Luna (25 page)

Selena found herself thinking that her own children were grown now, that those moments were gone forever for her, and she regretted their loss. Something gone out of her life, something for which there was no substitute. Diana had turned away, to Tammy on her other side, and
Selena could no longer see her face as she bent, her lustrous hair falling forward over her shoulders.

Across the table, Sandy, a fifty-year-old woman who didn’t look more than thirty-five, served herself from the bowl of carrots and peas that Selena had canned in the fall. Sandy, whose home was a big house in the city, full of people like herself who couldn’t manage on their own in the world. Taken by her parents when she was fifteen to an institution and left there, then moved out of it into a group home. Allowed to go home only for the occasional holiday. She felt sorry for Sandy, who would never have her own house or children. She had been sterilized when she was a teenager. It’s better that way, they had all agreed.

And there was Phoebe, next to her, pregnant, silent, but at this moment not seeming unhappy as she spooned a little gravy onto her potatoes, then passed the dish to Mark beside her. Her inexplicable words earlier that day. And across from Mark, Tony, whose beloved, beautiful wife had rejected him.

Here we are, a family, Selena thought. For the first time she saw them as something more than relatives who knew each other from birth. She saw that they were bound by invisible bonds of pain and sorrow and joy, not just by blood and accidents of birth. Rhoda, approaching menopause, Gus with what Selena privately thought of as a ‘mean streak.’ All families are like this, she thought. This is what a family is.

“God, before we know it, it’ll be January calf sales,” Kent remarked.

“Don’t think about work,” Selena said.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Kent said.

Gus said, “The way things are going, it’s hard to think about anything else.”

“I heard in town that Whitelaw had to sell all his two-year-old steers. He’s back in the cow-calf business, like the rest of us,” Kent said.

“And you’re gonna keep your land,” Gus Said to Tony, shaking his head.

“Well, I see you and Kent are keeping yours,” Tony pointed out, grinning.

“Have to,” Kent said. “If I sell now by the time the bank got through with me, there wouldn’t be anything left. I guess I’ll stick it out to the bitter end.”

“Have some more turkey,” Selena said to Gus, who took the platter from her.

On her right, Rhea ate heartily. Rhea’s appetite was a mystery to all of them, she could eat rings around any of them, a family of hearty eaters. Where does she put it all? Selena wondered for the hundredth time. Old people are supposed to have small appetites and all kinds of digestive troubles, but not Rhea. Thinking of this, she felt her mood lighten again, and she jumped up to refill the empty dressing bowl.

Late in the evening Gus, Rhoda and Sandy left, and Mark and Jason went upstairs to bed. Tony and Kent had retired to the living room and were dozing in front of the television set, and the little girls had long since fallen asleep on the rug and been put to bed. Selena, Phoebe, Diana and Rhea were sitting in the kitchen. It was almost midnight.

“Do you want me to drive you home, Rhea?” Selena asked. “I didn’t realize how late it is.”

“I’m staying here tonight,” Rhea said. Irritated, Selena held her tongue. And where will she sleep? she wondered.

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” Rhea said, as if Selena had spoken aloud. Selena glanced up at Rhea, noticed that the skin of her plump cheeks and her neck looked white in the bright light, fragile, and was stricken with guilt because Rhea was an old woman after all, and would be alone in her own house.

“Good,” she said. “You’ll be here to say good-bye to Diana and kids tomorrow.” Rhea, unexpectedly, sighed. A long sigh, filled with something like sadness. It made Selena wonder if she was all right.

Diana said, “I don’t know if this is the best time to tell you or not.” They stared at her. Apprehension grew in Selena.

“What?” she asked, her voice low and tense.

“What I have to do,” Diana said, not looking at her. There was a silence around the table.

“Honestly, Diana,” Selena said. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” Phoebe, who had been leaning sleepily in her chair, her head touching the wall, straightened, and put her arms on the table in front of her. In the living room, somebody was snoring.

“I’ve decided to leave the girls here,” Diana said. For a moment, Selena couldn’t understand what she meant.

“You mean, with us?” she asked slowly.

“No.”

“What?” Selena asked, still calm. “You know I’d be glad to look after them till you get more settled.”

