From the air, the house looked like a joke told by someone with no sense of timing, a big brown rectangle in the middle of a slightly bigger green rectangle tatted with a white picket fence. The fence looked flimsy because the fence was flimsy. A child could knock it down, and did, several times, mostly as a result of trying to hurdle it and failing, sometimes just for spite. My father put up the fence when we moved in, to keep the dog in the yard. “Will you get a load of that?” said my mother, puffing on a cigarette. “Your father wants to prove that a lawyer can do more than lawyering. I’m pretty sure he can’t.” And sure enough, within three months, the dog—a small schnauzer beloved by my sister and my father, despised by my mother, and, for me, an object lesson in indifference—was gone through a corner of the fence where the slats flexed enough to permit its passage. “Where is Goosey?” Jill said, in a voice loaded up with tragic tones she had learned from the television. She did this all the time. It was difficult to take her seriously. “Where is my little dog Goosey?”
“I am so sorry,” said my father. The grief in his voice was real.
Since both my parents worked late, our dinners were prepared by a cook, a tall, thin woman named Catherine who was planning to open her own restaurant and who was, my mother told us, attempting to trick my father into becoming an angel. “That’s a kind of investor,” she said, as if there were any confusion. “I think he should think long and hard before he makes that kind of decision.” She was one to talk. When my mother had been in charge of the cooking, dinner was a roll of the dice, both random and risky. We could have pizza four nights in a row, and then not see it again for a month. We could have fried chicken every other night for two months and then lose it for the better part of a year. It made for an unstable relationship with food. With Catherine, we entered into a regimen of strict rotation: chicken, pork, fish, pasta, beef. Each day of the week partnered with a certain entrée. “It’s to help me learn what I need to know,” Catherine said, her eyes glazing over as she drifted into thoughts of her future restaurant, which she was going to call the Hungry Cat. Fridays were for experiments; she tried tagines, pastry shells, exotic meats. One Friday, she served something she called “a Bull in the Grass,” which consisted of a filet mignon served over a bed of spinach and topped with sautéed onions and mushrooms. Midway through the meal, I leaned over to Jill and said, “Why doesn’t she call this ‘a Goose in the Grass’?” My mother laughed. Jill burst into tears. My father said my name once sternly—it was also his own name—and then he said nothing. Had I not been so pleased with my own joke I might have noticed the way he stared at Catherine.
My mother and Catherine didn’t get along, and I wasn’t sure why.
Certainly, my mother wasn’t uncomfortable with the idea of having servants. She had grown up wealthy; her father was a prominent businessman back on Earth. Have I mentioned that we were no longer living on Earth? When gravity and oxygen were first introduced to the moon, the United States government arranged for the transfer of more than 25,000 Americans to Alpha Settlement. No one liked the name, so the government promised that after a year the residents could vote on a new name. That first year, while my parents were busy getting used to their new lives, meeting the neighbors, and fixing up the house—that was the year my father built the fence—Jill and I spent all our time thinking of names for Alpha Settlement.
As befits a self-serious fourteen-year-old, I favored dignified, slightly artificial names: Luna Village, Tranquility Hills. Jill, twelve, wanted a name that made her laugh: “Moonesota,” she said, or “Moontana,” or “Moonte Carlo.” My mother and I indulged her names with weak smiles and encouraging nods. My father loved them. He was constantly asking Jill to think of new ones or, better yet, to make a list of all the ones she had thought of to date. One day he came home from work, and she rushed at him with open arms. “Daddy,” she said. “I thought of three more today: Vermoont! Green Cheese City! Moonesota!” She was beginning to repeat herself, but normally that would have made no difference to my father. Normally, he would have stood next to her and laughed at each and every joke. This was not a normal day, though. He went to the dining room table, set down his briefcase, sat down stiffly, and told my sister and I that he was leaving my mother for Catherine.
This was followed by a long explanation in which he touched on several subjects that were unfamiliar to me and Jill. He spoke about what he called “carnal and conversational compatibility,” and did so in such a manner that it seemed he had not invented it, but rather had read about it somewhere. He warned us that when we picked a mate, we should be vigilant about ensuring that our moral compasses were oriented in the same direction. He even raised the issue of location: he had begun to feel strange since coming to the moon, he said, and worried that it was not natural to live there, no matter what the government said. When he was done with the speech, both Jill and I were thoroughly persuaded, and he sensed this. He nodded at us crisply, picked up his briefcase, and walked out of the kitchen. Jill and I rushed to the front window and watched him go through the gate in the fence. He closed it delicately and then he stood on the other side. He had one more short speech in him. “I put up this fence with my own hands,” he said. “I intended for it to keep you safe, to keep us all safe. It did a poor job because I did a poor job. It let Goosey out and now it is letting me out. I hope it does a better job for you.” He reached out to touch the gate, thought better of it, withdrew his hand. Then he turned and walked away. Jill began to cry. I kept staring out the window. Between the fence and the street, there were several hundred yards of empty frontage, which had two effects: first, to call into question the purpose of the fence; second, to allow me to watch my father recede slowly until he was no more than a tiny figure on the horizon of the evening. Then it was time for dinner, and I knew Catherine wouldn’t be coming, so I ordered some pizza.
