Girls in the Moon

by Janet McNally

  It’s so warm I can feel the heat of the pavement through the soles of my sandals. My suitcase makes a rhythm of the sidewalk cracks, brrrrrrrr bump brrrrrrrr bump brrrrrrrr bump. A few blocks down Court Street from Borough Hall, Luna turns down a leafy side street. There’s a chain bookstore on the corner and as we pass, I see a couple of kids, twelve or thirteen, sprawled and reading in the aisle close to the window.

  I can also see our reflections, Luna’s and mine, as we walk into the shade of her street, so I look at myself, wondering if I belong in this city, on this street with Luna. I think I do. Our hair is almost the same dark brown, and our skin is the same shade of ivory. If you looked quickly, especially at our reflections, you might not be able to tell us apart. In real life, you’d know the difference. She’s a little glowier, sparklier than I am. She has perfect posture and she looks everyone right in the face.

  I turn away from the windows. “Bookstore on the corner,” I say. “Not bad.”

  Luna nods. “Yeah, it’s great for the AC. I spent a whole day reading there last week when it was ninety-five degrees. My favorite bookstore is farther down Court Street, though. I’ll take you there later on.” She points behind us, back toward the traffic swishing slowly by.

  Luna stops in front of a dark red brownstone halfway down the block, one in a series of similar buildings, all connected to each other. Some of the buildings have stoops with sets of stone stairs, but this one is fronted by a low stone wall bordering the sidewalk, topped with a foot-high wrought iron fence, and has stairs leading down to a wooden door just below sidewalk level. There are garbage cans down there, but still, it seems a little magical. I’m not sure why. Maybe because this is the door into Luna’s new life.

  “Fourteen Schermerhorn Street,” Luna says, pronouncing it Skimmerhorn. The word sounds Dutch, or charmed, or both. She hops down the stairs and pulls the heavy door open, gesturing like a game show hostess.

  “Come on in,” she says, and disappears inside.

  It’s cool and dark in there, though the glare of sunlight is still visible through a leaded glass window on the left side of the door. We stand for a moment in the small, square foyer, where there’s a mess of mail spilled over a small wooden table. Luna rustles through the magazines and envelopes and pulls out a copy of Rolling Stone. She checks the label.

  “Mine,” she says, holding it up like a prize. It makes me think about the copy of SPIN tucked into my bag, the creased cover, and our parents, frozen forever, inches from each other. I want to show it to Luna, but not quite yet. First I want to figure out how she’s feeling about them, both my mother and my father. I want to take her temperature.

  The apartment is on the fourth and top floor, and Luna climbs the stairs quickly, cheerfully, like she’s scaling a mountain in The Sound of Music. I expect her to start singing vaguely Swiss-sounding songs. I follow slowly, bumping my suitcase behind me. From time to time I look up and see her higher than I think I’ll be able to manage to go. She told me it was only four floors, but there must be some kind of optical illusion, because it seems to me twice that.

  Her voice floats down from somewhere above me. “Sorry about the stairs!”

  My reply sounds something like “Umphhhh.”

  When I get up there, I’m practically panting. The door is open just past a doormat that says WELCOME, KITTY, with the silhouette of a small, whiskered cat. I pull my suitcase over the threshold and see that the apartment is mostly one big room furnished with a couple of couches and some chairs in the center, bookshelves lining the walls. Three guitars are hung on the wall over a small square table, and there are concert posters for Vampire Weekend and Florence + the Machine fastened to the wall with purple washi tape.

  Luna is standing in the living room with her arms folded, looking at me expectantly.

  “Welcome, Kitty,” I say. I slip off my shoes and leave them by the door, still following my mother’s rules from our house at home.

  “Came with the apartment,” she says. “And it also happens to be awesome.”

  “That’s debatable. Aunt Kit would like it, though.” I take a deep breath. My heart is still thudding in my chest. “On the plus side, you won’t have to go to the gym,” I say, “like, ever in your life again.”

