Luna (24 page)

“My goodness,” Rhea remarked, her voice wry, “such splendour! I hardly know myself.”

“Coffee’s ready,” Selena said. She poured four cups and they took them into the living room and arranged themselves lazily around the room.

“I don’t hear them outside,” Diane remarked.

“Kent probably drove them over to Simca’s,” Selena said. “It’s only a couple of miles and it’s not a bad day for a drive.” Diane sighed.

“What luxury,” she said, “not to have to rush around, not to have the kids in my hair.”

“Honestly,” Selena said, “I don’t even know where to start.” Diane looked amused.

“I know,” she said. “Why did I leave Tony. What do I think I’m doing. Have I lost my mind?” She laughed and looked out past Rhea to the snow-filled front yard where a half-dozen partridges were ambling around on the crust of snow, searching for seeds. “Don’t waste your breath, Selena.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you that,” Selena said, hearing the hurt in her voice. But even as she spoke she knew it wasn’t true. Of course she had been going to ask that. She had had little else on her mind for days. Some of her optimistic Christmas mood left her now, and her attention reverted to Phoebe sitting silently in Kent’s armchair, smoothing her smock over her abdomen.

Instead of replying, Diane turned to Phoebe.

“When are you due?” Phoebe didn’t say anything, merely dropped her head so that her neat, straight part revealed the startling whiteness of her scalp.

“She won’t say anything,” Selena said suddenly, surprising even herself. “I don’t know why she won’t.” Phoebe didn’t lift her head. “March,” Selena said. “Late March.” Diane looked at Rhea.

“Did you consider an abortion?”

Rhea said, “Phoebe knew what she wanted.”

“But wouldn’t she consider it?” Diane asked, looking again at Phoebe’s bent head. At this, Phoebe raised her eyes to look at Diane. For a second it seemed as if she might speak, but instead, she looked away to the wall. Diane looked questioningly at Selena and then at Rhea.

Selena said, “She just wouldn’t have it, in the end, although she thought for a while she would. She just … refused.”

Diane was silent. Then to Phoebe’s turned-away head, she asked, “Are you going to give it up?” Phoebe shook her head slowly no. Diane again looked questioningly at Selena, but Selena only shrugged, and sighed.

“We’re going to have a grandchild in this house,” she said, making her voice light, trying to sound pleased.

“You could come and live with me,” Diane offered.

“You’ve got your hands full,” Selena said. “And anyway, I want to look after her. I want her here with me.”

Rhea sat, her body turned so that she could look out the window behind her into the front yard. The partridges had disappeared into the carragana hedge.

“Phoebe is trying to understand this in her own way,” she said, without turning to look at them. A sparrow came and perched on the windowsill and pecked at the window frame, then flew away, knocking some of the fresh snow off onto the bank under the window.

Across the room from her, Phoebe moved abruptly so that Diane and Selena turned to her. She lifted her head.

“Things have to be complete,” she said. “You have to accept what’s given to you.” Her voice was stronger than it had been months before, deeper, too. Selena’s surprise at her speaking was overshadowed by what she was saying. “Rhea helped me.” She paused, but before either Diane or Selena could say anything, if they had been going to, she went on. “When that happened to me, it wasn’t just my body that changed. Everything changed. The world was different after that. Before, everything seemed bright and filled with hope. But afterward, it all became darker, there were shadows where I hadn’t seen any before. I felt as if I
had entered a dreamworld. But now I think that what I left behind, that bright world, was the dreamworld, and this one is the real one.” She looked at them, one by one, meeting their eyes, but there was no certainty in hers, only that intensity and depth.

They didn’t speak. Selena glanced tentatively at Diane. Surely Diane would understand, for wasn’t she lost in some vision of her own, too? But Diane was only leaning forward attentively, watching Phoebe, apparently not intending to say anything. She looked then to Rhea.

“Why did you leave Tony?” Rhea asked, and all their eyes went to Diane. Unexpectedly, she blushed. “Was he such a bad husband?” Rhea went on, her voice filled with amusement. She laughed then, the sound girlish amidst the Christmas decorations, the crumpled paper that had been missed in the cleanup sticking out from under the couch, the open boxes turned this way and that under the Christmas tree, the smell of roasting turkey drifting in from the kitchen.

