Julia didn’t know what to say to any of this. This whole family dynamic sounded like a low-class reality show. How her intelligent, talented brother could have gotten involved with people like that both mystified and saddened her.
There was a sudden commotion as a young woman and small child entered Del’s Deli. The child was crying loudly and trying to wrest himself away from his mother, but she managed to pull him inside so that the door could shut, at which point his wails were amplified. The woman’s face was impassive as she held him firmly and looked toward the menu board. It was a tolerant yet embarrassed look, the same kind of look Julia had seen on the faces of pet owners holding their dogs on leashes beside mailboxes.
The boy in the red T-shirt came out from behind the counter bearing a lollipop. He stooped down and waved it in front of the child, who stopped crying immediately and snatched it.
Carmen took the lid off her cup and got up. She had eaten the last of her sandwich by now, and only a few French fries and half the pickle remained on her plate. “You want more to drink?” she asked Julia. She took both cups for refills, and when she came back, she said, “So let me get this straight. Ida said Lulu died, but she didn’t say how?”
An idea came to Julia. “No,” she said, “but it could have been the result of a doctor’s error or something that went wrong at a hospital. If so, there might be a malpractice suit under way.” Though good taste forbade going further, she did it anyway. “Families often get large settlements from such things. You would want to be there if that happened.” And she couldn’t resist adding, “Anyway, Lulu must have had a will of some kind. There’s probably some money that’s rightfully yours.”
Carmen shook her head and spoke as if it were a closed subject. “No, no money. Even if there were, they’d make sure I didn’t get any of it. And why would I want it?” Though Julia could think of several good answers, she said nothing.
When the girl’s plate was clean, Julia said, “I can’t eat the other half of my sandwich. Do you want it?”
Carmen nodded. “Sure.” She ate it quickly, then said, “Thanks for lunch.” She picked up the long toothpick on her plate and twirled it between her fingers, then touched the little red cellophane ruffle around the top of it and laughed. “Very funny. A fancy toothpick.” On their way out, she spotted the cowbell mounted on the wall beside the door, a piece of rope tied to it. There was a printed sign above it: Ring me if you like Del’s Deli. Carmen pulled the cord, and a loud clank resonated.
As they walked to the car, Julia noticed the girl’s ripped shirt again. Okay, that could be the next thing. She could take her somewhere and buy her a new shirt. And after that maybe the next thing would come to her.
• • •
IT was during the darkest hours of morning several days later when Julia first heard the sound. It wasn’t the sound itself that awakened her, for it was faint and far away, the kind of sound that would go unnoticed if one were asleep. But she wasn’t asleep. She had been, but only for a brief time and not deeply. It had become a nighttime pattern long before Carmen arrived on the scene—short, restless naps followed by long wide-awake stretches of lying in bed, trying various methods of getting back to sleep.
She had tried both physical and mental strategies. On this particular night, in the few minutes before she heard the sound, she was trying a technique advocated by a New Age fitness trainer she had run across on daytime television several weeks ago, in which one contemplated his five senses one at a time, listing his own favorite sensory impressions in each category.
She wasn’t actually going through the exercise herself, only remembering how ridiculous the trainer had looked and sounded as he lay on a mat with his eyes closed, wearing his red and black spandex, droning on and on with all seriousness about memorable sights he had seen: ghostly clouds snagged like old witches’ hair across a haunted mountainside, smooth pearly stones in the burbling brook that ran through his grandfather’s pasture, and so forth. Julia felt sure somebody else had written the lines for him. She remembered how funny it seemed for a grown man to use the word burbling.
Another idea came to her. Sometimes if she tried to compile lists, she could weary herself into sleep. The Debussy preludes, for instance. She always started with the longer titles, some of which sounded like poetry. Sounds and Perfumes Mingle in the Evening Air.
That was as far as she got, however, for it was at that exact moment that she became aware of the sound. At first she thought it was coming from outdoors, perhaps from a neighbor’s tomcat that often prowled around. The noise stopped for a while but then resumed, softer now. She thought of other things it could be. A dog howling at the moon. Something with a squeaky wheel being rolled down the street. A high-pitched radio frequency. A beginning violin player.
It stopped again, for a longer time, long enough for Julia to start trying to simulate the rapid eye movements that usually preceded sleep. She had read somewhere that if you closed your eyes and then moved them around in circles very fast, you could eventually trick yourself into falling asleep.
But she heard the sound again, and though it was even softer now, she suddenly sat up in bed. Maybe it was inside the house. She waited a few seconds and then slowly pushed the covers back and walked to the door, where she stood listening. She heard nothing. The guest room where Carmen was sleeping was at the end of the short hallway, across from the other bathroom and diagonal to Julia’s bedroom.
She opened her bedroom door cautiously and looked out. All was dark and quiet. She stepped into the hall and moved toward the guest room but stopped a few feet away. The hardwood floor was bad to creak at this end of the hall. She stood very still for a long time but heard nothing. Just as she turned to go back, however, she heard it again, from behind Carmen’s door—a long, soft wail, as of pleasure or pain past telling. And then a soft bump. Julia hurried back to her room and closed the door. Moments later she heard the sound of water running in the hall bathroom, then the flush of the toilet, and all was quiet again.
