The Almost Moon (3 page)

"Five girls showed up, not eight," I'd say.

Or "His last name, Knightly, was irresistible."

When I look back, I think how silly I must have sounded, parroting the phrases of my mother's lovesick girlhood, but what was most precious about our house back then was that no matter

[17]

Alice Sebold

how wrongheaded everything might be, inside it, we could distill ourselves to being a normal man, woman, and child. No one had to see my father put on an apron and do overtime work after he got home, or watch me cajole my mother, trying to get her to eat.

"I didn't know he wasn't in the fashion industry until after he'd kissed me," she'd say.

"But what about the kiss?"

It was always here that she teetered. The kiss and the weeks immediately following it must have been wonderful, but she could not forgive my father once he'd brought her to Phoenixville.

"New York City," she'd say, looking down dejectedly between her splayed feet on the floor. "I never even got there."

It was my mother's disappointments that were enumerated in our household and that I saw before me every day as if they were posted on our fridge—a static list that my presence could not assuage.

I must have petted my mother's head for a long time. Eventually I saw the blue light of a television go on across the street. When my parents had first moved to Phoenixville, this neighborhood had been a thriving one, full of young families. Now the squat 1940s houses on quarter-acre lots were often rented out to couples down on their luck. My mother said you could tell who the renters were because they let the houses rot, but in my mind it was these very people that kept the street from turning into a place where the isolated elderly were slowly dying.

As darkness descended, so did the cold. I looked down at the length of my mother's body, wrapped in double blankets, and knew she would never feel the uncertainties that come with the fluctuation of air or light again.

"Over now," I said to her. "It's over."

And for the first time, the air was empty around me. For the

[ 1 8 ]

The Almost Moon

first time, it was not full of hatchets and blame or unworthinessas-oxygen.

As I breathed in this blank-space world—where my mother ended at the border of her own flesh—I heard the phone ring in the kitchen. I slipped off the back of the porch and walked back past the latticework. On the next-door neighbor's empty porch, I could see the local tomcat grooming himself. Growing up, Sarah called such cats "orange marmalades." I saw the old metal lid cocked at an angle on top of the neighbor's neatly tucked and rolled paper trash bag and made a mental note to take my mother's trash out. My whole life, she would instruct me about the proper way to fold a bag. "Paper bags, wax bags, are like your sheets. Hospital corners improve them."

The phone rang again and again. I walked up the three wooden steps to the door. My mother's feet extended out over the top stair. She had insisted that the answering machines I brought her did not work. "She's afraid of them," Natalie said. "My father thinks the ATM will eat his arm."

I smelled something as I shoved my mother's body just far enough aside to squeeze back into the house. It was the smell of lighter fluid and charcoal mingling in the air. By this time the ring of the phone was a hammer pounding from inside my skull, or a voice calling me from outside a nightmare.

The first thing I saw when I entered the kitchen was the stepstool chair beneath the wall-mounted phone. The red vinyl was cracked and taped thirty-five years ago, more than a decade after it served as my first high chair. Seeing it in the kitchen was like seeing a lion left standing, ignored. It leaped out at me, roaring with the voice of the phone above it, propelling me back to my father placing me there. I saw the slash of my young father's smile and my mother's wobbly wrist bringing peaches and bananas—

all pureed by hand—up to my lips. How hard she had tried and how she must have hated it from the start.

[19]

Alice Sebold

I grabbed the phone as if it were a life raft.

"Hello?"

"Do you need help?"

The voice was old, feeble, but I was no less startled than if it had been coming from just outside the door.

"What?"

"You've been out on that porch a long time."

I would recall this later as the first moment where I began to be frightened, where I realized that by the standards of the outside world, what I'd done knew no justification.

"Mrs. Leverton?"

"Are you two all right, Helen? Is Clair in need?"

"My mother's fine," I said.

"I can call my grandson," she said. "He'll be glad to help."

"My mother wanted to go into the yard," I said.