“No, he wasn’t a bad husband,” Diane said.

“He loves you,” Selena said, accusing without really meaning to.

“I know that,” Diane said.

“Well,” Selena said indignantly. “Is love so easy to come by?” It hurt her to say this.

“Love,” Diane said, gently, and gave a little laugh, dismissing it, then sobering slowly. Selena grasped her coffee cup more tightly with both hands, to stop them trembling.

“I haven’t forgotten when you thought you couldn’t live without him,” she said.

“Ahhh,” Diane said, remembering. “Well, it turns out that I can live without him after all.” Her voice thickened, seemingly drawn from some deeper part of herself that was constant and strong. “I won’t depend on anyone for my life.”

“Your …” Selena began. She had been going to say ‘life?’ or maybe ‘children?’ Diane went on as though she hadn’t spoken.

“Selena,” she said, turning her dark, deep eyes on her sister. “Marriage is wrong. It has nothing to do with love. It’s a fraud. It takes you and turns you into a fake, into a …”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me I’m only a servant,” Selena said. She was amazed at what she had said, amazed at the bitterness she could hear in her own voice. Anger swelled up inside her, she felt like she was choking, but she pushed the words down. The worst of it was that she was not angry with Diane now, but with things she didn’t dare articulate. Rhea turned away from the window in a slow, dignified movement, till she was looking directly at Selena, her eyes piercing through the circle of shadow around her face. Selena felt herself caught in Rhea’s gaze. She made a little noise, a tiny throat-clearing, or perhaps a whimper.

“Can’t you even
imagine
yourself a single, free individual—a soul out there in the universe?” Diane asked. There was a silence as Selena tried to understand this.

“You’re a mother!” she said, appalled.

“Men do,” Diane said, evenly, ignoring Selena’s accusatory tone.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Selena said. Emotions tumbled inside her—anger, sorrow, a desire to be left alone so she could think. Phoebe’s eyes, as she looked at Diane, had a new, speculative look in them. Rhea was looking out the window again, at the blazing blue of the winter sky, at the brilliance of sun striking snow. How can she look at that brightness without shading her eyes? Selena wondered, and then remembered, her eyesight is fading, she’s an old woman, she’ll die soon. And then, Phoebe has spoken at last.

“Men,” she said. “Men do a lot of things.” Involuntarily her eyes sought out Phoebe’s rounded stomach under her smock. Why did Phoebe persist in wearing white? As if she were a bride? A pregnant, virgin bride. She shook her head at this, confused. All of them were pregnant here, Diane with possibility, Phoebe with a child, Selena with the weight of her own unborn and incomprehensible life, Rhea with her death. A chill struck her, and she clasped her coffee cup more tightly to warm her hands—soon I’ll die myself, before I know it—before I’ve lived.

“Oh, Diana, Diana,” she whispered, returning to Diana’s christened name, which they had abandoned long ago in childhood. “You’re a woman. A woman, not a man. You can never be a man.”

“Who’d want to be?” Diana asked, and Rhea chuckled. Diana looked at Phoebe again. Why did they all seem to be talking to Phoebe? “I like being a woman more and more,” Diana said. “I am a woman.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Selena said helplessly. It was all too much for her, and she felt angry with herself because she could only respond to Diana like a child, she who was the older sister, who had raised Diana, been a mother to her. “Say something I can understand,” she pleaded. “Tell me why you left Tony,”

Diana swung her foot back and forth, looked down into her lap, then across the way to where Rhea sat in front of the window, a large, dark shape against the light.

“I’ll tell you a story,” she said, suddenly gay. “When I first went to the city, Tony and the kids and I used to go for walks along the riverbank when the weather was still nice. Sometimes we’d go into the downtown area and stroll along the streets and into that big downtown mall. Everywhere we looked, we saw people. All sizes, all shapes, all ages, all kinds. People in wheelchairs or on crutches or in baby carriages—or striding along with their heads held high, or running, or staggering. Once I saw a woman walking down the busy, main street of the city sobbing out loud, tears pouring down her cheeks. Another time I saw a Chinese man and a thin, dark-haired white woman walking down the street side by side. She was yelling at him, bawling him out and calling him names, telling the story of their lives together. He didn’t run away or even walk faster. He just kept walking, his expression flat, never saying a word to her. One time I saw a policeman arresting a teenage shoplifter in the mall. She was struggling to get away from him, screaming and cursing at him. Would you believe it? And I could tell she loved having everybody stare at her. You see all kinds of things in the mall. Women preening in front of plate-glass mirrors, a lost child crying, prostitutes fighting, small Asian immigrants strolling in clusters, looking lost and sad.”

