The Almost Moon (18 page)

I was still, I knew, the woman Hamish had wanted to make love to. Still the woman to whom girls at Westmore routinely said, "When I'm old, I want to look as good as you," not realizing the insult. But whereas I felt my mother had possessed, throughout her life, true beauty, I had always believed that I lived on borrowed time. I knew that the same bones that made my mother a domestic Garbo underpinned my more average looks. My father, though delicate around the eyes, was also longjawed and bulbous-nosed, and so I had inherited just enough of his qualities to blunt my mother's. I believed it galled her that a painting of me existed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And I had rushed to point out that it was only my body. "My face wasn't interesting to Julia Fusk," I said, trying to please her when I saw on her coffee table a monograph of the exhibit that Mr. Forrest had brought.

The steam from the shower filled the bathroom. I thought of the box of my mother's slips that I'd stolen from the basement some years before. I had put them in tissue paper in the bottom of a spare bureau in the walk-in closet. Sometimes, I would open the drawer and stare down at the rose-petal pink. It was such a simple thing, the satin piping on the bodice that became the spaghetti straps that looped over her shoulders. The slight swish and sway of the silk around the middle of her body. The tug of it when it met her hips.

I could see the general outline of my body in the fogged-up

[14 5 1

Alice Sebold

mirror. Having lost all shyness by having spent my career taking off my clothes in public, I enjoyed how demure the steam made me seem. Quickly, just before stepping in the shower, I leaned into the mirror and drew a smiley face. In the clear spots, I saw my reflection. "Ugly is as ugly does," my mother would say.

I heard Jake coming into the bedroom as I closed the frosted shower door. The idea of him being so close by after all these years both scared and delighted me.

At some point my father began sleeping in the spare room. Every morning he would wake up and make the bed perfectly as if no one had lain down there the night before, as if the empty bed waited for a never-invited guest. Even I believed this for a very long time until, like my mother, I began to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds of the house. When my grandfather's rifles were pulled off the rack, I could hear from my room the popping of the clasp that held the stocks. At least once every few months, I noted this distinctive sound, and in September of my senior year in high school, I decided to investigate.

It was unusually hot for September, and the humidity seemed only to increase after dark. The night noises coming through the open windows made my progress across the hall and past the top of the stairs go undetected. When I reached the spare room, I opened the door as quietly as I could.

"Go back to bed, Clair," my father said in irritation. He was looking down at the rifle, which lay across his lap in the deep blue of his terry-cloth robe.

"Dad?"

He looked up and came to standing immediately.

"It's you," he said.

The rifle dangled from his arm, its barrel pointing toward the ground. Behind him I saw the rumpled sheets of the bed. The

[14 6]

The Almost Moon

pillow, I knew, he had brought in from the master bedroom. The case matched the sheets on my parents' bed. On the table was a tumbler of orange juice.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm cleaning them," he said.

"Cleaning them?"

"Guns are like everything else, honey. They need to be cleaned to keep them in working order."

"Since when do you care about guns?"

"Right."

"Dad?"

His eyes seemed far away. He would focus on me for a moment and then drift.

"Why don't you just bring your stuff in here? You're not fooling anyone."

"No, honey, that's silly. I come in here sometimes when I can't sleep. So I won't disturb your mother."

"Are you done with that?" I said, indicating the rifle with the thrust of my chin.

"I can rely on you not to tell your mother about this, can't I?

Her father's guns are very precious to her, and I wouldn't want her knowing that I was fooling around with them."

"But you're cleaning them, you said."

"Right." He nodded his head in agreement with himself, but I was unconvinced.

I could not bring myself to move away from the door and go over to him. Seeing him in the soft clothes of pajamas and terrycloth robe had always been strange for me. He was up and dressed before I was, and he changed into his pajamas only after I went to bed. On the rare occasions when I saw him like this, I didn't know how to classify him. He wasn't the father I knew but more of the caved-in man who had appeared on and off since I was eight years old.

[14 7]

Alice Sebold

He took the rifle and returned it to its rack, then shut the clasp that held the barrel.

