The Hunger Moon (3 page)

“Mother, when will you admit that this house is too big for
you?” Helen had pressed. She lived the farthest away, in Houston, with her engineer husband and two high-school age children. Eleanor always detected a shade of guilt in her oldest daughter’s voice when they talked about her living alone. But now Janice and Peter added their voices to the argument, and she knew that to her grown children the fact that she stayed in the house irritated them, worried them, and lived in their minds as a problem to be solved.

Peter was an academic and shared a house in Durham, New Hampshire, with a painter. Eleanor suspected that her son was gay, but what pained her was not that his brief marriage had failed, or that he had been living with a man for the last ten years, but that he could not tell her this simple truth about himself.

Janice was unmarried and lived in Cambridge, where she was getting her third graduate degree, this one in public policy at the Kennedy School. She was an inveterate student, having studied French literature at Mount Holyoke, gotten a master’s in education at Harvard, followed by an MBA at Simmons. She had dabbled with a job in college administration, but was now attracted to working in government. Eleanor privately thought Janice would never settle on a career, preferring instead to spend her trust fund on degree after degree until retirement age. Janice seemed deeply afraid of beginning her life, something that Eleanor could not understand.

Eleanor would not have allowed her children to talk her into selling if she had not been ready. The truth was, a house as large as hers required ballast, and Eleanor’s hollowed out bones were no match for its Victorian hulk. She was tired of telling the landscapers to put a proper edge to the flower beds, and of nagging the housecleaner to dust the light fixtures and sweep behind the stove. The house longed for entropy: its shingles flew off during storms, its pipes corroded, its steps sagged, its boiler cracked. It wanted to sink into a blowzy old age with her, and she had enough work to do in getting herself up and groomed every morning, and out into the world for her few errands. She agreed to sell, and chose
a sleek modern apartment in Brookline with no nooks and crannies, no architectural complications of any sort. Her new apartment was utterly without history, her own or any other, as the building was so new. She moved into it with relief, and an immense lightening of spirit.

I
T WAS A DAY IN
N
OVEMBER,
unseasonably warm, and Eleanor was rummaging for the scissors when the phone rang. She frowned, pushed her short-distance glasses up on her nose, and left the kitchen drawer open while she went to answer.

“Hello?”

“Please hold while we connect you to receive this important call….”

For a brief second, Eleanor didn’t understand. Who was calling her? It was a man’s tinny voice, excited and sincere like a television commercial. That was it—a commercial advertisement was calling her. She slammed the phone down. Did they think the world was full of imbeciles? Did people actually wait in their own homes while a recording put them on hold? She took a deep breath and went back to the kitchen. The drawer was open, but it took her a few moments to remember why. Scissors.

Though she had been in the apartment for two months, the packing boxes were still stacked neatly around her apartment; in some cases they had been draped with scarves and doilies so that they resembled odd cubes of furniture. Items had started to collect on them—hats, mail, a flower arrangement Helen had wired her for her birthday. It was the clutter on top that finally spurred her to finish unpacking. She had circled this day on her kitchen calendar, a Monday at the beginning of a clear week that bore no neatly jotted medical appointments, no lunch with Janice, no library books due. It was the white expanse of a whole week that finally gave her the courage to slice one box decisively down the center of its strip of clear packing tape and see what was inside.

The memories of her Belmont house that were attached to the familiar objects were almost overpowering. Oddly, she had not thought much about the house on Rosewood Avenue since the day
she had met with her broker to convert the check from its sale into various neat certificates and folders and slim bank books. She had thought she would miss the house more than she did, had imagined dreaming for months about its many rooms and hallways, but in fact she had not had one dream about the house. Any dream that she now woke up remembering was strangely place-less, or the place was free of walls and ceilings, like a great field or stretch of sand.

Inside the box were white tissue-wrapped bundles, Eleanor’s handiwork. She wouldn’t let any of her children help her pack, knowing they would place things haphazardly inside, mixing up rooms, using insufficient paper for padding, forgetting to label the outside. This box was marked L
IVING ROOM: MEMENTOS AND OBJECTS.
Such labeling had allowed her to unpack the necessary items when she first moved in, and set up a functional, if spartan, household. She had put away items from K
ITCHEN: FLATWARE, EVERYDAY DISHES, COFFEE AND BASIC COOKING, DISHTOWELS;
B
ATHROOM: TOWELS AND TOILETRIES;
and B
EDROOM: SHEETS AND BEDDING
. She had hung the clothes packed in suitcases, but not opened the cartons labeled C
LOTHING: SUMMER;
C
LOTHING: RESORT;
C
LOTHING: ACCESSORIES;
or any of the other seasons or categories. In fact, she had found that she did very well living in a few pairs of stretch pants, loafers, and half a dozen sweaters and cotton jerseys, with one heavier coat hanging alone in her hall closet. But it was November now, and she should probably at least get at C
LOTHING: WINTER OUTERWEAR
and, maybe, if she felt up to it, C
LOTHING: PARTY
. She would probably be going out to a concert or an eggnog party, as well as her daughter’s annual Christmas Day dinner.

