Mending the Moon

by Susan Palwick

  They split up. Rosemary’s calmer now that she has a clearly defined task. The closet will probably be more work than the bureau— it’s a large walk-in with two tiers of hanging clothing, plus boxes, and it’s stuffed—but Vera can help when she’s done discarding underthings no one else will want.

  Rosemary has always loved clothing, and while she and Melinda never had terribly similar tastes—Melinda’s ran to Birkenstocks and hemp, and what skirts she wore were long, baggy, and embroidered—Rosie still expects to enjoy the process of packing up the garments for use by someone else. She’ll drive them to Goodwill, or call the local women’s shelter to see if they can be used there; she can even bring some to the hospital, since with winter coming, there will be more homeless patients in the ER who need warm garments. There are fewer female patients in this category than male, and anyway the ER staff doesn’t like to keep too much around—their compassion is tempered by prudent caution against becoming known on the streets as a source of free loot—but Rosemary can stow some sweaters and jackets in a storage room and let a few of the staff know they’re there.

  She believes that such recycling, like Holy Communion, transforms loss and brokenness into food. But even as she tells herself this, she has a sudden, unwanted memory of an article she read about a Holocaust survivor. The woman’s job was to sort the piles of shoes and clothing left behind by inmates heading into the infamous showers of Auschwitz. She stole items she thought her friends in the barracks could use, and she survived the work by concentrating entirely on how she was helping her friends. She didn’t, couldn’t, allow herself to think about where the items came from.

  Rosemary wants to think only about all the people this clothing will help, but she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to keep herself from thinking about Melinda. Does she even want to?

  She’s always pitied the Holocaust survivor, scorning the woman’s delusion. Now she finds herself admiring the discipline involved in maintaining it.

  You said you’d help. You promised. She steps into the closet, turns to reach for the nearest item, and finds herself grasping a fuzzy purple cardigan covered with beaded flowers. The thing’s hideous, but Melinda loved it. She found it in a thrift store in Philadelphia when she was there for an ALA conference, and shipped her find home even though it was high summer at the time and she wouldn’t be able to wear the sweater for months. Every year, she delighted in the first day cold enough for her to wear it. Over the years, she bought turtlenecks and earrings, and even a pair of purple suede boots, specifically to match it.

  This can’t go to strangers. It just can’t. Rosemary wouldn’t be caught dead in it, though. She takes it carefully off its hanger and carries it out of the closet, back into the bedroom proper, where she expects to find Jeremy and Vera busily at work.

  Jeremy’s sitting on the bed next to a half-packed box of tchotchkes, cradling a glass bottle. Hand-blown, from the looks of it: swirling brown ridges. “She got this in Guatemala when she went down there to meet me the first time,” he says. “There was some snag and she had to wait an extra day to meet me and she was really antsy, so she went shopping to distract herself, even though adopting me was costing a fortune and the last thing she needed was to spend more money. But she found this in a little shop and it was cheap, and she loved the shape and the color, so she bought it, and then she went back to her hotel room and sat on her bed holding it on her lap, just like this.” He shakes his head. “She kept rubbing the bottle, because she liked how the glass felt, and then the phone rang and it was the adoption people telling her that everything was going ahead, that she could come meet me. She called this her magic bottle. She said she rubbed it and I came out, like a genie.”

  Rosemary’s heard the story, but she’s never seen the bottle. She didn’t know Melinda still had it. Jeremy looks up at her and says, “If I keep rubbing it, do you suppose I’ll get Mom back?”

  He’s trying to be funny again. It’s not working. Rosemary retreats into chaplain mode. What would she tell the son of a dead patient at the hospital?

  “No, but you’ll get your memories of her back. You can keep that, you know. You don’t have to pack everything.” She holds up the sweater and turns to Vera. “One of us has to keep this. I’ll never wear it. Will you?”

  “Oh, Lord. That old thing.” Vera sighs and puts a stack of bras into a trash bag. “I guess I’ll wear it, if no one else will, but I can’t wear it at home because the cats will either shred it or shed all over it, or both. I could keep it in my office, I guess. Maybe even wear it to teach. Would that wake everybody up, Jeremy?”

