Undressing the Moon

by T. Greenwood

  She set the vase on the rock next to me and looked at it. Without sun, the glass was dull and dark red, almost brown. I could smell rain coming. I could hear thunder somewhere, not too far away.

  “Boo will love it,” I said. “She will. She has all of those vases, the Depression glass ones, remember? But she doesn’t have any red ones. I bet we could get twenty dollars for it.” My words were tumbling, eager and clumsy.

  She picked it up again, smiling, and ran her fingers across the rim. But she hesitated halfway around, her smile fading.

  “There’s a chip in it.”

  “Where?” I asked, as if it couldn’t be true. As if she could have mistaken this imperfection. I stood up, went to her, looked at the glass. The chip was small but certain. The vase wasn’t worth anything.

  She set it back down on the rock and walked away from me, disappearing into the garage. I picked the vase up and cradled it, briefly, like an infant in my arms. I set it back down, embarrassed, and felt the first cold drops of summer rain on my shoulder.

  She was inside the garage for a long time. I could hear her feet shuffling across the dirt floor. When she came out again, she was carrying a hammer. My throat felt thick. She scooted me out of the way and contemplated the vase again.

  I looked at her, and her face grew soft. In a glance, I asked her to please stop.

  “It’s ruined,” she said, her eyes pleading with me. “Already.”

  I stared at my hands. When I looked up again, she was standing over the vase with her eyes closed. When she swung the hammer back, her shoulder blades were sharp, like a bird’s wings at her back. And the vase made a sound like music when it shattered with one gentle blow.

  Tears welled up in my eyes but did not fall. I blinked hard.

  She sat down next to me and leaned her head on my shoulder without taking her eyes off the pile of crimson shards. There was no sun shining through the fragments. It was just a pile of glass.

  And then she stood up and brushed the pieces into the palm of her hand. She looked at me sadly. “Sometimes things need to get broken,” she said.

  I suppose I should have known then that it wouldn’t be much longer before she was gone. I should have seen the dull prisms in her eyes as we walked home in the rain with two suitcases filled with the dead man’s things. I should have noticed that all the sunlight had disappeared.

  The only thing that remained of my mother after she left was glass: in every room, her slivered pictures reminders that there was a time before. That there was a time when things were almost beautiful here. The pane that hung in the window over my bed was the last one she made before she left and never came back. She used every color in this one, and at the very center was a piece she kept in the crimson drawer in the shed: a bubble of red from the glass vase transformed into a small heart inside the chest of a bird without wings.

  If summer here were made of colored glass, this is the way the light would shine through the summer my mother disappeared: the dull green of turning leaves and branches reaching to a somber sky. But that summer she made me understand that it was not the glass that was beautiful, but the quality of light behind it. It was the sun, not the shards, that mattered. And when I peered through the heart, the world looked different. This was the way she might have seen things. When I forgot the tilt of her head or the smell of her hair, I looked through the bird’s heart to the world outside my window and imagined that I was she and that this was what she saw.

  And that fall, when she was already gone, autumn sunlight shone through the crimson shard and made spots like blood on my sheets.

  I don’t know what happened to that girl. I think she became lost a long time ago. I picture her wandering through the damp, dark woods of my past, looking for home.

  This morning, after Becca left for school, I went to my closet and crawled inside (over boxes and under clothes) and found the shoe box with the rest of my mother’s envelopes. Not surprisingly, all of them were filled with glass. But even after the envelopes were unsealed, their contents strewn across the coffee table like transparent puzzle pieces, I went back inside the closet. Searching. I tore open lids and untied bags. I reached into pockets and unwrapped packages. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t looking for him. That I was only cleaning house. Trying to make it easier and more manageable for my friends, just in case. But finding my mother inside that closet meant finding him, too.

