To See the Moon Again (7 page)

•   •   •

O
VER
the next week Pamela continued to call every evening with the same question: “Did she come yet?” She also said things like, “Well, you need to get on with your life. You're too tense. I think you ought to pack a suitcase and come see me for a couple of weeks. Sisters
do
usually visit each other, you know.”

As if it would ease anybody's tension to spend a week in the same house with an inveterate nail biter like Pamela. Julia always thanked her but declined, claiming she was too tired to pack a suitcase. She hadn't told Pamela about her sabbatical yet because she dreaded hearing all the questions, all the advice about how she should use the time, especially more hints about visits.

As the days wore on, she began to allow herself to believe that the threat of Carmen was past. She wasn't ready yet to open Matthew's closet, but she busied herself cleaning the back porch and kitchen cupboards, getting her teaching wardrobe washed and pressed and properly stored, watching movies, taking long walks, going back and forth to the library.

She began reading late into the night. She finished two books about writing, even took some notes to integrate into her lectures. Her colleague had been right about the Stephen King book—it was very good, even though King said bluntly that nobody really needed how-to books in order to learn to write well. You could learn everything you needed to know, he said, by reading and paying attention and rubbing shoulders with people in the normal course of living and working. And by writing, of course. You had to write a lot to learn to write well.

And this frothy-sounding principle from the other book by a writer she had never heard of: “To achieve the highest mark in fiction, the writer himself must live life fully.” She wrote that down, too. Though insipid, it could launch a class discussion:
What does it mean to live life fully?

Somewhere in the back of Julia's mind during the reading of these two books, an intention had formed. She had to write a story of her own and get it published. If she didn't, she could never hope to put to rest her fear and guilt over Jeremiah's stories. Not that writing a good story would absolve her, but maybe it would clear her mind, gain her a few more nights of sleep, or at least a few nights of more sleep.

Many years ago she had read a description of guilt that had stuck with her, the gist of it being that guilt is an irresistible thing humans latch on to and carry around like precious cargo. She thought it might have been in a Steinbeck novel, though she couldn't remember which one. She had read the passage many times, then had closed the book never to finish it.

•   •   •

O
N
the second Saturday morning in June, Julia rose early, having decided sometime during the night to drive to Andalusia in Milledgeville, Georgia, today. It would take seven hours of driving time altogether, and then the walking tour. Not only would it get her out of the house in case Carmen came, but she would also be able to list the trip under “Professional Growth and Development” in the next update of her faculty portfolio.

Besides visiting Andalusia, she had made another decision during the night: If she could get through another week safely, she would put Carmen completely out of her mind and get on with the summer.

She dressed quickly, ate a little breakfast, printed out directions, and by eight o'clock was locking the back door of the stone house. She got into the Buick, set the trip odometer, and pulled away from Ivy Dale, none of it with much enthusiasm. For some reason, this trip felt more like something she needed to do rather than wanted to.

Heading toward the interstate, she made another decision: Today she would try to live life fully. She had heard the phrase many times before running across it in the book, of course, and even though it was a cliché, it might be something to take up her mind today. She knew it probably started with a positive attitude—another nebulous concept, with a whiff of false virtue about it, one of those traits she associated with shallow naïve people. But it couldn't hurt. It might be fun to become a different person for a day.

The day promised to be a fine, sunny one—there, that was a start on a positive attitude. And the summer was spread out before her, and an entire year after that. She reminded herself again that many of her colleagues would love to be in her place, getting paid for all that time to do whatever they wanted to do.

As she settled into the flow of traffic, another idea returned to her, something else she had thought of during the previous night—that after this refresher drive to Andalusia she could perhaps plan a trip along the eastern seaboard. New England was full of authors' homes. Such a trip would certainly give her something to show for her year out of the classroom. Besides courage to leave her comfort zone, it would require research and preparation, not to mention careful budgeting, and then the trip itself would occupy a great deal of time and in the end provide her with even more professional activities to list in her portfolio. And maybe ideas for stories, too.

The miles passed agreeably enough. Before long she tuned the radio to
Weekend Edition
on NPR and listened for a while to a woman from Australia talking about the year she spent as a doctor in the African bush. “I've never liked change,” the woman said in her starchy, clipped accent. “I was absolutely petrified, but now I'm gratified that I did it.” Here was inspiration—a woman who was afraid to leave her comfort zone but did it anyway and was glad afterward.

Shortly there followed a story about a restaurant in Tennessee called the Critter Hutch, specializing in dishes featuring squirrel, possum, and rabbit. “Fried is the cooking method of choice here at the Critter Hutch,” the radio narrator said. In the background were kitchen sounds—clanging metal, whirring mixers, sizzling grills, running water, shouting, clattering, thunking. Though Julia had no interest in actually eating at the Critter Hutch, she suddenly wished she could see it. What a wonder—the world was full of such diverse people, even in neighboring states. Maybe she should make a list of some of these places for day trips. Tennessee wasn't that far away.

•   •   •

T
HE
radio soon became only background noise as Julia fell to remembering. Matthew's people had lived in Tennessee. He had taken her there the first Christmas after they were married. As she recalled, the relatives she had met on that trip were just the type to eat possum and squirrel. By then the grandmother who had raised Matthew was in failing health in a nursing home called Quiet Acres. They had gone to see her.

A bizarre but curiously tender scene came to Julia's mind. The grandmother, whom Matthew had always spoken of as Gran, was a wisp of a woman, part Cherokee, with sharp features, skin like old leather, and a long tangle of yellow-gray hair.

When they entered her room, Gran was staring hard at the door as if willing someone to appear. “Oh, bless us, you're here, Matty,” she said, her voice a high-pitched warble yet oddly commanding. “Come over here quick.” She raised a twisted hand toward her bedside table. “Look inside there and get that jar.”

