Undressing the Moon Read online

  Becca was cast as Peter Pan, and I was sent home.

  “I won’t do it,” she said. “I don’t want to do it without you.”

  “Please,” I insisted. “I’ll volunteer to do something else. Lights, or costumes. It’s okay.”

  Reluctantly, torn, she relented. I left her and took the bus home. It dropped me off at Gormlaith, and I trudged through the mud all the way back to the house. It could have been quicksand, it was so thick.

  Outside the house, I pulled off my sneakers. I had been optimistic, leaving my boots at home. My sneakers were completely covered with mud. I would have to put them in the washing machine before the mud dried. I could hear Sleep on his run out back, barking and running back and forth. He strained on his chain to see me through the chain-link fence. As soon as he recognized me, he stopped barking and started whining.

  “Hold on, Sleepy,” I said. “I’m coming.”

  I pulled my boots on inside and went out the back door, where Sleep was frantic. It looked like a cyclone had hit the backyard. His food and water dishes were upside down, food strewn everywhere. He had knocked over the plywood doghouse that Daddy built, and the bed inside was torn to shreds. The ground was covered with cedar chips and bits of upholstery.

  “What did you do?” I asked. Sleep whimpered and retreated at the tone of my voice.

  I stood staring at the wreckage with my hands on my hips. The last time Sleep had destroyed anything was when the man from Quimby Gas & Electric came to read the meter, and nobody was home.

  “Was somebody here?” I asked Sleep, trying to make him understand he wasn’t in trouble. “Sleepy?”

  I unhooked him, turned around, and followed him into the house, scared this time of what I might find. I squeezed my eyes shut tight against the thought that Jake and Gopher might be waiting inside for me, then I grabbed a steak knife from the utensil tray.

  “Hello?” I said, willing my voice not to fail me now.

  I walked into the living room and then down the hall. Sleep ran up and down the hallway. My heart was beating so hard I could barely breathe. I wondered whether I was too young to have a heart attack.

  “Who’s there?” I demanded, slowly opening doors. Quinn’s room, my room. At the end of the hall, I stood outside Mum and Daddy’s room and held the knife with both hands. I pushed the door with my toe and looked quickly around the room.

  Then I noticed the footprints on the dusty floor. My throat throbbed. I knelt down, and touched one of the little puddles, the wet shape of her foot.

  I followed the prints backward through the kitchen into the bathroom. They started there, at the edge of her bathtub. Outside, it was too soon for lilacs (they wouldn’t start blooming until May), but in here their wet perfume filled the air. She’d been here so recently, her footprints were still wet and everything smelled of her. I ran back to the bedroom and reached for the towel that was draped across the back of a chair. I picked it up and pressed it to my face. It was still damp.

  Through the fading steam in the bathroom, I looked at my face, at the makeup streaked in carnival colors, at the freckles on my exposed skin, at the way the fabric of my blouse clung to my breasts, and I cried. She wasn’t looking back at me from the mirror. I had become everything she wasn’t. I took the damp towel I’d been clutching and wiped at my face until it burned, until everything was clean. I soaked it in hot water and made the face in the mirror melt away.

  Later I looked for other mementoes, other things she might have left behind, but there was nothing. And soon, the footprints evaporated, and I wasn’t sure it had really happened at all. The only evidence of her intrusion was the torn-up backyard.

  Olivia, the widow, stood in my living room in the dress I had finally finished. She was balancing on a milk crate so that I could adjust the hem. With pins in my mouth, I asked her, “Well?”

  She looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror I had purchased for this purpose and nodded gravely. She is pretty in a very standard way: a homecoming-queen, catalog-model way. Blond hair, eternally coiffed. Brown eyes that might seem too small if not articulated by chocolate eyeliner and mascara. She is one of those girls who knows how to make the best of what she’s been given. She’ll probably grow old fighting, believing in the power of cosmetic potions. I’d started noticing things like this lately. I couldn’t help trying to imagine my friends (as well as strangers) as elderly.

