The Starfish Sisters: A Novel(3)
My mama died when I was eight, of a virulent breast cancer that showed up and killed her over the course of six months. When she died she took all the softness and kindness of my world with her, leaving me with my father, harsh and dry as a moonscape, a man who only really cared about preaching.
He was an evangelical long before it was called that. He listened to Billy Graham and Oral Roberts and considered them a bit too soft. He called his churches the Blood of Christ, every single one of them, from Eden, Mississippi, to Rifle, Colorado, and Holder, Nevada, then finally Oregon. His specialty was reviving churches with declining membership, building them up, then being “called” to the next one. They were always small, off some big highway. The only difference in Blue Cove was the high tourist traffic, which he played to his advantage.
The church in Oregon came with a house, a sweet little two-story Victorian. It was plain, with a living room, dining room, and kitchen on the main floor and three bedrooms upstairs. My room had windows that looked out over the dunes to the ocean and the rocks, so I heard it crashing all day and all night, a steadiness that made me feel whole. In the spring, lilacs bloomed in clouds all over town and made the world smell like a department store.
The church itself was a white-framed building with a proper steeple and stained-glass windows all down each side. A steeple rose at the front, and he loved it as if it were his very own special signal tower to the heavens.
When we arrived I’d just turned twelve, and got my period three days later. There was no chance in hell I would tell him, so I stole a five-dollar bill out of his stash and took myself down to the local market, which was not a supermarket back then, not even close, but big enough I felt like I could buy pads without much notice.
But standing there, in front of all the options I froze. My underwear was stuffed with toilet paper and I was afraid it might soak through, but my face got hotter and hotter as I stood there, bewildered by the choices. So many different kinds! And tampons, too, but I didn’t quite get how that all worked.
I missed my mother wildly, wishing ghost stories could be real so I could ask her this one thing.
A woman in a floaty blouse and jeans stopped beside me. Her hair was long, salt and pepper, tied back in a messy ponytail. There was paint on her hands. “You need some help, sweetheart?”
I looked at her, then away, petrified. My voice was gone, but I managed to jerk my head into a kind of nod.
“Let’s see here.” She chose a box. “These should do. They have adhesive so they stick to your underwear. I’m a long ways past my bleeding days, but I’m guessing this small size will work just fine.”
I hugged the box to my chest and looked at her in gratitude. Her eyes were big and pale blue. Another streak of paint hung on her earlobe, and for some reason, it made it easier.
“You all right?” she asked.
I nodded.
“You just moved here with the preacher, right?”
Another nod.
“My name is Beryl Axford. I live in the house with the purple door down at the end of the road. You need anything, you come find me.” She smiled. “I have a granddaughter your age. She’ll be here in a couple of weeks. Maybe you’ll be friends.”
“Thank you.”
“You have money to pay?”
“Yeah.”
She patted my shoulder and left me.
Now, on a rainy day decades later, I press my forehead against the cold glass. Headaches have been my constant companion since the attack. The cold eases this one a little. I long for the studio space where Phoebe is moving around. It seems like I might be able to breathe there.
Across the span of dunes, Phoebe stands by the window of the studio in her red sweater, drinking coffee. I’m wearing a thick white sweater myself. It’s cold and drizzly, the sea a restless dark gray. I watch for a long time, hoping Phoebe will send me a sign, but she never looks up.
Eventually, I move away from the window, into the kitchen. It’s a Frank Lloyd Wright house, at least nominally, built by one of his assistants from plans FLW drew, and it is as extraordinary as that implies, with built-ins and acres of wood and glass meant to frame the views. When I bought it, it had been abandoned since the ’60s, was rumored to be haunted, and was in danger of being torn down by the city. It had needed a lot of rehab—a long, expensive task—but I loved it madly. More to the point at the moment, I feel safe here, sequestered away from the world on the Oregon coast. It’s my refuge.
I’m no purist, not like Phoebe would have been. She wouldn’t have hung the paintings and drawings and photos of sea stars and anemones that I’ve been collecting all these years; instead she would have kept to the spirit of the house in some totally appropriate way. I don’t even know what I mean by that, exactly. Maxfield Parrish prints? Architectural drawings?
But I love my choices. A watercolor of a tide pool hangs beside the window with fat pink and orange sea stars clinging to the rocks. The colors are soft, the lines easy, blurry, much like many others I’ve picked up at art shows here and there. I don’t invest in art so much as collect the things I love, and in the process support struggling artists. Acting is not the easiest life, but it beats dragging around to parks and fairgrounds all spring and summer, hawking your wares.
Or maybe that’s not fair. Maybe it just sounds like torture to me. For all the fame my work has brought, I don’t love talking to strangers. My upbringing was so weird that I’m always sure I’m getting something wrong. It makes me reticent, if not exactly shy.