Jesus had very fickle fans, I wrote in the margin.
I giggled until I got the hiccups. After a fifth read through of the paragraph that proved no more illuminating than the first, I threw the paper to the floor, crawled down under my comforter, and decided to sleep until New Year’s.
I woke from NyQuil-sodden dreams to find my mother sitting at my bedside, her Chantilly perfume and vanilla lotion thick in the trapped bedroom air.
“Honey,” she said, cupping my face as she would a child’s. “You look dreadful.”
“I’b sick.”
“I know. That nice groundskeeper told me you were in bad shape.”
“The groundskeeper?”
“That young man with the ponytail out shoveling the driveway. He let me in.”
I squinted up at her, forcing my eyes to focus.
“He’s not a groundskeeper, Mob. That’s Zoë’s friend I was telling you about.”
“That’s Eli?” Her face went through a variety of contortions as she reformulated her previous impression of Eli. “Amy, you can’t possibly be serious about him.”
“I don’t even know him.” Rousing from my drugged stupor, I frowned. “Why are you here?”
“I had a Luna Landing in Columbus and was planning to do some Christmas shopping, so I thought, well, why not just come and pick you up to join me.” She went to the window, opened the blinds. “And it’s a good thing I did. You’re in absolutely no condition to drive home.”
I rolled over to avoid the sun. “I can dribe, Mob. I hab a cold. I’b dot paralyzed.”
“I’ll not have you driving under the influence.” She lifted the half-empty bottle of NyQuil as proof. “You can’t handle medications. Never could—your system is too sensitive.”
She went to the bathroom to throw the bottle out. Her voice carried from the hall. “Whenever I had to give you those little blue pills for your ear infections, I’d find you sleepwalking in the basement searching for your Cabbage Patch dolls in the pantry. And then there was the time with the wisdom teeth.”
She returned to the bedroom, her silver, sparkling Luna Lady makeup bag in hand. The front was emblazoned with the Luna emblem: black contours that suggested the figure of a woman holding a sphere in the crook of her robed elbow.
“What was that vile drug the dentist made you take? Viacon? You lay on the floor in the bathroom laughing so hard you couldn’t breathe. I thought you were having a mental breakdown. Here. I brought you something for your Rosacea.”
“I hab decided I hate by life,” I announced.
“Hate is such a strong word. How about some soup?”
I examined my mother’s Luna uniform: a pants suit with thick-set heels dyed a matching periwinkle. I still wasn’t sure if it was morning or afternoon. My mother’s schedule had been anything but routine since she’d become a salesperson.
As a Luna representative, it had been my mother’s duty to travel the tri-state with her toolbox of colors, painting women in wrinkle-reducing, sunray-blocking cosmetics while peddling Luna Lady philosophy:
A Luna Lady never forgets she is a celestial body.
A Luna Lady is like the moon, beautiful but inconspicuous, a reflection of the natural beauty shining around her.
A Luna Lady lives in rhythm with that heavenly body’s monthly cycle.
It was feminine mystique with boysenberry lip gloss at fifteen bucks a pop, hardly the material for a First Fundamentalist. My mother enclosed a tea-stained scrap of paper quoting Proverbs 30:31 in each complimentary blush compact to redeem all business transactions of any of That New Ageism. I assured her I didn’t think her morals compromised; all that mattered to me was that she had finally found work she loved.
She made herself busy in the kitchen while I showered. Washing with Luna Bubble Grit was like using sand for soap. I came out of the shower scratchy and red.
“I feel sunburned.” I accepted the bowl of soup she’d heated.
Zoë was at the table already halfway through the bowl my mother had heated for her. “You look sunburned,” she confirmed.
“That’s how it’s supposed to work,” Mom said. “The exfoliating bubbles create microscopic abrasions on the skin that scrape off all the dead cells. When you wake up in the morning, you wake up to a whole new you!”
