Half-Moon Scar: A Novel

By Allison Green

Allison Green's Half Moon Scar is an edgy novel about three childhood friends who reunite as adults to discover and heal each other's wounds, both physical and emotional.

Amy is a thirtysomething lesbian who escaped her small, Midwestern hometown of Willow Bay, Wisconsin, to pursue an academic career and establish a life with her lover. After years away from Willow Bay, she returns to visit the people she's left behind--only to discover that her old friends Gina and Gavin have learned to dissociate from their pasts in extreme ways that rival her own. Amy's tendency toward self-mutilation parallels both Gavin's anorexia and Gina's moody detachment from life, and Amy soon begins to fear for Gavin's life while becoming more and more bewildered by Gina's behavior.

As past and present collide and the visit extends far beyond its intended length, as the reunion forces all three to examine the shame and guilt they experienced as gay adolescents. Amy finds that she must reconcile the tense relationship with her family and her long-standing attraction to Gina, as well as her past romantic experimentation with Gavin. Together, Amy, Gina, and Gavin examine the scars--both emotional and physical, visible and invisible--that pervade their still-unresolved lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 14, 2000
• ISBN: 9780312275938

Allison Green

Allison Green lives in Seattle, Washington, where she teaches English Composition at Highline College. She earned an MFA from Emerson. She is the author of Half-Moon Scar (published by St. Martin’s Press) and has also had her writing published by Calyx, Bellingham Review, Defunct, Zyzzyva, Yes! Magazine, The Commons, Jumpstart, Raven Chronicles, Willow Springs, Teacher’s Voice, and Evergreen Chronicles. The city of Seattle awarded her a CityArtist grant in 2010.

Book preview

30,000 feet

i unfolded a map of Willow Bay, my hometown, over my knees. A small midwestern city: pulp mills, football team, branch of the state university. I grew up in Willow Bay, left, returned sometimes to leave again. You know how a map gets after it’s been folded and unfolded too many times? My body felt like that. Edges ripped, creases erasing the names of towns. No going back to its original condition.

The flight attendant said, Chicken or beef? I folded the map and took chicken. The man next to me lined up three little bottles of vodka on his tray and told me he didn’t think Seattle was so hot with the all-day rush hour on the interstate and he’d take Iowa City any day.

You would? I said.

Any day.

Behind me was the summer session, my grades turned in, piles of papers and folders and books on the floor of my office. Behind me was Robin talking gold rings and wanting to move my futon couch into her living room. Ahead was family, people I hadn’t seen in half a dozen years. My mother had been quiet when I called with the flight information. She wasn’t going to ask me why her plea worked this time. I wasn’t going to say it was the end of a paragraph: Which reminds me. I ran into that friend of yours, Gina. She still lives here. She says hello.

Robin dropped me off outside the ticket counters. I’d packed everything in one bag, heavy on my lap. The vinyl seat of Robin’s car stuck to the back of my thighs. Don’t forget, Robin said. She put my hand under her breast. The weight of it.

The plane flew over the Rockies—fissures and crevasses and ice. The plane flew over the Dakotas, squared off by farming. It landed in Minneapolis, and the man with the three vodka bottles said, Back to God’s country. The flight attendant smiled as I passed on my way out.

I had an hour and a half and there was a photo booth on the concourse, so I pulled the curtain and sat in front of the camera. The red light blinked.

I smiled.

I got tired of smiling, and the camera flashed.

Four times this happened. The strip of black-and-white pictures that came wet out of the slot was a strip of identical faces, wrinkles between the eyebrows, thin lips pressed together. My hair blended into the dark curtain behind me so my faces were white balloons, the faces of children in chemotherapy.

In the air again, leaving Minneapolis, I cleaned under my nails with the point of a safety pin. Willow Bay was under a thunderstorm, and the plane circled and circled, then fell right out of the sky and onto the Willow Bay runway. There at the end of the ramp was my family: my mother, father, brother, one of my sisters and her son. I walked down the ramp and there we all were, our gestures the same, our voices the same, though our clothes were different and our skin grown thinner, more tired.

We drove through Willow Bay, splashing water up on curbs. The storm had passed, and the sky was turning from black to blue. We had our windows halfway down and drops of rain came in and glazed my temple. The air was cool, with the promise of hot.

We drove through Willow Bay, and things looked the same, as if the city had the same gestures, too, the same voice, though it had aged some. Traffic still turned around this corner as it always had, and we stopped at this light as we always had, and someone was coming out of that same old post office.

