“How you’re always so sure about everything. You always know exactly what you want. You always know what the right thing is for you.” She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even move, so I continue. “You can leave home, no problem. You can tell Mom you’re quitting school.” I take a breath. “You would have told Tessa if Ben had kissed you.”
“Who knows what I would have done?” she says. “Sometimes it’s easier to just shut up.”
I scoff.
“What?” She sits up to face me, swinging her legs onto the floor. Her eyes look enormous, green and blue and gray all at once.
“You never just shut up.”
She purses her lips. “I shut up,” she says, “if it’s necessary.”
I shake my head, feeling my hair swing over my shoulders. “Nope.”
“I do!”
I smile. “You are literally proving my point right now.”
She takes a deep breath, a loud breath.
“You can’t even breathe quietly,” I say. I’m trying to make her laugh, but she doesn’t. Instead, she just keeps looking at the coffee table, at the robot flower my mother made. It catches the sunlight still coming in the window and seems to glow, silver and spiny.
I suddenly feel like telling Luna the truth about something.
“I’ve been talking to Archer,” I say. “Texting, I mean. Since I was here in February.”
Luna looks at me. “What?”
“I like him, Luna. I don’t know what this is, but it isn’t nothing.” I look down at my mother’s bracelet and twist it on my wrist. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
She shakes her head. “Okay,” she says. Her voice sounds small. My first thought is, That was too easy. I look up and see that she’s shivering.
“I think I’ve screwed everything up, Fee.” Luna presses her fingers to her eyes, and I notice that she’s wearing three rings, all silver ones made by our mother. Her fingers have been bare for days before this, and I can’t remember if she was wearing them earlier today.
“James will come back soon,” I say, leaning toward her. “It’s so obvious that he loves you.”
“It’s not James,” she says. “I know he loves me. Even when I’m a bitch.” She looks at me. “I think . . . I’m pregnant.”
I forget to breathe for a moment. Sparkly lights pass before me and I think I’m seeing stars, that I’m hallucinating or passing out, maybe. But then I realize it’s the lights of a passing police car twinkling blue and red on the living room wall.
“H-how?”
“How do you think?” She leans back on the arm of the sofa. She looks weak. It’s the first time I’ve seen her look like this, maybe ever.
I’m shaking. “That’s not what I mean.” I speak slowly, enunciating every word. “How could you be so stupid?”
Luna doesn’t say anything for a minute. I can hear the sounds of the street, passed up by the summer air through the open window. A dog barking. Cuban music from a tinny-sounding radio. Someone throwing glass bottles into a garbage can. I have this feeling like I could just walk outside right now, toward that dog, toward that radio. I could walk away from Luna and none of this would be my problem tonight.
But I don’t move. Every instinct is telling me to run, but I stay.
Luna tries to smile, but she doesn’t quite make it. “That’s a good question.”
“Have you taken a test?”
She shakes her head. “I keep meaning to buy one, but I can’t seem to make myself go into a drugstore.” She rolls one of the silver rings between her fingers. “I chickened out at CVS and Duane Reade and even a Rite Aid in Manhattan.” She looks toward the window. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Does James know?”
She takes a long breath, a deep breath, one that comes out like a sigh. “No,” she says.
I stand up from my chair, my bare feet flat on the smooth wood floor. Her worrying about being fat makes more sense now, and so do the tears after her nausea at the fountain. The barely drunk beer. I marvel at my own stupidity for not figuring it out before now.
I walk over to the counter, where James keeps a bottle of whiskey from which I’ve never seen him drink, and I pour a shot’s worth in one of the tiny jam-jar juice glasses. I’m not sure what I’m doing, what kind of show I’m putting on here, but it seems like the right thing to do. This whole thing already feels like a memory, going fuzzy around the edges like a Polaroid developing in reverse. I think of my mother twenty years ago, taking a pregnancy test. I wonder where she was.
