The Pull of the Moon (4 page)

I asked the woman how she was doing, how did she really think she was doing. “Oh,” she said. “Fine. Although … well, I know this is just temporary. But yesterday I shook the orange juice and the top was loose and a little bit spilled on the floor which I’d already wiped up about three hundred times that day and I just started crying. I went to sit in the bathroom, but of course I had to leave the door cracked open
.
I’ll bet I cried for twenty minutes. In the middle of it, I got my daughter a graham cracker. She didn’t notice a thing.” I said, but you believe you’re all right, that you’re doing fine? Well, yes, she said. Sure
.

I drove the rest of the day feeling that my mind was wrapped in a blanket, insulated. I noted what I passed as though it were in someone else’s dream. I came back into myself after dinner, which was in a truck stop. There was a special area for “professional drivers” to eat where the service was extra fast. The room was filled with smoke, a blue haze. I saw one woman there—the rest were men. The menu posted over the counter was full of things that the American Heart Association would have had a collective heart attack about, and everybody there was eating them with gusto. I myself had chicken-fried steak, in the other room, the one for civilians. We didn’t get phones at our booths. We didn’t get shower services—I kept hearing over the intercom, “Roadway, your shower is ready. Carolina, your shower is ready.” I asked for a little extra gravy and the waitress brought it to me in a soup bowl. There are places time doesn’t touch, I guess
.

There was a store there, too, a kind of 7-Eleven for 18-wheelers, attached right to the restaurant. They had an
amazing variety of junk food, including the biggest bag of the biggest pieces of beef jerky I ever saw; strange pieces of black or silver metal equipment that I couldn’t begin to identify; sheepskin seat covers; shellacked wooden plaques with “Prayer for a Trucker” written on them and featuring an illustration of an angel hovering over a truck as it made its way down a mountain road in a blizzard (if I’d known Lawrence’s address, I’d have sent him one). There was a whole rack full of black leather jackets, and, for the ladies, lace-trimmed, sleeveless T-shirts with a picture of a motorcycle done in pink and blue pastels. I bought one, couldn’t stop myself from smiling when I walked out with it. Do you want this? life seems to be saying. Is this what you want? Well, take it, then. What do you think it’s here for?

It feels like this is my time for coming into my own. Extraordinary to suddenly think of this as a time for
gain.
Martin used to say, imitating his funny old grandmother, “Oy, I can’t vait to get home and take my goidle off.” Well, my girdle’s off. Flung into the wind. What luxury, the feel of one’s true flesh beneath one’s own hand
.

Dear Martin,

I am at a booth in a diner, and I just ordered your favorite breakfast: two over easy, sausage, home fries, wheat toast. As you know, I don’t like sausage as much as bacon, but I am doing this in honor of you. Well, not in honor of you. In remembrance of you. Because I kind of miss you.

I didn’t sleep much last night, and so I have that fragile kind of feeling. You know how I get when I’m tired, when any negative thing can seem to poke a hole right through me—a newspaper headline, running out of Kleenex, the messiness of a little girl’s braids. You know how I get. I think it’s something you were always very patient about, really, and I don’t think I ever thanked you for it.

Well, the waitress just brought the coffee and I must say it is the best I’ve ever had—caramel-colored from the real cream, a slight taste of pecan that makes you almost want to chew. This diner is called the Metro. Not many people are here right now, and you can hear bits of conversation. Two old guys in the corner, their pants hiked up to their armpits, are talking about their blood pressure medication—“Doc told me I could
expect
that, but hell, who
needs
it?” one of them is saying, with the tremulous kind of outrage that is soft at the center, that breaks your heart. Even as I approach old age, I can’t stop looking at older people and assuming they were never young. Whereas they can’t believe they are now old. One of my grandmothers used to say, “I wake up every morning and look in the mirror to see if I’ve started to go backward yet. I never have.” And then she said to me, quite seriously, “Darling. Don’t get old.”

In a booth at the other end of the room are two young mothers, their babies in strollers beside them. I’ll bet they’re talking about their husbands. Do men ever do that, Martin? Talk about their wives at some length? Try to figure them out?

Before my eggs arrive I want to tell you what I did last night. I spent the whole day doing not much more than driving. I passed so many lovely things—a wide brook that followed alongside the road and made a wonderful sound—I turned off the radio to hear it. There was a long patch of woods with
DO NOT ENTER
signs all over the place, and I confess it made me want to
ENTER
. I miss being young and rebellious. I wish I’d gone to more protest rallies. Remember when everyone was going to Washington that time? It was before I was with you. My current flame, a wild-eyed artist named Chico, came to get me to go, but I said no, I was too tired. I said I was too tired! I thought my whole life would be one opportunity after the other to make important statements.

