The Book of Moon

by George Crowder

  My mother is a goal-oriented person, the kind who makes a list every day. In fact, she includes items she’s already completed, just so she can have the satisfaction of immediately crossing them off. Mom likes getting things done.

  Number one on the agenda was to “shore up the ruin,” as she put it. Apparently there’s nothing like a divorce for motivating a mother to become a Victoria’s Secret model. She set her mind to the task the minute Dad moved out.

  For three weeks, she shot out of school every day and hit the fitness clubs for their free sessions. Curves, Sports Connection, LA Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness, Bodies in Motion, Gold’s—Mom tried them all. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing with reps from the gyms pestering Mom to cough up the membership fee and actually pay for her workouts. Fat chance. She always wound up talking them into one more free session.

  Just when we thought Mom was never going to commit, she fell under the spell of a hunky trainer named Steve and joined LA Fitness. It was one of the cheaper places, and the trainer shrewdly convinced her she was better off paying less for a membership and spending the savings on his personal attention to her fitness needs. In that way he scored himself a daily four o’clock client.

  I guess Steve was good at his job. Dripping with what she called “dew” and sporting a goofy grin from Steve’s glorious TLC, Mom would fairly crawl through the door, much too wrung out to cook any dinner. She’d swallow several Advil, soak in the tub for an hour, and take to her bed while it was still daylight. Moss and I would shake our heads, get some fast food, and keep the noise level down. Being woken up would make Mom extremely cranky.

  The combination of intense workouts and her fatigue-induced fast produced quick results, as the pounds poured off and the ones that remained turned to toned muscle. This only motivated Mom to redouble her efforts. She decided we were all going on the South Beach diet.

  Purging the fridge of carbs was not hard: just don’t go shopping. Mom wasn’t doing much of that, anyway. However, she had lost all interest in cooking, and there was no way to follow a regimen of meat, fish, salads, and veggies without doing a little food prep. Who could she find to take over the chef chores?

  After visiting a Sikh gurdwara one Sunday, Mom took me to a department store. This was not part of our routine, and I was quite sure this temple to consumption could not be considered another church. Without explanation, she led me to the housewares department and declared, “Moon, it’s time you learned to cook.”

  “What about Moss?”

  “He likes fire,” my mother said simply. “He’ll do the grilling. As I recall, you like knives.”

  She had me there. I was a big fan of cold steel. I’d been collecting pocket knives since I was seven years old, and had amassed about a dozen of them. I realized that at that moment I was looking at a display of expensive kitchen cutlery. Hmmm…this could be interesting.

  Mom noticed a trim older salesman who was a little too involved in straightening up displays and called him over. His nametag said “Paul.”

  He listened to her explanation, nodded, and turned to me. “Wusthof Classic.”

  Mom balked. “Wusthof? Are you sure that’s necessary?”

  “Absolutely. When a young man cuts with Wusthof, he’ll not soon forget it.”

  He unlocked the display cabinet, then took a large knife and a sharpening steel from a set embedded in a block of wood. They were on sale for the low, low price of $449.99!

  “The steel should be used regularly to align the edge of the blade. Are you right handed?” he asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Take the steel in your left hand and the knife in your right thus. Commence with the widest part of the blade near the handle. Draw the knife towards you.” Paul demonstrated several strokes. “The proper angle of the blade in relation to the steel is critical. It should be twenty-two and one half degrees.” With a very careful inflection, he added, “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “That would be half of a forty-five degree angle, or one fourth of a ninety degree angle,” I said quickly.

  He smiled. “Indeed it would. Your turn.”

  Paul coached me through a sharpening session of ten strokes for each edge, then produced a sheet of newsprint.

  “A comparison is instructive.” Paul took a cheaper knife and tried to cut the newsprint. It pushed the paper out of the way, but did not bite. Another knife tore the paper rather than severing it. Then he tried the Wusthof blade we had just sharpened. The knife sliced effortlessly through the thin paper.

