Valley of the Moon

by Melanie Gideon

  We lost an entire family not two days later. Just before dawn, they hitched their fastest horse to their buckboard, hid under blankets, and tried to race their way through the fogbank. The baker was the only one awake at that hour. The only one who heard the sound of their wagon crashing into a tree. The horse’s terrified whinny. The cries of the children. And then, silence.

  After that, nobody tried to escape again.

  The third week, the truth of our situation slowly set in. Meals at the dining hall were silent. Appetites low. Food was pushed away after one or two bites. Everybody did their jobs. What else could we do? Work was our religion, but it also produced our sustenance. It gave us purpose. It was the only thing that could save us. The cows were milked. Fields plowed. Everybody thought the same thing but nobody would voice it. Not yet, anyway.

  Help wasn’t coming. We were on our own.

  I sat in the passenger seat holding a squirmy Benno on my lap. He had a ring of orange Hi-C around his mouth. I’d have to scrub it off before he got on the plane; it made him look like a street urchin. He sucked on the ear of his stuffed Snoopy while his sticky hand worked the radio dial.

  He spun past “Bennie and the Jets” and “Kung Fu Fighting.”

  “But you love ‘Kung Fu Fighting,’ ” I said.

  He vehemently shook his head and Rhonda laughed, her Afro bobbing. An X-ray technician at Kaiser, she’d left work early to drive us to the airport and help me see Benno off. We’d been roommates for the past three years, and she was the closest thing I had to family in California. Right now she seemed to be the only person in my life who wasn’t keeping a constant tally of my failures (perennially late everywhere I went, maxed-out credit cards, beans and toast for dinner three times a week, musty towels, and an ant infestation in my closet due to the fact that Benno had left half an uneaten hot dog in there that I didn’t discover for days).

  Benno stopped turning the dial when he heard whistling and drumming, the opening instrumentals for “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero.” He nestled back into my chest. Within a minute, his eyes were welling up as the soldiers were trapped on a hillside. He moaned.

  “Change the station,” said Rhonda.

  “No!” shouted Benno. “The best part’s coming. The sergeant needs a volunteer to ride out.” Tears streamed down his face as he sang along.

  “God help us,” I mouthed to Rhonda.

  “Babe, is this a good cry or a bad cry?” I whispered to Benno.

  “G-good,” he stuttered.

  “Okay.” I wrapped my arms around him and let him do his thing.

  Benno loved to feel sad, as long as it wasn’t a get-a-shot-at-the-doctor kind of sad. He loved, in fact, to feel. Anything. Everything. But this kind of emotion, happy-sad, as he called it, was his favorite flavor. Tonight I would indulge him. We wouldn’t see each other for two weeks.

  Rhonda took one last drag of her cigarette and flicked the butt out the window. She was no stranger to this kind of melodrama. The song ended and Benno turned around, fastened himself to my chest like a monkey, and buried his head in my armpit.

  I stroked his back until he stopped trembling. He looked up at me with a tear-streaked face.

  “Better?” I asked.

  He nodded and ran his finger across the faint blond down on my upper lip. He made a chirping sound. My mustache reminded him of a baby chick, he’d once told me. I told him you should never refer to a lady’s down as a mustache.

  —

  I’d given Benno my mother’s maiden name—Bennett. I loved the clean, bellish sound of it. She’d flown out for his birth; my father had not. At that point he and I had been estranged for more than two years, and my choice to have a son “out of wedlock” was not going to remedy that situation.

  My mother, Miriam, had been campaigning for Benno to come east for a visit for months. I’d said no originally. The thought of shipping Benno across the country to my hometown of Newport, Rhode Island, land of whale belts, Vanderbilt mansions, and men in pink Bermuda shorts, was unthinkable.

  “Please,” she said. “He needs to know where he comes from.”

  “He comes from San Francisco.”

  “He barely knows me.”

  “You visit three times a year.”

  “That’s not nearly enough.”

  She upped the ante. She promised to pay for everything. The airfare, the escort who would accompany him on the plane. Finally I relented.

  —

  I’d met Nelson King, Benno’s father, in a bar a week before he shipped out to Vietnam.

