To See the Moon Again (19 page)

It still seemed like such a contradiction to Julia that her sister, so cautionary and well-armed with practical tips, so quick to spot error, could give in to such trite mush in her music and reexperience the same sappy, banal scenarios time and again. But then, maybe it made a certain kind of sense. Maybe it was simply Pamela's way of acknowledging that the circumstances of life couldn't always be corralled and managed and that when the severest blows were dealt, as they so often would be, the time for advice was past and all one could do was mourn with the mournful.

Eventually the supper things were cleared away. Butch dug the Rook cards out of a drawer in the kitchen, and they all sat down at the table. Maybe things would have proceeded calmly if Pamela hadn't said, “Did I tell you that everything we had for supper was one of Mother's recipes?”

And if Carmen hadn't said
this
: “She must've been a good cook.”

A simple statement that could have been answered with a simple yes or no, but naturally Pamela couldn't stop at that. She started listing all her favorite dishes among the ones her mother cooked, many of which Julia couldn't even recall. “Oh, and she made this chicken spaghetti I just
loved
,” she said. Her smile suddenly vanished. “But Daddy didn't—at least that's what he told her one day after she'd been making it for years and years. She served it for supper that night, and he knocked his plate off the table and told her it tasted like . . .”

And suddenly, another hairpin turn of emotion. Before they knew what had happened, Pamela was in tears again. “Oh, she had such a
hard, sad
life!” she said.

We all did
, Julia wanted to say. She said nothing, though, nor did she cry.

Pamela continued. “She told me once that she always felt responsible for Daddy's accident. He woke up sick that day, but she talked him into going to work since he didn't have any more sick days left and they needed the money. If he had just stayed home, everything could've been different. But he didn't and she . . .” Fresh tears followed.

Julia took this in. Here was something she had never known, something their mother had for some reason chosen to tell only Pamela, and Pamela for some reason had never told her.

Butch stared at the table, chewing on the inside of his mouth, occasionally reaching over to pat Pamela's hand, as if this were a play they had rehearsed many times and he was listening to her lines again. Carmen, her eyes full of commiseration, apologized for bringing up a touchy subject.

“But you didn't, honey, you didn't!” Pamela said. “I set myself up for it, going through all her old recipes like I did. And wearing
this
again.” She fingered the piping around the bib of her apron. “It used to be hers.” At last she wound down and took several deep, shuddering breaths. With her red eyes and short mop of tight curls, she looked like an overgrown child, vulnerable and a little foolish.

There was a long silence, and then Carmen said, “I didn't know any of that. Daddy never told me much except that his relationship with his father was . . . acrimonious. He called his mother a few times—I remember once when he put me on the phone and told me to say something. I must've been seven or eight. So I told her all about some dinosaur bones somebody had just dug up near Painted Horse. But she never said a word back. Daddy said not to feel bad, she was probably crying, but I didn't see how dinosaur bones were anything to cry about.”

At that Pamela broke into laughter—the giddy kind that went on too long to be real. “Well, goodness, I sure know how to be a wet blanket, don't I?” She wiped her eyes and waved her arms about. “Here, let's clear the air of all the doom and gloom. Okay, now, does anybody want to play Rook? I warn you, Butch and I are
really
good.” Her voice was thin and bright, like something breakable. “Maybe we should split up so we're not partners, but whoever gets Butch, whoa, watch out. He's a
maniac
when it comes to bidding. You remember how to play, don't you, Jules?” She was talking breathlessly now, and Butch was watching her, no expression on his face.

Julia nodded. Rook sounded much safer than sitting around talking, running the risk of another cloudburst of emotion. It was decided that Julia and Pamela would team up against Butch and Carmen. Butch reviewed the rules aloud while Pamela went to get a pencil and scorepad.

•   •   •

I
T
was almost ten o'clock when Pamela stood up and, with a dramatic flourish, laid down her last card, then emitted a whoop of victory. She had saved the right color, yielding a windfall of all the remaining points plus the kitty, not only setting Butch, who had taken the bid, but also pushing the score for herself and Julia to 505. “We did it, we did it!” she cried, raising her palm to Julia for a high five. “We took them
down
!” She pushed her chair back and did a little jig, which rattled the dishes in the china hutch against the wall.

“Careful, you might rupture something,” Butch said. “My fault,” he said to Carmen. “I flubbed up when I trumped in on that measly fourteen in the third hand.” He went on to review each hand after that, ending with “And she knew my off-suit was black, so she saved her high one.” He turned to Pamela, who was still bobbing around in a circle, waving both hands. “You must've had a ton of black.”