  He shrugs, rocking the glass bottle, and Vera sighs again. “All right, kids. Here’s my show-and-tell item.” She waves a flowing blue scarf, billowing silk, like a piece of parachute. “Remember this?”

  “Of course,” Rosemary says. “Her strip-of-sky scarf.” If Melinda wore the sweater on cold days when she delighted in the change of seasons, she wore the blue scarf during gloomy weather—rare enough in Nevada, the sunniest and driest state in the country—when she needed to remind herself what good weather looked like.

  “I’ll wear the hairy grape sweater if you’ll wear this,” Veronique says.

  Rosemary prefers her scarves a bit more understated, but she can see herself wearing this. She can’t see herself wearing the hairy grape. “Deal.”

  “Did you find my boiled-wool jacket?”

  “No. Not yet. This is as far as I got.”

  Vera snorts. “We aren’t being very efficient, are we? I think we should get Ed and Tom to do this. We could supervise them—watch from across the room and tell them what to keep and what to toss—but they wouldn’t get bogged down in memories of why Melinda wore whatever, and where it came from, and what she said about it.”

  Rosemary walks to the bed and sits down next to Jeremy, the old mattress sagging under the double weight. Melinda really should have been sleeping on a better bed. “I don’t think efficiency’s the point. You know, this feels like liturgy. It should be liturgy. We have house blessings, after all.”

  “We do?” Veronique asks. “You do? I’ve never heard of that.”

  “It’s in the Book of Occasional Services. There’s a gorgeous one in the New Zealand prayer book, too. Anyway, there are house blessings, and there’s a service for the deconsecration of a church, and some clergy are doing divorce liturgies now, which makes sense.”

  Veronique looks skeptical. “How would it work? What would you call it? The Goodwill Liturgy?”

  Jeremy lets out a sharp bark. “That’s pretty good, Prof Bellamy.”

  “It’s not bad.” Rosemary hugs the hairy grape. She closes her eyes so she can think better. “Mmmm … A service for the Blessing of Belongings, maybe? Anyway, a lot of people would show up to help, kind of like a barn-raising, and whenever they found something with a story attached, they’d go ring a bell in the middle of the room—or maybe they’d all have their own little bells—and that would be the signal for everyone else to stop so the person who just rang the bell could tell the story about whatever they just found.”

  Jeremy groans. “That would take forever.”

  “Maybe. It would take a while, sure. It would take as long as it needed to take, and people could come and go. It would be open-ended. It would be a way to get the packing-up done and honor the memories of the community and support the mourners.”

  “I dunno, Aunt Rosie. The open mike at the funeral was bad enough. And I don’t think I’d want everybody from church crammed into Mom’s bedroom, you know?”

  “Not everyone would come. It would be a self-selecting group.”

  Jeremy snorts. “Yakking women. No offense.”

  “Interesting idea,” Veronique says, “but I take our young man’s point. How would you limit how long each person spoke? Would there be priests in the house, too? What would they be doing? Would the family have a way of kicking everyone out when they’d had enough?”

  Rosemary shakes her head. “I do
n’t know. This just occurred to me.” She looks down at the hairy grape, runs her fingers carefully over the delicate beaded flowers. “Okay, how about you ring the bell and then you only have a minute to tell the story? To keep the process moving so the packing actually gets done?”

  Vera purses her lips. “Maybe. It needs work.”

  “I know,” Rosemary says, but even as she folds the hairy grape and puts it on the bed, even as she stands up and gets ready to renew her battle with the closet, the idea plucks at her. She’ll have to talk to Hen about it. She turns to Jeremy and holds her hands out for the bottle. “Let me put that in the other room for you, okay? Where it will be safe? And then we can get back to the packing?”

  “Here,” he says, and shoves it at her.

  She takes it. The glass is warm from his hands. “Do you want to stop? It’s okay if you aren’t ready yet.”