  She smiles. “The stairs aren’t so bad unless you’re hauling a fifty-pound suitcase,” she says.

  “Which I was.” I pull the case against the wall when Luna gestures in that direction.

  “Right. Pack lighter next time.” She smiles. “So, what do you think?”

  The first time I visited Luna, she was living in the dorms at Columbia, a double on the fourth floor of a building on Amsterdam. I slept on the floor between her bed and her roommate’s, listening to a muffled White Stripes album play on repeat through the wall. This feels different. It’s her own space, no roommate, unless you count James. Which I suppose I have to, but he’s a different kind of roommate.

  “I like it,” I say. “It looks like you.”

  “The bedroom is over there.” She points to an open door off the living room. “And here’s the bathroom.”

  I peek into Luna’s bedroom, which I guess is James’s bedroom too. Her room at home is pale purple with gauzy white curtains and a plum-colored silk bedspread from India. Luna got my grandmother’s mahogany furniture when she moved into a retirement home and I’m still jealous, especially because it’s still in Luna’s room at home and she’s barely ever there. Here, the mattress is on a low platform, and there’s no headboard. There’s not really space for a headboard. The room is still pretty, though, painted the deep and glossy blue of the ocean at night. It’s small enough and dark enough that it seems like a cozy little cave. I see James’s clothes sticking out of a tall wardrobe next to the dresser—a pair of black dress pants, a pearl-gray collared shirt—because there’s only about two feet of space between those pieces of furniture and the bed.

  Luna shows me the kitchen, which is not much more than an alcove off the living room.

  “You actually have to step out of the way to open the oven.” She demonstrates, opening the oven door while sweeping to the side with a curtsy.

  “You can’t cook anyway, right?” I open one of the narrow cabinets next to the sink and see that it’s full of cereal.

  “You’d be surprised!” she says, then shrugs. “We eat a lot of frozen veggie burgers. I think that counts.” She straightens the bottles of spices on the back of the stove. “I’m learning.” She frowns a little. “I’m trying to eat healthier.”

  I can tell she loves it here, even with the four flights of stairs and the miniature dollhouse kitchen.

  “Are you keeping the place when you go on tour?”

  “Yeah, we’re going to sublet it. To a British tennis pro, if you can believe it.” She smiles. “He’s very cute. I must be sending off a signal that attracts British men. Some frequency only they can hear. I bet most of the neighbors won’t even notice James is gone.” She heads back into the living room. “Which is good because I’m not sure our sublet is legal.”

  I sit down on the sofa, which is wide and low and a little bit lumpy. “When are you leaving?” I ask. This is the temperature-taking. I’m sure she’s still going on tour, and not going back to school, but I want to see how she’s feeling about it.

  “September sixteenth,” she says. “Three weeks or so.”

  “What are you going to do in the meantime?”

  “We have shows in Brooklyn and Hoboken. One in Manhattan, too. Tomorrow night.” She looks at me with her head tilted at an angle. “I told you that, didn’t I?

  “I think so.” I drop my purse to the floor, and just then I hear my phone chime inside it. My mother. Safe landing? How is it?

  I assume it means the apartment. I don’t think their relationship has deteriorated to the point that my mother would refer to Luna with a genderless pronoun.

  Super safe, I type. Luna’s place is great. No metal flowers, though. We’ll fix that.

&nbs
p; Ha. Thanks for being my messenger.

  Yeah, well . . .

  It takes a minute for my mother to reply. Then my phone chimes again. Just give it a try.

  “What’s all the texting?” Luna asks.

  “Nothing,” I say. “Mom sent you a gift. She wants to know if I’ve given it to you yet.”

  I kneel down by my bag and unzip it, pulling the taped-up sculpture from my bag. It still feels heavier than you’d expect from looking at it, like an Easter egg, maybe, with coins inside. I hand it to Luna.

  “Metal?” Luna asks as soon as she feels the weight in her hands.

  I shrug. “I think it’s a peace offering.”

  She pulls a pair of scissors from the desk drawer and begins to cut into the package. Some of the bubbles pop indignantly, but most go quietly.