"Someday I'm going to convince your mother to get rid of them."

He walked over toward the head of the bed, picked up the orange juice, and drank it down all at once.

"Let's put you to bed, okay?"

We walked out into the hallway and across to my side of the house.

I lay down on my twin bed. "How about a round of waft?"

he asked.

And though this was a routine that we had abandoned years ago, I nodded my head. Anything to make my father stay longer in the room. Anything to make him focus back on me.

When I shut off the shower, I heard Jake talking in the bedroom.

I grew very still, and in trying to eavesdrop, I thought of Mrs.

Castle coming by the night before, how the water had seeped from the sponge and run down my arm until it hit my elbow, the drops falling from me back into the pan of soapy water.

"I don't know how long yet."

I reached for a downy white towel from the towel rack. I had bought half a dozen three years ago in a splurge at the mall.

Three for me and three for my mother. I had thought that if we used all white towels, we would suddenly be sunnier individuals, bright and happy, desperately clean.

"Just use the Science Diet and wet food on the weekend. Grace likes the beef, and Milo the lamb and rice."

He was talking to his dog-sitter. Giving him the facts.

"Yes, you know I'll make it up to you, babe. This is old business, and I need to be here right now."

I saw myself wrapped in the deceitful towel. Old business.

[14 8]

The Almost Moon

I heard him say his good-byes and the beep of the phone being hung up. I had managed to keep myself in good shape, but nonetheless I could see that through the eyes of the world, not just Jake's, I was indeed old business. I had come to treat my body like a machine both for the sake of my job and for the sake of my sanity.

This had paralleled the increased physical maintenance my mother required. Everything between us was best as regiment.

Habits were comforting in a way that love wasn't. Mrs. Castle, I thought, was somewhat daunted to find that I kept my mother's cuticles in tip-top shape, or that I buffed her calluses while her warped feet lay on a tufted footstool, or that I still indulged her belief in cellulite creams at the age of eighty-eight.

"Fuck! Helen!" I heard Jake scream.

I opened the door. He held the braid. I had removed it from its Ziploc bag the night before, as if it might suffocate.

"What the... Why would you do such a thing? "

I looked at him. He seemed more horrified about this than he was that I had killed her.

"I wanted a memento," I said. "A keepsake."

"I can't... I mean. My God," he said. Realizing what was in his hand, he threw it back onto my unmade bed. "You slept with this?"

"I brushed and braided it every week. I loved it."

I felt humiliated, standing there in my towel, my hair wet and spiky. I thought of my mother pleading with me to make a concession in my no-makeup existence. "Just a spot of lipstick, please,"

she'd said, and in my bathroom cabinet I had the tubes of vivid color she'd encouraged me to buy: Honeydew Frost, Maximum Red, Mauve Mayberry.

"I have to get dressed," I said.

"What do we do with that? You can't keep it," Jake said. The braid lay in the jumble of my bedclothes.

"Iknow."

[14 9]

Alice S e bo Id

I stood in a towel on the small rug in front of my dresser. I felt, in front of him, as I never had—ugly. I wanted to call Hamish.

"I'll wait downstairs for you. Is there a phone down there? I looked for it but couldn't find one."

"That's the number my mother had."

"And this one's different? " he asked, indicating the small black phone on my desk.

"Yes, it was Sarah's idea. The phone downstairs is inside the liquor cabinet, under a pillow. Sarah calls it the Bat Phone." I had never had to stand in my own house, half nude, and explain myself before. Certainly not since I'd begun to do things like hide my phone. "And there's a slogan on it about opportunity, which you can feel free to ignore."

"You know I'm here to help you, right?"

"I do."

The moment he was out the door, I felt relief. I liked hiding in my own darkness. I liked it to the point that I'd neglected to realize it was what I'd been doing more and more. Crouching with my mother in her house and ignoring the raucous, wild, demanding world. Even Natalie and I now saw each other mostly at Westmore. We would drive to the nearby Burger King in the afternoons and drink the brown-colored water they called coffee, groaning as we got out of the car.