“I’m leaving them with Tony,” Diana said. Rhea stirred, lifting her head, as if her neck were stiff, then lowering it again. If she laughs, Selena thought, I’m going to hit her.

“For … how long?” Selena asked. She could hear the fear in her voice.

“Until they’re grown,” Diana said, lifting her eyes so that they met Selena’s. Selena stared at her, aghast, hardly believing what she had heard.

“You don’t mean it,” Selena said, after a second. Diana’s eyelids fluttered as if Selena had struck her. “You’re going to abandon your own children? Have you gone era—”

“I am not abandoning them,” Diana said. Her voice was very quiet, yet firm. “I’m leaving them with their father.” Selena opened her mouth to shout, but thought better of it and tried to control herself.

“Why?” she asked finally.

“Because …” Diana began, looking over Selena’s head. “Because—it’s too hard. I can’t do it.” Her voice wavered at this, ever so slightly.

“Do what?”

“I can’t work out this thing I’m doing, and raise two children at the same time. It’s too hard, I never get any sleep. I’m not there when they want me to be. I can’t be there … and do this … thing, too. I …” She grew silent and drew in a long, quavering breath.

Selena sat and stared at her, pity, anger, horror, all churning inside her.

“Rhea?” she asked. The kitchen was so quiet, you could hear the air in the room. Selena began to feel her heart thumping in her chest. Squeeze, relax, squeeze, relax. She could actually feel her own heart. It frightened her. She could hardly breathe she was so frightened by the beating of her own heart.

“Rhea …” she gasped. Rhea was staring across the room … to the small frosted window at the top of the door leading outside, staring at
that small, frozen square of night, while Selena sat and felt her heart squeeze, and relax, squeeze, and relax, inside her cage of bones. She thought she might faint.

“Ah, Selena,” Rhea said, finally. Selena was startled because Rhea had chosen to speak to her and not to Diana. “What am I going to do with you?” Her voice was gentle; suddenly Selena heard echoes of her mother’s voice in that sound. It seemed to her that her mother was speaking to her and she grew confused, looking rapidly from one woman to the other, for was she not Phoebe’s mother? But Phoebe was a mother now. And was Diana not her sister? But she had mothered her—did that not make Diana her daughter? Who was mother here? Who was daughter? Who was sister?

She began to gasp, and Diana rose and went to her, stood behind her, and massaged Selena’s shoulders and neck with her long, narrow hands.

“Calm down, Selena,” she said. “Calm down. You’re just … tired, worn out with all this Christmas work …” Slowly the panic that had swept over Selena began to dissipate under the gentle touch of her sister’s hands.

“I don’t understand,” she said at last, putting up one hand to touch Diana’s.

“I know,” Diana said. “I know that. But my little girls will grow up anyway. With or without me. Tony will take care of them. He loves them. He
wants
to devote his life to them.” All the while Phoebe watched Diana with wonder in her eyes.

“You’ll come back sometimes and see them?” Selena asked.

“Of course,” Diana said. “Often, and I’ll take them now and then with me. They will always be my children.” She said this gently, her voice breaking at the last. She took her hands away from Selena’s shoulders and went back to where she had been sitting. She took a deep breath and said, “I’m going to go with Tony back to the old house tonight. I’m going to tell him.” She looked at each of them as if she had nothing but questions. They stared back at her, each in her own way: wonder, despair, acceptance. Then Diana burst into tears.

She put her head on her hands, bending forward from her waist as she sat on the kitchen chair, her long hair falling around her hands, and
sobbed as if her heart were breaking. She cried and cried and cried. While Phoebe, Selena, and Rhea watched her, not moving from their places.

Rhea is lying on the old sofa in the living room in the comfortable darkness. She is thinking about Diana, feeling pity for her. It is a long time since she has felt pity for any person. It irritates her, she rubs it away. Anyway, it isn’t for me to judge, she thinks, even if I knew what the judgement should be … a single soul struggling in the universe, at least she knows that much. She’s been shown something about life, she may not be strong enough, though, it may end in disaster.

It will end in her death, Rhea thinks, and can’t suppress a quick snort of laughter.

