Undressing the Moon Read online

  I didn’t know that he loved me yet. I only knew that he was careful with me, as if I were more fragile than I was. We didn’t know each other yet. It was too soon. Too dangerous.

  When Mr. Hammer told me he wanted to take me to Burlington to see a performance, a woman, a jazz singer, Quinn put his foot down.

  “This is weird, Piper,” he said. We were at Boo’s having dinner. She had made Shake ’n Bake pork chops.

  “Who’s the singer?” Boo asked, scooping some homemade applesauce, pink and thick, onto her plate.

  “I can’t remember,” I said.

  “Why does he want to take you?” she asked.

  “It’s weird. Teachers aren’t supposed to do that kind of shit,” Quinn insisted, spearing another pork chop from the pile in the middle of the table.

  “He wants me to go,” I told Boo, ignoring Quinn, “because she’s one of the old-timers. Like Billie Holiday. And Ella Fitzgerald.”

  “Then what the hell’s she doing coming to Burlington?” Quinn asked, his mouth full of pork chop.

  “I don’t know, but he says it may be the only chance I get to see her. She’s getting old and she doesn’t perform that much anymore. Mr. Hammer says it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. That if I want to be a singer, I need to listen to the great singers.”

  “Then why doesn’t he buy you a record?”

  Quinn asked. “Quinn, he’s my teacher. He’s teaching me.” I felt my skin growing flushed. I thought about his hands resting on the keys, about his hand resting on my shoulder as I practiced the scales.

  “I don’t know,” Boo said.

  “Mum would have let me go,” I snuffed.

  “And Daddy wouldn’t,” Quinn said. “But I’m the one in charge. And I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Every weekend, you get on a bus and go miles and miles away from home with your teacher to go skiing. Why is this any different?” I felt my face getting hot with frustration now. “I want to go to college for music. Anything I can do to help my chances, of getting a scholarship, of getting accepted even … I don’t see any difference.” I set down my fork and folded my arms across my chest. “It’s not fair.”

  Boo said softly, “Quinn, maybe she’s right. Nick Hammer’s a good guy. My friend Jessie knew his wife before she passed away. He’s a good teacher.”

  “Mr. Hammer’s wife died?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Car accident.”

  “That’s sad,” I said, forgetting all about the concert. I thought about Mr. Hammer’s house, tried to imagine what it might have been like with a woman living there. I imagined wildflowers on the tables, soft curtains in the windows. I thought it might not feel so dusty inside. Maybe his kitten wouldn’t be so mean.

  “Have you met him?” Quinn asked Boo.

  “Once. Remember the charity foul-shot contest last spring? He can’t shoot a basketball for shit, but he’s a decent guy.”

  Quinn looked hard at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “This is important to you?” he asked.

  I nodded. I couldn’t believe he was about to give in.

  “I want to know who this singer is first. You better find out her name.”

  Mr. Hammer pulled into our driveway the following Saturday afternoon. He stopped the car and came to the door, while I was trying to get Sleep out the back. Quinn almost skipped his race to make sure Mr. Hammer wasn’t planning to kidnap me, but I promised him everything would be okay. He also seemed to feel better after he talked to Mr. Hammer on the phone and after he saw an ad for the concert in the Burlington Free Press, which he went all the way to St. Johnsbury to get.

  Sleep kept sitting down, so when I pulled on his collar, his butt just skidded across the kitchen floor.

  “Come in,” I hollered.

  Finally, I got Sleep outside and hooked him to his run. He looked at me, sad-eyed, and I said, “Don’t pull that puppy-dog stuff on me. Quinn will be home in a few hours.”

