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“Ms. Skinner,” she began. “My name is Luna.” “Luna?” I said, and my voice caught, my breath stilled. For a moment I traveled back all those years to a different place and time. At last, I thought. Luna has returned. “Yes. My mother named me after the last line of The Love Poem,” she said.
“The Love Poem meant so much to her. I want to know, for my mother. Who was your inspiration? Who was Luna?”
A sweat rose along my hairline. It was a question I’d always refused to answer publicly. And privately; even Henry didn’t know the truth. But of course I should have expected it tonight. Isn’t that why I’d agreed to speak one last time? Isn’t that why I was here? To finally tell this story. An old regret lodged in
“When I was young, I tried dissecting love, setting it up on a table with a good strong light and poking, prodding, slicing. For years I believed it possible to identify the crux, the core, and that once you found this essential element you might tend it like a rose and grow something beautiful. Back then I was a romantic. I didn’t understand that there’s no stopping betrayal. If you live long enough and well enough to know love, its various permutations and shades, you will falter. You will break someone’s heart. Fairy tales don’t tell you that. Poetry doesn’t either.”
“Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a father and a mother and four children, three girls and one boy. They lived together in a house like any other house, in a town like many other towns, and for a time they were happy.” I paused, and all those faces in the auditorium stared down on me, all those eyes. “And then—” I stopped again, faltering. I sipped my glass of water. “And then there was the Pause. Everything started there.
this is a story about the failures of love, and the Pause was the first.”
Noni led us through that awful day with an iron grip on two of our eight hands. She alternated, she did not play favorites. She had four children, and we all needed to feel the warmth of her palm.
Their nails were dirty, but their souls were clean.
Noni was Catholic and felt it in her knees that ached from all the praying but not, she realized that day, in her heart. This was the last time she would entertain the rituals of organized religion, the last day she would bow her head to the words of a man wearing white.
and I felt a strange, empty excitement. A near hysteria. Plus all the food. Everywhere! Bowls of green grapes and Chex Mix and hard butterscotch candies and potato chips. Platters of ham-and-cheese sandwiches cut into neat triangles, cubes of watermelon that leaked pink juice onto the white tablecloth. I grabbed what I could and ate it quickly, unsure as to what was permitted here, what would be allowed. It soon became clear that anything was allowed when your father has died. I spied Joe beneath a table with an entire bowl of hard candies and three cans of Coca-Cola. Caroline took off her
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With a shoeless toe, she rocked the chair back and forth, back and forth. The movement soothed me like a ship on the sea or a car on a bumpy road. This is how I would always imagine Renee: as a steadiness in times of turmoil.
Would?
I was on Renee’s lap when it began. I don’t know what triggered Joe’s fury.
he took aim at the photographs that stood on top: pictures of what we, the Skinners, had been until that day. Six together. Ellis and Antonia, Renee and Caroline and Joe and little Fiona. Crash. Six together on windswept New England beaches and before tinselly Christmas trees, grinning and mugging, arms over shoulders, holding hands. Crash. We were gap-toothed children and anonymous infants, full-cheeked within our swaddles. Our parents were proud and exhausted, bright, blameless, beautiful even in their polyester and plaid. Crash. All of it, gone.
I wondered then, and I would wonder for the rest of my life: why did our mother not take the poker from Joe’s grasp, wrap her arms around him, tell him that everything would be okay?
I believe this was the moment when we each assumed responsibility for our brother, Joe. A lifelong obligation of love that each of us, for different reasons, would not fulfill. We would try: Renee in her studied, worrisome way; Caroline carelessly with great bursts of energy followed by distraction; and myself, quiet and tentative, assuming that Joe would never need me,
faltering,
Unsteady :,)
Our mother did not emerge for three days. Then six. Then four. Then six again. This continued. Occasionally she would appear to cook dinner. Or ask us about our day. Or preside over a cut knee, a sunburned shoulder, a snotty nose. But primarily she rested in her room, door closed, curtains drawn, lights off. A bubble of darkened quiet that we feared to disrupt. How long did it last? Renee later claimed three years, give or take.
When we were older, we called this period “the Pause,” but back then we had no words to describe it. We pretended that it was okay. This was temporary, we told ourselves. We must wait for Noni to finish resting. We must wait patiently for her to return.
THAT FIRST SUMMER we went feral. Joe and I became wild things, twigs in our hair, skin brown and dirty and scraped. Renee and Caroline tried to remain more respectable, more mature, but they, too, bore the marks of neglect and adventure. The house was never clean. We pulled what we needed from the cardboard boxes but did not unpack them fully. We played games, built forts, constructed castles that stayed up for days and then scattered underfoot as we played indoor tag or wrestled or fought. We slept in the clothes we wore all day, we did not brush our teeth, we bathed only when we began to
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Joe and I explored our new neighborhood: only six miles from our old house, but it felt foreign. Another state, another country. There were people with brown skin, head scarves, tattoos. The houses were small, and domestic life spilled from windows and doors in ways that would have been unthinkable in our old neighborhood.
it soon became clear that our friends had returned to their normal lives, lives where groceries must be bought, dinners cooked, television shows watched, where loved ones were bothersome but healthy and alive. We reminded them of the constant threat of calamity. How quickly it could all go to pieces.
Omg
There was the soft drop of the sifted flour, the crack of the eggs, the steady buzz of the mixer, and then—ping—out of the oven came the cake, all golden and puffed up like my own private sun.
It would be a terrible thing, I thought, to be separated from your siblings.