  “Where is the wedding again?” I asked her.

  “At St. Mary’s. The reception’s at Dunphy’s Pub. He’s Catholic. Irish.” She held her arms away from her body, awkwardly.

  “Relax,” I said. “Let your shoulders drop.”

  “Sorry.” She laughed uncomfortably. “I’m so tense.”

  “A wedding’s a big deal,” I said. I’m familiar with the posture of brides.

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to do it,” she said, turning her head to look at me. I was inspecting a little snag in the hem.

  “Sure you will. You just need to breathe. Besides, look at you.” I gestured to her reflection in the mirror. “You look perfect.”

  She smiled sadly. She kept looking at me, tentative and puzzled. “Do you think he knows I’m getting married?”

  I knew she meant her dead husband.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like to think so.”

  She looked back at her reflection and shook her head. “He’d hate John. I know he would. He’d think he was arrogant.”

  I kept pinning the bottom of her dress, trying to keep my fingers from trembling. The silk was slippery.

  “And I keep imagining him sitting in the church, watching all of this, this display. He wasn’t religious. We had our wedding up at his folks’ camp on Gormlaith. He’d think this was silly.” The hem lifted as her shoulders tensed.

  “Breathe,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said, the hem falling again. “I don’t know what the matter is with me.”

  I knew though, what she meant. I worried about the decisions people would make after I was gone. I was afraid to leave Becca alone. Afraid of the consequences of my departure.

  I finished the hem, and Olivia stepped off the milk crate. She slipped out of the dress, carefully, and I noticed that she was slimmer than the last fitting. I’ve seen this before. I usually wait until the week before the wedding to sew the buttons on wedding dresses. A body under stress can change incredibly over even a short time.

  After she left and I had put the dress back in its plastic garment bag and hung it in the closet, I closed the curtains in the window, took all my clothes off, and looked in the full-length mirror. I hadn’t looked at myself in months, except for glimpses of my face in the steamy bathroom mirror. I didn’t know what my body looked like anymore.

  I stepped onto the milk crate for a better view, the plastic grid pressing painfully into the soles of my bare feet. Ravaged. That was the word. I remembered it from a book he read to me all those years ago. About a girl and her older lover. She had said that after a certain point in time, her face changed. She had grown old in an instant. The face she wore after that moment was ravaged, and for the rest of her life she would have to grow into that old face.

  I wonder if he knew what he was doing to me. I wonder if he ever feels bad for the part he played. All of this time I have felt guilty for ruining his life, but I wonder if he ever thinks about how he ruined mine. He took something with him that night. Something that belonged to me. It wasn’t something as simple as a disposable razor or a rubber band ball. It wasn’t something he could return in the mail when he was done using it.

  Once. Upon a time that did not exist except inside his walls, inside the light of a winter afternoon, I chose between them. And I chose him over my mother.

  Under covers, under fingers, I told him the secrets she had taught me. The ones about glass. The ones about light. And the ones about why she left us and never came back. I still hear the melody of this story, the true one that I have always known, but never w
anted to believe. In gossamer whispers, I gave him a spectrum of explanations that she never gave to me. Poppy, mandarin, maize. When she left, she took everything with her, except for her children. Avocado, jade and blue, blue, blue. It had little to do with Daddy, and everything to do with growing old as only somebody’s mother. She knew she was more than that, and she gave us up to prove it. Plum. Violet. Wine. The truth was that she never loved us enough to stay.

  And when he told me to let go of her, said it was time to let her go, I gave him bone, silver, snow. I gave him my shoulders. I undressed. I undressed. I undressed until nothing was left. And he made me believe I didn’t need her anymore. Inside his walls, inside that light, I grew old.

  But I told him, through colors, that I would leave, too. That one day, I would be the one to pack a bag filled with broken things, and leave. I warned him.

  Once. Upon a time that did not exist except for inside his walls, inside the light of a winter afternoon, I chose between them. And I chose him.

