While her life, in story, seemed a grand adventure and her sometimes hard-to-swallow retellings profoundly rational, I had to admit that she had a deep-end thing going on about the moon. She first explained it to me over a lunch of peanut butter and cherry jelly, while I was on a break from painting the shutters. Pink. Geez.
“It’s coming ’round again tonight, I can feel it,” she proclaimed while I was in the midst of tonguing the chunky glue off my palate. For a moment, I thought she meant her period, which had to be a memory two decades past, at least. But Eva would talk about anything, so I wasn’t too surprised.
“I can never sleep when it does,” she said, her voice growing far away, dreamy. Her face relaxed then, and as the lines smoothed away, I caught a glimpse of the girl she’d once been.
It’s so hard to look at old people as anything other than old, but I guessed that Eva had once been a beautiful woman. The kind who trails allure like incense. I could imagine a line of men chasing her as she followed her faux Romeo to the land of the Bible.
I didn’t know what to say, so I played the employee. “Ma’am?” I said, once I unstuck the roof of my mouth.
“The moon,” she answered while reaching over to wipe a dollop of cherry jelly from my face with a cloth napkin.
“I can feel its pull when the moon is full. Always have. When I was a girl, my mother used to wake in the middle of the night and find me wandering in the topiary during the nights of the full moon. I never remembered how I got there. The doctor just said I was sleepwalking, but my mother soon realized that my walking episodes coincided with the phase of the moon. She would padlock the outside of my door once a month to keep me inside.”
She looked at me searchingly then and said, “Most people are too wound up in their lives to listen, but you’ve been out on the street during the full moon. Have you ever felt its tug?”
I shook my head no and she sighed, disappointed. “It gets stronger for me every year. It probably sounds crazy to you, but after all, they named lunatics after Luna, yes?”
I laughed along with her quiet chuckle, not knowing what else to say. She did sound a bit off.
“Sometimes, as a young woman, when I did sleep during the night of the moon, I would feel my soul pull away from my body and drift upwards, outwards, towards the window where the silvery light was reaching inside. I would look down at my own sleeping face and wonder, just for a second, who that was sleeping in my bed. And then the shock of who I was seeing, that realization would hit me and I’d panic, reaching out for my body and I would fall, inward, and wake up gasping for air.”
She paused then, a crooked smile on her face. “A couple experiences like that and I began to close my shutters each month. I wondered where the moon would take me, but I wasn’t ready to go just yet.”
It was several weeks later when I first felt that pull myself. Maybe it was the power of suggestion and my strong imagination working in tandem, but I know I felt something.
I was walking late along the water near the Embarcadero, and the lights of the Bay Bridge gleamed blurrily through the fog rolling in. The red warning lights blinked for aviators like angry fireflies and a snow-white cloud snaked around the metal struts below. The omnipresent San Francisco fire engines blared fuzzily in the distance, and above me, I felt the cool white hand of the moon on my back.
She was gentle but firm. It was as if, for a second, both my feet left the ground and I was propelled forward. My arms pinwheeled to restore my balance.
Two steps farther forward and I’d have been swimming.
I jerked around to see who had pushed me. There was only empty sidewalk.
I started to jog, telling myself it was nothing, and a little exercise would get my blood flowing. I’d just been falling asleep on my feet. But my jog turned into a run which took me all the way to the dollar-a-night hotel I was calling home just off Taylor Street.
In moments I’d left the cool creamy gleam of the moon on the bay behind for the echoes and fog of the inner city.
The next morning, I was at Eva’s place extra early, waiting for those gaudy pink shutters to open. On any other day of the month, I could have yelled through an open screen. She loved to feel the air slide across her at night, she said. Her windows were almost never closed in the spring, summer and fall. But last night belonged to the moon, and Eva hid from her hand. The hand that I now believed I had felt.
“I hope it’s hot,” she demanded, when she finally opened the door to my knocking, still in her long faded floral nightgown. She passed the back of her hand across her eyes and rubbed. “I barely caught a wink last night, but I don’t intend to waste the day abed.”
She pushed the screen door open and motioned me inside. “Come in, come in. Sometimes you’re slower than my auntie Jane’s molasses.”
I set the coffee on the kitchen table and turned to leave.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, holding my shoulder. “You don’t feel right.”
“Just a dream,” I shrugged and grabbed for the latch.
“Sit down, boy,” she insisted, and dragged me over to the kitchen table.
“It’s nothing, Eva, really. An overactive imagination is all.”
Her eyes bored into me and accepted no excuses. So I told her my story of walking by the bay in the moonlight. And of feeling the moon trying to push me in.
She nodded knowingly, then grinned. “I knew you could hear her, if you only listened,” she said. As if this were a good thing. “Now you won’t think I’m a crazy for drawing my shutters.”
I didn’t say anything. She took my hands in her own. “I’ve been telling her no for so long, sometimes I wonder myself why. I’ve spent these past weeks enjoying your company, but sooner or later, I have to answer her. She may have pushed your shoulder, but it’s my attention she’s trying to get.”
I didn’t say anything as she sipped a loud slurp of coffee through the plastic spout.
“You stay in on the night of the full moon from now on, you hear?”
I agreed. Then she turned the conversation to her daughter in Des Moines. Eventually she shooed me out to my painting, as if I had been the one insisting on dawdling at her table.
Not long after that, I bought myself a secondhand pair of Dockers and a button-down pale blue shirt that didn’t have five or six stains down the middle, and got myself a part-time job at the Chinese grocery down on Hyde.
They didn’t say anything about my coming to work in the same clothes every day since I was careful to wash out my shirt every night in the sink. I used my first paycheck to buy three more outfits.
