with Daddy, and she got him to buy it after only a year of marriage.
The house appears larger than it really is because it was built on a hill and looms over the roads and homes below us. It has three stories with a cupola that looks like a great hiding place for a monster or a ghost. Some of the kids think I crawl up into it every night and send spells and curses down on unwary travelers below. Whenever I hear these kinds of things about myself. I laugh, toss back my hair and say what Mommy told me Katharine Hepburn once said about publicity: "I don't care what they say about me, as long as it isn't true."
Very few people understand what that means. They think it's just more proof of my weirdness. They don't understand that when people invade your life and uncover the truth about you, they expose things you want to keep private, keep personal so you can keep your self- respect. It's why we lock our doors and close our windows and pull down our shades, especially in my house.
I don't care what impression my house makes on people. I love it as much as Mommy does. Second Empire houses have what are known as mansard roofs, which are roofs having two slopes on all sides with the lower slope steeper than the upper one. The house itself is square, and it has elaborate decorative iron cresting above the upper cornice. The front of the house has paired entry doors with glass in the top half and a half-dozen steps leading up and under the onestone porch. All of the windows are paired. The downstairs ones are all hooded. Mommy loves talking about it, lecturing about the architecture to anyone who will listen.
Grandmother Beverly thought it was a dreadful place to live, even though she readily moved in with us. Mommy said it was Grandmother Beverly's sole idea to move in. despite Daddy's telling me and everyone else that he asked her to move in with us since we had so much room and there was no reason for a woman of her age to have to live alone.
"No reason." Mammy told me. "except to give us peace of mind."
Anyway people often look at me as if they expect that any day now-- because we live in the eerie looking, supposedly haunted house-- I'll become a raving lunatic and maybe even try to hurt myself. Even when some of my teachers talk to me, I notice they stand a foot or so farther away from me than they stand away from their other students. All I have to do sometimes is stare at someone the way I was staring at Edith Booth and I can see him or her suddenly become overwhelmed with small terrors. The truth is. I've begun to enjoy it. It gives me a sense of power.
"What?" I snapped at her.
She stepped back.
"Mr. Kaplan... wants you... right away," she stuttered.
"Then stop interrupting me," I ordered. I locked my eyes onto hers and the color fled her cheeks.
She remained a few feet behind me all the way to the principal's office where I found Grandmother Beverly sitting anxiously on the small, imitation leather settee. She was rubbing her fingers in her palm as if she were frying to sand down some imaginary calluses, something she often did when she was very nervous.
The moment I entered the outer office, she rose to her full five feet four inches of height. Grandfather Carlson had been six feet two inches tall, but he always looked diminished in her presence. and Daddy never seems his full six feet next to her either. Her shadow shrinks people.
"Stature comes from your demeanor, your selfconfidence," Mommy once told me when we talked about Grandmother Beverly. "You've got to give the devil her due for that."
Mommy was practically the only person I knew who wasn't intimidated by her, but she wasn't strong enough to do constant battle with her, not with what I've come to think of as the Trojan Horse in our home, my own father. He could be strong in so many ways, but when it came to facing down his own mother, he became a little boy again.
For instance. Grandmother Beverly was as critical of the inside of our house as she was of the outside. She hated Mommy's taste in decorations, furniture, curtains, flooring, even lighting and bathroom fixtures. From the moment she moved in, she seemed determined to slowly change it all. She would point out the smallest imperfection, a tiny stain in a chair, a tear in a rug, and advised Daddy to have it replaced. Once he agreed to that, she went forward to choose what the replacement would be, as if Mommy wasn't even there.
One day a chair would be supplanted or a rug, and when Mommy complained that what
Grandmother Beverly had chosen didn't mesh with our decor. Daddy would plead and moan and promise that after this or that there would be no more changes. Of course, there always were.
It was easy to see why I compared
Grandmother's march through our house and lives to Hitler's march through Europe. Daddy was our own little Chamberlain promising "Peace for our time," if we just made one more compromise. Then we would be a happy little family again.
That's something we would never be again.
But I didn't know how definite that prophecy was until I went home from school with Grandmother Beverly.

"What's wrong? Why have you come for me?" I asked her.
Once I had arrived, she had simply started out of the principal's office and begun her stomp through the corridor to the exit for the parking lot. As usual she expected me to trail along like some obedient puppy.
