Cinnamon (Shooting Stars 1)

Grandmother Beverly has never hesitated to express her opinions or make her demands. My grandfather had been a meek, gentle man whose strongest criticism or chastisement of her was a shaking of his head and only twice at that. He went left to right, left to right and stopped with a shrug and that was always the extent of his resistence. No arguments, no pouts, no rants or raves or anything added. Once, when I tried to describe him to Clarence, I dryly said. "Think of him as Poland after Hitler's invasion."

It was not difficult for me to think of

Grandmother Beverly as a ruthless dictator.

"What I'm thinking," Mommy replied slowly to Grandmother Beverly's question, "is that I'll give birth to a healthy child. Besides, it's not so uncommon these days for a woman my age to give birth. I recently read where a woman in her fifties got pregnant. And not as a surrogate mother either." she quickly added.

Grandmother Beverly's eyes darkened and narrowed with disapproval. She picked up her fork and returned to her methodical eating, gazing furiously at my father who busied himself with cutting his steak. After that, silence boomed in our ears as loudly as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

However, silence was no sign of surrender when it came to my grandmother. She never missed an opportunity to express her disapproval. All through Mommy's months of pregnancy, Grandmother Beverly nagged and nipped at her like a yapping poodle. As soon as Mommy started to show. Grandmother's complaints intensified.

"A woman your age walking around in maternity clothes," she barked. "What a sight you must make. You even have some strands of gray in your hair, and now you have to watch what you eat more than ever. Women at your age gain weight more easily. You'll end up looking like my sister Lucille who popped children out Eke a rabbit and ended up resembling a baby elephant. Her hips grew so big, she once got stuck in a chair," Grandmother emphasized, looking at me and nodding.

Whenever she couldn't get a reaction from Mommy, she would try directing herself at me as if I were a translator who would explain what she had said.

"Aunt Lucille has only three children, doesn't she?" I asked.

"That's too many." Grandmother Beverly replied so quickly anyone would have thought she and I had rehearsed the dialogue. "Children are expensive and difficult nowadays. They make you years older than you are in short order. They need, need, need. When I was a child, the word want did not exist. My mouth was stuffed with 'please' and 'thank you' and 'no sir' and 'yes ma'am' and that was that. I can't even imagine my father's reaction to my asking him for a new dress or a car or money to waste on silly jewelry. Why if he was alive today and saw some of those... I don't know what you call them... walking around with rings in their noses and in their belly buttons, he'd think the world had come to an end and rightly so."

"Well, they'll be only two children in this house," I said and looked at Mommy. She was trying hard not to pay attention, but Grandmother Beverly was wearing her down, her snipping words coming at her from every direction like a pack of hyenas. By now Mammy was full of aches and pains and too pale. I thought.

And then she suffered the miscarriage. She started to hemorrhage one night and had to be rushed to the hospital. I woke to the sounds of her screams and panic. Daddy wouldn't let me go along. He came home alone hours and hours later and announced she had lost the baby.

Grandmother Beverly felt no guilt or sorrow. Her reaction was to claim it was Nature's way of saying no to something that shouldn't have been begun in the first place. When they brought Mommy home the day after. Mommy couldn't bear to look at her. She didn't look at anyone very much for that matter, not even me. Her eyes were distant, her sorrow shutting her up tightly, a prisoner in her own body.

Now I trembled inside imagining the possible reasons for my grandmother's very unexpected arrival at school.

Quickly closing my copy of Othello and my notebook, I gathered all of my things and rose. I knew everyone in the class was watching me, their eyes loyally following my every gesture, but most of my life I've felt people's eyes on me. It doesn't bother me anymore. In fact, it probably never did or at least never as much as it should. That indifference, or that dramatic fourth wall, as Miss Hamilton likes to call it, was always up, always between me and the rest of the world whenever I wanted it to be. In that sense I'm really like Mommy, although I must say. Daddy can be deaf and dumb at the drop of a nasty word. too. He certainly was that way more often around

Grandmother Beverly these days.

I know that people, including some of my teachers and especially my grandmother, would say I deliberately attract attention because of the way I dress and behave. My auburn hair is thick and long, down to my shoulder blades. I won't cut it any shorter than that and barely trim my bangs. Sometimes, strands fall over my eyes or over one eye and I leave them there, looking out at the world, my teachers, other students, everything and everyone through a sheer, rust-tinted curtain. I know it unnerves some people and especially drives Grandmother Beverly to the point where her pallid face takes on crimson blotches at the crests of her bony cheeks.

"Cut your hair or at least have the decency to brash it back neatly. I can't tell if you're looking at me or what when I speak to you," she often carped. One criticism led to another. She was a spider weaving its web. "And don't you have anything cheerful to wear to school?'

Like Mommy. I favor dark colors. I'm always dressed in black or dark blue, often dark gray. and I put on a translucent white lipstick and black nail polish. I darken my eyebrows and wear too much eyeshadow, and I keep out of the sun, not only because I know it damages your skin, but I like having a light complexion. My skin is so transparent. I can see tiny blue veins in my temples. and I think about my blood moving through these tiny wires to my heart and my brain.

At the moment, my heart felt as though it had been put on pause.

Edith Booth waited for me at the classroom door. She was performing her role as hall monitor, which meant she would escort me out and to the principal's office like some military parade guard. She pressed her thin, crooked lips together and pulled her head up, tightening her neck and her chin. She held the door open, but as I walked through it. I reached back, seized the knob and pulled it hard out of her hands, slamming it behind me.

I could hear the class roar at the sight of her staring into the shut door, her jaw probably dropped, her perfect posture definitely ruined. I heard her fumbling with the knob and then come charging out, flustered, rushing to catch up with me, her heels clicking like an explosion of small firecrackers on the tile corridor floor.

"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.