Someday You Will Go to the Moon

The powder blue Impala glided silent as a spaceship down long highways while I lay in the backseat, followed by the bright moon above. I was six, seven, eight. Not long before, a man landed on that moon. My dad took blurred black-and-white photos of the black-and-white TV the day the Apollo 11 made its wobbly landing, the day the first man took his first small step. Now, the bubble seatcovers molded craters in my cheeks and I thought about a picture book on my shelf at home, Someday You Will Go to the Moon, starring a blond boy who went on vacation to the colonized moon.

I didn't dream of romance, that young. I dreamed instead of a best friend I would have someday, someone who felt as much like an alien in this world as I did. I dreamed of a vague future and my own giant leaps for mankind.

From the front seat the voices of my parents sounded as if they were being transmitted from another planet.

Someday, I thought, drowsy and secure, someday I will go to the moon.


"Did you feel safe when you were a child?" I ask my friend Dana on long distance. I am training to be a rape crisis peer counselor, and I am obsessed with this issue.

"I didn't lie awake afraid anyone was going to murder me," Dana says. "And I wasn't really afraid that my father would physically hurt me. I was afraid of his temper, and I felt uncomfortable about the way he looked at me. But no, I didn't feel unsafe."

Dana was my best friend in our teens. In our twenties, our friendship has become more sporadic and contentious for reasons I've had trouble remembering during the last few months. There are things Dana and I avoid talking about, but I think of her as my link to the past. She is the one who knows my history so that I never have to explain.

I don't tell her how something in me freezes when I'm reading my rape crisis training manual and come across the list of symptoms for posttraumatic stress syndrome. Withdrawal. Eating disorders. Self-blame. Nightmares. Refusal to wear shorts or sleeveless shirts even on the hottest days.

I want to call Dana. I want to say, "I wasn't just weird when I was a teenager. It's a syndrome. Listen to this."

But I don't, because this is a topic that Dana and I dance close to, circle, then avoid.

I'm riveted by my training manual and the sessions I attend at the rape crisis center. In peer counseling, I learn, the goal is to help someone who has been victimized claim her sense of autonomy and control when it feels as if all control has been taken from her. I learn techniques for helping a survivor recast her experience, to focus not on the ways she was weak but the ways she was strong, the choices and decisions that enabled her to survive.

When a woman on the line says, "But I should have taken my instincts more seriously," or "I was such a wimp. I should have fought harder," I hear echoes of my younger self. And as I encourage other women to go easier on themselves, my own memories start to shift, reshape themselves.


Dana is insulted by the message I've left on her machine. "What's the world coming to when you can't even count on a fellow introvert to be home on a Friday night?"

"I'll have you know that I just went shopping for a little while, by myself," she says.

I top her. I never enter malls on weekends.

She one-ups me: malls really aren't that busy on Friday night.

And then we laugh. Competing to be World's Greatest Introvert is infinitely preferable to back when we used to compete for those titles women compete for: Most Desirable Woman, Most Active Social Life, Most Impressive Career.

Once upon a time, we bought into the idea that there was something wrong with being homebodies who enjoyed our own company and that introvert was a dirty word. If we didn't have dates or at least plans with friends on weekends, we didn't feel entirely worthwhile.

Dana and I feel freed, admitting to each other how much we both value solitude. We no longer feel obliged to bow to cultural pressure that would have us lament our time alone.

We settle in for a long, rambling conversation about love and men and mixed signals. Suddenly, Dana says, "Have you noticed that this is the exact same conversation we were having fifteen years ago?"

Is it? I remember dissections of facial expressions, words, accidental touches, and flickers of eye contact across cafeterias and in halls. Haven't I gotten anywhere in fifteen years? Maybe I've come full circle; at least now I know how rare and wonderful it is to have a friend to tell my life to.

We don't talk about how Dana is my link to darker memories, but I see our renewed friendship as a stand we've taken against those memories. From fear and sadness sprouted this source of strength, I think.

But we never talk about it.


When Dana comes for a visit, we start recalling songs from junior high choirs. I can sing, in their entirety, both soprano and alto parts of "Love Is a Song." I can do the boys and girls on "Love is the Answer." Dana, on the other hand, recalls every word of "Music, When Soft Voices Die," a song that sounds like a dirge, though she has no memory of the lyrics to the "Tennessee Wig Walk, " which I can recite in full. It's almost embarrassing what I remember. But beyond that, the question nags at me: what else doesn't Dana remember?

