The Pull of the Moon (3 page)

Dear Martin,

I hope you’ve gotten a little bit used to this, to my being away. I have, suddenly.

I am here in a room in someone’s house, in a very small town called Midgeville. When I asked at the gas station this evening where the nearest motel was, the man said there was no motel in town, but that the Lewis family had a kind of bed-and-breakfast, real nice place. You didn’t get your own bathroom or anything, but you got a bedroom. Twelve dollars. So I came here and it’s the most wonderful place. An older couple I’d put in their mid-seventies lives here, and the house is full of the old-fashioned things I love—doilies, a grandfather clock, maple end tables crowded with photos and flowered porcelain dishes, overstuffed sofas and chairs with soft pillows tossed here and there. The bed I have is a beautiful brass one, a blue-and-white quilt on it. The front window looks out onto the garden—I can’t really see much now, but Mrs. Lewis told me it’s her husband’s hobby, his pride and joy, he’s got sixty different kinds of rosebushes out there. One variety produces silver blossoms! She said she puts them in a vase with the purple roses, that they’re lovely together.

I feel a little like a child again, up in my room, the door closed, listening to the sound of voices below me. I’m looking forward to the morning—Mrs. Lewis is making applesauce muffins and I know they’ll be served with some care. My job is only to receive.

I drove for such a long time today, and I didn’t really get tired. This surprised me—you know how I always used to fade out after an hour or two when we took turns on a trip. But I went for miles and miles, listened to radio stations come in and out, thought about what it would be like to live in each town I passed through—there, the grocery store with the woman in pink curlers coming out, that’s where I’d shop; there, the small stone library, that’s where I’d request bestsellers from the gossipy librarian. I love doing this, Martin, I used to try to explain it to you, why I wanted to take the side roads. But you were always interested in saving time, so we took the interstates and there was never anything to look at, not even telephone poles. When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.

I stop wherever I want to, for as long as I want. Today I browsed in an antique store and I went into a dress shop to try on a yellow skirt I saw in the window and I stopped at a farm stand and bought a big fat tomato and then sat in the car and ate it from my hand like an apple. Then I just sat there watching people for a good half hour or so, seeing who came and what they bought, watching kids yank at parents’ hands or quietly rearrange the peaches. I listened to the sound of paper bags being rolled shut, the cash-register drawer dinging open and then being pushed closed. I liked this. You would never have stood for it. I remember once when we were in New York and we passed a man making pizza in a window, throwing the dough high up in the air. I wanted to watch and you lasted about fifteen seconds and then we had to move on. I could have stood there all night. We are so different that way.

I passed a sign for a pet cemetery this afternoon and I went to see it. It was off the bumpiest dirt road I’ve ever been on—you’d have been clutching your chest, Martin, yelling about axles and to turn back, oh yes you would. But I was very careful and nothing happened, the car seemed interested in getting there, too. I’d never been to a pet cemetery before. It’s a heartbreaking and wonderful experience, the crooked signs, the used toys marking the heads of graves, the animals’ names, most of them ending in
Y
, of course. There was a parakeet named Petey, a cat named Roly Poly. A lot of dogs—Rusty, Tippy, one called Admiral Commander III. I found a little boy, about seven, sitting at the side of one of the graves—his dog Sparky was buried there. Part bulldog, he said, mostly bulldog. The boy, named Ralph, said he never thought Sparky would die—he didn’t seem to be that sick, but he never came back from the vet’s. He told me Sparky snorted when he laughed, that’s what he said, that the dog laughed and that he snorted when he did so. Ralph had his skateboard with him, he visited every day on his rounds. He had a new dog now, Ruffian was his name. But as Ralph so eloquently explained, “Ruffian is his self, but this one here, that’s Sparky.”

It is rather a luxury to go on this way, Martin, to know that you are attending to what I am saying. That you will read this letter through, perhaps twice, because it is a letter and not me.

I wish you could see this quilt, the stitches so tiny and fine and hand done. But even as I say this, I feel some reservation, a stinginess of spirit. Because I don’t think you’d appreciate the stitches. If you’d been driving, I wouldn’t even be here.

