Undressing the Moon

by T. Greenwood

  He shook his head. “I’ve tried just about every route I can think of. Nothing turned up. Unless you have a rich and generous relative, I think we may have to try another avenue.”

  I tried to think of all these choices as avenues, as streets, but when I closed my eyes I saw only the pathway made of broken bottles leading into the glass garden.

  “Like what?” Becca said. Her neck and her face were bright red. Tears welled up in her eyes, threatening to drown us all if they were to spill.

  “There’s still hormonal therapy. Tamoxifen. I think we’ve talked about this before.”

  We had. A little pill, taken twice a day. A little pill that would block the estrogen receptor in my cancer cells. A little pill that might buy me twelve to fourteen more months here on earth. It would not cure me, but it might give me one more spring, summer, and fall. One more season of mud and cold sunshine. One more chance to watch the town girls flirting in the park on summer evenings. One more autumn, one more fire. And the side effects, compared to chemotherapy, were minor. Of course, there was the chance that the little pill would induce menopause. But instead of seeming tragic, it seemed funny to me that I would, indeed, get a chance to be an old woman before I died.

  At the restaurant on Church Street that afternoon, I pulled the article about the glass garden out of my purse. I asked the waitress if she had an envelope, and she found one for me in the back office. At the table, while Becca stared into her French onion soup, not eating any of it, I addressed the envelope to my mother at the Hampton Beach address, sealed it in the envelope, and put on it a stamp I found loose in the bottom of my purse. On our way out of the restaurant, I dropped it in a mailbox. I would give her fragments for a change, offer her slivers of me.

  Outside, Becca shivered in the cold. Her skin was pale, her face somber.

  “I want to go see my dad,” I said.

  Daddy came home in February, just like he’d only been out grocery shopping or dropping off a letter at the post office. It was Valentine’s Day, and he was wearing a fresh new heart-shaped welt on his face.

  Boo was at the house, helping me paint my bedroom. I’d been wanting to tear down the awful wallpaper, and Boo said she would help me. I wanted to feel clean. I wanted everything to be new. It was one of those false spring days that exists to help you survive the winter: fifty degrees and sunny. It was a promise that spring was coming, but I was old enough to know that even the sky can be insincere. Boo and I opened my windows anyway, welcoming all the warm lies in. I found an old T-shirt of Quinn’s to wear; it was for a football team that didn’t exist anymore, so I figured it was safe to get dirty. Boo brought a gallon of sky-blue paint she picked up at the True Value.

  The weekend before we had torn down the old wallpaper. Boo had helped me steam it off, and the room smelled sour all week. The remaining shreds of paper clung to the walls like dead skin. But now, after hours of grueling work, the walls were smooth. We dipped our paintbrushes into the bucket and they came out dripping liquid sky. In only an hour, the room was transformed into a bright place. Feeling ambitious, I thought that we could paint the whole house, one room at a time, until every room was new. Until our house was unrecognizable. We could become different people here.

  I thought that in this blue room, everything about what Mr. Hammer and I were doing that felt frightening or wrong might disappear. In this blue room, I could be like any other girl.

  My afternoons with Mr. Hammer still felt unreal. What happened between us happened in a different world, like one of Mum’s stories, a place suspended from the rest of the universe. I went to him, each time searching for something, finding nothing. And during the long walks back to our house on Sunday afternoons (my hair still tangled, my shoulders still longing) I felt no different from the trees stripped bare of their leaves. I held out my arms and they were transformed into white branches heavy with snow; I empathized with the birches.

  At school, we had been feigning indifference for so long, I started to believe I really didn’t know him. He carried his soft leather bag slung over his shoulder and nodded at me, impartial, an acquiantance, when we passed each other in the halls. But I knew that inside his bag was the soft velvet drawstring pouch I had put there on my way out of his house. And inside the velvet bag was a sliver of crimson glass. It was like this. Everything seemed normal from the outside, everything was going according to plan, but inside there was the soft velvet secret, protecting something that could both shatter and cut.