We drove through town and out to the development where my parents had bought a house, a white split-level. I could have guessed their development would look like this now. I’d seen it when new, earth turned up, trees small. Now the trees had grown and grass settled in, so the neighborhood looked like it belonged to this ground.

We got inside and we talked. My mother fed us, and my father gave me the tour of the basement remodel, and my sister had pictures of her son, even though he was right there. I was tired, and I was glad when my sister and her son left, my mother, my father, and my brother went to bed, and I was sitting on the sleeper sofa in the daylight basement, thinking: Nothing here has changed, nothing new will happen in this house. And it was a good, quiet feeling, that I could come back after half a dozen years and not have missed anything.

On a shelf above the fireplace was my old globe. I brought it down. Seamed cardboard, metal stand. A patchwork of smooth-colored countries, the United States divided into its squares and rectangles. Willow Bay was not labeled but was easy to find, there at the base of the thumb. When I was a kid, I had stuck tacks in this globe, tacks to show where I lived, where I’d been, and where I hoped to be going. Where I lived was Willow Bay. Where I’d been was Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, and one summer, Washington, D.C. Where I was going was the end of the continent, but I didn’t know it yet and there was no tack mark in Seattle on this globe. If Robin had been here, she would have said that Seattle was my destiny, and she would have meant her, her cat, Lois, her buckwheat pancakes and salmon omelettes. She would have asked my mother for a tack to make a mark on Seattle.

I sat there in my parents’ house on the sleeper sofa, the globe between my knees. I spun the globe and closed my eyes, imagining I held a tack. I imagined Gina. I touched the skin of the globe. It spun and spun, burning the tip of my finger. I jabbed the tack. The globe stopped. Now I would open my eyes. And when my eyes opened, I would see where to go.

part one

victoria and main

i sat in my mother’s car outside Gina’s house, the map of Willow Bay in my lap, finger on the corner of Victoria and Main. My mother’s car smelled like hand lotion and those thick tissues that come in pink boxes. Rain hit the windshield. Across the street was a Catholic church and a Catholic church school, a green lawn, sprinklers turning in the rain. The rain on the windshield blurred the school and the green lawn. When my Lutheran mother married my Catholic father, the room in the basement of the Lutheran church where they held the reception could have been divided by an electric fence, my mother said. No one crossed—no one wanted to get zapped. After they got married my dad converted and I never went into a Catholic church.

My finger pressed the map. Victoria and Main. This had to be the house: beige with orange trim, two stories, clapboard siding. Paint had fallen off in chunks, and cracks branched up from the foundation. Gina’s house. When I had spun that globe and stuck that tack into its skin, the tack landed here, on this house.

I put the map on the passenger seat, brushed the side of the door for the handle, found it, stepped out. Rain hit my glasses. I watched my feet walk up the gravel drive. Black sneakers. Army surplus jacket. Chocolate-covered apricots in a silver box. All to say: Dyke from the City. The One Who Got Out.

But my heart had started up. Flutter, flap. A bird stuck in a chimney.

The steps up to the screened-in front porch had crumbled. Faint television voices came through the closed window above me. I rang the doorbell, a rectangle glowing orange.

A voice said, Amy?

Gina came around the side of the house. Gina Winiecki. She had that same hair brushed back, not as blond as it had been. Long, yellow-haired legs ended in running shoes without socks. Her hands turned open toward me, long-fingered hands, and we hugged, my body touched by the impression of small breasts, narrow shoulders and waist, and then the air and rain were between us, and a faint smell of sweat. Gina, I said.

Amy. She smiled, tongue showing, crooked eyeteeth showing.

I followed her around the house to the back door. Apple trees and a picket fence and a beige garage screened the yard from the traffic behind it on Main. The yard was a dandelion yard, gold dandelions three feet high. Rain dripped from an apple tree onto a picnic table.

On the landing I hung my jacket and followed Gina up three stairs to the kitchen. Chocolate-covered apricots, I said, holding out the box. I hope you’re not allergic. My girlfriend is allergic to the sulfur they use on apricots. I watched her eyes when I said my girlfriend and they looked right at mine. She bit the cellophane on the box to get it started and her long fingers peeled the cellophane off. She opened the lid: fat lumps of chocolate. She smiled, lips closed, and replaced the lid without eating any. Thank you. Cup of tea?

I sat in a folding chair at the table. The wallpaper—above the counter, along the table—had red roosters and brown teapots. Around the stove the roosters and teapots were polka-dotted with red splatters. Gina filled a teakettle with water and turned on the burner. It’s been a long time, I said.