We argued about my holiday plans. She insisted I come home with her. I argued I could drive myself. As I threw up the tomato soup and crackers five minutes later, my argument did not prove convincing.
I lay in bed while she packed my suitcase. This consisted of her holding up blouses and pants from my closet to which I was to nod yes or no, an arrangement reminiscent of childhood when she helped me pick out my clothes for elementary school every morning while I lingered in bed as long as physically possible.
“How about this black jacket?” Mom asked.
“Old.”
“You have some nice sweaters.”
“Not from the top row. Those are going to Goodwill.”
She raked through the hangers. “You should wear that little pink blouse I bought you last year. The one with the little white buttons. ”
“Absolutely no blouses.”
“This?”
“No.”
“This?”
“Okay, that.”
Zoë sat at my desk chair watching our little operation. I eyed her suspiciously. I sometimes feared she was taking notes.
Growing up, Zoë had lived in NewYork City, D.C., and Chicago, where she graduated from high school. Her personal geographic bearings were far encompassing, the borders of Ohio proportionally insignificant. As if Zoë’s wanderlust hadn’t been enough, we now had Eli, who’d spent six weeks backpacking through Europe and an entire semester studying art history in Italy. I felt positively provincial sandwiched between this tête-à-tête of expatriates. Both my brother and I lived within an hour’s drive from home and were always visiting. I’d naively believed that if I were geographically close to my family we’d stay emotionally close. Our mutually single lifestyles had kept that illusion alive temporarily. Now Mom had Mr. Moore and her new career as a Luna Lady, Brian had Marie and his textbooks, and I had the feeling I’d missed something.
It wasn’t that I’d never dreamed of travel. I’d indulged fantasies of living a more exciting life in the city by applying to schools in Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago, but they all rejected me. Once settled in Copenhagen, I was resigned, happy with my small-town routine like a cat or a retiree. But now, watching my mother reorganize my underwear drawer while explaining that I wouldn’t get those fuzzy balls on my silk panties if I let them air out instead of putting them in the dryer, I wondered if the closeness of family wasn’t a little suffocating.
“I should warn you,” Mom said, taking the exit that led home.
I blew my nose. “Ward me what?”
“I’ve been doing some reorganizing.”
“In the house?”
“Well, yes. In your room, actually. Sally Linden called last week requesting an order for Luna Lady Bubble Gum Bubble Bath, and when I went over, she actually ordered a whole anti-aging facial set. Then she calls me a week later wanting to know if I’ll do a Luna party. Ten women came—that’s twice as many as usual. I’ve been so busy I don’t even have time to substitute teach anymore.”
“What does that have to do with my room?”
“It’s a mess. I meant to clean it, but I got so busy this week with the wedding. Marie wants to hang bulbs from trees at the reception— so we went to Internet for ideas.”
My mother always spoke of the Internet as though it were a being one should consult with deference and awe.
“I have just the bulbs she needs. The wedding planner wants her to rent them, but what they charge for every little thing is outrageous! So I tell her that I have these bulbs in the attic, and I was going to try to get them, but I can’t get up there without moving everything in your closet.”
“You went into the attic?”
“No
,” she said, offended that I would suggest such a thing. “I wouldn’t go up there. I was waiting for you.”
It had snowed in my hometown the night before. Battery-powered candles lit each window of our house, casting slants of buttery light onto the square bushes, the square patch of lawn. Mom paid a man to manicure our bushes year-round. She took pride in appearances.
The aroma of cinnamon, the striped wallpaper, and the ticking of the kitchen clock were so familiar I felt as if I were a little girl again. The nostalgia was a reflex, a brief but pleasant emotion that took me by surprise every time.
Upstairs, the sentiment quickly vanished. Madame Luna had pitched camp in my bedroom. My bookshelves had been cleared, their contents relegated to cardboard boxes lined up on the floor. A filing station had supplanted my old nightstand, and deliveries bearing the Luna Lady emblem covered my bed. The bulletin board that used to hold pictures from high school and then from college now displayed work orders and invoices.
