Starry Night
Isabel Gillies
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For Bill Clegg
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Author’s Note
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
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17
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60
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction. None of the characters exist in the real world. Wren is not me, the schools are not schools I went to, and nothing in the book actually happened. Of course all of it comes from my heart, experience, and imagination, so if you know me, it might seem recognizable, but everything in the book is a mishmash, a brew, or plain old make-believe.
“Love I get so lost, sometimes.”
—Peter Gabriel
1
I don’t think you fall in love for the first time until something—or someone—feels dangerous. I don’t mean dangerous like going to jail, I guess I mean just different, really different. Different can feel dangerous, right? Like, I think it feels dangerous when your heart pounds so hard you are sure it’s visible beating under your shirt. Or when you can’t sleep, or catch your breath, or concentrate or listen, or when you turn a different color just thinking about his face, or when your relationships with your friends get all screwed up, or when you fight with your parents. When you change direction or your mind, or when tears fall and fall from your eyes for hours, when your whole life gets put in a Cuisinart—all because of a single person.
For me, it started at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and it ended there too. I am not sure why the person that I was in love with ended up not wanting to be in love with me anymore. A part of me thinks it was my fault. That does not sound strong, but sometimes I don’t feel strong. What I hear is that we are very strong, we girls. Girls can do anything. We are leaders, we are intuitive, we are brave, we are smart, and we kick ass. “If women ran the world there would be no war.” Don’t you hear that? Maybe it’s true; I’m certainly not going to say it’s not. But if it is true, then how come it can all feel so impossibly fragile? How come you can feel like you are getting it entirely wrong?
Maybe boys don’t feel strong all the time either. I don’t think van Gogh felt strong, and look at everything he did—look at The Starry Night. Maybe you can feel fragile and still paint The Starry Night. Or maybe you can paint it because you are fragile. Maybe you can be strong and still be vulnerable, like a tree. Have you ever seen a tree filled with birds? There seems to be one on every branch, and then all of a sudden something happens, possibly from the atmosphere or the surroundings—or maybe not, maybe it’s something having to do with the tree itself, the branches, the leaves, or even the roots—that causes the birds to fly away in unison. And the tree is just left there—maybe strong, but left.
The air felt loaded in New York City. It was one of those days that you feel not only that the temperature will drop but that something tremendous is going to happen. It was a Monday in November and the sky was so blue it was violet, uninterrupted by clouds. The sidewalks reflected the shining sun, making us squint. Mostly, I remember this crazy wind. It was so forceful you knew the meteorologists were talking about it on the news. It was pushing us around. Our hair whooshed over our heads, twisting and tangling. Sometimes a gust would come and push us a few steps faster than we would have usually walked. This made us squeal. We were suited up in fall sweaters and jean jackets over our dark blue, pleated school uniforms and black leggings, scarves wrapped multiple times around our necks. Fall clothes are the best ones—I feel so much safer in a cardigan and boots than in some flimsy dress and sandals. But even in our chunky sweaters, we weren’t dressed for the sudden change in weather; we weren’t at all ready for it. The three inches of leg between where the stretchy legging fabric ended and my ankle booties began were red with cold, and that was just the beginning. We were not protected. We should have been wearing parkas, heavy ones.
Farah, Padmavati, and Reagan were coming over to my house after school because that night my father, who is the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was hosting the opening of a new exhibit he was curating, and—for the first time—my friends and I were invited to the party. Charlie, our only friend-who-is-a-boy, was meeting us at my house. He was probably already there because his school, St. Tim’s, is on the west side of Manhattan, where we all live. My brother, Oliver, goes there too, but he’s a senior, and we are sophomores. St. Tim’s is just for boys, and Hatcher, where Farah, Padmavati, Reagan, and I go to school, is just for girls. It’s on the east side of Central Park. But it’s not really where we met. We’ve known each other since we were born. Since before we were born really. We’re Turtles. Fifteen years ago on the Upper West Side, five babies were born all in the same month (basically) to parents in the same reading group, all because of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It sounds like a reading group orgy—but really, it was because of the discussion of one hot scene and what happened when everyone got home.
Our parents called us the Turtles because turtles lay so many eggs at one time.
2
Several weeks before the very windy day, it was an early autumn evening, the first one where you knew summer was truly gone. I was procrastinating in the living room with my parents.
“Can they all come?” I said to my mother and father.
“When are they not all invited to everything?” Mom said, pointedly sliding her new orange-and-purple reading glasses farther up her nose as she dog-eared a page in the Architectural Digest she was reading. Dad stood up and poked the fire.
“They can come to everything here, but they have never been to a Met thing. Can we sit at the same table? Me, Vati, Farah, Reagan, and Charlie?”
