The Almost Moon

by Alice Sebold

  "His friend hit me," I said.

  Mr. Forrest put down his glass on the marble-topped table beside him. He looked as if he too had been hit. He inhaled.

  "Helen, I'm going to teach you two very important words. Ready?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "And then I'm going to get you something else to drink because you obviously detest that."

  I had held the port in my hand but could not bear even to pretend to sip.

  "Here they are: 'fucking bastard.' "

  "Fucking bastard," I repeated.

  "Again."

  "Fucking bastard," I said, more surely.

  "With verve!"

  "Fucking bastard!" I said, almost yelling.

  I sat back into the couch, on the verge of laughing.

  "There are millions of them. You can't beat them, believe me. You can only hope to find a way to live quietly among them. Sitting and reading in this window, with all my antiques and books . . . You wouldn't know it by looking at me, but I'm a revolutionary."

  I wanted to ask him if he had a boyfriend, but my mother had scolded me never to pry.

  "You know I'm a book collector," Mr. Forrest said. "Would you like to see some of my newest acquisitions?"

  "What about my mother?" I asked. I pictured her curled around her transistor radio like a conical seashell.

  "Her?" he said, and stood with his glass. "We both know she's not going anywhere."

  He came over to retrieve my undrunk port. Tosh's tail beat against the back of the couch as he drew near.

  "I hate her," I said.

  "Do you really, Helen?" He held both our glasses and looked down at me.

  "No."

  "You will always be stronger than she is," he said. "You don't know that yet, but it's true."

  "She let Billy Murdoch die," I said.

  "That was her illness, Helen, not her."

  I stared up at him, not wanting him to stop.

  "It must be obvious to you that your mother is mentally ill," he said. He placed the glasses on the silver tray and turned back to me. "What does your father say about it?"

  "Mentally ill." It was as if someone had just very gently placed a bomb in my lap. I didn't know how to dismantle it, but I knew no matter how scary it might be, there was a key inside it--a key to all the hard days and locked doors and crying jags.

  "Haven't you ever heard those words?"

  "Yes," I said meekly.

  "Haven't you ever connected them with your mother?"

  I had used the word "crazy" but never "mentally ill." "Crazy" didn't seem so bad. "Crazy" was a simple word like "shy" or "tired" or "sad."

  Tosh jumped off the couch, sensing Mr. Forrest's desire to move. I stood.

  "We'll look at books and make you a G&T," he said. "You don't owe your life to your mother, you know. Nor does your father, for that matter."

  "You just said she was mentally ill."

  "Your mother is a survivor. I'll no doubt send you home with a book or two that she wouldn't know about otherwise, and you'll return the photograph as a favor to me."

  Tosh, Mr. Forrest, and I all went through the dining room and into the kitchen. After the two other rooms, the kitchen was a shock. It was all white and incredibly utilitarian. Nothing was out on the counters that would suggest he'd eaten or prepared anything to eat in months.

  He opened his fridge while I leaned against the sink.

  "You can give Tosh a treat," he said with his back to me. He found the bottles he wanted and opened the freezer. "They are in that white porcelain bunny jar by the sink."

  While I fed an ecstatic Tosh treats that looked like miniature bunnies, Mr. Forrest made me a drink.

  "Why are you friends with her?" I asked.

  "Your mother is fascinating. She's incredibly witty and beautiful."

  "And mean," I said.

  "Regrettably you and your father see a good deal more of that than I ever will. We have books. We can keep on that level, and then I leave."

  He handed me my drink. "Imagine, if you will, the demise of all the fucking bastards of the world," he said, and knocked his glass to mine.

  "What about my mother?"

  "Your mother is not a fucking bastard. Fucking bastards are simple by nature. Now drink up, because soon you'll be in a room where no liquids are allowed."

  The G&T was better than the port, and cool. We drank as Mr. Forrest led me down a hall that ran off the kitchen.

  "Somewhere in this hallway I turn into another person," he said. "But for your sake I'm going to try and remain tethered to reality."

