The Almost Moon (22 page)

the old-fashioned tub. I knew I should hurry to disrobe. In just a moment, Tanner would say, "Helen, we're ready for you." But I stood in my mother's slip. I felt the old silky fabric against my skin. I stepped out of my underpants and then undid my bra, pulling it through the spaghetti straps of the slip. Briefly I thought of Hamish waiting for me. Pictured him stretched out on the couch in Natalie's living room. Then the vision changed, and his head was awash in blood. I put my underwear in the hutch just above my pants and sweater.

Everything about disrobing at Westmore had a rhythm. I walked into the classroom, said hello to a few of the students, glanced at the platform, and went behind the screen. I started undressing as the professor arrived, and continued as he began the patter that preceded my posing. Each article of clothing had its place in every room. In the room where Natalie posed, there was an old metal locker salvaged from the renovated gym. In my room, there were hutches and a painted straight-back chair. As I ran my hand over the material of the rose-petal-pink slip and felt my chest, my stomach, the slight curve of my hip, I thought of my mother. I thought of what a refuge Westmore had always been. I came, stripped away everything, and stood in front of the students, who drew me. I had never been quite so foolish as to believe that this meant they actually saw me, but the methodical disrobing, the stepping up on the carpeted platform, even the shiver in my body, often felt revolutionary to me.

I heard the students opening up their large sketch pads to a clean page. Tanner was coming to the end of his useless minilecture.

I took the slip off over my head and stepped into my bamboo flip-flops. I placed the slip on the chair for just a moment and took the hospital gown from the hanger. Quickly, I covered myself.

"Helen, we're ready for you."

I saw the slip. It was my mother in the chair. I wanted to cry

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in horror, but I didn't. Was I thinking self-preservation at that point? What was it that made me do what I did? As if it were one of the small objects in my house that I discarded, I balled up my mother's slip in my hand and shoved it behind the hutches against the cinder-block wall. There it would stay, I knew, for a long time. Natalie had lost a ring there once, and months later a professor, bored to the point of rearranging the furniture in the middle of his own class, had found it.

I walked out from behind the platform, holding the hospital robe closed at the waist, my flip-flops and the shifting of the students the only sounds. I climbed the two stairs up to the carpeted platform, and Tanner handed me a little book. It was one with which Natalie and I were very familiar. Not much larger than my palm, it was part of a series of small art books from the late 1950s and had been kicking around the classroom for years. This one featured fifteen color plates of Degas and was titled simply Women Dressing.

"I'm good," I said, keeping the book held out so Haku would take it away again.

"We'll cycle then," he said. "Give them a three-minute pose.

Ten, Nine, Seven, Four, and ending on Two, which you can hold a bit longer if you like. You know the plates?"

"I do," I said. Ordinarily I would have shot back their names in the order he'd asked me to do them, but I was not paying attention to him anymore. Instead, I set my energy toward Dorothy, the best student in the room. I decided that for Dorothy, I would wear my mother's murder on my skin.

For my first pose, my back would be turned almost all the way to the classroom, so I pivoted around as Tanner stepped away from the platform. I saw the picture of the tub pinned to the curtain behind me, peeled back my robe and placed it in my right

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hand to pretend it was the towel in After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself. I leaned, as she did, to the side and tilted my head down to a half profile. Immediately the room was filled with the sound of furious undergraduate sketching, as if they were cameras and I a subject to be caught in flight. Very few, like Dorothy, had the skill of consideration.

Three minutes was a concession to the students. Eventually, by the end of the semester, they would be working in two. But I was fine with much longer poses, and always had been. Staying completely still was something I'd taken to from the start.

"It's like you were born to do this," Jake once said.

He was my teacher then. He was my Tanner Haku, and for all I knew, I was his Dorothy. But I did not have Dorothy's talent.

"You have such lovely skin," Jake had said.

