The relatively recent buzzword for this particular form of cool was glamour, which had begun to denote something, some irresistibly feminine, Coco Chanel sort of something that even women who were powerful and career-oriented could have—or maybe that only women who were powerful and career-oriented could have. I knew she had it, whatever it was, the moment she stepped down off that transcontinental express in Tucson and set her open-toed sandals on the station platform. And I wanted it, too.
She also had a certain starry look in her eyes. My first thought was that the glamour and the starry look went together, not understanding that they were actually antithetical, as things often are that follow one another as cause and effect and so for a single confounding moment show up in the same place. We kissed and hugged and cried for joy, and Mildred said how amazed she was to see what a pack of four little Indians her sister was raising, and so on. But it wasn’t long before she let out that she had met her dream man on that train, someone by the totally southern American name of Ferril Dillard, a tall, blond, beautiful Alabama soldier-boy coming west with his platoon to be trained for combat in the Japanese theater of war.
If there was one being in those mid-war days who was even more glamorous than a Seventh Avenue fashion plate, it was a man in uniform. And this Ferril Dillard turned out on sight to be really delectable, a kind of blond Elvis before there was an Elvis, with baby blues and a crooning sort of drawl and a funny joyous fatalism that was such a contrast with the rather dark kind we’d grown up with that I fell half in love with him myself. He came to visit on weekends before going overseas, and brought us things, and courted and cuddled up more and more to Aunt Mildred, and she, who was so tough and smart and self-possessed when he wasn’t around, turned into a kind of backlit American Beauty rose at a garden show, and just smiled and smiled.
My father, I’m sure, had his dark doubts about what was afoot, or what might actually come of this whirlwind courtship. But he was already too sick and bed-bound to raise a fuss over somebody who had actually shown up to give Maria a hand. And if he didn’t like to encourage marriage to this totally un-Italian Alabaman, even less did he like the idea of Mildred’s having a fling without it. So he played resident patriarch as best he could, and Aunt Mildred, not especially chafed by his watchdogging, settled into Tucson “for the duration,” as they said, or as much of it as it took.
There were moments of total misty absence of eye contact when you could tell she was thinking about him. But she not only loved us kids, but truly adored my mother, and most of the time Mildred was with us she was actually with us, a kind of celebrity big sister, dolled up and ready for her public, prancing around in shorts, showing off the trademark family good legs in bobby sox and platform heels. It was she who taught me about making a statement with lipstick, of which she had at least nine equally brilliant shades in expensive cases. And when she wasn’t lending a hand with the shopping or the wash or the cooking, or conspiring with my mother over some fine seam on the sewing machine, she would slather herself all over in cocoa butter (the smell of it can still pull the memory of her, like a genie, out of a jar) and throw herself down in the sun in her glamorous red bare-midriff swimsuit for a good hour’s tan.
And whenever Ferril had a short furlough, she dazzled him, and he dazzled her, and before you know it she was pinning together a cream-colored satin dress on the mannequin, and they were married in a quick and simple ceremony that was part of what came in those days with men going off to war. And then he went off to war, and they had a baby on the way.
Mildred never had another child. Thinking back, I can understand why. I was much too protected to be let in on the medical aspect of her condition when I was a girl, but I know she went a terribly long time giving birth. And I remember my sister and I being steered away from her until well after it was over.
She’d gone into labor the night before the night before Christmas. When we were finally allowed to see her, her face looking drained—and astonishingly lipstickless—there was all the same such a lustrous glory in her eyes that I thought her delight in her child must at least be proportional to her difficulty in getting it out of her body. It was a girl, a very tiny girl, born deep in the night of Christmas Eve, sleeping in a bassinet off to the side of her bed when we came enchanted and whispering into the room.
My mother and she had spent months playing with names, but Mildred threw it all over and completely surprised her. “Starr,” she announced, when asked. Maria kissed her cheek and smiled her most winsome smile. We all smiled. The whole issue of naming, now that we had left the Old World with its heavy burden of the deaths of ancestors, seemed to be thrown wide open. And Starr, in this context, could arguably be said to have had a basis in scripture. But for Mildred as for her tribe, only the road of excess could lead to the palace of wisdom, and a single allusion to the triumph of giving birth on O Holy Night would never be enough. “Starr Carol,” she corrected herself archly, looking a little, I thought, like a cat who has stuck her paw in the cream, again.
Maria expressed content by finding her least ironical smile and smiling it, and was just blowing her nose into a hankie when Mildred added, “Noel,” and forced her black eyebrows to shoot up again. Ann and I laughed and then clapped our hands over our mouths. Our mother shot a glance our way and then turned back to Mildred. Jokingly, she asked, “Any more names?”
“Of course,” said Mildred, wincing slightly as she shifted her weight in the bed. “Starr Carol Noel Dillard.” She pronounced it as if she had just locked in her baby’s claim to a platoon of harmonizing angels, and in that full, long, magical string you could hear the self-satisfaction of the Spagnola woman who has already got pretty much everything she ever wanted out of her man, and then some.
With a few exceptions, my sister Ann figures so little in the experiences I most remember about early Tucson that I have wondered if she was still too young to be part of them, apron-tied at home while every day my brothers and I adventurously (I thought) crossed a stretch of desert to our schoolhouse, a mile away. I am sure I strove to distance myself from her babyhood—even her girlness—in my longing to be taken seriously by my brothers, whose boy-freedom I envied and whose boy-daring I wanted to emulate.
But it was a continuous struggle: the more I sought them, the more they avoided me. As we followed the footpath home from school they would dart ahead or straggle behind, roaring for joy whenever an unpredictable finger of some evolutionary anomaly called “jumping cactus” flung itself at my head and grabbed one of my thick black braids, or stuck me full on the backside through my shorts, driving me to tearful despair, as if the whole Arizona universe were conspiring to punish me for being a girl.
The family called me “Fluffy,” to make matters worse. It was meant endearingly, a baby name that had hung on as such names do, and my mother used it with an especially tender affection that my little sister echoed. But still, it was a silly, lapdog sort of a name. And especially since my own body made itself laughable and awkward, it could be used against me. I could not seem to shed my baby fat no matter how tomboyishly I ran and played dodgeball and climbed trees. People might patronize me as “pleasingly plump,” but I was never fooled. I had to face it. The plain fact was I loved to eat. Not all of it went to fat, of course. By the time I was eight or nine I was also bigger and stronger than Lou, who was actually rather scrawny and bookish, and I was a giant compared with Carlo, whose misery nickname was the Runt. But to my brothers, I was forever Fat Fluffky. And they knew that the moment they skewered me with that name, I would disappear, hurt and humiliated.
Only the movies brought us together. My father, who ranked Saturday matinees lower than comic books as moral minefields for the impressionable young, must have made an exception for Walt Disney’s Dumbo, or else a restless, pregnant Aunt Mildred had prevailed over his house rule. He was right. Once we had seen that absurdly sweet and doleful, wing-eared circus elephant, we couldn’t get him out of our minds or our bodies. All Lou had to do, when the four of us were cleaning up after supper, was give the signal, and we would jump together and stack ourselves acrobatically on the kitchen