My mother was out all afternoon, covering for a friend at the hospital where she worked as a physician’s assistant, so she received confirmation of my father’s departure by telegram that evening. The pizza was a halfer: cheese for Jill, who had declared herself a vegetarian since the Goose in the Grass incident, and sausage for me. My mother took a slice from each half and nibbled at them cautiously. Normally she liked pizza, but even before the telegram arrived, she had suspected that the dinner was a bad sign. The doorbell rang. A man in a white hat and white gloves was standing there, and there was an envelope in his hand. In some ways, Alpha Settlement, still young, was unnecessarily formal. My mother read the telegram several times to herself, put it on her plate, and slid the sausage slice over it as a form of burial. “He used to send me letters all the time,” she said. And then she said no more. Had it been me, I would have closed my mouth if I had no more to say. But my mother did not close her mouth. In fact, she opened it wider, and then wider still. Jill and I, who had been staring down into the pizza, looked up at my mother’s gaping mouth. We didn’t know whether we were supposed to put something in there or take something out. Then my mother left the kitchen abruptly and went into her bedroom, where she stayed for one full month, occasionally emerging to shout at Jill or me, or drive to the liquor store, or watch old detective shows on TV. She loved to criticize the detectives when they missed obvious clues. “She’s wearing different shoes than she was before the murder,” she said. “Will you get a load of that?”
“He can’t hear you,” Jill said. “It’s a TV.” But my mother spoke with such volume that I wasn’t sure that Jill was right.
It would be nice to report that the love affair between Catherine and my father petered out—that she came to see him as an ineffectual man who had done his family wrong or that he came to see her as a siren who had tempted him into misdeed and mischance. In fact, his exit through the front door, and then the long pause by the fence, were the last we saw of him, at least in person. He married Catherine, moved back to Earth, helped her open the Hungry Cat, had a baby daughter named Rebecca, put ribbons in her hair, and developed a wide, toothy smile that he invariably displayed in the pictures that he sent us after birthdays and holidays. The photographs were accompanied by letters, and the letters, typed on a thin onionskin paper that allowed him to erase and retype over errors, were even more sadistic. He called Rebecca “your sister” and made outlandish promises to me and to Jill—vacations, ponies, battery-powered cars—that we believed painfully for the first year or two. The letters were addressed to me and to Jill at the house in Lunar City, for that was what Alpha Settlement had been named. Jill and I would sit in armchairs and read them, but my mother, aware that they represented a particularly efficient delivery mechanism for additional misery, seemed determined to ignore them. Every once in a while, though, she’d ask me or Jill how our father seemed to be doing. Jill scowled and refused to answer. “He seems a little unsure of himself, really,” I said, gently.
I was gentle to my mother because I loved her. Jill was rough with her because she loved my father more. I missed my father because his departure left me without an idea of the kind of man I might become at the same time that it forced me prematurely to become that man. Jill missed my father because she had been deprived of her first love. Perhaps these things are obvious, but they struck me as insights, particularly in those first few years after my father left.
I tried to raise the issue with Jill once when we were out in the yard fixing the fence. We were out there fixing it almost every week. She screwed up her face. “You talk so fancy out here,” she said. “It’s like the fence is making you think you’re smarter. Do you think it can see inside the human soul? From now on I’m going to call it the Shrink Fence.”
“Call it what you want,” I said. “But don’t deny how important it is to you to feel Dad’s love.”
“I’m not feeling anyone’s anything,” she said. “You’re disgusting. Anyway, I don’t love him. I hate him.”
“You don’t hate him,” I said.
“Why would I love a man who walks out on his wife and children?” she said. “Why would I love a man who puts ribbons in that stupid little girl’s stupid hair? Why would I love a man who let Goosey escape?”
Just a year before, this memory would have brought on tears, but Jill, now fourteen, was hardening quickly, and even Goosey was more a spur to anger than a source of sadness. “And on that same topic,” she said, “why would I love a man who built this fence? Incompetent is the only way you can describe this thing.” We had been packing in dirt around the bases of the fence-posts, and now she stood and kicked at the post closest to her, and the fence buckled like a bad idea and the section closest to her went flat to the ground. Goosey wouldn’t even have needed to squeeze through the pickets. He could have just walked out, right over them.