“I did, I did!” She started a modified cancan, though lifting her foot only a few inches with each kick. Her sweat pants were a size too small so that more was jiggling than just the dishes in the china hutch. “Time for a celebration!” she said as she danced over to the refrigerator to get the Chocolate Satin Decadence.

Later when Julia and Carmen were getting ready for bed in the guest room, they clearly heard Pamela say to Butch across the hall, “You can't shower till morning. I don't want them running out of hot water tonight.” And Butch's answer was just as clear: “I told you that dinky hot water tank wasn't big enough when we bought it.” Then he said, “Hey, what's wrong, sugar? Your feet hurting again? Here, come to Daddy. Lie down and let me rub them for you.” And there was a soft click as their bedroom door closed.

Carmen nodded, smiling. “I suspected all along they liked each other a lot more than they were letting on. But you probably already knew that.”

Julia said nothing. She was too busy wondering how a twenty-year-old could read between the lines so much better than someone in her fifties with a PhD.

•   •   •

T
HEY
got away after breakfast the next morning. On the front porch Carmen hugged both Pamela and Butch. “I never had aunts and uncles,” she said. “Not real ones. Or cousins either—I really want to meet Bobby and Kendra sometime. And Cody and Starla and Eleanor and little Jesse.” As they pulled out of the driveway, she called to Butch, “That was just a fluke last night. We'll win the next Rook game!”

“Oh, no, you won't!” Pamela said. “You just wait and see—right, Jules?” She gave a little yelp, then swung her hip sideways and bumped against Butch, who grimaced and pretended to be hurt. He was wearing a bright orange T-shirt with a big black question mark printed on the front and a pair of pants held up by suspenders—pants so roomy that it suddenly made Julia wonder if he used to be even larger.

Julia slowly backed out into the street, then allowed herself one last look. Pamela's round face had fallen, and she was holding her apron up against the corner of one eye. Something pulled at Julia's heart, seeing her sister standing there, wearing the same tight sweat pants as last night, her springy curls hugging her head like a nubby knitted cap. Butch moved closer and put an arm around her.

Carmen twisted herself around and waved to them until they were lost to sight. After a moment of silence, she sighed and said, “I sure like them.” She laughed. “Aunt Pamela is sort of . . . mercurial, isn't she?”

Already the image of her sister standing on the porch of the small brick house had begun to fade in Julia's mind, yet off and on throughout the rest of the day, for some reason, she kept seeing the big black question mark on Butch's shirt.

R
UGGED
O
PTIMISM

It was a cool day. High in the pale blue sky, small lumpy white clouds were laid out in long rows, as if someone had run a wide rake through them. The hillsides in Virginia were showing more fall color than in South Carolina, though it still wouldn't peak here for another couple of weeks.

Somewhere on the freeway in Virginia, Carmen chose a CD of Ferde Grofé's
Grand Canyon Suite
to play, but first she took the insert out of the CD case to read about the piece. “Okay, listen to this. Here was his inspiration.” And she read aloud: “
The richness of the land and the rugged optimism of its people fired my imagination.
I like that,” she said. “Rugged optimism.” She said the words slowly, distinctly. “And this is nice, too. Listen.
But this music is your music, and mine only in the highly technical sense that a copyright has been filed away with my name on it.
” She turned to Julia. “Don't you just love that? Doesn't it show what a big heart he must have had?”

That was Carmen, always looking for the best in people. To Julia it sounded like the kind of statement someone would carefully craft to market himself as noble and generous. She would like to ask Ferde Grofé what he did with the money he earned from the
Grand Canyon Suite
. Had he given all of that to the American people, too?

They rode in silence for several minutes as Carmen continued to study the insert. It was a pleasant pattern they had already fallen into: periods of quiet between the CDs and radio. And the talking, of course. Perhaps more talking than Julia would have chosen, yet she had to give Carmen credit—she could take a hint when Julia was ready to be done.

“I went to the Grand Canyon one time,” Carmen said now. “It was one of the few trips we took when I was a kid. We rode there in Daddy's pickup truck and stayed two nights in a motel. But we never did it again. It made Lulu too nervous to be away from home.” She closed the insert, then studied the picture on the front, an artist's rendering of the Grand Canyon at sunset. “Did you ever go on any trips when you were growing up? I don't remember Daddy ever talking about it if you did.”

