Love Over Moon Street

by Saxon Bennett

  “Oh,” Cheryl said, silently thankful that her major wardrobe consisted of gender neutral scrubs. She looked at their happy faces still flushed with exertion. She hated to ruin the moment, but if she didn’t broach the subject soon it would eat her up inside and, according to Lexus, give her an ulcer, which from a medical perspective was possible. Besides something had to be done to remedy the situation. She still couldn’t believe that in the twenty-first century with all its technology it was even possible that it had occurred.

  She jumped in. “We have to have a family discussion.” She steepled her fingers and tried to look calm. She’d sat in the leather chair nearest the window so she could look across the room at them, rather than sit alongside them. She’d learned this tactic from Lexus and her life-coaching seminars. Positioning while speaking was a serious consideration.

  “I’ll make us some green tea,” Lexus said. “Do you want cookies? I’ve got some oatmeal raisin that I picked up at the co-op.”

  “Can’t we just talk?” Cheryl said, not wanting to be distracted a moment longer from her purpose.

  “This is our first family discussion. I want to make it special,” Lexus said.

  Pen looked grave. “Am I in trouble?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Let’s wait until we have tea and cookies,” Cheryl said. “Then we’ll talk.” Now she wanted to put off the discussion.

  “Great, I’ll be right back,” Lexus said, flying off to the kitchen.

  Cheryl went to sit by Pen on the couch. “It’s about me, isn’t it?” Pen said. She stared miserably at her hands.

  Cheryl took a deep breath. “Well, yes and no. It’s sort of everyone’s fault, but it’s something we can fix.”

  “Am I going to be grounded? I’ve never been grounded, so I don’t know the rules.”

  “No, you’re not going to be grounded.”

  “But if I do get grounded, you’ll tell me how it works, right?”

  “Yes. When you ground someone you have to tell them what their grounded from,” Cheryl said, feeling a little overwhelmed by the whole situation.

  Lexus came in with the tea and cookies on a tray. “I’m so excited—our first family discussion.” She took in their glum expressions. “Am I missing something?”

  “I think I’m going to be grounded,” Pen said.

  “You’re not going to be grounded,” Cheryl said.

  “So this is about Pen?” Lexus said, pouring the tea. “Is everything all right?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Cheryl said.

  “How not exactly?” Lexus narrowed her eyes. She set the teapot down. The teacups stayed where they were.

  No one said anything. Cheryl was botching it.

  Lexus took control. “Let’s play how bad can it be? Are any of us terminally ill?”

  They shook their heads.

  “There’s a nuclear bomb? They’re rounding up gay people and putting them in camps? A toilet paper shortage? Pen got adopted and she’s leaving us?”

  The last one stopped them.

  “No,” Cheryl said.

  “Okay, then it can’t be that bad. So what is it?” Lexus said.

  “Pen hasn’t been going to school,” Cheryl said. She glanced over at Pen, who stared intently at her lap.

  “I used to skip school sometimes,” Lexus said. “Are the kids being mean to you or something? I’ve seen you do schoolwork. Are you test-phobic? Because we can work on that. I know techniques.”

  “She’s not even registered at Lowell Elementary,” Cheryl said. “I called the school to get her records so that we’d have it all ready for the social worker and they have no record of her. Then I called the District Office and they have no record of her either.”

  Pen still wasn’t looking at them.

  “What?” Lexus said. She looked over at Pen. “Where, what, how?” Lexus spluttered.

  “Pen, what’s been going on?” Cheryl asked. When she’d first discovered the problem, she’d suffered her usual “I’m not cut out for this” crisis—the one where the full gravity of taking in a ten-year-old child who was homeless hit her full in the face. Then something unusual happened. She stopped freaking out. It was a problem. It could be fixed. Pen was a good kid and there was obviously a reason she was not in school. She would go home and talk to her. Now it was Lexus freaking out.