And I clung to it. Almost as if, if he said it again, something would break inside me. And he did. He said it when he noticed I had grown so cold that I was almost shivering. He'd come over to me—I had been lying down and had a cramp in my side—

and had stood, watching me. I worried every moment that he was going to say, "You know, I was wrong. You're hideous. This was all a mistake."

"You're turning blue with cold," he said.

"I'm sorry," I said, keeping the chatter out of my teeth as best I could. I was eighteen and had never seen a man nude, much less been nude in front of one.

"Relax," he said.

He went behind the screen in the studio and threw a blanket over the top of it. It landed on me. The scratchy wool was like an assault, but I was too cold to complain.

"I've turned the kettle on," he said. "I'll make tea. I've got some ramen noodles if you want."

Ramen noodles as aphrodisiac. I had asked Jake later if he had known he would make love to me.

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"I had no idea. When you walked in in that silly pink suit, I almost laughed at you."

"It was coral," I corrected him. It had taken all the money I had.

"When you took it off," he said, "I fell in love."

"So it was a good outfit?"

"When it hit the floor," he said.

I was huddled in the scratchy blanket when he returned with two mugs of tea.

"Thank you, Helen," he said, and placed the mug by me. I remember I was still too cold to even reach for it. "You did an extraordinary job today."

I was silent.

"And your skin," he said. "It's lovely, really."

I started crying. Something about how cold I was and how much snow there was piling up outside and how far away I was from home and from my mother. He put down his tea and asked if he could hold me.

"Um-hmm," I said.

He wrapped his arms around me, and I put my head on his shoulder. I was still crying.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

How could I say what seemed ludicrous even to me? After having dreamed of getting away from her, I missed my mother. It haunted me during that first semester like an ache.

"I'm just so cold," I said.

"Change!" Hakubarked.

The students put their final touches to what was most obvious in After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself but not to what many of them were still too self-conscious to sketch—my ass. Whenever I looked at the drawings from freshman classes, the attention to

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detail was always focused on the props. On the one occasion I modeled for the Senior Center, there was no such fear. Both the women and the men dove right in, knowing time was limited.

"Woman at Her Toilet!" Tanner announced proudly. There was no laughter now. The students were serious, and I, dropping the towel nee robe onto the platform, leaned over the metal basin that had been left upon a chair and took the sea sponge in my right hand. I pivoted now toward the classroom and cupped my breasts in my right arm as I reached the sponge up under my left armpit, as if I were washing myself.

I had always found this pose awkward. It forced me to look toward my armpit and made me all too aware of my own body.

As the years went by, I could see more sunspots on my chest and shoulders, and the resilient skin with which I had been blessed had slackened no matter what inverted poses I was able to do in yoga. Flexibility did not, in the end, trump gravity. I lived on the borderline between a Venus just holding it together and Whistler's mother in the buff. I thought suddenly, as the dry sea sponge scraped against the tender skin of my armpit, that if I were less flexible, less in shape, I would not have been able to commit either of the crimes of which I now stood guilty. Lifting and hauling my mother would not have been possible. Being attractive to Hamish, unthinkable.

"Helen?" I heard Tanner say. He stood close to the platform. I could smell the garlic capsules he took every day.

"Yes?" I did not break my pose.

"You seem to be shaking. Are you cold?"

"No."

"Focus," he said. "Two more on this one," he announced to the class.

Five years ago and very late at night, Tanner had wanted to draw the skeleton of a rabbit he'd seen in a dusty showcase of the old Krause Biology Building. He had taken me to an art opening,

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and the evening had ended with us stumbling around without a flashlight in a building that had yet to be renovated. We found many a display case but not the right one, and we had frozen like misbehaving children when we heard the creak of the exit door below us, and Cecil, the elderly security guard, calling into the darkness, "Is anyone there?"

During the renovation of Krause the following year, I walked by and saw bones sticking up out of a Dumpster. Not caring who might see me, I hiked my skirt up and climbed onto some cinder blocks that had been lowered by crane and were still bundled in steel ribbons, so I could see inside the Dumpster. There lay the rabbit skeleton on its side.

