Page 14 - WTP Vol. VIII#2

When Bluejay Stole the Moon
“I’m going anyway—I don’t care! Ground me for the rest of my life!”
Jodi stormed out of the house, the morning of the day the world would watch the live broadcast of the two U.S. astronauts emerging from the lunar module Eagle onto the eerie, pockmarked surface of the moon. She left her mother dabbing tears with a limp Kleenex from her purse (smelling of Yardley April Violets and stale Doublemint gum, Jodi knew), after another of their big fights—this one because she had announced she wouldn’t go along to church. She’d made plans to bike over to the Freys’, instead—to ride Sibu before it got too hot, hang out with Anya, lie in the hammock between the big apricot trees and eat slices of water- melon sprinkled with red chile powder like on street carts in Mexico City (where the two oldest Frey kids had been born), and maybe listen to some music in Quinn’s studio—if she was lucky, with Quinn there too.
But she wasn’t to be lucky; the day would go from bad to far beyond awful.
~
All of the Freys were out of sorts when she got there, but Jodi was oblivious, assuming everyone was feel- ing as jazzed as she was—from having carried off that important defiance at home, and getting out of having to parrot those wishy-washy Lutheran hymns with trite words everyone sang out of tune, while old Mrs. Thorvaldsen showed off her wobbly soprano, trained—as Jodi’s mother always reminded her when she made faces—at the Conservatory of Music in St. Paul, only about a million years ago.
Jodi felt closer to the possibility of religion somehow at the Freys’ house, among their carved kachinas, painted Guatemalan saints, and little Burmese Bud- dha keeping watch without judgment from a recessed wall niche. Their graceful adobe house was in the older part of town, where there were artists’ studios and the acequia and corrals, as well as restaurants like El Farol and The Three Cities of Spain—not like the soulless modern neighborhood where Jodi and her parents lived, little boxy yards enclosed by ugly cinderblock walls and planted with twiggy trees, no bosky shade, lofty cathedrals of rustling leaves and dappled light.
Today Olivia, the oldest of the Frey children, was practicing Debussy’s Claire de Lune “in honor of the moon landing”—posture perfect in a loose-fit
pinafore with patch pockets over a baby blue t-shirt, her honey blond hair held back in a French braid ponytail. She played the baby grand piano in the living room, hung with those wonderful, strange paintings by the artist who they’d been friends with in Mexico, some Englishwoman said to be notori- ous, her surrealist art beginning to incorporate bits of Mayan mythology. Olivia attacked the opening measures of Claire de Lune over and over, adding strange syncopations, a kind of moody, aggravated ragtime—moments of squall and thunderstorm obscuring the moonlight.
Anya was in one of her “Monday” moods, prickly with bad temper, despite her perky yellow gingham shirt, but led Jodi out without comment to bridle the horses. They rode bareback across their rambling property and along the trail through the neighbors’, all the way to the far stand of cottonwoods and back. Anya draped herself over Conejo’s broad withers, the variegated browns of his namesake rabbit, the East- ern cottontail, her hands wrapped in his silky mane. Jodi rode awkwardly upright, bouncing more than she wanted, unable to grip Sibu’s warm chestnut flanks tightly enough with her unpracticed thighs and knees, but glorying, especially when they cantered down the long, sandy arroyo bed, imagining herself Theseus’s bride, Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, proud warrior bright with scorn.
“Riders of the Apocalypse,” Anya proclaimed melo- dramatically, with some bitter intent.
“What are you talking about?” Jodi had no idea what she meant, but Anya just wheeled Conejo around abruptly, and urged him home. She often produced strange, far-fetched stories, like a magpie’s fabled hoard of shiny bits pilfered from god knows where.
The house was cool when they got back inside, the Debussy like a shimmer of water, like running through the sprinkler. From the fridge in the garage Anya took out bottles of Dr. Pepper, wet with con- densation. Quinn was in the studio—Jodi’s stomach tightened deliciously when she saw him. But then she saw his friend Bruce Dermott was there too, sprawled next to Quinn on the tomato-red futon, listening to the countdown of the summer’s hits. He would ignore her, then, be in a high and mighty dis- position, clever and sarcastic. She hated that.
As they went in, she recognized the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, the movie she’d seen three times
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ChriStie CoChrell