The Pull of the Moon (5 page)

Dear Martin,

Today, around noontime, I suddenly got tired of the car. And so when I came to the next town, I pulled over and parked next to a church and got out to take a little walk. It was a small town, the requisite town hall and police station and library all clustered together like gossiping friends. I sat on the steps of the town hall eating an ice cream and trying to decide which direction to go in. I could see some railroad tracks off in the distance and I decided to walk along there.

I’d forgotten all the pleasures of walking in a place like that—the low twist of anxiety about a train coming when you’re in a narrow spot, the crunch of gravel alongside the tracks, the splintery wooden slats beneath the rusty silver rail, the rare wildflower in among the weeds, bowing to the breezes. I passed an old gentleman also out walking, and we stopped to chat for a while. He was well into his seventies, perhaps even his eighties, and still good-looking, you didn’t have to stretch to say so. He wore a green plaid shirt tucked into khaki pants, a braided belt, a pair of ultramodern sneakers. He said he lived in a nearby retirement center, and needed to get out and walk daily to get away from the girls. “No offense,” he said, “but they get to be like horseflies. Oh, I like them, like to sit and play cards with them in the evening, they’re all wearing their sparkly earrings and such, but all
day
…” He said the ratio of women to men in the place was 11:1. I asked him how long he’d lived there and he said seven years, ever since his wife, Honey, died. “That wasn’t her real name,” he said. “Eleanor was her real name. But I never called her anything but Honey. It fit her, she thought so, too.” They had nine children, and all of them are still close. One of his sons worked at NASA, one daughter studied opera in New York, the rest were just normal, nice people, he said—Americans, he said. He asked how many children I had and I said one; and you know, Martin, I suddenly felt ashamed that we only had one. As though we were dabbling in family, not really serious. He asked where I lived and I said outside of Boston and he said oh, far from home, was I visiting? I said no, just … traveling. He said, well if I were there at dinnertime not to miss Randy’s Lunch, right downtown, best damned meatloaf in the state. He said he went and snuck a bite every now and then even though if his doctor knew, he’d have his head. “It’s not going to hurt me,” he said, leaning close, as though his doctor might have a microphone planted in the tree nearby. “I swear to God it’s what’s keeping me alive at this point.” He had dimples like yours, Martin, deep ones on either side of his face.

Do you know that you’re still handsome? When you look into the mirror, do you feel a tug of the old satisfaction? I’ve noticed I don’t look in the mirror much at all anymore. I used to be quite vain, I know. But it’s been a while since I turned any heads. This has been kind of hard for me. I never liked it when it was happening, it made me so nervous, used to be I couldn’t sit in a restaurant without knowing someone was watching me eat, well not just me, of course, men in restaurants graze on the good-looking women, staring first at this one, then at that one. Staring and making up their little scenes, we can feel them doing it. But now I am seen by men as a number in line, a bakery customer; some old gal who needs her sink fixed; the driver of the nice Mercedes passing through a road-construction site. I feel this loss in a kind of vague way, I guess it’s not so bad, what was I going to do, become a Mrs. Robinson? Still, it’s odd to lose the power, this thing that lets you have a little something happen with every man you come in contact with. If you are a pretty woman, you get favors, and I was pretty. Not the gorgeous kind of pretty that makes men nervous and often angry, just the calm kind of pretty that makes men be a little kinder, rub with some sensuality the keys in their pockets, occasionally have ideas they mostly keep to themselves. Although Charlie Benderman, did I ever tell you what he whispered to me at the Maxwells’ Christmas party? No, I didn’t tell you. Well, he thought we should see how heavy the guests’ coats felt if we were under them, if you know what I mean. Do you know what I said? I said, “I love my husband, Charlie.” And he got all embarrassed and went to freshen his drink. When I watched him walk away, I confess I thought about it, thought about what it might have been like. Tried to remember what underwear I was wearing, if it matched. Wondered what he kissed like.

What I miss acutely is my periods. The last one was so long ago. I guess that was it, I guess I’m done with all that now. It feels so awful. Is that funny to you, Martin, after all the times you heard me complain about my periods? I know, I know, now you’re feeling a little nervous, thinking, ah jeez, here we go, Nan’s off on another tangent, talking about her periods, for Christ’s sake, and I’m supposed to be interested. Could you be interested, though, Martin? Could you try to be? Could you put your load of man stuff aside and just open yourself to hearing about this? It’s big as a boulder in me. It’s important.

You wait for your period. For what seems like years. You get the pastel-blue booklet with the white rose on the cover and the lecture from which the boys are barred; you are aware that when it comes, when it comes, when it comes, you will be a WOMAN by virtue of the fact that your body, the one that yesterday swung from the monkey bars, can today have a baby. Can grow and deliver to the world a live human being. You know that hormones will course through you, whispering commands; that the pull of the moon will be shared by you and the ocean and the minds of wild things. When your period comes, you prize the mess. You examine the stain, try to read it. You touch the blood, rub it between your fingers. You say to yourself, I am forever changed. Changed. Forever. Well, I did, anyway. The day my period came, I walked down the steps on new legs and showed my mother my underwear as she sat on the sofa, sewing. “Well,” she said, blushing, “well, now.” She was shy about it, and she turned me away from her to head me upstairs to the linen closet. “You’ll need this,” she said, not looking at me, “and this.” She was leaning into the closet, her apron hanging away from her housedress, and her housedress fallen away from her chest, and I saw her freckled breasts in her old yellow-white brassiere and they looked old and superfluous to me and I felt sorry for her, so far away from my new beginning, my start, my star-spangled life now dropped before me.