The whiskey tastes terrible, like wet stinging fire, but I swallow it. I set my glass down on the counter harder than I mean to, and I see Luna’s shoulders jump a little. If someone else were here, she might ask why I’m torturing my sister, and I would say, I’m not trying to. I just don’t know what to do.
This is when Luna starts to cry. I can see her eyes just fill up, and tears slide down her cheeks. But I can’t say anything else. I can’t make myself go over there and hug her.
Instead, I walk to the door and slide my feet into my gold sandals. Luna’s purse slouches on the floor between her shoes and a pair of James’s sneakers. I wait for a moment, my hand resting on the door frame. I try to hear Luna breathing, but I can’t.
“I’ll go,” I say. “But I’m taking your wallet.”
I stand there for a second and she doesn’t say anything. Then I step into the hallway and just as I’m closing the door—
“Fee,” she says. “I need a little time. Maybe . . . take the long way home?”
I take a breath, and my hand hovers over the doorknob for a moment. Then I say, “Okay,” but I’m closing the door, and I don’t know if she hears me at all.
Outside, I sit down on the steps of the apartment next door. It’s six o’clock and there are church bells ringing somewhere, their sound metallic and echoing in the day’s leftover heat. I don’t know what to do with myself besides go to the drugstore, and that won’t take more than ten minutes.
I take out my phone and shade the screen with my hand so I can see it. I have a text from my mother, but I don’t read it. And one more: this one from Tessa. It says this:
Have you seen the carousel yet?
I puzzle over the words for a minute. It’s the first thing she’s said to me in two months without my saying something first.
“Carousel,” I say out loud, and then I see it: the dark red cover of Catcher. I pull out the copy in my bag.
“Oo-kay,” I say, for the second time tonight, though I’m saying it this time to Tessa, who is not here, or maybe to the universe, which is sending me somewhere tonight, right when I need somewhere to go.
forty-one
THE EXPRESS 4 TRAIN STOPS where I want it to, and I come up to the street feeling victorious: Phoebe Ferris, Subway Queen. At least I got something right today. I stand on Lexington Ave. for a moment, then figure out which way is west and walk down East Sixty-Eighth Street toward the park. I want to stop somewhere and waste time, but this block is mostly residential, just narrow trees and pretty stone buildings. Air conditioners hum from windows, and when I get to the last few buildings before the park, I stop for a minute under a building’s green awning that stretches all the way across the sidewalk, and look at my phone. There’s Tessa’s text, still, and my mother’s, which I see now just says What’s new today? followed by a smiley face. What’s new? I imagine typing. Oh, nothing, except your older daughter is subconsciously trying to be you in pretty much every way possible and I’m just here to clean up the mess. I slip the phone back in my bag and keep walking.
When I enter the park, three runners pass from behind me, one with a stroller and two with little dogs moving so fast their legs are blurred. Then a cyclist flies by on my right, shining with spandex. I’m in the wake of a wave of fitness here, but I’m walking slowly, taking it all in. The park is so green it’s like some setting has been adjusted on a television screen. Yellow cabs pass on the road to my left, one afte
r another, taking a shortcut through the park, I guess. The road curves and winds gently, and it leads me right to the carousel.
When I thought of the carousel I pictured it out in the air, open to the elements, but instead it’s enclosed in a many-sided building made of red-and-tan-striped brick. I already checked, so I know that the carousel runs only until six o’clock today. But it’s six forty-five, and the building is still open.
To the west, softball fields stretch out under the lowering, golden sun. There’s a game at the farthest one, and tiny people in purple uniforms run around its big square. I wouldn’t mind walking over there to sit in the grass and watch the game for while. It would be nice to pretend that I’m not on a mission, that I don’t have somewhere to be.
Instead, I turn back to the carousel, then lift my phone and take a photo. In the sun I can hardly see my screen, but I know it’s not right. The photo just looks like a brick building with open spaces filled with shadows. You can hardly tell that there’s a carousel inside. I know this isn’t what Tessa has been picturing, and it certainly isn’t what Holden and Phoebe saw in Catcher.
