Moon Pies

I go over and over the day that the blue girl drowned, and still I can’t think why I didn’t help. I turn it over in my mind, that first image of her out in the lake, already blue, the girl who turned blue and stayed blue, the girl who drowned and yet still lives. Why didn’t I jump in, why didn’t I swim out to her? Why did I leave it to Irene’s poor Audrey, fifteen like my Caroline and always so nervous, the kind of girl who should never have seen such blueness up close. I should have gotten up and swam, out to the buoys where you’re not supposed to go. I was never afraid of water. I knew I wouldn’t drown, if there’s one thing I’ve known all my life it’s that I’ll never drown. But I was not the one to go.

To watch someone drown is a terrible thing. To watch her revived is even worse. To watch a girl who was already blue and who stays blue even after she breathes, this is the worst thing I can imagine. In all my years at the lake as a child, I never saw someone drown, I never saw anyone fall into a deep pocket or even cough up swallowed water. At this lake in this town I learned to swim when the water still looked like glass. I taught my own children to swim when they were babies with their faces in the water first. Don’t be afraid, I’d say, it’s only water.
I used to be one of the summer people. But no more. I stayed. People say that there are only a few of us who stayed, and I am one. I used to love this town when I was one of the summer people, but now it’s just a town like any other town, except for the blue girl, who’s made everything different, even the things I cannot name.

My parents brought me to this lake when I was a child. They came from Russia and made money in textiles. They told me, Magda, marry well, marry safe, forget happiness, there is no happiness in marriage. Their marriage had been arranged, and they played pinochle and took their children to a beach to watch them swim in a quiet lake in a quaint summer town. They said that the kind of people who could take their children away to summer in a cottage were the kind of people we should know. I remember sitting on my mother’s lap while she rubbed lemon in my hair to bring out streaks and watching the lake that looked like glass. I remember my brothers throwing stones to make ripples and how I stepped into the largest ripple just before it broke apart. If I could stay inside the ripple, I used to think, if only I could stay. Anything would be possible.

And so I found that I could stay. I met a town boy with long hair and gangly limbs and got myself pregnant out at that lake. We danced in the ripples. My parents wept. They said, this boy will bring you no kind of happiness, Magdalena, and I said, to hell with happiness, you said so yourself. Mama wept more and said, who ever said such things to you? And I hugged her and said, you did, Mama, you did.

Year after year, the town grew more dull. Maybe we were waiting for the blue girl all along, without even knowing it. The lake filled with algae, and the summer people looked more tired. The children grew. My parents died. My brothers said they had never seen our parents so happy as they had been in old age, playing pinochle and telling Russian jokes. The town boy became a man who still keeps his hair long and no longer makes me laugh. One day when the children were fighting, Greg and Caroline, Greg the boy who kept me here and the sensible Caroline who reminds me why I wanted to stay, I drove out to the lake to throw stones. They skimmed the water the way my brothers had taught me when we were summer people and embarrassed by our parents’ English. When the ripples floated out toward me, I went into the lake in my jeans and sandals and stood until the ripple broke through my body. The next day, the blue girl came from nowhere, out beyond the lake in the trees. She moved slowly, but her skin flashed. At first I alone saw her, and I thought, I will stay. Now I will have to stay.

I tell the blue girl lies.

In my bed at night when I see traces of the town boy in my man-husband, I sing, Tell me your secrets, I’ll tell you no lies. He smiles and says, you used to sing to me all the time, do you remember? I smooth back the graying hair with my fingers, an old habit, and say, no, I don’t. What did I sing?

Of course I remember. But there is such a thing as telling too much, my mother used to say. It’s better to lie.

Greg stomps in the kitchen. When I named him Gregorio and nicknamed him Greg, Mama took him in her arms and said, this boy will always be a boy, Magda, this Gregorio, this Greg the Boy. He has always been impetuous, my son, and reluctant to take direction, even at three and a half. Try to teach him to ride a tricycle, this boy knew better. But this is new, this swearing. I don’t remember my brothers talking the way he does. Mama was right about him. Greg the Boy.

He throws his sneakers on the floor and says, this blue girl, everyone wants to know how does someone get so blue? How does someone get that blue and still be alive?