  Back in the house, Mr. Hammer was standing in the kitchen all dressed up. Underneath his coat, he was wearing a black suit, a clean white shirt, and a red paisley tie. He usually wore jeans and sweaters. His hair was combed back instead of falling into his eyes, too. Suddenly I felt self-conscious about the dress I’d gotten from Boo’s shop. I’d altered it myself, cinching in the waist and lowering the hem, but it still looked secondhand. Becca had helped me do my hair, blowing the curls straight with a blow dryer and then spraying my whole head with Aqua Net. She told me she’d do anything to trade places with me. She said if Mr. Hammer had asked her to go all the way to Burlington with him to see a concert, she would have dropped to her knees and thanked God right then and there. She said she’d just about die if he even remembered her name.

  “You ready?” Mr. Hammer asked.

  “I think so,” I said, glancing around the kitchen to make sure I hadn’t left the coffee machine on or the toaster plugged in.

  He opened the passenger door for me, and I got in. Then he walked around to the driver’s side. The car was still warm and smelled a little bit like hamburgers. “Sorry,” he said, lifting a greasy paper bag away from my feet. “My lunch. Did you eat already?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I figured we could stop somewhere to get dinner before the concert, if we get hungry.”

  I nodded. I hadn’t brought any money. He’d told me not to worry about the tickets, that a friend of his had given them to him. But I didn’t know what I would do if we went to a restaurant. Maybe I wouldn’t get hungry.

  The sun was gone again, and the sky was completely white. Sometimes in winter, it felt as if we were living inside a giant cocoon. As if you got in a car and tried to drive to Canada or New Hampshire or Massachusetts, at the border you would hit a white wall. It made me feel both anxious and safe.

  There’s no interstate between Quimby and Burlington. You have to take Route 2 West all the way to Montpelier (which is in the middle of the state) and then get on I-89 North up to Burlington. I’d only been there a couple of times before, each time with Boo, who said the yard sales in Burlington had better junk because the people in Burlington had more money than people in Quimby. I’d gone to Montpelier with Daddy a couple of times when he had to renew his driver’s license. I’d also been on a field trip, in the sixth grade, to see the State house and the granite quarries in Barre. I still had the pink granite paperweight I got as a souvenir.

  But this trip wasn’t like driving with Daddy, high up in the truck, or riding the school bus to the capital. This time I was dressed up and on my way to see one of the most famous jazz singers of all times. Etta James. Her name even sounded like the name of someone famous. And I’d been picked special by my teacher to see her because he thought I was gifted. I sat up straight in the front seat of Mr. Hammer’s Volvo and felt, suddenly, very lucky.

  “I saw her once before,” Mr. Hammer said when we got to Plainfield.

  “You did?”

  “Uh-huh. In New York, when I was in graduate school. My wife and I were having a drink at this little bar on the Lower East Side. We were just sitting, talking, when all of a sudden we heard this incredible music. I got up to figure out where it was coming from and found this back room where she was singing. There were only about ten people there. I went back to the front to get my wife and she wouldn’t believe me. I practically had to drag her back there.”

  “What was her name?” I asked. It was hard for me to imagine Mrs. Hammer without a name.

  He look at me, confused. “It was Etta James.”

  “No,” I said. “Your wife.”

  “Oh,” he said, staring straight at the road. “Hattie.” I felt bad for asking.

  He didn’t say much else until we got to Montpelier.

  “You need to stop somewhere to use a restroom?” he asked, slowing down near a gas station.

  I shook my head.

  The traffic had slowed and the snow on both sides of the road was dirty.

 
“Are you looking forward to Christmas?” he asked as we drove past several street lights wound up in red and green garlands.

  I shrugged. I hadn’t been thinking about Christmas. The whole idea of Christmas without my mother made me feel strange. It was only a couple of weeks now until school let out for the holidays.

  “I’m not a big fan of Christmas, either,” Mr. Hammer said. I smiled. And I thought about how Mr. Hammer might spend Christmas. He and his wife probably used to go out to the woods together to find a tree. I could imagine them dragging it back to their house at Gormlaith through the snow. I could hear the sound of Handel’s Messiah and taste eggnog sweet with rum. But after she was gone, how could he do that anymore? How could he go alone into the woods to look for the perfect tree? How could he listen to the same music, enjoy the sweetness of eggnog?

