LIFE BY MOONLIGHT

October 1995

FRIDAY, 9:31 P.M, a humid night in fall: Mary Olson Burke, age thirty-three-pregnant, pregnant, pregnant-pauses in the paint-rollers-brushes-dropcloths aisle of the Home Depot in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and knows that her water has broken.

The tear is tiny, high in her uterus; there is no splash, no bursting water-balloon of fluid, no great, embarrassing release. Mary bends to lift a gallon can of white latex semigloss from a low shelf, when suddenly her panties are damp, then wet, a release of amniotic fluid about a thimbleful; she drops her eyes to the pleats of her cotton dress and finds no stain, no mark to tell anyone what has happened. And maybe nothing has. But, no. It is six days since Mary passed her due date, silently and without fanfare, like a car crossing a desert border at night. Inside Mary the question blooms: Hello? And: Soon? Her water has broken. Mary knows.

Mary is enormous; she is a cathedral, a human aria, a C note held for ten minutes. She feels luminous, beyond gravity; she is gravity itself. Her husband, O’Neil, is crouched to examine a rack of paintbrushes. Like everything else in the Home Depot, the display is huge and confusing, like a menu that is ten pages long. There are thick brushes and thin brushes, sleek brushes and hairy brushes, brushes with tips so delicate they could be used to stroke liquid gold on Fabergé eggs. O’Neil is all details, a man overwhelmed by the tiniest purchases; it will take him an hour to buy a paintbrush, but thirty minutes to buy a car.

“O’Neil…”

He tilts his head to the sound of Mary’s voice. His face lights up in a grateful smile; she has broken his trance.

“Who cares, am I right? You were about to say I should just pick anything so we can get the hell out of here.”

Mary gently lowers herself onto the can of paint, perching like a child on a potty chair. “Roger wilco, honeybear.” Now that she is off her feet, exhaustion folds over her like a heavy cloth. Repainting the kitchen now seems like madness, the dumbest idea of their marriage. “Please, can we just pick something and go? Can you take care of this while I sit here?”

O’Neil rises. “We’ll need a cart.”

“Make it two.” Mary tries to smile, and when she can’t, she realizes for the first time that she is afraid. “Just dump me in and wheel me home.”

They push their purchases outside, into the soupy heat and the sound of traffic on the turnpike. O’Neil leaves Mary under the concrete overhang and disappears across the parking lot, still full of cars at this late hour. Mary stands, clutching her side; under her fingertips she feels the baby shift position, feeling this also inside of her, like the sensation of her lips and tongue when the dentist has numbed them with Novocain, woozy and not quite real. Then she sees it: in the sky beyond the parking lot, the highway, the roofs of the buildings, a fat, yellowish light is emerging. Mary thinks at first that it’s a helicopter, or a searchlight, but then she sees that it’s the moon-a full moon, a harvest moon. It creeps up the cluttered horizon with amazing speed, leaking its liquidy light on everything. She is still watching it when the car pulls up.

O’Neil stops loading the paint and supplies into the trunk and follows her gaze to the horizon.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says finally. “A moon like that. What else? It means you’ll go into labor tonight.”

Mary looks again. Somehow, the moon seems even larger than before, and weirdly bright. It is almost too bright to look at. She wonders why she hasn’t told O’Neil about her water yet, and then she knows. It is the last secret she has; she will not surrender it yet, though soon.

“There’s always a chance,” Mary says.

“Ten bucks you have this baby before breakfast,” O’Neil says.

In the passenger seat Mary dozes, and by the time they pull into their driveway she is surprised to look over the lights of the dashboard and find her own house. For a moment she thinks the baby has already come but then realizes this is a dream she has had-that she was breaking open a hard-boiled egg and found a tiny person inside. Mary climbs the stairs, undresses, puts on a nightgown, and washes her face. Below her she can hear their front door opening and closing and knows that O’Neil is bringing the supplies inside. She finds him collapsed on the sofa in the living room, drinking a beer and watching television, the sound turned off. On the screen a group of divers in yellow wetsuits are lowering a small submarine from a crane into a choppy sea. These are the kinds of shows O’Neil loves.

“And zo,” O’Neil says, “ze brave men of ze Calypzo dezend once more into ze inky deep.” He pushes his glasses onto his forehead and rubs a hand over his tired face. “I think they’re looking for the lost continent of Atlantis. Apparently, it iz near ze Canary Islands.”

Mary bends to kiss O’Neil; he returns the kiss, then puts his beer on the coffee table, takes the round mass of her stomach in his hands, and kisses that too.

“Let me know if ze brave men of ze Calypzo stop by to paint ze kitchen,” Mary says.

Upstairs, Mary lowers herself into bed, leaving the shades open to fill the room with the night’s strange moonlight. The clock says it is just past midnight; three hours have passed since her water broke, and still nothing. She finds the position she likes, on her left side with a pillow between her thighs to straighten her back, and remembers the dream she had in the car, replaying its images in her mind like a prayer, hoping that she can return to it. It is a pleasant dream, and this time it begins in her parents’ kitchen in Minneapolis. Mary is alone, seated at the table, and there is an egg in her hand, still warm from the boiling water. Mary taps it with a butter knife, pausing to scrape away the flakes with her thumbnail. Crack, scrape, crack, scrape. But something is wrong; the egg is plastic, a plastic Easter egg. She pops it open, and inside she finds a slip of paper, like a fortune cookie, on which someone has written the word Atlantis.

Then she is in a different house, not a house she has ever seen before. In one of the bedrooms a monkey is living, left behind by the previous owners. Mary and O’Neil discuss what to do about the monkey. Should they feed it? Is it their monkey now? In the fridge they find a wedge of cheese, and they put it on a plate and take it into the bedroom. The room is dark, the shades drawn tight against the windows, and Mary can hear the monkey moving around, scratching itself, making tiny monkey noises. “Here, monkey,” Mary calls softly. “Here, little monkey.” Then the monkey is in her arms. She is nearly weightless, clinging to her. She has a soft, human face, with green eyes like O’Neil’s. Mary is happy, very happy, holding her, and does not mind at all that the monkey has urinated, soaking Mary’s nightgown, her thighs, her bare feet on the carpet. They will have to get a diaper for the monkey.

Then it is 2:00 A.M., and Mary awakens in a puddle that smells like straw, a strong contraction moving through her, and she goes to O’Neil where he has fallen asleep in front of the TV to tell him the moment is here, the baby is coming, that they have to go to the hospital, now.

O’Neil at 5:00 A.M., asleep and dreaming: a brief, unhappy dream in which he watches his parents fly over a cliff into darkness. The image plays before him like a movie on a screen, his parents moving away, and he can do nothing. He is pinned to his chair in the theater, and when he looks down he sees his wrists are tied; when he looks up, his parents are gone.

Then a new sound reaches him, distant and familiar. O’Neil thinks at first it’s a lawn mower, then that it’s the telephone, then that it is his wife, Mary, vomiting; they have been to a party, a weird and marvelous party where all the guests wore bedsheets and carried small faceless dolls, and Mary is drunk, and throwing up in the bathroom.