  Daddy came into the house without knocking, and Boo grabbed the lamp next to my bed, instinctive, protecting, when he walked through my bedroom door. He shielded his face with his hands and Boo set the lamp down.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said, her hand spreading across her chest to hold her heart in.

  Daddy held out a box of chocolates to me, feebly, apologetically. “I picked this up on the way home.”

  Home. It was one of the heart-shaped boxes I used to covet. Shiny satin with a plastic rose in the center. Lace and a velvety bow.

  “What the hell happened to your face?” Boo asked.

  Daddy touched the mark absently but didn’t answer.

  “The room looks nice,” he said and then chuckled. “You can paint the outside next if you want.”

  The outside of our house had never been painted. It was covered with aluminum siding.

  “Where’s Quinn?” he asked.

  “Mad River. A race,” I said, opening the chocolate box. Inside there was no heart-shaped sheet of paper to tell which kind was which. I closed the lid.

  “You guys eat lunch yet?” he asked. The blue of the room seemed to change with him here. The calm happiness I’d been feeling was disrupted by his presence. He was staining everything. When I squeezed my eyes shut, I saw drops of blood all over the new fresh paint. Suddenly, I felt angry. I wanted him to go away.

  “What are you doing here anyway?” I said.

  “Piper,” Boo said, alarmed.

  “He doesn’t even live here.”

  “Piper,” she tried again.

  “This is my house,” he said, his voice raised to a frightening pitch. “Far as I know, I’m the one who makes the mortgage payments on this place. Pays the taxes.”

  “You can’t just come back here whenever you want! It’s not a hotel!” My whole body was trembling. Boo reached out to touch me, and I shook her hand away.

  Daddy sat down on my bed and looked up at me, defeated.

  “I’m coming back to take care of you,” he said. “I’m your father.”

  “You’re coming back because you got in a fight with Roxanne, and she smacked you in the face. You’ll go back there tomorrow and everything will be better and you’ll forget all about us again.” I looked at the prissy box of chocolates and realized they were probably ones that Roxanne had rejected. I hurled the box across the room. The chocolates hit the new blue walls. “At least when Mum left she really left. She didn’t keep coming back, pretending she was going to stay.”

  At the mention of Mum, Daddy’s eyes grew soft and sad. It made me feel sick to my stomach.

  Boo put her arm around my shoulders and steered me out of the bedroom, leaving Daddy at the edge of my bed.

  “Let me talk to him,” she said. “Why don’t you go for a walk? Cool your head. It’s beautiful out.”

  I nodded and started to get dressed. I knew how to leave. We were a family who sought havens outside our home. We were all cowards.

  I stood at Mr. Hammer’s doorstep, defeated. He ushered me in, looking past me at the road. He had started doing this every time I came to visit, making sure there was no one to see me coming and going. He tried to be subtle, but I was aware of his fear.

  I thought about Daddy, sitting in my new blue room with his brand-new cuts.

  I went straight to Mr. Hammer’s bedroom, a habit already, and sat down on his bed. I pulled the chenille spread away from the pillow and pressed it against my cheek. I lay on my side, curled up, like an infant. />
  Mr. Hammer stood in the doorway.

  “There’s been an accident,” he said.

  I sat up. I could only think about Roxanne’s fists raining on Daddy, a hailstorm. Accident. “What?”

  “This afternoon. By the covered bridge. Charlene Applebee lost her brakes at the foot of Kirby Hill and flipped her car into the river.” His voice sounded distant and strange. “She’s gone.”

  He had told me about his wife, about the car accident. He had given me the moments of silence afterward, he had given me the blinking headlights and shattered windshield, the smell of gasoline. Everything in that accident was on a loop, repeating itself endlessly. I was beginning to learn that this is the nature of grief.

  But I hadn’t known Mrs. Hammer. She was a part of someone else’s sadness, someone else’s memory. I did know the way Mrs. Applebee smelled, the heady floral scent of expensive perfume. I could picture the way her pink lipstick cracked, the jewelry she wore on her fingers and around her neck. I knew the way her voice sounded.

  Mr. Hammer sat down next to me on the bed.

