Northward to the Moon

by Polly Horvath

  In the morning my mother opens the door. “Oh, here she is,” she says. “I thought perhaps … Jane, come help me find Dorothy’s car keys. I’ve mislaid them again.”

  While we look and Maya wakes up slowly in my bed, my mother says to me, “I’m going into town with Nelda to see about convalescent homes for Dorothy. Can you do something with Maya?”

  “Like what?”

  “See if you can get her interested in a book. Dorothy has a whole wall of them in the study. Maybe you can lure her away from the TV for a while, she just needs someone to play with.”

  I have not really checked out the books yet, fearing that they would all be Reader’s Digest condensed versions like the few on the coffee table in the living room. But after we have eaten, I explore the study with Maya. There are no children’s books for her and I’m beginning to get bored and itchy with dust when I see a bright cookbook. It is The Julia Bestenmeyer Book of Candy Making. There are bright pictures on every page of different kinds of candy. Saltwater taffy and peppermint drops. Chocolates. Hard candy, soft candy, fudge. And the women in the pictures all have pink-and-white-striped outfits and aprons. The candy is presented on pink-and-green cake plates. You never saw a happier venture. That Julia Bestenmeyer is one happy candy maker. And her message seems to be: Candy will make you happy. Just make some, you’ll see.

  I sit down in the comfortable overstuffed chair in the study and start to flip through it and to my surprise Maya comes and hangs over the chair, as mesmerized by such glossy candy happiness as I am.

  “That would be fun,” she says. “Making candy.”

  My mother comes in for her purse and overhears. “That’s a great idea. Jane, why don’t you make candy with Maya? I’m sure Dorothy won’t mind if you use her kitchen.”

  “Yeah, let’s make candy!” says Maya, jumping up and down.

  My mother and I smile. When was the last time we saw Maya excited about anything? Good. Maybe if I can keep Maya happy making candy we can stay here all summer.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s make candy, Maya.”

  “See what supplies Dorothy has and I can take you shopping tomorrow for whatever else you need,” says my mother, and speeds out the door.

  The only thing we have all the right ingredients for is plain pulled taffy but that looks like fun. Maya is bouncing all over the kitchen.

  We spend the morning making the pulled taffy. We color it with the little food coloring that Dorothy has, some tiny drops of green and yellow and red. It reminds me a bit of the saltwater taffy we bought once on a road trip with Mrs. Parks, a woman from our church in Massachusetts. It is strange to think that Mrs. Parks is dead now. Beyond the reach of saltwater taffy.

  Ned breezes through the kitchen, grabs a piece and burns his tongue. “OUCH. WARN people!” he says.

  “Where are Hershel and Max?” I ask.

  “Out in the ring. Ben is teaching them to ride. They hung over the ring looking pathetic enough until he got the hint and saddled up a couple of ponies for them.”

  I bristle in fury. He should be teaching me. I’ve hung over the ring looking longingly, winsomely and mysteriously at the horses. Clearly I should have gone for pathetic.

  “Didn’t Mom think they were too young for that?” I ask.

  “Your mother thinks a lot of things,” says Ned vaguely, and goes bustling on out again.

  Maya and I clean up the taffy mess, which takes a while. It is a taffy that hardens as it cools so everywhere we dripped some is now rocklike and we have to scrape it and try to melt it off with hot dishrags. Then we arrange all the pieces on a cake plate. Hershel and Max come into the kitchen after their lesson. I don’t want to give them any taffy. It’s enough they get riding lessons. But they put their grubby little hands right into the taffy plate, smearing disgusting muddy red dust from the ring over it. “Oh, you gross animals!” says Maya when she sees.

  They are unfazed and, after eating their fill, take some out to the barn for Hank and Leeron and Ben, of course, their new best friend.

  Then Candace, looking all square-shouldered and businesslike, comes into the kitchen, where Maureen is sampling our candy, and announces she is going out to the barn to fire Leeron and Hank. Even though Ben is the youngest, he is the experienced ranch hand and the others work under him. I don’t really mind her firing Leeron and Hank as long as she leaves Ben alone.