* * *

Dana, daughter of a heart surgeon, was on the fringes of a well-groomed, well-off, visible, and enviable junior high clique known as the "socials." She belonged to a country club swim team and took gymnastics and had been placed in all honors classes after a stellar career in an accelerated elementary school. Cute boys regularly asked Dana to "go" with them. Dana's best friend was Michelle, an obscenely tan cheerleader with bouncy dark hair.

I was a weirdo who lived outside the city limits, wore mostly home-made clothing, and had also for some reason been placed in honors classes after being rejected from the accelerated school because of an alarmingly low IQ score. I was allowed to be Dana's Art Table Friend, but I remained an embarrassment in more public settings. Dana and Michelle strolled up to me before a choir performance and hit me with a series of questions--had I ever been to a mall? Had I been to a clothing store there? Had I considered buying my clothes there?


Our junior high school consisted of three round windowless buildings in the midst of blank prairie, like three flying saucers that had just landed and huddled together to form a colony. A Ouija board told me that I was from the planet Leshma, a great comfort to me when I so clearly did not belong on planet earth. Eighth grade, the first year of co-ed gym: each day the girls left the locker room and paraded, in loose blue and white striped shirts and blue polyester shorts, before the boys. I was tall, with long, too-pale legs. My white cable-stitched knee socks were all wrong, making me feel delicate and girly. The other girls wore boys' tube socks with colored stripes around the top. My underarms dampened, my face felt hot each day, but pride held me back from buying boys' socks. The other girls, the socials, would think I was trying to be one of them, and I didn't want them to think that. I didn't want to be one of them. I had witnessed their meanness, the way they flipped their hair in classes while they made loud, snide comments about "the pimply nerds" around them.

The boys were learning to puff up their chests a little when they strutted around shirtless, their shorts riding low, sometimes a hint of pubic hair peeking above the waistbands. They had learned to berate anyone who made a mistake and to hurl their bodies like weapons. I employed a campaign of passive resistance. During games of Bombardment, when the balls flew hard and fast enough to leave red marks on the skin, I maneuvered into the path of a ball first thing. I was out. I exited the game to go daydream on the sidelines. During volleyball, fearing broken glasses and avoiding shoving teammates, I ducked away from the ball.

You're supposed to avoid the ball in bombardment, the coach yelled at me. You're supposed to go after the ball in volleyball. I had it backwards. Where was my fighting spirit? How did I expect to get by without a killer instinct?

I listened politely and stuck to my abnormal ways. During baseball, when my team was up, I went to the end of the batting line, every time. It was never my turn to bat, giving me more time to daydream. But then a boy told on me, and the enraged coach ordered me, in front of forty eighth-graders, to come forward and bat three times.

Reluctantly, I rounded the backstop and scooped up the bat. I watched pitches sail by, the ball almost making contact with the bat of its own accord. I watched it, this little planet whirling toward me.

There was a hush over the whole field, a suspense like in the movies, as the ball went by again and again and I did not swing. The coach, red-faced, stomped toward me. I stared at him blankly.

"You will swing the bat," the coach yelled, and some boys hissed at me, "Cheater!"

I wondered if I would be stuck here eternally, holding that bat, while a pitcher and catcher tossed the ball back and forth. I'd been quiet for years, faded into the background, and suddenly, here I was, my teammates like wild animals rattling the chain links of the backstop and hissing, the outfielders shifting impatiently and throwing down their gloves in disgust. The coach was red and explosive with rage.

Here I was, just a girl who didn't want to play, and look at all the fuss. I felt sort of proud, just standing here, mounting my own little strike.

Maybe only minutes went by or maybe it was hours that inadvertently, I'd brought the game to a halt. Lots of boys and a couple of girls yelled at me to hurry up, and hisses of "Cheater!" licked out from all directions.

And then, mercifully, from the school building, the bell shattered the air. Up till then, I'd felt oddly calm, but suddenly, heading alone into the locker room, the pressure lifted and left me shaking.


Over the summer between seventh and eighth grades, Dana had developed breasts, along with a figure that would someday enable her to look sexy even in sweats or a ratty bathrobe, a figure that would drive other women to envy. Dana and I were two of five girls placed in honors biology with fifteen boys during what was perhaps the meanest year of their lives. We entered this terrorist atmosphere each day not knowing when we would hear every feature analyzed in loud and derogatory detail, when we would be cornered or groped. No girl was completely immune, but Dana and I drew particular attention--Dana because of her breasts that caused her to be widely known as "Silicon Sister," and me, especially me, because I was so weird, in jeans that never fit properly because I was so tall and homemade shirts. I was less aware of the other factors that made me a target: my visible contempt for mean-spirited behavior, my shyness that prevented me from easily deflecting unwanted attention with humor.

