The Almost Moon (14 page)

It was this that finally pushed me to make a move. When Mr.

Serrano, who was an accountant and had a young daughter, crushed my father's Italian parsley, I dropped the quilt from my shoulders and stepped forward.

"You'll kill it."

It was that word.

Mr. Tolliver's friend was suddenly to my right, but I was watching Mr. Serrano step carefully back from the border of the herb garden. Just as I exhaled, I felt the sting of a slap across my face.

I fell onto the grass, my own hand going up to my cheek. Mr.

Warner was jumping past me to restrain the unknown father,

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whom Mr. Tolliver was patting on the back. I saw Mr. Serrano look down at me as he fled the yard. It was not my first awareness of the pity people had for me, pity like a vast sea that was impossible for me to cross.

The good men left with sincere apologies thrown over their shoulders, but not to me. They apologized to Mr. Warner. I was on the ground. I was a teenager. I didn't matter. Mr. Warner said,

"No problem." He said, "Talk later." He said, "Take care."

He had stopped the man who'd slapped me from doing more, and so I supposed I should have been thanking Mr. Warner, but I wasn't. I was edging toward the quilt, which I'd dropped a few feet behind me. It seemed the only thing in the yard to offer protection.

Mr. Tolliver and his friend had appeared ready to storm the house and find my mother, but they were no match for the law Mr. Warner laid down, and, I imagine, a female teenager in cutoffs and T-shirt lying on the ground was probably scary to them.

The sight of me begged a question neither had intended to pose.

Mr. Warner told them to go sober up and get some food. "Go home to your wives," he said.

The spring evenings stayed light for a long time, but the day had just crested that point where darkness was inevitable and the sun had begun to descend into the line of fir trees that separated our yard from the Levertons'.

I had reached the quilt, and sitting up, I grasped it to my chest.

I would not cry. I remember promising myself that, despite the sting in my cheek. What was oddest was that my father's crushed parsley seemed worse to me than the slap. It was one of the joys he brought into the house for my mother. When he did, clipping rosemary or marjoram or thyme, the scent would linger on his fingers, and he would run them through my mother's hair to make her smile.

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"You can tell your father," Mr. Warner said, standing above me, "that it is the consensus of the neighborhood that your family should move."

"We have the right to stay," I said. I had chosen my side.

He stared at me a moment and then shook his head.

He left the yard, and I wrapped myself tighter in the quilt. It was a memory quilt that we'd bought at the Kutztown Fair. "See that?" the woman who sold it to my father said. "That's all handwork.

No machines at all."

My father had bought it, sure that my mother would be impressed.

She had been. She put it over the arm of the couch, and during aimless afternoons when Natalie was busy and I had to keep myself entertained, I would spread the quilt out over the sofa and make memories up for my family.

"This bright red patch symbolizes a slap on the cheek to Helen when she was sixteen," I whispered to myself that night in the yard. Already it worked. The slap fell into the hole that was my accumulating past, and I stood, walked inside to clean up the casserole from the floor, and heard the scratchy sound of a bigband radio station as I passed the bathroom door.

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The night the men came to our yard, there were two adults within my reach: my mother, hiding in our downstairs bathroom, and Mr. Forrest down the street.

As I grabbed my jacket off the hook by the kitchen door, I spied one of the photographs of my mother from years ago. It was a small one, 4x6, and in it she wore a slip with an ornate lace bodice. The ecru one. It sat propped up among a grouping of knickknacks beside the red-velvet love seat, which to me was the most uncomfortable piece of furniture in existence.

"It encourages people to leave sooner," my mother would say when I complained.

"What people, Mom?" I'd respond.

I walked over to the photograph and paused. I wanted to hurt her, but she was always crumbling and crying, barking and biting, and to reach her seemed impossible to me. I lifted it and traced the outline of her body with my finger. I slipped the frame into my jacket pocket, and I left as quietly as possible through Alice S e bo Id

the front door. There was no way my mother could have heard me over the noise of the radio.

