Elizabeth Hand - Last Summer on Mars Hill

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ELIZABETH HAND

LAST SUMMER AT MARS HILL

Even before they left home, Moony knew her mother wouldn't return from Mars

Hill

that year. Jason had called her from his father's house in San Francisco --

"I had a dream about you last night," he'd said, his voice cracking the way it

did when he was excited. "We were at Mars Hill, and my father was there, and

mother, too-- I knew it was a dream, like can you imagine my mother at Mars

Hill? -- and you had on this sort of long black dress and you were sitting

alone

by the pier. And you said, 'This is it, Jason. We'll never see this again.' I

felt like crying, I tried to hug you but my father pulled me back. And then I

woke up."

She didn't say anything. Finally Jason prodded her. "Weird, huh, Moony? I

mean,

don't you think it's weird?"

She shrugged and rolled her eyes, then sighed loudly so that he'd be able to

tell she was upset. "Thanks, Jason. Like that's supposed to cheer me up?"

A long silence, then Jason's breathless voice again. "Shit, Moony, I'm sorry.

didn't --"

She laughed, a little nervously, and said, "Forget it. So when you flying out

Maine?"

Nobody but Jason called her Moony, not at home at least, not in Kamensic

Village. There she was Maggie Rheining, which was the name that appeared under

her junior picture in the high school yearbook.

But the name that had been neatly typed on the birth certificate in San

Francisco sixteen years ago, the name Jason and everyone at Mars Hill knew her

by, was Shadowmoon Starlight Rising. Maggie would have shaved her head before

she'd admit her real name to anyone at school. At Mars Hill it wasn't so

weird:

there was Adele Grose, known professionally as Madame Olaf; Shasta Daisy

O'Hare

and Rvis Capricorn; Martin Dionysos, who was Jason's father; and Ariel Rising,

nee Amanda Mac Rheining, who was Moony's mother. For most of the year Moony

and

Ariel lived in Kamensic Village, the affluent New York exurb where her mother

ran Earthly Delights Catering and Moony attended high school, and everything

was

pretty much normal. It was only in June that they headed north to Maine, to

the

tiny spiritualist community where they had summered for as long as Moony could

remember. And even though she could have stayed in Kamensic with Ariel's

friends

the Loomises, at the last minute (and due in large part to Jason's urging, and

threats if she abandoned him there] she decided to go with her mother to Mars

Hill. Later, whenever she thought how close she'd come to not going, it made

her

feel sick: as though she'd missed a flight and later found out the plane had

crashed.

Because much as she loved it, Moony had always been a little ashamed of Mars

Hill. It was such a dinky place, plopped in the middle of nowhere on the rocky

Maine coast -- tiny shingle-style Carpenter Gothic cottages, all tumbled into

disrepair, their elaborate trim rotting and strong with spider-webs; poppies

and

lupines and tiger lilies sprawling bravely atop clumps of chickweed and

dandelions of truly monstrous size; even the sign by the pier so faded you

almost couldn't read the earnest lettering:

MARS HILL SPIRITUALIST COMMUNITY FOUNDED 1883

"Why doesn't your father take somebody's violet aura and repaint the damn sign

with it?" she'd exploded once to Jason.

Jason looked surprised. "I kind of like it like that," he said, shaking the

hair

from his face and tossing a sea urchin at the silvered board. "It looks like

was put up by our Founding Mothers." But for years Moony almost couldn't stand

to even look at the sign, it embarrassed her so much.

It was Jason who helped herget over that. They'd met when they were both

twelve.

It was the summer that Ariel started the workshop in Creative Psychokinesis,

the

first summer that Jason and his father had stayed at Mars Hill.

"Hey," Jason had said, too loudly, when they found themselves left alone while

the adults swapped wine coolers and introductions at the summer's first

barbecue. They were the only kids in sight. There were no other families and

few

conventionally married couples at Mars Hill. The community had been the cause

more than one custody battle that had ended with wistful children sent to

spend

the summer with a more respectable parent in Boston or Manhattan or Bar

Harbor.

"That lady there with my father --"

He stuck his thumb out to indicate Ariel, her long black hair frizzed and

bound

with leather thongs, an old multicolored skirt flapping around her legs. She

was

talking to a slender man with close-cropped blond hair and goatee, wearing a

sky-blue eartan and shabby Birkenstock sandals. "That your mom?"

"Yeah." Moony shrugged and glanced at the man in the cartan. He and Ariel both

turned to look at their children. The man grinned and raised his wine glass.

Ariel did a little pirouette and blew a kiss at Moony.

"Looks like she did too much of the brown acid at Woodstock," Jason announced,

and flopped onto the grass. Moony glared down at him.

"She wasn't at Woodstock, asshole," she said, and had started to walk away

when

the boy called after her.

"Hey -- it's a joke! My name's Jason --" He pointed at the man with Ariel.

"That's my father. Martin Dionysos. But like that's not his real name, okay?

His

real name is Schuster but he changed it, but I'm Jason Schuster. He's a

painter.

