The Hunger Moon (17 page)

W
HEN
R
ENATA LET HERSELF INTO THE APARTMENT
, she found June watching a movie on television, and Charlie sleeping in his crib, neatly tucked in.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“He was great. A little fussy right before bedtime, but you said he probably would be. We had a good time playing with his gym on the floor, and then he drank the whole bottle you left, and I changed him into his sleeper, and by that time it was seven-thirty.”

“He went right down?”

“Yep. By about ten of eight, he was out. How’d it go at Viva’s?”

“Good,” Renata said. “It’s a nice place. The fanciest I’ve worked in, really. Want some French bread? I took home a whole loaf, and I know I can’t eat it all.”

June hesitated. “Just a small piece. For breakfast,” she said.

Renata cut the bread and wrapped it, then looked in the refrigerator. “I need to come down from work,” she said. “Do you want to have a glass of wine with me?”

“Okay,” June said. “Was it busy at the restaurant?”

“Just enough. I like it when you have to keep moving; it’s much better than standing around.” She handed June a glass of wine, then kicked off her shoes and curled up on the end of the sofa opposite her. “So, tell me about Owen. Is he still after you to go out?”

June shook her head. “I think I hurt his feelings the other night. He still says hello, but he doesn’t stop me to talk they way he used to.”

“And that’s how you want it?”

“Sure. It’s better not to keep his hopes up, isn’t it?”

“Don’t look to me for any advice about men. Anyone else on the horizon?”

“No. I haven’t really gone out with anyone since last year. And that guy was a jerk.”

“How so?”

June made a face. “He was a musician in a local rock band. I met him at a party. All he liked to do was go to these really loud music clubs, and then when we’d get there he’d talk to his male friends and ignore me. It was like I wasn’t even there. We went out for a couple of months and then I’d had enough.”

“Good for you. You need someone who is going to appreciate you.”

They drank their wine in silence for a moment.

“Were you ever married?” June asked.

“Nope.” Renata took a drink of wine and let her gaze drift to the television. June had been watching a movie with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The volume was muted so that the black-and-white figures skipped and twirled across the screen without music, as if obeying some elfin impulse from within. Neither seemed able to stray too far from the other’s orbit without gravity pulling them back, fusing them together again. It was beautiful, but Renata had always thought there was something wrong with the way Fred Astaire danced with women, no matter how graceful and perfect his steps. Somehow he didn’t
see
his partners; though smiling at them and even mimicking a soulful gaze of love, the whole time you could see how little any single woman mattered to him. What mattered was that he had a partner, someone who would complete him beautifully.

“No, I was never married,” Renata said again, as if she had not been clear before.

They ended up watching the rest of the movie, and microwaving popcorn. Renata noticed that when June ate popcorn, she extracted it piece by piece from the bowl; she never scooped up a handful. “You eat popcorn slower than anyone I’ve ever seen,” Renata told her. “It’s like you’re counting it or something.”

June blushed.

“Nothing wrong with that,” Renata said. “You just make me feel like a pig, is all.”

By the time the movie ended, Renata thought it was too late for June to go home, even in a cab.

“I’ll be fine,” June said.

“This city is dangerous at night,” Renata told her. “Don’t you watch the news? Just sleep here on the sofa bed and I’ll run you home in the morning.”

Renata lent June a nightgown and brought out some sheets and blankets. Then she looked in on Charlie again. When she entered her own bed, she fell asleep instantly, spreading out to fill the whole space.

E
LEANOR BEGAN EVERY YEAR
with a complete physical. Her doctor for the last twenty years had once been a student of Robert’s; he knew her very well. When Eleanor forgot her appointment this year, even though she had written it on the calendar, his office called to reschedule. On Monday the ninth, she took a cab to Dr. Brewster’s office.

“Eleanor, you’re looking as beautiful as ever. Feeling okay?”

“I can’t complain, Ned.”

“Still getting out, doing things?”

“Yes, except driving. I’m not comfortable with that anymore. I’ve asked Janice to sell my car for me.”

“You won’t even miss it, now that you live in town.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“What about your state of mind? Any blues? Sleeplessness? Nervousness?”

“I’m probably more crotchety than ever, but no. My mood is fine. My memory seems to be going, though. I completely forgot that I had an appointment with you last week.”

“Lots of people forget their appointments. My own memory’s shot. Lucy has to remind me as I go out the door in the morning where we’re going for dinner, and then, because she knows me,
she calls in the afternoon to remind me again. I wouldn’t worry about a little absentmindedness.”

Ned prodded and thumped her, and dotted the cold disk of the stethoscope across her back. She had always been at home around medical people, because of Robert. Hospitals and clinics did not make her anxious. They were places where the world behaved in an orderly fashion. Though illness might strike unpredictably, the doctors and nurses themselves had procedures to follow, and a rational pattern to their actions.

“Your blood pressure is a little higher than I’d like, Eleanor.” He consulted her chart. “Still taking the Aldactazide?”

She nodded.

“Any dizziness, headaches?”

“Some dizziness once in a while.”

“Okay, let’s get another reading next week. Just stop in some morning early in the day and the nurse will take it. If it’s still high, we’ll adjust the dose. I’m going to send you over to the lab now,” Ned said. “We’ll do the usual workup—blood count, electrolytes. Anything else in particular you’re concerned about?”