Dana made her last stab at being a "social," best friend of the disdainful Michelle. But Dana's quirky side was gaining ground. She was torn between spending our half-hour Activity Period with me, memorizing the Declaration of Independence, or going off with Michelle to practice gymnastics. We copied out the Declaration of Independence from an encyclopedia, tracing the drawing of an eagle that soared above it. Dana and I mastered half of the Declaration with the goal of having all of these big, mysterious words at our command should we ever need to win an argument through sheer intimidation.

When a mob of boys swarmed around us hooting and shouting profanities, we stared at the wall and recited in monotonous unison, "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . . "

This provoked the boys to new levels of fury. They tried to drown us out, and a guy named Mark pranced around with unzipped pants while the others hooted, but we soldiered on, soaring like that eagle, denouncing tyranny and declaring our independence.


Sometimes half the class left during Activity Period for play rehearsal or team practices, and those days it wasn't so bad when Dana left too. The rest of us dismantled a mobile of Styrofoam and foil planets, one of several displays in the classroom and lab; we took down Venus and played volleyball over the neon lights that hung down from the ceiling. I was good at this game. My height was an advantage, and I was quick. My classmates seemed surprised by this. They wanted me on their team. I looked forward to the days that the loud boys and the social girls left and the rest of us played Light Fixture Volleyball.

Whenever Dana went off to meet Michelle, she said to me, "Well, Michelle is my best friend," despite my lack of objection. Frequently, she explained why the frog parts flying toward us in lab or Mark's exposed genitals were, actually, my fault. "You should just ignore them," she told me, which was exactly what I was doing, which was exactly what wasn't working.

Later you forget the progression of events that lead to a day whose details blur; you forget their faces, their voices, their words, your thoughts, the exact movements of their hands that grab at clothes and glasses so that everything becomes a blur, the way a penis looks emerging from a fly, will remember only what it is to be at the center of irrational rage, of all that noise, trying to shake off hands pinning you down, to try to blot out roaring like a den of angry beasts. What you don't forget is the wire and foil solar system hanging above you, the sign saying that the typical junior high student would weigh two tons on the sun. You weigh two tons now, you will always ever after weigh two tons.

Why don't you leave, just walk out of that room? Why don't you fight, kick, punch, pinch, something? And where is the teacher? At some point the boys are alerted of her return, they push you away and zip up pants and return to their classroom desks as if nothing happened, leaving you shaking and askew in the lab room with its long black tables meant for dissecting the delicate tissues and organs of what was once alive. A tone sounds and you walk stunned through halls bustling with people, on to the next class as if nothing has happened.


"Mom," I said. "There's these boys who bother me." That's the only verb I could think of.

She smiled. "Boys bother you when they like you," she said.

The next morning I hesitated near the counselor's office but I didn't want anyone to see me going in. I decided I'd wait till later.

My friend Kim slammed her tray down on the cafeteria table and tossed her long hair. "Mark is telling everyone that he raped you," she said. "He says you're going to go see your guidance counselor."

All of my friends laughed and looked impressed, as if it were an honor to be linked to Mark, the ringleader, in this way.

"He did not," I said. "I am not."

Now I couldn't go to the counselor. If I did, if I let on that what had happened had affected me in any way, he would win. I would pretend it didn't happen. I would be casual, nonchalant. But when I looked at him, at any of them, it would always be with contempt.

Dana, who had been off with Michelle that day, was spending less and less time with her. Dana and I started leaving class during the Activity Period break and coming back late, one of the rare infractions our teacher actually noticed. She ordered us to write sentences: "I will not be late. I will not be late."

We liked writing sentences. It made us feel like rebels. We came back later and later each day, writing more and more sentences.

Mrs. Johnson cracked down. She told us that we were no longer allowed to leave during the break. When we sneaked out during break the next day, Mrs. Johnson gave up on us. We would continue to be the sort of quiet, smart, clean girls who never got detained or suspended but who frequently maneuvered around rules that didn't work in our favor.

"You were always such a rebel," Dana told me years later, and it surprised me that she thought I was the instigator. I always thought it was her.

