Alice Sebold - The Almost Moon

I had always found this pose awkward. It forced me to look toward my armpit and made me all too aware of my own body. As the years went by, I could see more sunspots on my chest and shoulders, and the resilient skin with which I had been blessed had slackened no matter what inverted poses I was able to do in yoga. Flexibility did not, in the end, trump gravity. I lived on the borderline between a Venus just holding it together and Whistler’s mother in the buff. I thought suddenly, as the dry sea sponge scraped against the tender skin of my armpit, that if I were less flexible, less in shape, I would not have been able to commit either of the crimes of which I now stood guilty. Lifting and hauling my mother would not have been possible. Being attractive to Hamish, unthinkable.

“Helen?” I heard Tanner say. He stood close to the platform. I could smell the garlic capsules he took every day.

“Yes?” I did not break my pose.

“You seem to be shaking. Are you cold?”

“No.”

“Focus,” he said. “Two more on this one,” he announced to the class.

Five years ago and very late at night, Tanner had wanted to draw the skeleton of a rabbit he’d seen in a dusty showcase of the old Krause Biology Building. He had taken me to an art opening, and the evening had ended with us stumbling around without a flashlight in a building that had yet to be renovated. We found many a display case but not the right one, and we had frozen like misbehaving children when we heard the creak of the exit door below us, and Cecil, the elderly security guard, calling into the darkness, “Is anyone there?”

During the renovation of Krause the following year, I walked by and saw bones sticking up out of a Dumpster. Not caring who might see me, I hiked my skirt up and climbed onto some cinder blocks that had been lowered by crane and were still bundled in steel ribbons, so I could see inside the Dumpster. There lay the rabbit skeleton on its side.

It sat now, as pristine as I could have hoped, as the centerpiece of a collection of found objects that Tanner had placed on the long, high windowsill that ran the length of the room. It was the first thing I saw sometimes when I entered the space-the delicate bones of the rabbit next to rocks of various shapes and sizes, a God’s eye made by a student’s child, and an endless collection of sea glass he picked up on his solo journeys to the Jersey Shore.

Now I felt the menacing bones of this rabbit behind me and could not strike the image of my mother rotting in layers until she too was bone. There was something in the idea of it, this slow molting toward yellowed calcium that must be pinned together to prevent collapse, that I found both frightening and comforting. The idea that my mother was eternal like the moon. I wanted to laugh in my awkward pose at the inescapable nature of it. Dead or alive, a mother or the lack of a mother shaped one’s whole life. Had I thought it would be simple? That her substance, demolished, would equal myself avenged? I had made her laugh by playing the fool. I told her stories. I paraded around as a fool at the mercy of other fools, and by doing this I guaranteed that she did not miss anything by choosing to turn her back on the outside world.

By giving up my life to her on a global basis, I bought small moments away. I could read the books I liked. I could grow the flowers I wished. I could drive to Westmore and stand nude on a platform. Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was.

“Change!” Haku barked. I could hear in his tone an admonition to work harder on my pose.

A godsend, this one, after the awkwardness of the last. I sat down sideways on the chair, knowing that the students would have to imagine the edge of the tub beneath me. How my ass would be rounder instead of squared off by the seat of the chair. Again, I reached for the hospital gown and used it as a towel. After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Neck always allowed for a quick massaging squeeze or two to my shoulders before I grew still.

I heard a few students grumble about a lack of time. How they wanted the poses to be longer. There was one boy I particularly disliked, even if I knew myself to be uncharitable. When I was introducing myself in the first week and telling them about myself, describing my daughters-where they lived and what they did-the boy had said, “So you’re, like, as old as my mother.” I had answered, because my pride knew no danger, that I was forty-nine. His two-word response, I told my mother, laughing, was “Vomit city.”

“I tried to seduce Alistair Castle once,” she had said to me. I stopped and stared. Early in her eighties, she’d begun to tell me things I’d never known. How she was touched inappropriately by a friend of her father’s. How she had stopped having what she called “relations” with my father after his accident. How she didn’t care much for Emily, though she enjoyed Sarah’s failed audition stories. “Imagine having to audition to be a waitress,” she’d said, loving that in New York a restaurant job could be so competitive it involved callbacks.

With each of these unexpected revelations, I grew numb, an art I had perfected over time in order to extract the truth behind the flashes.

“And how did your seduction go?” I had asked my mother, my head spinning with the pain this must have caused my father if he’d known.

“Vomit city!” my mother responded, looking into the empty fireplace, whose bricks were painted black. “Marlene Dietrich had it right,” she said. “For about ten years, you can glue rubber bands to your head and pull your skin tight, but after that, it’s about hiding out. At least then you have mystique.”

I wanted to tell her that in terms of mystique, she’d won the lottery. From Billy Murdoch to her blanketed escapades, her mystique was bulletproof, even if it was more about being creepy and strange than unattainable.

She looked from the fireplace to me. She assessed. “You should get plastic surgery. I would if I were your age.”

“No, thanks.”

“Faye Dunaway,” she said.

“Tits, Mom,” I said. “If I get anything done, I’m going to get huge monster tits. I’ll serve dinner on them, and you can eat off the right tit and I’ll eat off the left.”

“Helen,” she said, “that’s disgusting.” But I had made her laugh.

I stood to draw the blinds before turning on her PBS shows for the evening. As I lowered the blinds all the way and then went to the television in the opposite corner, my mother landed her spear: “Besides, Manny and I were talking, and we both think it’s your face that needs work. Your body is still fine.”

What I wanted to say was “I’m glad to know Manny wants to fuck my headless body.” Instead I said, “It looks like Wall $treet Week has been preempted by Live at the Boston Pops. ”

Days later, the rest of her story came out.

“Hilda Castle was in the hospital, having a hysterectomy,” my mother said. “I offered myself.”

The phrase repelled me.

“You what?”

“I tried to seduce him.”

I was holding the large bath towels I used to mask her way to the car, and she was delaying us as she always did when we had to go to the doctor.

I stood just inside the front door and unfolded the first towel, draping it across her shoulders like a shawl. This was the backup. If, for some reason, the towel that was protecting her head and face should fall, she could quickly grab the shawl towel and replace it.

She peered into my eyes, the algae green of the towel darkening her papery skin.

“Does Sarah fuck?”

I knew enough to ignore her.

“We are late for your date with the machine,” I said. My mother was scheduled for an MRI and was deathly afraid. For weeks beforehand, I had arrived to find her lying on the floor of the living room with a ticking alarm clock by her head. “What are you doing?” I’d ask her. “Practicing,” she’d say.