  “Oh no!” says Maureen. “Not yet. We haven’t made any provisions … we haven’t told Mother. Let’s wait, we’ve only just talked about it.”

  “No time like the present,” says Candace briskly, scooping up a fistful of taffy. She puts a piece in her mouth and crunches it aggressively. I’m surprised she doesn’t break a tooth. “I find if you wait around to do these things, they don’t get done. ‘Sign the papers! Sign the papers now!’ I tell clients. That’s why I’m one of the most successful realtors in my firm. I taught a seminar on closing and I talked for an hour and a half but this is what it could have boiled down to: CLOSE! CLOSE! Close the deal. CLOSE!”

  Maya backs away from her and even I jump at this. Scary realtor. Scary realtor.

  “I just think we should wait—” Maureen begins, but Candace gives her a look that says what a spineless jellyfish she thinks Maureen is, goes out to the barn and fires them. She comes in a few minutes later very pleased with herself as if being hard and unyielding is a talent.

  For the next two days no one says anything to Dorothy about it. Even Candace doesn’t seem to want to broach it. She has given Leeron and Hank until the end of the week so Dorothy doesn’t even know they’re fired until a few days later when Hank and Leeron go up to say goodbye to her and collect their wages and then we hear her scream, “SHE WHAT?”

  Maya and I are in the kitchen making candy. We stop breathlessly as Candace, who has been drinking coffee on the porch, still basking in the glow of her decisiveness, goes upstairs to deal with it. We hear a lot of loud arguing and a lot of shrieking by Candace about how Dorothy can’t afford to keep them on and Dorothy shrieking that it is none of Candace’s business. Maya puts her hands over her ears.

  “Come on, Maya,” I say, because my mother is still driving around the state with Nelda looking for a decent living situation for Dorothy. They had no luck in Elko and are going off to check points west for convalescent homes and assisted-living facilities and will probably end up just combing the county for someone who takes in stray cats and is willing to expand to larger mammals.

  There has been a shift in Maya the last day or so. She is neither irritable nor particularly interested in the candy. She just looks kind of blank. Now she is standing with her hands still over her ears and doesn’t seem to hear when I tell her that the sugar we are boiling has reached the soft-ball stage. Usually she loves dropping hot balls of cooked sugar into cold water and seeing if you can squish them into a soft ball.

  “Soft ball,” I say again, showing her I have made one, but she doesn’t even look. This turns my blood cold and then I think maybe I am being too dramatic. I decide to get her out of the house and away from the yelling, so I take her to the barn, where we can see what Max and Hershel are up to.

  Hershel and Max, as usual, are leaping all over the barn. They tell us they are helping Ben load bales of hay onto a conveyor belt that takes it up to the loft. They don’t appear to be much help, really. They spend a lot of time riding up the conveyor and jumping around in the hay and Ben yells at them frequently to stop stepping all over it.

  He seems quite unfazed by Hank and Leeron’s getting fired. I thought, given his clearly heroic persona, that he would threaten to quit in protest or at least appear to feel bad about it. But maybe he keeps his feelings bottled up. That could be why he never looks at me.

  The boys tell Maya to ride up the conveyor but she says it is too scary. She goes up the ladder and finds a quiet corner of the hayloft until the boys wreak havoc again and Ben yells at them and then she goes back to the house. I follow behind her. Dorothy has stopped yelli
ng at Candace, whose rented car is gone.

  At least the house is quiet. Maya seems to forget that we are in the middle of candy making and goes to watch TV. My mother comes home. She and Nelda have had no luck with homes for Dorothy and they look tired and discouraged. I wish I had some candy to offer them. It was bright and cheerful. It perked everyone up while it lasted.

  The next day my mom takes me and Maya grocery shopping in Elko. I have decided we should branch out and make something truly exciting like marshmallows. There is something so magical about homemade marshmallows and I am trying to reinterest Maya in the wonder of candy making because I am slowly developing a plan to be alone with Ben. If I can get Maya happily interested in cutting marshmallows into perfect squares and decorating them with piped-on icing flowers like the picture in the book, something time-consuming enough that I can get out to the barn, and if I can somehow get rid of Hershel and Max, then I think I may have a shot at getting Ben talking to me.