  I grinned. “Crude but persuasive,” he remarked, pleased with my reaction. He handed me the knife and I slashed the sports section to ribbons. My mother sighed.

  “We’ll take them,” she gave in.

  “Obviously,” said Paul. “I expect you’ll be needing new pans, too.”

  “I think our old ones are okay,” Mom objected weakly.

  “New diet, new pans, I always say,” said Paul, looking at me.

  “Yeah, that’s what I say, too,” I jumped in.

  “Yes, indeed. Young man, let me introduce you to Calphalon.”

  When we checked out, the total came to almost $800. I had a sudden attack of buyer’s remorse.

  “How are we going to pay for all of this?” I asked.

  “Child support,” said Mom.

  Paul ran Mom’s charge card through the machine and smirked.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It’s Alive—Alive!!

  “Try not to maim yourself,” was the extent of Mom’s cooking advice. She didn’t give Moss any, so I thought I’d assume the parental role. “Try not to torch yourself,” I suggested. Moss usually has to learn things the hard way, though, and promptly singed his eyebrows while lighting the recalcitrant barbeque.

  I avoided any bloodshed in the kitchen. Preparing the simple dishes for our new diet didn’t really call for all the top-notch equipment we’d bought, but I did enjoy it. Between watching the cooks at Fanatics and on the food channel, I learned plenty of technique and could whack through veggies like a food processor. Slicing frozen meat for stir-fry was more of a challenge, but I learned to cut morsels you could almost see through.

  After Moss’s initial setback, he became a very proficient hand at the grill. Dad taught him to gauge a meat’s doneness by touch, and after a couple weeks Moss could really nail “medium rare” versus “medium.” Marinating the meat and fish was my end, then Moss brought them home to perfection.

  This was an improvement over fast food, so I was starting to think maybe Mom’s crazy self-improvement plan wasn’t so crazy after all. Except it was only the beginning.

  No question, Mom was looking better than I’d ever seen her—and that was pretty damn good. But she was still far from satisfied with what she saw in the mirror. So she went to Dr. Fisher to “have a little work done.”

  Dr. Fisher was a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who must have apprenticed to a butcher. When Mom came home from her initial consultation, she had a diagram of a woman’s body that looked like a schematic of how to cut up a steer: filet here, ground round there, prime rib, flank steak. He’d marked up the diagram to show what he could do for Mom’s body. Dr. Fisher saw plenty of room for improvement.

  When Mom explained the plan to me, I told her I was really impressed that our medical insurance would cover all that. She laughed so hard she choked. Then she told me the insurance wouldn’t pay for any of it: she’d taken out a loan against the house.

  This was just another of many things I didn’t understand, but it gave me more to worry about. How was Mom’s new body going to take care of us if we lost the house? And why did Mom think that was so funny? Had she lost her mind?

  Maybe, but I don’t think I could blame that on Dr. Fisher. Mom’s brain was the one part of her body on which he did not perform surgery.

  Dr. Fisher worked on her for most of the summer, one procedure at a time. Mom thought it best to withhold the details from me and Moss, but we couldn’t avoid a
ll of it. There was no one else, so we had to take care of her. She was swathed in bandages, moaning for painkillers, and sucking fruit or vegetable smoothies through a straw—the only thing she could eat for days.

  In the end, Dr. Fisher’s work was finished, and we beheld his greatest creation.

  Frankenmom.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Target Practice

  The human being inhabiting Mom’s room bore a faint physical resemblance to our mother. If she had been one of America’s ten-most-wanted, and had gone to Argentina for a makeover to elude the authorities—well, it was like that. You could barely recognize some of her former features. Maybe her earlobes, or her incisors. She was a spectacular butterfly emerging from a chrysalis—a transformed creature. Yet, if anything, the psychological changes were even more dramatic than the physical ones. We were soon to learn that this new person had little to remind us of the woman who had seen us through the early years of our life.