It sat now, as pristine as I could have hoped, as the centerpiece of a collection of found objects that Tanner had placed on the long, high windowsill that ran the length of the room. It was the first thing I saw sometimes when I entered the space—the delicate bones of the rabbit next to rocks of various shapes and sizes, a God's eye made by a student's child, and an endless collection of sea glass he picked up on his solo journeys to the Jersey Shore.

Now I felt the menacing bones of this rabbit behind me and could not strike the image of my mother rotting in layers until she too was bone. There was something in the idea of it, this slow molting toward yellowed calcium that must be pinned together to prevent collapse, that I found both frightening and comforting.

The idea that my mother was eternal like the moon. I wanted to laugh in my awkward pose at the inescapable nature of it. Dead or alive, a mother or the lack of a mother shaped one's whole life. Had I thought it would be simple? That her substance, demolished, would equal myself avenged? I had made her laugh by playing the fool. I told her stories. I paraded around as a fool at the mercy of other fools, and by doing this I guaranteed that she did not miss anything by choosing to turn her back on the outside world.

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By giving up my life to her on a global basis, I bought small moments away. I could read the books I liked. I could grow the flowers I wished. I could drive to Westmore and stand nude on a platform. Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was.

"Change!" Haku barked. I could hear in his tone an admonition to work harder on my pose.

A godsend, this one, after the awkwardness of the last. I sat down sideways on the chair, knowing that the students would have to imagine the edge of the tub beneath me. How my ass would be rounder instead of squared off by the seat of the chair.

Again, I reached for the hospital gown and used it as a towel.

After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Neck always allowed for a quick massaging squeeze or two to my shoulders before I grew still.

I heard a few students grumble about a lack of time. How they wanted the poses to be longer. There was one boy I particularly disliked, even if I knew myself to be uncharitable. When I was introducing myself in the first week and telling them about myself, describing my daughters—where they lived and what they did—the boy had said, "So you're, like, as old as my mother."

I had answered, because my pride knew no danger, that I was forty-nine. His two-word response, I told my mother, laughing, was "Vomit city."

"I tried to seduce Alistair Castle once," she had said to me. I stopped and stared. Early in her eighties, she'd begun to tell me things I'd never known. How she was touched inappropriately by a friend of her father's. How she had stopped having what she called "relations" with my father after his accident. How she didn't care much for Emily, though she enjoyed Sarah's failed audition stories. "Imagine having to audition to be a waitress,"

she'd said, loving that in New York a restaurant job could be so competitive it involved callbacks.

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With each of these unexpected revelations, I grew numb, an art I had perfected over time in order to extract the truth behind the flashes.

"And how did your seduction go?" I had asked my mother, my head spinning with the pain this must have caused my father if he'd known.

"Vomit city!" my mother responded, looking into the empty fireplace, whose bricks were painted black. "Marlene Dietrich had it right," she said. "For about ten years, you can glue rubber bands to your head and pull your skin tight, but after that, it's about hiding out. At least then you have mystique."

I wanted to tell her that in terms of mystique, she'd won the lottery. From Billy Murdoch to her blanketed escapades, her mystique was bulletproof, even if it was more about being creepy and strange than unattainable.

She looked from the fireplace to me. She assessed. "You should get plastic surgery. I would if I were your age."

"No, thanks."

"Faye Dunaway," she said.

"Tits, Mom," I said. "If I get anything done, I'm going to get huge monster tits. I'll serve dinner on them, and you can eat off the right tit and I'll eat off the left."

"Helen," she said, "that's disgusting." But I had made her laugh.

I stood to draw the blinds before turning on her PBS shows for the evening. As I lowered the blinds all the way and then went to the television in the opposite corner, my mother landed her spear: "Besides, Manny and I were talking, and we both think it's your face that needs work. Your body is still fine."