Chico painted on huge canvases, often with his feet. He swam naked in a pond that was behind his crooked house, and it always pissed him off that I wore a bathing suit when I went in. He had a rowboat, and once when we were out in it he dove in the water and took the boat’s rope in his teeth and swam me back to shore. I suppose I was meant to be impressed or something but I was just annoyed. He gave me crabs, Chico. I was so embarrassed to have them. I remember when I told you, years later, that I’d had them—I thought you should know—and you said, so what? Everybody had them. I said did you? and you said sure, that you and your roommates used to have races with them across the lid of the toilet seat.

Not that you really need to know this, but my eggs are here. More later.

Well, I’m through with a delicious breakfast where the home fries were
not
made from canned potatoes, and the waitress has just said, Sit here as long as you want, honey, take your time, tell me when you don’t want any more coffee. So I will finish this letter to you. Someone has put Hank Williams Junior on the jukebox, and I am feeling quite content. The coffee has given me enough of a charge that I want all my i’s to be dotted, this paper to be folded exactly into thirds before it gets put in the envelope.

So. As I was saying, I saw lots of wonderful things—fields plowed in ways that were so neat and orderly, and farmhouses set back from the road, the kind that always make me think the occupants eat at tables with blue-and-white dishes, embroidered tablecloths, jelly glasses that are sparkling clean. Cows stood in pastures like chess pieces, rarely moving, seeming to contemplate some un-hysterical thing. I passed several houses in one town with quilts over the railings, out for an airing—quilting must be big, there. I was not thinking about much of anything, just driving and looking, driving and looking. When I ate dinner, there was a man sitting across from me reading a paperback that had a cover of a night sky. And it made me think about how I’ve always been so afraid of the dark, how I get a kind of claustrophobia when I am alone in the dark. I feel something surrounding me, kind of squeezing, and I wait for something awful to happen. It’s like hearing an evil mind thinking, and then the thoughts gain form and reach out toward you. And you are immobilized by your own too-strong desire to get away. My mouth gets dry, my heart beats so hard. I hate this about myself. I’m fifty years old and I still leave the hall light on when you’re out of town—as well as a light in every room downstairs. Looking at that book cover, I thought, Well, this is my time of discovery, this trip. This is my time to let new things happen, and to enter into fears in order to come out the other side. And so I bought a sleeping bag—not the kind you would have bought, I know; you would have researched sleeping bags and bought the most sensible one, and after you bought it you would have researched still, making sure you got the best price—whereas I simply went into a store and bought the one I thought was prettiest. And least complicated—my God, Martin, some of them seem like they ought to enter themselves in a talent contest. I drove until I came to a heavily wooded area, and then I pulled over to the side of the road and walked in a ways. The sun was setting—it was so quiet, no birds, no squirrels, nothing but the sound of my steps breaking twigs. It felt like
On the Beach
, like the world had died and I was the sole witness. I laid the sleeping bag out and got into it, and when the dark came, I was just petrified. I thought, this is how it happens. People go too far, they get foolish, and they get killed.

Still, it seemed very, very important that I do this, that I confront this fear of the dark, access my woman warrior—don’t smile, Martin, it is in us all, we are just well-behaved, and for all of humankind men have reaped the benefits of the first woman who said for the very first time, “That’s all right. You can go first.” Anyway, I thought, if I can just stay alone one night, I won’t be afraid anymore.

I stayed the whole night. And I must say it was the longest night of my life. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep but there was no way I was going to have the kind of trust that would let me stop jumping at every breeze, every buzz of every mosquito (and there were many). When the sun came up, I burst into tears. Then I walked back to the car and got in and locked the doors and I drove to a gas station and washed up and put on deodorant and perfume and lipstick and a gold bracelet that was at the bottom of my purse. I guess it wasn’t exactly a vision quest. I guess it was just a woman trying not to be afraid of the dark, who still is.

One thing I want to tell you about all this is that the fear I felt lying alone in the dark was close to the anxiety I feel when I wake up at home. That sense of something out there that has no respect for my life. With the exception of my night in the woods, since I’ve been on the road, those middle-of-the-night panics have not been happening. I wake up and think about where I am, I lie awake for a while, but I am not afraid. I am just—Well, I don’t know how to say this to you. I am just realizing. I guess that’s what I’d say.

