The Almost Moon Read Free Page A

crows
    [13]
    Alice Sebold
    clinging on to the tops of the trees took flight, that she made it easy on me. That she pointedly listed all the sins she had committed during her long life.
    She was eighty-eight. The lines on her face were now the cross-hatchings of fine old porcelain. Her eyes were closed.
    Her breathing ragged. I looked at the tops of the empty trees.
    There is no excuse to give, I know, so here is what I did: I took the towels with which I had meant to bathe her, and not thinking that near the latticework or by the back fence there might stand a witness, I smashed these downy towels into my mother's face. Once begun, I did not stop. She struggled, her blue-veined hands, with the rings she feared would be stolen if she ever took them off, grabbed at my arms. First her diamonds and then her rubies briefly flickered in the light. I pushed down harder. The towels shifted, and I saw her eyes. I held the towels for a long time, staring right at her, until I felt the tip of her nose snap and saw the muscles of her body go suddenly slack and knew that she had died.
    [14]

T W O
    My clues to my mother's life before me were not many. It took me a while to notice that almost all of them—the Steuben glass paperweights, the sterling silver picture frames, the Tiffany rattles that were sent a dozen strong before she miscarried her first, then second, child—were chipped or dented, cracked or blackened in various ways. Almost all of them had been or would be thrown either at a wall or at my father, who ducked with a reflexive agility that reminded me of Gene Kelly tripping up and down the sodden curbs in Singin' in the Ram.
    My father's grace had developed in proportion to my mother's violence, and I knew that in absorbing it and deflecting it in the way he did, he also saved her from seeing herself as she had become.
    Instead she saw the same reflections of herself that I pored over when I snuck downstairs after dark. Her precious still photography.

    * * *
Alice Sebold
    When my father met her, my mother was fresh from Knoxville, Tennessee, and made her living as a showroom model of underwear and support garments. She preferred to say, "I modeled slips." And these were the photos that we had so many of.
    Framed black and whites of my mother in better times, wearing black slips or white slips. "That one was eggshell," she might say from the corner of the living room, not having said anything to anyone all afternoon. I knew she was referring to a specific slip in a specific picture, and sensing this, I would choose the white slip I thought could be eggshell. If I got it wrong, the moment would burst—as fragile as a blow bubble glistening in the yard—and she would slump back into the chair. But if I chose right, and I would come to memorize them over time—there was the bone, the ecru, the nude, and my favorite, the rose-petal pink—I would bring the framed photograph to her. Hanging on to the thin cord of her smile, I pulled myself into the past with her, making myself small and still on the ottoman until she told me the story of the photography session or the man involved or the gifts that she had received as partial payment.
    The rose-petal pink was my father.
    "He was not even the photographer," she would say. "He was a junior water inspector in a borrowed suit with a pocket square, but I didn't know that then."
    These were the years of my earliest childhood, when my mother was still powerful, before she collected what she considered the unforgivable flaws of age. Two years short of her fiftieth birthday, she began covering all her mirrors with heavy cloths, and when, as a teenager, I suggested we remove the mirrors completely, she objected. They remained there as she grew infirm.
    Her shadowy, silent indictments.
    But in the photos of the rose-petal-pink slip, she was still worthy of her own love, and it was this love for herself that I tried to take warmth from. What I knew, I think, without wanting to
    [16]
    The