Not long ago, I saw a woman in a drugstore pick something up in her hand, delighted, and hold it out toward her husband. It was just a perfume bottle, but the shape of it was lovely. “See this, hon?” she said. And the man said, “Yeah,” but he had his back to her and was walking down the aisle away from her. The woman put the thing back, diminished.

Do you know what I mean, Martin? I think this comes from mistakes so many women make early on in a marriage. When we got engaged, I stopped driving my own car. I rode shotgun every time we were together. The default settings on the mirrors, on the closeness of the seat to the wheel, they were yours. Remember when that car caught on fire, the engine? Maybe it was auto grief. Don’t think I’m crazy, Martin. I have only gotten out my shovel, to dig a bit. I’m just pointing out what I uncover. You can look or not. I want the difference to be that I don’t put the thing back on the shelf because you say it’s not worth seeing.

I just read this letter over and I see that there is a lot of anger here.

I’m sorry.

Love,
Nan

I am staying at a bed-and-breakfast on the edge of a lake. The windows are wide open and the wind has come in to snoop around, to lift the doilies, to blow up the edges of the bedspread, to push at the closet door, creating a low and urgent rattle. I can hear waves lapping at the shore and the sound is faintly obscene. There is an owl hooting somewhere out there, but I can’t see him
.

I took a walk earlier, just around the block. The sidewalks heaved crazily, damage from the tree roots below, and at one point I tripped and nearly fell flat on my face. An older man walking behind me came rushing up, asking if I were all right. I said I was fine, thank you. He said, wasn’t it a lovely evening? and I said it certainly was. Good weather will do this to people, bond them in their gratefulness. The man was
wearing wrinkly clothes and he had prickly looking gray stubble on his face. Cactus man
.

He told me he’d been a lifer in the US Army. “Logistics,” he said. “Know what that is?” Not exactly, I said. “Well,” he said, “it’s the most important thing. First ones in, first ones out.” Uh-huh, I said. I didn’t want to talk army. The sky was a mixed color, peaches and blue. I wanted to think about that. Or I wanted to think about the fact that this old guy was once my age. He was once younger than I, and I imagined him slicking his hair back to dance in the moonlight with girls whose perfume scent frightened him and aroused him. How different they were, dressed in smashable taffeta, so carefully arranged in hair and in makeup and in words. Everything about them practiced, and he raw and improvising. The pearl of their teeth through the passion of their dark lipstick, should he? The shadowy and too tender indentation at the base of their necks, how could he? We passed a small library and the man said, “I know all the gals in there.” I thought, I’ll bet he does. I’ll bet he comes in regularly, leans on the counter and chats and chats and chats with the “gals” and they chat back, and when they turn away from him they smile at each other with a gentle weariness. I’ll bet his name is Willy or something like that, and
he puts down beer in the VFW hall in the late afternoons, his hat pushed to the back of his head. I’ll bet he has many keys on his key chain and that the fob is tacky and meaningful. Baloney must be in his refrigerator. His socks must be thin and cheap and the blue that turns purple, and he must not be strict about how many days in a row they are put to the task
.

Our steps made such a fine sound on the roller-coaster sidewalks. Our conversation was so light and arbitrary and I felt like my imagination was off the leash and rolling in the grass that had turned bluish in the setting sun
.

I still feel that way now, that my imagination is free, that I have a red carpet unfurled before me like Dorothy’s yellow brick road and I can go on and on. Speak, this journal says. I’m listening to you. Go ahead and say anything. Confess. Exult. Weep. Nothing makes me walk away. Nothing bores me. The truth is always interesting, whatever form it takes
.

I am washed up and settled in for sleep in a stranger’s bed, which always feels luxurious to me. There is something about being handed buttered toast as opposed to making it yourself, and there is something about lying against another person’s selection of sheets. Not a hotel’s choice, a person’s, who had a dialogue in their mind before making their selection
.
Too many violets? No, I don’t think so, and look at the blue next to them, that’s nice
.