My mother was as angry as Jill, if not more so, but she had a different style entirely. To the untrained eye, her anger probably seemed as though it was pointing in all directions at once. It was not, not by a long shot. She hated the government, particularly the mayor, whom she held accountable for the way Lunar City was zoned.
“It’s his fault that we have almost no neighbors all the way out here,” she said. “I blame him for our loneliness.” She hated television detectives, as I have said, and pizza delivery boys, of course. But that was about it. She loved nearly everyone else, and she expressed that as passionately as she expressed her hatred. When Jill turned fifteen, she started to date a pizza delivery boy just to antagonize my mother, and she was always taunting her by saying things like “We were there at the store late because it’s his job to lock up” or “I think I left my sweater in the back of his van.” Jill confessed to me that she didn’t really like the guy, and that she hadn’t let him do more than put his hand up her shirt, but that she was driven to get my mother’s attention by at least pretending to be committing these transgressions.
“Driven to get attention by committing transgressions,” I said. “Sounds like someone has been standing out by the Shrink Fence.”
“Whatever,” Jill said. My mother was in the room now. “Anyway, I’m heading over to Eric’s place. He has a new mattress.”
My mother didn’t take the bait. She never did where people she loved were concerned. “Bye, Sweetie,” she said. “I can’t see what you see in him, but I trust that if you see something, it’s there. I believe in your judgment, because I feel that you are capable of great things. I hope you agree, or that you’ll come to agree.”
“Leaving,” Jill said. “Leaving leaving leaving.”
But Jill didn’t leave. I left. I worked hard in high school, happier in class than at home, and spent afternoons out by the fence, thinking things through. When it came time to apply to college, my mother pressured me to attend Lunar City University, which was a fine institution, staffed by some of the best minds in America, many of whom had jumped at the opportunity to teach on the moon, others of whom had been reluctant initially but found the large salaries persuasive. “What do you like, business?” my mother said. “You can study business there. They say on TV that lunar franchises are a big deal now. Lunar franchises: Will you get a load of that?”
“I don’t like business,” I said. “Not at all.”
“What, then?” she said. “The law?” Her lip curled when she said it. But she loved me, and if I had said yes, she would have been right on it, weaving an elaborate defense of the law as a legitimate career.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just want to go back to Earth.” And so I did, to a nondescript four-year university in a nondescript state in the broad middle of the nation, only fifty miles or so from where my father had settled with Catherine and Rebecca. At first, my mother and I spoke on the phone every week, but the conversations grew strained. There was something in the extreme long distance of the call that diluted the tone of our voices and made each of us less liable to believe the other. For example, she suspected that I was secretly spending time with my father and Catherine there on Earth, though I told her plainly that I wasn’t. And I suspected that she was angry at me, though that seemed impossible. One day, near the end of the first semester, she was worrying about what she should cook when I came back for vacation. I told her that I wasn’t sure I was coming, that I was thinking of spending the holiday in Maine with a roommate. “It might be easier if you and Jill just ordered something,” I said. I didn’t mean anything by it, though I realized as I said it that it meant everything. My mother didn’t speak for a few seconds. I imagined that her mouth was wide open. Then she told me that I was acting just like my father, which I took as a sign not to call her for a while.
My relationship with Jill was better. We didn’t talk on the telephone or send each other electronic messages. Instead, we exchanged letters, and in those letters she was able to give a fuller account of how she was feeling. In fact, they seemed to encourage her to try to understand her own motives and the motives of those around her, and to analyze before she judged; they were like a portable version of the Shrink Fence. At the start of my sophomore year in college, she visited me. By then, she was a swan of a young woman, tall and beautiful and capable of cool irony along with the silliness and surliness that were her trademarks. At least two of my friends fell in love with her during the week she was on campus, and one of them went so far as to spend his winter break working on the moon, calling her daily and offering to take her to expensive restaurants. He returned to college in the spring, defeated because Jill had spurned his advances. In the next letter she sent me, she explained. “It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with Anton,” she said. “But I met a guy here and I think I’m in love. He’s a pizza delivery boy. Ha ha. I am just joking. But you know the irony of it? He owns the pizza store. His name is Jack Holland, and he moved up here from Earth just last year. He is a quite a bit older than me and divorced. He is also the tallest man in town, I think. He’s six-eight if he’s an inch. On our first date I told him about Moonesota and he laughed so hard he fell out of his chair. This is not an exaggeration or colorful language. He fell out of his chair. Sitting there on the ground, he was almost as tall as I was.”
