Undressing the Moon

by T. Greenwood

  Daddy was lucky. When he lost his job at the factory, he found a new one right away at the landfill in Quimby, collecting money from the summer people who brought tidy bags of coffee grounds and banana peels in from their rented camps at Lake Gormlaith. By July, every camp on Gormlaith would be full, and the summer people made enough garbage to keep Daddy busy ten hours a day: mildewed bathing suits, broken water skis, watermelon rinds. Corn husks and inner tubes. In the summer, he came home smelling like other people’s garbage, but sometimes he would bring my mother some shimmering thing he’d found poking out of a trash bag, or buried under a pile of dirty diapers. He’d polish the pieces as if they were gems and offer them to her in the same way.

  Of course, there was pain in our house, too. I would have had to be blind not to notice the sad way he extended his hand to her, and the reluctant way she accepted. I would have had to be deaf not to hear their careful arguments at night. My father’s job at the dump was a seasonal one. We all knew that summer would eventually end, and as much as we despised the summer people, we relied on them. Soon enough they would return to their real homes in New York and Connecticut and Boston, taking their money and their trash with them. The end of summer was a desperate time, even for us. I knew that instead of shopping for new school clothes, I’d have to pick through the summer people’s leftovers dropped off at my aunt Boo’s thrift shop. I knew that Daddy’s fingers would be blackened by newsprint, the classified ads preserved in piles all over the house. That my mother’s words would become careful, that all of us would have to move gingerly, until he found a winter job.

  The first couple of years after the furniture factory closed, he worked pumping gas at a friend’s station, but it closed down when the big Shell station opened across the street. This year, he didn’t know where he would be working. Quinn had taken a job at the Shop-N-Save as soon as he turned sixteen. But despite my mother’s pleas to please let her help, to let her find a job in town waiting tables or at one of the shops, Daddy insisted that she stay home, that he could do enough. He said that he would give her the world he’d promised when she first loved him. And this made her angry. In my room, I held a heavy pillow over my head so their words couldn’t find me. The slivers here weren’t made of glass but of her sighs and his tears. But my mother was a magician, and she could mend things.

  What I choose to remember, the beads my fingers linger on, are these: The days when Daddy and Quinn were at work and my mother belonged to me. The days that we went hunting. We made picnic lunches (cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches, bottles of Orange Crush or lemonade) and walked for hours, waiting for the sun to catch in the blue or green of something broken. Of course, sometimes we could walk all day without finding anything; sometimes the beach held nothing for us but tangled fishing lines, a soggy shoe, wet plastic bags. But other times, we’d find piles of glass in the road, the glorious remnants of an accident. Or a perfect piece of cobalt that used to be a wineglass. Those days, we felt like explorers or pirates, and we would sit down under a tree and eat our junk-food picnic as if we had been journeying for days without food, counting the shattered pieces like medallions of gold.

  Sing for me? she would ask later as we lay, bellies full and brown, on the blanket she had spread by the water.

  And as I sang, she would close her eyes. Sometimes it scared me, how far away she seemed, as if my own voice could send her away. But when I stopped, when I swallowed the only beautiful thing I knew how to make, her eyes would flicker open again, and she would return to me.

  She was already further away than any of us knew.

  In the evenings, she would put together the pieces we had found.

  “Look,” she said.

  I had tiptoed outside, past my father snoring softly on the couch, and past our dog, Sleep, who was doing just that on the front porch, to the shed. It was July, and the air was loud with crickets and the distant sounds of fireworks. The Fourth of July wasn’t for two more days, but the summer people were impatient.

  It was so warm I didn’t need the sweatshirt I had grabbed on my way out. The door to the shed was open and light spilled onto the wet grass. I could see my mother’s shadow moving across the walls inside.

  I knocked softly on the open door and peered in at her. She held up one of her stained-glass panes to the bare bulb.

  “Look.”

  The glass was indigo: not quite black, not blue. But beyond that confused color was the certainty of ruby and emerald and amber. The verity of red and green and yellow, an explosion of color, but still perfectly intact.

  Outside, the air cracked and burned with Roman candles. And as I sat on the wobbly stool while my mother worked, I thought about the possibility of explosion. About calmness, and sudden detonation. Watching her hands work across the broken pieces, I felt almost sick with appreciation, but there was no way to tell her how much I needed her.

  That night after I crept back into the house, nearly tripping over Sleep’s long body in the kitchen, the sickness stayed with me. It settled in my stomach and shoulders all through the night. If I’d been able to articulate the feeling, I might have realized that I missed her. Already, and she wasn’t even gone.

  The next day was brilliant and we walked to the lake to lie in the sun. The grassy place near the boat-access area was littered with empty fireworks shells, burnt at the edges and quiet.

  Mum spread a threadbare cotton sheet across the softest patch of grass at the shore, kicked off her flip-flops, and pulled her legs under her, Indian style. She shielded her eyes from the sun and looked across the impossible expanse of blue, unbroken by motorboats or sails that day.