I’ve been thinking about that waiter Lawrence’s house. He did have an amazing amount of angel paraphernalia—calendars, wallpaper, figurines, many pictures, bookmarks, coffee mugs, even a bathroom rug. I’m afraid he was on the way from refreshingly eccentric to fearfully peculiar. Such a slight and delicate thing he was, the waist of a woman dancer, a wrist with skin so translucent I could see the blue lines of his veins like an etching. We had some tea (Celestial Seasonings, of course), and he told me he was a little sad that angels are so popular now, because he’d loved them long ago, from the time he was a little boy; and when too many people love what you do, some of the pleasure is lost. When he was seven, he’d used the shoelaces from his sneakers to anchor an angel figurine at the head of his bed. Unfortunately it had fallen and given him a black eye
.

He had difficulty holding jobs, and thought perhaps what he’d do next was apply at the dry cleaner. No customer contact required, he said, he’d just work in the back, alone. He thought it would be hard for him to get into trouble there, didn’t I agree? and I said yes, that was probably true, and I tried to sound optimistic, but the truth is it tore at my
heart a little that such a true and friendly person must keep to himself
.

He asked me where I was going and I said I wasn’t sure. I said I was a fifty-year-old runaway and he said
really!
and there was some admiration there and suddenly I felt it for myself
.

Today, when I was driving down a small, winding road, I came to an albino squirrel, stopped in the middle of the road. It was frozen in place. I didn’t have time to stop but I didn’t hit it; it was between the wheels. And I was so relieved and then I thought, well, that was probably purposeful; isn’t that interesting; that squirrel has learned that if you don’t quite make it across, you just hold still and the cars will go over you. But it bothered me, and about ten miles down the road I felt like going back to see if the squirrel had made it over to the side of the road. My first thought was, you can’t do that. You’ll waste a good half hour. And then I thought, you can too. And I did go back and I saw the squirrel off to the side of the road, dead. Some car had hit it after all, because it hadn’t had the courage to honor its own correct instinct. And I began to cry because I had this thought about people, that they do this all the time, deny the wise voice inside them telling them the right thing to do because it is different
.
I remembered once seeing a tea party some little girls had set up outside, mismatched china, decorations of a plucked pansy blossom and a seashell and a shiny penny and a small circle of red berries and a fern, pressed wetly into the wooden table, the damp outline around it a beautiful bonus. They didn’t consult the Martha Stewart guide for entertainment and gulp a martini before their guests arrived. They pulled ideas from their hearts and minds about the things that gave them pleasure, and they laid out an offering with loving intent. It was a small Garden of Eden, the occupants making something out of what they saw was theirs. Out of what they truly saw
.

Then I started thinking about what else Martin might have done with his life if he hadn’t been a salesman. And I think that once in a very great while he thinks about that too, sits outside at night, alone, wondering, and I know the notion pokes at a soft place in him. He is very successful, but he is embarrassed by what he does, he has told me. He wanted to study astrophysics, but when he was ready to apply to graduate school, he saw that there were so many people around him who knew more than he. Not to be racist, he said, but Jesus, those Chinese guys. Who could compete? On Saturdays, Martin would be on the campus smoking a little
dope and playing a lot of Frisbee—mostly with dogs who wore kerchiefs around their necks—and he would see the Chinese guys in his classes coming from the library when it closed and think, No, I don’t think it runs so deep in me. He went into business. Put his telescope in the basement next to the TV trays we got for a wedding gift and never use but can’t throw out. And then I thought of how his bald spot is growing larger and how he was impotent for the first time in his life not long ago and it made me feel so tender toward him I almost called him. But he would not be at the kitchen table thinking about such things. The conversation would not have worked. When are you coming home? he would have said
.

After lunch (a perfect cheeseburger at a dime store in the middle of a real Main Street), I passed by a house that stood all by itself, just at the edge of town. It was a chartreuse color, awful really, but at least different. I saw a woman sitting on the porch, watching her children play in the yard, and I remembered my desire to talk to other women. It occurred to me that I could really do it. Well, I could try. I pulled into the driveway, and the woman shaded her eyes against the sun, looking to see who I was
.

