Adapted from the Novel Forgive the Moon

When Keith and I decided to go ahead with the pregnancy that surprised us during senior year of college, our friends thought we had lost our minds. “You two must be crazy,” my former roommate Diane kept repeating, using the word loosely, the way everyone did. Few of them knew it was my mother who actually was crazy—schizophrenic, to be exact—herself the most persuasive argument against my having children.
         But once the test came back positive and I got over the shock of it and Keith grew accustomed to the idea, I wanted nothing so much as to have this child.
         I knew what I was in for. A baby would enable me to recreate my experience of family, recreate myself. I would be the kind of mother I had always longed for: attentive, safe, normal, a mother who would protect her child against chaos.
         I dreamed in color about her. She had a tiny, hairless animal body and a serious face. “Who are you?” the dream-baby asked as she appeared before me in a dimly lit, blue room. I looked at her and knew. “I’m your mother.”
         “Well, then,” the dream-baby said with a logic that seemed to give her small body weight, “you will have to love me.” I woke up frightened I would lose the chance.
         Keith coached me through my labor, strong and tireless and deeply frightened. The obstetrics night nurse was a throwback who disapproved of fathers—or any non-medical male presence—in the delivery room. Stoically, Keith ignored her mumbles and glances and guided me through the heights of the worst pain I had ever experienced. And Keith got to see what I never did, the first look at our child’s perfect face framed in the oval aperture of my flesh, that split second before she slid into the world.
         “So this is who you are,” I said to my daughter as I held her, and, with a prodigious effort, she opened her eyes for us to greet each other. She was the most distinct person I’d ever seen. I stared at her for hours, cradling her in the crook of my left arm even as I ate my hospital dinner.
         On Wednesday, we brought her home to our apartment on the ground floor of an old but fairly charmless house in our college town. Keith photographed Isabella in the wicker laundry basket we’d made up as her first bed. He photographed her in the green plastic infant seat he’d picked out of someone’s trash and washed with Lysol, artfully backlit by a narrow window. He photographed her in bed with me, and I photographed her in bed with him. For two days we did little but adore her and wonder how we’d ever lived without her. We also wondered how we’d ever have a life again.
         My mother came to visit us on Friday. She took the train up from Long Island because my father didn’t want her to drive alone the four and a half hours to the college campus where we lived. But though her mental state was, my sister Lizzie had informed me, border line—a change of seasons or an important occasion would invariably set her off, and both had occurred—my father never objected to her making the trip. “A mother should be with her daughter at these times,” he had said, as though my mother were like all other mothers.
         She arrived carrying a squat, deeply lined pumpkin, and wearing such bright make-up and clothes, I thought at first she was dressed in costume.
         “Hel-lo,” she said, her voice so deep in her throat that it sounded almost a growl.
         I looked up from the sagging, thrift-store couch where I lay smelling Isabella’s head after nursing her. The sight of my mother’s face jolted me like a sudden pinch. Mascara had smudged in two grey half moons beneath her eyes, and her passionflower pink lips twitched to one side every few seconds (a side effect of her medication). I wanted my mother to go away; and I wanted my mother.
         “Hello, Grandma,” Keith greeted her as he took her coat and purse and suitcase and looked around the apartment for a place to put them. My mother held on to the pumpkin. He decided, finally, to stow the purse and suitcase against the wall and drape the coat over a chair as though its owner wouldn’t be staying long.
         My mother’s mouth stretched into a clown smile. “I’m Grandma,” she agreed, handing Keith the pumpkin.
         “Wow, a large, orange gourd,” he said, then added at her frown, “A really great pumpkin.” He set it on a table by the door, on top of a week-old stack of mail.
         I kissed Isabella’s head, avoiding the soft, downy spot that pulsed with her heartbeat. “Isn’t she perfect?” I said as I levered myself into a sitting position. My mother stepped toward us, her hands outstretched but her arms close to her body. A child might think she was a monster.
         “Let me hold her,” she said and then lifted my sleeping daughter from my embrace. “Please.”
         I clung to the baby. “Wash your hands.”
         My mother gazed at her fingers as though they were smeared with grime.
         “You’ve been travelling,” I reminded her.
         Her eyes seemed to turn inward then, and I recognized the look of her listening to a voice from within. Her lips moved soundlessly, and I had to look away. I felt an old pang, double-edged with anger and remorse.
         She turned toward her purse. “I’ll have a cigarette first.”
         My mouth dropped open, wordless; Isabella stirred.
         “Out,” my mother said as though directing herself, walking to the door without her coat. “On the porch.”
         Keith looked at me as the door closed behind her and the pumpkin wobbled on its perch. “Oh boy,” he said, shaking his head. “Three days?”

