To See the Moon Again (17 page)

“I'm so sorry,” Carmen said softly. “You don't have to. I shouldn't have . . .” She stared out her window as Julia turned the car around and headed back to the stone house.

Two blocks from home, they passed a house with a wraparound porch. Wind chimes of every variety hung along the eaves.

The windows of the Buick were still down, and they stopped and listened a moment. It struck Julia that though the visual effect was whimsical, the choir of wind chimes wasn't as harmonious and lilting a sound as one might expect.

“I like to walk this way whenever the wind is blowing,” Carmen said, nodding toward the house.

Other mournful words of her father's old songs came to Julia's mind.
Hang your head over, hear the wind blow. Look down, look down that lonesome road. Nobody else can walk it for you, you've got to walk it by yourself.

A car horn beeped behind them. Julia raised a hand out the window and then drove on toward home.

T
HE
B
EATEN
P
ATH

Julia was still in bed when the phone rang early Saturday morning. “I hope you don't come dragging in after dark,” Pamela said. “I sure wish you would stay two nights instead of just one. We'll barely have any time to visit. We're grilling out for supper.” All the same things she had been saying for the past week. “Are the suitcases in the car yet? What time are you leaving?”

“After Carmen gets home,” Julia said.

“Gets home? Where is she?”

“Here right now, but she's headed to church soon,” Julia said.

Pamela groaned. “Church—
today
? It's Saturday.”

“The Sunday school classes are putting on a play about Moses and the Israelites tomorrow. She volunteered to do the props.”

Pamela gave a derisive laugh. “The
props
? Like what? The golden calf?”

“No, just manna and stone tablets. The manna was easy, but the stone tablets took a little work. She made them out of foam.”

Pamela said, “That ought to make a real convincing sound when Moses throws them down.” She laughed again. “How are they going to manage the plagues? And the parting of the Red Sea?” Julia knew Pamela was only flaunting her knowledge of Bible stories. She never missed a chance to let it be known that she had taken her children to church and Sunday school when they were growing up.

Julia gave her time to finish laughing. “Are you done now? Because if you are, I need to hang up. I have to get ready for a trip.”

“Did you get the oil checked in your car?” Pamela asked. “You could burn up your engine if you . . .”

“I told you, we're renting a car,” Julia said. “We're picking it up at noon.”

“Well, still, it wouldn't hurt to check the oil, and the tire pressure, too. And the heat and air—make sure that . . . wait, did you say
noon
? You're not leaving till
noon
?”

Julia finally got off the phone with her, but not before Pamela once again dropped a hint to be invited along on the authors' tour: “I've heard the colors are supposed to be especially good this year. That's something I've always wanted to do—visit New England during October.” Julia knew that the wistful sigh was meant to be heard.

“Well, we won't be able to get away at all today if I don't get off the phone,” Julia said. “We'll see you when we get there.” And she hung up. She couldn't imagine having Pamela along for the whole trip. This overnight visit at her house was going to be bad enough.

•   •   •

J
ULIA
was driving the first leg of the trip. They had been on the road over an hour, listening to a program called
From the Top
on NPR, featuring especially talented young musicians.

“Did you ever take music lessons?” Carmen said.

Julia nodded. “Piano. Your father could play circles around me, though.” She remembered how she dreaded practicing, not because of the practice itself—she had actually loved playing the piano—but because of her father's tutorials shouted from the other room, always ending sooner or later with “Stop! You're slaughtering it! No more!”

They passed a billboard:
FIREWORKS AND PEACHES NEXT EXIT.
Evidently North Carolina was no different from every other state in the South, all of which were full of such signs that stayed up year-round.

“I never heard Daddy play the piano,” Carmen said, “but you knew he played the guitar, right? He taught me a little. He got me a little plastic ukulele when I was only four.” She positioned her left hand on an imaginary fret and made strumming motions with her right. “Isn't
ukulele
a cool word? Has a little Hawaiian twang.” She said it again.
“U-ku-le-le.”

“Your father could have played any instrument he picked up,” Julia said. She turned the radio off. “Okay, want to start reading now?”

Carmen reached to the backseat and got a book titled
Masterworks of Short Fiction
. It was Julia's idea that they use some of their road time reading aloud. For this purpose, she had selected an anthology of short stories and the novella
Ethan Frome
, which she wanted to save for after they visited Edith Wharton's home in Massachusetts. They would listen to the radio, too, of course, as well as the CDs she had brought along.

The truck traffic was heavy along this stretch, but Julia's driving strategy was to set the cruise control at sixty and stay in the right lane. This meant, of course, that most other vehicles, including eighteen-wheelers, were whizzing past their rented Honda. That was fine with her. She was in no hurry to get to Pamela's. A red Corvette convertible flew by, then whipped in front of her to pass a car that wouldn't give up the middle lane.

The stories in the
Masterworks
book were arranged in alphabetical order according to the authors' last names. Julia had assumed they would start with the first story and continue in order, but Carmen opened the book and ran her finger down the table of contents, then stopped suddenly and laughed. “Well, how about that? I should've known. Here's a story you probably know from memory—let's do it first.” And she turned to Flannery O'Connor's “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

Julia had actually hoped to be the one to read this story aloud since it was one of her four favorites by Flannery O'Connor. But this might be better after all. Now that she thought about it, she couldn't remember ever hearing it read aloud by someone else, though she herself had done it numbers of times.

•   •   •

C
ARMEN
cleared her throat and plunged in. Julia wished later that she had a recording, not necessarily of the story itself, though Carmen was an expressive, fluent reader, but it was the girl's commentary along the way she wished she could replay.

