Moon Pies

I never touched her teeth. What she brushes with now, I don’t know, but never with baking soda, that much I’m sure of. What kind of a mother would put baking soda in her baby’s mouth?

Caroline smiles when I mention her teeth and slides one of the barrettes from her hair. Even with just the one strand hanging loose, she looks so much softer, less severe, less like my mother.

Mr. Fish made Greg get in front of the class today, I was so embarrassed, she says. And Audrey, I thought Audrey was going to cry when someone asked how someone could drown and still be alive.
The mitts feel tight around my hands. I set the tray on top of the oven to cool and think of Audrey sprinting toward the water, bone thin, pulling the blue girl out.

Caroline says, everyone wants to know. Everyone asks about the day she drowned.

Steam rises from my cakes. When I smell something in the air, I rush back to the stove and lift the pot off to keep the marshmallows from burning.

I ask, what did Mr. Fish say?

Caroline eats another marshmallow. The marshmallow is less white than her teeth, even the marshmallow can’t compete with teeth like hers.

He said it could be vascular, the way her skin is, that he’s heard about this blue girl, she says, but then he said he doesn’t believe she’s real.
Greg comes back in and hovers over the stove. He has always been a hoverer, this boy, always lurking.

One of the cakes falls to the floor. My son with his freckles the size of quarters, freckles no one in my family has ever had. He picks up the cake and takes a bite.

He chews on the cake and then says, this cake sucks, and spits it there, right into his hands.

I call Irene to ask her what time we should meet, and as I’m dialing I think her name is the name of a song, too, maybe a song I used to sing. What were the words? Irene, Irene, what was so special about Irene? Something, I think, made the Irene in that song special, but what it was, I can’t remember. Maybe the visits to the blue girl are taking my memory. I don’t know. I don’t remember.

Irene, Irene, I sing into the phone when she picks up. What time, Irene?

She whispers. I can hardly hear her.

What? I say.

Same time, she says, as always, and hangs up.

Irene’s a nervous woman with a nervous daughter, even though I can’t blame Audrey for being nervous after saving the blue girl that day. She’s thinner than ever, and once I asked Irene, is she eating? and she said, of course she’s eating, I cook for her every night. It was the wrong question, I knew it as soon as it came out of mouth. I have that way about me, like Mama did. Mama once asked a woman at a fruit stand if she shaved her legs above the knee.

So smooth, she said to the woman, is why I ask.

Some people don’t like to have observations made about them, Mama, I told her, even if the observations are nice. And she said, what observation? I like things smooth.

The nights we go to the blue girl, I miss Mama. Papa not so much, since he was quiet and let Mama do most of the talking, but Mama, I miss her humor, I miss the way she phrased things, so embarrassing to me as a kid. I even miss her disappointment in me. I think about what she’d say about this blue girl who lives in our town out in the woods with an old woman. No family? she’d say. But you feed her. Feeding is good.

Not even in my imagination do I let her ask me what it is I feed her.
David’s on the couch watching television when it’s time to go. He’s belched up my stroganoff. Tastes even better coming up, he laughs. I sit on the couch beside him and think of the blond boy who swam after me in the lake and first slipped his fingers inside in a way that made my head fall forward against his chest like I might never be able to lift it again. David, I told myself, slayer of giants. A good name for a man you marry. Never mind the boy inside me who made me get married in the first place.

I tell him, I have to go. I have to meet the girls to give them the cakes for the bake sale.

Another bake sale? he asks.

You should know what kind of town this is, I say. You grew up here, not me. It’s not my fault there are so many bake sales.

He lays a hand on his thigh and looks over at me in a way he hasn’t looked in a long time.

I tell him to check to make sure they’ve done their homework, especially biology which that boy is failing again, and to please compliment Caroline on her hair. She’s very sensitive these days. We don’t want her thickening any more than she already has.

He shakes his head at me and leans into me close, says, what happened to that wild girl who shook out her hair in the water? Who would have ever guessed you’d become such a fine, domesticated woman?

My mother, I think, that’s who.

People change, I say, as I look around the room at my needlepoint, the ceramic mugs the kids made in grammar school, the pictures of our wedding, so young and stupid, and he says, I guess they do.

He asks me if I’ve left any of the pies for the kids in case they want a snack, and I tell him I’ve made them their own pies, special ones, that I would never deprive my children, what kind of mother does he take me for? Does he really think I’d keep things from my children?