  “You’re not from here” was the first thing he said to me.

  I’d been in San Francisco a little over a year at that point and thought I was doing a pretty good job of passing as a native. I’d worked hard to shed my New England accent. I’d traded in my preppy clothes for Haight-Ashbury garb. The night we met, I was wearing a midriff-baring crocheted halter top with white bell-bottom pants.

  “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “You hold yourself differently than everybody else.”

  “What do you mean? Hold myself how?”

  He shrugged. “Stiffer. More erect.”

  I puffed out my cheeks in irritation. He was an undeniably good-looking man. Pillowy raspberry lips. Luminous topaz skin. He could be anything. Persian. Egyptian. Spanish. Later I’d learn his mother was black, his father Puerto Rican.

  “That wasn’t an insult,” he said. “That was a compliment. You hold yourself like somebody who knows their worth.”

  I was nineteen, in between waitressing jobs, and desperately searching for an identity. That he saw this glimmer of pride in me was a tiny miracle. We spent every day together until he shipped out. It wasn’t love, but it might have blossomed into that if we’d had more time together.

  After he’d left, I’d written him a few letters. He’d written back to me as well, echoing my light tone, but then we’d trailed off. Three months later, when I’d found out I was pregnant, I’d written to him again, but didn’t get a reply. Soon after, I discovered his name on a fatal casualty list in the San Francisco Examiner.

  Although his death was tragic and shocking, the cavalier nature of our relationship and that it had resulted in an unexpected pregnancy was just as jarring. We’d essentially had a fling, a last hurrah that had allowed for a sort of supercharged intimacy between us. A quick stripping down of emotions that I imagined was not unlike the relationship he might have had with his fellow soldiers. The details of our lives didn’t matter and so we’d exchanged very little of them. We’d just let the moment carry us—to bars, to restaurants, and to bed.

  In an instant, the dozens of possible futures I’d entertained for myself receded and the one future I’d never considered rolled in.

  I was pregnant, unmarried, and alone.

  —

  “What do I call the man?” asked Benno as Rhonda pulled into the airport parking garage.

  “What man?”

  “The man who lives with Grandma.”

  “The man who lives with Grandma will be away when you visit,” I said.

  The man who lived with Grandma, a.k.a. my father, George Lysander, would be spending the last two weeks of August at his cabin in New Hampshire, as he’d done for the last forty-something years. My mother had timed Benno’s visit accordingly.

  “I met him before,” said Benno.

  “You were only two, Benno. Do you really remember meeting him?”

  “I remember,” he insisted.

  My father had been in San Francisco for the Association of Independent Schools’ annual conference (he was dean of admissions at St. Paul’s School in Newport). He’d arranged to stop by our apartment for dinner: it would be the first time he’d met his grandson.

  “For you,” he’d said to Benno, handing him a loaf of sourdough bread.

  Benno peeked out from behind me, his thumb in his mouth.

  “Say thank you to your grandfather,” I prompted him.

  �
��He doesn’t have to thank me,” said my father.

  “Yuck crunchy bread,” said Benno.

  I watched my father taking Benno in. His tea-colored skin. His glittering, light brown eyes.

  “I don’t like it either,” my father said. “How about we have your mother cut off the crusts?”

  Benno nodded.

  “We can make bread balls.”

  It was an offering to me. Bread balls were something my father and I did together when I was a little girl. Plucked the white part of the bread out of the loaf and rolled tiny little balls that we dipped in butter and salt and then popped into our mouths. It drove my mother crazy.

  That was all it took. Benno adored my father. He climbed into his lap after dinner and made him read The Snowy Day three times. I washed the dishes and fought back tears of relief and resentment. Why had it taken him so long to come around?

  But he hadn’t—not really. When Benno was standing in front of him in the same room, he came around. But when he was three thousand miles away from us, back home in Newport, the distance grew again. His contact with Benno dwindled to a once-a-year birthday card. The incongruity between our realities, the life I’d chosen and the life he’d wanted for me, was too great to reconcile.

  “What if he’s there?” asked Benno.