  Finally, after an hour of excavating, I found the poem inside a wooden music box, one of the few salvaged relics of my childhood. The box was in the back of my closet, wrapped in the folds of an old dress that used to belong to my mother. But despite my attempts to protect it, the wood was chipped and the découpage of the Austrian Alps on the lid had faded. It came from the Trapp Family Lodge gift shop: he’d bought it for me during a class trip, slipped it into my backpack while I was sleeping on the bus ride home. It used to play “Edelweiss,” but the brass key to wind it up had broken off years ago.

  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I will be leaving behind. I have lived in the same apartment for almost five years, and the walk-in closet is a virtual tomb, a catacomb of gathered things. Of saved things. But what to me are sentimental tokens, to other people would probably seem, at best, like prospective yard sale items and, at worst, like possible Goodwill donations. That’s the way with sentimental things: it’s the memory the junk conjures that’s valuable, not the junk itself. The true past is manifested not in the broken baby doll, but in her missing arms. In the lost or stained pages of sheet music for your favorite songs, in the holes of your favorite dresses. My past is the song captured inside that wooden box, and the words the poem doesn’t say.

  Perhaps she is hungry, having used her only bread as a futile trail home.

  The paper was fragile, like chalky wings, and I was worried that it might crumble in my hands when I unfolded it. But remarkably, more than fifteen years after they were written, the words were still intact.

  Edelweiss, edelweiss, edelweiss.

  I remember falling asleep on the long bus ride back from Stowe. It was while I was sleeping that he slipped the music box into my backpack and changed everything. I didn’t hear him or feel him come or go, but when I awoke I knew that nothing would be the same again. Shivering, my head pressed against the cold window, I made a cloud with my breath on the glass and started to write his name with my finger. I stopped after the first letter, realizing that despite the gift, the admission, I could never write his name, not even in the clouds I made with my own breath.

  He was my secret. He was everything I kept hidden and inside. Even at fourteen years old, I knew plenty about deceit: I had lied to (and been lied to by) everyone I had ever loved. I guess that’s why I wasn’t afraid. At least this secret belonged to me. But because I was only fourteen, I also lied to myself. I believed that he was the end of the world. He appeared after I’d already lost everything. He arrived just in time; I thought then that he was saving me.

  I am aware of my body now, sixteen years and as many lovers later. I am ever conscious of skin and bones and marrow. The distant dankness of breath and the gentle yellowing of teeth. I am older than I seem. These creases run deeper than you’d think. I know who I am and what a body can and cannot do. But then, when I was a child, I knew only what he told me. And that was love and music, music and love. I only vaguely understood the power of one hand on my hip, defiant, or the potency of my braid swinging over my shoulder, loose hairs making me wrinkle my nose. I didn’t know that a single careless gesture of mine could be the end of his world, too.

  I don’t know what happened to that girl.

  He was already broken when I met him. I was wise enough to see right away that he was made of fragments too, that he was also comprised of slivers. He offered me his sorrow, not as an explanation, but as a gift. He gave me in whispers the names of his lost wife and then his lost child. Felicity. Felicity. Her name sounded like a constellation to me, like an imagined girl. But all that hap
pened long before I knew him. When I met him, he was already broken. I know I’m not to blame for that, at least. And now, that is what comforts me.

  I was not innocent. I am not innocent. But sometimes I look for ways to blame him for what is happening to my body now. I sometimes imagine that the decay began the moment I saw his face. That it infected me. That he started killing me all those years ago, and that now the dying is just finally settling in. I think that this must simply be the completion of our exchange: a life for a life.

  After the birds descended, after the trail of bread was gone, where did she go? I imagine she spun on the tips of her toes, until dizzy, and the wet green of leaves could have been a kaleidoscope of tears.

  After I reread the poem, I carefully folded it along its familiar creases and put it back inside the music box. I wrapped it up again in my mother’s soft blue dress (whose pockets were filled with their own secrets) and wondered what would happen to it after I was gone. Becca has the best intentions. She has denied me my thrift store, pawnshop, yard sale pleas. She’s told me that she’ll take care of my belongings if she needs to, but for now I don’t need to get rid of anything. That I should leave the door to my closet closed, keep the artifacts inside: my mausoleum of not-forgotten things. I’m grateful for her tenacity: I would never really be able to get rid of the closet’s contents. Like my mother, I have unwittingly become a reluctant but proud curator of broken things.