This is the son who kept me here, who caught inside me became this freckled, lanky boy. Such a boy, this boy is, defying me with talk of the blue girl. He wants a rise out of me, and I won’t give in.

I say nothing to him, and he says, I’m going to go find her out there, out by the lake, a bunch of the guys and me, we’re going to go find that blue girl and see why she’s so blue.

Mama taught me well.

I say, listen, boy, this is no way to talk in my house, and you will go nowhere near that girl, not if I have a thing to say about it.

I can play his game.

He laughs and says, Ma, you are such a gas.

He fishes around in his pockets, his head slung low like it’s too heavy to carry, like he hopes his head will snap off. I know the feeling. But I am trying to bake because we’re meeting tonight, and I need to make moon pies. I had never heard of moon pies before this, before Irene said we should visit the blue girl and bake moon pies to offer her for our failure to save her. She called this morning and said, we need to go, tonight, Magda, tonight is one of those nights, and I said, don’t worry, we’ll go, all you have to do is ask.

I think of the blue girl and look over at Greg with his sloping shoulders and grabbing hands, and I say, get out of my kitchen, boy, you are failing biology.

He says, how the hell do you know?

I say, I have my ways.

I pluck marshmallows from the bag and arrange them in the pot to melt. He’s failed biology three times, this boy who kept me here, this boy who cannot understand cells when it was the splitting of cells that made me stay in this sorry town.

Zygote, I say, and whack him with my spoon.

He says, what’s that? and I say, you should know, my boy, you of all people should know, and he lumbers out of the room with his hands at his sides, his arms like puppets with the hands broken.

The marshmallows bubble in the pot. White liquid simmers and draws circles around itself. This is the best part, the stirring as the bubbles rise up and then pop. I move my spoon around and around, stabbing at bubbles with the wooden handle. This is where I spoon in the lies. I imagine each circling bubble opening up and taking them in, one lie at a time.

Little white lies, tiny bubbles, my life in a pot.

Tiny bubbles, I start to sing.

Caroline shuffles into the kitchen. Her hair is pinned back in barrettes, very unflattering with the zigzag part all the girls are wearing now. When she came down the stairs this morning, she leaned down to show me her scalp and the butterfly clasps that held the hair back from her forehead, which is much too large for her smallish face, and she asked me how I liked her hair. I said, very much.

Tiny bubbles, tiny bubbles. I don’t know the rest of the words.
She leans against the sink with her arms crossed over her chest. The butterflies look t
rapped.

Mama, you look so happy when you make those little pies, she says.
I turn to her and toss a marshmallow to her from the bag. She’s getting thick about the waist, the Russian blood coming out in her with her heavy hands and squat legs. If only Mama had lived to see this.

I say, who said anything about making pies?

The marshmallow disappears inside her mouth. I throw another and another to make her laugh. Anything to keep her from my pies.

Greg’s failing biology again, she says.

The whiteness thickens. I stir and stir. The cakes are still in the oven, not quite ready for their sticky filling.

I know, I say. I have my ways, you kids should know, I have my ways.
Under the cabinet I find my oven mitts, a pair with faded sunflowers Mama bought me when I first got married. She said, to bake bread for that blond boy husband, but I’ve never baked bread for him, not a day in my life. Moon pies are all I can manage.

The cakes are perfectly round. I’ve never seen cakes so round. I let out a little whoop inside myself so Caroline doesn’t hear. She can’t have a mother whooping about the kitchen, it will give her ideas. The blue girl’s mouth appears inside my mind, open, with blue skin giving way to pink tongue. Like a cat’s except without ridges.

Are those for us? Caroline asks. I’m hungry.

I am ever the disappointing mother.

No, I say, and when she looks down at her sneakers and bends to tie the laces, I say, I’m making something special for you. These are for the bake sale, too sweet, anyway, no good, they’ll rot those beautiful teeth.

This much is true. If Caroline has one beautiful thing, it is her teeth. They shine. Even as a child, her baby teeth almost glowed. At the lake the summer people would stop me as I paddled her in the water and ask, how do you get your baby’s teeth so white?

I’d say, baking soda.

They’d look at their own babies’ teeth with the milky film across them and squint their eyes at me.

A remedy from the old country, I’d say.