Laughing Down the Moon (3 page)

“Happy All Sah-veeeeen, Veronica!” Trisha called.

Veronica tossed her coat over the banister. She wore a low- cut dark green blouse that showed off her deep, soft cleavage. An even darker green velvet skirt with black lace edging and her tiny black ankle boots finished the outfit. She and I smiled at each other over Trisha’s careful pronunciation.

Veronica called back, “Thank you, my dear!”

“What’s in the bags?” Patrick asked, setting the backpack on the floor and draping the cloak over the back of a chair. He returned to Veronica’s side and started peering into the folds of black tissue paper that filled the intriguing silver bags.

“Never mind, nosy!” Veronica jerked the bags out of Patrick’s reach. Her brown eyes were shiny with secret knowledge. She loved surprising us with what she called her little giftees. “See if you can find some patience in one of those wineglasses,” Veronica said.

“Harrumph. I’ll find
something
in here,” Patrick said, holding out an empty glass and inspecting it by the light cast from the collection of candles on the fireplace hearth, “but I doubt it will be patience.”

He filled it with wine and passed it to me, then handed another to Veronica. She found a space for herself on the floor as Patrick filled the remaining three glasses, called to Trisha and passed one to her after she set a stack of five small white plates on the coffee table. Trisha settled in on the floor beside me. She leaned against the couch, tucked a strand of her flaxen hair behind one ear and inhaled deeply over her wine.

“Ahh,” she breathed out.

“Everybody ready?” Veronica asked.

We nodded and looked at each other to make sure there was nothing else that needed to be said before we honored those who had passed before us with our silent supper. I was more than ready this year. Having to listen to Patrick tell Veronica about the laugh yoga mishap this morning was not high on my list of fun evening activities, so I was relieved to be entering at least an hour of silence. If the story came up after dinner, well, so be it. For now, I welcomed the communal solitude.

“Wait!” Trisha hopped up, dashed to the mp3 deck and turned the volume up. “There’s nothing worse,” she said, “than listening to chewing during these silent suppers.” She arranged herself on the floor next to me again. “That’s okay, isn’t it? To have music at dinner, I mean. It’s not silent, but—”

“Of course it is,” said Veronica, nodding. Her lingering glance touched all of us. I knew she was going through some of the ritual in her head, rather than in actuality, in order to not weird out Patrick. She cleared her throat and sat taller, kneeling with her heels tucked beneath her beside the low table. “Okay,” she continued, raising her wineglass toward the middle of the coffee table, “tonight, in silence, under the light of the waxing moon and with the warmth of the creatures of fire, do we honor those who have come and gone before us. Let us do what we can to walk respectfully in their steps and be open to their words tonight if they need to reconnect themselves with us to offer guidance. We give thanks for another wonderfully abundant harvest, and we give thanks for the beginning of the end of yet another incredible year. God, Goddess, Mother Earth, let us sense you in every way possible as we honor our ancestors.”

With this, she set down her glass, carefully sliced a bit of cheese from the hunk and placed it on one of the small plates. She put two crackers on the plate beside the cheese and set the plate in the center of the table. She moved the unclaimed, fifth glass of wine beside the plate and grasped her wineglass again by its stem. She clinked its rim first to the glass in the middle of the table and then to each of ours. We each clinked our own glasses to the center wineglass and then to each other’s. “So mote it be and amen,” Veronica said.

“So mote it be, amen,” we all replied with gusto, our smiles the last act of communication for the next hour. Patrick dipped his head at Trisha and gave her a wink, which she returned.

I loved being with them. I was so grateful that nothing had changed between Patrick and me when Mickey and I had broken up. Or when Mickey dumped me, I should say. Trisha and Mickey were like Bert and Ernie from
Sesame Street
, total opposites, but great friends. They’d known each other long before they met Patrick and me. They had gone to the same all-girls’ Catholic school as children and had been friends since the sixth grade. Mickey had been the one to introduce Patrick and Trisha a few years ago, thinking that they’d hit it off. They had, and the rest was a delicious history.