Watch out when you pay the milkman. The last three times he charged for cottage cheese which I never ordered.

Love,
Nan

I spent the night in the woods last night. I wanted to end up feeling calm and safe and a part of the orbiting earth. This was a romantic and completely unrealistic notion. I ended up feeling like a tidbit being dangled over the jaws of a wolf. I was so afraid the whole night, stiff with fear, literally afraid to move. Now it is five o’clock in the evening and I am in a filthy motel, but I don’t care. I only need sleep, and this will do for that. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to bed so early in my life. It feels very odd, yet very comforting, too, turning to pajamas in my time of need
.

I will write for a while, then sleep as long as I want to
.

I tried saying the rosary last night, to calm myself, but it had no effect. So I tried to remember every lover I’d ever had. This was a very interesting thing that did not lessen my fright
but at least kept my mind occupied. Martin and I once did this, sat at the kitchen table and tried to write down the name of every person we’d ever slept with. It was my idea, of course. I thought that it would … well, I don’t really know what I thought it would do. Maybe I just wanted to know. Anyway, my list was longer, which surprised me. Men’s wrists should be bigger than women’s, and men’s lists of lovers should be longer, I guess that’s what I believed. We told each other about all our lovers, too, which we had never done before. We were very careful to paint them all in an unflattering light of some kind or another. Every story about every person ended up with some unfortunate inclusion—my favorite was Martin telling me that one woman snorted the first time he made love to her and he just couldn’t stand her after that. He demonstrated, snorted lightly in a rapid, rhythmic way and we both laughed. It was, in a way, a very good experience, but we didn’t tell the whole truth, I know we didn’t
.

You are where I unlock myself, where I say that I have often put down my wooden spoon to stare out the kitchen window to see the men I thought were magic for their storytelling or their way of walking, or the ones I was so strongly sexually attracted to, even though they weren’t good people—at least not for me
.

There is one thing I never told Martin about. When I was in high school, I met a twenty-five-year-old man who said he would teach me everything I needed to know about sex—without actually having sex with me. You can be a pre-bed student, he said, winking. I was at a burger place with a girlfriend of mine, she’d introduced me to this man, Joey was his name. She had dated him, she always dated older men. He was obviously not the brightest guy in the world, but he was very handsome. I had a reputation—entirely deserved—for being extremely naive sexually. I got teased a lot and I was tired of it. I was off to college in the fall; I wanted to know something when I got there. On senior skip day, I told my mother I was going swimming with my class, but I went instead to meet this man, who was going to take me to a motel
.

Isn’t it funny, I fell asleep last night after I wrote the above, the pen in my hand. I woke up around four, put you on the bedside table, got a drink, and went back to bed. But you, open to this page, felt to me like a spectator dressed in black. A silent presence standing too near, crowding me. I closed you, moved you to the bathroom floor, then shut the door so that I could not hear you calling
.

I never told Martin about this event, and I never told myself, either. I realize that, now. I realize that’s why I went to sleep, because years away from it, I still don’t want to face it. But I’m going to, here. Sometimes night is outside you; sometimes it is in you
.

I still feel a kind of fear. An awful shame. I went to a lecture once by a famous psychiatrist who was talking about how women must rid themselves of the idea that they are sitting on the ground, eyes cast downward, waiting for a man to tap them on the shoulder. It is a very common feeling, I know. When he said that, the woman sitting next to me re-crossed her legs and straightened herself in her seat, the truth of what he said snaking through her, through all of us there. The air in the room seemed to change, to become charged and visible. What he did not say is how the story repeats itself over and over, how once a woman is tapped, she is likely to get up and do what she is bid, then sit down and wait again. Where does this start, I want to know? When do we leave behind staring straight at someone, not worrying if, in the middle of the conversation, there’s a mosquito bite we need to scratch?

I believed, at twelve, that I could be a scientist. I read a book a day. I believed I could be a writer, an actress, a professor
of English in Rome, an acrobat in a purple spangled outfit. Days opened for me like the pulling apart of curtains at a play you’ve been dying to see. I had a microscope on my desk, shelves full of books and treasures that I found outside: rocks, wood, abandoned nests of hornets and birds, notes to myself for things to do tomorrow because I hadn’t had the time today. I believed the way to ride bareback was to get on and go, the rising heat of the horse against your bare legs the only instruction you’d need. The how of everything was simply in the doing of it. I had a turtle in a plastic bowl, and I fed him flies I captured with my bare hands and to whom I apologized before killing. I had a crow living outside my window, I spoke to all the dogs in the neighborhood, and they understood me. I patted them so hard dust rose up off their backs in tiny, dim clouds, and they understood this, too—they stood still for it for as long as I would do it, their eyes closed in itchy pleasure. My life was like a wild, beating thing, exotic, capable of unfolding and enlarging itself, pulling itself higher and higher up like a kite loved by the wind, and it was captured beneath my cereal bowl. There in front of me, my own for the taking. And then, suddenly, lost
.