Two more paychecks and I moved into a tiny studio apartment. It was south of Market, but I was off the street and out of the tuberculosis hotels. I hung my meager wardrobe in the single closet off the kitchen, with hangers from Eva, and scrubbed the floors clean of grease and mold with wire mesh and a towel I found in a dumpster out back. There wasn’t much to boast about in the place – it had no air conditioning (a noticeable detraction as the heat began to rise and the fog disappear), no bed (I slept on the floor on a rolled-up pair of jeans) and the kitchen was really just a sink and a half-sized refrigerator sitting on scuffed tan tile in the corner of the room. The refrigerator rattled dangerously whenever the cooling element kicked on.
But it was mine.
And while the lock was less secure than the two rusted hinges on the front door, I didn’t have anything I was worried about the street boys stealing. It was hard to believe, but life was actually looking up.
It was a Wednesday afternoon, weeks later, when I finally finished all the painting on her house and garage that Eva could possibly devise. The air was scented with salt and longing. Long rays of sunshine colored the ground in tints of amber and yellow, and the roses on Eva’s porch smelled stronger than bottled musk.
The day before, a girl who I’d seen before eyeing me along with the lettuce heads at the grocery finally braved the fates to talk to me.
“Where is the soy sauce?” she asked, admittedly not a personal question, but I took it as a good sign. She was Chinese and had shopped there as long as I’d worked there. She knew where the soy sauce was.
I vaulted up the steps to Eva’s door filled with the sauce of a man on the rise. My brushes were clean, there was five dollars in my pocket and there was a pretty black-haired girl who might be stopping by the grocery tonight because she’d “forgotten” an item yesterday. My world was blue and green and bright.
But Eva’s face was otherwise.
“Can you drive?” she asked me when I got to the door.
“Well, I don’t have a license anymore, but sure, I used to drive,” I said.
“Take me to the airport.”
Eva bade me stay at her place until she came home from her daughter’s in Des Moines, so she could phone me to say when she’d be back and I could pick her up at the airport. I couldn’t afford a phone at my apartment.
What was supposed to be a few days of absence stretched longer when her daughter didn’t pull through. She was gone for weeks; after the death and funeral, she called to say she was hopping another plane to stay for a while with her son in Africa. It was Eva all the way. I shook my head and smiled at the thought of this little old spitfire touching down on the Ivory Coast.
At 8:13 a.m. on a Saturday (her stove had one of those electric digital clocks) as I sat reading her paper at her table in her kitchen, after a night on her couch (I wouldn’t sleep in her bed – it just didn’t seem right) the phone call finally came.
“Pick me up at three this afternoon,” she said. “At the United terminal. I’m ready to come home.”
I almost didn’t recognize her when she came out of the terminal, lugging the one canvass bag she’d packed before leaving, along with two new plastic bags lumpy with additions. You don’t ever come back with less than you take. Always more.
Eva had also come back with more on her mind. She’d aged two decades in two months. Suddenly she seemed as frail and weathered as an oak leaf in December. I didn’t know what to say to her. When she’d left it was to help her daughter after a car accident, and she’d come back without any daughter at all.
I pushed her bags into the trunk and got the door for her, but she insisted on closing it herself.
“Get in the car,” she said, shooing me away from the handle. “Let’s just get home.”
It was a long, quiet ride from the airport; Eva stared out the window at the bay, and I tried not to punch the unfamiliar brakes too hard. I’d owned a car once but that had been many years before. Eva’s Chevy probably predated my Honda, but I hadn’t driven it while she was gone.
When we got home, I picked up the couple of items I’d brought with me from home – a recently acquired toothbrush and my laundry – and headed for the door, eager to leave her with her own thoughts. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, staring at the floor of her kitchen and clumsily shifting my plastic sack of belongings from one hand to the other.
Eva nodded. “Don’t forget my coffee,” was all she said.
By the end of October she seemed back to normal. Mostly. I only really saw her in the mornings, bringing her that one-cup care package that had managed to pull me off the street and into a full-time job at the grocery store (the stockboy had quit a couple weeks before) and a one-room apartment on the skid. The week before I’d even asked the Chinese girl, Soo Lee, to a movie.
And she said yes.
“Have you heard from the moon lately?” Eva asked me one morning.
I shook my head no.
“Not since that night,” I replied. “I took your advice; I stay in when the moon is full.”
Actually, I had long ago begun to think the incident was a product of a mind ripe with street delirium.
She nodded absently. “Just as well. There are still things here for you to do.”
I looked around at the freshly varnished cupboards, the recently painted back door, the newly screened front windows and put my hands out in askance.
“What?”
She smiled sadly and shook her head. “Tell me about your little Chinese girl. Will you take her out again?”
In fact, I did take her out again. And again. And two weeks later, I introduced her to Eva.
“This is Soo Lee,” I said, beaming with pride. Slurring with pride too; we’d just come from Happy Hour.
“Would you like some tea?” Eva invited, but I declined.
“We’re off to Perrone’s for dinner.”
Perrone’s was just a diner, but for me it was living high. As Soo Lee stepped down from the porch, Eva pressed a ten dollar bill into my hand.
“Get her whatever she wants,” she said. “And you… stay off the wine tonight.”
I knew better than to argue.
That night, as I walked Soo Lee home by the light of the moon, I felt a touch on my shoulders once again. This time though, it wasn’t a push, but a cool caress along my neck and shoulder blades.
At first I thought it was Soo Lee’s fingers running down my back, but then I realized her hand was in mine. I shivered in the night breeze. She smiled at me, her eyes dark with compassion. “You are chilled?”
“No,” I said, glancing behind me. “Your hand keeps me warm.”