They were married a year after they met and were, in my eyes, the perfect couple. It was the kiss of death to think of them like that, but there it was. I couldn’t handpick a better mate for Patrick. Trisha was smart, independent, beautiful and gutsy, and Patrick deserved the best of the best, as far as I was concerned. I had told Patrick several dozen times that if Trisha were gay, I’d steal her right out from under him. He had told me each time that if Trisha were gay she would never be under him in the first instance. He makes a good point. I smiled, raised my glass, inhaled the dark aroma and took a large sip of the merlot. I let it have its way with each taste bud as it journeyed over my tongue.

Our first All Samhain with Veronica, all those years ago, had for some reason made me nervous. Now, taking my second sip of wine, I thought of that night. I must have been drinking double-time in order to ease my nerves because before the dinner had ended, I had made eye contact with Patrick, who had then looked at Veronica, who, when I looked over at her, had been staring at me. This absurd eye contact triangle had struck me as infinitely funny, so I had burst out in a big, tipsy laugh, much like I had this morning at yoga. I cringed.

At the time, Veronica had also started laughing. Then Patrick had choked on some bread as he had tried not to laugh with us. Soon he couldn’t even breathe. Veronica, who paled despite being so dark complexioned, had reached out and whacked Patrick hard on the back. Eyes wide, Veronica had stopped laughing, and so had I. The whack had catapulted the bread wad out of Patrick’s throat and right onto the plate that was set to feed and honor the dead. We all stared at that soft little bread ball that had attempted murder, and Veronica had started to cry. Patrick and I had comforted her. I remembered him saying that the dead would not be upset that we ruined their dinner, which had made Veronica begin to cry harder and, at the same time, begin to laugh again.

“No,” she had wept, “I was scared you were going to die!” Her face had been shiny with tears and laughter. We never quite regained our composure that night. That seemed so long ago now, long before Mickey had joined us in our celebrations.

Thinking of that now, I kept my gaze on the dishes at the center of the table. They were the only plate and glass that were not emptying as the dinner went on. Would Patrick empty the plate and glass after Veronica and I left for the night? Or would Trisha? All these years of celebrating Samhain and I never thought about this before. Odd.

I had also never thought about how we looked like a group of poster children for a multispiritual, multiracial ad campaign. Veronica’s brown eyes and brown skin were set aglow by the pale whiteness of Trisha and the golden ruddiness of Patrick. Trisha’s long, flaxen hair stood in ethereal contrast to my own long, dark straight hair. And that helped showcase the wonderful spring of Veronica’s brown hair and the fiery sheen of Patrick’s red hair. I was pretty certain that everyone’s round-shaped eyes highlighted my own almond-shaped ones. And then, too, we ran the gamut of sexual orientation…from straight to lesbian with bases covered in between. Somewhere, a human rights campaign was smiling down on our gathering. Granted, our poster was missing people of Latin and Native American descents, but we did have the Asian, Northwestern European and African angles covered. Funny how these things come together sometimes.

After an hour of silence, Veronica cleared her throat. I never broke the silence because I could never think of anything important enough to say to bring attention away from those who had gone before us to those of us who were still here. Plus, I didn’t trust myself not to crack a joke.

“Blessed be the beings whose spirits may have stopped by for a visit tonight. Blessed be the Goddess, God, and Mother Earth,” Veronica said. I expected more, but she rose, collected the gift bags and deposited one in each of our laps. She then went over to the heavy green cloak she’d brought and draped it across my outstretched legs.

“This is for you—you’ll need it to go with what you learn from the book inside the bag,” she said to me. “And you two won’t need cloaks—or much else for that matter—to go with what you’ll learn from your books.” She smiled devilishly at Trisha and Patrick.

The cloak’s weight pressed my legs to the floor. Its crushed pale green velvet exterior and dark green satin lining thrilled my palms as I ran my hands through its luxurious folds.

“Thank you, Veronica,” I exhaled, “it’s beautiful.”

Veronica’s smile was warm and full.

From my gift bag I pulled a book called
Drawing Down the Moon
by Margot Adler. Drawing Down the Moon was a ritual for bringing the energy of the Goddess into yourself. I realized that it was exactly the ritual I needed to snap out of this funk. I had seen this book before but had never read it.