  FIVE

  Becca is directing a production of My Fair Lady at the high school, and I have agreed to do the costumes. Now that the widow’s dress is done, this is a slow time of year for me. I won’t get the rush of prom dress orders until April, and this year there will be fewer June weddings than usual. The black flies last June were so bad that a lot of girls who have always dreamed of outdoor weddings have decided to wait until later in the summer.

  Getting kids involved in theater these days is next to impossible. Becca cast everyone who tried out, and she was still short. As a result, she will play Eliza Doolittle and Kit, the teacher she brought to Christmas, will be the professor. She’s secretly coveted this role for years. She’s happier than she has been in months.

  “I promise I’ll still be here every day, it’s just a couple of hours in the afternoon,” she said nervously when she told me.

  “That’s great,” I said. “Please do it. I’ll be fine. You know how much better I’ve been feeling lately.”

  She looked at me, dubious, but soon a smile spread across her face. “Oi think I’ll do it, then, me lady,” she said, dipping into a curtsy.

  “Good,” I said.

  She won’t admit it, but I think Kit and she have been flirting.

  On the weekends we scour Boo’s for clothes we can turn into costumes. We go to the fabric store and wander through the rows and rows of bolts until we’re dizzy. I have transformed the living room into a costume shop. I lay out the old clothes and the new fabric on my floor, shoeing Bog away. He’s been sleeping a lot lately, and he always wants to nap where I am working.

  I’m still tired. The doctor assured me that it’s a perfectly normal side effect of the tamoxifen, that a small percentage of patients become lethargic, but I’m skeptical. It’s the same fatigue I’ve been feeling all along. When I first got sick and started treatment, I fought sleep. I’d stay up late at night watching movies. I’d scrub my kitchen floor just to prove that I could. I’m not so proud anymore. I give in. Every afternoon while Becca is at rehearsals, I put away the fabric and half-made costumes and take a long, long nap. I allow myself to sink into the deep sleeps that scared me only months ago. It feels good to let go. To fall. I sleep until Becca comes and wakes me, usually two or three hours later. It’s a luxury, all this sleep. I have been feeling more and more like Bog, who naps with me as well as throughout the day.

  Today, I try to read before I fall asleep, but my eyes start to cross and then close only a few minutes after I lay down. I close my book and let myself go. I wake up when Becca curls up next to me on the bed. She is facing the opposite wall. I touch her shoulder, and it is shaking. She is crying.

  “Becca?”

  She rolls over, facing me, and says, “I think Bog is dead.”

  We put Bog’s body in the backseat and drove to Gormlaith. The water was still cold, but no longer frozen, and we borrowed a boat from one of the year-round inhabitants.

  “Where you going?” the old man asked, peering out at the car.

  “Just out to the island. We’ll have it back to you in a couple of hours.” Becca’d said she would do all of the talking. My throat was too thick.

  He looked at us, skeptical, and then reached into a little wooden cabinet by the door and took a silver key off the hook. “Here’s the key to the lock. It’s the second dock there.”

  “Thank you,” Becca said. “We’ll be back in just a little bit.” And when he crossed his arms, still suspicious, she shoved her hands into her pocket and pulled out her wallet. She pressed it into his hands and said, “Here. Collateral.”

  He nodded and closed the door behind us.

  We put Bog’s body and a snow shovel in the boat and pushed away from the shore, toward the cold center of Gormlaith. I touched his fur, familiar and fine, ran my fingers across his barrel chest, down his skinny legs. I adopted him almost seven years ago. He would have been killed; at two years old, his racing days were over. When I brought him home, he didn’t know how to navigate stairs, and he was afraid of loud noises. I tried to crate train him, on the advice of a friend, but inside the giant cage, he must have thought he was back in his pen at the racetrack, because he started to drool and cry, and pee made a hot puddle around his feet. When I looked at his wet brown eyes, I knew we would be friends. I brought the crate back and let him sleep with me on my bed for the next seven years.

