Your Eyes in Stars by M. E. Kerr

Tag,” I’d say when anyone said good morning, or perhaps just Tag , as Elisa sometimes said. Tag, Süsse.
    Special times Elisa would treat me, after school, to an ice-cream soda I had invented: a strawberry soda with pistachio ice cream. We would share a booth in Hollywood Hangout. Elisa had a bigger allowance than I did, and she declared that in return for buying me the soda, I must tell her any tale I could think of about the Chi Pis, who crowded into booths at Hollywood Hangout and all wore green socks on Thursdays.
    I would tell Elisa the Cowpies were made to lie in closed coffins for hours as part of their initiation and, blindfolded, made to kneel by toilet bowls and fish out bananas that felt like turds, then eat them.
    “ Lieber Gott! Who told you?” Elisa would ask, eyes alert,covering her mouth with her hand as though those around us could read lips.
    “I can never tell my source.” Some stories about the Cowpies I made up, and some I put together from rumors Seth had heard about frat boys’ initiations at Cornell University. Seth, true son of Olivia Myrer, liked intrigue and scandal too.
    Gone were the days when I would sit in Seth’s room hanging on every word from his mouth. I began to think of those days as part of my childhood, silly really, and gone forever. Elisa had come into my life like some new color never before seen.
     
    Daddy took Mother for an extra-long walk when it cooled just a trifle, despite the fact all weather reports promised the heat would return with a vengeance. They went all the way to downtown Cayuta and bought peanut sundaes at Hollywood Hangout.
    “Even if he is not intimate with her, he seems to love her,” said Elisa. “Last night he took her downtown for ice cream, ja ?”
    “He always takes her for walks! Big deal!”
    “Why do you want to believe they do not have relations?”
    “Because she’s an icicle.”
    “Maybe not to him.”
    Elisa had put aside an English-language edition of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables . She was allowed an “open choice” veering from the summer reading list for tenth graders at East High. I was reading a new writer, Thomas Wolfe, copying lines into my diary like: “Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?”
    We were lollygagging about on the front porch swing, painting our toenails and drinking raspberry Kool-Aid. Lollygag was one of my father’s favorite words. It meant “hang around and do nothing.” My father had grown up down south, and southern expressions would slip into his speech now and then. He would say Mother was “strutting Miss Lucy,” evenings she got all dolled up to go to dinner with him. He would say, “If you knock the nose, the eye will hurt,” meaning if you hurt anyone in a family, the whole family felt it. Sometimes in the shower he would sing “Alabama Bound.” He would clown around: “I’m Alabamy bound….”
    Across the street, Elisa’s parents were getting into their black Duesenberg.
    “Where are they off to?” I asked Elisa.
    “My mother’s driving him to the university.”
    “He’s like my father, “ I said. “He never gets time off.” I was admiring the fit of Heinz Stadler’s white pants. He was tall with long legs, and his trousers with their white belt gave his body a slender, sexy look. My father andbrother never wore tight pants.
    “He is not like your father. He is home every chance he gets. Family is everything to my father. You know what? Grandmother will live with us when she is finally here. That is the way my father is. He is devoted to family. And she is Mother’s mother, not even his own.”
    “When is she coming here?”
    “Soon. She is trying to sell her house. She is very old, and my father says we cannot miss the opportunity to be with her in her end years.”
    I had nothing to say to that. My mother’s parents had both died of alcoholism at early ages. My father’s lived in the south, still regretting the fact their only son lived up north and had