The Exact Same Moon Page 8

  “I can’t take conflict,” she says. “I just can’t take it.”

  “I know.”

  “I told you I just can’t take conflict.”

  “I know—but I thought The King and I was, you know, it’s not really conflict.”

  “He’s mean.”

  “Right …”

  “Well, I can’t take it.”

  This, I want you to know, is not my mother talking. This person in this bed they call my mother is not really my mother. This whole conflict issue seems to have come out of nowhere. Yesterday she couldn’t take the rerun of The Mary Tyler Moore Show I brought in because Mr. Grant was chewing out Ted Baxter, which was, to her, too much conflict.

  Fine. So I figured: a musical. Tomorrow I’ll bring in a musical. I really thought The King and I would be benign. I am striking out day after day with the entertainment here.

  I rewind The King and I. I reach in my bag for my ace in the hole: Swing Time starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. I figure: singing and dancing. Just some happy singing and dancing. These movies got a lot of people through World War II.

  My mother watches the opening dance with the blankest of stares.

  “You don’t see dancing like that anymore,” I say, because this is what people say when they watch these movies.

  She looks at me with the most impatient glare.

  “Inane,” she says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is utterly inane.”

  Okay, then. I let out the biggest sigh I can muster and hold the bridge of my nose. I just need a … moment.

  “I’m sorry,” my mother says. “I just can’t seem to—take anything.”

  “I know.”

  She’s depressed. Of course she is depressed. Who wouldn’t be depressed? Look at Bobbie; she had psychotic episodes. She nearly lost her mind. Everybody with GBS goes, to some degree, bonkers. It’s in all the literature. If depression is the manifestation of a loss of control, well then, here you have the ultimate case study. A person trapped in her own body. A person with virtually no choices. A prisoner who never even got her day in court. One day you’re running around free, and then, bam—your body betrays you, and you can no longer brush your own teeth.

  This is a depression that makes perfect sense. But I’ve never seen my mother depressed before. So I really don’t know this woman.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t like any of the shows.” She’s watching me pack them all up.

  “Well, they’re all going back in the bag,” I say forcefully. I’m losing patience. Losing patience, I am.

  “I’m not really a TV watcher,” she says.

  “I know.”

  She’d read, but she can’t turn the pages. Plus, her eyes aren’t working right. Her hearing goes in and out, too. My mother’s body has turned into an extremely complicated rocket ship where all systems are definitely not Go.

  “How about I put something in the CD player?” I say. “I brought The Marriage of Figaro back in.” It’s her favorite opera.

  “That’s okay,” she says. “I’d rather not.”

  “You’re just going to lie here and stare at the ceiling?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she says.

  “I don’t know if that’s so good for you, Mom,” I say.

  “Well, maybe it will work tonight.”

  “Maybe what will work?”

  “Prayer.”

  “Well, but—”

  “Maybe it will work,” she says.

  “You’re not going to be able to pray your way out of this,” I say as gently as I can. “You do know that. You’re not going to wake up and suddenly be over this.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  I look at her. She’s staring at the ceiling, her eyes are welling up, her chin is quivering.

  “I can’t pray,” she says.

  “Oh, I didn’t—”

  “It just doesn’t work. I haven’t been able to pray.”

  I stand here wondering what to say.

  “You’re angry at God?” I say finally.

  She shakes her head no.

  “It would be normal,” I say. “You know, it would be normal to think ‘Why me?’ ”

  She shakes her head no again. “That’s not it,” she says. “Why not me? Why should I be spared from suffering?”

  “Because you’re my mom,” I say.

  “So it’s ‘Why you?’ ”

  “There we go.”

  She manages a smile.

  But it fades.

  “I’m just … cut off,” she says, then. “I try to pray, but it’s just blank.”

  My mother is more than simply a “religious person.” My mother, we have always said, has a direct line to The Man.

  “I’ll tell you,” she says. “It’s like losing your best friend.” The tears are coming in fuller now, pushing the pool over the edge.

  I wish Kristin were here. She would know what to say. Oh, this whole thing is a disaster. My mother’s having a crisis of faith, and I’m bringing in Mary Tyler Moore reruns?