When Ruthie got her period, I think it was a better experience for her. I know we smiled right at each other, and I bought her a little pearl necklace to celebrate when we went out to lunch—it was a Saturday, clear blue sky and the kind of sunlight that felt so perfect it seemed fake. We had a nice time, and she asked me not to tell you until the next day, and I didn’t. I lay in bed that night feeling the tie between Ruthie and me grow stronger, grow leaves.

What is comparable for you, Martin? Would you tell me if something were? Do you know how much I long for you to lift the rock, to tell me about your underside? You once said, “Women are all the time asking what men are thinking about. We’re not thinking about
anything!”
Well, maybe that’s true. But we are. We are thinking about things. It seems to me that the working minds and hearts of women are just so interesting, so full of color and life. And one of the most tragic things I’ve seen is the way that’s been overlooked, the way that if you try to discover what the women were doing at any given time in history, you are hard-pressed to find out. Why? I want to say to you that we are not silly, that what we think about and what drives us to talk, talk, talk, this is vital.

Does this follow anything? I mean, is there a particular reason that I bring it up now? I don’t know. But I want to say it to you. And I want to say that I don’t want to live in our house anymore. I want to move. With you. To the place I pick this time. I have ideas. I’ve dreamed about the house I want. Next letter, I’ll tell you about it.

Love,
Nan

I am in a Hilton hotel in Des Moines. It was time for a little city. I took a Jacuzzi and I went down and had my nails done and I sat at the bar until the silliness drove me back up to my room. I have been sitting on the edge of the bed thinking about what I wrote in here last time. I think every woman I know has a story like that, some incident of paralyzed humiliation involving a man and sex. I’ll bet if you asked any woman, was there ever a time when you … Oh yes, they’d say. There was this one time … My best friend in college told me that she once watched her fraternity boyfriend spray semen around the room, holding his penis in his hands like a fire hose. And she lay in bed, one leg pulled up prettily, genuinely confused, thinking
, is this what it’s supposed to be? Where is the romance?
At least she wasn’t frightened
.

I visited a trailer park today. I turned down the gravel road, drove slowly, looking at the way the trailers were all decorated: curtains, little picket fences protecting a line of garden, an attempt at a patio under an awning. So many of them seemed so desperate to look as though they weren’t trailers at all. And I wondered why those people just didn’t get a co-op, some nice little place that didn’t have wheels. There was a woman about my age outside hanging wash on a miniature clothesline. I pulled up, got out and introduced myself, said I was just having a look around. Go right ahead, she said, you can look at my spot all you want. She was one of those tough-but-kind people, hard line of black eye makeup, smoker’s breath, a fondness for hair spray—and a need, too, what with the severe French twist she wore. She had a pretty spectacular figure, if everything I saw was real. She was wearing silver backless heels, those tight black stretchy pants that look like a second skin, a short-sleeved blue sweater, large silver hoop earrings. She hiked her empty pink basket up against her hip, asked if I were considering living here. I said yes I was. She told me it was a quiet place, there was a duck pond down in the middle of their little private park, a Laundromat on site, though the dryer was pretty regularly out of order. Uh-huh, I said. Grocery store just a
mile and half down the road, she said, King Savings, great beef but stay away from their chicken. Oh, I said, uh-huh. And then she said, “You’re not really looking to live here, are you?” I said well, no, probably not. She said she didn’t think so, said I didn’t look like the type. I said is that right. She chuckled and then coughed a few times into her fist, bad smoker’s cough. Then she said yeah, that was damn right, laughed again. She was looking off to the side like she was sharing the joke with an invisible ally. I said what type did I look like and she said I looked like the type that went down and volunteered at some suicide prevention center in order to save my own life. Handed over my Joan and Davids to the Goodwill with a sense of regret that they would not be recognized as the great shoes they were. I stood stock-still for a minute, trying to figure this out, because it was so surprising, and because although it was pretty nasty, it was said in such a friendly way. I thought, where did this woman come from? How did she end up here?

She lit a cigarette and offered me one, and though I don’t smoke, I took one. Salem. An awful mix of foul and mint. I had a sudden urge to get my hair dyed platinum
.

We sat at her little picnic table and she said, Not much of a smoker either, are you, Nan? I said no, but that I’d always
wanted to be, that it always looked pretty good to me, sexy, too. She said it
was
sexy, watch this, and she French-inhaled while she stared me straight in eye
.

