sister moon (con’t)

PART TWO

After the sixth ode, my parents got a note from Principal Ott asking if they would come in for a parent-teacher conference. I decided Mrs. Erman wanted to talk to them about transferring me to a gifted school where they sent “exceptionally bright and creative” students who wrote really smashing poetry. I could just hear Mrs. Erman singing my praises, using phrases like “the best student I’ve ever had,” “an absolute treasure,” and “undoubtedly a child genius.”

The moment they walked in the door after the conference I heard my mother exclaim, “A counselor! Really, the nerve of that man! Our child does not need to talk with a counselor!”

The school counselor wasn’t really a counselor at all. I think he was a registered nurse or an engineer who had once taken a college credit in psychology, but I suppose back then he seemed as qualified as anyone for the job. As it turned out, he was a little man who was completely bald and had enormous thick black glasses. He worked all day long in a room filled with those obscenely bright clown pictures that grown-ups always think kids are so crazy about. I, for one, was mortally terrified of clowns. Weird pale men with fat red double mouths drawn over their real mouths and hair that shot out in frightening angles from their heads like gigantic sheep horns. And they were always trying to get into cars together. Lots of them. In little cars. This troubled me. I thought that a whole office filled with pictures of these inexplicable characters wasn’t the thing to set any normal kid at ease, but I figured I’d get in trouble if I mentioned it, so I kept my mouth shut.

We sat for a long time looking at pictures I’d drawn, mostly of my Sister Moon and me. He asked me a lot of questions about the pictures and about my Sister Moon. At first, I was flattered that he was so interested, but after a while, I started to feel that he was being a bit nosy. I mean, really, our family dynamic was none of his business.

“You see, the moon isn’t a she or a he,” he said to me at last, picking up what I thought was a particularly good picture of my Sister Moon and me together in a car. You couldn’t see much of her in it. I had just kind of drawn a big white blob in the passenger seat beside me. “The moon is just a chunk of rock floating in the sky,” he continued. “It’s like a little mini Earth that moves in circles around us. It orbits us like we orbit the sun.”

I stared at him. He was nearly as clueless as the Jupiter employee.

“She’s not really your sister. The moon isn’t a person. It’s not like you and me. Do you understand?”

I ignored him and began coloring another picture. This one would be my Sister Moon and me climbing up the side of a mountain. It was such a courageous theme, it appealed to me immediately. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the counselor frown and adjust the rims of his glasses. Yes, yes, he was definitely looking a little flustered — and were those not beads of sweat I saw forming on his wide and expansive forehead? I was wearing him down.

“I hear from Mrs. Erman that you want to be an astronaut. Well, you’re a very bright student, and I’m sure you’ll indeed become one someday if you choose. And when you are, maybe then you can go to the moon. In fact, you can probably even walk on the moon then because it’s that big.”

I refused to look at him, knowing that if he thought I wasn’t listening he’d eventually go away. That tactic worked with a lot of grown-ups. I’d drawn the mountain and now I was working on my Sister Moon. I had the white crayon in my hand and I was going at it. This would be one of my better pieces.

“Remember how you told me that sometimes the moon disappears, that it gets smaller and smaller until you can’t see it anymore, and then eventually it comes back and gets bigger and bigger? This is because the moon circles around the earth, so at certain times of the month you can’t see as much of it, just part of it. They’re called the phases of the moon. Do you understand? The moon is not a person. The moon is not even alive.”

Something was beginning to itch in the corner of my brain and I tried desperately to ignore it, to concentrate on my drawing, on the white crayon that was beginning to stray wildly from one end of the paper to the other. I was no longer drawing within the lines. The picture became blurry and all the colors bled into one another. My Sister Moon, climbing up the side of the mountain.

The counselor kept talking. That wicked little bald man. He was just jealous, just trying to make my life miserable when all I wanted was for my family and me to be together. I put down my crayon and looked up at him. I couldn’t draw anymore. My eyes were wide and sort of wet around the edges. The world became blurry through my gathering tears.

“But she follows me around. She likes me best.”

“Now listen, the moon doesn’t follow you around. The moon is so high up that you can see it from anywhere. It just looks like it’s following you around because it’s so high up.” He got up suddenly, walked over to his desk, and came back with a stack of colored photos. “Do you want to see some photographs of the moon, up close?”

I’d seen lots of pictures of astronauts preparing to go to the moon. One of them, a man named Neil Armstrong, was from Wapakoneta, Ohio, not too far from my hometown. The counselor brought the photos out and began explaining each one to me — who was in it and what they were doing and when it was taken.

I stared at the astronauts in their frightening white spacesuits. There were tubes weaving in and out of their bodies and their faces were half-hidden by huge bubble helmets. They stood on rocks and craters in the middle of a pale and empty and utterly lifeless landscape made by NASA to mimic the moon’s surface.

“This is what the moon looks like,” the counselor said, pointing at the dusty, jagged ground of each photo.

Was this really her? Could she truly look this way, my Sister Moon?

As I stared at those photos something within me came tumbling down and fell all to pieces; some part of me curled up into a little ball and went to sleep forever. I realized that what the bald little man was saying was true. The moon didn’t follow me anywhere, and the moon had never loved me. The realization struck me like a blow to the chest, and for an instant, I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t speak. I wasn’t sure if I was even breathing. I’d just decided that I probably was indeed dying (was it familial love or a heart attack that did it?), when the thought of Heaven came rushing back to me with visions of harps and hymns and no sweets. The image was so strong that I immediately jolted myself back to consciousness. There was no way I was going to end up there just yet if I could do anything about it. The day was turning out bad enough as it was.

The counselor was now squatting down beside me, his thick black glasses inches from my face. I looked at him through my tears. My head was spinning.

“Are you all right, dear?” he asked me.

I gritted my teeth and nodded. “Yes, sir, I’m fine.” But we both knew I wasn’t.

I was completely inconsolable the entire way home. I was crying so hard I could barely walk. My mother just kept apologizing over and over again.

“I’m sorry, honey. It’s okay now. You don’t have to go back.” She paused, then looked at me hopefully. “Do you want some ice cream?”

I glared at her. Really. As if that would make up for it.

A few moments later we sat outside Paul’s Dairy eating soft-serve. As I shaped my tongue around the ice cream to sculpt out an Elvis hairdo, I tilted my head up at the night sky, reminiscing on my Sister Moon and on the good times we had.

She was still there and always would be. Pale and beautiful, surrounded by those specks of smaller lights, a heavenly army of admirers. She was so lovely, so perfect and round; a full moon that night, as well she should be on the day we parted ways.

I sighed then — for lost thoughts, for broken dreams, for innocent misunderstandings. But I knew there was nothing to be done. My story with her had come to an end and there, that evening, sitting beneath the dimly lit Paul’s Dairy sign with trails of vanilla dripping down my chin and onto my shirt. I wiped my eyes, took a deep breath, and bid her farewell. My good friend, my Sister Moon.

— END —