White Goddess

Neil Armstrong and the Apollo may have taken a small step for man, but women have owned the moon since the creation of imagination. Full moon, new moon, crescent moon, harvest moon--from the Greek Artemis to the Aztec Coyolxauhqui, goddesses rather than gods have controlled our nearest neighbor, whose tidal pull was recognized early on as intimately linked with that most intimate of female miracles: childbirth.

And now we have the high-wire moon, whose image dominates Susan Straight’s latest novel of the Southwestern United States and the many Earthbound women who look up to it for guidance. Sandy, the foster mother of Straight’s heroine, asks her young charge, Elvia, “Tell me when that fat, bright moon sits on the telephone wire outside. Tell me. I love those few minutes when it’s balancing. When it’s a highwire moon.”

At the age of 15, long after she has learned to trust and speak, long after she has left her foster mother, “Elvia remembered exactly how it looked--like it could stop going on the same path it took every month, like it could roll sideways instead, suddenly deciding to visit a whole new place, riding the silvery wire, raising starry sparks.”

Balance and movement require control, however. And control, historically, has played a lesser role to accident in the history of Elvia’s family. Her father, a cowboy of a laborer, meets her mother, Serafina, a Mixtec Indian from Oaxaca, by chance during a raid by immigration authorities. One thing leads to another, and the innocent Serafina is impregnated by Larry. Yet the biggest accident of all falls on the evening when, with Larry away, Serafina drives an unfamiliar car to a local church to pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe. After she crashes into a hedge, a neighbor calls the police and Serafina is taken into custody by immigration authorities. Without enough English or Spanish to explain that her 3-year-old daughter is asleep in the front seat of a truck parked by the church, Serafina is deported across the Mexican border, leaving young Elvia to social services and a childhood of abandonment and misunderstanding.

For a while, Elvia grows in the care of the foster mother, Sandy of the balancing moon. Eventually her father discovers her whereabouts, takes her from Sandy and raises Elvia to the best of his confused ability. But at the age of 15, fearing she is pregnant by a stoner of an Indian boyfriend, Elvia loses her balance and starts to roll sideways in search of guidance from the mother she believes abandoned her.

But “Highwire Moon” is only partly the story of Elvia’s quest. Serafina, too, has begun to slip along the telephone wire, north toward the border in search of her lost daughter. So has Sandy, the foster mother, who has kept Elvia’s baby teeth in a marked box of remembrance all these years. Elvia, it turns out, is only one of the many women in a family of moonstruck Wallendas, pulled and knocked around by circumstance and pregnancy, who orbit around one another in ever-tightening circles, colliding, avoiding, missing.

The men certainly have their share of anxiety . S erafina’s Mixtec brother follows the fruit pickers and runs from la migra , lives on “tortillas and coffee and anger.” Larry strives for the nobility of paternal responsibility but is thwarted by a gender-related ignorance that is epidemic in Susan Straight territory. Although Elvia meets women who spend their nights “sketching”--smoking amphetamines, from speed to Sudafed--or worse, selling their babies for drugs, it is Straight’s women who are the tragic heroines, victims of their own moon-driven loves: abandoned, knocked up or scarred into sterility by some careless husband’s gonorrhea.

There is something quite wonderful about Straight’s sub-lunary women, connected less by the moon than by an umbilical sympathy. “The sharpest pain, sharper than the pain in her jaw or her feet or her stomach, ricocheted between her hipbones, the way it did each time she saw the small back in the tub, the almond-colored cheeks and eyes, the smile when she lifted her face. The hands at her knees, on her back. The terrible untethering from the ground of Serafina’s whole body without those fingers in hers, on her, holding her.”

What makes “Highwire Moon” shine above a simple story of simple people is Straight’s determination to make it a story also of a people. Though Serafina is hardly Ma Joad and Elvia no Rose of Sharon, “Highwire Moon” is full of modern-day rootless Okies, bulldozed and burned from one end to another of the telephone wires of the Southwest. Every child born to every Serafina, to every Elvia, increases the population of these outcasts, the Mixtecs, the orphans, the poor. Every birth beneath all our moons is both a miracle and another grape of wrath in the potent mixture brewing along our Southern border. *