We read the book with Ms. Stanton last year and some of the girls didn’t really get it. Even Willa: every day when we’d start to talk about it, she’d raise her hand and say, “Big surprise: Holden’s pissed about something again.” Tessa loved the book, so she’d spend half the class defending Holden for being crabby. “His little brother died,” she’d say. In one way, though, Willa was right. The whole book is one long series of complaints: the people he thinks are phonies, the kids his age who aren’t as smart as he wants them to be. He drops in the stuff about his little brother dying of leukemia so gently that if you were skimming the book, you might not even notice it, but that’s where his anger comes from. And that’s what I liked best about the book—not that his brother died, but the way Holden would keep circling around to it as he told us about wandering around the city. He didn’t make a big deal about it, but it kept coming up, over and over. You could tell it was the thing that broke his heart and kept breaking it.
That’s what I wrote in my essay, anyway, the same essay for which Tessa wrote about the symbolism of the carousel. I argued that Salinger is using Holden to show that we all have something—one thing, usually—that weighs on us. One thing that keeps cracking us open no matter how we try to glue ourselves back together.
The last time the four members of my family were in a room at the same time was when Luna turned fifteen. It was December, and my father was in Buffalo for a visit. Three days. He was supposed to leave early on the morning of Luna’s birthday—he had a show somewhere—but a snowstorm hit in the middle of the night and all the flights were canceled. I remember waking up to find the whole world wrapped in white, and more snow falling from the sky like powdered sugar, half an inch per hour. When I looked out my window I could see that the lights in our garage apartment were on, and I knew my father was still there.
Pilar and Tessa both walked over from their houses at lunchtime—Tessa wore her mother’s ancient snowshoes, even though it wasn’t really necessary because the plows had come through, and she only had to cross the street. She just liked how they looked. Pilar showed up with her hair glittering, encrusted with snow, even though she had been wearing a hat. She had to wrap it in a towel.
Luna stood in the kitchen, her shoulders angled toward the garage and our father.
“What do we do about Dad?” she asked.
My mother was digging through the junk drawer looking for birthday candles, and she didn’t look up.
“Go tell him to come over,” she said.
He did. He ate enchiladas in our dining room and sang “Happy Birthday” with the rest of us while Luna sat in the glow of fifteen tiny candles, an unconvincing half smile frozen on her face. Now that I think about it, that’s the only time I can remember hearing my parents sing together outside of their records.
My parents talked a little, but I don’t remember what they said. He helped her shovel the driveway for an hour after lunch, wearing his not-warm-enough canvas jacket and one of my old wool hats. We were supposed to be watching a movie—Sixteen Candles, even though Luna was fifteen—but Luna and I were mostly watching our parents out in the snow. They talked the whole time, but I couldn’t figure out what they were saying. I wished, not for the last time, that I could read lips. My father smiled a lot, which was pretty normal, as far as I knew, and my mother smiled from time to time. They looked like two people who had known each other for a long time. Which they were. Two people who, after all of this, didn’t exactly hate each other.
But then he got the call that his flight had been rescheduled for six o’clock, and an hour later, Luna and I were standing on the porch in our boots, waving to him as the taxi pulled away. I remember being happy about the way the day—the extra day—had gone, but I was only thirteen. After he left, Luna barely talked to my mom or me for three days. Anger came off her like static electricity. Eventually it seemed to fade, and things went back to normal. Nothing changed. He didn’t call any more than he had before that. And then, about a year or so later, he stopped calling at all.
Now, I walk closer and lean against the metal fence in one of the large openings in the carousel building’s walls. Across from me, standing still, is a black horse with a white mane and tail, adorned with a complicated array of blankets and banners, saddle and halter. Its neck is a perfect curve, its head arcing down toward the floor. I snap the picture and there in the shadows I can see it on the screen: this is the horse that Tessa would ride, if she were here and the carousel were running. This is the one she’d choose. And if we got to the carousel too late to ride, like I did today, we could sit on the bench outside it like Holden did, and maybe we could finally talk.
