The Hunger Moon (5 page)

Renata never used to be afraid. But the warm, trusting weight of Charlie, and her knowledge of his absolute helplessness, her absolute necessity to him, filled her at times with this sudden panic. She had felt it while driving over a mountain pass in Montana when a blinding rainstorm hit and she was forced to pull over to the muddy shoulder to wait for it to pass, the hazard lights on the car blinking in rhythm with her heart. Fear had electrified her one night in one of the little stucco motel rooms, when there was a sharp knock on the door at nine
P.M.
—the manager asking her if she would move her car to accommodate a truck that needed to park. Now her skin rose into bumps as she thought of how alone and exposed they were, with three strange men coming upon them.
You are being ridiculous
, she told herself.
They are taking a walk through a state park. They are here for the same reason you are, no other
. Adrenaline fired her pulse. How many other cars had been in the parking lot? Was hers the only one?

Charlie, who had been hypnotized by the light and shadows, decided to cry, to remind her that he was only halfway through his meal.

“Shh-shh,” she whispered, jiggling him and then putting him against her shoulder, rubbing his back.

The men’s voices suddenly dropped, or maybe it was a trick of the woods throwing their voices away from her, or maybe Charlie’s whimpering drowned them out.

Upset because the breast wasn’t forthcoming, Charlie leaned his head back and cried full force. She could hear nothing now but him.

“Charlie, sweetheart, wait just a minute,” Renata pleaded, rocking him back and forth. He screamed, his eyes tight with rage, his face red, tears rolling down his cheeks. Renata had no choice but to push up her shirt again and undo the other cup.

As soon as she put him to the breast, his cries stopped, and he sucked passionately with closed eyes, the tears beading on his eyelashes, and small, reproachful whimpers issuing intermittently from low in his throat.

Renata adjusted the shirt so that it covered all of the breast, showing just the back of the baby’s head, and waited. She held Charlie close to her.

The men strode into view, looking straight at her. They had quit talking among themselves. She thought they looked surprised, then uncertain. One of them said something and they all laughed. They were about twenty yards from her. They wore boots and jeans and black leather motorcycle jackets. Two had a beard and a ponytail, another a mustache and longish dirty hair over his collar. In that instant when one spoke to the others, Renata imagined that they shifted from their tentative individual glances at her to a unit of masculine confidence. She thought she saw it in their walk, and in the set of their mouths, half-smiling.

Renata stared at them and felt a fierceness so complete begin to build in her that it colored her vision and made her slightly lightheaded. Charlie was still nursing, his whimpers having turned into rhythmic swallowing. With this animal mother rage flooding her, she thought that if they approached her she could tear them apart, rip them to pieces if she needed to. They had better not come near her child.

Another said something and they laughed again, a low chuckle. A six-pack dangled from the fingers of the one with a mustache, who was stocky verging on fat.

Renata’s eyes were locked on them.

They were coming up even with her picnic blanket. They were close enough so that she could see the sheen of oil on the skin of the shorter one with the ponytail. She could see the silver coiled snake that was his belt buckle, and the dirty cracked leather of their boots. She stared.
Better not
. her eyes warned.
Better not. I will kill you if you touch my child. I swear to God 1 will kill you with my bare hands
.

“How ya doin’,” the fat one said.

“Nice day,” said one of the others.

Renata nodded without speaking, tensed. She wasn’t sure if they hesitated or not. Then they were past her, their conversation resumed, their backs disappearing into the woods.

That was all. Renata was limp with exhaustion; she felt like weeping. She looked down and saw Charlie staring up at her, wide-eyed. When her eyes met his, he released the nipple to smile.

“Hi, Charlie,” she whispered. “Come on, sweetheart, time to go.” As she strapped the baby into his stroller and folded up the blanket, she was made dizzy by the thought of how utterly her baby belonged to her.

A
FTER THAT
, R
ENATA STOPPED ONLY
at municipal parks crowded with mothers and children, or rest stops that had at least half a dozen cars clustered in the parking lot. When she spread a blanket on the grass, she hugged the margins of large family groups; she made eye contact right away with the other parents and smiled and nodded. She began to wish to belong somewhere. If not in a family, then a neighborhood, a mother’s circle, somewhere. There should be someone besides herself to know about Charlie’s existence, and to miss him if he suddenly were not there.