• • •
THE problem of Carmen had not been fixed. After buying her two new shirts and some underwear at Sears on Saturday, they had stopped by a drugstore for some toiletries. After that, with a sense of defeat, Julia realized that the only thing left to do was to take her home. She made it clear, however, that there was a limit. A week—she could stay that long while she decided “what to do next.” She stated it firmly. Carmen had nodded distractedly but said nothing.
Whole days had somehow passed, three of them, and June had turned into July. But there appeared to be no solution in sight, no evidence whatsoever that the girl was making other plans, even though Julia had left her cell phone out and told her she could use it. She also offered the use of her laptop, but Carmen hadn’t touched either one. Each day she stayed in the guest room for long hours with the door closed, even during the daytime. Maybe she was reading the magazines and books she had asked to take from the living room. Or maybe she was sleeping, for there was never a sound from behind the door. Until tonight.
Yesterday she hadn’t emerged until well after lunchtime, wearing an old pair of Julia’s pajamas. Julia had told her to help herself to any of the things in the guest room closet, her holding place for clothes she was tired of and ready to donate to Goodwill. Carmen came into the kitchen, where Julia was cleaning out the refrigerator, and said, “What day of the week is it?”
A few minutes later she came back out dressed, said she was going for a walk, and disappeared for over two hours. Upon returning, she pointed across the backyard and said, “There’s a college over in that direction. I guess that must be where you teach. Especially since I found an office with your name on the door.”
She sometimes looked at whatever was on television but not with much interest. One day she stood in front of the shelves of CDs for a long time, reading the labels, and several times she went into the backyard and sat on the bank of the creek. Another day Julia looked out the kitchen window and sa
w her several houses away talking to Dr. Boyer, the French teacher, in his front yard, and another time she stood by the mailbox conversing at length with a woman pushing a stroller. She came in later with a cosmetics catalog, which she left on the kitchen counter.
Since Saturday Julia had moved about the house nervously, as if she were the guest. She tried to keep herself busy with small projects but constantly lost her train of thought and failed to finish any of them—she straightened one dresser drawer, sorted through part of the linen closet, polished some of her good shoes, reorganized the top compartment of her jewelry box. Carmen asked once if she could help with anything but didn’t offer again after Julia told her no, she had her own way of doing things. The thought of working side by side with the girl made her fearful. It would seem too much like an acceptance of her presence, could perhaps be interpreted as an invitation to extend her stay. Carmen might think of it as payment for her room and board. And, of course, if they worked together, they would have to talk.
Not that they didn’t talk now. There were always the inevitable conversations at mealtimes, though Julia tried to get through those as quickly as possible. A few times she had eaten early, by herself, rushing to finish before Carmen appeared in the kitchen, then waving toward the stove and telling her to take whatever she wanted.
It was too early to tell whether Carmen was naturally talkative or if she was only forcing herself to be friendly. Either way she was full of questions, some uncomfortable, some merely strange: “What was your husband like?” “Do you wear contacts or are your eyes really that green?” “Have you ever seen an armadillo?” “Have you ever been to an opera?” “Do you ever look at doors and wonder who first thought of hinges?” And this one: “Isn’t eating a funny thing? I mean, putting stuff into your mouth and . . . masticating it, then swallowing it?”
Brief answers, or none, instead of discouraging her, only left time for more questions, more random comments, often as if talking to herself. One morning, between bites of oatmeal, for example, she said, “Exchanging the truth for a lie and worshiping the creature more than the creator.” Whatever that was supposed to mean. Another time, “A rider named Faithful upon a white horse.” Though Julia felt no obligation to respond to such things, it was unsettling not to know what might come next. She could have tolerated the girl’s presence better had the two of them silently occupied their own spaces within the house, as this was a way of living already familiar to her from the years of her marriage.
They went to Target to get Carmen more socks and a second pair of jeans. Julia had no intention of outfitting her completely, but, on the other hand, you couldn’t expect someone to keep wearing the same things day after day. When they carried the bags into the house afterward, Carmen said, without looking at Julia, “Thank you for these, but I don’t like to live off other people’s generosity. I’ll pay you back.” Julia had merely shaken her head dismissively. She couldn’t really say what she was thinking: The best payment will be when you leave.
She had no idea what was going through Carmen’s mind concerning the weeks ahead. She wanted to ask her point-blank if she was making any progress with long-term plans, but she was too afraid of the answer she would get. Things certainly couldn’t continue like this, Julia knew that, but she had promised a week, so she would hold on till Saturday before taking further action, though she couldn’t imagine what kind of further action was even possible if the girl refused to leave.
As for Pamela, she had little to offer. A reversal had taken place. Because she had suddenly stopped calling every day, Julia had taken to calling her instead. Every time they talked, however, Pamela spoke in a hasty, absentminded way, claiming that she needed to get back to the new baby, who was usually crying in the background. According to Pamela, he wasn’t taking to breast-feeding and had lost too much weight since they brought him home, so the doctor had instructed them to feed him formula with a dropper every two hours. They were all having trouble sleeping, she said, and her daughter-in-law, convinced that everything was her fault, was crying almost as much as the baby.
