Apples Full of Stars

“The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.”

—Jack Kerouac, On the Road

This month, my partner and I returned to Vienna. I have been occupied with setting up our new apartment, airing out and placing what we already have, taking note of what we don’t yet have to feel comfortable, provided-for, at home. If you don’t count roommates, co-ops, squat houses, and vehicles, it’s our first place together since we met here eight years ago.

How to live reverently, not too attached, with Things? I got in touch with a woman via Willhaben (think: Austrian Craigslist) who is in charge of excessing rooms full of minimalist walnut furnishings from a first-district Altbau penthouse. Midcentury modern bookshelves galore! (Never mind my library is sequestered in a basement in New England, awaiting organization and the expense of a freight forwarding service.)

I keep saying I’m going to hit the IKEA in town, but am cowed by my memory of always wanting to bring home more than I can carry. My stomach-eyes are much bigger than our apartment (you should see the size of those dark bookshelves I’m eyeing). After seven austere and bumpy years On The Road (RIP Jack, who passed two days ago in 1969), using crates to store at most a dozen books in our humble ’95 Econoline between subletting, squatting, and couchsurfing, suddenly I’m a kid in a candy store. I’m noticing that the bigger and heavier and older the furniture, the more I’m attracted. Hold me down!!! It’s been hard, living transiently, to acknowledge and honor my love of things.

One of the few household items I shipped from my mom’s storage unit in southern California was a set of vintage Laura Ashley coasters, the Romantic old Welsh brand. They’re pale floral and lined in gold, not exactly in keeping with the luxe Old-World Zen-center mood we’re trying to cultivate in our place, but they hold sentimental value, transferring the power of love that fostered me in early childhood. I can’t remember them in circulation, but they make me happy. Besides, I’m scared to stain all the old big heavy furniture I’m seeking for our new home. Nice furnishings and coasters are for grown-ups, nevermind their Beat(en) pasts/paths.

I noticed the other day that the tote bag I’ve been using for my household-assembling errands is Laura Ashley, one my best friend gave me when I visited her and her family earlier this fall. Two years ago this month, in central California, I got married in Laura Ashley: a vintage prairie dress, dusty-poppy cotton, my mom’s from the early 90s. We didn’t have a ring, so my mother mailed me one. She sent it up to my friend’s P.O. box because my own building’s mailboxes were often bashed open and robbed, like all the mailboxes and cars in our neighborhood in the East Bay (bippage rates sky high…).

The day before I got married, then, my best friend and I sat in her car in the parking lot of her rural post office, staring as it glimmered in the cup of my palm. Sending diamonds by post?! My (Scorpionic) confidante marveled at the (Taurean) audacity. (“Well,” she’d said over the phone, pragmatically, “you have to have something.”) We talked about cold feet, nerves, birth and death, mothers and motherhood, lineages of loss and love, crying and laughing in turn, processing and shaking off what all had been happening to us the past years so that what would happen the next day could emerge of its own volition, not too caught up in anxiousness, but genuinely celebratory, sparkly, free, brightly-lit, strong, available.

Her partner had brought home croissants, roses, and champagne for the day. We pressed a slew of red and pink-white petals into books. My friend and her new baby acted as witnesses (one legal, one spiritual) to our fifteen-minute civil ceremony, after which we went to In N Out for hamburgers and french fries. Baby ate her first bite of burger! We also stopped at a Mexican heladería and got cotija and passionfruit ice creams. I got a rose-flavored milkshake.

Back home, my boyfriend-husband wandered into a neighboring apple orchard and made off with two bags of fallen green apples. Late that night, after the baby went to sleep, we sat up talking, and my friend baked us an exquisitely-latticed apple pie. Next day, at dusk, I put my mom’s Laura Ashley dress on again, put my husband-boyfriend in his rumpled white shirt, and we stole back into the orchard to take wedding photos. The mountains in the background shone matte and settled into serene, hazel night. The sky was clear with wisps of sheer cloud. “Apples full of stars,” we sang, though I can’t remember why.

I learned that my mother had the ring made in the late 80s, early 90s on the beach in Fiji. I think she was on one of the vacations she won by topping certain sales numbers at work. I can imagine her standing on the beach, bare feet wet, selecting the stone, the pearl, the style. The band is gold, shaped into a cresting wave. The inside of the wave is occupied by a large pearl (beneath) and a little diamond (set into the tip).

As she well knows, I love the ocean above all things—more even than people, more even than poetry. The ocean is my god, holder and haver of universal energy, That Which Contains All Things. (The ultimate furnishing; the furniture of the ultimate…) In keeping, my Pisces moon was marrying a Pisces sun; further, he and I had been living more or less on the beach during what I called “the van-demic.” This ring could not have been more apt. It stabilized and reassured me in a moment of high chaos, where the stress of houselessness and bruise of despair still threatened to stain any choices we were making (like, you know, the one to get married).

Our decision to rush the job was driven by stress derived from insecure housing. We forfeited planning, guests, flowers, a white dress (my mother’s Laura Ashley fell somewhere between rose and poppy). This meant that no biological family was present at the small-town city hall on that day. Still hot in October, it hit 100 degrees F out on the sidewalk where we fiddled with our collars and our long hair, fit the baby’s hat on her head, decided to bring one red rose to exchange for the ring when it came that time.

Though I lacked the perspective (and organizing power over space-time) then, now I wish we’d had elders there—but having a baby present, naturally emanating her purity, power, and joy, felt right. (A year and a half later, halfway around the world, in altogether another kind of ceremony, we did experience a deep ancestral blessing of our union. It’s too real to write about here. But a big party with lots of good food and a DJ and friends and moms and dads, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews, is still in the works. They’d be coming from all over the world, the US, Europe, Israel, Africa. I wish they could all just Apparate into this new little sparsely-furnished apartment, but there’s nowhere to sit yet, and not nearly enough drinkware.)

At any rate, what we did have were talismans, and ritual feasting: the faded poppy dress; the roses; the wave ring; ice creams and apple pie. Weeks after, over the phone, my mom asked me if I “got” it, as in, the symbolism of the Fiji ring. I’d been wearing it happily, especially admiring how the nacre of the pearl shone darkly, how in changing light it always looked a little different. When I hesitated, she waited, then supplied, “It’s the moon and a star.”

The Moon and A Star! I understood immediately. When I was two or three years old, Mom asked me what I wanted to be for Halloween. I replied, as if obvious, “I want to be the moon and the stars.” So she went and decorated a little set of black cotton leggings and t-shirt with shiny gold stickers shaped like stars—maybe she had me stick them on myself (if my friend’s baby this summer is any indication, I would have adored this task). And she looped around me a few feet of silver star-studded tinsel, and glued a yellow felted-cardboard crescent to the end of a dowel rod for me to carry around, so that I could have my wish.

“The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.”