  Autumn, and everything was falling.

  For the first few weeks after Mum left, we expected her to return. We all pretended that she’d only gone for a walk, that any moment she would walk back in the door with a handful of late-summer berries or a single fallen maple leaf, like a giant golden palm. We pretended that she’d only gotten lost in the colors of fall.

  Sometimes I’d sit on the porch and squint my eyes, imagining that the red of a maple tree was the velour bathrobe Daddy had given her three Christmases earlier. That the wind was her hair. But inevitably, the trees remained trees and she didn’t come home.

  When she left, she didn’t take much, just enough to let us know that she’d gone willingly. A suitcase, a fisherman’s sweater. Her favorite jeans, her shoes and socks and toothbrush. When I ran away at six years old, I took the same sorts of things: my tattered sock monkey, six pairs of underwear, a hairbrush. Of course, I only got as far as Lake Gormlaith before I turned around and came home. But she wasn’t a child; she wasn’t afraid of leaving.

  It wasn’t until later that I found the other missing things. The good flashlight, the radio, the pocketknife I’d won at the state fair. Her best slip, a scarab bracelet from Boo, and the copy of Alice in Wonderland we bought at the library sale that reminded her of the one she had when she was little. The magnetic plastic pages of the photo album didn’t lie right now that some of the photos were gone: my first cartwheel, Quinn learning to ski. I searched my drawers for other things she might have taken; I ran my fingers through my hair, wondering if she might have cut a lock of it while I was sleeping.

  I think I was the first one to realize that she wasn’t coming home. Daddy and Quinn didn’t know her like I did. They believed she needed them, when I knew she didn’t need any of us.

  In September, I started high school, terrified by the maze of classrooms and the ease with which everyone seemed to move along the pale green hallways. I sat near windows. I spoke to no one. Ithought my silence might make me invisible, as if a voice alone could make you real. Becca and I had opposite schedules. We passed each other in the hall, similarly scared, but reversed, like faces in a funhouse mirror. We had the same lunch period, thankfully, and we sat at the far end of the cafeteria, studying the gestures of the pretty girls and the way the boys walked. For twenty minutes each day we pretended that all of this would be all right, that some of the Quimby kids might befriend us, that we didn’t come from a town without a name. But it was clear early on that the dividing lines were drawn long before we got there. We were the poor kids, the Pond kids—as if we’d come from the murky depths of the sawdust-bottomed Pond instead of from our mothers’ wombs. And with my mother gone, it seemed this could be true.

  Quinn was a senior that year. Sometimes I saw him emerging from the boys’ bathroom in a halo of smoke, hands shoved into his pockets, laughing with the other guys. He would nod at me, but we didn’t speak. I knew that he had worked too hard for this, and I wouldn’t take it from him. He’d fought his way from the depths of the Pond, crawled out, evolved.

  When school was over and we were outside the big brick building, he’d find Becca and me sitting under a tree by the football field and offer to drive us to Boo’s on his way to work at the Shop-N-Save. Quinn drove our mother’s car, another thing she had left behind. There were still candy wrappers from her Tootsie Rolls in the ashtray, and an empty paper coffee cup rimmed with her lipstick rolling on the floor. I would let Becca sit up front while I peered through the back window at everything falling away.

  At Boo’s shop, we played dress-up: Becca searching the discarded clothes for some hidden treasure, and I for clues about where my mother had gone.

  “Look at this!” Becca said, pulling a paisley scarf from a plastic bag like a magician.

  Someone had just dropped off ten Hefty bags full of clothes and ties and shoes.

  Boo was sitting behind the makeshift counter, untangling a mountain of costume jewelry. “It’s silk, I think,” she said, looking up over the tops of her glasses. She and my mother didn’t look related. She was Mum’s little sister, but while my mother was miniature, like a doll, Boo was like me. Tall. Big hands, long legs. Boo had even played basketball for the UVM girls’ team. Sometimes when the shop was quiet, she and I would shoot hoops outside the garage.