  “He won’t be.”

  “But what if he is? What do I call him?”

  “Then you call him Grandpa,” I said. “Or Grandfather. Or Mr. Lysander. Or George. Christ, Benno, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him what he wants to be called, but I don’t think it’ll be an issue. You won’t see him.”

  My father had never missed his precious two weeks at the lake. He would not be missing them now.

  —

  I hated airports. They were liminal space. You floated around in them untethered between arrivals and departures. A certain slackness always descended upon me as soon as I walked through the airport doors.

  “Are you scared?” I asked Benno.

  “There’s nothing to be scared of, kid,” said Rhonda. “You’re going on an adventure.”

  “I’m not scared,” he said.

  “Look, babe. The days will be easy. It’s the nighttime that might be hard. That’s when you’ll probably feel homesick. But just make sure you—”

  “Can we go up the escalator?” he interrupted me.

  I stopped and crouched down. “Benno, do you need a hug?”

  He blew a tiny spit bubble. “No, thank you.”

  “Don’t do that, that’s gross.”

  He sucked it in.

  “Well, may I please have a hug?” I asked.

  “I’m busy.”

  “You’re busy? Busy doing what?”

  “Leaving, Mama,” he sighed.

  —

  Abortion wouldn’t be legal in California for another three years, but even if it were, I never would have terminated the pregnancy. Perhaps given different circumstances I’d have chosen differently, but for this baby my choice was life. Of course I didn’t know he’d turn into Benno. My Benno. I just knew he needed to come into the world.

  Everybody thought I was crazy. Not only was there no father in the picture, but the father was black. How much harder could I make it for myself—a single white mother with a mixed-race child?

  He brought me such joy. I never knew I was capable of loving somebody the way I loved him. Purely, ragged-heartedly. I couldn’t imagine my life without him in it.

  But my life with him in it was also ridiculously hard. I was a parent twenty-four hours a day. Every tantrum, every cry of hunger, every question was mine to soothe, to feed, and to answer. I had no spouse to hand him off to. No partner to help pay the bills. I could never just walk away. I was the sole person in charge of resolving every issue in my child’s life, from how to deal with bullies, to Is that rash serious? to He’s three years old and still not using a spoon properly—what’s wrong with him?

  I wasn’t stupid. I’d known that raising a child on my own would be challenging. It was the isolation that blindsided me. The intractable, relentless truth was that I was alone. I could meet other mothers on the playground. We could talk bottle-feeding and solid foods, how to get rid of cradle cap, the best remedy for diaper rash. We could laugh, commiserate, watch each other’s babies while somebody ran to the bathroom. But at the end of the day, they went home to their husbands and I went home to an apartment that was dark until I turned on the lights.

  —

  When we got to the gate, I was panicked but doing my best to hide it. I’d never been separated from Benno for more than a night.

  “You must be Benno,” said the stewardess when we checked in. “We’ve been waiting for you!” She picked up the phone, punched three numbers, and spoke softly into it. “Jill, Benno Lysander is here.” She hung up. “You are going to adore Jill. She’s a retired stewardess. She’s got all sorts of activities planned for you, young man. Crossword puzzles. Hangman. Coloring books. A trip to the cockpit to meet the captain, and if you’re very good, maybe you’ll get a pair of captain’s wings.”

  Benno’s eyes gleamed. I was on the verge of tears.

  “Stop it,” Rhonda whispered. “He’s happy. Don’t screw this up.” She pulled her camera out of her pocketbook. “Let’s get a Polaroid of the two of you before you go.”

  Five minutes later Benno was gone.

  We walked out of the airport silently. Rhonda waved the Polaroid back and forth, drying it. When we got to the car, she handed me the photo.

  I’d forgotten to wash Benno’s face. His mouth was still rimmed with orange.

  —

  Later, back at our apartment, Rhonda poured me a shot of Jack. Then she looked at my face and poured me a double. “It’s only two weeks,” she said.

  I pounded the whiskey in one swallow. “What was I thinking? He’s a baby.”

  “He’s an old soul. He’s a forty-year-old in a five-year-old body. He’ll be fine. Give me that glass.”