In that same letter, Jill told me another piece of information, which was that my father had stopped writing her. This surprised me because I hadn’t received any letters from him since I started college, and I had assumed that he wasn’t writing to anyone. “I got them at a regular clip until last month,” Jill wrote, “and then they stopped suddenly. I had come to depend on them, even though they were growing steadily more boring. A few months ago, he and Catherine took Rebecca to the zoo and then let her nap in the back office at the Hungry Cat while Catherine chalked the specials on the board. I know this because it’s exactly what his letter said. It was so boring that even writing about it is boring. But it was a piece of him. I would like it if you would investigate and find out why he stopped writing. If you don’t want to do it for me, do it for Mom. I’m pretty sure she has noticed that the letters have stopped, and I’m pretty sure that it bothers her. She grew accustomed to seeing them piling up in our rooms. It comforted her, if you can believe it.” I folded up Jill’s letter and slid it to the side of my desk.
Anton came by a minute later, saw the handwriting, and pulled up a chair. “If there’s any way you’d give me another chance,” he said. “I’ll do anything.”
“She can’t hear you,” I said. “It’s a letter.”
I made some calls and read some articles and was able to find out more news about my father. He had gone on a business trip to the Pacific Rim, during which time he had contracted a bacterial infection from shellfish. He recovered from the infection, but it left him weak, and when he returned to the States, he was unable to climb the stairs to his office, even though it was only on the second floor. He took the elevator, and as he was impatient, he pressed the CLOSE DOOR button repeatedly. I mention the CLOSE DOOR button because it was the last button he ever pushed; the elevator panel had been removed and replaced, and the tongue end of a live wire had somehow been connected to the metal plate. The numbered buttons, the ones that instructed the elevator to travel to specific floors, were rimmed in rubber and consequently grounded. The OPEN DOOR and CLOSE DOOR buttons were not. Electricity pierced the tip of my father’s finger. A blue flame traced the outline of his hand. Current ran around his heart, which chased the current until it was exhausted and collapsed. The newspaper account I read mentioned a possible lawsuit. It also mentioned that he was survived by his wife Catherine and his daughter Rebecca. I omitted this bit of information when I wrote to Jill with the news. She called me immediately when she received the letter. She was crying. “I need to go talk to Jack,” she said, and her crying tapered off a bit.
I kept writing letters to Jill. I thought she needed to receive them, and I knew that I needed to send them. Increasingly, though, she responded to my letters with phone calls. I tried to explain to her why this was a mistake, but she wouldn’t listen. As a result of whatever she thought she was feeling with Jack, she was in the mind of doing something new—new for herself, new for the world—and that meant pushing past what I now saw she believed was an antiquated practice. It hurt me at first. We entered a brief period of opposition, which came as a shock to me, not because it arrived with any particular violence but because it arrived at all. It had been a long time since we had allowed ourselves to be enemies. The memory that came back to me most vividly during that time was the moment when I told her that we were eating Goosey; I was wrong to fix on it, of course, but I must have believed that it triggered the entire process that led my father to notice Catherine, to leave the house, to tie a ribbon in Rebecca’s hair, to press the CLOSE DOOR button. For a week or so, I dropped into a deep depression, and my only consolation came from the fact that it was so theatrical that I knew it would not last. Then I met a girl who came from a town very near to where my father had lived, and then Anton started dating her friend, and I was all at once in a new thing of my own. I called Jill when I wanted to talk to her, and though this felt like a concession, it also felt like progress. The only persistent negative effect of the calls was that they brought into sharp relief the fact that I was still not talking to my mother. It had been nearly a year, and she had not asked for me, and I had not asked for her. She would watch as my sister spoke to me, but we were both too proud to end the silence. When Jill told me that she was starting to fail a bit, that she would sometimes forget Jill’s name or insist that my father was just late coming home from work, it should have encouraged me to call directly, but it had the opposite effect. I had broken off talking to my mother while she was still vibrating with hatred for my father and the mayor and love for everyone else. I did not want to find her again only to discover that she had been diminished.
One day, out walking in a neighborhood near campus, I had a very clear vision of the house where I grew up, as seen from overhead: the brown rectangle, the green rectangle, the white fence. In my vision, my mother was there, standing forlornly in a corner of the front lawn, and I suddenly came over with an idea. Since I could no longer write letters to Jill, and since I could no longer speak to my mother on the phone, I would write letters to my mother.
