The Pull of the Moon (6 page)

Dear Ruthie,

I don’t think I’ll be able to express just how much our conversation tonight meant to me. You have no idea how frightened I was to call you, how ready I was for accusations, protestations, questions that I could not answer with any grace or even any legitimacy. But you were so—well, I don’t even know the word for it. Calm. Unsurprised. Supportive. Interested. Thank you, Ruthie.

I’m glad you’re checking in on Dad. He pretends to not need much, but he does. Don’t worry about him eating the same thing every night. This is what he does when I go away. When I went to Aunt Bernice’s funeral and stayed with Grandma for a week, I found a stack of Hungry Man frozen-dinner cartons in the garbage when I got home. He’d eaten the same kind every night, I think he likes the Salisbury steak, in fact I think he eats two of them at a time. He’s all right in that department. What he needs is a kind of reassurance. We are what he checks himself against, you and I. So if you call every few days and just let him talk, that would be nice. He’ll tell you about his job and so on, just let him go and then tell him you’ll be calling back soon. He’ll be fine. He has a bit of a relationship with the neighbors, he likes to go out and inspect his lawn and chat with them for a bit while he has his evening coffee, oftentimes he likes to drive to the Dunkin’ Donuts to get it, they know him there, and he takes a particular kind of pride in that. “Don’t even say my order,” he says. “I walk in and they pour it up.” And of course he has his television shows. I’m writing him every day, as he told you. I’m glad he’s saving the letters.

I’ll be in Minnesota tomorrow. We’ve never been there. I hear the people are very friendly. I’ll let you know. I will let you know everything I can, Ruthie. Isn’t it funny, the two of us thinking so much the same thing all this time, and neither of us saying much about it.

All your life, Ruthie, when I thought about you, I thought, oh, this is her best time. But then I kept changing my mind, thinking, no,
now
is her best time. And here it is, happening again.

You are always in my thoughts. When you were little, I knew your whereabouts at any given moment. Now that you are a young woman and off on your own, I still always know where you are, because I keep you in my heart. Don’t give me your don’t-be-so-mushy lecture. It won’t do a bit of good.

When I come home, let’s make everything we love and eat it all at once. It will be even better than that pie party we had. I still remember that, do you? You were six, and you and I stood at the head of a long, long table we’d rented that was just covered with pies. My God, it was an extraordinary sight. It was beautiful. Forty-seven guests, all showing up with their favorites, some people with two kinds, they couldn’t decide what to make. Theresa Zinz made the best lemon meringue pie I ever tasted, nothing I’ve had since has ever come close, people were buzzing around her like bees, but she wouldn’t part with the recipe, which frankly I thought was small-minded. But poor Ida Young, nobody wanted her rum raisin but her. I remember thinking, what a fabulous idea you’d had, just … pie. You should hold that close, Ruthie. You should never lose that, that sense that an impulse can become a real thing.

Watch
Nightline
with Dad if you decide to come home for a visit. You won’t hear a word Ted Koppel says, because Dad will be talking over him the whole time, setting him straight. But it’s a comfort to your father to have someone listen to him, suggesting by their silence that what he says is true.

I’m buying souvenirs for both of you. I got Dad a pair of moccasins with Corvettes beaded onto the fronts. Very attractive. They’ll go well with the Dopey T-shirt you brought him back from Disneyland. He wears that shirt every time it’s clean, wears it to bed, did you know?

I’ll call you again, soon. It’s nice to know you’re there, Ruthie. Always has been.

Love,
Mom

Dear Martin,

Today as I drove, a patch of sun lay against my throat. At first it felt warm and comforting; then it began to feel too hot. There was no way for me to adjust the visor to block the light, so I put my hand there, and it got hot, too. And I thought of Sam Kearny, you remember how he had to get radiation to his throat? and I wondered if it burned him and then I thought, I hope I don’t have to get that. Sometimes when I wake up at night it’s to do an inventory of what might happen, how I might go. This is not just a function of my age, I know; it used to happen with some regularity when I was in my mid-twenties, not too long after Ruthie was born. I’d wake up and think, “But wait. This won’t last. I’ll have to die.” I think it was because Ruthie was so important, and I wanted to stay forever to make sure she was all right forever.