Renata began to feel impatient to get to Boston. Her destination had been a whim originally. A guy named Rick whom she had waited tables with in Venice was from Boston, and he had told her about the cobblestone and brick sidewalks on Beacon Hill, and about the Public Garden, where they had ice skating in the winter and swan boats in the summer. He showed her a picture of his parents’ brownstone, the roof rounded with snow like a house in a
children’s book, the shrubs frosted white in a doll-sized garden.

She was driving to that picture as much as anything else, because it represented nothing she had come from; in such a place you could begin your life, the one you were supposed to have.

Renata had no family to leave behind except Marcia and her kids. Her parents were dead, and their parents, the grandparents she never knew, were all dead. Although her father had had some half-brothers and -sisters in California from his mother’s second marriage, he hadn’t known them. Her mother’s family, the O’Conners, were originally from New York City, but the children had dispersed all over the country. Her mother never spoke of her family, other than to say, “You’re better off not knowin’ ‘em, sweet,” when Renata had asked why she didn’t have grandparents and uncles and aunts, like the other kids at school.

Not that much of her life growing up resembled that of the other kids. Even Marcia’s arms around Renata in their bedroom when they were children could not have protected her from the sound of their parents yelling and screaming down the hall. No number of stories Marcia told, in which a princess named Renata escaped from a gloomy castle through a window no bigger than a keyhole, could have reassured. But even those sisterly comforts, slight though they were, proved fleeting. Soon after entering high school, Marcia left Renata to fend for herself. She fell in love her sophomore year, and moved in with her future husband just after graduation.

With Marcia gone, Renata was on her own when her mother died. Though her mother used to drink almost as heavily as her father, she was not a mean drunk, and stayed glassily affectionate to her daughters until she passed out. Renata was always “Rennie” to her mother, who made up a song about “Rennie, Rennie, bright as a penny; Rennie the lass from Kilkenny.” Renata was in junior high when her mother’s cancer slipped in between her ribs like a snake and sucked her from their lives in less than a month. Her father became sober for the first time in years, and actually tried, Renata noticed, to fill in some of the gap in their house,
coming straight home after work to cook hamburgers or hot dogs or Kraft macaroni and cheese for them. But to Renata this silent, clear-eyed man was a stranger, and though she did not necessarily prefer the slurring, sarcastic man who cursed her and slammed things, she did know what to expect from him, as she did not from this new father.

They didn’t have much to say to each other, although Renata longed to have a conversation between them, tell him how much she missed her mother, and ask him if he ever missed her, too. She wanted to know things about him: what his days were like; if he had chosen to be a printer or if that was just what had happened to him; whether he was sorry he had had a family so early; if he loved his daughters. But there was no way to pose these questions, and he, in his turn, seemed incurious about her life at school, though Renata at the time was earning straight A’s, and being asked about her thoughts on going to college by the school guidance counselor. She thought it might be her fault that she and her father could not talk at suppertime, because, try as she would, she could not present a cheerful face to him. She guessed that her sadness must have looked like sullenness, since somewhere along the line her father seemed to have given up on her, staying late after work again to drink with his buddies, forgetting to leave any food in the refrigerator.

For a while Renata used her baby-sitting money to buy McDonald’s, then she began writing her father notes to please leave grocery money on the hall table. He did this, and she started doing all the food-shopping for them, as well as cleaning the house when she felt like it. Though her father had returned to his drinking, his outbursts were rarer now, so while they lived together in the house during Renata’s high school years, she could do pretty much as she pleased as long as she stayed out of his way. Both of them started spending nights away from home, she with her twenty-year-old boyfriend who already had an apartment, and her father who knows where. Renata had smoked marijuana first as an experiment at some junior high parties, then because she liked it. She started
sleeping in and missing classes in her senior year, and barely graduated. After graduation, she got a job as a waitress at the International House of Pancakes, and saved for a car.