The first one was written with the kind of unthinking innocence that always reveals itself, in time, to be a form of deceit. I decided to type it because my mother had always complained that she could not read my handwriting. I obtained onionskin paper because it was the best lightweight paper available at the campus bookstore. (Perhaps the Shrink Fence would challenge both of these statements.) In that first letter, I affected a more adult tone because I wanted to impress her with my independence. “I know we haven’t spoken for a while,” I wrote. “I wish it weren’t the case. Life in the States is good.” The rest of it was small talk about the news, save for one long sentence at the end where I tried to communicate what I understood of human connection: “The way in which I faded away is unforgivable and I would not blame you if you agreed,” I wrote, “which is why I am not asking that you write back, only that you continue to let me write to you.” I was helping my girlfriend move some furniture at her parents’ house that weekend, and I deposited the letter virtuously in a box at the corner of the street.
A few days later, my mother called me. “Guess what?” she said. “Your father wrote me a letter.”
The monstrosity of this misunderstanding should have compelled me to clarify matters right then and there. Why I didn’t, I will never know. But rather than disabuse my mother of her delusion, I redoubled it. I sent another letter, and this time I clearly took on my father’s persona, right down to the easy eloquence he assumed when painful matters were close at hand. “So much time,” he wrote, “and so little time within that time to make amends. Going backward, well, that is the behavior of a fool, but going forward without acknowledging the ways in which I crippled the past so that it could only hobble into the present, that is the behavior of a villain.” When I mailed that second letter, I was sure that I would be found out, if not by my mother, then by Jill. But Jill was out of the house, and my mother was failing, and this letter was something that she believed in more completely than if it were true. On the phone, she told me that he had written her again. “He moved to the earth,” she said, as if she had forgotten that I lived there, too. She was calling me regularly now, in part because she was rejuvenated by the letters, and in part because she was aging rapidly and forgot the calls almost as soon as she made them.
I should have stopped after two letters, or three, or five, or ten.
When Jill decided to marry Jack Holland, there was no thinking long and hard. She just did it, stepped into a bone-white cocktail dress and drove herself to a justice of the peace on the other side of town. Jack came straight from the pizza shop to meet her there. I didn’t think he was right for her, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she was only eighteen. He was too powerful, too big, with reserves of rough strength it seemed unlikely that she would be able to control. She was a delicate person, no matter how much she liked to pretend otherwise.
I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I congratulated her and asked her if there would be a party to celebrate. “Mom said she’ll throw one, but she’s slipping further every day,” Jill said. “I think I’ll have one for myself. But you have to promise to come and to bring your girlfriend.”
“Where will it be?”
“At the house, of course,” she said. Her voice had an offended note in it.
My girlfriend had never been to the moon, and I over-prepared her with stories about everything I could remember. Our flight was delayed, and we arrived midway through the party. As I came across the frontage, I saw that there were balloons tied to the fence. It looked like they were holding it up. I opened the gate gingerly and motioned my girlfriend through. Jill was the first person I saw, and her new husband was the second. I hugged her and shook his hand and told them both that, for the first time in my life, I felt certain that I didn’t have to worry about my sister. Behind them was a long wide table loaded with pizza. “Very nostalgic,” I said to Jill.
“What do you mean?” Jack said thuddingly. “I brought the food.”
“You did,” Jill said, and pulled him close to her. He refused to bend, and he towered over her, but he looked down with an expression that had no condescension, no cruelty, and no pity. It was an expression of total and unconditional devotion, and it came through loud and clear.
Jill and I stood in a corner of the yard while Jack took my girlfriend on a tour of the house. We made the smallest small talk: when I thought I might graduate, where she and Jack would live. Two little boys and a dog were playing tag outside of the fence. One boy lunged for the other, who evaded the tag. He bumped into the fencepost closest to us, which pulled up slightly.
“Someone should fix that,” Jill said.
“I’ll get right on it,” I said.
“You should see Mom,” Jill said.
“Of course,” I said. “Do you think I forgot?” But the truth was that I had.
My mother was sitting up against the house, in an armchair someone had brought out to the lawn. She was a small brown husk, hardly recognizable. But she brightened immediately when she saw me. “Is this your girlfriend?” she said, pointing at Jill. She grasped Jill’s hand. “You’re an angel,” she said. “I hope Goosey isn’t bothering you. He’s a horrible little thing.”
Jill scowled, then remembered who she was supposed to be. She smiled and excused herself. “I’m going to go powder my nose,” she said.
My mother took me by the elbow and pulled me down close to her mouth.
“You know who I’ve been hearing from?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Your father,” she said. “I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want to upset you. I know that he stopped writing to you a while ago.” She paused, gripped the arms of her chair as if she might stand, thought better of it, relaxed. “Letters from your father,” she said. “Will you get a load of that?”
“I am so sorry,” I said. The grief in my voice was real.