  “Was she alone?” I asked. Necessarily linked to my recollections of Mrs. Applebee were thoughts of Lucy. They were intertwined, identical, Lucy being the smaller, more fragile, replica of her mother.

  He nodded.

  “What should we do?” I asked, as if there were something we could do.

  “I don’t know.”

  I lay back down and curled my knees to my chest. He lay down behind me and pressed his chest against my back. Lying like this always made me think of the orange slugs that Quinn and I used to catch and torture with Mum’s salt shaker.

  Inside his arms and legs and the curve of his chest, I thought about Lucy Applebee without a mother, and how strange it was that we had something in common now. How it didn’t matter that I was a Pond kid, that I had to wear plastic bread bags over my feet to keep the snow and mud from seeping through the holes in my boots. It didn’t matter that Lucy probably had one of those pink ruffly canopies over her bed, or that she had never tasted government cheese. Neither one of us had a mother anymore. We’d both been left behind.

  I could feel his breath on my neck. It was warm, slow.

  “What happened to your little girl?” I asked.

  He was quiet for a long time, and I started to think I hadn’t asked. But then he gave me a few more pieces. Glimpses through prisms: the color of her hair in the sun, bright red popsicles, and grass-stained knees. After Hattie’s accident, after shattered glass and bones, there was terrible sadness. So much sadness that you could smell it in the little house. He said it was like decay: pungent, rotten. It was so strong that no aerosol canister of fresh air could extinguish it. No flowers or bleach or pine-flavored toxins could cover it. It was seeping into the wooden floors, into the woolen rugs, into his sheets. And so he tried to fight it by rivaling it. He stopped throwing away the banana peels and beans and Tupperware containers of leftovers. He left dishes in the sink, in water that grew skins. He didn’t take the trash bags out. He even stopped bathing, thinking that he might be able to fight it with the scent of his own sweat and blood and breath. But still, underneath the smell of garbage, it lingered. It was stronger than anything rotten. And the house, filled with spoiled things, was no place for a little girl. No place for someone small.

  “They took her,” he said, and enclosed me like a cocoon, like a fist.

  He was holding me so hard, I felt a little panicked. I couldn’t move my arms or my legs. He could have crushed me, or swallowed me, I was becoming so small inside his arms. I pushed gently, trying to move, but his arms closed tighter. I could feel him sobbing, his chest heaving against my back silently, the tears of a grown man making my hair wet. I tried to straighten out, but his body was holding mine in place, a vise of arms and legs and chin. I felt my heart start to beat hard inside my chest. I pushed again, with all of my strength, and I felt his grasp loosen.

  I sat up and touched my shoulders, which were sore. I looked at him angrily.

  His eyes were swollen. His skin was blotchy with tears.

  “Don’t go,” he said, reaching for me. “I’m sorry.”

  But I had seen his weakness, and it made me want to spit. It made me want to hit him. It made me want to slam doors, to run.

  “I have to go,” I said, hurrying out of the bed and out of his house, running as fast as I could back to my house, where my father was standing at the stove, as if he always made hot dogs and baked beans for us for dinner.

  My father’s girlfriend, Ruby, answered the door. Despite the fact that she had been sending me cards and beauty salon gift certificates, there was a moment after she answered the door when her face was blank. I could have been selling magazine subscriptions or candy bars. Finally, a flash of recognition and she said, too loudly, “Piper! Hi!”

  It was three in the afternoon, but she was wearing a flannel bathrobe and something silky underneath. Knee socks with dirty heels. There were bags under her eyes, bruised crescents. Behind her, I could see that the house was a mess. There was a laundry basket on the kitchen table, half of the clothes hung over the backs of the chairs. There were dirty dishes, overflowing ashtrays, trash bags spilling bloody foam meat trays. Newspapers and cans. It was not what I expected from someone who gave pedicures as gifts.

  “Come in,” she said nervously.

  “This is my friend Becca,” I said.

  Becca reached for her hand. “Hi.”

  We went to the living room, where she had to push an old gray dog off the couch. He limped away, into a dark doorway down the hall. The blanket covering the couch was thick with gray fur.