  “So she isn’t mad anymore?” Luna asks.

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  Luna smiles and peels the rest of the tape away.

  I lean back on the couch. She pulls the sculpture out of the wrapping and there’s the metallic vegetation she never knew she wanted. “Uh, wow.”

  I know what she’s thinking. Lots of spikes.

  I’m quiet for a minute, watching her look at the flower. I bite my lip. “I think Mom’s just scared,” I say.

  “Could’ve fooled me.” Luna looks up. “Scared of what?”

  “I don’t know.” I can think of a thousand possibilities, but I can’t settle on one. “That you won’t go back to school? That you’ll turn out like her? You know, angry about the whole thing?”

  “I’m not going to turn out like her,” Luna says, looking right at me. She pulls her mouth tight. “Anyway, she’s happy, isn’t she?”

  Huh. That’s a good question. Is she? I’m not really sure. She seems it, but sometimes she’s sad and I don’t know exactly why.

  I pick up my phone again and type a text: We try to figure out each other and make the pieces fit. But sometimes happy is an accident, and we forget not to give up on it. I send it, and I put my phone back in my purse.

  Luna turns the robot flower over in her hands, her fingers finding the smooth parts under the petals. She shakes her head.

  “I’m surprised they let you bring this on the plane.” She sets it down on the coffee table.

  “That’s exactly what I said.” I poke the sculpture with my foot, and it slides across the wood with a squeak. “The good news, from what I gathered, is that you can always use it as a weapon if you need to.”

  Luna smiles, nodding. “I’ll remember that if you get out of line.”

  Near the end of Luna’s senior year, my mother donated a large sculpture to St. Clare’s. Luna had been caught skipping school. She’d left early one day to drive to Toronto for a Weakerthans show (“It might be their last one!” she’d said), and so she had to serve detention for a half hour each morning in the little waiting room outside of Sister Rosamond’s office. She was my ride, and I often sat in there with her because I didn’t have anywhere else to go at that hour. We did our homework, so it wasn’t much of a punishment. I liked it, truth be told, sitting there quietly with Luna, our pens scratching away at our notebooks on the table. Sister Rosamond would peek her head in from time to time, and Luna would smile widely at her, showing all her teeth. Honestly I don’t think Sister Rosamond was even that angry, but my mother used it as an excuse to offer some major metal.

  The sculpture looked like some far-off version of a solar system: a large silver sphere in the middle surrounded by smaller ones at various distances, all tethered to the center by thin strips of steel. It was large enough that drivers could see it from the street, but not in any detail. They would see only a delicate shiny thing floating over the lawn, unless they pulled into the curving driveway of the school and took a closer look. In the months after it was installed, some people did. They got out of their cars and stood for a while at the edge of the drive, watching the sculpture curve the sunlight it caught along its surface. Then they’d get back in their cars and drive away.

  “It’s like the mother ship, bringing the aliens in,” Tessa said once, months after it first appeared. She was looking out the window of our math classroom at a guy in a Sonic Youth T-shirt staring at the sculpture. He reached his hand out and looked around, then seemed to figure he shouldn’t touch it. I had to admit that my mother did something magical with metal, something that seemed to go beyond just bending or shaping it. Her pieces were made of materials besides steel, forces besides heat.

  The St. Clare’s sculpture was unveiled after school on a Friday, and a lot of Luna’s and my friends stayed past their buses to be there. The nuns wore pantsuits and sensible shoes and generally looked a little confused but happy. Our friends had that rumpled, end-of-the day look: sweaters unbuttoned, skirts rolled up higher than we were actually allowed. But they were excited; this was what passed for big news at St. Clare’s, and my mother was pretty much the most famous person any of our friends knew.

  I was disappointed to find out that “unveiling” was an exaggeration—the sculpture was out in the open from the beginning. I had imagined my mother pulling a cover off it like a magician, a white sheet, maybe, or a big piece of parachute cloth like the ones we used in gym class when we were little. There might be music; the chamber orchestra could sit in chairs on the grass and play some suspenseful song. People would honk as they passed in their cars.