It was years before I would recall the me that pushed the rules, refused to bat, resolved from the sixth grade on never to endorse meanness in any form. One day I tell a friend a sketchy version of what happened, and she answers, "My daughter is strong. That won't happen to her." And I will remember how strong I was, so that when Mark stopped me in the hall the day he was bragging about raping me, when he said, anxiously, "You won't tell, will you?" I yanked away from him, I enjoyed one second of power over him, I focused on him all of my contempt, and then I didn't tell. I didn't need to tell; I would handle it alone, I was strong.

It is years before I think about this part, remember anything but that paralyzed girl, staring up at Styrofoam planets dangling from the ceiling. Limp string hanged down where Venus used to be; not long before, the foil had peeled away from Venus, and the Styrofoam crumbled in our hands during a game of Light Fixture Volleyball. And on the periphery of those yelling boys, just watching with cold eyes and moaning occasionally, was a boy who once set up Venus for me to slam, who once clapped me on the back and yelled, "Good one." I focused on the remaining planets. I wanted to stretch up, touch Mars, as if touching it might transport me there.


Of course, I thought, nothing really bad had ever happened to me. After all, everyone at school laughed off the rumors, no one at home seemed to notice my silence although my mother occasionally got after me for being anti-social at church, and the other girls in science, the two who were still in the classroom during Activity Period that day I was cornered in the lab, they stayed at their desks minding their own business. If something really bad had happened, wouldn't they tell someone?

Somehow, boys could tell which were the good, wholesome girls they would someday marry, which were the bad girls they would make out with in backseats, and which were the freaks to be discarded altogether. Frantically trying to hide whatever abnormality at my center made me deserve my fate, I joined the choir and tried out for the eighth grade operetta.

"You won't make it," Mark said, but I did. I had few lines but did perform a stunt that never failed to draw gasps from the audience: a carefully choreographed fight over a chair that ended with me tumbling backwards into a back shoulder roll and landing within inches of the stage edge. Now during activity period, I was the one who left for rehearsals.

By the last day of school, things had calmed down. The operetta had conferred on me an appearance of normality, I thought; I had felt increasingly safer, more confident, more protected as the weeks passed without incident. I thought I would be OK now. Something inside of me had hardened, like the core of an apple or a peach's stone. I understood that there was a hard center of me that no one could ever touch.

School was almost out for the summer and I was home free, I thought, looking up from my book during Activity Period to find a circle of boys closing on me.

They hooted and moaned but no one touched me.

Still, I thought, panicked, this was not supposed to happen. I felt my center crumbling, as flimsy after all as the Styrofoam that had once been Venus.

Tears welled up and escaped faster and faster, and oddly subdued, thrown off balance somehow, the boys scattered.

Was that all it took, for them to see that I was human? Or were they just scared that now I really would tell?


When we were 15, Dana's period ceased to correlate with Michelle's and aligned itself with mine. We bonded over the miseries of cramps and pads and tampons, of leakage and embarrassment and ruined clothes.

"I hate my father," Dana confided to me.

During Activity Period, we hid in the forbidden part of the gym, behind stacks of mats, against the orders of our drill sergeant coach. We played Barry Manilow tapes and ate nacho cheese Doritos and ignored the boys who one day pitched rotten fruit at our hiding place. The coach didn't bother us, though. I'd figured out that he was mystified by girls. Underneath his bluff manner, he was terrified of the unknown we represented.

Years later I would read the AAUW report How Schools Shortchange Girls, astonished at the discussion of harassment in schools and even more surprised to realize that what I experienced had something to do with being female and smart, had something to do with being a smart girl intruding on what was seen as male territory--in this case, an honors science class, and later, the boys' gym. I would remember the uproar when, as office proctor, I'd delivered messages to the "men's choir" room, the tales I heard of girls being driven from shop classes. But that year, ninth grade, I was just relieved to be able to escape the worst. Now, when I had to deliver messages to all-male classes, at least if the boys started up their howling, I could leave.

Given the behavior we regularly witnessed, Dana and I took some pride in our anti-social tendencies. Dana's had become so pronounced that she no longer went to lunch. Every day we lined up in typing class and filed down two flights of stairs, winding through circling halls to the cafeteria. Every day, Dana stepped out of line and slipped into the girls' bathroom. No one dared question a girl's need to go to the bathroom.

