EXCERPT Every night they all went outside, Benjy too, because their mother said he would go crazy, allergies or no allergies, if he stayed cooped up indoors day and night. The grown-ups seemed too excited about the moon-landing, their voices raised in laughter as they lifted plastic glasses, rattling ice cubes and citing what they'd read about Neil Armstrong's wife, Buzz Aldrin's kids, how the astronauts had practiced eating upside down in the simulator. Robin stood by Uncle Mark's diving board and counted out loud to one hundred so she wouldn't have to listen. She'd turn her back on the yard, shadowing in dusk, the embers on her parents' cigarettes glowing red against the darkening lawn, the lit pool like a blue-green jewel, while Benjy found a place to hide. The sky behind the neighbors' black palm trees was tangerine and lavender, psychedelic with smog, and the stars weren't out yet. She saw only the crescent moon, tilted as if leaning back. Her father had explained to her the phases of the moon, and she knew it was always all there—hefty, substantial—although sometimes she saw nothing at all, or only half of it, or, last night, a white curve like a cat's shorn claw. Sometimes she could see it during the day, a surprise up in a blue sky. Men were on their way there, they'd be there in a few days, her father said: Robin would see it on TV. Robin didn't need these explanations, these reasons to believe. She knew from looking at it the moon was real. It was more real to her than the grown-ups' voices, the clunk of ice cubes against plastic, the rustle of palm trees in the wind. Don't get there, she would whisper, closing her eyes.
Make a wrong turn.
From “Careful”: They had nothing in common. She taught an evening poetry workshop at the local community college and worked as a translator from the French during the day. He was doing a postgrad in physics, spending hours with strings of numbers and symbols as strange to her as hieroglyphics. She could barely move in the morning until she had the first of three cups of coffee (a blend long ago perfected, ground from beans in the first harsh noise of her day); he could emerge from four hours' sleep with only a glass of juice or an apple, and nap on the sidelines of a basketball game. She wore a lot of black—turtlenecks, leggings, mini skirts with opaque tights, boots; he dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a button-down unbuttoned over it, sneakers on his big feet. She talked a lot out of nervous habit, finishing many sentences with “you know?” or “don't you think?” He always answered, but measured his own questions with care and consideration, as if he might have a limited amount and didn't want to use them up too soon. When they spoke on the phone, his voice, deep and smooth with an even, soft laugh, carried the echo of their intimacy, his familiarity with the feel and scent of her skin, so that even when they were discussing the bridge traffic and if she should take an alternate route, she was reminded of what they did together in bed. She told all her friends it was a fling, nothing more. She got an itchy feeling when she talked too much about him, as if she might be making something up. When her friend Ian ran into them together one night at a concert and referred to him the next day as the Puppy, she agreed that he did remind her of an eager, loping golden retriever. She had always preferred cats. From “Tell Me Something I Don't Know”: Rhoda calls every Sunday morning, just as I walk in from the corner bakery with a banana-blueberry muffin in a white bag, fat newspapers sliding against my hip. “Your brother,” she begins, complete with heaving sigh. He's been pulled over for a broken brake light and the police found outstanding traffic violations, two crack vials smashed under the front seat. He bargained with a judge for a ninety-day drug program and dropped out after four weeks. He lost his job at a bicycle repair shop and got another, at a bagel store, but couldn't keep the hours. My father hired him to stock the hardware storeroom ("Ned was so neat as a child," Rhoda says as if in justification), and came up short eighty-four dollars. Etc. Now it's the house again, three times in two weeks. Rhoda describes for me the motion-detecting beams, the dowels in the window frames, the safe in front of which my dad kneels every night. Ned still gets in. “Your brother,” she says, “must have the tread of an angel. I'm such a light sleeper.” As if his only crime is not waking her up. I hold the phone out as far as I can, listen to the rise and fall of her voice. The sun outside my window is all white glare, heat covering the city like a tarp. Trapping me. My brother. We used to be like that —third finger crossed over index, in the soft place between knuckles, the sign girls use to seal promises, break them too. Ned and I used to sleep in each other's beds, pick each other's scabs and poke at the black pores in each other's ears, like chimps. We'd wake each other Christmas morning so neither would be first to the tree. Our mother, Lucy, never had time to wrap, just left the toys and puzzles and games in their packages, his by the chair, mine against the wall. I've seen him break in. I know he's good.
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