  “I’m ready,” he says. “At least I think I am. I want the room to be cleared out, you know. I just don’t want to go through the process of doing it. But I don’t want other people to do it for me, either. So I guess I just have to hang tough.” He sighs. “I know she’d want me to move into the room, to enjoy it. It makes me feel like The Bird Who Cleans the World, that’s all.”

  * * *

  When Jeremy is still very small, four or five, Melinda reads to him from a slim volume of Mayan fables called The Bird Who Cleans the World. The author, Mayan himself, explains that his mother told him these stories when he was a child. They’re mostly animal stories, moral fables and creation myths.

  Melinda originally plans to read Jeremy one story a night; at that rate, the book will get them through a month of bedtimes. But she rejects some of the tales because they’re too sad, or too baldly about the horrible fates meeting disobedient children, and Jeremy seems uninterested in many of the others.

  He responds to only two of the tales. One describes a huge flood that covers the earth, leaving only one house standing on a mountaintop. Inside the house, animals of every species take refuge. When the waters begin to recede, a buzzard is sent out to survey how much land has been uncovered, and in the bird’s greed and hunger it eats the bodies of the dead animals that it finds, and ever after is cursed, or blessed, with the task of cleaning the world by eating carrion and corpses, the reeking and rotting.

  “We heard that story in Sunday school,” Jeremy says. “’Cept it didn’t talk about the buzzword.”

  “Buzzard, honey.” Where did he get the word “buzzword”? Or has she, trying to interpret his childish speech, transformed his syllables into a word she knew? “It’s not quite the same story. It’s a little different.”

  “The aminals are in a house, not a boat.”

  “Animals, honey. Yes, that’s right.”

  “And in Sunday school it’s a pretty white bird that flies out. It comes back with a flower.”

  “An olive branch, to show that things are alive. That’s right.”

  Jeremy sucks his thumb thoughtfully for a moment, and then says, “This one doesn’t have a rainbow.”

  “No.”

  “So it could rain again. God didn’t promise to be good.”

  She smiles. Yes, come to think of it, the rainbow is God’s promise to be good, even if people aren’t. “Well, this story doesn’t talk about God. It doesn’t say why the flood happened.”

  “So maybe nobody was bad? It just rained for no reason?”

  “Maybe. We don’t know.”

  “The dead animals weren’t bad?”

  “We don’t know if they were. The story’s not really about them. It’s about the b— the buzzard.” She almost said “big bird,” but doesn’t want him to get the scavenger in this tale confused with the friendly yellow creature on Sesame Street.

  “He was bad.” Jeremy frowns now, clearly concentrating very hard. “Because he ate the dead animals?”

  “No. Because he didn’t fly right back to the house, the way he was supposed to.”

  “So he was punished. He had to eat dead things. But he liked eating dead things.”

  “Yes, he did. And he was doing a good thing by eating them. He was cleaning the world. But the other animals didn’t want to be around him, because he smelled bad. So he had to be lonely.”

  He looks utterly perplexed, and Melinda reaches out to smooth the soft bangs off his forehead, realizing belatedly that the seemingly simple tale has led them into thickets of ambiguity that many adults would find bewildering. Terrible things happen for no reason, and only the lucky survive. The buzzard is bad for doing something good, and he’s punished by being forced to keep doing what he wants to do, but in isolation. The bird that cleans the world is held in contempt, shunned, rather than honored. She thinks of a line from the Psalms: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Isaiah’s suffering servant, and Christ’s agonizing crucifixion after his friends abandon him.

  This is dark stuff, grown-up stuff. She wonders, as Jeremy resumes sucking his thumb and drifts off to sleep—at this stage he’ll wake again if he feels her weight lift from the mattress, so she’ll sit a while longer—if the fable was composed before or after the Mayans were exposed to Catholicism. Liberation theology. This is the worldview of a people who’ve seen too much suffering and death, as far from the complacent triumphalism of right-wing American Protestantism as you can get. No easy answers here, no assured salvation, no rainbows: just paradox and the stench of corpses.