“Thank you, Veronica,” I said. How did I ever find such wonderful people?

“You’re welcome,” she said, ducking her head a bit. I thought I saw a blush warm her brown cheeks, but it was hard to tell in the candlelight.

I laughed when Patrick held his gift aloft, his smile huge and his eyes alight. His new book was a travel guide to the clothing optional beaches in Europe. He and Trisha were planning a trip for next summer. Trisha’s book was called
Sky-Clad
, evidently also about nudity.

“Well, I sense a theme here,” Trisha said, laughing.

“I’m going to have to put in a few more hours at the gym, I guess,” Patrick sighed, patting his imaginary beer belly.

“As if,” I snorted. Trisha rolled her eyes.

For the next hour or so, we looked over Trisha and Patrick’s new books. I was saving mine for later when I could truly savor the ideas within it. Patrick dog-eared pages in his book as he found beaches that caught his or Trisha’s eye. At the end of the evening as we were saying our goodbyes, I realized I still hadn’t read the text from my sister.

Chapter Three

The Assignments

The daisy-shaped clock on the sky-blue wall ticked as loudly as a time bomb. Dr. Browning shuffled through the papers in my file. Mine, I noticed with some relief, was the thinnest among the files stacked on her desk. I looked at Dr. Browning’s forehead, furrowed behind her clunky black-framed glasses, wondering what she’d add to her earlier informal diagnosis. She wore a white cotton blouse with poufy short sleeves. I counted the blue star-shaped buttons that ran down the front of her shirt until my view was interrupted by her desktop. Seven. Even though I couldn’t see her legs now that she was seated, I knew she had on a full, dark blue skirt that was edged in white cotton lace. And despite the chill of autumn, her bare legs ended in strappy, white high-heeled sandals. Her style, I thought, was too young for her forty-some years. I was almost forty and wouldn’t feel comfortable in poufy short sleeves. Tick, tick, tick, tick. She took out a page of her handwritten notes, placed it on the desk, drew a red ink circle around a word or two and then proceeded to make hasty underlining marks on down the page. Tick, tick. She nodded three times before looking up at me. Her dark hair swung forward with each nod.

“Adjustment Disorder, with a specifically depressed mood, is what I had assumed we’d be dealing with here,” Dr. Browning said, “but there is nothing in the results to lead me to that conclusion. You are not depressed. You have nothing to worry about, other than dealing with the normal variability of day-to-day life.” Tick, tick…pfezzzzz…a dud, thank the Goddess. Wait, if I wasn’t depressed, why did I feel like I had lost my edges and was slipping through life?

“Nothing to worry about?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“How do I get back to feeling normal?”

“Tell me more,” she responded, peering at me through her heavy glasses.

I hated it when people use statements that are so stereotypical of their profession. I sighed.

“I feel like my highs aren’t as high and my lows aren’t as low as they used to be.”

“You want low lows?” she asked, looking at me with that direct I’m-going-to-sort-you-out look.

“No…of course not,” I said. I sat back, folded my arms and then toyed with the garnet beads around my neck as if this would buy me time to think. “But I do want high highs again. I don’t want to feel as if I’ve already lived the best parts of my life. That would just be so…so sad.”

Dr. Browning laughed and said, “I see.” She made an additional underline on the notes from our last meeting, the only meeting where we had actually talked. The second time I’d come to her cheerful office, I’d filled out a Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory to determine where I was emotionally. I didn’t even see Dr. Browning that time, as her assistant had led me into a small pink-walled room and had shown me how to fill out the test. But before the test appointment, I had already told Dr. Browning about what I had been experiencing for the past five months.

Mickey and I had broken up a little over a year ago, but she hadn’t moved out until this past July. I didn’t know if it was her absence and the deafening silence in the house or if it was the gloomy pall cast over my work by humdrum writing assignments, but something had me down. Perhaps I had been feeling down for longer and only since Mickey’s absence had I had time to notice. I didn’t know how to be certain about it, whatever it was. Maybe it was a combination of bad projects and loneliness, or maybe it was something completely unrelated, something like the onset of menopause or maybe a brain tumor that was putting too much pressure on the joy receptors in my brain.