No one ever noticed that Dana didn't come back out. She spent the lunch hour doing leaps and back walkovers, drawing and reading, enjoying her solitude. This is the story I tell about her, years later, the one that encapsulates Dana for me: how she progressively withdrew, hiding in the bathroom every lunch hour, and then, the next year, transferred to a private Catholic school where her closest friends were her teachers. She wasn't Catholic. Her main rationale for attending the school was that it was close enough to walk home during lunch. I remember how she used to get phone calls, rape threats from someone who told her he knew her route to and from school. She was terrified but refused to tell any adults, afraid to have to give up her privacy and solitude. I admired her for guarding her space so vigilantly, for choosing to be different rather than being different because she had no choice, which is how I saw myself.

Now, Dana tells me that she loves "Thelma and Louise" but would like to see a remake with Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore.

"Think of it," she says. "A movie with ravishing, sexy young women who could have whatever they want but reject the norm."

I myself think Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are plenty ravishing, but surprise distracts me from responding. I've always thought of Dana as that kind of person she's describing, one who strolled, casually, shrugging, right out of the norm.

And so her comment sobers me. Did she choose? Did I choose?

Was I kicked out of the norm, or did I desert of my own free will?


Dana's recurring story about me in high school is the one about the dressing room: "I knew you were thin, but I had no idea how thin. I was really scared. I could see every one of your ribs." For years, when my life spins out of my control, I simply stop eating. No one but Dana has ever noticed the rapid plunges in weight or my tendency to be spacey and sleepy. It's my secret until my late twenties, when a nurse who has completed some bloodwork says, "Is there a reason you're fasting?" I panic. It's bad enough that signs of damage might have ever been visible on my face or in my protruding bones, but now it's becoming encoded in my blood. Was it our knowledge of damage that bonded us, Dana and me?

But what I recall is joy and resistance. My school was the state football champion, and Dana and I were always going to football games that we never watched, instead talking and making up our own obnoxious cheers: "Let's get a little bit dowdy," we'd yell, "D-O-W-D-Y." Or we'd watch, beyond the cartoon-bright field and cheering crowd, the moon making its slow way across the sky to tangle in the branches of some distant tree. We talked for hours on the phone, we engineered ways for me to be with my first love, we processed our first romances. On a day that I was feverish with sunburn, Dana asked me one too many times whether I'd come with her to get an abortion if she got pregnant. I picked her up and took her to Planned Parenthood for birth control pills.


Our second year of college: Dana was my disdainful bridesmaid, blowing cigarette smoke out the car window on the way to pick out dresses, refusing to eat the soup I'd made because she'd turned vegetarian and I'd used chicken stock. We competed for who had the highest grades, went to the best college, had the most considerate boyfriend. I become the conservative married friend, disapproving of Dana's wild ways. Dana spent years in Wisconsin, then moved to Philadelphia and became a paralegal. I moved to a new state and started a new degree or job every few years. I become the divorced friend briefly flirting with my own wild ways. Dana went to a doctor who asked her how many sexual partners she'd had. "I don't know, 35," she said. His eyes bulged.

"Thirty-five is normal, isn't it?" Dana asked me, indignantly.


Some months into my work as a victim advocate and crisis counselor, I read Dana excerpts from my 10-year high school reunion booklet, which I purchased even though I didn't attend the reunion. I read her the paragraph that Mark sent in, mentioning his recent business successes and raving at length and with many in-jokes about his high school memories.

"If I ran into him on the street," Dana says in an unusually vehement voice, "I'd spit on him."

I take this as an expression of solidarity. In turn, I understand better Dana's difficult relationship with her father, who treated her like a sex object long before the eighth grade, who left her with a desperation to please men, at any cost. I know that Dana's father never touched her yet looked her up and down in that appraising way that men sometimes do, commenting on her body in ways that made her uncomfortable. I know that he once invited a single friend to dinner, asked Dana to wear something sexy, and seated her next to his friend. "I felt like my father was offering me as a gift, saying, here, take my daughter," Dana says. "I was only sixteen."

I have other friends who survived incestuous acts, and Dana is no less damaged by her experience than they were by theirs. I come to see that Dana didn't feel kicked out of some charmed circle of normality the way I did as a teenager, convinced that only talent or intelligence, never sexuality, never love, was going to save me; instead she came to believe that her sexuality was the route to love and acceptance, that it was her talent.

Dana turns over a new leaf with men. She calls me: she spent agonizing time on writing a Christmas card to her unrequited beloved and then threw it away. "I realized I'd already wished him happy holidays at a church coffee hour," she says. "What if he thinks I'm a slut or something, offering additional holiday greetings?"

