Girls in the Moon

by Janet McNally

  “Besides, it’s for Luna,” she says, “not you.”

  Right. Luna, who abandoned me all summer on tour with her band after telling our mother she wasn’t going back to school. She conveniently skipped Buffalo, went right from Pittsburgh to Cleveland without stopping. I figure this was because it was easier for her to say no to my mother if she didn’t have to be in the same room with her.

  “So you’re not going to talk to her,” I say, “but you’ll send metalwork her way?”

  “I talk to her.” My mother is looking at her raspberry bushes instead of me, and stops to straighten some bird-shield netting that flopped to the side. She yanks it a little harder than she has to, and I watch some unripe berries ping off toward the fence.

  “When?” I’m still holding the sculpture in both my hands. There’s nowhere to put it down, and I don’t know what to do with it.

  “I sent her a text message a few days ago.” She kneels down and pulls a weed with pointy leaves from the loose dirt under the berries.

  “I’m just saying, I can’t fix this between you. You are sending me, but I am not that girl.”

  My mother looks over and smiles at me in a way that says she’s pretty certain I am, in fact, that girl. So I shake my head in what I hope is a clearly vehement fashion. Side. To. Side. I’m determined to get the message across.

  “I’m not ‘sending’ you,” she says. Her voice makes the quotation marks practically visible in the air. She stands and brushes the grass off her knees. “You’re going to visit.”

  “Right.” I sweep one foot through the grass and snag a toe on some clover.

  “And if the opportunity to talk presents itself, nothing’s stopping you from giving it a shot.” My mother opens her car door and starts rummaging in the backseat. “She’ll listen to you.” Her voice is muffled with her head in the car, so I lean forward. “Just ask her to consider going back to school in the fall.”

  I take a breath, and suddenly things feel a little off kilter. All I’ve wanted this whole summer is to leave, and now I’m not sure I want to go.

  “I’ve got enough to worry about without taking on Luna,” I say.

  My mother turns around, then reaches forward and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear. I feel unexpected tears prick my eyelids.

  “I know it’s been a rough summer,” she says. “But things will get better when you go back to school.”

  “Unlikely,” I say. “I ran into Tessa out front. It didn’t go well.”

  My mother knows only some of the story, that I was keeping a secret I thought would hurt Tessa, something I thought I could make go away on its own. She doesn’t know what really happened. She doesn’t know about Ben, or the fact that my friends Evie and Willa haven’t called me all summer either.

  I hold the sculpture out to my mother. It feels leaden, literally. “Will you just take this?”

  She reaches into her backseat again and pulls out two squares of bubble wrap. She hands the first to me.

  “Stress relief,” she says. I lean back against the car and start popping the bubbles, hard and fast enough that Dusty wanders over to see what I’m doing, and if she can eat it.

  My mother pulls a long piece of black electrical tape off a roll.

  “You carry that tape in your car?” I say. “I’m pretty sure that’s a kidnapper trait. Like, if you were a suspect on Law & Order they’d totally be bringing you in on the evidence of the tape alone.”

  She shrugs, zigzagging the tape over the wrap. “You never know when you’ll need it.”

  I can feel the heat of the car through my dress. I shift my weight. “Fine. I’ll try. But no promises.”

  “That’s my girlie.” She hands me the package, fluffy-feeling from the bubble wrap but heavy, as if it has a dense core. Like a comet.

  “This is going to get me kicked off the plane, Mom.” I poke it in her direction. “They’ll X-ray it and think it’s a weapon—a weapon wrapped really carefully. An heirloom weapon.”

  She smiles her wide smile, which looks exactly like Luna’s. “You’re going to have to check your bag, seeing as it weighs one thousand pounds. And anyway, in the right circumstance, almost anything can be used as a weapon.”

  “Says the woman who spends her days making pointy things out of metal.” I shake my head. “You would totally be Law & Order suspect number one.”

  I unzip my suitcase just a little and try to cram the package inside. When I look up again, my mother is staring at me with what Luna calls her “sad mom” look. I guess it’s time for the Big Good-bye. Better here than at the airport, I guess.