  A pair of loons had nested at the opposite shore earlier in the summer and we’d watched them after their child was born, teaching the brown downy adolescent how to fish. But today the couple swam and cackled at each other, and the child was nowhere to be found.

  “Where’s the baby?” I asked, concerned that some irate fisherman had felt threatened by the bird’s ability to find fish in the depths of the lake when he, himself, went home empty-handed. It had happened so many times before that now signs all along the lake warned that the loons were a protected species.

  “They’ve probably left him alone. That’s how they teach him independence. He’s probably at the other end of the lake.”

  “Alone?” I asked, horrified.

  “They’ll go get him in a little bit. He’s okay, Piper. He’s just growing up.” She reached into the bag she’d packed and handed me a cold sandwich, wrapped in wax paper. “It’s meatloaf, with mustard.” She smiled. Only she knew that cold meatloaf sandwiches were my favorite. She had probably even saved the last piece, hiding it in the back of the refrigerator, safe from Daddy and Quinn.

  I unwrapped the sandwich carefully, like a gift, and ate it slowly, trying not to think about the baby loon alone on the other side of the lake, protected by the law but not by his own parents.

  In the summer, we didn’t worry about what would happen when winter descended. In the summer we didn’t worry about money. About food in the cupboards or that my feet were growing so fast I would need new boots again once snow fell. In the summer, it was just me and my mother, searching for broken treasures in the mud.

  The clarity of that summer still surprises me. Sunlight struggling through the green of new leaves. The marbled pink of a sunburn, and tumblers filled with lemonade. I suppose the sunshine might have blinded me a little. With the beads of sunlight in my fingers, even now, I skip over the ones made of milky glass, the gray beads that would not let the light come through.

  These were the days when Daddy didn’t go to work. The migraine days. The days when he closed his eyes and saw falling stars. On those days, Mum didn’t seem to know what to do. Normally, we would have walked to the lake or through the woods to the Pond, where some of the best glass lay buried in dank mud. But with Daddy home, lying on the couch with a cool cloth pressed against his temples, she stood in doorways, looking lost. On the migrain
e days, the TV was always on: game shows, soaps, talk shows. She pretended to be absorbed in programs I knew she had never watched before. She jumped every time the phone rang, because once when someone tried to sell her life insurance, Daddy grabbed the phone out of her hand and demanded, Who is this? When Daddy was home, we didn’t go hunting, because every time she walked near the door, Daddy would reach for her, asking, Where are you off to? And then she wouldn’t go anywhere. Not to the lake for picnics. Not even to the shed to work. But then Daddy’s migraine would disappear, as quickly as it came, and he would go back to work. When he was gone, the light returned, and I had my mother back again. I had the green of grass after rain, the soft orange of peaches in a basket, and the violet of the sky outside my night window. If summer here were made of colored glass, this one would be made of emerald, topaz, amethyst. I suppose the sunlight blinded me a little, to the dark days.

  On these days, the gray days, I could see the worry in her face and in her hands. I could hear it just under the surface of her voice. At night I listened to their whispers, pretended that their voices belonged to crickets, to bullfrogs, to loons.

  * * *

  “We’re going to Quimby today,” she said one morning in early August.

  “Hmmmm.” I nodded. I was busy pushing scrambled eggs across my plate, thinking about how I might ask her for a new pair of jeans for school. I had grown five inches since last summer; I was almost as tall as Daddy, and my clothes didn’t fit anymore. But today was the first day in two weeks that Daddy had gone to work. We didn’t have any money for new jeans.

  “Piper?”

  I looked up from my plate.

  She was standing in front of the sink in her nightgown, and the sun was shining through the sheer fabric. Inside the giant nightie, I could see how small she was. It embarrassed me. I looked back down at my plate.

  “I think I’ll bring some of my pictures to the artists’ gallery,” she said softly, like a question.

  I looked up again. She was running her fingers across the counter. Nervous.

  “You should!”

  “You think?” she asked. “Maybe the summer people might buy them?”

  I imagined my mother’s glass pictures hanging in strangers’ homes. Filling windows in high-rises, the way they might change the yellow glow of a street lamp into something cool and green.

  That afternoon I helped her gather her stained-glass panes and we took them to the artists’ gallery in Quimby. While she met with the owner in the back office, I wandered through a labyrinth of jewelry and sculptures, quilts and paintings. I was amazed by so much beauty in one place and wondered what it would feel like to be able to buy something. To reach into my pocket and pull out enough money for the velvet crazy quilt. How it might look spread across my old bed.

  Mum was smiling when she emerged from the back room. The handsome owner of the shop had his hand on her back. When she saw me, she smiled shyly. She blushed when he wrote her a check for the pieces, and she squeezed my hand tightly as we walked back to the car. At the Miss Quimby Diner, she said, “Order anything you want. Anything!” We got hamburgers and French fries smothered in gravy. I’d never tasted anything more wonderful. On the way home, I could still taste the salt on my lips. We rolled the windows down and sang, together, at the tops of our lungs.

