The Stars Are Fire(7)

“I don’t fuss, you know that.”

Gene gazes at his raw son. “They’re going to take the adrenal gland and her ovaries, too.”

“My God,” says Grace. “Why the adrenal gland?” She is fairly sure she couldn’t point to the adrenal gland in her own body.

“Get rid of all the estrogen. Same with the ovaries.”

“Both?” Grace asks.

“Ovaries?”

“Breasts,” she says.

“Of course,” Gene answers, looking at his wife as if she were a moron.


When Grace is honest with herself, she finds that no part of her wants Merle to die. If that were to happen, Grace would lose her husband to grief, and her children would have no Nana.

“Maybe after the surgery,” Gene says mollifyingly. His mother’s illness is not, after all, Grace’s fault. “We’ll visit together. I’m going back now, just to calm her fears.”

“Is she frightened?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

Gene kisses Claire and Tom and opens the door.

“Give her my love,” Grace calls, surprising Gene and herself with the word, one she has never used in any situation involving her motherin-law.

“I will,” Gene says, but Grace knows that he won’t. Why upset his mother with a name Merle can’t abide?


Because Tom’s skin begins to peel, Grace deliberately misses an appointment with Dr. Franklin.


After the surgery, Gene’s mother wants to die. Specifically, she believes she is no longer a woman.


Gene spends more and more time with his mother, which turns out to be fortuitous, because Mrs. Holland dies ten days after surgery from a blood clot that travels to the heart. Gene believes his mother went willingly. Grace, who never had a chance to visit, believes that when the clot hit, Gene’s mother didn’t know or wish a thing.


“How’s Gene?” Rosie asks a few days after the funeral when she and Grace are sitting in Rosie’s backyard watching the children. Rosie has completed several loads of wash in Grace’s machine.

“He’s managing.”

“Truth.”

“He’s awful. I feel guilty. He makes me feel guilty.”

“How so?”

“If I had gone to see his mother once in a while, she wouldn’t have gotten breast cancer.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

“Yes, well.” She thinks a moment. “But you know what? It feels true.”

It feels true that she might have wished her motherin-law gone. Not dead, just gone. It feels true that she caused the hurtful night in bed, even though she sort of knows she didn’t. She does know, however, that it’s been too long since she and Gene have had sex. It feels sort of true that she doesn’t want to start up again.


One morning, when Grace is feeding the children, she hears, through the screened window, the surf smash against the rocks two streets over at the beach. It isn’t that she has never heard the surf from her house before; it’s that it seems especially noisy this clear summer’s day, a paradox that perplexes her.

With Claire walking beside her and Tom in the carriage under a small umbrella Grace rigged to the hood of the carriage, she visits the beach. She can’t get any closer than the sidewalk opposite the seawall, breeched every time a tall wave comes at it. She has never seen the surf so high. She notes that the residents of the houses that sit directly across from the seawall have come out to stare. Claire jumps up and down and shivers with delight and fear. Just as it seems that a wave will send its spray so high that it will cross the street and catch her, it pounds the wall and slithers away in the undertow.

A woman Grace has never seen before stands beside her and says, “If it takes the house, I got nothing.”

“It won’t do that. There’s no wind.”

“It isn’t even high tide yet,” the woman, in a green housedress, points out.

If Grace paid any attention to the tide chart that Gene pinned to the inside of the cellar door, she would know this. “There must have been a storm out to sea.”

“Beats me. Scary as hell though.” The woman seems to have a small head, but it’s an illusion because it’s covered in pin curls. She must have bad eyesight, though: Few women would wear glasses outside the home. Hers are oval in slender gold frames. “You live on the street, too? I haven’t seen you around,” the woman asks.

“I live two streets back.”

“Oh well then, you’re all right.” The woman stares at Grace’s children. “George and me, we couldn’t have them.”

“I’m sorry,” Grace says, taken aback by the revelation. “If you wanted them, I mean.”

“I wanted them all right. As for George, I can’t say. He’s long gone.” Arms crossed, the woman asks through thin, tight lips, “You like your husband?”

“I do.”

“You hang on to him. Life’s too damn hard without one.”

Grace watches her retreat into her house. Will she board up her windows? Fill sandbags? Should Grace have offered to help? How the woman must hate her and her house safely two streets back with a husband and two children in it.

The surf rises as high as the trees behind her. The spray wets the road. What are these messages from elsewhere? It’s impossible at this moment not to think the sea menacing. To give it a mind, and an angry one at that.