  I am busily developing this plan as we go down grocery aisles, when Maya grabs my shirt and points. There is a bag of pastel-colored marshmallows. “Let’s color them!”

  Yes! This is a good sign. I’ve got her hooked again.

  We are in line at the grocery store with our load of sugar and corn syrup and food coloring and chocolate and sprinkles and other enticing candy supplies when we overhear two women in front of us talking about the wolves.

  “Well, Daran wants to take his rifle out and shoot them. They got one of Henry’s sheep and who knows what they’ll get next. I told the principal he’d better watch those children at recess.”

  “You can shoot them all as far as I’m concerned. There aren’t supposed to be wolves in Nevada. Haven’t seen them for years. I called Animal Control and they said that the closest ones are in Idaho. But lands, that’s just over the border; you telling me wolves know a state line when they see one? They just don’t want to deal with it. That’s what that’s about.”

  “Oh, and now they’re on the endangered species list like everything else,” says the cashier.

  “Daran says what’s the point of having a gun, you can hardly shoot nothing anymore, it’s got so bad. Let’s see how they feel when someone’s horse gets mauled. I seen what a bear can do to a horse. My granny remembers wolf packs and she says let ’em be endangered. Good riddance to ’em.”

  “People seem to feel like Ben about them,” I whisper to my mother. “He wants to get rid of them too.”

  “I hope they have good places to hide,” whispers my mother. “I would miss their calls.”

  Then it’s our turn and we pay for all our stuff, and my mother drops us at home to cook and takes Nelda out again to look for homes. My mother isn’t too crazy about all this activity on Dorothy’s behalf, especially since Dorothy doesn’t know about most of it. All she knows is that Hank and Leeron were fired. She doesn’t know what else is in store for her. But my mother doesn’t think it’s her place to tell Dorothy any of this. It should come from her own children.

  “Nelda can’t drive so I feel duty bound to take her where she wants to go, but I feel funny about it,” she says to Ned. “Shouldn’t you be talking to Dorothy?”

  “Someone should, I think Candace elected Nelda …,” says Ned and he is out the door so fast he leaves my mother saying into thin air, “But I don’t think Nelda knows she was elected….”

  “Well, Jane,” she says to me as we watch Ned disappearing round the side of the barn with the speed of light, “I guess I’ll go tell Nelda it’s time to go. I’m not sure when we’ll get back.”

  I myself would find it very trying to spend a day carting Nelda around. Nelda never speaks above a whisper and so you’re always having to say “What? What?”

  This seems to really annoy Maureen, whose job it is to make breakfast and who gets her revenge by making jelly Madonnas on the toast. “There,” she will say, “look at that, Nelda. You have a Madonna on your toast. It’s a jelly miracle.”

  It all started one night at dinner when Nelda made the mistake of telling us about somewhere in Mexico where someone saw the Virgin Mary in a tortilla. People came from miles around to see the miracle. Everyone at the table scoffed at this except Nelda, who, it turns out, believes in these miraculous sightings. Maureen was particularly scathing and from then on miraculous sightings of the Virgin have appeared on Nelda’s food. Last night Nelda found a Virgin Mary tomato configuration on her salad.

  “Praise God,” whispered Nelda when she sat down at her place and saw it.

  “Praise Maureen, I made it, you ninny,” said Maureen.

  “I know,” whispered Nelda, and ate it reverently all the same.

  It’s too bad they’re all leaving soon. Just as we’re getting to know them. But que sera, sera, it fits in perfectly with my plan. As if the universe aligns things so that Ben can observe me being saintly without the distraction of a lot of other people cluttering up the scenery.

  I decide to make sheets of marshmallows and tell Maya we can’t cut them and decorate them until just the right moment. Maya has taken to watching more and more TV with Dorothy. This would work fine except that lately Dorothy has had a tendency to send her to get snacks and her glasses and Kleenex and water and I am afraid Maya will drift down at a critical moment and see me out in the ring, come out and spoil everything.