Before the end of each conversation, Pamela rushed through the same advice concerning Carmen: “Just tell her you have somewhere you have to go, so she has to leave.” She reminded Julia that the invitation to come to her house for a visit was still open. “I’ll be home on Sunday. Just say you can’t change your plans, somebody’s counting on you.” It was the kind of advice easier to give than to follow, to tell someone to leave your house, especially someone related to you, someone with no car, no money, no home, no job, not even a suitcase.
• • •
NO more sounds came from down the hall, so apparently Carmen was done crying—for there could be no question that that was what she had been doing. Julia turned on her bedside lamp and got back into bed. Another tip for sleeplessness was to turn on the light and do something until you started to feel sleepy, reading being at the top of the list of recommendations. She had a novel on the table, one with a dense meandering opening. So far she had found nothing in it to interest her, though the book had been a fixture on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. She kept having to reread the same pages each time she picked it up. Lean, clean story lines didn’t seem to be in vogue these days. Even now she couldn’t remember anything about this one except that the main character was a U.S. senator who was in a hospital in Russia for some reason.
She opened the novel, read the sentence Medieval Icelandic sagas had been Saul’s passion since before the Cold War ended, and immediately closed it again.
She took another book from the table, titled From Life to Fiction, its premise being that a writer didn’t need anything but his own familiar experiences to write fresh, unforgettable stories. She let it fall open and read a sentence: Tap into your parents’ stories—the ones you’ve heard since you were a child.
Her childhood wasn’t anything she wanted to think about, especially not in the deepest part of night. Her parents hadn’t been the kind to tell stories anyway. Her father’s only references to the past were for the purpose of pointing out how soft and lazy children today were compared to when he was their age, when he rose at dawn, walked five miles to school, worked in the fields, and all the rest. Julia had never gotten a new pair of shoes without having to hear all over again about the cardboard cutouts he had put inside his shoes as a child when his soles wore out.
Behind his back, and a few times to his face, Jeremiah had made fun. “And did you put gravy on the rest of the cardboard and eat it for supper?” he had asked one time. There had been no end of shouting and things being flung about that night. Julia remembered it clearly, for that was the time her father had gotten Jeremiah in a choke hold. And who knew what might have happened had her mother not fallen on the floor, weeping and praying aloud?
There were no bedtime stories growing up, though sometimes at night Jeremiah and Pamela would crawl into bed with Julia and she would read to them, very quietly, with a flashlight.
There was the one story her mother told her, however, that summer day in the kitchen while they were snapping, blanching, and freezing green beans. In the living room Julia’s father was sounding notes on the piano, working as always on his endless compilation of folk songs, his only pastime since his accident.
Her mother had lifted her gaze from the pot of boiling water and stared at the doorway through which the tune of “Listen to the Mocking Bird” was stopping and starting. “He was traveling with that evangelist,” she had half whispered, “leading the music and singing solos and playing his accordion, and I sat in the front row between my parents every night that whole week. I remember how my heart fluttered every time I thought he might be looking at me. I was only seventeen.”
She had spoken with a tone of utter bewilderment, as if trying to figure out how she could have gone from a beginning like that to her current state of slipping out to attend church by herself on Sunday mornings, though not every week. She must have planned those Sundays with gr
eat forethought, spacing them out and steeling herself for what would follow, for experience had taught her, had taught them all, what was to be suffered afterward—first, specific grievances about the quality of Sunday dinner that day, followed by more general ones about women who failed to put their families first, about the weakness of character evidenced by anyone who leaned on a “religious crutch,” about the place in hell reserved for hypocritical, slick-haired, fire-and-brimstone preachers. All of this bellowed by their father, between large mouthfuls of the dinner he had just pronounced unfit for human consumption, and endured mutely by their mother, who had risen early to prepare it. Going to church was, in Julia’s memory, the only step her mother ever took outside the rigid boundaries set by her father.
She looked back at the book she was holding now. How odd, and inexpressibly sad, she thought, that her mother had told but one story. And what a story—that her father could have ever been young and dashing, her mother seventeen and in love with him.
Julia closed the book and stared at the black-and-white photograph on the cover—a man walking down a dirt road holding the hand of a barefoot child. Julia recalled only a single time she had felt her father’s approval. She wasn’t yet old enough to go to school, and Jeremiah was only a toddler. Pamela hadn’t been born yet. They were in a yard somewhere, not their own. She was playing tag and hide-and-seek with other children while the grown-ups talked. One of the adults called to her father, “Your girl is a fast runner. Look at her go.” And her father had swung her up to his shoulders and sung a few bars of “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” in his perfectly pitched bass voice while everybody laughed and clapped.
One morning sometime later he went to work like always but didn’t come home for weeks. Her mother told her there had been an accident on the assembly line, and her father was in the hospital. After that he never held a job again, never lifted her up on his shoulders again, or sang or laughed. It was as if another father had come home from the hospital.
To See the Moon Again Page 9
