Your Eyes in Stars by M. E. Kerr Read Free Book Online Page B

house.”
    “Your parents must be intimate, Jessica.”
    “No. They don’t even sleep in the same room.”
    “Are they estranged?” Elisa asked.
    “No. They get along just fine. He often comes home early to take a walk with her. Then he makes her grasshopper cocktails.”
    “I believe they do it secretly,” Elisa said. “Even if it’s alle Jubeljahre einmal. That’s how we say once in a blue moon.”
    “Why would they do it secretly? They’re married.”
    “They might not want you to know they do it.”
    “I’d just as soon not know,” I said, “although I do know they don’t do it…. Can’t your father wait until they go to bed?”
    “My Mutti prepares hors d’oeuvres for Vater , and theyhave wine,” said Elisa. “Remember, he has been gone all week.”
    I liked to watch the Stadlers on their front porch weekend nights he was home. I’d seen Heinz Stadler light two cigarettes at the same time and pass one to Mrs. Stadler. Mrs. Stadler put it into a long cigarette holder, which she held between two fingers. He sat with his arm around her and looked as if he were whispering sexy things to her.
    One night my mother had moved away from the venetian blinds muttering, “I wouldn’t let a man maul me right in plain view of the neighbors.”
    “Where would you let a man maul you?” I asked her.
    She acted as though she hadn’t heard me.
     
    Elisa said, “Jessica, tell me something honestly. Is Seth never home because I’m there so much?”
    “He started staying away from home before you moved across the street,” I said. “Why do you always think about boys? I can take them or leave them.”
    “You are not German, that’s why. We even have a word for the fear we’ll be left behind when we’re twenty-one, with everyone else married. Torschlusspanik. I love our language more than any other. We have a word for everything. One word for something it takes six words to describe in other languages. I miss so Potsdam, where I’m from.” Elisa picked up the coffee can with our pollywogsin it. She said, “We’d better go. It’s getting dark…. I think so much of whom I will marry someday. He will be my Verlobter first. My fiancé. My mother is always saying who would be a good Verlobter for me. The answer is someone like Vater . I want to marry a man like my father.”
    “I want to marry one like mine but with a different job.”
    “I want mine to be an idealist, and romantic.”
    “I wonder if my father is romantic,” I said. “He couldn’t be that romantic married to her. He’s too involved with the prison anyway. Hey, I saw a note from Slater Carr to my father. You want to know what it said?”
    “Of course! Why didn’t you tell me before?”
    “I was saving it to tell you. The note said, ‘Boss, I have learned a special song for you, and I am ready to sing it. Yours truly, Mr. Carr.’”
    “What song?”
    “Search me. But I think I know why he learned it. I have a surprise for you.”
    We would often save surprises until we felt it was just the right time.
    I said, “Slater Carr learned that song for the Fourth of July, I bet. The Blues are playing right in this very park on the Fourth. We can see Slater Carr plainly, up on the bandstand.”
    “Can we talk to him?”
    “No one can talk to any of them.”
    “Someday perhaps I will marry a musician…. Oh, Jessica, listen!”
    “What?”
    “He’s playing,” Elisa whispered.
     
    When Taps was over, Elisa said, “Jessica, one of us should fall in love. Then the other one can help her through it. From what I know of the subject, it is filled with pitfalls.”
    “ You fall in love then. I don’t feel like it.”
    “Don’t make a comedy of it. I am telling you something more serious than our usual topics.”
    “I’m sorry. Don’t fall for Seth, because he’s undersexed.”
    “Who said?”
    “I said. Coming from the kind of parents we have, where there is no action to speak of in the master bedroom, ever , how would