I was completely taken off guard; in all the years I’d been gone, my mother had never touched my room, except to vacuum the carpets and wash the sheets in preparation for my visits. I’d never asked her to leave my room alone, but I’d grown accustomed to it. For years my bedroom had been a carefully preserved shrine to my childhood and a reminder that my mother’s calendar revolved around my homecomings.
She set my suitcase in the doorway. “You can sleep in Brian’s room tonight if you want—I’ll have this stuff off your bed tomorrow.” Even as she spoke, she began to fuss, picking boxes off the bed and shoving them against the back wall.
“It’s fine, Mob,” I said. “Honest. Clean it later.”
“I’ll get in here early in the morning.” She kicked another box beneath the bed and shuffled loose mail on the filing cabinet into a neat stack.
“Mob.”
“Tomorrow!” she declared, raising two pointer fingers in the air and tiptoeing over the mess to escape down the hall.
Evicted as it were from my old room, I spent three days convalescing on the couch. Doped up and slack-jawed, I revisited old favorites: Singin’ in the Rain, Alien, My Fair Lady, Spaceballs.
Brian was on break as well. His arrival made things better. When Marie wasn’t on call for her ob/gyn rotation, she was sleeping, which meant I had my little brother all to myself.
The night he came home, Grandma joined us for dinner. Over dessert, Mom made her big announcement: She’d been promoted to Regional Director. In the two years she’d worked as a sales representative, she’d supplemented her income by working as a substitute at the local elementary school. Now, to her relief, she would never have to step foot in a classroom again.
We congratulated her on the promotion. Grandma wanted to know if this meant she’d be getting more free samples. Brian said he needed some wrinkle reducer. And I said no, I didn’t mind that she needed my old bedroom for an office (though it took considerable self-control to resist asking why she’d chosen my room over Brian’s, which was decidedly larger).
Brian and I pitched new products:
Mooning, a perfume aphrodisiac
The Moonwalk foot bath
Crater Cream for acne
Rover, the battery-powered razor for women fighting that pesky mustache
Brian even invented a jingle: “You’ll rave when this Rover shaves!”
“You all think it’s funny,” Mom said. “Mustaches on women is more a problem than you’d think. You remember Mrs. Priory from the supermarket? She looks like Uncle Lynn now.”
Grandma said, “Uncle Lynn looks like Hitler.”
After dinner I took a book to the living room. Brian came in to sit beside me.
“Just to warn you: Mom knows about your little live-in boyfriend.”
I dropped my book to my lap. “What did you tell her?”
“Nothing. She brought it up.”
“Brian.”
“It’s not my fault you’ve lost all common sense.”
He took my foot and popped my toes, trying to irk me. He was always popping things. Knuckles, gum, bubble wrapping.
“Did you read those books I sent you?” I asked, kicking my foot free.
“I don’t have time to read, Amy.”
“You should make time. It’s good for you. Like exercise is good for you.”
“I’ll read this one.” He took the book from my hands.
“Love in the Time of Cholera,” he read. “That’s like titling a book, Love in the Face of Massive Diarrhea.”
His tastes had never been literary.
While Mom and Grandma finished their holiday shopping, Brian and I killed two days with PlayStation and managed five games of Monopoly. Laughing with my brother, I gained some perspective: Introductory composition was not purgatory, and thirty was not so old.
The day before Christmas Eve I was well enough to walk without experiencing vertigo, so Mom drafted me to search the attic for the elusive glass globes. Holding on to the low-hanging rafters, I stepped cautiously from beam to beam. The air smelled of wood and dust, an almost sickeningly sweet potpourri.
My mother never got rid of things; she simply reshuffled them, which gave her the illusion of cleaning house. When the closets filled to capacity, she used to make our father redistribute the clutter to the attic. When my father left, I took over the chore. The trapdoor opened from my closet ceiling; I’d always considered the attic an extension of my room and felt a kind of ownership over the mysterious, dark place. I carried boxes of old Tupperware, crates of used Matchbox cars, and bags of winter sweaters up the rickety ladder, frightened of the shadows lurking in the corner, determined to overcome my fear so I could enjoy the solitude such a private place afforded.