After twilight the streets seemed deserted. No one was outside on their lawns anymore. I thought briefly of what an aerial view of our neighborhood would look like with all the roofs sheared off. In how many houses would happy families be settling in for the night, watching TV with bright bowls of popcorn in their laps? In Natalie's house her mother would be slowly passing out, assisted by what she called "a little splash." Natalie would be up in her room, mooning over Hamish Delane, who had just moved to America with his family. Over and over again she'd drawn inscrutable lines on a page until she confided it was "Mrs. Natalie Delane."

To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades.

Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk.

There were no shortcuts.

His door opened before I could ring the bell.

"I hoped I might see you," Mr. Forrest said. "Come in, come in. Let me take your coat."

"I brought you something," I said.

I reached into my jacket and pulled out the framed photograph.

Mr. Forrest took it from me. I stood in the hallway and looked around, past the porcelain umbrella stand and into the drawing room, which I had seen only from the outside, and into the dining room behind that, which was elevated by three wide wooden steps.

I had been fuming on my way over, and inside his house I could feel the heat of it on my cheeks.

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"She's a beautiful woman, your mother," Mr. Forrest said, looking at the picture.

"Right."

"Let's sit down in the drawing room, shall we?"

It had taken me this long to notice that Mr. Forrest was being incredibly nice to me, even solicitous. I knew how extraordinary this was. Mr. Forrest had no use for almost anyone in the neighborhood other than my parents. He was never rude, but he was perfectly pleasant in a way that, I would realize as an adult, was the suburban equivalent of a stiff-arm.

He had been in our house multiple times over the years, but I had never stepped inside his home. Now I stood on the edge of a silk rug in front of his fireplace, uncertain what to say.

"Sit," he said. As I did, he whistled loudly, and bounding into the room came Tosh. "I know who you really came to see," he said, and smiled.

Tosh slowed to an obedient halt in front of Mr. Forrest and sat down on the floor beside him, facing me.

"I owe you a deep apology," Mr. Forrest said. "I shouldn't have run away. Fve never felt exactly comfortable here. In that, I'm not unlike your mother."

I spied an oval tray near the mantel. It sat on a spindly cherrywood table, and arrayed upon it were crystal bottles that refracted light. Mr. Forrest followed my eyes.

"Yes, you deserve a drink," he said nervously. "I know I'd like one. Come, Tosh." He led Tosh over to the white-slipcovered couch where I was sitting and patted the space beside me. Tosh jumped up and immediately leaned into my side. "That's a good boy," Mr. Forrest said.

While Mr. Forrest's back was to me, I hugged Tosh and held him to me, petting his floppy ears.

"Port is my choice for you," he said. "We can sip it and talk about disgusting people before putting them aside."

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He handed me the bloodred liquid and went to sit opposite me on a gold velvet chair that made his knees jut up into the air in front of him.

He laughed at himself. "I never sit in this chair," he said. "It's called a slipper chair, and ladies used to have them in their boudoirs.

It belonged to my great-grandmother."

"I see you through the window sometimes," I said.

"A dull thing to look at," he said.

I had my arm around Tosh and was scratching the space beneath his right ear. His mouth hung open in a panting smile, and occasionally he would tip his head back and look at me. I took a mouthful of the port and immediately wanted to spit it out.

"Sip," he said, seeing my face. "I did say that, didn't I?"

What felt like the longest minute in the world passed as I tousled Tosh's fur and swerved my head around the room.

"Helen, what happened after I left?"

"Forget it," I said, suddenly not wanting to talk about it, wishing instead that I could be alone with Tosh.

"I'm sorry, Helen," he said. "In general I leave the neighbors alone, and if I don't go flouncing over to their houses, they let me be."

"His friend hit me," I said.

Mr. Forrest put down his glass on the marble-topped table beside him. He looked as if he too had been hit. He inhaled.