We don't know anyone here. I mean, does it ever get above forty degrees?"

He scrambled to his feet and looked at her beseechingly. Smaller even than

Moony

herself, so slender he should have looked younger than her, except that his

sharp face beneath floppy white-blond hair was always twisted into some ironic

pronouncement, his blue eyes always flickering somewhere between derision and

pleading.

"No," Moony said slowly. The part about Jason not changing his name got to

her.

She stared pointedly at his thin arms prickled with gooseflesh, the

fashionable

surfer-logo T-shirt that hung nearly to his knees. "You're gonna freeze your

skinny ass off here in Maine, Jason Schuster." And she grinned.

He was from San Francisco. His father was a well-known artist and a member of

the Raging Faery Queens, a gay pagan group that lived in the Bay Area and

staged

elaborately beautiful solstice gatherings and AIDS benefits. At Mars Hill,

Martin Dionysos gave workshops on strengthening your aura and on clear nights

led the community's men in chanting at the moon as it rose above Penobscot

Bay.

Jason was so diffident about his father and his father's work that Moony was

surprised, the single time she visited him on the West Coast, to find her

friend's room plastered with flyers advertising Faery gatherings and newspaper

photos of Martin and Jason at various ACT-HP events. In the fall Jason would

staying in Maine, while she returned to high school. Ultimately it was the

thought that she might not see him again that made Moony decide to spend this

last summer at Mars Hill.

"That's what you're wearing to First Night?"

Moony started at her mother's voice, turned to see Ariel in the middle of the

summer cottage's tiny living room. Wine rocked back and forth in her mother's

glass, gold shot with tiny sunbursts from the crystals hung from every window.

"What about your new dress?"

Moony shrugged. She couldn't tell her mother about Jason's dream, about the

black dress he'd seen her wearing. Ariel set great store by dreams, especially

these last few months. What she'd make of one in which Moony appeared in a

black

dress and Ariel didn't appear at all, Moony didn't want to know.

"Too hot," Moony said. She paused in front of the window and adjusted one of

three silver crosses dangling from her right ear. "Plus I don't want to

upstage

you."

Ariel smiled. "Smart kid," she said, and took another sip of her wine.

Ariel wore what she wore to every First Night: an ankle-length patchwork skirt

so worn and frayed it could only be taken out once a year, on this ceremonial

occasion. Squares of velvet and threadbare satin were emblazoned with suns and

moons and astrological symbols, each one with a date neatly embroidered in

crimson thread.

Sedona, Aug 15, 1972. Mystery Hill, NH, 5/80. The Winter Garden 1969. Jajouka,

Tangiers, Marrakech 1968.

Along the bottom, where many of the original squares had disintegrated into

fine

webs of denim and chambray, she had begun piecing a new section: squares that

each held a pair of dates, a name, an embroidered flower. These were for

friends

who had died. Some of them were people lost two decades earlier, to the War,

drugs or misadventure; names that Moony knew only from stories told year after

year at Mars Hill or in the kitchen at home.

But most of the names were those of people Moony herself had known. Friends of

Ariel's who had gathered during the divorce, and again, later, when Moony's

father died, and during the myriad affairs and breakups that followed. Men and

women who had started out as Ariel's customers and ended as family. Uncle Bob

and Uncle Raymond and Uncle Nigel. Laurie Salas. Tommy McElroy and Scan

Jacobson. Chas Bowen and Martina Glass. And, on the very bottom edge of the

skirt, a square still peacock-bright with its blood-colored rose, crimson

letters spelling out John's name and a date the previous spring.

As a child Moony had loved that skirt. She loved to watch her mother sashay

into

the tiny gazebo at Mars Hill on First Night and see all the others laugh and

run

to her, their fingers plucking at the patchwork folds as though to read

something there, tomorrow's weather perhaps, or the names of suitors yet

unmet.

But now Moony hated the skirt. It was morbid, even Jason agreed with that.

"They've already got a fucking quilt," he said, bitterly. "We don't need your

more wearing a goddamn skirt."

Moony nodded, miserable, and tried not to think of what they were most afraid

of: Martin's name there beside John's, and a little rosebud done in

flower-knots. Martin's name, or Ariel's.

There was a key to the skirt, Moony thought as she watched her mother sip her

wine; a way to decode all the arcane symbols Ariel had stitched there over the

last few months. It lay in a heavy manila envelope somewhere in Ariel's room,

envelope that Ariel had started carrying with her in February, and which grew

heavier and heavier as the weeks passed. Moony knew there was something

horrible

in that envelope, something to do with the countless appointments Ariel had

since February, with the whispered phone calls and macrobiotic diets and the

resurgence of her mother's belief in devas and earth spirits and plain

old-fashioned ghosts.

But Moony said nothing of this, only smiled and fidgeted with her earrings.

"Go

ahead," she told Ariel, who had settled at the edge of a wicker hassock and

peered up at her daughter through her wineglass. "I just got to get some

stuff."

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Elizabeth Hand - Last Summer on Mars Hill

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