64 Harvest Moon
Harvest Moon
Typically by this hour, Regina would have taken her Valium, along with whichever other medications filled the pillbox that sat on her bedside table.
Often this meant she fell asleep on the couch, but with her customary regimen of pills seemingly abandoned, that night Regina seemed surprisingly alert.
She consulted the typewritten list she’d made up for the day, noting that Forrest had neglected one of the duties she’d spelled out for him. Vanilla frozen yogurt. As always, she’d specified the brand.
“It’s not like my husband to forget something like that,” she said. “He’s definitely distracted. I guess we both know why.”
“He’s planning the big party, that’s all,” I told her.
“Ah, yes,” she said. “The party. I wonder if he invited his girlfriend.”
The funny thing was that even as she held on to the belief that her husband was plotting to kill her for the purpose of going off with Brenda Barnett, Regina’s demeanor had turned weirdly chipper, though in a slightly manic way.
She had tried to engage Jilly in a game with her dolls once or twice, though she never seemed able to sustain her interest in American Girl tea parties.
Then there was the afternoon she’d baked a roll of Pillsbury slice-and-bake chocolate chip cookies.
She’d even put an apron over her caftan.
At dinner one night, she told us all about this great movie she’d heard of called Back to the Future, as if none of us had heard anything about it.
“We’ve all seen it,” Jilly told her.
“Like . . . three times,” Hayward added.
This particular evening Regina had made a bowl of microwave popcorn—no butter, naturally. It was as if she’d recently read a book with the title How to Have Fun with Your Family and she’d been taking notes.
Now she sat there, looking out the window as if this was the first time she’d ever laid eyes on the moon. It cast a shaft of light over the lake. I could hear music far off on the water. One of the neighbors must be cruising the lake in their motorboat. I could make out the sound of laughter.
“I guess I’ve missed out on a lot,” Regina said. It seemed she was speaking to nobody in particular, though the only one there was me.
There was no way of refuting this. She had missed out on a lot—bathtime with Jilly only one example. Her children’s whole childhood to date, another.
An odd thing happened then. This wave of protectiveness came over me.
For Regina, of all people. When I thought about it, my job performance that summer had been lackluster at best. But at that one moment, I could feel myself rising to my duties.
I was a mother’s helper, after all. The person I’d needed to help wasn’t just either of the children. It was their mother.
It came to me then that the whole drama swirling around us now was all Forrest’s fault.
Never mind that he hadn’t gotten on board with Brenda’s crazy scheme to fake Regina’s suicide.
He was the one who’d brought the Brenda mess into their lives.
If he hadn’t done that—if he’d been content to spend the summer having our nice breakfast talks and teaching me to water-ski—none of this mess would have happened.
At the moment, though, surprisingly, Regina gave the appearance of calm and well-being. She sat there in a pair of silk pajamas, eating popcorn and knitting, as the two of us faced the television.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” she said. “The kids in bed. The two of us cozying up with a TV show. My darling husband off at poker night.”
I studied her face. There was no telling what she’d do next.
“Poker!” Regina hooted. “More likely poke-her. I’d like to poke her eyes out.”
She smiled and patted my leg. Nothing for me to do but reach for a handful of popcorn.
The program Regina had tuned in to watch that night was one of those TV magazine shows that focused on a true-life crime. These generally involved rich or famous people, the kind you might not think would get involved with criminal activities. People like Forrest and Regina, come to think of it.
That night’s episode examined the story of a wealthy Danish businessman named Claus von Bülow, who’d married a wealthy socialite known to her friends as Sunny.
One night, Sunny von Bülow was found “unresponsive,” face down on her bed, leaving her in what was described as a “persistent vegetative state.” The initial findings of the medical examiner had suggested that a combination of the drugs and alcohol Sunny had taken that night had left her this way.
But further investigation into the case, much of it instigated by Sunny’s children from her previous marriage, led the authorities to charge Claus von Bülow with attempted homicide.
His mistress had testified against him. She’d put his neck in the noose, basically.
The program revealed he was found guilty and sentenced to thirty years in prison but later acquitted.
Watching from her spot on the couch, Regina reached for the bowl of popcorn. She ate hers one kernel at a time.
“You think you know a person,” she said. She pointed one of her knitting needles in the direction of the TV set, the handsome face of Claus von Bülow filling the screen. “Then it turns out you didn’t know them at all.
“Take yourself, Frances,” she said. “You seem like this sweet innocent girl. But who knows what dark thoughts and wild ideas go on in your head? You could be a pathological liar, or a thief. You could go up to your room every night and make plans to assassinate some famous rock star. For all anyone knows, you could turn out to be some kind of sex maniac.”
After all the other things she’d listed, the last item on her list of my imagined madness hit home.