  “You haven’t been going to school. Where have you been? Why are you doing this? Don’t you want an education? Don’t you realize how important being educated is to your future? This is horrendous,” Lexus said, standing up and flapping her arms around.

  Cheryl stood up. “Lexus, go in the other room.”

  “What!”

  “Right now.”

  “This is a family discussion,” Lexus said.

  “Your histrionics are impeding the process and you’re scaring Pen.”

  Pen did look frightened. She’d drawn her knees up to her chest and her eyes were wide. She looked on the verge of tears.

  “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” Lexus said, pulling Pen into her arms. “I just got alarmed by the situation.”

  “Okay, now let’s start from the beginning,” Cheryl said. “Have some tea,” she handed Lexus and then Pen a cup. She sipped her own. They sat holding theirs. “Drink, it’ll make you feel better.” She offered the cookie plate. They each took one and automatically ate.

  “These are good,” Cheryl said. She appeared to be the only one not shell-shocked from the event.

  No one said anything.

  “Now, Pen, when you’re ready you can tell us what’s going on. Lexus promises to remain calm,” Cheryl said, looking pointedly at Lexus.

  “I promise,” Lexus said.

  Pen finished her cookie, set her cup down and inhaled deeply. “I went to school when we lived in California.” She amended her statement. “Most of the time. We moved around a lot, so I had to reregister a lot.”

  The picture started to make sense to Cheryl. Pen had been in and out of school. There would be problems with paperwork. People had to have a physical street address and Martha Sue didn’t always have one and she wouldn’t want Social Services to necessarily know that. She glanced over at Lexus. She could see the nickels were dropping for her too.

  “So what happened when you got here?” Cheryl said.

  “We came too late for me to start again. It was almost summer and we didn’t have a place. Martha Sue got a job as a maid at a hotel, but she got fired. We lost the apartment. That was last fall. She tried to find another place, but she got real bad and we lived in the shelter. I haven’t been to school since and when I came here it was almost over again.”

  “But I’ve seen you doing stuff that I thought was your homework,” Lexus said. “What were you doing?”

  “My friend Elisabeth gets me books at the library. It’s the ACT manual. I study it so I won’t be put in the dummy class when I go back.”

  “Who’s Elisabeth?” Cheryl asked.

  “She’s one of the library people,” Pen said.

  “Didn’t she know you weren’t going to school? She’s a librarian,” Lexus said.

  Cheryl didn’t point out that Lexus was also a librarian and didn’t know about Pen’s truancy.

  “Have you been going to the library when we thought you were going to school?” Cheryl said.

  “Yes,” Pen said.

  “Which one? The Capitol Hill branch?” Lexus asked.

  “No, it’s too small and they’d notice us,” Pen said. “We all go to the Central Library. It’s big and real nice.”

  Lexus beamed. “I know, right. I love that place. Rem Koolhaas did a great job.”

  “He was a real smart guy,” Pen said.

  “Who’s that?” Cheryl said.

  “The Dutch architect who designed the library. Well, at least you have good taste in libraries,” Lexus said.

  “Didn’t your librarian friend find it odd you weren’t in school?” Cheryl said.

  “Elisabeth isn’t a librarian. Sh
e’s one of the library people.”

  Lexus got a queer look on her face. “‘Library people’ as in people who meet every day at the library and spend all day there until closing time?”

  “Yes. They know all sorts of things,” Pen said. “We hang out and read and talk about stuff—I mean once you get to know them.”

  “Is Alice B. Toklas one of the library people you know?” Lexus asked.

  Pen’s eyes got wide. “You know Alice?” Pen was delighted.

  “Yes, I do know Alice,” Lexus said.

  “She’s like the head of the group now that OED is gone.”

  “OED?” Cheryl asked.

  “Old Ed Donaldson. They took him away one day. He had one of his fits because they moved his table. My friend Elisabeth said he had a stroke. He never came back. We signed a card for him. He went to Tacoma where his daughter lives.”

  “Alice B. Toklas as in Gertrude Stein?” Cheryl asked.