“I’m not anyone,” I said, getting out of the car. And then
,
“You don’t know me.” She didn’t say anything. I said I was not a salesperson or a Jehovah’s Witness and then she smiled, relaxed. She asked if I were lost. I said sort of. She was awfully young, a pretty woman, her short, dark hairdo and large round eyes reminding me of a chickadee. She wore a sweatshirt and jeans and lovely pearl studs in her ears—dressing up a bit of herself so she wouldn’t forget how, no doubt. You will see this in mothers of small children: they dress up from the neck up. Everything else is in danger of peanut butter
.

I sat down with her—although a step below her out of some sense of propriety—and one of her children, a boy who looked to be around four or so, came running up at full speed, then stopped dead in his tracks before me. I said hello and he said nothing, just looked at his mother. “She’s lost,” the mother said. “She just needs directions.” “Oh,” he said, in that kind of adenoidal voice kids often have. Then he ran off to join his slightly younger sister, who was adjusting her doll in the buggy with straight-mouthed determination. The boy faced away from her, made a gun out of a stick, fired into the woods at the enemy. The ancient roles
.

I used to play with my cousins in the basement of our grandparents’ house. They were the warriors; we girls were
the nurses, left to talk quietly to each other and make a hospital from towels we found in the laundry and lawn furniture stored in the cobwebby furnace room. One by one, the boys showed up with whatever wounds they described to us: “My guts are hanging out, right here, see? Pretend it’s just all gloppy intestines, real slimy.” Or “My bone is sticking out of my arm plus my ear got shot off.” Or “I’m dead. You have to wrap me up like a mummy and call my parents.” We cared for them, smiling with a kind of bruised superiority, silent
.

The young woman asked me if I would like a cup of coffee. I said I would love one. She said she’d be right back and then when she stood up, there was just the tiniest hint of fear in her, a hesitancy—as though she were thinking, Wait, should I leave this stranger out here with my children, should I be getting coffee for someone who might be a bad headline tomorrow? But I looked at her and smiled my intentions and this worked; people still often communicate best without words. The woman came out with a yellow mug with blackberries painted on it and we drank our coffee and I told her about what I was doing. Said I’d decided I needed a trip away, just by myself, that my husband was back home, we were fine, I just … And she sighed and said yeah, she loved her husband but that she ran away from him with some frequency
.
I said, really? She said, yes, most of the time he knew nothing about it. But once he did. They’d had a bad fight late at night and she took off in the car, meaning never to come back, meaning to drive to Alaska and begin again. But she was barefoot and this seemed to prevent her from doing anything. She said she drove to the grocery store and slept in the parking lot until three-thirty, then snuck back into the house. “But I didn’t go to bed. I slept on the couch,” she said. “I didn’t want him to know I was home.” “Right,” I said, and I thought, how can it be that two strangers are exchanging such intimate things? Well, most women are full to the brim, that’s all. That’s what I think. I think we are most of us ready to explode, especially when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with “Mommy” embroidered over the left breast, over the heart. I too sat on porches, on park benches, half watching Ruthie and half dreaming—trying, I think, to recall my former self. If a stranger had come up to me and said, “Do you want to talk about it? I have time to listen,” I think I might have burst into tears at the relief of it. It wasn’t that I was really unhappy. It was the constancy of my load and the awesome importance of it; and it was my isolation. I
made no friends out of the few people I saw in the park—frazzled mothers too busy for a real conversation; discontented nannies staring blankly ahead. And oftentimes the park was empty. The swings clanked so loudly against the pole. I could hear Ruthie’s little voice carried on the wind toward me, always toward me. Watching her small back bent over her bucket in the sandbox, I ached with love for her and fingered the pages of the novel I couldn’t really read. I watched the time, because I had to have dinner ready when Martin came home. It was a rule neither of us ever thought to question or unmake. We flowered in the sixties, but the spirit of the fifties was deep in us. We saw what our parents did, and, blinking blandly like the baby chimps in the jungle, followed suit—at first in ways that felt clumsy, then in ways we called natural, though in me, I see now, there were internal earthquakes wanting to happen all the time
.