  I slid it across the table and she poured herself a splash.

  “I forbid you to go in his room and sniff his clothes,” she said.

  “I would never do that,” I said.

  “Hmm.” She took a dainty sip of the whiskey.

  Elegant was the word that best described Rhonda Washington. Long-necked, long-legged. An Oakland native, Rhonda had five siblings. All of them had R names: Rhonda, Rita, Raelee, Richie, Russell, and Rodney. Rhonda’s mother said it was easier that way. All she had to do was stick her head out the window and yell “Ruh” and all the kids would come running.

  “Now, what’s your plan? You aren’t just going to sit around the house moping,” she said.

  “I’ve got this week off, then I’m working double shifts all next week.” I waitressed at Seven Hills, an Irish pub in North Beach.

  “So what are you going to do this week?”

  “I’m going camping.”

  “Camping?” said Rhonda. “Like, car camping? With a bathroom and showers?”

  “No, middle-of-nowhere camping, with a flashlight and beef jerky.”

  I’d given a lot of thought as to how I was going to spend my first week of freedom in five years. I let myself fantasize. What if I could do whatever I wanted, no matter the cost? Where would I go? How about Paris? No, too snooty. Australia, then; Aussies were supposed to be friendly. Oh, but I’d always dreamed of seeing the Great Wall. And what about the Greek islands? Stonehenge? The Taj Mahal? Pompeii? I pored through old National Geographics—I rarely let myself dream anymore. My list quickly grew to over fifty places.

  In the end I decided on camping right near home. Yes, it was all I could afford, but I wasn’t settling; before I’d had Benno it had been my escape of choice. I’d been to Yosemite, Big Sur, and Carmel. Closer to home, I’d camped on Mount Tam, at Point Reyes, and in the Marin Headlands. If I was depressed, angry, or worried, I headed for the hills. If I didn’t get a regular dose of nature (a walk in Golden Gate Park didn’t count), I wasn’t
right. I needed to get away from the city. Sit by myself under a tree for hours. Fall asleep to the sounds of an owl hooting rather than the heavy footfalls of my upstairs neighbors. I was competent in the wilderness. Nothing frightened me. I wanted to feel that part of myself again.

  Rhonda tossed her head. “Okay, nature girl.”

  “What? I am a nature girl.”

  “Using Herbal Essence does not make you a nature girl, Lux. When’s the last time you went camping?”

  “A few months before Benno was born.”

  “Do you still remember how?”

  “You don’t forget how to sleep in a tent, Rhonda.”

  “This just seems impulsive. Is it safe to go alone?”

  “Yes, Rhonda, it is. I can take care of myself. I know how to do this.” My father was an Eagle Scout. He taught me everything he knew.

  “Fine. Why don’t we make a list of what you’ll need.”

  “I already have a list.”

  I knew what Rhonda was thinking. Here goes Lux again, just throwing things together and hoping for the best. That was how I lived my daily life, from hour to hour, paycheck to paycheck. This was the only Lux she knew. I wanted to show her another side of me.

  “I’ve been planning this for months, you know,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Well—good,” she said. “Good for you.”

  I walked around the table and threw my arms around her. “Admit it. You love me.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. You love me. Silly, flighty me.”

  Rhonda tried to squirm out of my grasp, but she grinned. “Don’t ask me to come rescue you if you get lost.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And don’t take my peanut butter. Buy your own.”

  “Okay.”

  I’d already packed her peanut butter.

  —

  I did go into Benno’s room at midnight. I did lie down on his bed and bury my face in his pillow and inhale his sweet boy scent. I fell asleep in five minutes.

  —

  Rose Bennedeti and Doro Balakian were my landlords, the owners of 428 Elizabeth Street, a shabby (“in need of some attention but a grand old lady,” said the ad I’d answered in the classifieds) four-unit Victorian in Noe Valley. A lesbian couple in their seventies, they occupied the top-floor flat. We lived on the second floor, the Patel family (Raj, Sunite, and their daughter, Anjuli) lived on the first, and Tommy Catsos, a middle-aged bookstore clerk, lived in the basement.