She continued to walk, ignoring my questions. She always fixed herself on her purpose or destination as if she were a guided missile. Getting her to pause, turn or stop required the secret abort code only her own private demon knew and was reluctant to relinquish or reveal. You just had to wait her out, calm yourself down and be patient as difficult as that was, Grandmother Beverly could spread droplets of poison frustration on everyone around her like a lawn sprinkler.
But this was different. She had ripped me out of school and sent my head spinning. I would not be denied.
"Grandmother?"
"Just let's get out of here," she said sharply, not looking at me. She lowered her voice and added, "I don't want anyone hearing about this. if I can help it"
My heart was racing now, galloping alongside my unbridled imagination.
"Your foolish father," she muttered. "I warned him. No one can say I didn't warn him."
We passed through the doors and headed toward her vintage Mercedes sedan.
"Grandmother," I cried, planting my feet firmly in the parking lot. "I'm not taking another step until you tell me exactly what is going on."
She paused finally and turned to me, hoisting those small shoulders like a cobra preparing for a deadly strike.
"Your mother has gone mad and you're the only one who can talk to her. I certainly can't. Of course. I can't reach your father." she said. "and there's no time to wait for him anyway. I don't want to call an ambulance if I can help it."
"Ambulance?"
"You la
^-
low how one thing leads to another and in this community there's enough gossip about this family as it is.," she continued. "Maybe you can get her to stop."
"Stop what?"
"I can't even begin to describe it." she said, wagging her head as if her hair had been soaked. "Let's just get home," she insisted and hurried to get into the car. Now that she had sharpened my curiosity and raised the level of my anxiety like mercury in a thermometer, I rushed to get in as well.
Once I was seated, my head bowed with the panic I felt.
"I must tell you," she continued after starting the engine and pulling away from the school parking lot. "I have always felt your mother was unbalanced. She had tendencies I spotted from the first moment I set eyes on her. I warned Taylor about her minutes after he had brought her around for me and your grandfather to meet her.
"She was coming to see us for the first time, but she wore no makeup, draped herself in what looked to be little more than a black sheet, kept her hair miles too long like you do and had enough gloom in her eyes to please a dozen undertakers. She could have worked constantly as a professional mourner. I could count on my fingers how many times I've seen a smile on that face, and even if she did smile at me, it was the smile of a madwoman, her eyes glittering like little knives, her wry lips squirming back and into the corners of her cheeks like worms in pain. How many times have I asked myself what he could possibly have seen in such a woman?"
I had heard a similar lecture before. "Maybe he was in love. Grandmother."
"Love," she spat as if the word put a bitter taste in her mouth. "How could he be in love with her?"
She glanced at me and then put her eyes back on the road. She was a good driver for someone in her early seventies, I thought, but then again, she was good at everything she
did.
Failure isn't in her personal vocabulary.
"Your mother was certainly never what
I
would call beautiful.
I'm
not saying she doesn't have pleasing features, because she does, but she does nothing to enhance them.
In
fact, what she does is diminish them just like you do with that silly makeup you wear.
"Of course, it
didn't
help that she had the personality of a pallbearer. Believe me," she said. "that takes the light from your eyes, the glow from your smile.
It's
no wonder to me that she never made any friends. V/ho wants to listen to the music she likes or read those poems about loss
and
death
and
insanity? She has no social graces, doesn't care about nice clothes or jewelry . She was never interested
in
your father's work or helped him meet business associates."
"Then what do you think
it
was, Grandmother,"
I
asked dryly,
"a
magic spell?"
"You think you're being facetious. I know,
but
let me tell you that woman can cast spells of sorts. I'll tell you what it was," she said, after a short pause, never wanting to
admit
to not knowing something. "She was probably his first love affair. Men, foolish men, often mistake sexual pleasure for love. Sex is like good food. You can eat it with anyone,
Cinnamon. Remember
that,"
she ordered.
"Then what's love?" I asked her.
"Love is commitment, responsibility, dedication.
It
requires maturity."
"Sounds boring," I said. "If that's love. I'll take good food."
She opened her mouth wide and glared at me, shaking her head.
"You'd better be careful of your thoughts," she admonished. "Insanity can be inherited, you know. The genes from our side of the family just might not be enough."
I wanted to laugh at her, but I kept thinking about what awaited me and how it might make her right,