He says, no, of course not, that’s not the kind of woman I am. He meant nothing by it, he says. He has never found me to be selfish.

Irene waits for me in her blue station wagon, the same station wagon she’s had for ten years, rusting now at the trunk and around the edges. She is married to Richard who never speaks, who plays basketball like a child. I think I can count on one hand the number of things Richard has said to me over the years. I try to count them in the car, but I lose count at three and give up. He is not right in the head, but still he coul
d buy her a new car, she deserves that much. I don’t ever tell Irene those things. Talking about Richard makes her nervous, and she’s nervous enough as it is.

I get out of the van and wave. She mustn’t see me in the dark, she doesn’t even turn her head. I knock on the window, and her head snaps around, so fast I can almost feel the burn up her neck from a crick in the neck like that. She opens the lock and lets me in.

She says, the children are beginning to talk.

I light a cigarette that I save for our nights that we go to the blue girl and crack my window. When I offer the pack to Irene, she takes one, though she never has before. Her hands are shaking.

I say, it’s just talk, Irene, it’s just talk.

Irene puffs on the cigarette. She leans forward to squint her eyes at the road ahead that leads to the house like she can see everything.

Buck dreams about her, she says. The smoke curls around her fingers. He’s eight. He dreams about her every night.

I take a loud puff and blow it out the window. Mama loved to smoke when she was young, and I imagine her sitting beside me, sucking on her unfiltered cigarette and laughing, saying, afraid of her own children, this woman, such a shame, and then clucking her tongue.

Irene, I say, children talk. They dream. They do all sorts of things.
She nods but does not puff anymore.

Look at my boy Greg, failing biology, always stomping around, I say. They grow up and become strange.

She says, Audrey doesn’t sleep, and I say, I know. She has circles under her eyes, we all see.

And then I say, they ask her about the blue girl at school, Irene. All of them. Maybe it’s time you talked to Audrey.

She glares at me and flinches like I’ve poked her with a lit match and says, this is our secret. I thought we agreed.

Not about this, I say, but maybe about other things.

She doesn’t answer, and the time for talking is past.

We laugh. Every time we visit the blue girl, we laugh, the nervous laughter that comes up at funerals sometimes or when we reveal things to each other about sex, like the time Irene told me that Richard snorted like a dog when he came. Once I told the story of David falling asleep while I went down on him with ice cubes after too many shots of rum, but I’ve been sorry I told that story ever since, even though Irene is my friend and who else can I tell? We laugh even though these stories aren’t funny. They make us look bad, they embarrass us. They show how unattractive we’ve become, unable to seduce even our own husbands. But since we don’t tell what we put into our moon pies, even to each other, we have to tell each other something. And not just about kids or cooking or summer gossip. We have to tell something about ourselves.

I’m the first to go in, always, but since the last time when the blue girl choked, I want to go last. But we must have routine, that’s one thing we agree on. It’s a ritual, and we must abide by it. I hear my mother murmuring approval as I think this. The blue girl seemed peaceful in her bed that first time we visited her, lying there with her blue fingers interlocked and white blankets draped over her. Her breath came slow and deep and didn’t whistle, not then. She lay there on the bed and opened her mouth as soon as I unwrapped the moon pie. She swallowed it and smiled at me with rapture.

I said, you like that? and when she nodded, I broke off a piece and gave her another.

Each bite made me feel lighter. I felt bubbles in my head like after too much champagne.

I thought of every lie I’d ever told, and though they were too many to count, I felt hopeful. That first night, after I fed the blue girl my lies, I swam nude in the lake. The ripples washed over me, and I couldn’t see them breaking in the darkness, I couldn’t tell where the ripples ended and I began. It made me cry, swimming that way. I thought about David as the blond lanky boy I met that summer, how I’d lean my head against him as he sucked on my breast, tugging at it with teeth, like he wanted to swallow me whole. How I wanted him to. I’d press my chest forward to make the sucking deeper, give him more of me, but it was never deep enough, there was never enough to give.

These last few times, the blue girl looks restless. She sits up in bed and stares, not lying back like she used to, not opening her mouth until the moon pie is almost at her lips. When she choked, I began to cry, and I haven’t cried for so long that it hurt to stop. She swallowed one of the pies whole and opened her mouth to show me she could breathe. She tried to grab for my hand. I ran out to the tiny room where the old woman waits and out to my car, crying all the way.