  “Let me tell you something,” she says. “This is the worst paralysis you can have.”

  “This?”

  “Not being able to pray.”

  “Oh.”

  She closes her eyes. The tears come trickling down.

  “I wish I knew what to say,” I say.

  She shakes her head no.

  “It’s my own battle,” she says.

  “I know, but—”

  “Don’t take it on,” she says. “Really. It’s useless.”

  “No, that’s me.”

  She opens her eyes, looks at me.

  “I know all about useless,” I say. “Useless is my middle name.”

  She clearly has no idea what I’m talking about.

  “And let me tell you, uselessness is the most disgraceful form of anguish,” I say.

  “Just plain anguish is plenty enough to bear,” she says.

  “Right.”

  “Right.”

  She smiles. Something is funny? “Hold my hand,” she says. Oh, we are so not the hand-holding type. I do it anyway. Of course I do. Sometimes you have no choice but to reach through fear. It’s a small, bony hand. It’s a baby bird’s claw.

  “You’re my rock,” she says. “Thank you for being my rock.”

  I have no idea what she is talking about.

  “You’re just—my rock,” she says.

  A rock. A firm foundation for her to stand on. An un-movable, reliable presence. How wonderful. How useful.

  The reassurance, it boosts me right into the sky. I throw my shoulders back, raise my chin. She looks at me. She sees something new now. Oh, she sees what she has just done. She did what all good mothers are good at. She gave her aching kid some comfort.

  “Well, thank you,” I say. “That was good medicine.” I tell her she’s a good mom. I tell her that her motherhood muscles seem to be working just fine.

  Afterward I stop to visit the Chihuahua.

  He’s in his metal cage, chewing a rubber mouse. I see that his neighbor, the Border collie, is gone. Hmm. But the husky below is still here.

  A mouse? Hey, why did they give him a mouse to chew on? That’s a cat toy. He is a dog! He is a dog! And why is no one buying this dog? Two months have gone by, and no one is buying this poor little dog.

  He sees me. His big brown eyes bug out. Well, his eyes are always sort of bugged out. But still, he knows me by now. I open the cage, and he scampers, falls into my arms.

  “Okay, buddy. I’m here.”

  He nuzzles my chin, reaches his head frantically toward my ear. His body is warm and strong and panicked.

  “Okay, it’s okay. Everything is okay.”

  Everything is, yes, okay. Everything is just as okay as it was yesterday. Okay, okay, okay. These days are blending together. Spring is in full bloom. Pretty soon summer’s going to take over. Okay, okay, okay. I wonder how the farm is. On my last trip home the sheep came. That wa
s exciting. One day we woke up, and there were all these little puffballs over the back hill. “Sheep!” I said to Alex. “Sheep!” We stood there awhile and watched them from our window. I loved what they did to the hill. Like if this were a painting you were doing, a lush landscape, and suddenly you got it in your head to add some action. Sheep! It makes the painting come alive with stories. That’s the way I was looking at it. Alex was having a more literal reaction. Alex was seeing: lawn mowers. Lawn mowers that don’t mind going up and down a steep hill, and as a bonus they fertilize while they go. Ten acres, straight up, or straight down, depending on your vantage point. The first few times Alex mowed that hill, he didn’t admit to being afraid. But I could tell. For instance, he didn’t complain when I made him take the cell phone with him in case of an emergency.

  It’s a guy thing, I suppose. He was trying to take the idea of driving a big machine down the side of a cliff in stride. Then one day he was over at George’s, and there were some other farmers there. And all the farmers were filled with admiration for Alex. “So you’re the guy,” they said. “So you’re the guy who mowed that hill.” Lifetime farmers, not a one of them said he’d ever have the nerve to drive a tractor down that hill. “It’s not a hill for people,” one said. “At least not if you’re figuring on living long.”

  After that, Alex got more and more interested in the idea of George’s sheep. He started aggressively pursuing George’s sheep offer. We’d had a particularly wet spring, so the grass was growing early and fast. So you can imagine Alex’s relief when we saw the sheep that morning.

