Valley of the Moon

I was breathless, thrilled they thought I was older than fourteen.

I didn’t end up reading Rabbit, Run at the New Parents’ Reception. My father, preaching the gospel of St. Paul’s School from the pulpit of the chapel, was too riveting. Like everybody else in the audience, I was swept away by the force of his charisma. I prayed for his eyes to fall on me, to choose me, to mark me as special. But foolishly I’d chosen to sit in the back row. It was impossible for him to pick me out in the sea of blue dresses.

At least that’s what I told myself; I wasn’t ready to admit the truth—I was afraid my shine had worn off for him. Things had become awkward and forced between us over the past year. Most of my friends already had that distance with their fathers, it was built into their relationships; they’d always been much closer with their mothers. But in my house, it was the opposite. It was my father and I that were inseparable. His darling girl; that’s what he called me. He understood me—his bright, easily bored, passionate, underdog-defending, in-need-of-large-doses-of-physical-activity-and-changes-of-scenery daughter. And more important than understanding me, he liked me. He was most proud when I took the road less traveled by.

It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say I lived for the look of delight and surprise in his eyes when I accomplished something out of the ordinary. Beating him at chess. Reading the unabridged version of Anna Karenina when I was ten. Starting a campfire with nothing but a flint and a knife.

But now it seemed our father and daughter skins were growing too small. I still craved his attention and approval, but he gave it more sparingly. Our long, rambling conversations about everything and anything—the speed of light, the Cuban missile crisis, how many minutes on each side to grill a perfect medium-rare steak—had petered out, replaced with the most quotidian of inquiries: Is Gunsmoke on tonight? Is it supposed to snow tomorrow? When’s the last time the grass was cut?

It was mostly my fault. I’d created the distance. Or puberty had done it for me. Along with my new body (Breasts! Hair! Hips! Pimples!) came disorientation. What was charming behavior when I was a girl wasn’t always so charming at fourteen. Also, my adventurous nature didn’t set me apart anymore. The rest of my friends had finally caught up with me. Not only were they doing the daredevil things I’d always done, but they were doing those things on a grander, if more subversive, scale. They lied, they sneaked around, they hid their real lives away from their parents. They said they were going to the beach; instead they took the bus to Providence. They said they were sleeping over at a friend’s house; instead they spent the night on the beach with a boy. I was a good girl, I still asked permission to do practically everything, but for the first time in my life my father had started to question my judgment. He’d loved my precociousness when I was young. He’d let me roam free my entire life, in fact he’d encouraged it. Now, just when I was on the cusp of truly being able to handle the independence, he wanted to shut me in.

More and more we stood on opposite shores, or, worse than that, he wasn’t on the shore at all. Instead it was my mother who’d taken his place, waving at me from across the sea that separated parent from child, imploring me to wash my face and moisturize every night.

“I’m going to miss you two,” my mother said the next morning, watching me zip up my suitcase.

Jeans. Shorts. Shirts. Bathing suit. Underwear. Sneakers. What was I forgetting?

The phone rang downstairs.

“I’ve got it!” shouted my father.

“Why don’t you come with us?” I asked.

She plumped up the pillows on my bed. “Me, sleeping on that mildewed mattress? All those bugs? Rats running around in the eaves at night and God knows what else?”

Lapis Lake was no Lake Winnipesaukee. It was a dozen or so uninsulated fishing cabins clustered around a small lake. It was at the base of Mount Fort, a tiny mountain, more of a hill, really. My grandfather Harry, who worked as a pulper at the paper mill in Rumford, Maine (until he died of lung cancer at forty-eight), had made the exodus to the lake every summer, as had a group of other mill families. When my grandfather’s generation passed, the cabins had been handed down to my father’s generation, who in turn brought their sons and daughters every August. Or daughter, in my case.

My mother had gone with my father to Lapis Lake a few times, but after I was born she’d stopped. She wasn’t a snob (she sent Christmas cards to all the other lake families every year), she just wasn’t outdoorsy. She much preferred to stay home in Newport. When Dad and I were gone, she met her friends for drinks and dinner. She waded through thick books, ate at odd hours, and went to the movies. She had no problem keeping herself busy.

“I’ve never seen a rat,” I said. There were, however, plenty of mice.

There was a loud thud from the kitchen and my father yelled, “Jesus!”

We ran down the stairs and found him in his jeans and undershirt, barefoot, coffee and broken pieces of mug all over the floor.

My father’s left leg was almost two inches shorter than his right; he usually wore his lift from the moment he got out of bed to the moment he climbed back in at night. This structural defect (he referred to it that way, as if he were a building) had prevented him from participating in any kind of athletics when he was a boy, and when he was a man it had kept him out of the war. It hadn’t barred him from academia, though. He’d gotten his undergraduate degree in English at the University of Maine and his graduate degree in public policy at URI. Education was everything to him. It was the only path up and out.

Now thirty-nine (with lifts for every kind of footwear imaginable, including his slippers), my father was confident and handsome, his dark hair Brylcreemed, his face smelling of Pinaud-Clubman aftershave. He didn’t have a belly like lots of the other fathers. He boxed at McGillicutty’s gym in Middletown three times a week to stay in shape.

“What a mess,” my father said.

“I’ll get it.” I grabbed a dish towel and wiped up the spill.

“Who was that on the phone?” asked my mother.

“Manny. He’ll be here to cut the grass on Thursday.”

“You already told me that,” said my mother.

“Did I?”

My father smoothed the hair back from my mother’s face, tipped up her chin with his finger, and looked into her eyes. When my father turned the spotlight of his gaze on you, it was like you were the only person alive.

It was a quiet ride north. My father and I often didn’t speak when driving to the camp; it was a transitional time and we honored it. But this silence felt oppressively heavy. Had my mother told him I wanted to come late?

“Are you okay?” I asked when we rolled through the New Hampshire tolls.

He shook a cigarette out of its pack. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

“Looking forward to getting to the lake?”

“Mmm-hmm.” He punched the cigarette lighter in.

An hour later we turned onto Rural Road 125. The woods were lush and green.

“Smell that?” said my father, inhaling deeply. “That is the smell of freedom.”

And dead mice, I thought as we walked into the cabin.

“Christ,” said my father. He put down his suitcase and immediately began opening windows and shutters. “Get me a bag.”