Gingerly, Eleanor unwrapped the first bundle. It was a clay figurine of a peasant woman she had bought in Mexico a few years ago. She placed it on her bookshelf and turned to the next bundle: a painting on linen from India. She placed it on the carpet to wait for hammer and nail for hanging. Gradually the wrinkled sheets of tissue paper formed a pile beside her and the souvenirs of her travels
assumed their accustomed places on her shelves and tables. Eleanor sat back on her heels and surveyed the room. The apartment was starkly white, with a sliding glass door to the deck and wall-to-wall slate-gray carpeting. Her exotic dolls, ornamental paperweights, rice-paper fans, brass animal statuettes, and porcelain plates suddenly annoyed her. Their placement around the living room had been too automatic: the doll from Kenya by the lamp, the Japanese tea set arranged in a semicircle on the top shelf of the bookcase. And yet, for all their familiarity, the objects were alien clutter in this room. What had accumulated naturally in her house over the years now seemed a grotesque and ridiculous assortment. Eleanor began to rewrap the objects, packing the box as full and snug as it had been before. She found a roll of packing tape and sealed it shut.

The walls were bare, the bookshelves bare. This disturbed her children, but Eleanor had grown used to the spare lines and empty space. The hollow feeling pleased her. What was jarring was the gathering of junk on top of the boxes, and the bulky presence of the boxes themselves, neatly stacked as they were. She tested the weight of L
IVING ROOM
:
MEMENTOS AND OBJECTS
, and found she could lift it. Bending at the knees, she hefted the box and walked it into the spare room. Laboriously she collected all the boxes from the rooms where the movers had placed them and transferred them to the empty second bedroom. The boxes she couldn’t lift she pushed along the carpet. Finally she collected all the catalogs and junk mail she had been building up and swept them into the trash. The flowers, past their prime, went too. When she was done, the apartment seemed uninhabited: sofa, armchair, bare bookcase, and walls. End tables with nothing on them.

She drifted absently from kitchen to sliding glass door, sipping a glass of water, trailing her fingers along the smooth surfaces that everywhere met her fingers. No distractions. No busy colors. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of it earlier: the release that pure emptiness could bring, the relief of letting your eyes rest on nothing but white.

S
HE WAS GOING TO BE LATE, AS USUAL
. Somehow the hour she had to kill before the appointment with Mrs. MacGregor had drifted away over a newspaper in the student center and now she was running to the Kenmore station. Not a great way to start a new job. June saw the C train coming, and breathed a sigh. A break.

Settling into the first available seat, she tucked her parka under her, resting her arms on her red nylon backpack. The woman next to her was knitting something garish out of cheap acrylic yarn. Her face, puffy, middle-aged, a blunt fringe of bangs and bright slash of lipstick, was a picture of happy industry. She reminded June of her mother—cheerful and scatterbrained, unconcerned about her appearance, with dozens of half-begun craft projects littering the house, filling every inch of empty space after the divorce.

June had been discouraged from getting to know her father’s new wife, who lived with him in Chicago. Melanie the Elegant. With her Chanel suits and lacquered nails, she was definitely not the arts-and-crafts type. Melanie had long red hair, the only wife June had ever seen with hair all the way down her back. Her mother’s hair was short and brown, and she had kept June’s similarly
mousy hair clipped short when she was a child. June’s hair was now down to her waist; she gave it a henna rinse every three weeks.

After her father left, she had tried to give her mother makeovers from the pages of her
Seventeen
magazines, but Alice had resisted June’s offered hairstyles and tips for applying makeup, the calorie-counter tables and low-fat recipes. By thirteen June had given up on trying to create a new mother, a sophisticated one like Melanie, and instead had gone to work on herself. Her mother, distracted with her weaving and stenciling classes, scarcely seemed to notice June’s transformation. Her daughter had emerged from a slightly pudgy junior high school student into a swanlike teenager. June had decided that food was less necessary to her than wearing size three jeans. For breakfast she had an instant chocolate drink that was guaranteed to contain all the vitamins and nutrients she would need in a day. For lunch she bought a salad at the school cafeteria and drizzled the merest teaspoon of French dressing on it. Dinner could be skipped, or if she had been so starved that she ate a full portion or, worse, a double one, she could always make herself throw it up afterward. Her mother was too preoccupied to cook. Like single women living in the same house, they were in the habit of making themselves sandwiches or microwaving frozen food as the mood struck them.

June eventually increased her caloric intake when she read an article about eating disorders in
Glamour
magazine. She decided that hers was only a borderline disorder. After all, her eating habits in high school had not been too different from any of the other girls’. Sometimes she starved. Sometimes she gorged and purged. After reading the article, she convinced herself she didn’t really have a problem. Whatever it was, she would cure herself. She decided that she would allow herself to grow a size, and began eating lunch and dinner. That was the kind of will June had. Actually, she grew two sizes, which meant that she still had to watch herself, because if she ever completely gave up control, there was no telling how big she might get.

S
HE GOT OFF THE TRAIN AT
W
ASHINGTON
S
TREET
, and walked up the street, toward the address the job-placement office had given her. Her stomach was growling, but she had learned to ignore its complaints. When she buzzed apartment 712, the security lock clicked open. She walked by the concierge, a guy about her age who looked up from his book to smile at her, and took the elevator to the seventh floor.

The door opened and an immaculately dressed old woman peered out at her over tortoise-shell half-glasses; she wore black stretch pants and a red sweater. Her white hair was pulled back into a chignon. June was immediately impressed with the woman’s makeup. It was complete and flawless down to the carefully lined red lipstick.

“Come in. You must be June.”

The apartment, white and modern, was completely bare except for the furniture. No pictures, no books on the shelf, no decorations of any kind.

Mrs. MacGregor was appraising her.

“As you see, June, I don’t have a whole lot that needs cleaning. I’m not sure you’ll find the job worth your while; with some grocery shopping, it will be just a few hours a week. I wouldn’t have advertised, really, but my children think I need someone coming by. To check on me.” Mrs. MacGregor smiled slightly.

“I don’t mind short hours.” June willed Mrs. MacGregor to hire her. She didn’t have even ten dollars left in her checking account.