  “Sheep,” I said to Betty and Marley and Wilma. “Now you dogs go outside and you ignore those sheep.”

  I let them out, closed my eyes, and hoped. They went and stood by the fence—an electric fence. They stood by that fence for the better part of the day, staring at the sheep. And that was it. Within a day the sheep faded into the background of their doggy consciousness.

  “See, I told you,” I said to Alex.

  “Well, you told George,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  I miss Alex. I miss Betty and Skippy and all the animals. I miss normal days. I miss waking up and feeling good about sheep.

  I miss the me I used to be. The me before the void. Last time I was home I didn’t have the void. Well, I had it but it wasn’t formed. You know, it’s easier to complain about the loud ticking of your kitchen clock. It’s … easier. This is one thing I can say for sure: Vague longing in the form of a bird pecking on your head is a lot easier than walking smack into a brick wall. Whew. I should get that one framed and put on a magnet to hang on our new refrigerator.

  Impossible. This is an impossible situation. There is no way Alex is going to go for the idea of us having a baby. And there is no way I can live without Alex. And there is no way I can live with the void.

  I wonder if the void is the reason I’ve been visiting the Chihuahua. Maybe the Chihuahua is my surrogate baby.

  Well, this is just getting more and more pathetic.

  But I do think: I’m a mom. I think some moms are born way before the kid comes along. Of course, plenty of kids come along way, way before the mom is born. Moms are born. That’s the thing. Moms are born. As a mom, I think, I am just being born.

  This, I tell you, is a most startling discovery.

  It’s not that I’ve never thought about wanting a baby. Nor have I ever had anything against babies. As a kid, I had dolls. I had a doll that burped. I easily imagined myself a mom. I thought babies were swell. Not that I had ever touched a real live baby. I didn’t do that until I was sixteen years old. I met her at the airport. Gate 10 at Philadelphia International Airport. We had signs and balloons. I saw her, in Eileen’s arms. My brother’s wife. Their first baby. Alyson. I saw her tiny bald head from across the crowded gate. Alyson. I saw her! I burst into tears. The tears were coming from some new place, some place in my chest I’d never even heard about before. I stood there crying, biting my thumb, folded into a tile wall. They came near me. They held her up to me. I was to be her godmother. Here, hold her, they said, don’t you want to hold your goddaughter?

  No, I didn’t. I was too busy holding on to consciousness. Was this what fainting felt like? Was this the instant of warning you got?

  But I didn’t faint. Instead, I reached out. I reached through. I reached through terror and awe and love, and I touched her. I touched the baby. I touched her forehead. It was warm and soft and moist. It was nothing so spectacular, and yet it might as well have been God. Maybe it was.

  Alyson became the center of my world. And then, a year and a half later, my nephew John arrived. My brother went on to have four kids in all, and my stated goal was to be the favorite aunt, the number-one aunt, oh, I would maintain that status even if it meant ten more hours of playing Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper, a toy beauty salon, you pushed the lever and watched the Play-Doh come squirting in strings out of the heads of the bald lady and the bald man, neither of them, miraculously, bald anymore. It was fun being the favorite aunt.

  But—my own baby? That had always been something way, way far off. I had too much to do. I had too much me, me, me to get right, to get on track, to polish and protect. There was no room for another. In fact, just about the time most people are thinking about having babies, I was headed in the other direction. I was discovering alone. I was all about subtraction, not addition. Was something wrong with me?

  Me, me, me. How tiresome it now seems.

  The Chihuahua fits in the crook of my arm. God, I love this little dog. His ears, I swear his ears are twice the size of his head. They stick straight up, tall and strong and so paper thin, the light comes through them, making them pink. I scratch the spot between his ears. He likes that. He also likes it when I scratch his chin bone, either side is good.