  Meanwhile my mother and Nelda, Maureen and Candace now all pile into three cars every morning, frantically trying to find a place that will take Dorothy. They have been told that sometimes it’s just a matter of being at the right place at the right time. So much for waiting lists, says Candace. It gets my mother out of the way, though.

  But what to do about the boys? They are annoyingly always around underfoot, or worse, under Ben’s feet. Then, thank goodness, Max rips his last whole pair of jeans and my mother decides to take the boys into town to get them some pants.

  As soon as I hear this I realize it is the best shot I am going to get at my plan. Ben is in the ring. The boys and my mother will be gone. My mother has sent Ned off to drive Nelda. Of course, my mother could have sent Ned shopping with the boys and driven Nelda but I bet she put her foot down and told Ned it was his turn to get whispered at all day.

  I race into the kitchen, throw together some batches of different-colored icing and put it into paper decorating cones. Then I call upstairs. “Quick, Maya, the marshmallows are ready to be cut and decorated.”

  “I want to watch The Price Is Right,” calls Maya.

  “Well, you CAN’T!” I yell before I think of a more tactful enticing way to put it. “That is,” I go on, sounding very much like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” “the marshmallows are all done and waiting, dear.”

  “They’ve been done for days,” calls Maya.

  “But the icing is HARDENING!” I screech.

  Ned is futzing around outside talking with Ben while Nelda waits in the car.

  I run upstairs and say, “Well, I can cut and decorate them myself, if you want….”

  Maya follows me downstairs with her blank look but I don’t have time to think about her facial expressions.

  “Okay, you can use this plastic icing knife to cut the marshmallows, see?” I say, demonstrating. “But they all have to be exactly one inch square, so measure each one with this ruler.”

  She nods. Good! Good, good, good. It makes sense to her. Of course, that means she is an idiot, but I can’t worry about that now.

  “Then you make a flower on each one with a little green, a little yellow and a little pink, just like the picture in the book. I’ll show you.”

  I do a petal and run to the window. Good, Ben’s still there. Good, good, good. Will Ned never leave? I do a leaf, I run to the window.

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” says Maya, trying to grab the cone. “Why do you keep looking out the window?”

  Why? Why, why, why? Ah! “I’m checking the light levels. Of course, the light levels.”

  “The light levels? What’s that?”
<
br />   “What is it? What is it? Easy. The levels of light!”

  “Why?”

  Why? Why, why, why? Ah! “Too much light will fade the marshmallows. Look how bright ours are, but one wrong beam of sunlight and they will end up looking like the pastel ones in the supermarket. We don’t want that.”

  I race over and pull down all the blinds.

  “Problem solved!”

  “Do I have to keep the blinds closed?” asks Maya.

  “Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Under no circumstances open the blinds! You don’t want second-rate marshmallows. You want perfect marshmallows!”

  “You’re scaring me! Your voice is all weird.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” I snap. Then I take a deep breath. I am so close. Don’t scare her now, I say to myself. Breathe, breathe. I take another deep breath. It makes me cough.

  “Don’t cough on the marshmallows,” says Maya.

  “I think the sugar is making me cough. I think I need to go outside and get some fresh air. You will have to start decorating alone. Do you think you can? I mean, I know you’re only eight….”

  “I don’t need you to help!” scoffs Maya. “I’m a better drawer than you.”

  “That’s right, you are,” I say soothingly. “You’ll do great if you just follow a few simple instructions.”

  She nods.

  “Okay, now remember to measure and remeasure all the marshmallows. You should end up with ninety-six,” I say, pulling a number out of thin air. I stopped listening to myself several minutes ago. Has Ned left yet? Is it safe to go out? I peek out the window.

  “Are the light levels still good?” asks Maya.

  “PERFECT!”

  She looks scared again so I take another breath.

  “Ninety-six. Can you remember that?”

  “I get it,” says Maya. “Where are you going to be?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t think about me, just think about the marshmallows, the marshmallows, Maya,” I say to her, handing her the plastic knife.