The casual tone was a ploy, something the girl had obviously discovered to be more successful for getting answers to her questions, especially questions concerning Julia's childhood, about which she seemed genuinely interested, though Julia knew that her greater interest was in Jeremiah's childhood. Head bent, Carmen pretended to be very busy trying to fit the insert back into the case, as if she didn't much care whether Julia answered or not.

Julia wasn't fooled, but she answered the question anyway. “Only one I can remember,” she said.

“Yeah? Where did you go?” Carmen asked.

So Julia told her.

As navigator, her mother had had only one tool—road maps, the uncooperative ones that would never fold back up the right way. Unfortunately, some of them were also out of date, which, along with the hubbub of having three children in the car, resulted in more than one wrong turn. Her father's way of dealing with such errors was to pummel the dashboard and steering wheel while shouting insults at her mother, the children, other drivers, and the people who made the road maps.

It was the only family trip they ever took after her father's accident. All the way from Alabama to Missouri to visit her mother's parents, and all the way back again. Julia realized now that her father must have been under tremendous physical duress the whole time he was driving—an activity expressly forbidden by his doctor, whom he always referred to as “Peabrain Peters.” As a child, however, she was aware of only one thing: her deep fear that the trip would never end or that none of them would still be alive when it did.

She remembered cowering in the backseat, never relaxing for a minute, trying to shush Jeremiah, who kept saying he was thirsty or hungry or needed to go to the bathroom. He couldn't have been more than five, but already he and their father were at odds. When their father threatened at one point to make them all get out and walk, Jeremiah spoke up at once. There was no way Julia could stop him fast enough. “But Grandma and Grandpa wouldn't like it if
you
got there and we weren't with you,” he said in his clear, flutelike voice. It wasn't exactly sarcasm, or sass, but simply a bright child's way of noting the humor in an adult's silly statement. But because almost anything Jeremiah ever said was assigned to the broad category of “impertinence,” their father took immediate offense.

Julia remembered how wildly the car had swerved on the two-lane road, accompanied by a horn blast from an oncoming car, as her father swung an arm into the backseat, trying to make contact with some part of Jeremiah's body. He hit Julia's Chatty Cathy doll instead, knocking her onto the floor and activating her voice. “Let's have a party!” the doll said. Jeremiah made the mistake of giggling at this, and their father slammed on the brakes and careened off the road. The car stopped at a crazy angle, the nose aimed down into a wide shallow ditch.

Their father must have realized the difficulty of administering a spanking in such close quarters, especially since he seemed to have pulled a muscle and raised a welt on his hand, for he proceeded to deliver only a tongue-lashing about “back talk,” in which he included everyone in the car, even Julia's doll that didn't know when to keep her blankety-blank mouth shut.

For Jeremiah, scoldings were so routine by now that he generally failed to be attentive, much less impressed, often putting him in double jeopardy: a spanking for the original crime and another for contempt of court. But not this time. Her father never even turned around to see Jeremiah laying both sticky hands against the window and tracing around them with his tongue.

Julia remembered very little of the actual visit with her grandparents. She had seen them only a few times in her life, had never before been to their house, though they always sent nice presents for birthdays and Christmas. They were the ones, in fact, who had given her the Chatty Cathy doll for her last birthday. She had only vague memories of them: her grandmother's large, soft lap and sad, droopy eyes, her grandfather's stooped posture and his fondness for peppermints. She remembered sleeping in a white room with two white beds and yellow striped curtains. And she remembered saying good-bye, being pressed close to her grandmother, smelling her talcum powder and feeling her shake as she wept.

On the way back, her mother drove the car, with all three children jammed elbow to elbow in the front seat while their father lay on the backseat updating them every two minutes as to the degree of his discomfort and the further damage to his back.

“Pamela was the lucky one on that trip,” Julia said to Carmen. “She was too young to remember it.”

Carmen was quiet for a moment before venturing, “The part about the doll is pretty funny—but I can say that because it didn't happen to me.” She turned to look out the window. “Daddy was such a different kind of father from that. It's hard to see how the two of them could've been related, isn't it?”

“It was the accident,” Julia said. “My father never got over it. Not physically, not mentally, not emotionally. He took it out on the world, and since it was our misfortune to be stuck in the same house with him, we bore the brunt of it.” Even as she said it, she realized that this was something she had never before put into words. To Carmen it must have sounded like a prelude to forgiveness, or the act itself, though Julia knew she was in no way capable of ever doing that.