  In the months she spent recuperating from her operations, Mom had consumed tabloids and women’s magazines as greedily as her pain medications. It was like standing for hours in supermarket lines, leafing through the crap rack literature about which star is diddling which star, how to have better bowel movements, and above all, intimate male/female stuff which mothers should not worry about. I believe it was responsible for reprogramming her mind in hideous ways.

  Moss’s theory is that Mom was always like this and kept it under control while she was married to Dad. He figured that was why she was so unhappy in the marriage, because she was hiding her true nature. That’s a much simpler explanation, but I can’t bear to think he’s right.

  At first Moss and I were mercifully uninvolved in the mechanics of my mother’s new social life. She seemed to be busy almost every night, attending lectures, art exhibitions, chamber of commerce mixers, and other singles’ events. She scaled back her gym workouts to a maintenance level so she’d have energy for her fresh exploits. But there were plenty of shopping expeditions to acquire a new wardrobe suited to her pursuits.

  She also took on a partner-in-crime. Betty Bridges was a perky blond who’d been playing the scene for years. Moss and I called her “Betty Boobs” in honor of the dramatic work she’d had done in that area. Betty’s breasts defied gravity like twin Hindenburgs, mammoth entitties that ascended to wondrous heights.

  When we first met Betty, Moss elbowed me and muttered in awe, “Unchain those beauties.” I was even more mesmerized, a fact that seemed to please Betty. On the rare occasions she could wrest my attention from her spectacular jugs and force eye contact, she would give me a complicit smile.

  Betty claimed to be a secretary, but I think she was really a spy of some sort. She had compiled dossiers on the many single men who made the rounds. Had she wanted to, she probably could have extorted a lot of hush money; though she panned most of the men as “tight as a nun’s you-know-what,” so maybe they wouldn’t have paid up. Instead, she blackened their names for free.

  Mom and Betty took me to an art museum reception where I witnessed the two of them in action. Their behavior made me very nervous, but they seemed oblivious to my discomfort.

  As we entered the museum’s courtyard, their faces bore identical synthetic smiles, as if they were both in on a joke that I hadn’t heard. Their heads swiveled quickly from side to side, and Betty remarked, “This is what you call a target rich environment, Janice.”

  I noticed an inviting hors d’oeuvres table. “Maybe we should have something to eat before you shoot anyone down.”

  Betty seductively clasped my arm and burst into gales of absurd laughter, her eyes dancing suggestively, as her other hand coyly covered her mouth. “Oh, Moon, you are so witty!”

  Mom gave her a look usually reserved for disobedient students. “Betty, that’s my son!”

  Betty came out of it quickly. “Sorry, just a reflex,” she apologized. She and Mom enjoyed a genuine laugh over this.

  I tried again. “Food?”

  “I could eat a bite,” Betty agreed, taking a step towards the appetizers. But Mom grabbed her by the arm.

  “Now, Miss Scarlett, I ain’t aimin’ for you to eat like a field hand and gobble like a hog!” she exclaimed theatrically.

  “Fiddle-dee-dee! Ashley told me he likes to see a girl with a healthy appetite!” said Betty, with a campy southern accent.

  “What gentlemen says and what they thinks is two different things!”

  More riotous laughter. I noticed uncomfortably that people were starting to stare at us. Of course, that was likely the goal of the exercise all along.

  “It’s Gone with the Wind, dear,” Mom explained. Her attention was suddenly riveted on a man standing in line at the bar.

  “Betty, on your six, line at the bar, black blazer.”

  Betty surreptitiously looked over her shoulder. “That’s Armani,” she said with respect.

  “He’s much too young,” Mom disagreed. “And better looking.”

  “Not the man, the jacket. I don’t know him. He’s fresh meat.”

  “Watch me beam him in,” Mom declared, then remembered me. “Uh, Betty, would you mind escorting my son to the canapés?”

  I kept my eye on Mom as Betty led me away. Mom cocked her head and leveled a gaze of laser intensity on the man in line, about fifteen feet away. He was restlessly surveying the crowd in the same way that Mom and Betty were.