Selena lies upstairs in her big bed beside her husband and thinks about Tamara and Catherine, Diana’s children, not suspecting the terrible turn their world is about to take. But Tony will look after them as well as Diana has, she thinks, so what is this outrage I feel? What it amounts to is that once children are born,
someone
has to raise them, they can’t raise themselves, so Diana’s action, since she is their mother and the logical one to raise them, makes no sense, except for her, in a personal way. The world can hardly be run that way, can it? With each person caring only for her personal needs.

I remember, she thinks, that the teacher said
Hamlet
is a tragedy. Is it a tragedy because Hamlet dies? She can’t remember if he died or not, she can only remember that Ophelia died. She sees Ophelia floating down the river, garlanded with flowers—brown-eyed susans, milkweed, wild primroses, bluebells, dandelions—singing. Is this a tragedy I’m living in?

A few miles down the road from her, Diana lies sleepless too. I won’t pretend it’s right, she decides. I feel like I’m above those kinds of rules, but I would never dare to say that aloud. I mustn’t think about my babies, I mustn’t think about them, because I have no choice about this. I have to do it. Men have always done this—neglected or abandoned their wives and children, driven by some vision, some obsession. They went off, over and over again, on some quest that made no sense to anybody else—that photographer at the turn of the century who disappeared for years at a time,
taking pictures of the Indians. Nobody even knew where he was. Explorers, gone for years, scientists—buried in their work—might as well be in Antarctica—doctors devoting their lives to other people. Men have always done this, and always been forgiven. Well, I’m an explorer, too.

A free person in the universe? Selena thinks. Freedom? She wonders what freedom is, tries to imagine it. Is it getting up in the morning and not having to cook breakfast for anyone? Is it going to the city? Like Diana? But I hate the city, I hate the smell, it frightens me, everything happens too fast there. What is it, then?

Rhea is thinking about her death. She knows, she has always carried it as a dried and unsprung seed inside her. Tonight it is swelling, and she allows it all the room it wants, all the space it needs to grow and blossom in, so that she can, at last, take its measure.

She rises from the couch where she has been lying awake, opens the curtains and stares out into the motionless, cold, silver-blue night. A long time she’s been waiting. And now, what is left? She sits down again, turning toward the warm comfort of the house, and she leans against the old couch and rests. I don’t want any surprises, she thinks, I don’t want anything left undone.

I wonder what they will say at my funeral: How hard I worked. All those miles of scrubbed floors, acres of washed clothes, mountains of kneaded dough. She sees her clean white sheets flapping in the wind. She sees herself stretching to hang them on the line Jasper built for her that the wind was forever tearing down, dragging the clean clothes in the dirt so that she had to wash them all over again. Her spotless kitchen, the loaves of bread sitting out on the table cooling, all the meals she cooked.

She allows herself to feel a second’s satisfaction. But then thinks, whatever my life has been, it isn’t quite that. Work was only the raw material out of which I fashioned my life, out of which I fashioned my soul.

All those children, they will say. This bothers her, she doesn’t know what to think when it comes to her children. Woman, after all, she reminds herself, was made to give birth. That new life flowed through me, it is true. But that is only the way things are, I have been only an opening, a conduit, for the greater life to express itself.

So what are all those children to me? She lifts her large, once strong, farm woman’s hands from her lap, then drops them helplessly. Still, they were my babies, she thinks, and I would have given my life for any one of them, even though now I can barely remember their names. The names I gave them belong to the babies, not to those gross, loud strangers who come sometimes to see me.

There’ll be a minister at my funeral. Someone who never set eyes on me when I was alive. He’ll say I was a pioneer, and he’ll talk about the courage of the pioneers, about my courage. Courage! We did what we had to do, that’s all. He’ll talk about the hardship: the work, the doing-without, the loneliness.

All those years of loneliness. Never seeing another woman for weeks at a time, in the early days. Jasper up and out working before sunrise, not coming back till well after dark. Nobody to talk to but the kids and the animals and the air itself.

What it does to you, always being alone. People don’t know how much they rely on other people to keep them from knowing what they are, to keep them from knowing about that other, that interior life everybody has. They’re afraid of it, afraid it’s nothing but a black hole into which their everyday selves will fall. People are afraid they will fall into that other world, into madness, and never be able to climb out again.