The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [31]
It was on a drive with Natalie that I discovered the view of the Limerick nuclear plant. It was during a long, humid afternoon in the early ’80s, when I was visiting my parents with Emily in tow. Sarah had stayed in Madison with Jake.
Every time I came home to Pennsylvania from Wisconsin, I would call Natalie, and we would go for long drives during which neither one of us would talk. It was our way of being alone without being alone, and it provided a justifiable excuse, to my mother, to Jake, to Natalie’s husband, to get away for a little while from the emotional hotbeds that were so benignly labeled “domesticity.”
We would purposely set off to get lost together. We would dead-end on old farm roads that hadn’t been used for years or find ourselves in isolated churchless graveyards, our feet sinking into the gaps of air left by the only frequent visitors—the moles. Once lost and outside the car, wandering, we would easily separate, trusting that we would find each other again. If I looked for her, I might come up behind a long-dead chestnut tree and hear her crying. In those moments, I would feel the cords of my upbringing pulling me back. I had not been raised to hug or to comfort or to become part of someone else’s family. I had been raised to keep a distance.
As I drove by the chicken coops and dark backyards and then hit the old keystone tunnel that separated the partial town from the rangy farmland and incipient suburban development on the other side, I noticed that Hamish had fallen asleep. His head nodded on the stem of his neck, and I saw no reason to disturb him. Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I’d spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you realized the thread woven through your DNA carried the relationship deformities of your blood relatives as much as it did their diabetes or bone density?
Over the past ten years, Hamish had been brought in for various jobs around my mother’s house. After anything Hamish did, from installing a sprinkler system that kept the hedges and ivy watered along the curb to once wedging himself into the smallest crawl space to rescue a feral cat, my mother had rewarded him with food. I would arrive in the afternoon to see how things had gone and find him sitting at the dining table, surrounded by the tins of cookies that were my mother’s contraband.
Once, when my mother had gone back into the kitchen to, grudgingly, I felt, bring me a cup for tea, Hamish had seen the expression on my face.
“She told me you used to have problems with your weight.”
He held out the tin of fudge, which, as my mother aged and I assisted at the helm, had become grainy with sugar.
“No, thank you, Hamish,” I said.
“More for me!” He placed an entire square of fudge in his mouth, then winked at me.
I remembered taking the girls to various toddler parties held on the other side of the keystone tunnel. I would stand in the kitchen with the mothers, wondering what demonic communal mind created games like bouncing up and down on balloons until each child broke theirs, fell on the floor, and then ran to an appointed place to be showered with candy. Once, I had been beckoned in the middle of the night by the clipped voice of another mother. Emily had wet the bed at a slumber party. When I arrived to pick her up, she was sitting alone in the hallway on a rubber dog mat with jam in her hair. And while Emily pissed, Sarah hit. She kicked. She called the other children Fat Assholes, Big Babies, and her favorite, Jerk Bastards. The two of them reminded me of polarized Scottie magnets.
I looked over at Hamish and found myself wondering about a man who chose never to leave home. This choice seemed an unwise one to me, and yet, ultimately, it had been the one I too had made.
The car took the familiar loft