  But when she told Daddy that night at dinner, when she handed him the check, he was silent. Quinn stared at his plate and disappeared into his room right after dinner. I didn’t know what to do with myself in all that quiet, and finally, reluctantly, I left them alone. Later, the words that crept under my door (trust and cheat and whore) wound their way into my dreams. He asked her, in whispers like pins, Do I have to watch you twenty-four hours a day? And I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to imagine what would happen to us if he never left the house again. The next day he got a headache that didn’t go away for a week.

  A month later, my mother had stopped getting out of bed in the mornings. I knew she was awake, listening to hear Daddy either getting ready to leave or clicking on the TV and settling onto the couch for another headache day. In my own room, I was doing the same. Quinn was the only one of us who seemed real anymore. While the rest of us wandered about the house like ghosts, Quinn went to work every morning, and he came home every night with stolen milk from the Shop-N-Save, eggs, and packages of sliced cheese so that we would have something to eat besides the contents of the dusty cans that had been in our cupboards since last winter.

  One morning, after Daddy hadn’t gone to work in three days, I thankfully awoke to the familiar sounds of his work boots shuffling across the linoleum, and the sound of Quinn cracking his back, twisting first left and then right. And finally, the rattle of the truck disappearing down the road with the two of them inside. I waited until I couldn’t hear his tires crushing gravel anymore and then I crawled out of bed.

  Summer was almost over, but the air was still hot. Sticky and stifling. I had taken to sleeping in one of my mother’s old slips to stay cool, and in the kitchen, in my mother’s tattered lingerie, I poured the last of the coffee into a mug. I wasn’t supposed to drink coffee, but today I didn’t care. I kicked the screen door open and went outside. Sitting on the rusty porch swing in my mother’s slip, drinking the forbidden coffee, I pretended things weren’t falling apart. That it was just another summer day. But my mother would not get out of bed, and there were clouds caught in the tops of the trees.

  Inside, I walked tentatively down the short hallway to the door to Mum’s room and peeked in.

  “Morning.” She smiled, rolling over to look at the clock.

  I sat down on the bed, and she reached for me with her little hands, motioning for me to lie down next to her. Sometimes lately I’d felt as if she were the child; she was so small. But when I lay down next to her and she put her fingers in my hair, I was the little one again.

  “Is it nice out?” she asked. Her breath was musty. I knew what she meant was, Is he gone?

  “It will be. It’s cloudy, but it’ll burn off.”

  “Promise?”

  I nodded.

  “What do you want to do today?” she asked.

  I shrugged. She hadn’t wanted to do anything for weeks, and I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

  “I told Gray’s sister I’d help her clean out the rest of his house. She said we can take anything we want.”

  Gray Wilder had been our closest neighbor, about a quarter mile down the road from us, near the Pond. He had died that spring. He was the first dead person I knew. I was curious, and the idea of spending the day on an adventure with my mother thrilled me.

  “I was thinking we might be able to find some things to sell at Boo’s,” she said.

  My heart thudded in my ears. I wondered what Daddy would say if she came to him with another check. My hands shook with the prospect of another night listening to those words. But she held me so tightly, I couldn’t say no. She needed this. She needed me to agree. And I missed her.

  We walked to Gray Wilder’s house carrying suitcases, and the sky threatened rain. It felt as if we were running away, but the suitcases were empty, and I wasn’t wearing any shoes. My mother walked slowly, noticing things: a late raspberry, the red almost brutal amid all that green. A hornet’s nest in the top of a tree. A perfect silver feather in the middle of the road. With her gestures, she tried to make all of this beautiful, to distract me from the gutted-out car over the bank near Gray Wilder’s house and the bag of trash somebody had dumped there. But my eyes lingered on the crushed Valentine’s candy box, empty aspirin bottle, and single filthy sneaker.

  Gray Wilder’s house was a trailer on concrete blocks. It smelled like an outhouse when my mother finally found the key and let us in. I’d never been inside a dead person’s house before, and suddenly, I didn’t want to be there. We collected a few things from the living room: a clock made out of lacquered wood, a wicker magazine rack, two candles made of layered wax that looked like a sunset. But the smell got to
me soon, and while my mother scoured Gray Wilder’s garage for something valuable, I waited for her outside on a rock, picking the dead skin off my feet. The sky rumbled angrily.

  After a long time, she finally came out holding something wrapped up in the pages of a dirty magazine. She unwrapped it quickly, tossing the crinkled pages on the ground. In her face I could see something like desperation, as if her very happiness depended on what was inside the glossy pictures of skin and hair and lipstick. I couldn’t help but stare at the fragments of women’s naked bodies, at their pubic hair, shaved into tiny triangles, and at their swollen breasts, their colorless nipples. They reminded me that my own body (though I was growing in height) had yet to go through the magical transformations that some girls in my class had gone through one or even two summers before. I made myself turn away, looking up instead at the red glass vase in her hands.

  “That’s pretty,” I said. I wanted her to know she had found it: the perfect thing that would save this day.