Back then, when I had those anxious nights, I used to get up very carefully so as not to wake you, and go to watch Ruthie sleep. She was so little then, not even two, still in a crib, and she slept with her butt up in the air, her arm around her bedraggled Doggie. I would hear her soft breathing, see the dim outline of her toys scattered around her room. The white rocker I’d nursed her in was still in the corner, the curtains I’d made her were hanging there, just as they did in the daytime. Being in her room always worked to calm me down. I would cover her again—her blanket was always off her—and pick up one of her toys, sit in the rocker with it, move back and forth in the ancient rhythm. I would think, tomorrow I will give her some ABC soup for lunch in her blue bowl, and I’ll give her little squares of toast with it; and for dessert, some vanilla yogurt with strawberries sliced on top. After her nap, we will walk to the library and look for birds’ nests in the bushes—she liked to find them, she always asked was there a mommy
and
a daddy that lived there, and this always made me think, I can never get a divorce. Not that I thought about it so much then. I did think about it later, though I only told you about it once. Do you remember that morning? Ruthie was eight years old, off to school, and you were leaving for work in one of the suits you’d just bought—a very nice Italian silk, I remember it was a wonderful taupe color with a minute pattern, your cologne was fabulous—and I was sitting in the chair in my bathrobe with my terrible coffee breath and I said to you, Martin, I’m too lonely. And you said, Oh Jesus, Nan, not now. I said, Martin, I need romance. And you said, So have an affair. I looked up at you and I said, You bastard, I want a divorce. And you looked at your watch, and I really think if I’d had a gun I would have shot you. You said you had to go, you were late, we’d talk that night, but we didn’t.

You never knew this, but the reason we didn’t talk is that I went to lunch with one of my old girlfriends that day and she told me how much trouble she was having with her husband. By comparison, we seemed great. I remember that after that lunch I went to the grocery store and bought a fancy cut of beef, made a wine/mushroom sauce for it that was quite good. And that night, when we were watching television in our pajamas, you covered me with a blanket. We’d forgiven each other, and we lay comfortable in the groove of our life together.

We’ve become quite good at forgiving each other by now, have you noticed? Sometimes I want to say to people considering divorce from a marriage that’s only vaguely bad, Oh, just wait. It just takes a lot of time, that’s all. You’ll see. Later, you’ll be sitting together and you’ll see the small lines starting in each other’s faces, and though your hands may be in your laps they will also be reaching out to touch those lines with a tenderness you weren’t sure was in you. You’ll think, Oh well, all right. You’ll have come to a certain kind of appreciation that moves beyond all the definitions of love you’ve ever had. It’s like the way you have to be at least forty before a red pepper sliced in half can take your breath away. Do you know what I mean, Martin? A certain richness happens only later in life, I guess it’s a kind of mellowing. And now when I think of dying I think, Oh not now, not when I’m just starting to see. And I also think, don’t let it be from something where I have to get my throat radiated. Don’t let it be from something that makes me have a lot of pain. Don’t let it be from something where I become a vegetable, or a burden in some other way. Let it be this way: Let me be eighty-eight. Let me have just returned from the hairdresser. Let me be sitting in a lawn chair beside my garden, a large-print book of poetry in my hands. Let me hear the whistle of a cardinal and look up to find him and feel a sudden flutter in my chest and then—nothing. And, as long as I’m asking, let me rise up over my own self, saying, “Oh. Ah.”

Fifty years old. It is an impossible age in many ways. Not old. Not young. Not old, no. But oh, not young. What it is, is being in the sticky middle, setting one gigantic thing aside in order to make room for the next gigantic thing, and in between, feeling the rush of air down the unprotected back of the neck. I know that the transition is scary and full of awkwardness and pain—mental and physical. These dropping levels of hormones leave damage behind, like bad tenants on moving day who wreck the walls carrying things out. But once I get to the other side, I think I might be better than ever before. That’s what I keep hearing. And when I think of it, that’s what I’ve seen.

Have you ever sat by a group of older women out together at a restaurant, Martin, who are so obviously enjoying each other, who seem so oblivious to what used to weigh down so heavily on them? All of them wearing glasses to look at the menu, all ordering for themselves and then checking to see what the rest got. It is a formidable camaraderie I’ve seen among older women; I do look forward to that. I just wish I could cross over a little faster, I wish that this part of watching things go would not be so hard. Although maybe their leaving deserves to be mourned. Maybe mourning is the cleansing act that makes room for what follows.

I know exactly what you’re thinking right now. And no, I am not cracking up.

The house I want will have much smaller rooms than the one we have now. I think we will have it built. There will be pastel walls, Martin, not the safe off-white you always insisted upon because that heavily jeweled, heavily perfumed, heavily made-up interior designer who came out when we bought our first house told us to let the things
on
the wall speak—not the walls themselves. Neutralize, she said, looking at me because I had said I would like walls the color of the sun, and of robins’ eggs. I don’t know how we could have put so much stock in a woman whose clothes we both hated. The very notion of some stranger telling people how to arrange their houses seems so ridiculous to me, now. Did then, too, if you want to know. It’s like someone else deciding when you’re hungry.

I want a place by the ocean, where you can hear the water any time you decide to pay attention, where you can see it out of the windows. The ocean will be ever-changing during the day, blue to gray to green; but always the same at night: vast black. I want a white fence around the property, tall flowers leaning against it in patches so thick they don’t suffer from the occasional thief. I want a porch, wide and long enough for an outside living room, perhaps a hammock for you, I think you might like to drink your seltzer in a hammock. You might like to read your Sunday newspaper there, too, then doze off under the business section.