I don’t want to send the photograph alone, but I don’t know what to type. I want to tell her I saw my father. I want to tell her about Luna, and where I have to go next. I want to say Wish you were here or Next time we’ll come together, but nothing seems right.
I sit for a minute on that bench facing the carousel and I watch the clouds float over it as if they have somewhere to be. Then I click my phone on again and type, This is the best I could do, and then, xo. I hit send and the photograph wings away to the satellites, then to Tessa, wherever she is right now. Maybe in her bedroom across from my empty one; maybe on the honeysuckle trellis, making her escape; maybe sitting on the swings at the park down the street. I imagine her hearing her phone chime in her pocket, taking it out to see what I’ve sent. I imagine her missing me, whatever that would look like.
When I leave the park I walk from Fifth Avenue into the East Sixties, heading north in the direction of the 6 train. Just across from the station entrance I see a small bookstore with a narrow, glass-paned wooden door. USED AND RARE BOOKS, it says on a wide sign over the doorway. I stand on the sidewalk for a minute, reading the sign, and then I go in.
It’s cooler inside the store but still a little stuffy, as if the air-conditioning isn’t working well enough. It’s darker in there, lit by incandescent lights in glass globes, and I have to wait for my eyes to adjust.
“Hello,” says a voice from the back. I look up and see the silhouette of a woman on the second level, a few steps up from the floor. “What can I help you find?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. I reach out and touch a row of leather-bound dictionaries. “Poetry, I think.”
“That’s up here,” she says. I can see now that she’s in her fifties, probably, pretty, with long red-brown hair pulled back into a knot. She has an armful of books and she sets them down on a table as I climb the stairs. She motions to a bookshelf on the other side of the landing, and then walks over to meet me there.
“Anyone in particular?”
I scan the shelves, but there are so many names—Frost, Dickinson, Glück, O’Hara—I don’t know where to start. “I don’t know that much about poetry,” I say. “Just what I’ve read in English class. I like it, though.” I�
�m hoping this does not sound totally lame.
She nods, a small smile on her lips. “You need a place to start,” she says. She pulls a book from the shelf. “How about this?”
It’s a navy blue book with sharp silver lettering: American Women Poets, it says, and then in smaller letters: Twentieth Century.
I like the way the book feels in my hands, and I like that it’s full of poems I haven’t read yet. The pages are a little yellowed, but there’s no writing inside.
“Okay,” I say. I follow the woman to the cash register. I pay her with a twenty and she gives me back a ten and some change.
When I sling my bag over my shoulder, I can feel the good weight of my new book inside.
After that, I ride down to Astor Place and then get out and walk toward Washington Square. I don’t know where I’m going—retracing my steps from the other night?—but on a street where the buildings are hung with NYU flags, I see a bunch of girls walking together. They must be summer students or something, because they have backpacks. I don’t know what makes me notice them. Maybe it’s the way they’re walking, leaning toward each other and laughing, that reminds me of my friends. The friends I don’t really have anymore. Without thinking, I follow them, a little aimlessly, and when they go into a coffeehouse half a block away, I go in too.
I’m a whole state away from Queen City Coffee, but the sounds inside this place are exactly the same: clinking dishes, a low hum of conversation, the whirr of milk steaming. Orders being called out from the counter. I don’t really drink coffee—I see way too many coffee junkies when I work to want to get involved—but I love the smell of it, and the scent of this place lowers my blood pressure almost immediately. The girls ahead of me order a bunch of iced coffee drinks, and then it’s my turn. The cashier has short blond hair and a tiny silver stud in her nose. She smiles.
“What can I get for you?”
“Two percent vanilla latte, please,” I say. “Medium.” She nods and puts the order into the register. I hand her one of Luna’s twenties. When she gives me my change I put two dollars in the tip jar.
Girls in the Moon Page 20