Her grown-up life began with the car. At the age of nineteen, she knew that anytime she needed to, she could pack clothes and leave: she had the keys to her used Toyota, she had waitressing experience and had discovered she wasn’t afraid of hard work, and, more important, she had nothing at home in Springfield that she would be sorry to leave.

One day just short of her twentieth birthday, she did leave, but it was boredom, rather than unhappiness, which caused her to go. By then she had moved in with her boyfriend, and their lives had settled into a routine. After work they hung out at a local tavern. Renata sat on the barstool and smoked, feeding the jukebox; Mike played pool. She thought that they never fought because they were so well matched temperamentally, but on Valentine’s Day, when he suggested they get married, Renata had the revelation that she had never cared enough about him to have an argument. It was his proposal which made up her mind to go to California. When Mike gave her the ring at the Red Rustler steak house, where he liked to go to celebrate all important occasions, she took it because she didn’t know what else to say. In fact, she was touched at the amount of saving he must have done to produce a diamond so big.

She accepted the ring, and then, like a coward, dropped it in the mail to him on her way out of town. She wrote two letters, notes really, one to her father and one to Mike. To her father she said only that she was going to California for a while. She would send him an address and hoped he stayed well. To Mike she wrote that she thought she was too young to settle down, though if she were ready, it would be with him. This last part was not true, but she owed him at least that much sentiment. She insured the ring for $2,000 and sent him the receipt in a separate envelope in case he needed to make a claim.

Renata lived in San Francisco for a few years, but was drawn
eventually to the sun in Southern California. She sent her father her address every time she moved, but heard from him only once, on her twenty-fifth birthday. Why the twenty-fifth, and not the twenty-third, or even the twenty-first, which would have made sense, she didn’t know. Actually, it was on her sister’s birthday that he sent the card, but since Renata’s birthday had been only two weeks before, she forgave the mistake. Inside was a check for a hundred dollars, which Renata kept uncashed for a month while she pondered what to do with it. Finally she decided to get herself a very expensive haircut at one of the salons in Santa Monica, and, with whatever money was left, buy lunch overlooking the ocean.

She told the stylist to go very short, and the slim young man whose own hair was a brilliant platinum cropped close to his skull and whose close-fitting white jeans and white T-shirt gave him the appearance of an angel, nodded his head approvingly. First he tilted Renata’s head from side to side, scrutinizing the lines of her profile. Then he robed her and led her to the marble shampoo sink, where he gathered her dark shoulder-length hair in his hand and gently sprayed it, cradling her head as he worked. She watched as he deftly combed her wet hair back from her forehead and experimented with several natural parts. He told her she had a serious face, and she agreed, thinking that it was almost too serious a face for Los Angeles. As her hair fell to the floor under the hairdresser’s quick scissors, Renata grew more and more pleased. By the time he was through with her, her eyes were enormous, and her mouth and nose suddenly had a strong, classic shape. Even the hairdresser was surprised at the difference he had made in her looks.

“Don’t ever hide underneath your hair again,” he scolded her kindly, rubbing a dollop of scented mousse between his hands and working it through her hair with authority. Her hair, freed from the weight of six inches or so, was now wavy and caught the light with a subdued sheen. He had shaped it close around her head, with short, feathery bangs. From the salon she drove
to a restaurant in Malibu where she had never eaten and ordered a margarita. Her table was outside on the deck under a large umbrella. She faced the wide, blue expanse of the Pacific. Since it was a Wednesday around two, she had the deck almost to herself except for one or two customers who looked like Malibu locals, probably record-industry moguls or something, with their casual running shorts, beach sandals, and frayed cotton shirts.

Renata had just ordered her meal and was beginning to drink her second margarita when two guys came out on the deck and took the table next to hers. One of them kept staring at her. She avoided his eyes and studied the ocean. Renata was taking pleasure in reminding herself that she was her father’s guest for lunch, as if that fact were nothing very extraordinary, as if he had even chosen the restaurant and the view. Then the wind blew the baseball cap off the table of the guy who had been watching her, and into her lap. She caught it in surprise and he laughed.