From where I stood, I could see through the small window over the kitchen sink and across the backyard. I remember my mother arduously training a vine to grow so that it masked a view of our house from the Levertons' upstairs bedroom. "That man will stare right into your private places," my mother would say, hanging her front half out my bedroom window, which was directly over the kitchen, threading the vines and risking life and limb to make sure Mr. Leverton never caught a peek. Both the vine and Mr. Leverton were long dead now.

"Is Clair still out there?" Mrs. Leverton asked. "It's awfully cold."

This gave me an idea.

"She's waving at you," I said.

"The Blameless One," my mother had called her. "Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth and stupid as the day is long."

But there was silence on the other end.

"Helen," Mrs. Leverton said slowly, "are you sure you're all right?"

[ 2 0 ]

The Almost Moon

"Excuse me?"

"Your mother would never wave at me. We both know that."

Not so stupid, apparently.

"But that's pleasant of you to say."

I had to get my mother's body in. It was as simple as that.

"Can't you see her?" I risked.

"I'm in my kitchen now," Mrs. Leverton said. "It's five o'clock, and I always start making supper at five o'clock."

Mrs. Leverton was the champ. At ninety-six, she was the oldest fully functioning member of the neighborhood. My mother had been nothing in comparison to her. When it got down to it, the final competition among women seemed just as inane and graceless as all those in between. Who grew breasts first, who scored the popular boy, who married well, who had the better home. In my mother's and Mrs. Leverton's life, it came down to who would be the oldest when she died. I felt like saying, Congratulations, Mrs. Leverton, you've won!

"You amaze me, Mrs. Leverton," I said.

"Thank you, Helen." Is it possible to hear preening?

"I will encourage my mother to come in," I said. "But she does what she likes."

"Yes. I know," she said. She had always been careful with her words. "Stop by anytime and give Clair my best." Her best, I did not point out, was as improbable as my mother's wave.

I hung the phone back on the upright cradle. Like my mother, Mrs. Leverton probably still insisted that phones were most efficient when they were connected by cords. I knew that she had been weakening in the previous year, but she had informed my mother that she still did exercises daily and quizzed herself on state capitals and ex-presidents.

"Unbelievable," I said to myself, and I heard the damp echo of it bounce off the green-and-gold linoleum. I wanted to rush out and tell my mother about the phone call, but when I looked her

[21]

Alice Sebold

way through the screen door, I saw the marmalade torn standing on her chest and playing, like a kitten, with the ribbon of her braid.

Inside me, the child who had protected her mother ran to the screen door to shoo the marmalade torn from the porch, and yet, as I watched the huge scarred cat that my mother had taken to calling "Bad Boy" fall on her chest with his full weight and bat her braid with the ribbon attached to it with his front paws, I found myself unable to move.

Finally, after all these years, my mother's life was snuffed out, and I had been the one to do it—in the same way I might snuff out the guttering wick of an all but extinguished candle. Within a few minutes, as she struggled for breath, my lifelong dream had come true.

The marmalade torn played with the ribbon in her hair until he freed it, and it went sailing up into the air and landed on her face. It was then, the red ribbon on her cheek, the cat claw reaching out to grab it, that I shoved my fist in my mouth to cover my scream.

[22]

I sat on the floor of the kitchen. My mother's body lay positioned outside the door. I felt like turning on the bug light above her but didn't. Look upon this, I imagined saying to the neighbors.

This is where it all ends up.

But I didn't really believe that. I believed, as my mother always had, that there was them and there was us. "Them" were the happy, normal people, and "us" were the totally fucked.

I remembered throwing water in her face when I was sixteen.

I remembered not talking to her and seeing her dismantled, as she had never been, by trying to learn the language of apology.

Watching her do that—admit that she was wrong—was one of the most helpless moments in my life. I had wanted to save her with a rush of talk about high-school chemistry and my recently failed algebra exam. To fill the silent moments while she toed the edges of the carpet with her foot as I sat in my bedroom chair and restrained myself.

