The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [36]
As if I am committing a crime, I will take an item—a paperweight, a dried-flower arrangement, a small cameo brooch of my great-great-grandmother’s—and “accidentally” dispose of it on trash day. I’ve done this on a whim, never planned. I’ll see something resting on a shelf and feel the need to grab a piece of newspaper or an old rag and cloak it, like a magic trick. Then I’ll walk rapidly to the curb and dump it into the sole pristine can of labeled waste waiting to be forked up by the garbage truck. A lightness overtakes me. One less stone weighing me down.
I looked at the weeping Buddha, the size of a fist and carved of gnarled wood. It would be the first item of my own that I disposed of—a gift from my child. But as I reached out to grab it, I thought of Manny.
I touched the Buddha with my fingers but let it remain on its stand.
I walked upstairs to my bedroom, trying not to think of Manny having sex in one of the rooms of my mother’s house while, most likely, she was downstairs, sitting in her chair in the living room. What did I owe him besides the tips I had given him above and beyond what my mother had paid him?
I turned on the bedside lamp. What had I been reading before this day began? Emily had sent me a new translation of the Tao Te Ching. The slim volume itself was comforting to hold, but when I opened the pages and tried to read, it was as if all language had turned to Xs. I was not a fish or a door or a reed and never would be. I was a fetid human creature ŕ la Lucian Freud.
Over my dresser I had hung an early drawing Jake had done of me. He’d based it on a photograph Edward Weston took of Charis Wilson before she became his wife. I sat the wrong way on one of our metal-and-vinyl kitchen chairs from the house we shared in Wisconsin. I wore my childhood Brownie beanie, which Jake drew to resemble Wilson’s sporty beret, and a bra and short slip. When I spread my legs, I made the slip come up to the tops of my thighs. Though you could see nothing through the slip, which drifted down to act as a veil, the invitation was there. With that drawing, I went from being a bright student in the classrooms of my professors to being a pinup in the faculty gallery attached to the university library.
I crawled into my bed and pulled the blankets over me. I remained fully dressed in my soiled clothes. I thought of the nightly rituals of beauty that I had learned growing up. How adult I felt the first time my mother applied moisturizer to my feet. After this came socks and then old-fashioned lace-up ankle weights. “Otherwise,” my mother said, “you’d rip the socks off in the middle of the night and ruin the effect.” As I drifted off to sleep, I remembered one of so many countless phone calls from Mrs. Castle over the last few years. She had arrived to find my mother wearing dainty Danish-green cotton gloves, over which she’d fastened a pair of aluminum handcuffs. She had informed Mrs. Castle that she had misplaced the key. Did I happen to remember where it was?
SEVEN
I was eight when my father had an accident in his workshop and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital. He did not come home for three months, and I was not allowed to see him. My mother said he would be gone for exactly ninety days and was visiting friends and family in Ohio. When I asked who, or why we couldn’t join him, she hushed. Mr. Forrest’s visits grew more frequent, and the Donnellsons and Levertons brought us meat loafs and casseroles, which I often found on the stoop after school.
I would let myself in and sit at the dining room table, reading. I allowed myself just enough light via the dimmer switch on the chandelier so that when darkness fell, the house did not go black. My mother came down from her bedroom in the early evening, and we made dinner together. I had decided, after my father had been gone a week, to hoard the casseroles. Instead we made peanut butter on Ritz crackers, or Swanson suppers, or my favorite: endless rounds of cinnamon toast. My mother would