  I saw him make eye contact with Mom and raise his eyebrows in surprise. Mom gestured that she’d like a drink. He nodded and mouthed the question, “White wine?” She nodded and rewarded him with a smile of seductive gratitude.

  Betty took me by the hand and gently led me toward the museum’s interior. Before she could clear the crime scene, I witnessed my mother burst into gales of laughter and take the Armani man’s arm. “Oh, Michel, you are so witty!” she exclaimed breathlessly, eerily echoing Betty’s words to me a few minutes earlier.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tahiti or Bust

  This museum experience made me wary of women’s wiles. I examined Jasmine carefully for indications that her words of praise were as hollow as my mother’s and Betty’s, but her enthusiasm during our tutoring sessions seemed genuine. This was on my mind as I sought my mother’s counsel one evening.

  Between ourselves, Moss and I referred to my mother as, “The person formerly known as Mom.” Her attention was not easy to come by these days. However, I had noticed that when she was putting on her war paint before her nightly raids she was at least a shadow of her old self. I liked to lie in the empty bathtub and talk to her while she went through the familiar routine of anointing herself. Only half-listening, she was capable of the occasional motherly utterance.

  I often guided our sessions to the same topic: my future. Like a loose tooth, I couldn’t leave it alone. “What do you think I should be?” I asked.

  “I think you could be anything, dear,” she replied automatically.

  “Anything is almost as bad as nothing. It doesn’t help me narrow it down.”

  “No, I suppose not,” she murmured, applying rouge to her cheeks.

  “What about a teacher?”

  “Why would you ask me a thing like that?” she snapped, suddenly peeved.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it, Mom. A lot of people are teachers. You’re one. Do you think I’d be good at it?”

  Moss and I had agreed that it was best to conceal all traces of our life with Dad from our mother. Fortunately, as she became more involved in her own activities, she inquired much less into ours. So I didn’t mention I’d had a little on-the-job training that might be motivating my curiosity.

  “Well, of course you would,” she mouthed, putting on scarlet lipstick. She smushed her lips together, then blotted on a tissue. “You’d be good at anything, dear.”

  Mom had evaded the question, but I wasn’t giving up. There were other teachers in my life besides her.

  The next day at recess I asked my math teacher, Mrs. Jo
hnson, what she thought of the idea. She took a sip of hot coffee, winced, then carefully stated, “Moon Landing, were you to become a teacher it would be the greatest disappointment of my thirty-six years in the classroom.”

  I thought I’d ask one more person. My English teacher, Mr. Desrosiers, might be approachable. Kids made fun of him because his French accent was thick and his hair was thin. He grew it long and combed it forward à la Napoleon Bonaparte to camouflage a large bald spot. However, he’d recently complimented my pronunciation of his name, so I thought he might have a better reaction than Mrs. Johnson.

  When I ran the idea past him, Mr. Desrosiers made one of those inscrutable French noises to express disapproval. Then he gave a Gallic shrug that indicated—well, it can indicate a lot of things. I had to wait to see what came next. A long sigh, more little noises, drumming fingers on the desk. Then raised eyebrows, pursed lips, several head shakes. Clearly out of sorts, he ran his hands through his hair, exposing a hairless patch vast enough to resemble a medieval monk’s tonsure. This was unprecedented: Mr. Desrosiers never touched his hair in public. I was growing concerned.

  Finally he looked at me. “Monsieur la lune…”

  Uh, yes, that is French for “Moon.” Jeez.

  “I am thinking about…eh…what I wanted to do when I was your age. I did not want to become a teacher.”

  “What did you want?”

  He sighed deeply. “I wanted to go to Tahiti and live as Gauguin.” It sounded as if he were confessing something dark and shameful.

  “Gauguin?”

  “Oui.” He gestured at some colorful posters on the wall. “These are his work, of course. I wished to be a painter.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Non. Tahiti is not the same. And I…I am not Gauguin. So I became a teacher.”