There was only one jar in the drawer, and Matthew took it out. It was a jar of hair removal cream. “You got to do this, Matty.” She touched a clawlike finger to her jawline. “I got these old whiskers down here, but my hands are too crippled up to do anything.”

Matthew had held back. “I brought Julia to meet you, Gran,” he said. He cast a look at Julia that said,
Help me out here
. But Julia stayed where she was, at the foot of the bed. She must have spoken the usual niceties—
Glad to meet you, I've heard so much about you
—but Gran had eyes only for Matthew.

“Nurses here can't do squat,” Gran said. “Only one I like—a colored girl. All the rest I got no use for. Don't reckon half of them ever even went to nursing school.” She pushed herself up higher on her pillows. “Go on, Matty, get a washrag from the sink and wet it. It tells you how to do it on the jar.”

Julia remembered little else about that trip to Tennessee, but she could still see Matthew sitting on the edge of his grandmother's bed, smoothing cream onto her face and then gently wiping it off. Afterward he brushed the tangles out of her hair. Julia hadn't thought much about the incident at the time, but it struck her now as a marvel. She wondered why she couldn't have learned to love a man like that, couldn't have at least tried. It was at unguarded moments like this that she felt the impact of her carelessness, her failure to notice important things.

Well, Matthew had been careless, too, leaving her saddled with so many debts that she'd been forced to deplete almost every resource, even most of her modest inheritance. She had always trusted him to pay the bills and keep their accounts in order. After all, as an insurance adjuster, he worked with numbers every day. It was incredible to think she had known so little about their finances, that she had no idea, for example, about the bad investments or the other two credit cards Matthew used besides the one they shared, and that he routinely robbed one to pay the other. Electronic equipment, expensive clothes, things for the house, a new car every couple of years—nothing that worried her at the time, but all of which added up to a lot of money.

When all the debts were finally settled, she considered it a mercy that she was able to keep the stone house and her Buick. That she had enough each month to pay Gil the yardman was a luxury.

But she had already strayed from her purpose—these weren't positive thoughts. She couldn't let herself start going over all of that. It was in the past. With Pamela's help, she had paid every debt. Except for her monthly mortgage, she owed no one. There, that was a happy thought. Her accounts were clear, with some left over.

There was no way to know how word of her financial difficulty had leaked out, but such news always did. Even though she had been spared the public ignominy of foreclosure or bankruptcy, Julia could still see in people's eyes that they knew she had fallen to reduced circumstances. She wanted to wear a sign around her neck:
Don't feel sorry for me. I am completely solvent.

She turned the radio up a little. “. . . and though they've recently received sharp criticism from animal rights activists, for now the Critter Hutch is still open for lunch and supper six days a week,” the reporter was saying. Well, of course, the whole world could be overrun with squirrels and rabbits, with ten possums lying dead along every country mile, but there would always be some PETA fanatic ready to stage a protest over killing them for food.

Julia turned the radio off and popped an audiocassette into the tape player. Respighi's
Pines of Rome
—that would do. She didn't mind being one of the few people who still had a collection of audiocassettes and still drove a car with a cassette player. It was a perfectly legitimate way to listen to music. It occurred to her that perhaps she could go to Rome someday and see the Coliseum and the Vatican and the catacombs and the Pantheon. And whatever else was there. Aside from the stereotypical things—the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Big Ben in London, the canals in Venice—she knew so little of the world. Surely part of living life fully had to be visiting other countries.

Or she could read about them—that would be free, although inferior to the real thing and certainly not the most aggressive way to combat provinciality. Still, armchair travel could be another way to fill the long hours of the coming year.

•   •   •

S
HE
pulled into the entrance at Andalusia before noon and made her way to the broad steps leading up to the house. A short video about Flannery O'Connor ran continuously in one of the back rooms, and this was where she decided to start. Though none of it was new information to her, she never grew tired of it. After that she took her time walking through the house. She stood at the doorway of O'Connor's bedroom a long time, imagining the author bent over her typewriter every morning.

On the wide screened front porch, she sat in a rocking chair a good while, looking out over the same landscape O'Connor had observed decades earlier. She left the house and strolled among the various outbuildings, then walked down to the pond and along the road for a piece, imagining what it must have been like when O'Connor lived here, when the sweetness of purple wisteria hung in the air and peacocks roosted in the trees at night.

A strange hobby for a single woman to have had—raising noisy, showy peacocks—but O'Connor had owned as many as fifty at a time. Recently the foundation had reinstated a moderate number of the birds at Andalusia, no doubt hoping to attract more tourists. As Julia walked around the property, she observed them closely, musing over the astounding inequity between the plain-looking females and the males dragging their ridiculously magnificent tails behind them. She remembered reading somewhere that a peacock's nighttime screech sounded like someone crying, “Help!”

She finally left Andalusia and drove through the town of Milledgeville, past the college O'Connor attended, her childhood home, the old Sanford Tea House where she used to dine, the church where she attended daily mass, the cemetery where she was buried.

It was well after three o'clock by the time she started home. The trip had been a good idea. As she had hoped, the old fascination had returned and Andalusia had worked its spell on her.

•   •   •

F
OR
the next week it rained off and on every day, with sudden gusts of wind whipping up and clouds letting loose torrential downpours that flooded creeks and basements. Most days it rained two or three times, loud sustained drummings on the roof. Once a storm broke in the middle of the night, after Julia had finally fallen asleep, the lightning so intense and prolonged that she could have read in bed without the lamp. Twice the power went off for several hours. “Someone better build an ark,” a weatherman on television said.