Moon Pies

Irene said, if we can just hold on, Magda, it will be all right once it’s over, and I said, I know, but sometimes it’s just so hard.

Tonight the old woman is waiting by the door. She’s small and hunched and keeps her hands hidden in pockets. Her hands move inside the pockets, I can see the outlines moving, and I imagine they’re filled with nuts. When we’re gone, I think, she cracks open the nuts with her teeth. She motions to us with her hand, but it’s too dark to see the hand, even the outline, to see what she’s hiding. I think that if Mama were here, she could talk to the old woman in a strange language and get her to open her hands. I have no such gifts like Mama. I can’t even sing half the time.

The old woman says, she is hungry, and gives me a look of such meanness that I almost crush the moon pies before I remember that they’re in my hands. She says, you take so long to come, the girl is starving, the girl needs to be fed.

Irene says she’s sorry, that we have children who need us, things to attend to, we don’t mean to be forgetful. The old woman doesn’t answer Irene. She pokes at my moon pies with her finger.

Go, she says, and I hurry through the small room with no chairs, almost tripping, and down the hallway to her door. I think of knocking, but she’s always in bed, this blue girl, so I turn the knob and go inside.

The first thing I think is that she looks bluer than before, but how this is possible, I don’t know. But how she became blue in the first place is a mystery to all of us, how she breathes, where she came from, what she wants. What we want from her. It feels so much like a dream that, standing there, I’m sure I’ll wake up in a minute and find Mama shaking me in my bed, telling me it’s time to go swimming in the lake, that I should get some sun on my face, I’m too pale. I think I’ll wake up and there will be no boy pulling at his groin or husband staring at me and no daughter with limp hair and thick middle. It will just be me and Mama and Papa playing pinochle. I’ll be one of the summer people again. My brothers will throw rocks in the lake. I’ll dance in the ripples.

She’s sitting up in the bed looking bluer than ever but not serene like she used to. There’s no peace in her face. Her brows knit together, her crazy hair jutting out worse than Caroline’s. I think of offering to comb it. I think the blue girl would like that, a mother’s touch. But I’m no good with hair.

I say, I brought you pies, your favorite, and when she smiles, I say, you’re very hungry.

It’s the first time I’ve seen her nod. Her head moves slowly, up and down, up and down again, like a baby when you first teach it to say yes or no, even though no is always the favorite.

I ask her if she’d like some of my pie, and she nods again, up and down, her whole neck bending then coming slowly up. It looks like a great effort for her, this nodding, but she smiles when she does it, so I think it mustn’t hurt. Her blue lips part as I hold out a piece for her. She closes her eyes, smiling while she chews, and I think of Mama saying, This blue girl, so easy to please. You were once that way.

She finishes the pies in several big bites, and I watch
her for signs of choking, but they seem to go down smoothly, no gasps. When she swallows the last bite I hear the song in my head, Tiny bubbles, tiny bubbles. I wish the blue girl knew the words.

I’m about to get up when she lets out a grunt. A low, guttural noise in her throat, so low it stops me, and I fall back in the chair.

I open up the linen napkin and say, that’s it, no more. She holds out her blue hand to mine. I don’t take the hand. I just look at it. Even the fingernails are blue.

I say, no more, that’s all I have.

She shakes her head at me again.

Then I say, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t go in the water after you, but you were saved by the girl. You were saved.

She shakes her head back and forth, back and forth. I get up from the chair to move toward the door. There’s no time for lingering.

I don’t look back. I move out the door as fast as I can. I don’t even wait for Irene. All I can think is that I have to get home before something happens, but what I don’t know.

I drive fast with my foot hard on the accelerator and my hands tight at the wheel. Mama sits in the passenger seat next to me holding cards in her hands. She says, so much pain that girl has. Why don’t you sing instead of telling such lies?

I blink, and Mama’s gone. In my head I tell her, No more lies, I promise I’ll sing, but I know even that is a lie. It’s the one thing I’m good at, doesn’t she know?

Greg is up when I get home. For a minute I want to take the freckled boy in my arms the way I did when he was small, when the freckles were still small. We used to play connect the dots on his arm. Now we’d need to draw a map.

He says, Ma, where are all the pies?

I stand there looking at this boy, this son of mine who fails biology. I think someday when I’m gone he’ll imagine me in his car with him and think about the smell of my pies. I wonder if that’s all he’ll have of me, this mother who made moon pies. That can’t be all. There must be more.

He rattles around in the refrigerator. It’s late, and I’m so tired.
He says, who took all the pies?

I stand there in the kitchen with the linen napkins in my pocket. I imagine I hear the blue girl’s voice. It is like a song.

I say, never mind the pies, it’s time for you to go to bed.

For once the boy listens to me. He ambles out in that way he has, head hanging low. No stomping this time. His feet seem to float.

Alone in the kitchen I whisper that I’m the one who took the pies. The pies are mine. There will be more.

 

Laurie Foos is the author of five novels: Before Elvis There Was Nothing, Bingo Under the Crucifix, Twinship, Portrait of the Walrus by a Young Artist, and Ex Utero. She teaches at Lesley University and lives on Long Island with her husband and two children.

 


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