  A few people did end up honking, though I think it was boys from Delp Academy on their way to the far-out suburbs. Even so, my mother seemed to enjoy the unveiling. Sister Rosamond gave a small speech (“We’re so grateful to this talented artist and alumna, plus mother to two of our shining students,” she said, and Luna elbowed me and whispered, “Did Rosie just make a metal pun?”) Then my mother came up and stood with Sister Rosamond in front of the sculpture so Sister Monica could take their picture, and then they called Luna and me up there to be in another photo. Tessa and Evie made faces at me from the crowd. After that, there was a reception in the library and we all ate crudités and cake. I noticed halfway through that Luna was missing.

  My mother was talking with Tessa and Sister Lisa, the only nun at our school under the age of forty and a mystery to all of us. No one saw me go. I walked through the hallways, so quiet now that my footsteps echoed, then out through the foyer with its delphinium-blue stained glass windows. There are two flights of stairs leading down from the front door at St. Clare’s, and from up at the top I could see Luna on the front lawn leaning against a maple tree, facing the sculpture.

  It took me a minute to walk down the stairs and across the grass, but when I got to my sister I sat down next to her, crossing my legs in the grass. She was quiet, so I watched the traffic swishing by on Main Street and the traffic light turn from yellow to red to green. Then she spoke.

  “Didn’t you ever want a normal mom?” Luna asked.

  “No,” I said. I didn’t have to think about my answer. But I didn’t know exactly what she meant, either.

  “Like a mom who’s a lawyer, or a doctor, or a librarian or something.” She pulled a small handful of grass out and then dropped it. “A high school teacher.”

  “Mom is a teacher.”

  “It’s not the same thing. Mom used to be famous, and now she’s not, except she still is, a little. I mean, all this sculpture stuff. If you don’t want to be famous, then just don’t be, you know?” She looked toward the school as if she were talking to our mother, up in the library with her appetizer plate. “But I guess how else is she going to prove that she’s the best?”

  I was surprised to hear Luna say this, to admit that she worried about being able to live up to my mother’s talent. But the way that Luna felt about my mother, that was the way I felt about Luna. She was always shinier. She would always be better at things than I was.

  “Mom’s going to wonder where we are,” I said.

  “More important, Sister Rosamond is going to wonder, and I can’t afford to piss her off again.”
She sat forward onto her knees and brushed grass off her lap.

  Luna stood up and walked to the edge of the sculpture, just outside its orbit, then touched one of the smaller spheres. It was like a tiny planet in her hand.

  When she pulled her hand away I expected for some reason to see the steel ball still in it, but her palm was empty.

  Later, when the cake was gone and so were my friends and teachers, my mother pulled out of the parking lot in the Volvo with me in the passenger seat and Luna in the back. She stepped on the gas a little bit harder than she had to and squealed out onto Main Street.

  “We may not be able to donate money like the families with lawyer daddies,” she said, “but we donate art, bitches!” She punched the air emphatically.

  “Are we the bitches, or is that the nuns?” I asked, leaning my head against the back of the seat.

  My mother thought about it. “It’s a rhetorical bitches, I think.”

  I looked back into my visor mirror and saw that Luna was smiling even though she was trying not to. She had turned her face toward the window but I could still see her.

  We were a poorly drawn triangle that day in the car, the angles between us always shifting, but always adding up to the same thing. In the end, we were always trying to understand one another, even if we only made it halfway most days.

  eleven

  MEG

  SEPTEMBER 1996

  WE WAITED IN MATCHING BLACK leather chairs, hands in our laps. Through the hotel room window, I could see the gray drizzle of a Seattle sky. I had memorized the pattern of the wallpaper, the shape of the four tulips in the painting above the bed. On the table between us was a pregnancy test. I had already peed on it. Kit had bought it at the drugstore down the street from the club where we were doing sound check, brought it to me wrapped in a plastic bag.