Had she found my journal? Slipped into my room when the children and I were at tennis, carefully removed the line of BBs laid out to alert me to any breach of security, and read all the crazy stuff I’d written about Forrest and me?
Then returned the journal and the BBs to their original location, afterward?
The Regina I knew could not have made it up to my little bedroom on the third floor.
I’d counted on that. Plus, I kept my journal under the mattress.
She’d be too weak to lift it. But this Regina—Regina as she’d become since finding out about Brenda’s plot, Regina since getting off her medications and embarking on her Destroy Forrest campaign—seemed capable of anything.
After I’d heard her speculate about the possibility of my shameful secret life, my face must have betrayed some indication of shock. Now Regina patted my knee—the furthest she seemed able to go in displaying affection.
“For god’s sake, Frances,” she said. “I was just kidding. Everyone knows the closest you ever get to a sexual adventure is in one of those books you’re always taking out of the library. You’re our quiet little bookworm!”
For a moment I felt insulted. I wanted to tell her she was wrong about that. I could tell her, You don’t even know me. But it was better that she didn’t, of course.
The show about the von Bülow case was over. Still no sign of Forrest. “I’m heading to bed,” Regina said.
Partway up the stairs, she called down to me. “You’re a funny little person, aren’t you?” she said. “All this time I’ve been so worried about Brenda Barnett, but maybe it’s really been you all the time who’s the big problem.”
After Regina went upstairs I stayed in the living room. I tried to read my book, but Regina’s words kept coming back to me. I figured Forrest would make it better. I wanted to be there when he got back.
On poker nights—or whatever they were—it wasn’t unusual for Forrest to stay out until two in the morning. I knew this because, nights in bed, I often listened for his car pulling into the driveway. It always felt comforting, knowing he was home.
Staying up that night, I told myself I just wanted to finish my book, but really I was hoping Forrest and I would get to have a few minutes together after his long night out.
He’d pour me a glass of chocolate milk—a whiskey for himself—and ask me some question about my life.
Did I believe that people were fundamentally good?
If I was driving a car and I hit a deer, and he was lying on the road in a lot of pain, would I be able to hit him over the head with a rock?
If I could live a long, unexciting life or a short, amazing one (like John Lennon, for instance), which would I choose?
Short and amazing, I’d say.
Same here, he’d tell me.
Now, once again, I waited for him—though no longer, as I once did, with the fantasy that he might take me in his arms or tell me I was the most wonderful girl he’d ever met.
That fantasy was gone, but the place Forrest occupied in my brain was only slightly less significant now.
I still saw him as the most important man in my life.
I couldn’t have articulated this at the time, but there was something I needed to understand, and it seemed to me that if we could just talk, maybe I’d figure out how a person I’d loved so much could behave as he did.
I didn’t need further confirmation that Forrest Emerson was no Claus von Bülow. But who was he, then? What was he doing with Brenda? If he really loved Regina, how could he keep having sex with someone else?
Most of all I wanted to know, Did I mean anything at all to him?
It was after two in the morning when Forrest walked in the door. He wasn’t drunk, but he’d definitely been drinking. Despite the hour, he didn’t seem surprised to see me on the couch.
“What do you know?” he said. “I may have just dropped a few hundred dollars in a poker game, but I get to finish off the night with one of my all-time favorite people.”
As I always did when Forrest was around, I felt my heart open up. How could I hate this man? I also believed he was telling the truth. He really had been playing poker.
“How about that moon tonight?” he said to me. “Let me play you a song.” He pulled an album out of its sleeve.
Neil Young. “Harvest Moon.” He set down the needle.
“Every time I hear this, I have to dance,” he said. “Someday, when you meet some man who truly deserves you, I’ll come to your wedding. You’ll dance with your father, of course. But maybe at some point, you’ll have a few minutes to step out on the floor with me.”
He opened his arms. He took my hand in one of his, the other resting on my back, as a father might. A different kind of father from mine.
I could see him clearly then. Forrest Emerson had his weaknesses alright—among these, an attraction to women in low-cut dresses. A tendency for brief enthusiasms that might not last beyond a summer, likely to distract him. For a while, anyway.
But his devotion to me—the place I represented in his life—was different.
This would endure beyond the summer. Forrest actually cared about me, for reasons that had nothing to do with the things people did with each other when they took off their clothes and got into bed together. Into bed, or onto a patch of moss.
In some ways, this was better. I was not all that familiar with what Forrest Emerson had felt for me, but it felt like something real. It felt like love.
That night in my little attic room, I took out my journal again. It had been a while.
I was wrong to be mad at Forrest, I wrote. He never really cared for Brenda. That was all just about sex.
Forrest loves me, I wrote. I love him too.