My mother decided to cook us dinner in the wok, though she had never used one. “This is an interesting pan,” she’d said. Keith had gone out to a class-he was a graduate teaching assistant and had already missed four days-and Isabella lay in her basket on a white cotton pillow my mother had embroidered for her with flowers and rabbits. From my bed, I could hear her tiny sucking movements, and wondered if she was dreaming of my breast.
         I lay under the chenille quilt that had been Keith’s grandmother’s, trying to nap. “You should sleep when the baby sleeps,” my mother had instructed as she chopped onions on the kitchen counter, the only parental advice she’d offered so far. It was a good though impractical suggestion. I needed to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep. I hadn’t really slept, it felt, since Isabella’s birth. The closest I’d got was a kind of semi-alert twilight, a drifting state of exhaustion that offered rest but not restoration.
         Twilight. That’s what glimmered outside the window, a silvery October dusk that made the world seem small. And twilight seemed to describe the darkening descent of my mother’s condition, a state where it was difficult to see the real shape of things. Her mind was still, for the most part, with us, but as though slightly obscured, in lengthening shadows.
         I lay there, wishing for sleep, but also wishing to be drinking tea at the cast-off patio furniture that served as our kitchen table, my mother—a normal mother—across from me, passing on her wisdom and experience, telling me the stories of my own infancy. Instead, I lay alone in my room as she fixed another of her silent meals. It was her way, I knew, of caring for us, for me. The very way, I thought bitterly, that consoled me least. “I’d rather order in Chinese,” I’d told Keith, “or deli sandwiches, than have a mother who cooks good food while listening to voices.”
         He had shrugged, half listening to the lament he’d heard from me so many times. “I like your mother’s cooking,” he had said as he leaned to kiss me goodbye. “Isabella will get her first taste of it, what, about four hours after you do.”
         I’d smiled. Another first. “I’ll have to pick out the onions.”
         Now I propped up on an elbow and listened: my mother was humming in the kitchen. A good sign. I decided to make myself some tea and talk to her. I grabbed a pillow and shuffled out of the bedroom, pausing first to bend over Isabella and listen to her breathe. I bent closer until I thought I could feel the tiniest brush of her breath on my cheek.
         In the hall, the smell of frying garlic and onions grew strong, a familiar smell, an appetite-whetting smell, but one that now raised my ire. Had my mother given any thought to the fact that I was nursing and should be eating bland foods? Did she know—or remember—anything about caring for infants? I stopped halfway down the hallway, partly because my stitches ached and my insides felt as though they were about to fall out, partly to compose my emotions. Once again I was close to tears. Hormones, I told myself. I didn’t want to be annoyed with her, though almost everything she did annoyed me. I wanted—what was the phrase the books used—to feel our bond. She was after all my mother and I had just borne her first grandchild. She began to hum a melody I recognized, Once I had a secret love. She couldn’t be hearing voices and humming that tune, the song that had always meant she was happy.
         She was happy. A warm excitement tingled in me, as though I had been given an unexpected gift. All I wanted at this moment was to be somebody’s child and to talk about my own.
         My mother hadn’t turned on the light in the kitchen, and it was nearly dark, but my eyes were adjusted to the dimness. She didn’t turn as I entered the kitchen. She stood at the stove, lowering chunks of breaded chicken into sizzling olive oil, still humming. The oil in the wok was three inches deep.
         “What are you doing?” I cried out, startling her. She turned toward me abruptly and dropped the plate of chicken into the wok. Boiling oil spattered up across her left hand.
         I screamed.
         My mother didn’t, but she held out her reddening hand and began to bite her bottom lip.
         I rushed to the sink and turned on the cold water. “Quick!” I ordered her. “Get your hand under the water while I get ice.”
         “Sssh,” my mother warned as her face contorted in pain. “You’ll wake the baby.”