  We reached a doorway that was half glass, through which I could see small spotlights in the large room on the other side.

  "Let's put our drinks down here. Are your hands clean?"

  I placed my drink next to his on a built-in shelf.

  "I think so," I said.

  He reached up to a second shelf and brought down a wooden box. Inside there were several pairs of small white gloves made of cotton.

  "Here, wear these."

  I put on the gloves and stared at my hands. "I feel like Mickey Mouse," I said.

  "Minnie," he corrected. "Are you ready?"

  "Yes."

  He turned to Tosh. "Sorry, boy."

  He opened the door and flipped a switch to his right. In a circle all around the room, the spotlights were joined by small lamps that were connected to the upright beams of bookshelves. There were no windows in the entire room.

  "I think of this as my city," Mr. Forrest said to me. "I shut the door, and the world falls away. I can be in here for hours, come out, and have no idea what time it is."

  He brought me over to a long table. I couldn't resist running my hand along its shiny surface.

  "It's from New Zealand," he said. "Made from an old railroad bridge. Heavy as hell and it cost me a fortune, but I love it."

  He stooped over to the center of the table and drew toward him a large, flat box made of cardboard.

  "These are archival boxes," he said. "I keep color plates in here and some letter prints, which arrived yesterday. They were horribly packaged in recycled freezer bags. The horror!"

  He opened the box. The first letter I saw was an H under a cloudy sheet of what I took to be tracing paper.

  "See, it's perfect that you came today. Though I admit I'm partial to the S in most medieval alphabets."

  He picked up the H by swiftly lifting it in what he explained was its protective vellum, then opened it in front of me.

  "See their faces?" he said. "Usually they are so stoic. But this artist challenged convention by making the characters within the letters have expressions. I didn't know it until I saw them in person, but I won't be able to sell these. At least not yet."

  Mr. Forrest reminded me of a geeky kid I knew at school. He spent most of his time in the audiovisual room, tinkering with sound equipment. In the cafeteria, he had once spoken so excitedly about the qualities of static that everyone grew silent until David Cafferty, a jock who was missing his two front teeth from being kicked in the mouth during football practice, began the avalanche of laughter that buried him.

  "How old are these?" I asked.

  "Sixteenth century, but besides the faces, what makes them special is that they were drawn by a monk who'd taken a vow of silence. I like to think this was the only way he could communicate. Wait, you'll see."

  Mr. Forrest quickly took each letter out of the box and arranged them down the length of the table in their folded vellum.

  "It's a story," he said. "I haven't figured it all out yet, but from the lance one of the figures carries and the frequency of certain colors, I believe the monk was telling his own story."

  I looked at the H in front of me. Two figures comprised the verticals. Across the horizontal, one figure was passing something to the other.

  "Is this food?" I asked. I thought of my mother's ruined casserole.

  "Good, Helen," Mr. Forrest said. "That would be grain. The plates tell the story
of the harvest, which was very common, but they also tell this other story. There, now, we have them in order. Come follow the plates with me."

  Mr. Forrest circled around the other side of the table and joined me at A.

  "This is the figure to watch," he said, pointing at a male figure who had what looked like a bowl cut. "See how he's dressed in blue and gold?"

  "Yes."

  "He will be in almost all the letters. This was very unusual. These alphabets are largely decorative, and to draw too much attention to any repeating figure was not done."

  "Here he is again," I said, pointing to the C.

  We walked slowly down the length of the table together. I studied each letter and followed the blue-and-gold figure.

  "I take it your father isn't home?"

  "He's supposed to be in Erie."

  "How is he these days?"

  "If I could get my driver's license, I could at least do the grocery shopping."

  I reached the X and leaned in close. On the slant that began on the left, there was a figure who could have been sleeping. On the slant that began farther right and crossed over the body of the sleeping figure was the blue-and-gold figure. He held only the handle of the lance. The rest was buried in the sleeping figure.

  "He murdered someone!" I said.

  "Bravo, Helen! Very good! It took me much longer to see."