After the first page, it was, simply, “She's a good writer. Very funny, very compact.” On the next page she remarked that it felt odd to be riding in a car reading a story about a family riding in a car. She also said she had a bad feeling about the cat hidden in the basket on the floor of the backseat. “That cat is going to cause trouble, you wait and see,” she said, as if Julia didn't already know.

She stopped and laughed heartily after the sentence
In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.
“I did laundry for a woman in Rhode Island just like that,” she said. “She wore this lacy pink underwear whenever she went out in case she ended up in the emergency room.”

On the next page Carmen paused and said, “So I guess the grandmother's never going to get a real name besides ‘the grandmother,' right?” But she didn't wait for an answer. After the part about Mr. Teagarden and the watermelon, she stopped again and laughed, and when the monkey sprang into the chinaberry tree a little later, she laughed even harder, then said admiringly, “Who would ever think of putting something like that in a story?”

She thought June Star was especially funny, said she used to know a little girl exactly like her. When the Misfit was mentioned again on the fifth page, she said, “Uh-oh . . . portentous. Is he going to show up at the end?” But she kept reading, quite fast, rarely faltering over a word.

Julia hoped the traffic wouldn't be this bad the whole way. She had thought the roads would be clearer traveling on Saturday. Right now she was hemmed in on all three sides by trucks, with two more lined up behind the one that was passing her. She wasn't going to let herself get pressured into joining the passing game, though. There was no need to rush. She knew there was a rhythm to freeway traffic. This little bottleneck would loosen eventually. Anyway, it was a fine day for traveling—overcast with an expected high of sixty—and she was listening to one of her favorite stories.

The description of the accident tickled Carmen, especially the way it started, with the cat leaping out of the basket onto Bailey's shoulder, “clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.” She laughed at some length over that phrase, and the grandmother's “I believe I have injured an organ.”

But that was the last time she laughed. When the three men in the black car showed up and the grandmother recognized the driver, Carmen stopped and threw her head back. “Oh, no, I knew it. It's him. I don't think I want to read any further.” But she kept going, only slower now, as all the family members were marched off into the dark woods except the grandmother. Carmen didn't even smile when the Misfit said his father died in “nineteen ought nineteen,” and when the last three gunshots were fired, she paused and gave a low half moan before reading the final few paragraphs.

Julia found that she was clutching the steering wheel tightly, her neck tense. Somehow the story seemed more violent this time than it ever had before. Perhaps it was due to the fact that she wasn't seeing the words on the page. Free from the physical process of reading, maybe her mind translated the words into more powerful images. Or maybe the story was colored this time by Carmen's remarks or by her slower pace at the end. Whereas it had never before quite seemed like anything that could really happen, this time it struck her with the force of some gruesome report on the evening news. She was suddenly reminded that horrible things could happen to real people on road trips.

The blue light of a police car was flashing up ahead, and as they passed it, Julia saw the red Corvette pulled onto the shoulder of the road. The driver was handing the officer something out the window.

Carmen inhaled deeply and let out a long sigh. “Wow. Are all her stories this . . . harrowing?”

“Well, no,” Julia said, regretting now that this was the story they had started with. She didn't want Carmen to think she enjoyed stories about old women getting shot by escaped convicts. She wished one of O'Connor's milder stories had been included in the book rather than this one. Even the one about Hulga Hopewell and her wooden leg would have been better.

And after Carmen's next words, she wished it more than ever. “Okay, I have a question,” the girl said. “Maybe I'm imagining things, but it seems to me that Flannery O'Connor is sort of interested in religion. I mean, even the title of the story, right? ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find'—well, yeah, like
impossible
, if we're talking about man's natural . . . depravity. You think that's what she was getting at?”

Julia had no desire to discuss man's natural depravity. “Maybe, maybe not,” she said.

“Well, they're all sinners, not just the Misfit,” Carmen said. “Even the grandmother—she goes from being this very funny character to sort of pathetic, you know? Sort of . . . fatuous. She's this selfish old hypocrite that gets them on the wrong road first, and then gets them all killed. But then at the end when she finally sees the truth about herself and him and everybody else—well, it's too late then for . . . grace. I don't know, though—is
that
what's going on?”

In Julia's years of teaching, whenever a student offered some insight beyond his years, her first thought was always to suspect it was not his own, that he had read it in a journal or online critique and was just trying to show off. But Carmen's comment had come so spontaneously that Julia was forced to accept it as genuine. She tried not to act as surprised as she felt.

Depravity, hypocrisy, grace—these were Flannery O'Connor's bread and butter in the way of themes, but how could a high school dropout extract all of this? In one reading, no less? And how could she nail the grandmother's character so precisely when so many readers saw her as purely comic or purely evil?

•   •   •

S
HE
felt Carmen's eyes on her, as if waiting for an answer, though Julia couldn't think of what the question was. “Her fiction is very complex,” she finally said.

“But do all her stories have this kind of
religious
slant?” Carmen said. “I wouldn't expect you to like stories like that.”

Julia couldn't remember now why she had ever thought reading stories aloud in the car was a good idea. “I guess you could say,” she replied slowly, “I like her stories in spite of her religion, not because of it. A good story can always be enjoyed on different levels, both literal and figurative.”

Carmen laughed. “Oh, Aunt Julia, I just love the way you talk. I know there's no way I could ever learn everything you know.” She paused. “You know, that part when the grandmother told the Misfit he was one of her
babies
? Well, I wonder if . . .”

Thankfully, Julia didn't have to hear what Carmen wondered, for at that very moment a distraction appeared in the form of a flashing message on a portable signboard along the side of the road:
TRAFFIC SLOWING AHEAD.
Carmen stopped talking and pointed to it. Seconds later, they came to the top of a small rise and saw a long line of vehicles bumper to bumper in all three lanes ahead of them as far as they could see. They soon came to a complete stop.