The Hunger Moon (15 page)

J
UNE ARRIVED HOME TO FIND HER MOTHER
sitting on the living-room floor surrounded by bundles of dyed fibers. Her curly hair was too far between trims and stood out around her head in a great brown cloud. Little wisps of wool clung to her sweat suit, which was in need of washing and a half-size too tight. The couch and all the chairs were covered with weavings and sketches, and the loom occupied the space most people would leave open for walking. June looked around.

“No Christmas tree?”

“June, it is customary for a mother and a daughter who have not seen each other in a month to begin by saying hello. Some would even say a kiss would not be too extreme.”

“Sorry. Hi, Mom,” June said, giving her a peck on the cheek. “Don’t we have a Christmas tree?”

Her mother sighed. “June, I just couldn’t get around to it. If you want to go get a tree, take money from my purse.”

“That’s a lot of fun,” June said under her breath.

“What, dear?” her mother asked, peering down her bifocals at two bundles she was comparing. “Which red do you like better with those colors over there, this cranberry or the burgundy?”

“They look the same to me.” June stepped around the samples her mother had woven and spread out on the floor. “What’s for dinner?” She didn’t know why she was asking; she knew from long experience that dinner would be a do-it-yourself affair. But she wanted to imply that something
should
be for dinner when she came home for a visit.

“I thought you would have eaten before taking the bus. If you’re hungry, there’s sandwich stuff in the fridge.”

“No, thanks.”

“Why don’t you sit down and talk to me while I weave this sample? How did the semester end?”

“Okay. I got A’s and B’s.”

“That’s wonderful, June.” Her mother beamed at her. “You’ve always done so well. Have you thought about graduate school?”

“A little.” She had been thinking about her fib to Owen about going to New York and joining a dance company. Maybe it
hadn’t
been a lie; maybe she was trying to tell herself something.

“Would you stay with psychology?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” June played with a skein of yarn lying on the frayed arm of the overstuffed chair she was slumped in. “I saw Dad.”

“Is that right?” Her mother stopped the clacking of the loom and frowned at the two inches she had woven. “How is he?”

“He and Melanie are going to have a kid.”

Her mother stopped fussing with the weaving and put her hands in her lap. She gazed at June without speaking.

“How’s that for a laugh,” June went on, trying to sound light. Maybe if she played it up like a joke she could soften it for her mother. June supposed it was better that her mother heard it from her, anyway. And the sooner the better; give her a chance to get used to it. “Dad doing the family thing again. Wants to get it right this time, he said.” She laughed, but it didn’t sound right.

Her mother was still silent. June couldn’t stop herself now.

“This is the best part, Mom. When I saw him, he said Melanie
couldn’t come to Boston because she was in Florida at a spa. She wanted to keep working on her figure, even during the pregnancy, he said.”

“June—”

“Don’t feel bad, Mom,” June rushed in, afraid she had hurt her mother’s feelings with the reference to Melanie’s figure. “He’s still a shit. He’s exactly the same. You were so lucky to get out of that, you know.” Her voice shook despite her best efforts.

“June.” Her mother crossed the room and put her arms around her. June started bawling like a baby, nuzzling her face into her mother’s sweatshirt until it was soaked.

“Oh, my poor little girl, my little June,” her mother cooed, rocking her back and forth. “I’m so sorry.”

T
HEY WENT OUT FOR HAMBURGERS
and stopped at a lot on the way home to buy themselves a small Christmas tree. Her mother tied bows of colored yarn around the tips and June fished in the attic for the decorations. Every time she unwrapped a box, her childhood rose in images before her: holding her father’s gloved hand while they waited in line for Santa; kissing her parents good night on New Year’s Eve before they left her with the baby-sitter, her mother strange to her in perfume and lipstick, her father like someone on TV in his tuxedo. June put the boxes away. She came upon a Woolworth sack with a package of colored balls still sealed in their original plastic; her mother must have picked them up at an after-Christmas sale. She brought it down and hung the twelve glass balls, carefully spacing them.

“That’s enough balls, don’t you think?” she asked her mother. “I think I’ll string some popcorn for it, too.”

Her mother smiled and nodded, and kept the shuttle evenly moving back and forth on the loom. It was a soothing sound. Carols were playing on the stereo, and her mother had made cocoa. June went to the kitchen to microwave the popcorn, and surveyed the walls while she was waiting. Her mother still had practically every piece of artwork hanging that June had ever made her. Beside the window was a small dusty weaving made out of wool, grasses, and bark from summer camp. She took it down and brought it out to show her mother.

“I can’t believe you still have this.”

“Oh, I love that. Don’t you remember? I thought it was so beautiful that I started collecting scraps of things to weave myself. That’s what led me to take my first fiber class.”

June remembered. She had been embarrassed by her mother’s craft enthusiasms, but relieved that something finally interested her during that period after her father had first left them. For months after his departure, Alice had not cleaned, had not shifted things in the house to cover the bare spots where he had taken things from, and had bathed and changed clothes only sporadically. June had made excuses for her to her friends, saying that her mother had the flu, that they were getting rid of things and so the house was a mess, that they should go over to their houses instead of her own because her mother had gone back to school and had to have the house quiet to study. When Alice took up ceramics, and began spending hours at her potter’s wheel, covering herself with little splashes of clay, June began to worry less. Her mother became like one possessed, staying up until three in the morning to get a pot thrown just right, silent for hours at a time while she painstakingly applied glazes.

Their Christmas Eve was quiet; only her father’s relatives lived nearby, and June saw them even less than she saw her father. Alice cooked a pot roast and June made brownies from a mix. When they were finished baking, June cut them carefully into sixteen pieces so that she would know exactly how many calories were in each. After they ate, they sat by the Christmas tree and opened each other’s presents. June handed her mother her gift. Alice unwrapped it eagerly.

