The Stardust Lounge: Stories From a Boy's Adolescence

168 Pages·2002·1.89 MB·English

by  Deborah Digges

Acclaim for Deborah Digges's
The Stardust Lounge
“The Stardust Lounge is shocking, touching, funny, and beautifully written. For anyone concerned with teenage rebellion, anyone who plans a family, anyone who loves children
and animals—this book is a must. I was caught up in the drama; I could not put it down.”
—Jane Goodall
“Well crafted, quite stunning at times.… So idiosyncratic and strangely moving that if it were fiction it would seem contrived beyond critical description.”
—The Washington Post
“[One] of the best confessional memoirs this year.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A wrenching memoir about the things that mothers and children will do to, and for, one another, written with a poet's eye for resonant images.”
—Booklist
“Deborah Digges has written a memoir so powerfully charged and exquisitely textured that I found it transcended its medium and drew me unequivocally into its world, as only
the best books do.”
—Nicholas Christopher
“The rest of the world may suffer from blindness and prejudice toward the most interesting children and animals but Digges sees them clearly, likes them for what they are and
refuses to abandon them to a hostile world. If everyone could be the kind of parent that she is the world would be a far better place.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Deborah Digges
The Stardust Lounge
Deborah Digges is the author of the memoir Fugitive Spring and three award-winning volumes of poetry. Her poetry appears regularly in The New Yorker and other publications. She lives in
Massachusetts with her husband, Frank.
Also by Deborah Digges
POETRY
Vesper Sparrows
Late in the Millennium
Rough Music
Ballad of the Blood—The Poems of
Maria Elena Cruz Varela (translations)
MEMOIR
Fugitive Spring

FOR FRANK
and in memory of my father
There are no laws in the air.
Stephen on the stoop, 1991
Summer, 1983
PROLOGUE:
Midday, midsummer. Iowa City. Stephen and I are waiting for our clothes to dry at the Bloomington Street Laundromat. Charles is away at summer camp.
When we arrived at the laundry, unloaded our baskets, and hauled them inside we heard something familiar, the clear, resonant sound of a cello, a young man practicing while his
clothes go through the washer and dryer.
The first time we discovered the cellist at the Laundromat this past fall, twelve-year-old Charles had been undone with excitement. “Mom,” he'd whispered to me, “this is a painting!
I've got to do some sketches!”
As the cellist plays, the few of us here are listening—the attendant, an older couple passing through. In the parking lot their Air stream trailer glints in the sun. Its license plates read
Idaho.

Just outside the entrance five-year-old Stephen enacts a game in which, from time to time, he whirls and crouches, brandishing his favorite blanket at an imaginary foe. A flock of
sparrows anting in the dust nearby rises and circles and resettles each time he sweeps close to them.
I fold the boys’ bright shirts and shorts, our old, comfortable towels, mismatched socks, an ordinary activity made sacred in light of the music. The cellist plays through to the end of a
piece. Then he sets his instrument aside and unloads his clothes from the dryer.
As I ready to carry our baskets to the car, the woman of the Airstream trailer comes over to me and touches my arm.
“Is that your little boy?” she asks, nodding toward Stephen, who kneels now, quiet in the strangeness of the silence the music created. He stares toward the sparrows taking wings full
of dust into their feathers.
“Yes,” I answer. “His name is Stephen.”
“He's—” She stops. “There is something special about him, isn't there? I've been watching him. May I lay my hand on his head? “
I must look confused, because the woman offers quickly, “My husband and I are both professors of parapsychology. We study psychic phenomena. We've been traveling across country
on a lecture tour. Now we're on our way home…”
“I see,” I offer, trying to hide my skepticism.
“My name is Beth. What's yours?”
“Deborah.”
“Is it all right if I touch him?”
“If Stephen doesn't mind.”
“Stephen? “ the woman says softly as she moves toward him and kneels. “Stephen, my name is Beth.” She places her hand on his head.
“Hi, Beth,” Stephen says easily. “I'm Thteve.” He smiles, revealing his missing teeth as he looks into her face.
As I see it, the stars were once nameless, and the days and the months of the year. Then they had many names, the names we gave them and forgot and misremembered. They fell in and out of
their own timing, the seasons particular to the angle of the light, the pitch of the planet—by the laws of gravity earth's one moon decided the tides.
Maybe with people it is different. Certain people emanate something other, some newness, time or timelessness. They enlighten or shadow others. It is in them and little gets in its way.
So it is with a woman named Beth and a child with a lisp who calls himself Thteve at the threshold of the laundromat one summer day in Iowa, a moment I'll remember, a moment so
many others will fall into to lose themselves or find direction.
Beth is kneeling. She is laying her hand on my son's blond head and nodding. “Oh, yes,” she says as she smooths his hair and stands. She touches my arm. “Deborah—your Stephen?
He'll know a higher turn in the spiral.”