  “It’s okay, Chihuahua,” I say. He smells like cedar chips. Not a bad smell for a pet shop dog. He’s trembling. He’s doing a little quiver dance. He’s probably picking up the beat of my heart. My heart is pounding like crazy. Thump-thump, boom. Thump-thump, boom. My heart is pounding the way it pounded when I saw my name on the list of the high school freshman basketball team—holy hell, it’s there! It’s there!— and I had to pretend that this was merely a very nice thing to see, yes, very nice, but certainly not the single most exciting event to happen in the history of my life. Which it was. But you don’t go acting like that. You are in high school. You wait until you can get somewhere. You wait until you can get home and tell your mom, or your cat, or your favorite tree outside, you wait and wait and wait all the way through fifth period and all the way on the bus ride home, all the way down your street until your feet reach the place, under your favorite willow tree, that one place where you can explode, up, down, up, down, leaping for joy.

  That is exactly the way my heart is pounding now. Thump-thump, boom. Thump-thump, boom. I have a secret inside. I have a revelation sure as hell. Hey, Chihuahua! A baby. A mom! I am a mom! But of course a Chihuahua in a pet shop isn’t the place for a thirty-nine-year-old woman to take something like this. Especially not a thirty-nine-year-old woman who thinks of herself as a mom but who doesn’t have an actual baby and who is at once thrilled about her new self and miserable about the fact that it is, after all, merely virtual.

  “You want to go see the gerbils?” I say to the Chihuahua.

  He doesn’t protest, so we head over.

  I wonder if Alex will give me credit for not bringing this Chihuahua home. For not even suggesting bringing the Chihuahua home. Does that earn me extra credit that I can put toward maybe getting a baby?

  Oh, brother. We are now sliding well past pathetic.

  But—Alex doesn’t want a baby. I’m certain of that. He’s already done fatherhood. He raised Amy and Peter as a single dad. He has fatherhood medals out the wazoo. He thinks he’s too old to do it all over again. He’s fifty-four, forgodsakes. There is no way.

  There has to be a way.

  What if there is no way?

 
; Okay, now he’s snoring. I have never imagined the sound of a Chihuahua snoring. It’s the highest pitch. Sweet little dog. When I put him back in his cage, he wakes up with a start. I tell him good night, now. I tell him the store is going to close soon so I have to go. He cocks his head to one side, cocks it like a puppy on a poster in a little girl’s bedroom. Oh, come on. “I am going to turn around now and not look back,” I say to him. “Do you understand?”

  I take four steps. I look back. Oh, jeez. Those are the most pathetic eyes. Okay, one last pat. “But this is it,” I say, opening the cage. “I mean it.” I bring him into my arms. He’s shaking. He must be so terrified of going back in that cage. I can’t blame him. A taste of freedom must be the worst thing to dangle in front of a prisoner serving life. The shaking, it’s a jet-propulsion kind of shaking. The shaking, it thrusts him up, over my shoulder, and then down to the floor. He lands on his feet. He does not look back. He goes zooming toward the gerbils, past the gerbils, his feet clicking and clacking past the fish and the birds and around to the gerbils again. “The Chihuahua!” I am yelling. “Hey, anybody! The Chihuahua is loose!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  It’s a hot Saturday in July. We were just about to head out for a walk, but the phone rang—someone needing something from Alex—and then George showed up. I don’t really mind the interruptions; I don’t much care what happens. I’m just glad to be home, back to normal, back where happily-ever-after was reportedly last seen.

  From my spot at the kitchen table I can see Marley and Wilma lying like walruses on the porch, their chests rising and falling with the rhythm of sleep. Betty is here with me, curled up in a ball between my feet. And George, he’s leaning on the kitchen counter, arms folded. He’s waiting for Alex to get off the phone, waiting for him like a kid eager for his buddy to come out and play. That’s the thing. Alex and George have become pals. A shrink and a sheep farmer. It’s not the most natural combination. It’s something to see. They’ll hang out for hours at his barn or our barn. They do tractor-talk. They do livestock-talk. They do hay-humor, and I suppose they share plenty of beef-and-poultry-gossip. I don’t really know what they do. I just know that it’s usually George doing the talking and Alex doing the laughing and nodding and chin-scratching. It really is something to see. It makes me happy to see it. Except I am getting a tiny bit worried that Alex is going to start chewing tobacco.