I was a precocious and prolific reader, often stealing Renee’s books or ones from the cardboard boxes we had yet to unpack, generally preferring to exist within my own made-up world rather than the real one that surrounded me.
as they poked and picked algae from the rocks like housewives choosing melons.
Renee and Caroline spent their days primarily indoors in front of the fan, where it was cool. They braided each other’s hair and made papier-mâché bowls and beads and masks by wrapping gluey strips of newspaper around the various items they wished to replicate. When they were tired of making things, they watched The Brady Bunch or The A-Team on rerun or sometimes a program that showed a man painting oil landscapes, his voice so calm that it stupefied them. They learned from this man nothing about painting, only that it was possible to spend your entire day in a sort of daze, half awake, half
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Now Ace’s parents left him alone with a ten-dollar bill, a house key, and instructions to keep out of trouble.
Ace went there only because his parents had money and they didn’t know what else to do with him. He boasted that he’d been kicked out of a fancy boarding school in New Hampshire, suspended at public school, and Pierpont Academy was the only place that would take him.
They were friendly, but, I believed at the time, they would never be friends.
At the field the look on his face was always dreamy, his movements casual, but it must have cost him to play like that. To give us the spectacle we craved.
?
He pranced along the top. “Come and get me, Joe,” he said. Joe didn’t go to the top of the dam. None of us did. Renee told us it was too dangerous, we could fall, and we believed her. We all watched Ace jump on one leg, then the other, taunting Joe, daring him. Ace’s feet were wrapped in silver as the water rushed over them. “Come on, Joe,” he said. “You pussy.” And then Ace slipped. One foot dropped over the far side of the dam. He landed heavily on a knee, which cracked with a sickening sound just before he slid off. For an instant Ace’s hands hung grasping onto the lip, water pushing into
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For us the pond marked the edge of our world. Beyond the pond, below the dam, stretched an unknown wilderness.
Soon it became clear that Ace had changed. The challenge that he’d worn like a badge was gone. The bite of aggression between Ace and Joe evaporated. In its place was a new, cautious friendship. Joe treated Ace with kindness and some pity, almost as though he were a much younger child.
Later I understood how every day Ace disappointed his parents simply because of who he was: unambitious, easily distracted, petty-minded. Even then I recognized the signs of that disappointment: the way his mother did not look directly at her son. The way his father walked a pace in front. I found myself feeling sorry for Ace. I found myself unable to recall the Ace that once had seemed like a threat.
The year that Renee turned thirteen, she grew high, round nubs on her chest and hair that went lank and greasy just days after her bath. She exuded a musty, earthy smell and was inhabited by a new atmosphere of churning activity like a spirit possessed. We had all seen the movie Poltergeist, and I thought that this was the only explanation for my sister: an otherworldly occupation.
“But what about your cheek?” I asked. “Who hurt you?” Renee gingerly touched the spot on her face as though discovering it for the first time. “Oh. I . . . um . . .” “She scraped it on the slide,” said Joe. “She ran out so quickly she didn’t duck low enough. So she hit it.” Renee nodded tentatively, then with more force. “Yes, that’s it,” she murmured, again touching her face. “The slide.”
Only girls remained at the mercy of men with bad intentions.
In my notebook I wrote the words dust, dirty, drafty, alone, Gilligan, cold, island, tv, shipwrecked.
“I thought he’d be here,” Joe said. “Who?” I asked. “Dad. We’re looking for Dad. That’s why we’re here.” “Dad?” I barely remembered our father. I thought of him rarely and only with reference to Noni and all that she’d endured. “Joe, are you sure?” “Yes I’m sure,” he whispered fiercely. “Now, shhh. I know he’ll come.” The yearning in Joe’s voice shattered the still air into a million pieces. It shocked me into a stunned silence.
I never told anyone about this episode, although later I came to see it as a marker of the end of the Pause. Certain things had become unsustainable. Certain pressures threatened to explode. Renee’s responsibilities, Caroline’s nightmares, Joe and his . . . I didn’t know what to call it. His lack. The way he had everything and nothing. The way he smiled and flicked back his cowlick and said everything that everyone wanted to hear, and yet it seemed that his manner began outside himself, externally, with the wishes of others who wanted something from him. Coach Marty, Noni, the team, his
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Twice weekly the four of us walked from home to the Bexley playing field. The route consisted of one mile of calm, tree-lined residential streets followed by one and a half miles of flat, fast Route 9, a four-lane highway running through empty fields of tall, yellowed grass and splintered old fences, the occasional neglected house, and one you-pump gas station. There was no sidewalk, so we walked in the breakdown lane or in the grass.
My heart
“Joe Skinner, is that you?” “We’re on our way to practice,” Renee answered, still walking. “I’m taking Joe to the field.”
Sad
Caroline. “Let’s go with him.” There were dark half-moons beneath her eyes. Her tolerance for this life had reached its limits.
What before had been only Noni resting, always resting, now appeared to me terrible.
I wrote muscle, broom, thick, bristle, warm, squeak, soap, gravy, meat, full.
“But I didn’t realize both your parents were dead. And no siblings. I hadn’t realized you were so alone, Antonia. Really, I hadn’t.”
We saw in these stories a Noni who enjoyed her life away from us. This life of drama and intrigue that existed far from the confines of the gray house and us, her children.
Thank goodness nothing horrible happened.” We would look at one another and say nothing about the pond, or Ace’s accident, or the man who followed Renee from the bus stop. In fact, we told Noni nothing about the Pause.