  “No, we don’t have a Gertrude in the group,” Pen said.

  “So who beside Alice is in the group?” Lexus asked. She was sipping tea now and looked much calmer.

  Cheryl was confused. “Can I ask a quick question?”

  “Sure,” Pen said.

  “What grade are you in?”

  “I went as far as third grade.” Pen bit into a cookie. “Do you know Jane or Charlotte or Giovanni?”

  “No, but I’ve heard of them. You’ve got some big name friends,” Lexus said.

  “What do you mean?” Cheryl asked.

  “Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Giovanni…” Lexus stopped. “Hold on, give me a minute…Boccaccio. Am I right?”

  “Yes. We talked about some of his stories. Not the racy ones.”

  “Racy?” Cheryl said.

  “Giovanni wrote the Decameron,” Lexus said. She bit into another cookie.

  “Are these imaginary friends? I mean those are dead authors’ names, right?” Cheryl said.

  Lexus and Pen looked at her like she was nuts. “Well, duh.” Lexus said.

  “They’re real people,” Pen said.

  “I don’t understand, so let’s go over the whole thing again—start to finish,” Cheryl said.

  They nodded.

  “You have only gone to school up to the third grade in California. You haven’t ever gone to school here. You’re supposed to be in what…fifth grade next year? And you hang out in the Central Library with people who are named after famous authors and you study the ACT book so you won’t have to take remedial classes when you do get back in school. Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Pen said.

  Cheryl had put her head in her hands and whimpered.

  “What’s wrong?” Lexus said, rubbing her back.

  “Are the library people like crazy homeless people who carry bags of newspapers around and mutter to themselves and don’t take baths?” Cheryl asked, looking over at Pen.

  “They have homes, I think,” Pen said. “They bring their lunch.”

  “It’s not like that,” Lexus said. “The library people are odd and they don’t have the best social skills, but this group is like famous. Each person picks an author and studies every facet of their work and lives, right down to taking the writer’s name. They become them. Like the book people in Fahrenheit 451.”

  “We have a Ray too. He only comes on Tuesday because that’s the day his wife has Pilates,” Pen said.

  Cheryl groaned.

  “What do you mean? This rocks. Pen has been hanging out with some cool people. She could have been smoking crack in the park all this time for all we knew,” Lexus said.

  Cheryl stuck her head between her legs.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Pen asked.

  “I think she’s having a panic attack. Just breathe, honey,” Lexus said.

  Cheryl muttered something.

  “What? I can’t hear you,” Lexus said.

  Cheryl popped up and said, “That’s just it.”

  “That’s just what?” Lexus asked.

  “That’s just it. What kind of parents are we if we didn’t know she wasn’t going to school and was hanging out at the library with people that we don’t even know? How responsible does that make us? We’re failures,” Cheryl said. Her head swirled with all the possible liabilities of being a bad parent. She stuck her head back between her legs.

  “I don’t think you should’ve said that thing about the crack,” Pen told Lexus.

  “Perhaps that was a poor choice,” Lexus said.

  Pen rubbed Cheryl’s back. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t know if I was staying and then school ends in two weeks anyway. I’ve just been going to the library every day for so long that it didn’t feel strange to keep doing it. I should’ve told you, but the library people are my friends and I would miss them.”

  “See, it’s not all bad. Pen had a good reason. So here’s what we do, we get the test for fourth grade and have her take it. Whatever subject she’s lacking in we get a tutor over the summer and get her up to standard and register her next year in the fifth grade. See, it’s easy,” Lexus said.

  Cheryl popped her head up. “What about the CWA? What if they found out that she wasn’t going to school?”

  “They won’t,” Pen said.

  “How can you be so certain?” Cheryl said.

  “I got lost in their system.”

  “Oh,” Lexus replied. “Then it’s not a problem. Let’s hire a tutor right now.”

  “How about Mrs. Kirk at Shady Meadows? She was a teacher and she’s really smart,” Pen said. “She always says she’d like to do more.”