She paused, swinging her foot again, the one leg crossed over the other.

“At night I go to class at the university …” Selena wanted to say, and who looks after your children? but held her tongue. “One night I was
walking to work from the bus stop. It was midnight, and I was so tired. My eyes were blurring, I couldn’t even see right, and my mind wouldn’t work, you know? I would look at things, but I couldn’t see what they were. I mean, I could see the cars and the signs on the stores—the words—but I couldn’t figure out what they meant. I was stumbling down this city street in the night, with all these … things … around me, and they didn’t make any sense at all.

“I knew my kids were at home in bed, that my husband was with them, I could see them, but I couldn’t understand what they were. I couldn’t understand how they could be my children. I couldn’t understand anything anymore.”

Selena listened, fascinated, appalled, afraid to speak. Diana wasn’t looking at any of them now. It was as though she were explaining to herself.

“Suddenly everything seemed different. I can’t tell you how, but it was as if I could see the world the way it really is—without love and hate and all that wanting … I could see the people, just creatures, you know, just bodies that moved and were warm or cold, that laughed or cried …”

She uncrossed her legs and sat forward, her elbows resting on her red skirt, her chin resting on her fists.

“I thought of Mom, Selena, what I can remember of her dying. I remembered all of it. I remembered things I didn’t even know I knew. Her lying in that bed, day after day, so thin, white-skinned, her eyes sinking deeper and deeper into herself, withdrawing from us slowly. I thought how … we all … die.” Here she laughed a small embarrassed laugh and looked down to her lap. “You remember how she died.”

“I remember,” Selena said, although she never, never thought about it. Both Phoebe and Rhea were motionless.

“At night class I was studying Shakespeare—
Hamlet—
we took it in high school, but I never paid any attention. It didn’t mean anything to me then. But this time I understood, really understood. Ophelia especially.”

Selena couldn’t remember who Ophelia was. Was she the one who drowned? Floating down the river singing that crazy song? The one all the boys had laughed at? Selena remembered blushing over that, as if she were the one floating down the stream singing that nutty song.

“So you see,” Diana said, straightening, putting her arms down by her sides, looking across the room at her sister, “so you see I could hardly go on the same way I always had, after that, could I?”

Suddenly Rhea laughed, that long, ridiculous laugh, and abruptly Diana joined in with her, laughing and laughing.

They were thirteen for Christmas dinner, fewer than usual, but enough to support the weight of the occasion with noise and laughter. Kent sat at one end of the table, Selena at the other, with Rhea on her right. Diana, her children on each side of her and then Tony, Mark, Jason, and Phoebe, Gus, Rhoda, and Sandy, were spread down the sides. They had moved the table into the living room, where there was more room, put another, smaller one against it, then covered them both with a big tablecloth so that the join was barely visible. Then they had set it with Selena’s best china and silver that had been Diana and Selena’s grandmother’s, decorated it with unlit candles in glass holders sitting inside plastic wreaths of holly, and laid a big, bright paper napkin with red poinsettias beside each place setting. A sprig of mistletoe hung in the doorway between the hall and the living room and everybody had been duly kissed and teased under it. Selena looked up and down each side of the table as Kent carved the turkey. It seemed to her that she had much to be grateful for, more than the quick grace Mark had mumbled could ever express.

After Rhea, the children were served first, from the youngest to the oldest. Diana bent to cut Cathy’s turkey for her, and to spoon a little cranberry jelly onto it. When she had finished, Cathy reached for her glass of milk. Diana held it to Cathy’s lips while Cathy got a firmer grip on the glass. Her hand remained around it as Cathy drank, she seemed oblivious to the loud conversations around her, to the passing of bowls and platters and the clink of cutlery against china. As Cathy drank, Diana’s lips moved. In that second, she was pure, a mother.