Dana and I are as inarticulate with those we have crushes on, and often even our lovers, as we were as teenagers, but at least now we can articulate our stupidity to each other. Together we come to terms with our choices, our decisions to stay single, our senses of inadequacy about not conforming to social expectations. Together we come to an appreciation for our passions for books and for our work, for language and solitude and good friends. We come back to a place where we were as teenagers, rejoicing in our weirdness, even seeing ourselves as lucky.

Here is where I wish the story ended: Right before we go to a drag queen show in Savannah, we catch sight of ourselves in a mirror, two shy weirdoes from Kansas. We try messing up our hair and grimacing. In the pictures we take of each other, we look like two shy weirdoes from Kansas with messed up hair, trying to look tough. And later, as we walk on the beach, Dana regales me with a series of carols she has composed in honor of her cat, Beeber, short for Sleekit Beeber. Then she does cartwheels in the sand, legs still straight in the air.

"I've changed so much since I lived in Kansas," she says, and I hoot.

"You're the exact same person you were when you were twelve," I say, as she peals with laughter, that laugh that even back then made me want to laugh too.


Here's where the story really ends: on a road trip months later, frictions build; Dana makes comment after comment about how proud she is to be white, how immature and unintelligent people from other cultures are, how women should accept boorish behavior from men as part of their nature, should even appreciate it. I can think back, through the years, of comments that have made me uncomfortable, but I always gave her the benefit of the doubt, thought she couldn't possibly mean what she was saying, she was too smart, maybe she didn't know how it sounded. Now the comments are too blatant to ignore.

And something stubborn in me kicks up. I don't want to have the same conversation I had twenty years ago, focusing on men as if they are our only route to contentment. Maybe I'm just tired, I think. Maybe we've just spent too much time together and are getting on each other's nerves because of it.

I mention junior high, the memories that usually make us laugh. But Dana says thoughtfully, "I wish I hadn't lost touch with Michelle. We used to have lots of fun."

"She was stuck up," I say. I have always assumed that Dana chose me to be her best friend because she didn't like Michelle's snobbishness. Has Dana ever told me this, or have I just wanted to believe it? Did Dana drift away from Michelle, or did Michelle dump Dana?

"That's not fair," Dana protests. "You didn't really know her." Dana has developed a habit of picking all the skin off her upper arms, goose bump by goose bump. I am shocked and worried: has Dana undergone a huge transformation, or have I ignored signs of trouble for a long time?

"Michelle was always rude to me," I say. "She was part of that whole mean group. Mark and them."

"Mark," she says. "He was a really funny guy."

I stare at her, unable to answer. Have we ever really been united in anything? Did we really share any of the same trauma? Or did I invent her part in it, not wanting to be alone in my ordeal?

I feel sick, and then just sad, wondering whether I remember anything accurately at all. Dana has her own story that may be nothing like mine, one that is apparently more wistful than I ever realized about not being part of the charmed circle of popular kids. Maybe she is, after all, the exact same person she used to be, and I have never really known who that is.

I remember Dana telling me, back in the eighth grade, that Mark and his friends wouldn't pay so much attention to me if I'd just act different, respond differently, and I wonder if she ever stopped believing that what happened was somehow my fault.

But of course she did. How could we have been friends so long if she really believe that I'd deserved to be harassed and assaulted?

But why is it that we've never, ever talked about it?

I don't know what to think about us, about anything. Dana is staring out the window, whistling under her breath. I think the tune might be "Music When Soft Voices Die." I wonder if Dana realizes that something irrevocable has occurred, that our friendship may have less than I thought to hold it together.

But now she's scolding me because I spoke up, politely, when her stepfather made a homophobic comment this morning. As a guest in his house, Dana says, I should have respected his right to make such comments. And then I see how separate our lives have been, really. I see the damage left over from her childhood will always make her yearn for a father, will always make her willing to sacrifice everything else for the approval of men. There is some deep damage my friendship can never heal, and the quarrel that's brewing feels like something final.

I am riding in the front seat of Dana's car, staring out at the moon, just a sliver like a glimmer of a frown, a moon that my uncles would say doesn't hold water. It holds nothing; partial, downturned, it spills out stars and darkness and memory, and I will never again be that giggling twelve-year-old at an art table, never be an eight-year-old in the back seat of a car borne safely through the stars while tires hum with possibility and whisper against the road: Someday, someday, you will go to the moon.

§ § §

Nancy McCabe's creative nonfiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, Puerto del Sol, Fourth Genre, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, among others, and has twice been listed in Best American Essays. "Someday You Will Go to the Moon" is an excerpt from her forthcoming book After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening.

She can be reached at ngm4@exchange.upb.pitt.edu.

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