She shook her head. Aside from a few chronic issues, mainly her blood pressure, arthritis, and hiatal hernia, Eleanor knew that at seventy-eight she was as healthy as a horse. Now that she had a new hip, she thought she was probably good for another twenty years. Her sister, Isabel, had finally succumbed to metastasized skin cancer two years earlier. It had been a slow and painful death, and her husband had been there until the end, with the bedpans, IV tubes, and a hospital bed he had bought for the living room of their Palm Beach condominium. Isabel had been so groundlessly worried about symptoms she exaggerated her whole adult life that everyone including herself was astonished that a painless mole on her back the size of a ladybug had finally killed her. It was odd burying a sister, even a sister you weren’t close to. No one, not even a spouse, had shared the moments that formed the basic core of a person like one’s sibling. With Isabel, Eleanor said good-bye to the only living companion of her childhood.

It was Isabel’s death that set Eleanor thinking about her own. As she watched her birds come and go on the deck, Eleanor thought about preparations. Not that she thought her time was short. But Eleanor had always packed early for trips, had moved through life with organized closets and drawers, daily lists, and five-year plans. She hated to be taken unaware, and early on had formed the habit of being fully dressed at eight
A.M.
so that no one would catch her in her pajamas.

The other night she had had a marvelous dream in which Robert appeared in black tie and tails, asking her to dance. As they waltzed around and around in some magnificent chamber, Eleanor kept thinking,
But he doesn’t dance; Robert has never been able to dance. Death must have taught him a few things
.

When she was first widowed, Eleanor negotiated nightly with the dark in their bedroom for any kind of sign from him while she slept. If it came, she never remembered it in the morning. But this invitation to dance, unasked for, unexpected, now teased her mind like a coded message, like a love letter in a language she could only half read.

W
HEN
J
UNE CAME OVER THE NEXT DAY
, she was practically bursting with excitement. She had just received a letter from one of her instructors inviting her to a special class with some famous choreographer. As June rattled on, Eleanor began looking around; speaking of mail, when had she last received any?

“Not everyone gets invited to these master classes, you know; it’s an honor. But the best thing about it is that you get to know these really connected people. It can be almost like an audition if they have their own company—”

“June, would you run down and see if I have any mail?” Eleanor fished for the key to the box.

She noticed that June looked hurt.

“I’m sorry for interrupting you, dear. What were you saying? It’s just that when you mentioned mail, I remembered that I hadn’t received any for the longest time.”

When June returned, her hands were full. “I’d say you had a few days’ worth here, Mrs. MacGregor.”

Eleanor stared at the pile. It did seem to be a lot. She flipped through the envelopes, becoming agitated. What were all these bank letters? As June started cleaning the bathroom, Eleanor sat at her desk with her stack of mail and opened each envelope with a neat slit. She threw the advertising circulars directly into the wastebasket and put the electric and phone bills to one side. Then she began opening the letters from the bank; there were four of them. She read the overdraft notices, uncomprehending. She had never overdrawn her bank account in her life. Every month she deposited her social security and annuity checks, which were more than enough to cover her monthly expenses. Someone had better take responsibility for this, she thought. There was no reason why she should be put to aggravating inconvenience because of some incompetent worker at the bank.

She checked her bank balance and saw that it should be around two thousand dollars, just as she thought. Then it occurred to her to look in her purse where she put her checks for deposit. There, neatly tucked in the zippered pocket with her deposit slip, was a bundle of checks totaling just over four thousand dollars: social security, two interest checks from annuities, and a pension check. Oh, how stupid of her; how very, very stupid. She had entered the deposit in her checkbook, but had never made the trip to the bank. She blamed the holidays, which, thank goodness, were behind her. All her routines had been upset by the unusual amount of visiting she had done in the last two weeks of December.

She examined the bank notices again. The checks presented for payment had been honored, since she had a companion savings account, but she was being charged twenty dollars per overdraft, a total of eighty dollars. Eleanor dropped her head in her hands. It seemed this kind of mix-up was happening to her more and more often, and she couldn’t say why. She was not supposed to make mistakes like this; she was the one who sorted out other
people’s confusion. Hadn’t it fallen to her to convince her fearful, aging mother that the meter reader was not a German spy? And wasn’t it rational, patient Eleanor who had talked Robert back into the house when he stood shivering barefoot on the porch in January, waiting for his dead brother to arrive for a visit? Was it her turn now to be ill, to be old?

She shook her head briskly, to clear it of maudlin thoughts, though the sour taste of stomach acid lingered in her mouth, and a headache had started up. She entered the eighty-dollar charge in her checkbook, and thought she might ask Janice to go to the bank for her.

Her daughter emerged from the bathroom, sponge in hand.

“I think we need to put cleanser on the grocery list,” she said. “Do you want me to go to the store now?”

“Yes, Jan, and would you take my bank deposit to my branch for me at the same time? I need to get these checks in right away.”

“Sure.”

“When you come home, dear, your father will probably be here, and we can eat.”

“My father?”

Eleanor stared at her impatiently. “Janice, get going. We don’t want the bank to close.”

“Mrs. MacGregor, it’s me, June. Not Janice.”

“I don’t think Peter will be eating with us tonight. Didn’t he have chorale practice?”

“Mrs. MacGregor, your son is in New Hampshire, and your daughter is in Cambridge. I’m June. I work for you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want you to quit arguing with me, young lady, and do what I asked you to. You don’t need to read those, they’re all made out. Just skedaddle with them to the bank.”

“Mrs. MacGregor, this deposit slip is dated almost a month ago. Do you want me to write in a new date?”

“If it makes you happy.” Eleanor’s voice was querulous.

“You know, you could get these checks to go directly to your
bank account, and you would never have to worry about getting them in on time.”

“Don’t tell me how to run my affairs, miss.”