she said immediately. "He's just drugged up."
"Can I talk to him again?"
"He's a horrid conversationalist right now," she said.
I asked my mother what exactly had happened.
[3 0]
The Almost Moon
"He tripped on the stairs. Tony Forrest came over and took him to the doctor. It's his hip and those damn varicose veins.
Tony says Edna St. Vincent Millay killed herself that way."
"With varicose veins?"
"No, stairs. She fell down them."
"Can I speak to him?"
"You should call later in the week. He's resting now."
I felt the distance of miles then. I tried to picture my father under the memory quilt, sleeping, as my mother bustled about the house, making meals out of dry cereal flakes and canned corn.
I was sweating in the closed-up house but too afraid to open a window. Too afraid another death rattle might escape my mother's lungs and seep into the air and wake the women who, like my mother, lived alone and feared such things. The nighttime intruder who comes and kills you. The dutiful daughter who suddenly finds her hand on top of a towel on top of your face, smashing that face in, something inside her hammering over and over again with a child's vendetta finally fulfilled.
I turned on the tap in the kitchen sink again. I waited for the water to heat. I saw the dishes from the early morning washed and put in the dish rack by Mrs. Castle and wondered what made her keep coming to a house like my mother's to help an old woman as the days, then years, passed by.
The Castles had moved to the neighborhood when I was ten.
Mrs. Castle became known as the handiest wife while her husband was considered the handsomest man. When the two of them would visit our house to take away the rocking horses for the church fair, my mother and father would sit in the living room with them, each of my parents happily distracted—-my father
[3 1]
Alice Sebold
with Mrs. Castle and my mother with Mr. Castle, or Alistair, as she called him, the last syllable when she pronounced it sounding wistful, as if his name were a synonym for regret.
I suddenly knew what I would do. I would clean my mother as I had intended to, but this time without the possibility of protest, without her eyes clicking open like an ancient baby doll's, the starburst blue glass an instant indictment. I did not care anymore about the watery mess it might make on the floor. The critic was dead. Carpe diem!
I leaned down to my right and opened the old metal cabinet.
Inside were enough saved-from-the-grocery plastic containers, with their bowed companion tops, to store the hearts and lungs of every citizen along Phoenixville Pike. But I was searching for something else. Something very specific in my memory. I burrowed in and tossed the plastic containers to the side and out the front until, in the very back, where no one had been in years, I found the saved-from-the-hospital sick bowl I was looking for.
It was a pale aqua-green, the color of the surgeon's scrubs.
Seeing it again sent shivers down my spine. "He almost died"
was always the last line of the story told. It had taken me years to wonder why, if the story was about my father, my mother always ended up as the main character.
I filled the small container with near scalding water and squeezed in a little dish soap. If my mother was greasy, this soap promised to lift it right off her! I shut the water off, took the dish sponge and dish towel, and knelt to my task.
I would start at the bottom and work my way up.
I peeled off my mother's blue men's orthopedic anti-embolism socks and balled them up, resisting an urge to lob them over her body and through the small back hallway that led into the living room. With aim and enough upper-body strength, I could have
[3 2]
The Almost Moon
landed them among the balls of yarn in the basket beside her wing chair. Instead, I placed them to the side, to be dealt with later.
There were her toes, delicate when exposed. I had seen them intimately now for years. Mrs.
"Can I talk to him again?"
"He's a horrid conversationalist right now," she said.
I asked my mother what exactly had happened.
[3 0]
The Almost Moon
"He tripped on the stairs. Tony Forrest came over and took him to the doctor. It's his hip and those damn varicose veins.
Tony says Edna St. Vincent Millay killed herself that way."
"With varicose veins?"
"No, stairs. She fell down them."
"Can I speak to him?"
"You should call later in the week. He's resting now."
I felt the distance of miles then. I tried to picture my father under the memory quilt, sleeping, as my mother bustled about the house, making meals out of dry cereal flakes and canned corn.
I was sweating in the closed-up house but too afraid to open a window. Too afraid another death rattle might escape my mother's lungs and seep into the air and wake the women who, like my mother, lived alone and feared such things. The nighttime intruder who comes and kills you. The dutiful daughter who suddenly finds her hand on top of a towel on top of your face, smashing that face in, something inside her hammering over and over again with a child's vendetta finally fulfilled.
I turned on the tap in the kitchen sink again. I waited for the water to heat. I saw the dishes from the early morning washed and put in the dish rack by Mrs. Castle and wondered what made her keep coming to a house like my mother's to help an old woman as the days, then years, passed by.
The Castles had moved to the neighborhood when I was ten.
Mrs. Castle became known as the handiest wife while her husband was considered the handsomest man. When the two of them would visit our house to take away the rocking horses for the church fair, my mother and father would sit in the living room with them, each of my parents happily distracted—-my father
[3 1]
Alice Sebold
with Mrs. Castle and my mother with Mr. Castle, or Alistair, as she called him, the last syllable when she pronounced it sounding wistful, as if his name were a synonym for regret.
I suddenly knew what I would do. I would clean my mother as I had intended to, but this time without the possibility of protest, without her eyes clicking open like an ancient baby doll's, the starburst blue glass an instant indictment. I did not care anymore about the watery mess it might make on the floor. The critic was dead. Carpe diem!
I leaned down to my right and opened the old metal cabinet.
Inside were enough saved-from-the-grocery plastic containers, with their bowed companion tops, to store the hearts and lungs of every citizen along Phoenixville Pike. But I was searching for something else. Something very specific in my memory. I burrowed in and tossed the plastic containers to the side and out the front until, in the very back, where no one had been in years, I found the saved-from-the-hospital sick bowl I was looking for.
It was a pale aqua-green, the color of the surgeon's scrubs.
Seeing it again sent shivers down my spine. "He almost died"
was always the last line of the story told. It had taken me years to wonder why, if the story was about my father, my mother always ended up as the main character.
I filled the small container with near scalding water and squeezed in a little dish soap. If my mother was greasy, this soap promised to lift it right off her! I shut the water off, took the dish sponge and dish towel, and knelt to my task.
I would start at the bottom and work my way up.
I peeled off my mother's blue men's orthopedic anti-embolism socks and balled them up, resisting an urge to lob them over her body and through the small back hallway that led into the living room. With aim and enough upper-body strength, I could have
[3 2]
The Almost Moon
landed them among the balls of yarn in the basket beside her wing chair. Instead, I placed them to the side, to be dealt with later.
There were her toes, delicate when exposed. I had seen them intimately now for years. Mrs.
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