  The Y was the murderer imploring the Gods, his arms raised up and his head visible only from the pitched-back chin as he screamed. And the Z had no human figures in it at all, only a series of lances interconnected over and over again, and at the very end, an anvil.

  "You make money this way?"

  "Yes. I travel to different antiquarian book fairs, and I try and find things at estate sales. I always take a pair of gloves along. I've plundered just about every nook and cranny within a hundred miles."

  "How much is this worth?"

  "Do I see a burgeoning collector before me?"

  He began to gather up the letters, starting with the Z and moving up toward the middle of the alphabet, where the box sat. He placed the latter half of the alphabet inside and then continued from the M up to the A.

  "All I've got at this point are pictures of my mother in slips."

  "Do you know what a muse is, Helen?"

  "I guess."

  "What?"

  "Poets have them."

  He placed the stacked letters inside the cardboard box and put the lid on it. "Other artists do too." He walked over to the shelves along the back wall and went immediately to a large white-spined book. He turned and brought it over to me, delivering the hefty volume into my hands.

  "The Female Nude," I read.

  Mr. Forrest pulled out a round-backed wooden chair. "Here, sit. Many artists have muses. Painters, photographers, writers. There is something very muselike about your mother."

  I sat at the shiny wooden table and looked at page after page of nude women. Some lay on couches and some sat on chairs, some smiled demurely and others had no heads at all, just legs, breasts, and arms.

  "My father works with sediment."

  "That doesn't mean Clair can't inspire him."

  "In what?"

  "She keeps him going, Helen. If you can't see that, you're blind. They are interlocked--each sustains the other."

  On the pages in front of me were two paintings of the same woman. "The Clothed Maja," I read aloud. "The Nude Maja."

  "Yes. Goya," Mr. Forrest said. "Aren't they wonderful?"

  I looked at the two paintings side by side, then hurriedly closed the volume.

  "Mr. Warner said everyone thinks we should move," I said. I saw the holes in the wood of the table now, where iron must have been driven through to secure the bridge's beams. They were filled with perfectly cut pegs made from a wood that was lighter in color.

  "Do you want to move?"

  "I don't know."

  He was quiet for a moment, and then he offered me his hand.

  "I think you should allow me to help you learn how to drive."

  "In the Jag?"

  "Are there other cars? I wasn't aware."

  I flushed with happiness.

  On my way home, I carried two things: the picture of my mother in her ecru slip, which I would replace, and an open invitation to come play with Tosh. But what preoccupied me most were visions of myself at the wheel of Mr. Forrest's car. I would wear a colorful scarf around my head and huge sunglasses, and, somehow, I would smoke.

  It was dark out now, but there were no lights on downstairs at our house. Inside, I saw that the bathroom off the kitchen was empty and that the radio had been left, along with my mother's knitting, at the base of the stairs. I went up to my bedroom and took a pair of pajamas from the bottom dresser drawer.

  I changed and went down the hall to brush my teeth. I thought of the nudes hidden in Mr. Forrest's house. He had forgotten to give me a book to take to my mother, and somehow this delighted me, as if I'd won a competition, as if his loyalty, however obliquely, had been transferred to me. In the bathroom I filled my pink plastic glass with water and brought it back to my room.

  I could hear the snap of the metal blinds as I entered my bedroom.

  "Where did you waltz off to?" my mother asked. She walked to the second window, directly over my bed, and snapped shut the blinds.

  I did not respond. Instead I walked past her and sat down in an old chair I kept in the corner of my room. It was piled with half-dirty clothes, as it always was, but instead of moving them, I sat high on my mountain and looked over at her.

  "Really, I was worried sick," she said.

  I said nothing.

  My mother began pacing back and forth on the braided rug.

  "Look, Helen, you know it's hard for me," she said.

  Nothing.

  "There was no way I could face those men. I haven't even been out in the yard since, well, you know, since that boy fell in the road."

  He was hit by a car! I screamed it, but only inside my head.

  "Where were you?"