“Darling, we have no idea how we’ll do the tables now,” Dad said, in his slight Dutch accent that just sounds European unless you know what you are listening to. A log rolled awkwardly off the pile and he bent down to prop it back up. Although he is one hundred percent city, he does things like kick around burning logs on the fire like someone who lives in the country. And Dad wears Barbour oilskin jackets on the weekends like Prince Charles.
“But we can all stay till the end, right?”
“Yes, Wren! Goodness, the exhibition isn’t for months. Relax, this is worse than you are about Halloween.” Mom put her glasses up on
her head and looked at me with wide, this-is-getting-annoying eyes.
“I don’t dress up anymore,” I said, and pulled a random thread on the upholstered armchair I was sitting in.
“Don’t pull that, Wrenny!” My mother kicked her leg over in my direction to get me to stop.
“Sorry.” I really do pull on things too much.
“The whole chair will unravel!” She winked at me, put her glasses back down on her nose, and resumed her reading.
“It will be fun, my love. You all can dress up and hobnob with the nobs.” Dad was finished futzing with the logs in the small arched marble fireplace, but before he sat back down on the love seat to read his book, he came over and kissed my head. “Are you all done with your homework?”
“No.” I scrunched my nose up, knowing that he knew I wasn’t and that’s why he asked.
“Well, get to it and leave us to think about parties. Your B average that is required to apply to Saint-Rémy isn’t going to materialize by itself, and I believe you have some work to do in that area.” He raised his eyebrows.
I had just started my sophomore year at Hatcher, but I was already working on my application for this unbelievable, impossible-to-get-into junior-year-abroad program in France that I had been wanting to go to since the end of eighth grade, when my art teacher, Mrs. Rousseau, looked at a collage of a jungle I’d made and told me about the program. She said anyone who could draw a leopard like that (it was quite fierce and a little crazy-looking) should go to Saint-Rémy. It’s an art school in an old nunnery next to the asylum where Vincent van Gogh convalesced for a year and painted one hundred and fifty works of art, most of them masterpieces. He painted The Starry Night there.
“Oh my god, I’m never going to get in!” I slid down the chair onto the wool sisal rug next to our old corgi, May, and curled up with her in front of the fire.
“Wren, please—you won’t get in if you lie around on the floor with May. Get upstairs and Go. To. Work. That self-portrait isn’t going to draw itself either, you know,” my mother said.
Lying on the floor in the glow and heat, I wished I could just be May. How was I going to do that self-portrait? You had to produce a great one to be considered for this program—it had to be genius. Self-portraits are so intense. Have you ever seen Frida Kahlo’s? The one with the monkey and the hummingbird around her neck? Oh my lord, she is giving such a look you can’t believe it. She actually said, “I was born a bitch.” And you can see that very clearly in the painting. There is no hiding in a self-portrait; everything comes out.
I put my head on May’s side and her insides made a low guttural gurgle. I closed my eyes and pictured The Starry Night. It’s my favorite painting of all time. Sometimes when I feel that I won’t be able to do something, or I want something really badly, I put this painting right in front of my mind’s eye and wish on one of its eleven stars. There might be more than eleven if you are counting the flashes of yellow that swirl around in the midnight sky, but I don’t count those. There is one bigger ball I guess you could call a star, but I think of it as the moon. No, I count eleven true stars. That night I picked the bright one next to the cypress tree to wish on. Please, star, give me what I need to draw a real self-portrait and get into the France program next year. Please … please … please … I drifted blissfully around in the thick blue swirls of van Gogh’s paintbrush marks. The fire was soaking into my face and hands and May’s thumping heart beat steadily beneath my ear.
“Wren? What’s going on down there?” Mom called from her chair.
“Mama?” I was shocked to hear her voice. I had been in the cosmos.
“Yes, love.” She looked down at May and me. Her glasses were back on the top of her head.
“Mom,” I said. She sighed like she only half wanted to hear what I would say next.
I didn’t move. I just looked up into her impatient but listening face.
“Mom, what if I look inside to draw myself, and I don’t like what I see?”
She took a deep breath in and let it out slowly.
“I think you will find that your insides are very beautiful, Wren. But you have to look. You have to try.” She leaned back so I couldn’t see her anymore. “You have to get off the floor.”
May shifted like my head had gotten too heavy for her to be comfortable. I thought I should probably text everyone to see if they were doing their homework.
“And why don’t you leave your phone with us, yes?” My father looked up at me over his reading glasses and stuck out his hand. I swear Dad is some kind of mind-reading wizard. They both are.
3
I am going to introduce my friends by going back in time. Then we’ll get back to the present. The future will be in some other book.
