Descending Star

BACCHANALIA

Charlie's modest four room house became a lot smaller on the week leading up to the prom. The kitchen contractors occupied the entire first floor and back yard. Ben had to wear headphones on his remote sessions, to hear his instructors. Charlie himself couldn't take the noise, but he fled the scene every day, either to work or to his fishing holes, and effectively left the workers unsupervised.

Every afternoon, Dr. Niland came to the house, and Ben's miniscule domain compressed even further, down to the narrow staircase, which he worked on endlessly, with the crutches. Dr. Niland seemed to be in on the Cullens' plot to get him to the prom next Saturday night. He would not have a single cast removed by that time, not one of the seven. Dr. Niland's therapy regimen focused on a low expectation: to ensure that Ben would make it safely to his assigned seat under his own power.

"If I won't be able to dance, what's the point?"

Charlie was swept up by nostalgia for the spring ritual and imparted stories of its fabled past, in his efforts to boost Ben's enthusiasm. The prom had been held in the high school gymnasium every year since he'd been a kid himself, a big deal, a major rite of passage.

"Different theme every year, no two ever alike," Charlie insisted, one evening over dinner.

They were working on trays of fried fish and biscuits in the living room. The kitchen had been utterly demolished and now hung in a kind of contractor-induced limbo in which not much seemed to happen for days on end, except noise, noise, noise, to no positive effect. Ben didn't know precisely where Edythe was at that moment– she might have been hiding in his bedroom or might even have been out in the yard, but she would not be far, since she stubbornly refused to leave his proximity, not even to hunt, so he was certain that she could hear this conversation.

Ben skeptically asked, "The prom themes have never repeated, not once?"

"Not once, ever," Charlie confirmed with confidence. "Only went to one, myself, so I'm not exactly sure. Our theme was Under the Sea. Huge papier mâché sharks and squids hung from the ceiling. Corals on the tables. Jellyfish on the walls."

"How did all that stuff get there?" Ben asked, reasonably enough, and to Charlie the preparations were a mystery. Presumably prom themes and their props manifested themselves spontaneously in gymnasiums when the flowers bloomed.

"Did the sharks have candy inside?"

"This was a prom, not a birthday party." Charlie began to suspect that his chain was being pulled.

"What color was your tux?"

"Looked pink to me. This was before Renée's time, but she's seen the pictures. She says the color was cerise."

"Fancy word for pink," Ben provided. "I don't want to go to this thing," Ben admitted, certain he could be heard by more than just Charlie. "I feel like I'm being roped into it. Look at me. I'm a cripple. I won't be able to dance. I'll just be a lump in the corner."

Charlie scoffed, "Don't give me that malarkey. You'll be a lump with that Cullen girl on your arm. And I don't know about not dancing, neither. Even crippled, you'll twirl circles around all these yahoos in town. You think you got problems. At least you're improving, with that Fred Niland coming around to put you back together every afternoon. Look at me. Every time I come home, the kitchen looks worse and worse. Now they're digging into the subfloor. Gotta watch my step just getting to the refrigerator. I can see down into the basement for Chrissakes."

"You'll be glad you did it, when it's all finished. The cabinets were falling off the walls, and that linoleum was, what? Fifty years old?"

"More like sixty. But I've kept the place up, gotta give me that. Contractors were even impressed, you know. Foreman took me around when I got home today and pointed out all the fresh bracing under the subfloor, around the joists. I told him I'm no slouch on home maintenance. Go around the house every spring to fix-up this and that, whatever I see."