Isabella slept and slept. “Is this normal?” I asked my mother, willing to believe whatever she told me. We were sitting on the porch with the door ajar so we could hear Isabella’s cries, but though I sometimes had to strain my ears to be sure, she remained silent. She had been sleeping for four hours.
         My mother drew on the cigarette in her right hand; her left hand lay wrapped in ointment and gauze in her lap. “Babies sleep,” she answered me. “Be thankful she’s a good sleeper.” She tilted her chin as she smoked.
         “But she’s not,” I said as I watched a set of headlights turn the corner, hoping they were Keith’s. Isabella had been waking up every couple of hours, all night long, since we’d brought her home. Admittedly, that had only been two days ago. The headlights belonged to a giant-tired car with ridiculously high suspension: some townie’s.
         “This is my last cigarette,” my mother said. “Then she’ll wake up.”
         I looked at her, huddled in a creaking lawn chair under the yellow porch light, a miniature moon beneath the half-hidden hunter’s moon in the sky. The index finger of her burned hand was tapping out some pattern on her lap.
         “How do you know?” I asked, hoping for maternal wisdom—infants under four weeks of age rarely sleep more than four hours at a time—rather than superstition—if I finish this cigarette in three puffs, the baby will wake—or worse.
         “Ssh!” my mother lifted a finger to her lips, and I thought she had heard the baby. I leaned my ears toward the door.
         “I hear whispers,” my mother told me, whispering.
         My muscles coiled tight, ready to spring toward the door and my slumbering baby. The baby I knew so little about beyond the fact of the raw, protective love I felt for her. Who was there? I listened but heard nothing beneath the ordinary night sounds of engines and electricity. Fear leapt in me as though pulled by the moon.
         “I hear whispering,” my mother repeated, rocking in her chair. “And I know who it is.”
         Like the gas flames on the stove I had rushed to lower earlier, the high, quick heat of my fear immediately reduced, simmering rather than boiling that familiar stew of anger and incomprehension.
         “What?” I asked, clenching my back teeth. “Who?”
         My mother crushed out her cigarette against the metal arm of her chair. “If I only smoke when they tell me,” she explained, “Isabella will stay safe.”
         This was the first time she’d said my daughter’s name; until now she’d referred to her as “the baby.” Another first. I winced. My breasts throbbed tenderly; my milk was coming in.
         Keith’s car pulled up in front of the house and at that moment I heard Isabella cry. I jumped up, knocking my pillow cushion to the floor, wanting to rush to him, wanting to rush to her. For a second I swayed on my feet, confused.
         “I’ll get the baby,” my mother said, pushing herself up.
         “No!” I snapped and rushed past her through the house.
         In the dark bedroom, I lifted my daughter to my shoulder, careful to support her heavy, wobbly head. She continued to cry, an insistent, angry sound that I thought was from hunger. I had never heard her wail this way, and part of me was glad, for my breasts burned full. It wasn’t until I got to the sofa in the living room, and sat with her beneath the lamplight that I saw the bright red line across her cheek.
         Keith followed my mother into the room. “I smell something good,” he said. He cupped my shoulder and bent over Isabella. “And I don’t mean you, Stinky.” He kissed her forehead.
         I glared at him. I didn’t like this nickname for her he’d begun using. “Look,” I said, turning her cheek toward him. “She’s scratched herself.” I hadn’t yet mustered the courage to cut her papery fingernails.
         Keith examined Isabella’s face as I opened my shirt. I could hear my mother in the kitchen now, opening and closing cupboards. We had agreed to wait until Keith got home to eat her deep-fried wok chicken and vegetables.
         Keith frowned, his eyelids lengthening. “She’s bleeding,” he said. He lifted Isabella’s tiny, curled fist. “Her nails are not that sharp.”
         He was right. My eyes met his, panicking, as Isabella’s rose petal mouth latched on to my nipple. Something—or someone?—had hurt her. “But how?” I asked, my stomach rolling into a tight fist. She sucked like an animal.
         Keith straightened. “Something in her basket,” he said and strode to the bedroom.
         Isabella’s sucking was painful, a punishment. I knew before Keith returned with it in his hand that it had to be the pillow. He came back carrying it, shaking his head.
         “What?” I asked, so tired the blood seemed to have slowed in my veins.
         “Look at this,” he said, holding up a sewing needle under the lamp, a thin, pale thread dangling from its eye. “Someone left a needle in this pillow. It could have stabbed her eye.” His voice trembled with fury.
         Someone. My crazy mother. I guess you didn’t smoke your cigarettes in the right order, I wanted to say to her. But I looked up and saw her standing in the doorway, her hands clasping a tattered dish cloth to her chest, her eyes so large and liquid they reflected light. And I knew that there would never be a trick to keeping children safe.

 

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