Thirteen years. Gina reached into the cupboard and brought out blue mugs. Unlucky thirteen.

Thirteen? I could feel the imprint of her hand on my waist in the darkness of the amusement park ride.

Thirteen years ago, Gina said, I went through your line at the Red Owl.

I felt again the rubber mat under my feet, my fingers on the cash register keys.

Remember? Just before you left. She was taking tea boxes out of the cupboard. I remember because you told me you were going to Madison and I was short—I think it was a carton of cigarettes—and you said you’d cover me.

Yes. Gina buying a carton of cigarettes in my line at the Red Owl. I remembered looking at her hands as they picked up the carton.

Gina said, So what’s happened in thirteen years? As she made tea, I told her about college and graduate school and tenure. I didn’t tell her about the woman who slept with her ex again—Just once. Why are you so uptight? The one who kicked me out of my own car and made me walk the two miles back home. The one who pushed me, not hard really, just enough for me to fall and sprain my wrist. I didn’t tell her about Robin, either, who, when I was sick, made tea from her own mint, whose exes lived in other states, and who, just weeks before, had said it was time we combined our households, and she would sell her house and garden if I wanted to find a new house together.

When it was Gina’s turn, she said nothing about lovers either. She told me she tended bar at night, coached girls’ soccer and basketball, and worked in the summers as a day-camp counselor. They don’t pay squat, she said, but I like working outside. Then silence.

What else to say? I said, Nice house. Do you own it?

No. Cheap rent though.

That’s good.

By then she’d poured three cups of tea, and I thought: Roommate? Lover? She smiled, tongue showing, crooked eye-teeth showing. Let’s go to the front room.

She shouldered through a swinging door to the front of the house. I followed with my cup through a dim living room, fireplace on the right, screened front porch ahead. On the left were French doors. She nodded at them, her hands full. I turned the glass handle. The door opened to the smell of unwashed sheets, to white walls, to television voices. And under an orange afghan, to Gavin.

Amelia!

My knees loosened and the muscles in my calves had to straighten me up. Gavin. The last words I’d said to him: Freak. Fag. The last time I’d seen him: pulling up his pants, white face in the darkness.

His eyes now were big, the big of eyes behind glasses, but he didn’t wear glasses. His cheeks and the cleft in his chin had gone shallow. The word for his illness ballooned in the back of my throat.

He elbowed the pillows to push himself upright. Amelia. Gavin’s voice. The sound came to me more like a smell than a sound, calling up memories. His younger face swam beneath the surface of this grown-up stranger’s face. But the half-moon scar was there on his nose, and when I saw it I knew he was really Gavin.

The couch sank under my weight. His thin arms wrapped around me, and I held his voice as much as his body. He didn’t smell like Gavin or look like Gavin or feel like Gavin but he sounded like Gavin.

When I sat back, Gina was sitting on an ottoman, holding the two mugs of tea. Her long calves tensed and released, tensed and released. She leaned forward with Gavin’s mug and he took it. We held our mugs, white hands around blue porcelain.

Gavin muted the television and tucked the afghan around his waist. Surprise! Were you surprised? His smile spread across hollow cheeks.

Yes. I tried to breathe into my belly, the way Robin had taught me.

And you didn’t guess?

How could I guess?

He turned his head to look at Gina. You did good.

Gina held her mug right under her nose.

I had no idea you were even in Willow Bay, I said. No idea you were alive. No idea I would ever see you again.

Nobody does. I snuck into town.

When?

Last summer. Long boring story of my life. Nowhere else to go, really, so it’s back home. I lived with my brother for a couple months, then Gina took me in. She’s just like the Humane Society. She’ll put me to sleep if she can’t find another owner.

Please, Gina said. She was watching pioneers ride their wagons across the plains.

And you’re here, Gavin said. He looked in the mug, wrinkled his nose, put the mug on the floor. Who’s the girlfriend?

Robin? I looked down at my hand. No ring on my finger, yet.

Ha, he said. I knew it.

What?

The air of a married lesbian. He laced his fingers together and turned the palms out, cracking his knuckles. We were wondering if you turned out to be a dyke. He winked at Gina, who wasn’t looking at him.

I tried to smile. The mug, resting on my knee, was warm.

We are, too. Gavin patted his hair, pale brown, thin. Dykes. I’m the femme. He coughed. He put his fist over his mouth and coughed again. His face went red. The coughs were thick and deep, and I put my hand on the afghan, on his leg—my hand tightened around nothing. Watery muscle, slippery bone. He patted the floor for the mug. Gina’s eyes stayed on the