  And then I thought about Christmases before my mother left. There was a box of Christmas things she kept out in the shed: bread-dough ornaments we had made, a battery-operated Santa Claus that shook and laughed, plastic candles with lightbulb flames. She always took a mirror and put it on the coffee table, arranging cotton balls around the edges. The mirror became a lake and the cotton balls turned into snow when she added the miniature village: post office, grocery store, train station. That was my favorite. There was also a candle holder that looked like a carousel of angels. When you lit the candles, the angels started to spin. I wondered what Christmas would be like this year without Mum. She used to make chocolate cookies with powdered sugar and maraschino cherries, coconut bars almost too sweet to eat, and bread that looked like a shiny blond braid.

  We were pulling onto the interstate, increasing speed, and Mr. Hammer held the wheel tightly.

  “This is the first Christmas without my mother,” I said, more to see what it felt like to say it than to tell him.

  He nodded and merged into traffic. But instead of asking where she had gone, the way most people would, he just said softly, “You must miss her.”

  My hands were sweaty and I could feel my throat trembling even though I wasn’t saying anything. I nodded once, hard.

  Daddy had already tried to convince Quinn and me to spend Christmas with Roxanne and Jake and him. Quinn said that we already had plans, that we wouldn’t be able to make it. Daddy didn’t put up much of a fight, Quinn said. But then again, he never did.

  The drive from Montpelier to Burlington is only about a half-hour long. The interstate is much faster than the winding road that weaves through every village and hamlet between Quimby and Montpelier. We were talking about the production of The Sound of Music, which was scheduled for the end of January. Mr. Hammer was saying he hoped nobody forgot their lines over the holiday, that we should maybe try to squeeze in a rehearsal between Christmas and New Year’s. And then we were at the exit for South Burlington, and then the one that would take us downtown.

  “Well, here we are,” Mr. Hammer said, as surprised as I was. “Have you been here before?”

  “A couple of times,” I said. “My brother’s probably going to be on UVM’s ski team next year.”

  “That’s great.” He gestured out my window. “There’s the main campus.”

  I tried to picture Quinn, a backpack slung over his shoulder, walking across the snow-covered quad.

  We drove down Main Street, past the colorful Victorian houses, the lake at the bottom of the hill a great white expanse. We parked in a parking garage, on a rooftop that looked out over the marketplace on Church Street.

  “Are you hungry yet?” he asked.

  I was starving, and I was mad at myself for not getting some money from Quinn. Daddy had just dropped off a check, a little bigger than usual for the holidays.

  Mr. Hammer must have sensed that I was hedging, and squeezed my shoulder. “My treat?”

  I smiled, and we walked out of the dark parking lot into the city.

  He took me to a restaurant called Carbur’s, where the menus looked like old-fashioned newspapers and all the items had funny names. It was warm and light inside, and through the window as the sun set, little white lights lit up in the trees, like stars appearing in the night sky.

  He pulled out my chair for me and helped me with my coat. No one had ever done that before. I felt as if I were on TV. I ordered a sandwich called Name That Tuna, and a lemonade. Mr. Hammer had a Cool Hand Cuke sandwich and a Coke. The restaurant was crowded and loud with music and conversation. Sitting next to us was a family with three kids. The littlest one kept escaping and crawling underneath my chair. The mother scooped her up, apologizing, each time I signaled that she was underneath my feet. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Terrible twos.”

  For dessert, I ordered a hot fudge sundae. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had one, and Mr. Hammer had said, “Order anything you want.” He ordered a cup of coffee, and I asked the waiter if I could have one, too.

  The mother strapped her two-year-old into a heavy wooden high chair when their food arrived. The hot fudge was so good, so thick and sweet, I felt suddenly incredibly happy. The waiter lit the candle in the center of our table, and Mr. Hammer sipped on his coffee.

  “Is it good?” he asked.

  “Mmm-hmm,” I said, nodding. “Want some?” I held out a spoon full of ice cream and hot fudge.