  I tore open one bag, and a bunch of scuffed shoes fell out. They smelled like sweaty feet.

  Becca stood in front of the full-length mirror, adjusting the scarf around her neck and head. The burgundy swirls clashed with her strawberry hair.

  I reached for another bag. It was light. Inside were two pillows, lumpy and stained. “Ugh,” I said and tossed it in the trash can.

  “Someone dropped off some dresses. Nice ones,” Boo said. “Why don’t you look through those instead?” She motioned toward a rolling rack at the far end of the garage.

  Becca let the scarf fall from her hair and rushed to the rack.

  I sat down next to Boo on an orange leather hassock. The stitching was coming undone, and the stuffing inside was gray.

  “How’s school?” she asked.

  “I hate it.”

  She nodded and worked on the chains in her fingers.

  “How’s your dad?” she asked.

  I shrugged. For the first few weeks after Mum left, Daddy stayed at home, sitting on the front porch smoking cigarettes, staring into the trees. I think he saw the red of her ratty old bathrobe among them, too. But when it was clear she wasn’t coming back to us, he didn’t wait anymore. In the mornings, he’d get dressed as if he were going to work, and then he’d get in his truck and leave. Sometimes he didn’t come home until midnight, and I knew he was looking for her. I imagined him driving all over the state, to Burlington and Rutland and Montpelier, searching for her, as if she would just be walking along the edge of the interstate or sitting in a restaurant somewhere and he would be able to take her hand and lead her home. He wasn’t looking for a job, because he was too busy looking for her. I didn’t tell Boo that, though. I only shrugged.

  Becca had something pink in her hands. “Can I try this one on?” she asked shyly.

  “Of course, honey. Use the bathroom inside.”

  Becca scurried into the house, and I watched Boo’s fingers. Three silver chains, knotted and intertwined. A heart pendant, someone’s class ring, a broken locket.

  “Tell me about Gramma,” I said.

  Boo rolled her eyes.

  “Please?”

  “Which story?” she asked, loosening one of the reluctant necklaces.

  “The one a
bout when she finally left Grampa and took the train to California.” In this story, which Boo and my mother told together, my grandmother wore a straight gray skirt and a hat with a peacock feather. She carried a plaid suitcase in one hand and a train case filled with makeup in the other. In this story, she smelled like Evening in Paris perfume. My mother once found one of the midnight-blue bottles, broken and buried in the mud near the Pond, and she held it in the palm of her hands like a wounded baby bird.

  Boo set the jewelry down and looked at me sadly. “Your mum didn’t go to California,” she said softly.

  My throat ached. I looked at her, but she wouldn’t look at me. Her fingers worked the tangled necklaces, her eyes straining in concentration.

  My throat was thick, my hands shaking. “Tell me,” I said softly. “Please.” And I waited for her to tell me where my mother had gone. She knew.

  But instead she only recited the imagined life she and my mother had made for their mother after she was gone. The pink hotel from the four or so postcards she sent. Chandeliers and white sand. The smell of salty air and smog and the sound of waves that crashed into their uneasy sleep. I clung to the green of palm fronds and the taste of Italian ice eaten with a flat wooden spoon.

  “Boo, where is she? You have to tell me.”

  Boo closed her eyes and offered me explanations, a thousand tangled necklaces I tried to separate in my mind. Your daddy. For a long time. She couldn’t breathe. But I already knew why. What I didn’t know was where. But just as I opened my mouth to demand that she tell, Becca opened the door and stood there in a hot-pink dress two sizes too big, waiting for compliments, and I felt sad and sorry that I’d even tried.

  Later, after Boo had given us supper, Quinn pulled into the driveway and waited patiently for Becca to pick out the few things she wanted to keep before he took us back home. Sometimes Daddy was there, but that night he didn’t get home until after I’d let myself slip off the edge of the wooden pier into the cold dream water where an undertow threatened and birds screamed.