  She looked at me, half accusing and half pleading. Her hands were shaking and reaching out about her to soothe some beast I couldn't see, some phantom self that haunted her day by day. Mr. Forrest's words were the only ones I heard: "mentally ill."

  "I suppose you went to Natalie's. Don't think I can't smell booze when it passes by me. What did you tell that woman? Did you tell her your crazy mother was cowering in the bathroom? You won't get very far bad-mouthing me to the neighbors, getting drunk with Natalie and her bilious mother. I can't keep this house in order without help. Do you know where Natalie's mother comes from? Do you? The South, just like me, but she did one of those 'I'm moving north and losing my accent' maneuvers like the South is some sort of trash bin she's fleeing from. Believe me, if you think your little friend Natalie's mother is any better than me, you're crazy."

  I saw myself as if outside my body. I rose from my chair as my mother continued speaking, though I could not hear her anymore. Her hands were waving about her ever more wildly, and all I wanted was for it all to stop. The pink plastic glass was in my hand, and then my hand was shooting forward, and only the water hitting my mother's face woke me to what I had done.

  I wanted to tell her that I'd been hit; I wanted her to comfort me. I wanted to scream at her and rake my nails down her face. I wanted her to be sane. But instead she cowered, and I screamed, "Mr. Warner informed me that it is the consensus of the neighborhood that we should move!"

  And then, just as promptly as I had stood up, I sat back down again on the lump of discarded clothes.

  My mother did not make a move to dry her face. She smiled weakly at me and spoke very softly. "Mr. Warner would use a word like 'consensus.' He's a . . ."

  I could fill in the words--an actual Mad Lib! "Pompous ass."

  I could see that my mother was grateful for this, that I had greeted her back on the road she walked down. Water dripped off her nose and lips. Her face appeared glossy in the lampligh
t.

  "One of the men hit me, Mom," I said.

  The more words I spoke, the more I felt my resolve, my separation, my autonomy, leaking away from me. She would own me yet.

  She half turned away from me and looked down.

  "Helen," she said.

  "Yes."

  "It's just that . . ."

  "Yes."

  "It's just that I have . . . Well, you understand. You're my daughter. I don't fit in around here."

  I noticed my mother was toeing the edge of the carpet. The movement was obsessive and seemed to match the rhythm of her shaking hands. Somewhere she was trying to retrieve the language of apology but was struggling.

  "Why don't I brush your hair?" I said. "Like Dad does."

  I stood, and my mother brought her hands up in front of her face. She looked at me from behind them.

  "I want to," I said. "It will feel good, and then we'll both go to sleep and things will be better in the morning."

  What I did not say was that I did not intend to speak to her again. That in the morning I would wake up and leave the house early so I wouldn't have to see her. That I would begin to squirrel food away so I could claim I wasn't hungry at dinnertime. That Mr. Forrest had given me a gift greater than any driving lessons or G&T. He had called my mother "mentally ill," and I, even if my father never did, was determined to see this as our truth.

  The next few weeks were exhilarating. When my father came home, I told him what happened in the yard and that Mr. Forrest had offered to teach me to drive. I didn't need to mention that I wasn't speaking to my mother because it was with this news that she greeted him at the door. All I knew was that in not speaking to her, it felt as if I were storing nuts or bullets. I grew stronger every day.

  Mr. Forrest would pull up in his Jaguar and honk the horn, and I would grab my jacket and fly down the stairs. Sometimes I would be aware of a shadowy presence in the living room, but it took exactly three giant steps from the bottom of the stairs until I was out the front door, and so I chose to believe that her presence was diminishing with my every escape from it. Outside was sunlight and the willow-green car with the jaguar leaping boundlessly in the air.

  Once I was outside my house, Mr. Forrest and his car were only twenty concrete stairs away, but I was always too afraid to slide down the metal banister to get there faster. I had a vision of my head split open on the sidewalk, followed by a vision of my mother, unable to come down to where I'd fallen, unable to call an ambulance, or worse: pushing herself to the point where she stomped around in the brains and muck of me while gasping for air and gesticulating wildly.