Then all of a sudden I asked her, I said, what did you
want
to do? Oh hell, she said, and stared off into the distance. Then, looking back at me, “Everything.” I asked her name and she said Susan Littletree and I said is that your married name and she said yes; and no, her husband was not Native American. What he was, was gone. I said well. She said you’d like to see inside the trailer, wouldn’t you? I said yes, I would. She said come ahead but don’t get freaked out at the statues of Mary, it’s just a joke. Then, looking over her shoulder as she climbed the steps up, No offense if you’re a Mary fan. A believer, one of them. More power to you if you are, she said. You got something
.

It was amazing how when you got in that trailer, it seemed like a house. It was clean in there, which surprised me—I’d expected dirty dishes all over, newspapers on the floor. She gave me a tour, showed me her blue bedroom—flowered wallpaper, pink sweetheart roses in a vase at the bedside, along with six or seven Mary statues. The bathroom had gold fixtures, and a magazine rack discreetly off to the side, I saw
Bon Appetit
in there. She had burnt-orange
kitchen counters, dark wooden cabinets, a little window over the sink with white ruffled curtains. There was a booth to eat in, striped brown and white fabric. She looked at her watch, asked me would I like a tuna sandwich, it was close enough to dinnertime. I said I would, but to let me help make it, and I stood at her tiny counter chopping celery and sweet pickles and hard-boiled eggs while she mixed the tuna with the mayonnaise. I was so glad it was Hellmann’s, the real thing, none of that mincing fake stuff that you always try so hard to pretend is
fine,
even though your taste alarm is going berserk
.

I said it was awfully nice of her, me just showing up and her offering me a meal. Oh well, she said, she’d always thought that was the way it should be, some people wandering around and other people taking care of them, think of Jesus. I said pardon me? and she said think of Jesus, how he wandered around and people fed him. Washed his feet, too, I said. Come to bad end, though, didn’t he, she said, and I’m afraid we started laughing, which made me feel badly and also a little superstitious because if there
is
all that heaven and hell and accounting stuff, God was shaking his head
.

We sat at her table for a while after we ate and she told me her husband had left her three years ago, took off with her best
friend. Susan sold their house and bought this trailer, thinking she’d live here a little while, then move on. Only she hadn’t left yet. She worked as a receptionist at a car dealership, got hit on by the salesmen, brought one home occasionally, kicked him out the next morning or even that same night, depending on his level of skill and/or his marital status. She’d heard that Trudy, the woman her husband ran off with, had gotten ovarian cancer. I said that must feel very odd, that probably she felt a weird kind of pity, a reluctant, confused kind; and she said no, she felt a full-blown pity, nothing confused about it, she felt a terrible sadness about the whole damn thing. “I’d go down there and take care of her if she asked me to,” she said. “It’s for sure he ain’t gonna do it right. She’ll see that, if she hasn’t already. ‘Where’s my dinner?’ he’ll be saying. ‘What, you can’t even make dinner?’”

We went shopping, drove over to a huge mall. I told her I wanted to buy her something. She said all right. We looked at all kinds of things, and she settled on a turquoise nightgown and matching robe, on sale, and a new potato peeler. That was all she’d let me get her. I got a few books, a new pair of shoes—she’d got me going with that talk about Joan and Davids. I liked her so much, everything about her, and at one point I asked if she’d like to come along for a while
,
that I’d pay her way back home from any place we got to. She said well where was I going? I said nowhere. Anywhere. I was just going around, seeing. She thought about it, then said, hell, she couldn’t leave, she’d lose her damn job. I said oh, you can get another one, jobs like that are easy to get. And she cooled then, looked me in the eye, said, you don’t know a thing about it, Nan
.

I took her home, then drove another fifty miles in the dark, thinking oh well, it probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway, thinking that the purpose of this trip was to spend a lot of time alone, not to start insulating myself from all I might see. The radio was playing a lot of old songs, Frank Sinatra when he was skinny, Tony Bennett, Patti Page. It’s good to be in a car, the dark around you, when songs like that are on. I’m getting used to driving so much. Seems like it’s part of me, now. I wake up and think
, Go.

I know my own luck. I know how rare it is for a person to be able to do this. And I know more and more what I’m doing it for. I feel a kind of strength starting to happen that is wholly legitimate, that is not some trapping I wear until it falls off. It is as though the thing has roots, and seeks the sun with its face turned toward it. And I know I never would have found it without leaving
.

Once I took a job on the community newspaper, writing a weekly column. “Nan’s Notes on Life,” it was called, silly. Well, no it was not. The editor there, a nice woman, told me I had real talent. I told Martin and he said, “
Who
said that?” I told him, and he said, “Oh.” And the bottom fell out. What I am seeing now is that it never was up to him. He could have been more generous. He could have been more sensitive. But how I felt, that was not up to him. I only let it be. No more. Perhaps it will be a relief for him not to have to decide for me how I feel. I should think it would be
.

For now, the pleasure of heavy blankets and cream-colored sheets, a room-service menu that I intend to study for the best choice in breakfasts. Tomorrow I will make the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis
.

I am so much farther away than I thought I’d go
.