The attic had two gabled windows overlooking the front lawn. One was directly over my bedroom, providing a view identical to the one I saw from my dresser, but from higher elevation. I pushed an old desk against this window to create my secret office on the small square of weight-bearing floor, partitioning the space off from the rest of the room with a tall discarded bookcase placed three feet opposite the desk. For increased privacy, I braced dowel rods between the shelf and the wall on each side, hanging a shower curtain on one and Brian’s old Superman bedsheets on the other.
The attic was stifling in summer and unbearably cold in winter. I alternated a desk fan and space heater accordingly. In summers I sat in my church slip; in winters I wore long underwear. I considered the harsh conditions romantic. Writers were meant to suffer. In an age of electric light bulbs and jet printers, suffering was hard to come by.
For years, no one suspected my hideout, and even when my mother did find out, she didn’t tell me. Without ever speaking directly of the matter, we came in time to the quiet understanding that no one was to go into the attic without my permission. If she and Brian thought my behavior strange, they didn’t say.
From my window I tracked our neighbor, Mr. Matlon, who came and went from his house in the early hours of the morning. I imagined he was a spy. Also, I imagined the red blinking light of the radio tower was actually a beacon to help invisible aliens direct their course as they flew in the skies, watching over us like guardian angels. I wrote short stories and poems and began work on a novel. I cut people from magazines to use as characters in my plots. The door to the attic was my wardrobe into Narnia, my portal into the strange dreams of Wonderland.
Now I sat down at the old desk, my knees bumping against the edge of the tabletop. It had always been too short for my long legs. The items on the desk were still carefully arranged in preparation for a night’s hard work. Sheets of paper were stacked at my right. The pencils in the plastic Disneyland cup were sharpened, the pens capped. To my pleasure, the reading lamp clicked to life.
A family photograph sat on the left corner of the desk. We were on summer vacation in Austin, Texas, for one of Dad’s business trips. Though he was only in his mid-thirties, his hair was turning white. In the photo he’s standing beside Mom, who holds one-year-old
Brian propped on her waist. I am between them, a spindly six-year-old in a flower-print jumper, hair a fringe of friz around my face, overbite smile proud. Dad has one hand around my mother’s waist, the other resting protectively on my shoulder. It was this protective gesture that made the photograph one of my favorites; I liked the way he spread his broad arms to encompass all three of us. He left one year later.
My parents’ separation had been abrupt and final: My father was home and then he was not. He stayed at a Motel 6 for a month, then moved into an old house in Cleveland. Brian and I spent every other weekend with him until my freshman year of high school, when he moved to Atlanta to live with his then-girlfriend, Linda. He appeared at holidays and at our high school graduations, his life tethered to ours by a thin bloodline.
As the years passed, I absorbed information about his life the way I took bad news about foreign countries: with a stirring of abstract sympathy but with no real concern. Linda got pregnant. They married; they bought a house; they divorced. Over the years he changed houses, jobs, and girlfriends with alarming frequency. Now he was living near the beach with a pharmacist named Penny, who rode a Harley and volunteered as an EMT for the county. She drove everywhere with a portable siren in the back seat of her jeep.
I popped the Austin picture from its frame and held it up to the lamp. It was one of the few photos of my father I’d managed to salvage. My mother was a revisionist. Under the guise of scrapbooking projects, she had systematically removed him from our family photo albums. By the time I realized what was happening, he had been erased from our documented family history.
Turning, I ran my fingers along the notebook bindings lined along the bookshelf. They came to rest on the smallest of the journals, a ratty notebook with its spiral spine undone and sharp at top and bottom. I had used an eraser to etch the title Space Adventure into the purple ink of the notebook cover.
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