The Stardust Lounge by Deborah Digges Read Free Book Online Page A

Charles—even in the face of our joy for his success, his new adventures— opened up bare rooms inside Stephen and me.
    In an attempt to close the spaces, I'd rearranged the furniture in the apartment; into the corner of the kitchen moved a small table just big enough for two, laid out a bright tablecloth and a light left burning. Here Stephen and I ate together.
    But the enormous rooms around us and the cold night outside bore through. Stephen would fall silent, speaking up only to ask if he could call Charles tonight. Of course. But Charles was often out.
    So might so-and-so sleep over? But it was a weeknight, and though Stephen was certainly allowed to telephone, one, two, three friends in the area, the parents of the boys said no.
    “How about if we curl up in my bed and I'll read to you?” I'd offer.
    “I'm too old to be read to, Mom, remember?” was his reply.
    “Awww,” I tried to cajole him, “just one good story for old times’ sake?
You
read to
me
now. You owe me fifty-two thousand and twenty-three stories. Read me ‘For the One Who Set Out to Study Fear.’ I love that one, don't you?”
    “I don't feel like it, Mom. Sorry.”
    Indeed, about a month or so before, in the middle of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Stephen had declared himself too old to be read to. But for years we had read to each other every night, sometimes for hours.
    Though Stephen is exceptionally bright, perceptive,taught himself to read at three, he possessed then and now a short attention span. At that time doctors, therapists, teachers rarely isolated the problem as attention deficit disorder.
    And Stephen was much like his namesake, my youngest brother, Stephen, who had also been a very active, delightful, but challenging little boy. Stephen's behaviors were not unfamiliar to me. He was, to be sure, insatiable about his interests. Physically gifted, he spent the good part of any day on his feet. The one, perhaps the only meditative quality young Stephen possessed was that he was a rapt listener to good stories.
    Stories were a way, for instance, to get Stephen to settle down enough to take a bath. Through the years we developed a repertoire of bathtub tales, most if not all focusing on the animals of my childhood.
    Stephen's favorite concerned a little black dog named Vick. He loved to hear me tell how one day on a bike ride in the country, I heard puppies whining and barking somewhere nearby. Behind a farmhouse I found a mesh kennel full of small black dogs. When the owner came out of the barn and offered to sell me a pup, I was sorry to tell him, “I don't have any money. But I'd take good care of one…
    “You's a little Sugabaka, ain'cha? Live over to the apple orchard? Behind Main?” Stephen laughed at my overwrought affectation of a deep southern Missouri accent.
    “Yes, sir,” I answered.
    “We-e-11, telly what I'd do. I'd trade one o’ them pups for a bushel of apples from your daddy's trees.”
    The tub stories were short, the length of the bath. Afterward,we'd settle in to read. And I began to see that by reading to him, Stephen's attention could be engaged for longer and longer periods of time. I hoped that eventually this experience would translate into other areas in which he might comfortably sit still.
    Stephen leaned close to me, his head just below mine so that I could smell his hair, his sweet child's breath as now and then he asked a question or asked to be reread certain passages. As he became more proficient at reading, we would trade off, he reading one page, I another.
    So we devoured fairy tales, myths, narrative poems, ghost stories, science fiction, and, as he grew older, novels. During art period and after school he liked to draw the characters we'd read about. Stephen pinned up his drawings until nearly every wall of his room was covered in pictures of Ged and the flying dragons from
The Wizard of Earthsea,
Long John Silver, Frog and Toad, Odysseus disguised as a sheep, the Hunchback of