  “I don’t know what I’ll do without you,” my mother says. She smooths back a flyaway piece of hair and the sun glints off her ring, a silver band speckled with holes.

  “It’s only a week,” I say. A glorious week when I won’t have to come home from my job at Queen City Coffee smelling like South American Blend and muffin grease. When I won’t have to listen at the cash register to another forty-year-old guy with a lawyer-ish suit and a wedding ring tell me that I have pretty eyes. A week when I won’t have to look over at Tessa’s window and see an empty square of glass. And besides, in spite of my mother’s sad eyes, it shouldn’t be that hard for her to let me go. Unlike Luna, she knows I’ll come back.

  “I know. Oh, I almost forgot,” my mother says. “I made this one for you.”

  She pulls a thin silver bangle off her wrist and slips it over mine. It’s warm from her skin, and I can see that she’s hammered it to give it a wavy finish. It looks like the surface of a pond on a windy day.

  Luna and I used to joke that it was only a matter of time before our mother forged us a matching pair of dog tags so we’d never forget who we belonged to. For years, we’ve been weighed down by necklaces and earrings, bracelets pulled over our wrists and wound around our ankles. Somehow it’s still easy for Luna to leave, even with all that hardware pulling her down. Maybe she just takes it off. What I’m wondering is this: Why can’t I do the same?

  My mother shuts the trunk and pulls herself up to sit on its edge. She looks like she means business.

  “We should talk about the rules,” she says.

  “Rules?”

  “Just a few.”

  “Can’t wait to hear them.” I lean against the side of the car.

  “Good,” she says. “Number one: be careful.”

  “Check.”

  “No drinking,” she says. “Or . . . not much drinking.”

  “No problem.” Alcohol and I haven’t mixed well so far, and I’m not in a big hurry to try that whole thing again.

  “No musicians.”

  She says this and I see it lit up in my mind like a sign: NO MUSICIANS, NO DOGS, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE.

  “I’m pretty sure there will be musicians there,” I say. “Like, um, your daughter. For example.”

  She shakes her head. “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Okay,” I say. “What do you mean?” I have a pretty good idea, but I want to hear her say it.

  “I mean that you need to watch out for yourself.”

  “Not everyone’s like Dad,” I say. “At least, I’m assuming. James is great. Oh, that’s right, Luna is dating a musician, isn’t she?” Once again, Luna has a different set of rules. Or is it just that Luna doesn’t follow anyone’s rules but her own?

  My mother nods begrudgingly. “I like James, even if I don’t like that he’s encouraging Luna to leave school.”

  “You know that Luna only does what Luna wants to do,” I say. “You can encourage her until the cows come home, but it won’t matter.”

  “Cows?” My mother raises her eyebrows.

  “Whatever. You know what I mean.” I look up at the puffy white clouds drifting above me like balloons escaped from a parade. “Anyway, I’m pretty much done with boys for a while. I’ve had enough trouble.”

  “That’s smart,” my mother says, “because boys are trouble.” She’s smiling when she says it, white teeth f
lashing like pearls, but I know she’s serious. This is one of her basic philosophies. Girls Are Best, and Boys Are Trouble. Someday she’ll print it on a T-shirt, the first part on the front and the second on the back. The real question is, when things flamed out with my father, why didn’t she start a band like the Bangles or Sleater-Kinney, or go out on her own like Liz Phair? She could have been done with men altogether. She could have had it all.

  And honestly, after the last few months I’ve had, I’d be first in line to buy that stupid shirt. I’d buy it in every color and wear it all week long.

  My mother bends down and picks up my shoulder bag, which I left lying on the grass next to the steps. She peeks inside.

  “Do you have any snacks in here?”

  I practically leap across the grass to snatch the bag back from her. Thank god for ten years of halfhearted ballet lessons. I land near the edge of the driveway and scoop the bag up in one fluid motion.

  “Yes!” And then, because I feel my leap needs some context, I say, “And you can’t have them.” I hug the bag to my chest.

  She gives me a look like she’s pretty certain I’m deranged, but she’s willing to let it go because I’m leaving soon.