Carmen seemed to be thinking this over, but then she said, “I actually remember Daddy telling me about that doll of yours—I'm sure you already know why.” She didn't wait for a reply. “What other things could your Chatty Cathy say?” This, too, was typical of the girl, buying time, suspending the discussion of something important by circling back to a trivial detail.

But trivial details were fine with Julia. She didn't want to talk about her father anymore. “Oh, let's see—she could say, ‘Tell me a story' and ‘Please brush my hair' and ‘Let's play house' and ‘May I have a cookie?' Those were some I remember. And ‘I love you.'”

She could have told Carmen that her Chatty Cathy doll mysteriously lost her voice shortly after the trip, that one day when she went to pull the ring behind the doll's neck, there was nothing to pull. The ring was gone, with only an empty pinhole where the string used to be. But there was no reason to get into all that—her mother's dissolving into tears when she saw it, Julia's own inconsolable grief, the fact that she never said a word to her father for fear that next time she might find one of the doll's limbs missing, or the pretty blue eyes that opened and closed, or the blond hair on her head, or her whole head. To think that she had a father who would do such a thing filled her with horror and shame. And a great deal of anger, which she took care to conceal.

She had loved the doll before that, but thereafter she loved her obsessively, with a sentimentality born of pity, as one would love a blind puppy. From that day on, Julia stayed in her bedroom more than ever, and she took to hiding Chatty Cathy whenever she wasn't home. She never carried the doll out in public after that, for she didn't want to run the risk of exposing her handicap to others.

Well, goodness, enough of all that,
she told herself now. You couldn't go through life whimpering over a little thing like a doll. Such was life. She had gone through much worse things than a broken doll. And so had other people. She glanced over at Carmen, who was staring into space, her lips pursed as if whistling, though no sound came out.

•   •   •

J
ULIA
wanted to be behind the wheel of a car as little as possible in the four major cities they would be visiting before beginning their authors' tour. To this end she had instructed Carmen during the planning stages to find hotels within walking distance of the main tourist attractions. They would locate their hotel, park there, and then do their sightseeing on foot. Or if they couldn't walk somewhere, they could take a taxi, maybe a subway or bus if they could figure out the right one.

Washington, D.C., was the first stop. They could only sample it, of course, so it was a matter of selecting. The National Zoo was Julia's choice, an easy one after learning that Carmen had never been to a zoo. After some deliberation, Carmen chose the National Mall. Even then, they would have to keep moving to see them both.

After arriving in the city, finding their hotel, and eating lunch, they walked to the Mall and spent the afternoon visiting the monuments and war memorials. “It's a shame, isn't it?” Carmen said as they stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking across the Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument. “To be able to see such a little bit, when you could spend days and days here. It feels sort of like a . . . desecration, doesn't it?”

At the World War II Memorial, they separated briefly while Julia moved around the oval walkway taking pictures of the arches, pillars, fountains. When she returned to the Pacific Tower, she found Carmen bent down in front of an old man in a wheelchair, listening, nodding earnestly. “This is Clarence Baker,” she said when she looked up and saw Julia, “and this is Clarence Baker, Jr.” She gestured toward the younger man at his side. “They're both veterans—World War II and Vietnam.” The old man lifted a finger and said something with great vigor, though indistinguishable. It was then that Julia saw the tears coursing down his face.

Carmen took one of the old man's hands in hers. “Thank you for what you did for our country.” She looked up at his son. “Thank you both. You're true heroes.” She patted the old man's hand gently and smiled. “And thank you for sharing all those things with me,” she said. “We owe you so much.”

“What was he telling you?” Julia said as they walked away.

“I don't know,” Carmen said. “I couldn't understand any of it, but his son said he fought in the Pacific and was in the Bataan Death March.”

•   •   •

T
HE
next morning they took the Metro to the National Zoo. They started at the Cheetah Conservation Station and wound their way down Olmsted Walk to the emus, then the elephants, the small mammals, the apes, reptiles, lions, and tigers. After the Kids' Farm, they started back toward the front entrance, stopping by Lemur Island, Gibbon Ridge, and Beaver Valley. In Julia's opinion, the whole experience verged on sensory overload—sights, sounds, smells. Even touch, for Carmen insisted on joining the children who were petting the goats at the Kids' Farm.

They took their time, stopping all along the way for Carmen to sketch pictures of animals in her journal while Julia took notes in hers. They ended near the entrance again, saving the Bird House and Asia Trail for last, and it was here, along the Asia Trail, where something unforgettable happened. Julia knew the lemurs and clouded leopards and otters and flamingos and all the rest would fall out of her mind eventually, but this was the memory she would keep.