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  I shrugged and put the spoonful in my mouth.

  “You’ve got some chocolate,” he said, motioning toward the corner of my mouth. I felt my cheeks grow red and I dabbed at my face with my napkin.

  “Still there,” he said, reaching for his own napkin and quickly wiping at the chocolate smudge. It made me remember my mother’s gestures, the rough swipe of a paper napkin or the soft edge of her worn T-shirt.

  “Thank you,” I said, rolling my eyes, embarrassed.

  After Mr. Hammer paid the bill, he said, “I’ve got to run to the bathroom. Wait here for me?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  While he was in the bathroom, the baby, done eating, escaped again and wriggled under my chair, refusing to move. Her mother came over and said softly, “I am so sorry again. I hope she didn’t ruin your date.”

  The words didn’t register for a moment, and I started to tell her, No, no, it wasn’t a date. And then the immensity of what she had said hit me, and I just shook my head. “That’s okay.” I set my fork down and glanced anxiously around the room.

  When Mr. Hammer came back from the bathroom and I stood up, I wondered what everyone else in the restaurant might think. Had the waiter thought we were a couple? I tugged at the skirt of my dress, straightening it, and let Mr. Hammer help me on with my coat. It struck me as both terrifying and wonderful that anyone would believe I was grown, that I wasn’t a girl at all, but a woman. I tried tossing my hair back like a woman on our way out of the restaurant. I tried walking like a woman, and when I spoke again, I wondered if my voice was like a woman’s.

  The concert was on the UVM campus in one of the old buildings that we had driven by earlier. At night the building looked ominous, but inside, it was quiet and much smaller than it had appeared. Like a church. The audience was even whispering, as if they were waiting for God.

  I was nervous and excited. My whole body seemed to be trembling; I sat on my hands to keep from shivering. Mr. Hammer had gotten a cup of coffee for himself from the concession stand and a cup of cocoa for me. I held the foam cup between my hands to keep it steady.

  “You okay?” he asked, leaning toward me, whispering.

  I nodded.

  When the lights went down, darkness descending, Mr. Hammer whispered, “Listen.”

  She came out while it was still dark. We were close enough to hear the sound of her heels on the wooden stage. When the lights came up on her, I closed my eyes. They were too distracting, all the lights and glitter and equipment. When the music started, I only wanted to feel her voice.

  I felt myself fragmenting. I felt everything shattering. Everything that was whole was turning into slivers, each of
them a different color of sorrow. And when the pieces came together again, I felt rearranged. Whole.

  I was aware of Mr. Hammer sitting next to me. I could feel the warmth of his skin, smell the now familiar scent of his detergent, the vague smell of cologne. Of pine maybe, of the woods where we lived. I opened my eyes once and turned to see if he had been reassembled, too. He turned to me, in that exact moment, and I knew that he understood. I didn’t need to say a word. He was right there. Inside the music with me. Edelweiss.

  Here was the color my mother had saved the bottom drawer for. It was the color of the sky the morning I woke up and discovered that she was already gone. The color of a single, discarded shoe at Boo’s. It was the color Daddy must have seen on his migraine days, the color of bruise. It was the color of a room that belonged to no one, the color of sadness, the color of wanting something that was already gone.

  For nearly an hour, I let myself be lost inside Etta James’s voice. Each note flowing into the next, each song into the next. I kept my eyes closed, resting my head first on the back of the seat, and then on his shoulder. It was different than it had been with Blue at the Star Theater. I was not aware of the touching. I was only aware of the colors of her voice. Of the perfect silence of music.

  But then the music ended and the audience was standing. The ridiculous cacophony of applause made my head ache, and it took everything I had not to put my hands over my ears to stop the noise.

  Mr. Hammer was still sitting, too, his hands quiet in his lap.

  He smiled at me and reached for my hand. “Are you still cold?”

  I realized I hadn’t taken my coat off the entire time. My hands were inside the cuffs. I felt a distant ache, and, still, the tremble.