Suddenly I spied, through the thick hedge that bordered my Alice Sebold

mother's yard, Carl Fletcher coming outside with a plate of steak.

As his own screen door banged and he plodded down the three wooden stairs to his lawn, a beer in one hand, a portable radio tuned to WIP sports in the other, I pictured a circle of tiki torches and throbbing white people in loincloths raising the remains of my mother high on a special catalog-ordered all-weather funeral pyre.

"I like the man next door," my mother had said when Carl Fletcher moved in six years ago. "He's pathetic, which means he keeps to himself."

Now he was on the other side of the latticework, in a yard that had been empty only moments before.

If Hilda Castle had called one day later, Sarah would have been visiting for the weekend, and she would have helped me carry my mother up the stairs to the bath. But more likely, Sarah would have made phone calls. The simple phone calls that any sane person would have made. I could not imagine my youngest standing above her soiled grandmother in the wing chair and saying, "Mother, let's kill her. That's the only choice."

On my hands and knees, I crawled over to the screen door and looked out over my mother's body and through the hedge into the adjacent backyard. Mr. Donnellson, who had lived in the house until his family put him in hospice care, had asked my mother to marry him a dozen years ago. "There's no one left," he said. "Let's be companions, Clair."

He had seen her getting her newspaper and shown up a few minutes later with a bouquet of mauve-colored tulips. "From bulbs his wife planted!" my mother repeatedly pointed out. I remember being charmed by his offer, so charmed I had been tempted to rush over to his house after he'd been spurned to see if, perhaps with only a shift in generation, his offer might hold.

When he died, my mother gloated in triumph. "I would have had to wipe up his drool for five years and then bury him," she

[ 2 4 7

The Almost Moon

said. On the day of his funeral, she had blamed her watery eyes on the onions she was cutting up with her ancient hand-sharpened paring knife.

Peter Donnellson's house had been sold as is by his three daughters, and my mother had braced herself for a teardown.

Despite what was obvious—that the area had been going downhill for years—she fretted over the emergence of a Phoenixville nouveau riche. She worried for the roots of her giant maple trees that extended over into Mr. Donnellson's yard. She worried for the noise and for what she imagined would be the sound of children screaming almost every hour of the day. She had me research soundproofing schemes and considered replacing the windows on that side of the house with cinder blocks. "That will fix their wagon," she said, and I went, as I often did, to fill the electric kettle with water and listen to its soothing hum.

But Carl Fletcher moved in alone and didn't change anything.

He had a job with the phone company and went to work out in the field early each morning. He came home at the same time every day but Friday. On the weekends he sat in his yard and drank beer. He had the paper with him and a book and always, always, the portable radio that he kept tuned to sports or talk.

Occasionally his daughter, Madeline, whom my mother called the "circus freak" because of her tattoos, would visit. My mother complained about the noise of her motorcycle and "all of that flesh spread out in the yard," but she had never spoken to Carl Fletcher, and he had never bothered to introduce himself. What I knew of my mother's neighbors at this point was all secondhand, distributed, along with frozen soups or potted jams, by Mrs. Castle when we crossed paths.

As Mr. Fletcher turned his steaks over, I could hear the sizzle of the fat dripping into the fire over the noise of the game.

From my kneeling position, one I refused to adopt anymore at Westmore—too hard on the knees—I crawled outside and

[ 2 5 ]

Alice S e bo Id

knelt again at the edge of my mother's body. I thought of a man I'd read about who felt so devout he dragged a replica of Jesus's cross from one end of Berlin to the other, wearing only some sort of Gandhi-like diaper and traveling on his quickly bloodied knees.

The small scratch on my mother's cheek had congealed. Her eyes had purpled in halos around their sockets. I remembered turning her in bed and adjusting strips of sheepskin under her to stave off the inevitable bedsores during the lengthy convalescence that followed the surgery for her colon cancer.

Mr. Fletcher placed the steaks on a plate, took his meat and his radio, and went back inside. He was the sort of man who could be counted on, I realized, never to look up. I saw the coals still orange in his grill.