  And I smile innocently, no teeth, because I don’t want her to see what I’m hiding: a copy of SPIN magazine from February 1994—the one Tessa and I bought using Tessa’s MasterCard.

  The magazine is a little beat-up, but in pretty good condition for a pile of paper two decades old. The girl on the cover is wearing a black dress with long sleeves, her lips painted plum purple and her eyes outlined in charcoal. She’s wearing torn gray tights and boots laced up close to her knees. She’s not quite smiling, not really, but she looks as if she’d be willing to smile if you told her the right joke. So, if you’ll forgive me for speaking in Madonna lyrics: Who’s that girl?

  Bing! You guessed it.

  The girl on the cover is my mother, and printed across her knees in purple ink are the words Meg Ferris, First Girl on the Moon. Behind her is a pale silver moon, just like the one that was on Shelter’s album cover for Sea of Tranquility when the magazine came out. And off to her left is the rest of the band: the bassist and the drummer, Carter and Dan, who still visit my mother sometimes when they come through Buffalo. They’re like kind uncles: they bring records and concert posters for Luna and me and take us all out for pizza.

  Last on the cover is the guitarist, handsome and lanky in a black T-shirt and jeans: my father, Kieran Ferris. Recent deadbeat dad, man of mystery, and writer of ambiguous and baffling songs about summer.

  In the yard, dark pink daylilies bloom in verdant clumps and yellow-eyed daisies gleam, sharp as stars. I’ll leave and my mother will still be out here, deadheading roses and pulling slugs off the dahlias. She’ll make three or four small sculptures in the week I’m gone, each destined to end up in some rich person’s living room. And she’ll wait to hear what Luna does when I see her, when I drop off this message my mother wants me to deliver.

  I turn toward the car. My mother has climbed into the driver’s seat and the Smiths are blasting from the speakers. Dusty is in the back, nose pressed to the window on my side, her tail a windmill blur behind her.

  “You have to take care of Mom,” I say to her through the glass, as if she were that nanny dog in Peter Pan or something. But I know Dusty can’t manage much more than barking at the motorcycles that drive down our one-way street, or keeping the garden free of bunnies. There’s no way she can keep Meg Ferris under control. I walk up to my mother’s window.

  “Let’s jet,” she says. She pulls her sunglasses down over her eyes. “Make like a tree, etcetera, etcetera.”

  “When we drive away? Let’s leave the bad puns behind,” I say. I walk around the car and stand still for a moment to text another lyric before I forget it: I’ll stitch the words together, string them like pearls on thread, remember them out of order, and forget what it was you said.

  “Phoebe!” my mother calls. I press send.

  I open my door, holding my purse close to my body, as if there were a kitten or a baby inside, something that needs to be treated tenderly or protected from both the world and itself. This magazine is a sign of why I exist, but it’s also a sign of Tessa and how I screwed everything up with her. Finding this magazine might be the last nice thing Tessa will do for me, because the last nice thing I tried to do for her went so totally wrong.

  five

  LAST APRIL, WHEN WE WERE still friends, Tessa and I went to a party in a big old house off Parkside. It was one of the first nice spring days in Buffalo and we were still winter desperate and happy to be outdoors. Every green thing seemed like a miracle. The leaves on the trees looked lush and glossy and the smell of grass made me giddy, even though I didn’t really want to go to this party. Still, I put on jeans and a sweater and pulled my bike out of the garage, then followed Tessa through the darkening streets to Delaware Park.

  The house was a huge purple Victorian half a block away from the zoo, so we left our bikes locked to a fence by the giraffes at the edge of the park. We wanted to show up on foot. It’s awkward bringing bikes to a party, because you can’t just leave them out front, and Tessa always worried there wouldn’t be a place for them in the back. When we passed the giraffes’ enclosure, they were walking slowly around the yard looking stunned and ethereal. I saw one of them bring its head down to the ground as slowly and carefully as a construction crane, and even then it had to bend its legs to reach the grass.