"Helen, I'm going to teach you two very important words.

Ready?"

"Yes," I said.

"And then I'm going to get you something else to drink because you obviously detest that."

I had held the port in my hand but could not bear even to pretend to sip.

"Here they are: 'fucking bastard.'"

"Fucking bastard," I repeated.

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"Again."

"Fucking bastard," I said, more surely.

"With verve!"

"Fucking bastard!" I said, almost yelling.

I sat back into the couch, on the verge of laughing.

"There are millions of them. You can't beat them, believe me.

You can only hope to find a way to live quietly among them.

Sitting and reading in this window, with all my antiques and books... You wouldn't know it by looking at me, but I'm a revolutionary."

I wanted to ask him if he had a boyfriend, but my mother had scolded me never to pry.

"You know I'm a book collector," Mr. Forrest said. "Would you like to see some of my newest acquisitions?"

"What about my mother?" I asked. I pictured her curled around her transistor radio like a conical seashell.

"Her?" he said, and stood with his glass. "We both know she's not going anywhere."

He came over to retrieve my undrunk port. Tosh's tail beat against the back of the couch as he drew near.

"I hate her," I said.

"Do you really, Helen?" He held both our glasses and looked down at me.

"No."

"You will always be stronger than she is," he said. "You don't know that yet, but it's true."

"She let Billy Murdoch die," I said.

"That was her illness, Helen, not her."

I stared up at him, not wanting him to stop.

"It must be obvious to you that your mother is mentally ill," he said. He placed the glasses on the silver tray and turned back to me. "What does your father say about it?"

"Mentally ill." It was as if someone had just very gently placed

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a bomb in my lap. I didn't know how to dismantle it, but I knew no matter how scary it might be, there was a key inside it—a key to all the hard days and locked doors and crying jags.

"Haven't you ever heard those words?"

"Yes," I said meekly.

"Haven't you ever connected them with your mother?"

I had used the word "crazy" but never "mentally ill." "Crazy"

didn't seem so bad. "Crazy" was a simple word like "shy" or

"tired" or "sad."

Tosh jumped off the couch, sensing Mr. Forrest's desire to move. I stood.

"We'll look at books and make you a G&T," he said. "You don't owe your life to your mother, you know. Nor does your father, for that matter."

"You just said she was mentally ill."

"Your mother is a survivor. I'll no doubt send you home with a book or two that she wouldn't know about otherwise, and you'll return the photograph as a favor to me."

Tosh, Mr. Forrest, and I all went through the dining room and into the kitchen. After the two other rooms, the kitchen was a shock. It was all white and incredibly utilitarian. Nothing was out on the counters that would suggest he'd eaten or prepared anything to eat in months.

He opened his fridge while I leaned against the sink.

"You can give Tosh a treat," he said with his back to me. He found the bottles he wanted and opened the freezer. "They are in that white porcelain bunny jar by the sink."

While I fed an ecstatic Tosh treats that looked like miniature bunnies, Mr. Forrest made me a drink.

"Why are you friends with her?" I asked.

"Your mother is fascinating. She's incredibly witty and beautiful."

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"And mean," I said.

"Regrettably you and your father see a good deal more of that than I ever will. We have books. We can keep on that level, and then I leave."

He handed me my drink. "Imagine, if you will, the demise of all the fucking bastards of the world," he said, and knocked his glass to mine.

"What about my mother?"

"Your mother is not a fucking bastard. Fucking bastards are simple by nature. Now drink up, because soon you'll be in a room where no liquids are allowed."

The G&T was better than the port, and cool. We drank as Mr.

Forrest led me down a hall that ran off the kitchen.

"Somewhere in this hallway I turn into another person," he said. "But for your sake I'm going to try and remain tethered to reality."

We reached a doorway that was half glass, through which I could see small spotlights in the large room on the other side.

"Let's put our drinks down here. Are your hands clean?"