Farah, Vati, Reagan, and I all started at Hatcher together in kindergarten. In seventh-grade, there is a school fair that everyone in the class organizes, hosts, and cleans up after. You vote on a charity to donate the money to: the Michael J. Fox Foundation, breast cancer, the Natural Resources Defense Council—something like that. You decide what games to have: face painting, apple dunking, guess the teacher’s weight. You sell tickets, you make posters, and then one Friday afternoon it all happens in the Hatcher gym on the tenth floor.
Farah, Vati, Reagan, and I got Charlie and about six of his friends to come to our seventh-grade fair. We were the only girls in the grade who brought boys that weren’t their little brothers. It was pretty awesome because having boys there made the fair feel cool and happening. Instead of helping with the cleanup, we bailed and went to Nino’s Pizza on Lexington and Eighty-Sixth Street and played video games with Charlie and his friends. We didn’t think a thing of it again all weekend; maybe we thought there was a cleanup committee that somehow none of us were on? Anyway, Monday morning when we got to school we got in a mother lode of trouble.
“You don’t give a SHIT about people with diabetes!” Tyler Morgenstern yelled from the top of her desk where she was standing at the grade-wide emergency homeroom meeting that was called to discuss what we had done. Mrs. Garrison, our homeroom teacher, blanched when Tyler said “shit,” but as the meeting was supposed to be an opportunity for everyone to talk about how they were feeling, she didn’t say anything. “All you guys care about is St. Tim’s boys!” continued Tyler.
“Are you KIDDING ME?” Farah stood up. “I will have you know, my aunt has diabetes. She has to walk around all day long with a machine attached to her with an alarm in case her insulin drops! It was my damn idea to give the money to the American Diabetes Association.”
“Damn” made both Mrs. Garrison and Mr. Tropple half stand up.
“Girls, calm down, we are trying to work this through now,” Mr. Tropple, our bald Marxist history teacher / other homeroom teacher urged.
“Oh YEAH—then why did you guys leave it all up to us to clean up? You just left with your little boyfriends without looking back,” said Katie Boyer, who stood up on her chair to make that point. She wasn’t the most agile of girls, so she just put one leg up on her desk. “If you gave a shit…”
“Oh, hey there!” pleaded Mr. T. “Let’s watch our language, girls.”
“Sorry, but honestly, Mr. T, they think they are so cool just because they know guys from St. Tim’s,” Katie said, in a much calmer voice.
“I don’t think we think we’re cool—I think we, well, I know we are sorry.” I offered this but it was thirty-something against four, and the thirty looked like they wanted to destroy us. It felt medieval, like they were villagers and we were the outcast dragon that had eaten and spat out all of their sheep.
“Wren, give me a break, they are all just jealous that we brought boys to the fair and had fun and all they could offer up were their little brothers!” Farah said, not under her breath at all.
Tyler started to cry, which made me feel really bad. Vati started to cry too. With seventh graders, crying is contagious; in minutes you could have at least thirty hysterical tween girls on your hands.
Reagan’s hand shot up.
“Reagan,” said Mrs. Garrison.
“Okay.” She got up on her desk. I guess the desks were like our podiums, but every time one of us got up there the teachers sort of put their hands in the air like they were there to save us if we fell. “It sounds like they feel taken advantage of. That is what I am hearing.” All the townspeople nodded.
“If we say we’re sorry, and maybe write a paper during recess about how we would feel if we got taken advantage of, maybe we can move on and let this water move under the bridge.”
Reagan is so sophisticated. Her mom has spoken to her like she was a thirty-year-old since she was three. My parents practically still sing me lullabies.
I raised my hand.
“Wren?” Mrs. Garrison said.
“Um, if we are going to do that—and I totally think we should because we feel bad and everything—can I use my computer? I fully intend to write more than two pages, and I really can’t write that much longhand.” I get special computer privileges because I’m dyslexic and have dysgraphia. Although I can draw an owl so it feels like it’s sitting right next to you, I have the handwriting of a four-year-old.
“That’s fine, Wren,” Mr. T said.
“I have one more thing to say.” Farah didn’t need to stand on her desk; when she spoke everyone in the class listened.
“I will write this paper, but I’m telling you something … if someone took advantage of me, I wouldn’t whine about it in a shitty meeting like this. I would use my six years of tae kwon do and kick their ass.”
4
Hanging out with Charlie, age twelve:
“This, you noodles, is called DUMBO!” Winston Fudge, Charlie’s dad, called out from the front of the Nosh van. Reagan, Farah, Vati, Charlie, and I all went to the same preschool. But once we got into elementary school, we didn’t see Charlie except on the weekends for playdates or soccer, or sometimes when Charlie invited me to ride in the Nosh van with him and his dad delivering catered meals to people. Nosh is now a huge catering company, but when Charlie’s parents started it, they cooked out of their kitchen on the Upper West Side and had an online menu; then people would order dishes to have in their fridges to nosh on, get it? Nosh?