And look, now, how I avoid this still. How I use my own hand to turn my face away
.

Here. I will say it all now. No stopping. Like a dive into the deep end, intent on making it to the shallow end without surfacing
.

I took a bus to the motel. I still remember the driver, he wore a gray cardigan sweater with brown leather buttons, and his resemblance to my beloved grandfather was so strong that I nearly turned around to go home. But I didn’t. I got on the bus, sat alone in a seat by the window, feeling as though I were being pulled somewhere by an uncaring hand. Feeling also that although I had chosen this, I had not really had a choice. There was a mother sitting across from me with twins, toddlers, and I stared at them the whole time, wanting the mother to pull me into her watchful circle, to say, “Oh, honey. Don’t do that. Come with us.” I thought of how everyone else at school was going swimming, how later they’d have a big picnic, and there would be no gap left anywhere for me
.

The bus got to the stop where Joey and I had agreed to meet, somewhere near the motel, and I saw his car, the engine running, his hand out the window holding a cigarette. I got off the bus and he opened his car door, stepped out, waved at me. I waved back with one hand, pressed the other hard into my own middle. I was thinking, well, his real name
is Joseph. And he was on time, he likes me. When I got in the car, he told me to lie down on the floor until he said it was all right to get up. He said no one should see me or we’d get in a lot of trouble. I lay on the floor trying to keep my sweater from getting dirty—it was a light pink, angora; and I was wearing a gray straight skirt with it, new nylons, and my black flats that I’d polished the night before. I had a barrette with pearls on it anchored to one side of my hair. When I put it in, I had imagined him taking it out, my hair falling to my shoulders in a way I thought he might admire. I thought he might touch my curls, gently, hold one strand of hair up to the light to see better the reddish color it could take on. I’d thought he might kiss my hair, then my neck, and then my lips. Now I could only see his shoes, his foot working the gas pedal and the brake with some impatience. I thought, I don’t know those shoes at all. I could hear his keys in the ignition jingling softly against one another and I wondered why he had so many keys. It seemed dangerous to me, that he would have so many keys. He stopped the car, told me he was going into the office to get a room, and not to move. “Okay,” I said, and my voice was so high and strange. And I remember I looked at each of my fingernails when I waited for him, because I wanted him to think every
part of me was pretty. I’d painted my nails pearl pink the night before. I’d put perfume in places I’d never put it before
.

Well, I am just shaking! Perhaps there is no point in remembering this. I don’t think there is any reason. It was a very bad experience, over now. I am fifty. It is over, now
.

All right. I will say the worst part. Let me do that. Then it will be over
.

There was a point at which he was straddling me, we were both naked, my God, I had never been naked with anyone before, not even partially, except for the ancient doctor I went to, and he had the sensitivity to look at the wall when he put his hands to me under the paper gown. But Joey looked directly at me and he put his penis on my chest and pushed my breasts together hard. Then he rubbed himself between them. “Doesn’t this feel nice?” he said, his voice hoarse, close to cruel. He was so far above me. If I looked up, I could see the inside of his nose, which seemed too intimate, and which seemed rude for me to do. Anyway, I didn’t want to look at him, it embarrassed me to do that. I’d caught a glimpse of his penis and the fleshy sight of it made me feel like vomiting
.
I didn’t know where to look. The wallpaper was peeling, the lamp buzzed, the door to the bathroom was cracked open, and I could hear the drip of the faucet. I closed my eyes and tried not to cry. I could see my bed at home, my heart-shaped pillow lying against the other pillows. And then he put his hand to my face and opened my mouth. “Don’t
bite,”
he said, and he was laughing a little, and then he was not, and the bed squeaked and squeaked and squeaked and squeaked. The barrette had slipped to the back of my head and it pressed into me, and I felt I could not move to adjust it. It ended up making a small wound that kept me tender for a long time
.

Why tell more? The silent ride home? The way he barely looked at me when we said good-bye?

I am exhausted again. I am going to sleep until I wake up far away from this place I’ve been to
.