  “Is my dad around?” I asked.

  “No. He might be back in a little bit, though.”

  “Oh,” I said. I really didn’t know what I had expected, and now didn’t know what I was doing here. The shades were all drawn. The TV was on, with the sound turned down.

  “Were you up to the hospital?” Ruby asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Checkup. I’m starting a new treatment next week.”

  “That’s great!” she said, again too loud. Too enthusiastic.

  Becca fidgeted with her gloves.

  The coffee table was filthy with ashes, cellophane cigarette wrappers, and magazines. On it were a rusty razor blade, a broken pen—a makeshift straw—and an empty plastic bag, filmy with white dust. A pile of quarters and a box of dryer sheets.

  Ruby saw me looking at the debris. I should have noticed how thin her legs were. I should have noticed the scabs on her face. I’d only seen crystal addicts on TV before, like wiry animals sleeping on bare mattresses, forgetting to brush their teeth, to eat, to sleep.

  “Listen, if my dad comes, tell him I stopped by,” I said.

  “You don’t have to go already?” she said, standing up and following Becca and me to the kitchen.

  “We want to get on the road before it gets dark,” Becca offered, smiling too brightly.

  In the kitchen, Ruby searched through a pile of junk on the island. Disorder. Dismay. Decay. I wondered whether she and Daddy were only trying to fight the stench of sadness.

  “Well, let me give you this,” Ruby said. “It’s from your dad and me. For Christmas.”

  She handed me an unwrapped box. Inside was a basket of lavender soaps, bath beads, and a loofah shrink-wrapped in purple cellophane.

  “Thanks,” I said, accepting the basket. “I’ll be sending your gift soon.”

  In the car, I leaned against the window, staring straight ahead at the road. I didn’t cry, though, because I was afraid that this feeling might be greater than sadness, that even tears would not suffice. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the car moving forward through snow and space and time. I held on to Becca’s leg the whole way back to Quimby and because I was afraid to let go, she slept next to me that night, letting me hold on.

  Daddy stayed only through the weekend. I knew he would leave again and that this time would be the last. He sat in t
he living room flipping through the channels, drinking beer, and falling in and out of sleep while Roxanne called the house every half-hour, asking me to tell him she was sorry and to please come home. Home.

  On Sunday, after Daddy left again, I didn’t go to Mr. Hammer’s house for my lesson. I didn’t even call him to tell him I wouldn’t be there. I imagined him waiting for me. I thought about the way he’d almost crushed me.

  Instead of going to my lesson, I rode with Quinn to his race at Sugar Loaf. He was supposed to ride the bus with the rest of the team, but his coach let him do just about anything these days. He was their star now. He was winning almost every meet.

  I had never skied before; the very thought terrified me. But while plummeting down a mountain seemed insane to me, the mountain was the one place where Quinn was completely fearless. On the top of the mountain, in the snow and cold of winter, Quinn was entirely at peace. I envied him this; there was no where I felt safe anymore.

  He didn’t ask why I wanted to come with him. Ever since our argument about Boulder, we’d avoided talking about anything that had to do with skiing. We moved carefully around each other, gently avoiding the subject.

  I watched the race with the other team members’ families, at the bottom of the run, behind a makeshift red fence. Each time a skier finished, we were dusted with snow. Quinn was seeded in the top five, so he went early on. It was thrilling to watch him navigate the flagged bamboo poles.

  After he’d come to a stop, he skied over to me at the fence and pulled his goggles up onto his forehead. His cheeks were bright pink, his eyes sparkling. I was so proud of him. I felt ashamed that I would ever have thought of keeping him from pursuing this, even if it took him all the way to Colorado.

  “That was awesome!” I said.

  He was out of breath.

  “Your bib’s coming undone,” I said, reaching for its tie and tying it with my bare fingers.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ve got an hour until the giant slalom race. Want to get something to eat?”

  Inside the ski lodge he clomped over to me in his ski boots, carrying a plastic orange tray with hamburgers and fries and sodas. He unwrapped his burger carefully, peeling off the bun and picking off the pickles. We ate quietly.