“Oh, June, what a beautiful shade of blue. And I need a new robe.” Her mother tried it on over her T-shirt and jeans and sat wearing it.

June’s mother had filled a stocking for her: soaps, bubble bath, dance tights. Then she gave her a slim envelope and a large box.

“Which one first?” June asked.

Her mother shrugged. “The big one, I guess—it’s riskier. I’m pretty sure you’ll like the envelope.”

June unwrapped the box and found a weaving of her mother’s about a yard square, mounted for hanging on a rod. It was a mix of many colors, yet they were muted and soft, like a landscape in milky light. There were rough, nubby textures in it, shot through with silkier threads, and here and there a ribbon, a lace, a piece of cloth.

“I don’t know if you like my weavings, June. You’ve never really said.”

“You know I do, Mom. This one’s great. Thanks.”

“Well, this one was especially made for you. These silks are the color of your hair.” Alice pointed to a coppery brown thread. “This lace is from a piece of a baby dress you wore. This is a hair ribbon from when you were a little girl. This string is from your first pair of dance shoes. Then there are some colors that make me think of you: pink June roses, a watery blue for the ocean we’d go to every summer around the time of your birthday.” Her mother’s eyes were bright. “I had such fun working on it. It felt like I was making something whole out of your childhood; I know we botched things up pretty horribly for you at the end.”

“Don’t say that. Dad was the one who ruined everything.”

“It takes two, sweetheart. I guess I wasn’t really paying attention to things he missed. Things got kind of old hat for him around here. I mean with me, the marriage—nothing to do with you.”

“Mom, he’s a shallow son of a bitch.”

“June.” Her mother tried to look stern. Then she laughed. “Well, you wouldn’t really call him deep.”

Her mother’s other present to her was a pair of tickets for the Twyla Tharp company coming to Boston in February. Alice had always encouraged June’s love of dance. From the time June was twirling around the house at the age of four, a make-believe ballerina, through the years when she was enrolled in first ballet,
then tap and jazz, then finally modern dance, her serious love, her mother had gone faithfully to recitals, bought leotards, and run interference for her with her father over dance-class bills. Alice was the mother who could always be counted on to ferry car-loads of little girls back and forth to the dance studio.

D
URING THE REST OF THE VISIT
, June ran every morning, wearing sweats layered over tights. Running wasn’t her favorite kind of exercise; it made her leg muscles shorten and bulk up, and she had to stretch for an hour afterward to reverse the effects. But the exercise made up for all the junk food she ate when she visited her mother. The two of them watched television every night, and June couldn’t help munching on everything she found in the cupboards. Every morning she was filled with such self-reproach that she added another mile to the run, until by the end of the week she was up to ten. Her knees ached with every step and she knew she should take a day off. But the next day she rose at six and slipped out of the house again. She couldn’t stop after five miles anymore, or six, or seven; she needed to feel herself grow dizzy before she thought she had gone far enough. She loved her morning shower after the run, rubbing the concave space that was her stomach, knowing that she had eaten zero calories so far, and that she had burned off a thousand. It was the way she wished she could feel every minute of her life—her appetite as quenched as a saint’s.

On the way to the bus station for her return to Boston, June stopped with her mother at the community art center where Alice had hung three weavings for sale on consignment. None had sold. June’s mother took them off the walls and shook some dust out of them.

“I think I’ve come a long way since these, don’t you, June?” Alice asked, unrolling her newest work to hang. “My textures are much more intricate now. I’m glad these didn’t sell, because now I see how amateurish they were.”

“Sure, Mom,” June said, embarrassed for her. What her moth
er needed was a real job; her father reminded June every time he saw her that her mother’s alimony would be running out when June finished college. But Alice seemed oblivious to this reality, and kept waiting for her “apprenticeship with the arts” to pay financial dividends. Even the rejection of having her pieces hung unsold for three months didn’t faze her. She seemed happy, hummed even, as she rolled up the old weavings, while June burned with the shame of her mother’s failure, which, inexplicably, felt like her own.

R
ENATA STAYED IN ON
C
HRISTMAS
and roasted a small turkey. Eleanor was visiting her daughter today, and June was at home with her mother. It would be just Renata and Charlie.

She helped Charlie unwrap his packages. She had bought him a toy plastic telephone he was not quite old enough to appreciate, a ball that he liked well enough until it rolled away from him twice in a row, and a soft stuffed dinosaur he didn’t really notice. He had fun, though, crinkling the paper and chewing on the ribbon, until Renata noticed that the dye was coming off all over his chin and took it away. She opened a box that Marcia and the kids had sent her; it contained a cashmere scarf, with matching gloves and cap, in a shade of red just slightly too orangy to wear with her new red coat. There was also the present Jess had made Charlie: a Santa Claus doll made out of pipe cleaners. But she couldn’t let him have because of the tiny sequins Jess had glued all over Santa’s felt coat. Renata would call and thank them later, but she couldn’t summon the energy yet.

There was nothing like Christmas to show you how many—or how few—people you had in your life. The baby had fallen asleep on a blanket in front of the Christmas tree. Renata wasn’t ready to carry him to his crib yet. As soon as she put him down for the
night, she would officially be alone. She stretched out on the sofa, lifting Charlie to a spot nestled inside the crook of her arm. They dozed together under a blanket as the room grew dark except for the tree lights glowing.

The phone rang, waking her. She groped for it, trying not to disturb the baby. Charlie continued to sleep beside her, nuzzling his face into her side as she shifted.