  The next night she reads him another fable, one she’s chosen for its simplicity and happy ending. A cricket disturbs the rest of some jaguars who dislike his singing, but he and a rabbit, his friend and ally, defeat the jaguars by gathering gourds of wasps, which chase the predators away by stinging them.

  Jeremy likes the story, and asks for it again the next night. It has Christian subtexts, too: the last shall be first, the smallest shall be greatest. Jeremy doesn’t understand that part yet, of course. He only knows that the cricket and the rabbit, for all their tininess, are smart, and that their quick thinking keeps them safe.

  A week or two later, Veronique and Rosemary come over for Scrabble. After the game, Melinda shows them the book. “You know, for anybody who survived the civil war, that second story must have seemed like a joke. No wasps defeated the army when it overran the Mayan villages. The little guys lost.”

  Veronique looks up from the illustration she’s been studying. “Your little guy won. And this author, Victor Montejo”—she raps the book with her knuckles—“it says he wrote another book about watching a village being destroyed. But he included the wasp story anyway.”

  “I still like the buzzard one better. But it’s hard.”

  Rosemary grimaces. “Yup. No meaning in disaster: only in the work you do afterwards, even if no one says thank you.”

  * * *

  Bone-weary, Veronique puts the shopping bag from Melinda’s house on her own bed. She and Rosemary just packed this bag, and now she has to unpack it again. Why does so much of life seem like useless repetition, like an utterly random reordering of insignificant bits of matter and energy? Move a sweater here, move it there. Teach the same classes to different generations of students who all begin to blur into one dully staring face. Grade new stacks of papers, which all begin to blur into one dull essay, distinguished only by increasing numbers of sentence-level errors.

  She really needs to retire.

  She really can’t retire.

  She really needs to put away the things in the bag, or they’ll become another burden, another weight on her shoulders.

  At least they aren’t in a mystery story anymore. They know who killed Melinda. In a mystery novel, that would be a happy ending.

  Veronique isn’t happy. She doubts anyone else is, either.

  She reaches into the bag and pulls out the hairy grape, which in her current enervated state feels as heavy as a full-length mink coat. She has to hang this in the closet, at least, although she’ll only take it out again the next time she goes t
o campus, so she can put it in her office. But she needs to put it away now so the cats won’t have their way with it.

  She’s closed her bedroom door to keep them out, and they’re wailing and mewling outside, butting the door with their heads. You never feed us. You have never fed us. Not once in the last thousand years have you fed us.

  She feeds them twice a day, fed them just before coming upstairs. They’ve already forgotten this, or abandoned the offering as unacceptable. Rummaging in her closet for a hanger while the cats mourn outside, Veronique thinks it might be nice to be a cat, for whom each opening of a cat food can is unprecedented cause for rejoicing, rather than the same damn thing all over again.

  The hairy grape is safely stowed. Next? Veronique peers into the bag—how can she already have forgotten what it contains?—and spots a woven basket. She didn’t really want this, but Jeremy insisted she take some of the items cluttering Melinda’s nightstand and windowsills and bureau, and the basket’s innocuous enough. She’ll find some use for it.

  Inside the basket is a small white box holding a pair of earrings, silver with opal and lapis inlay. These, Veronique genuinely likes. Melinda had lovely taste in jewelry.

  And below that, a scarf: not the billowing blue thing Rosemary took, but red chenille, a spot of brightness. It glowed like a ruby when Veronique came across it in Melinda’s bottom dresser drawer, and the color lifted her heart for a moment even as her fingers treasured the soft fabric. For those reasons, she claimed the scarf. She rarely wears scarves, but she’ll wear this one.

  She hauls herself upright and walks to her own dresser, across the room. The scarf goes in the top drawer, next to neatly folded socks. The earrings go in her small jewelry box. That leaves the basket. Indecisive, she holds it in both hands. She doesn’t know where to put it. She can’t think of a spot in the house where it will look right, and anyway, the cats are as likely to claw and chew this as they are to savage the hairy grape. Finally she goes back to the closet and stands on tiptoe to deposit the basket on an upper shelf.