  Lexus cocked her head, seeming to consider. “And Mr. Elkins was a math teacher. I bet there’s quite a few people at Shady Meadows that could help us. Do you still have the ACT manual with you?”

  Cheryl was sitting upright. Her head had stopped swimming in the pool of mea culpa. Lexus could fix this. They could fix this.

  Pen dug around in her omnipresent backpack. “It’s not due back for another week.”

  “Do you have a library card?” Lexus asked, pouring them all more green tea.

  “No. I need a parent to provide an address and sign it.”

  “Oh, well, we’ll fix that too,” Lexus said. “And I can’t wait to meet your friends.”

  “You want to meet them?” Pen was delighted.

  “Sure,” Lexus said. “Now hand over that manual.”

  Cheryl leaned back on the couch. She felt better already. They’d survived their first family crisis and they’d pulled together. She felt like she’d passed her own test. She knew she still had a lot to learn but withstanding “worst-case scenarios” was the deepest of parental pitfalls and as a family they’d just climbed out of a big one. There was just one more thing. “Pen?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking up from the manual where she was showing Lexus her progress.

  “You have to promise not to hide things no matter what. You have to tell us and we can work on it together as a family,” Cheryl said.

  “I promise,” Pen said.

  “Pinky swear,” Lexus said, hooking out her pinky finger. Pen seemed to know what that was. Cheryl had never seen it before.

  “You don’t know what a pinky swear is?” Lexus was incredulous.

  “No, we didn’t do pinky swears where I come from,” Cheryl said.

  Lexus said in a loud whisper, “She’s really an alien so we’ll just have to humor her.”

  “I heard that,” Cheryl said.

  “Pen, show her how it’s done.”

  And Cheryl learned yet another thing this day.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Post-Coital Discussions

  Lexus ran her tongue around Cheryl’s nipple. Cheryl touched her cheek. “You are a wonderful lover,” Cheryl said.

  “You’re only saying that because I made you use the Lord’s name in rapture,” Lexus said, crawling up next to her.

  “I do seem to discover religion when I come.”


  “I didn’t want us to suffer from LBD because we’re parents now,” Lexus said.

  “What’s that?”

  Lexus snickered. “Lesbian Bed Death, silly. You really don’t make a very good lesbian.”

  “I do too.”

  “How many lesbian thoughts have you had lately?” Lexus said.

  “I had a lot today. I was thinking about your lovely breasts just now.”

  “That doesn’t count. We were being very lesbian, so of course you were having lesbian thoughts.”

  “I could have been thinking about cleaning the oven or getting my car serviced.”

  “Were you?” Lexus sat up.

  Cheryl pulled her back down.

  “Of course not. I was thinking about anatomy,” Cheryl said, running her hand down Lexus’s thigh.

  Lexus smiled. “Well…you do know your anatomy.”

  “I am a doctor.”

  “I wonder—would you like sex if you were a gynecologist? I mean, staring at vaginas all day could remove the allure of sex.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never asked one. Why were you worried about LDB?” Cheryl said.

  “It’s not a lesbian death bed. It’s lesbian bed death.”

  “Whatever. Why were you worried about it?” Cheryl was trying to shake images of lesbians on their deathbeds out of her head.

  “Because it happens to a lot of couples,” Lexus said.

  Cheryl tried to remember the last time they’d had sex. It had been a while. When Pen came, it seemed they’d gotten distracted. She knew they’d had sex one afternoon while Pen was at school or rather the library. They’d taken a nap which had turned into a quickie. Okay, so in the two months Pen had been with them they’d made love twice now. She sat up in bed. “We’re having sex less than most people check out a book from the Amazon Prime online library.”

  “Will you relax? It’s all right. I’ll fuck you again tomorrow. My Puddin’ is kind of sore right now,” Lexus said.

  Lexus referred to both their genitals as “Puddin’,” which was fine until someone asked if they wanted some pudding and they’d snicker.