  Becca rowed the whole way out to the island, pulling the boat heavy with me and Bog’s body up onto the shore so I wouldn’t have to step into the icy water. She offered to carry Bog, but I shook my head and lifted him into my arms.

  While she dug into the still slightly frozen ground, I sat under a tree and touched Bog’s belly. It took almost an hour to make a hole big enough to put him in, and Becca’s hands were raw from the shovel’s metal handle.

  She rested her foot on the shovel and her chin on the handle when she was done.

  “Ready, sweetie?” she asked me softly.

  I lay down and hugged Bog’s smelly old body and blinked away my tears.

  “‘Bye, friend,” I said, kissing his snout.

  Becca looked out toward the water as I picked him up and set him gently in the shallow grave. Then she covered him. And we got back in the boat and headed back to the shore.

  The sun was struggling to break through one heavy cloud. Each time it succeeded, the water sparkled like glass beneath us. I stuck my fingers into the cold water, letting them become numb.

  “I want to be cremated,” I said, staring down into the murky water. “And I want you to come out here, on the sunniest day in summer, and put my ashes in the water.”

  Becca’s arms were shaking from the effort of digging and rowing. She took her hands off the oars and let them rest in the oar locks.

  “Will you do that for me?” I asked.

  Becca stared past me at the island becoming smaller in the distance.

  I reached for her hands, forcing her to look at me.

  “Of course,” she said, wiping at tears with the back of one freckled arm. “On the sunniest day.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered. I stood up and motioned for her to switch places with me. But after only a few strokes, my left arm was so tired, the boat just started to move in a futile circle.

  “Let me,” she said, and I did.

  Mr. Hammer did not come back. A “For Sale” sign appeared in the front yard as soon as the ground was thawed enough to hammer the post in. The summer caretaker came early, to clean out the things he had left behind.

  While Becca was at rehearsals for Peter Pan, I took the bus back to Gormlaith every day after school and watched his house become empty. I made friends with the caretaker from a distance. While she swept the front walk and removed the storm windows, I sat on the grassy shore with my homework. I watched the ice melt. I watched everything turn green. Soon enough school would be done, and Becca and I would watch the summer people from this same shore. Becca might fall in love with the boy whose parents rented
the big blue camp. We might watch him like this, from a distance, all summer. We might lie in the grass with the other Pond girls, the ones who emerged from the woods in the summer in their one-piece bathing suits, with their pale skin glowing in the new sun. But for now, it was just me and the lady who was in charge of removing Mr. Hammer. She waved to me sometimes, and I waved back.

  I thought about Daddy, starting his job at the dump again. I knew that some of Mr. Hammer’s things would arrive there, bundled neatly into bags. Boxes of stale cereal, bottles of shampoo. All that was nothing but trash. But it was likely that the other things, the salvageable things, would wind up at Boo’s. Scuffed wingtips, pot holders, and candlesticks. A kitchen clock, a single sock. Clothespins. I wondered, sometimes, about the kitten.

  I watched things arranging themselves around me. It was amazing, I thought, the way the world wants to be an organized place.

  The Tamoxifen isn’t working. Of course, I don’t tell Becca this. She is sure that it will save me, at least for a little while. Even my doctor is optimistic; it sometimes takes several months before any progress is made. I will feel nothing but side effects until then, and I shouldn’t mistake this for failure. For futility. But I know, the same way I knew that my mother had come home and taken a bath in our house that day. And, as when I knew my mother had returned, there is something pacifying in this understanding. It’s something I can hold on to, something that makes sense. I feel finally as if I know where I am going; it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve had this sort of certainty. Now I can go about my business, clean the closets out.

  But some things are best kept secret. This is one thing I learned from Mr. Hammer. So I allow Becca to believe. I have so little to offer her, and I’ve been so selfish. I’m trying to return her kindness, with the gift of innocence. Of hope.