Inside the house, golden-colored wooden stairs should lead up past a small leaded glass window. The sunlight should come through that window so thickly it looks like candy. There should be no curtains in the house except for white ones in the bedroom, with trim so beautiful it’s heartbreaking. I can find those curtains somewhere, I know—they’ll be old, of course, and hopefully used, and therefore saturated with soul.

In the bathroom, I want an old-fashioned sink with a wide pedestal base; and the presence of a clear, strong blue color—perhaps in towels, and probably on the ceiling, too. There will be a claw-footed tub, and in the summer, I will paint its toenails, and in the winter I’ll knit slippers for it. We’ll have big seashells scattered here and there on the floor as though they had stopped by to change out of their swimsuits.

I want a small fieldstone fireplace, a bouquet of flowers always on the mantel. Multipaned windows, French doors. The kitchen should be a large friendly square and the cupboards should have glass doors to show this brown speckled bowl, perfect for making pancakes; that yellow mug, right for morning coffee. Our forks should be decorated on the ends with forget-me-nots so that each bite will carry flowers to our mouths. We can do without some of those damn wineglasses, Martin. I would just as soon drink wine out of a jelly glass, it always looks so good in the movies when the Italian men wear their T-shirts and sit at the kitchen tables and drink their wine that way. And in the background, the women standing over pots with lively smells, wearing print housedresses and white aprons and braids pinned on top of their heads, and little, foreign, dangling earrings—I bet they have a nip too, their own glass on the counter beside them. Yes, I believe we must both start to drink from jelly glasses, and I think when we do, some stubborn old stone will be loosened.

The kitchen counters will be wooden, hip high, and a slight slope will develop in the middle from the weight of our meals. There will be a back door off the kitchen, a rope clothesline you can get to from there.

Our bedroom will have a little wall space for paintings of flowers, but otherwise there will be windows. The bedspread will be white chenille. Our closet door will be large and heavy, and it will creak in familiar but different ways when we open it, as though it were saying the same word in different moods.

There will be another bedroom with yellow walls. For Ruthie and for guests. A round, floral scatter rug on the floor. Lace here and there. In summer, a blue vase on the dresser with one pink-and-white peony, the shameless-hussy variety. In winter, a fat book lying open there, pale sunlight on the page like a wash.

I want one bedroom painted a blue leaning toward purple, and I want that room kept empty except for the fill of light and the dust motes, drifting down like inside snow. It will be the place to stand in and get peaceful. To remember the fullness of spareness.

I want a little room only for me. Stuffed full of what I love. A ticking clock, too, the smooth measure of time that is not hysterical or guilty or full of longing, that offers no judgment of anything, that just says here, here, here, in slow, sounded seconds. Here. Here. Here. Off that room should be a small balcony, facing the water. Room for one chair and a begonia, a flustered red color. Room for one cup of coffee balanced on one knee.

There should be a shed in the back, with my red bicycle inside, a brown basket on the handlebars. Your bike will be in there too, though I know of course you won’t want a basket, you think it’s wimpy. I’ll use the basket to hold loaves of bread from the bakery, packages I’m taking to the post office. We can ride to look at other parts of the ocean, to see the large and larger rocks, tan colored or gray, sharp or smooth. Waves will crash and the spray will be spectacular, as it always is, small cymbal sounds seeming to come from it.

We should keep gardening tools in the shed, and old newspapers stacked up neatly, just in case. You know. In case of paint. In case of puppies, in case of kittens, it’s good to keep yourself open to the possibility of them.

You can do something in our new house just for you too, but this time
you
will ask
me
about it. It will be your turn to say, “What do you think about this idea, Nan?” And it will be my turn to say, “Well … I suppose.”

Well, look how long this letter is, how I have gone on and on! This is so different from the usual way, when I try to cast my thoughts out, meaning to share all of them with you, and then slowly pull the line back in, your not having seen much at all. You stop listening so I seize up, or I seize up so you stop listening. Which is it, Martin?

I am in Minneapolis, staying at the Radisson, right downtown. Yesterday I bought cowgirl boots and a cowgirl hat. Black. Don’t ask me how or why I found them here. They were in a store window and I answered the call. Then I had caramel corn for lunch and took a walk around a lake, there are lakes everywhere, here. The boots were very comfortable, I don’t think they’ll hurt your picky feet.

Well, it was supposed to be a surprise, but as you can see now, I bought you boots too. And a hat. White, so you can be the hero. Which you sort of are, to me and to Ruthie. You know we both love you very much. I suppose in my own way I’ve been as neglectful as I accuse you of being. So let me tell you, to start, that I never felt scared of robbers when you were home. And I think your French toast is the best in the world.

I’m going to a movie now. Middle of the afternoon, in my cowgirl boots. Tomorrow I’m driving further north. I hear it’s beautiful. And when I am there I am once again going to attempt sleeping outside. I don’t know why it’s so damn important to me.

Do not throw away any of my magazines. Believe me, I will know if you do.