  I leaned against the fence for a moment, wanting to keep watching, but Tessa marched on. She was the one who wanted to go to this party, thrown by a kid we sort of knew from St. Clare’s brother school, Alfred Delp Academy. I knew it would be a bunch of private-school kids drinking beer and wine coolers and trying to stay just quiet enough so that the neighbors wouldn’t call the cops. It’s safe to say this wasn’t really my scene.

  Still, an hour later I had a bottle of beer in my hand, already getting warm since I was mostly ignoring it. It was more of a prop, or a talisman, maybe, than something I planned to drink. Tessa would have said I was afraid, if she had noticed. But she had a different philosophy regarding alcohol. She was on her second beer, and that one was still cold.

  The backyard was lit with fairy lights strung like bright beads along the fences. The lawn was a perfect emerald green, and tulip stems in the garden pushed their blooms straight up toward the sky. We were sitting around a metal fire pit with our friends Evie and Willa and a bunch of other St. Clare’s girls. Or rather, I was sitting in a rusty metal chair with my feet on the rungs underneath and Tessa was standing, leaning with her hip against the fence. She liked to stand. She was like one of those birds with the long necks—a crane, maybe—balancing on one leg or two when it got a little windy. She always wanted to see what was coming.

  “Where are the boys?” Tessa said. “Isn’t this party hosted by someone from Delp Academy? Where are his friends?”

  “The ratio of girls to boys can’t be worse than Emerson’s party in December,” Evie said.

  Willa stretched her legs out in front of her and crossed her ankles. “Whatever. If we can avoid visiting urgent care tonight, I’ll call it a success.”

  The last party we’d gone to, over winter break, was at Emerson McGrath’s huge old mansion on Lincoln Parkway. It was lit up with so many Christmas lights you’d think her parents were expecting visitors from outer space and wanted to make sure those aliens could find their way. Emerson told everyone it was a Great Gatsby party, but that seemed to be just an excuse for her to wear a silk nightgown as clothing and drink gin out of an old crystal glass. Tessa and Evie weren’t wearing nightgowns, but they drank the gin, so they were both listing to the side like sailors by the end of the night. Willa and I tried to keep them in line on the way home, but when we walked across the lawn of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Evie hopped up on this sculpture that looks like a papier-mâché banana, then slipped off and twisted her ankle. She had to call her bro
ther Daniel to pick her up. I was running for junior class secretary that week, and Evie was going for president. Somehow we both won, even though Evie had to give her pre-vote speech on crutches.

  “The first step to safety is avoidance of modern art,” I said, raising my eyebrows at Evie.

  She held out her right foot, wearing a sparkly silver ballet flat, and rotated it in a circle. “All healed,” she said.

  “She’s learned her lesson,” said Willa, fastening her curly red hair on the top of her head. “Or at least she knows Daniel won’t pick her up next time she falls off a banana sculpture.”

  “You wish he would!” Evie said, poking Willa in the shoulder. Willa blushed. Evie calls Willa’s crush on Daniel a known entity, even though Willa has denied it since we were freshmen.

  My phone buzzed in my purse then, so I pulled it out. Happy Saturday, it said. What’s going on?

  Backyard high school party, I typed. Warm beer and fairy lights, a few bright stars in the sky.

  My screen lit up. That’s a lyric right there. Maybe the start of a whole song.

  I smiled. Across from me, Willa stood up and grabbed Evie’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “We have to find a bathroom. I’ve got to pee.”

  Evie rolled her eyes, but she let Willa drag her away. Just then, Tessa stood up on her tiptoes, looking out toward the street. Even from my seat, I could see a bunch of boys in sweaters and khakis, led by a blond with a lanky build. They came up the driveway in a cluster and then spread out through the yard.

  “That’s him,” Tessa whispered, too loudly. She leaned down toward me so her hair touched my shoulder, and pointed toward the guys who had just entered.

  I turned my head to look at the blond boy, in whose direction she was pointing. “Who?” I asked.

  “Lacrosse Boy.” She had been talking about this guy for months. Even in the middle of winter, she’d see him biking down Delaware with his lacrosse stick fastened to his back like an antenna. She once got so close to him while driving her dad’s car around Gates Circle that she nearly hit him. She hung back after that, at my suggestion. “What’s the point of a crush if he’s dead?” I had said.