My Name Is Venus Black(6)

“You don’t care?” I said accusingly. “You don’t care about what your own daughter is learning in school?”

“You’re not learning this in school,” she said. “You’re just reading your books about space.”

“So what? How could a mother not be interested in her daughter’s favorite subject?”

“Okay, Venus,” she finally said, like it was super hard just to talk to me. “Do you mean with the naked eye? And where am I standing? It depends on what part of space I’m looking at.”

She was right. The answer I had read in a book was three thousand, but that probably meant the number of stars that are visible in the entire, viewable sky.

“Okay. So yeah,” I told her. “With the naked eye and if you could see them all at once.”

“Three thousand,” she said, turning to look at me with a sly smile, still stirring the junk in the pan behind her.

She was right again. But there’s no way she could’ve known that unless she read it in one of my books, which made me mad. “You’re wrong,” I told her. “It’s not really three thousand, since lots of those stars you think you see already died a long time ago, so all you’re looking at is leftover light.”

“For God’s sake,” she said, turning back to the stove. Then she told me to set the table.

I was reaching for the plates when I smelled smoke. One of the pieces of toast was stuck in its slot and burning. I tried to force the lever up, but it wouldn’t budge—clearly, four holes doesn’t mean quality. When the fire alarm started going off, Inez yelled at me to unplug the toaster, while she dragged a kitchen chair out to the hall to stand on so she could reset the alarm. Leo had been sitting at the kitchen table spinning the wheels of a toy car and staring into their turning. But now he was wailing at the top of his lungs like he always did when he heard any kind of loud noise.



I took Leo downstairs to my room to calm him down. I had discovered one of his favorite things was to watch the blue lava lamp I got at Spencer’s at the mall. I plopped down on my bed, expecting Leo to go straight to the lamp. But, instead, he lay down next to me—not touching, of course, because Leo hates that. He stared up at the mobile of the solar system hanging from my light fixture. I’d recently bought it when our class took a field trip to the Science Center in Seattle. I also bought dozens of glowing stars, which I stuck to the ceiling.

I didn’t realize Leo hadn’t seen them yet, so I began to point at each planet and name it for him. “Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars…” Then I said, “Let’s count the stars, Leo, starting in the corner.” I tried to include him, even though I knew he wouldn’t join me. At this point, he hardly talked. Just single words, like no!, and our names, and doughn for don’t.

While I counted aloud, Leo continued to calm down. After a while, he was at that stage of a tantrum where the worst is over but your body still has the hiccups. I love that feeling, and it made me wish I could have a big tantrum, too, even though I couldn’t decide what I would cry about.

I had just begun counting the stars from zero again, and when I got to five, Leo said five, too, and then kept counting with me. I was never so shocked in my life. If I hadn’t been lying down I might have fainted.

I wanted to race upstairs to tell Inez that Leo could count out loud, but I was scared to interrupt him in case he never did it again. So, instead, I lay there listening to his small, mechanical voice—sex…leven…fiffteam…wendynime—as he counted with me across the starry ceiling.

So this is what Leo would sound like if he said more than a word at a time.

When we got to the end of the stars, Leo pointed at the mobile and made his grunting sound that means he wants something. I realized he wanted me to do it all again, so I started to name the planets again, and on the second round, he started to name the planets after me, pausing when we got to Venus to say, “Venus is red!”



He was right. For some reason, Venus was red, even though Mars is supposed to be the red planet. But this was another shock, that Leo knew his colors. It was like all of a sudden something had clicked in his brain. For a long time I’d been trying to teach him colors, using the original box of eight Crayola crayons. After that night, he named them all, like it was easy. But when Inez got him a box of twenty-four Crayola crayons for Christmas later that year, he got so upset. He would only use the original eight primary colors, and every other color he called “wrong.”

Leo is funny like that. He cracks me up. And thinking about all this now makes me miss him so much. At home, sometimes I act like he’s a big hassle. But now I feel so guilty, because he must be having so many tantrums without me there to do my part in his routines. I wish I could ask Inez to bring him to see me, but she hasn’t come back since the first day when I refused to talk. Plus, Leo would have a fit, because he doesn’t like to go new places. Only familiar places like McDonald’s.

Anyway, after the night the toaster broke, we all realized Leo was smarter than we’d thought. So I started to teach him things like ABCs. Which wasn’t that easy, because he only wanted to do it when he wanted to. You had to wait for him or he would totally ignore you. And you had to turn everything into a rhyme or chant.

As a rule, I never liked it when any of my family came down to my basement bedroom. At the time, I liked the feeling of being away from everyone else. And though the room had ugly knotty-pine paneling, the attached bath and shower more than made up for that. After Leo fell in love with my mobile and my stars, I didn’t mind him coming down at all.