I walked to the phone and dialed her house, not thinking what I'd do if she picked up. But it was Hamish.

"Hello?"

I found myself unable to speak.

"Hello?"

I hung up. I wanted to drive out to Limerick in my car and fuck him again.

A moment later, the phone rang.

"It's called 'star sixty-nine,'" he said. "Who is this?"

"Helen."

[15 0 1

The Almost Moon

He paused and then echoed my name back to me.

"Good morning, Hamish," I said.

"When can I see you again?" he asked.

To think, even if for the wrong reasons, the feeling was mutual made me smile as if I were half, as opposed to closer to twice, his age. I tucked my chin down but saw my painted toes and quickly looked up. Reminders were crowding in on me.

"Maybe tonight," I said.

"I'll count on it," he said brightly.

"I can't promise. I have a lot to get done, but maybe."

"I'll be home," he said, and hung up.

When Jake started leaving the studio we'd fashioned behind a drape in the living room and going out into the cold, I didn't question it. At first he went alone for an afternoon and hurried home in the pale-blue Bug, the car shaking up to the outside of our temporary-faculty-housing Quonset hut and sputtering to a sudden stop. We were not too far from town, and I could walk if I needed to run chores. Besides, I had Emily and then Sarah to attend to. He would return half frozen and amped up, talking about ice on leaves and the way an underground stream meandered at the base of a tree.

"And berries. These dark-red berries. If you crush them, they make this sort of thick viscous dye!"

Now I put down the phone and turned to where my mother's braid throbbed on the bed. Even I knew it was too damning to keep. I took my orange-handled shearing scissors from the pencil cup on the dresser and walked over to the bed.

In the bathroom, I leaned over the toilet, squatting down so no hair would fly away. I began to slowly slice the braid into bits small enough to flush.

For her colon surgery, they had had to shave what hair was

[15 1]

Alice S e bo Id

left from her pubic area. Tucking her in at night, I'd think how we had come full circle. "It's like handling a giant baby," I said to Natalie. "When she's too tired to fight, she just collapses onto me, as if we hadn't been battling each other for half a century."

Natalie listened to me and asked questions. Her parents were younger than mine by a decade and had moved into an assisted-living community on the edge of a perpetually flooded golf course. Her mother had stopped drinking and become the leader of the community's pep step class. What will I tell Natalie?

I wondered.

At the thought of this, I nicked my finger with the scissors.

Blood and hair floated on the surface of the water. When I was done with the braid, I stood and flushed the toilet, waiting for it to resettle and then flushing it again. I made a mental note to squirt in some Soft Scrub later to clean under the rim.

I remembered taking my mother to the doctor. The blankets, the towels, the constant cajoling, and how once she arrived and removed her wrappings, no one knew she was anything but just a little fearful and strange. She might moan and scratch, but when we hit the entrance door, she performed.

I was present at a rectal examination of my mother when, calling back to her long-held notions of hospitality, she tried to distract the young intern from what he was doing by telling him the story of the meticulous restoration of Jefferson's Monticello, which she had read about in Smithsonian magazine. I sat nearby in the visitor's chair, helpless. The intern, a West Indian, was too polite to continue the examination while my mother chattered on. The result was that our visit took a very long time.

When I stepped into the walk-in closet, I could hear Jake's voice coming up through the floorboards, but I couldn't make the

[15 2]

The Almost Moon

words out. Denied the braid, I opened the bottom drawer of the dresser I kept in the closet and took out the rose-petal-pink slip.

I walked downstairs in my old black sweater and jeans. I had let the slip fall over my hips like a tunic. Since I made my living taking off my clothes, the ones I wore to and from Westmore were barely noticed. And it would be an outfit Sarah might like when she came.

Jake was standing in the kitchen, knocking back shots.

"Well, I've told Emily," he said.

"You what?"

"I didn't tell her the gruesome details," he said, "just that her grandmother's dead. I needed to talk to her. I was supposed to go up there at the beginning of next week."