The Pull of the Moon Read online

  Praise for

  Elizabeth Berg and The Pull of the Moon

  “[Berg] has a gift for capturing the small, often sweet details of ordinary life.”

  —Newsday

  “Berg’s writing is to literature what Chopin’s études are to music—measured, delicate, and impossible to walk away from.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Berg’s great talent is knowing how to tell stories that touch the heart…. Reading an Elizabeth Berg novel is like lingering over coffee with a Dear friend. It lets you know there are other people out there feeling the same way you sometimes do…. This is a book that women will pass around to each other with a brief handwritten note tucked inside the cover, ‘You have to read this.’”

  —Charleston Sunday Gazette-Mail

  “Berg has created a woman worth listening to…. You cheer for this woman who is willing to break away from all that’s safe and familiar and find a little truth.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “[The Pull of the Moon] is upbeat from beginning to end.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “[Berg] specializes in illuminating little truths about women’s lives, especially the nature of their relationships with men…. Berg’s work also glows with a sensual appreciation of life’s fine details: the cast of sunlight drifting through a window, the taste of food, the color of wood, the feel of rain.”

  Orlando Sentinel

  “[Berg] drives her narrative home with direct, heartfelt language. She has a real gift for imbuing ordinary lives with emotional weight and heft.”

  —Booklist

  “Simply wonderful … [The Pull of the Moon] puts into perfect perspective the thoughts and worries that keep us up at night.”

  —Chattanooga Times

  “Berg convincingly shows the anxiety, fear, and hard choices women face when standing on the threshold between youth and age…. Berg’s fast-moving story invites us to share in Nan’s fears and to experience the joy in her discovery that ‘a certain richness happens only later in life.’”

  —The Virginian-Pilot

  “Amusing and poignant, involving, and candid.”

  —Albany Times Union

  Also by Elizabeth Berg

  HOME SAFE

  THE DAY I ATE WHATEVER I WANTED

  DREAM WHEN YOU’RE FEELING BLUE

  THE HANDMAID AND THE CARPENTER

  WE ARE ALL WELCOME HERE

  THE YEAR OF PLEASURES

  THE ART OF MENDING

  SAY WHEN

  TRUE TO FORM

  ORDINARY LIFE: STORIES

  NEVER CHANGE

  OPEN HOUSE

  ESCAPING INTO THE OPEN: THE ART OF WRITING TRUE

  UNTIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG

  WHAT WE KEEP

  JOY SCHOOL

  RANGE OF MOTION

  TALK BEFORE SLEEP

  DURABLE GOODS

  FAMILY TRADITIONS

  For Marion Jeanne Hoff,

  one of the “Looney” girls

  and my mother

  In midlife, we’re left with all that was

  ever ours to hold in the first place.

  Barbara Lazear Ascher,

  The Habit of Loving

  Upon being asked if she knew how to be

  fifty, Joni Mitchell answered, “It will

  make itself known.”

  Acknowledgments

  My editor, Kate Medina, read this book in installments and kept calling to say she loved it. This was rocket fuel to the fingers. Lisa Bankoff has a cool head, a warm heart, and a great sense of humor—an unbeatable combination in an agent. Jean-Isabel McNutt copy-edits with artful precision and with enormous sensitivity. Thanks too to Sally Hoffman, Renana Meyers, Linda Pennell and Abby Rose for the excellent work they do for me.

  My Tuesday morning writing group was with me every step of the way, as usual. My thanks to Sally Brady, Betsy Cox, Linda Cutting, Alan Emmet, Alex Johnson, Kate Kruschwitz, Mary Mitchell, Rick Reynolds, and Donna Stein for their honest input. And for their love.

  Last, but most: Thanks to my daughters, Julie and Jennifer, for being themselves; and thanks to my husband, Howard, who tolerates all my travels—inside and out.

  Dear Martin,

  I know you think I keep that green rock by my bed because I like its color. And I do like its color. But the reason I keep it by my bed is that oftentimes I wake up frightened, and it comforts me to hold it then. I squeeze it. I lie on my side away from you and I squeeze the rock and look out the window and think that outside are rocks just like this one, lying still and strong and silent. They are beside rivers in Egypt and in fields in Germany and at the center of the desert and on the moon. The rock seems to act as a conduit, drawing out of me whatever it is that is making my heart race, whatever is making me feel as though my own soul is one step ahead of me, saying don’t come. Don’t bother. Martin, I am fifty years old. The time of losses is upon me. Maybe that’s it. I don’t know. I saw Kotex in the drugstore the other day and began to weep. Then I saw a mother with a very little girl, helping her pick out crayons, and this, too, undid me. I had to leave without buying what I came for. I drove home and I thought about Ruthie standing next to me as I lay on the couch one day. She was two and a half, holding Legos in the basket of her hands. I had a mild case of flu; I was mostly just exhausted. And Ruthie dropped the Legos on me and used my chest to build a small city and I was perfectly happy. I think I even knew it. It was that Chinese thing, that when your mind is in your heart, you are happy.

  You know, Martin, when Ruthie was a freshman in high school, I was driving home from the grocery store one day and listening to the radio and I all of a sudden realized that in four years she would be gone. And I felt like screaming. Not because I have nothing else in my life. Just because she would be gone. I pulled over and I wept so hard the car was shaking, and then I repaired my makeup in the rearview mirror, and then I came home and made dinner and I never said a thing about it, although maybe I should have. Maybe I should have started telling you then. I was afraid, I think, that you would say, “Well, she’ll visit,” and the feeling would have been of all my eggs being walked on by boots.

  I’m sorry the note I left you was so abrupt. I just wanted you to know I was safe. But I shouldn’t have said I’d be back in a day or two. I won’t be back for awhile. I’m on a trip. I needed all of a sudden to go, without saying where, because I don’t know where. I know this is not like me. I know that. But please believe me, I am safe and I am not crazy, I felt as though if I didn’t do this I wouldn’t be safe and I would be crazy.

  I have no idea what will happen next. I am in a small Holiday Inn one hundred and eighty miles from home. I have a view of the pool. Beside me I have a turquoise journal, tooled leather, held closed by a thin black strap wrapped around a silver button. I bought it the day before I left. Normally, that kind of thing would not appeal to me. But it seemed I had to have it. I opened it, looked at the unlined pages, closed it back up and bought it. It was far too expensive, forty dollars, but it seemed to me to be capable of giving me something I’d pay more for. I thought, I’m going to buy this journal and then I’m going to run away. And that’s what I did.

  I don’t mean this to be against you. I don’t mean any of it to be against you. Or even about you. I have felt for so long like I am drowning. And we are so fixed in our ways I couldn’t begin to tell you all that has happened inside me. It was like this: I would be standing over you pouring your coffee and looking down at your thinning hair and I would be loving you, Martin, but I would feel as though I were on a ship pulling away from the shore. As though the fact of your sitting there in your usual spot with cornflakes and orange juice was the most fantastic science fict
ion. I would put the coffeepot back on the warmer and sit opposite you and talk about what was in the newspaper, and inside me would be a howling so fierce I couldn’t believe the sounds weren’t coming out of my eyes, out of my ears, from beneath my fingernails. I couldn’t believe we weren’t both astonished—made breathless—at this sudden excess in me, this unmanageable mess. There were a couple of times I tried to start telling you about it. But I couldn’t do it. There were no words. As even now, there are not. Not really.

  I’ll call Ruthie. I’ll tell her. You can tell everyone else anything you want. I mean this kindly, Martin.

  I’ll write you often. I don’t want to talk. Please Well. You know, I write that word please and I don’t have any idea what to say after it. But please. And can you believe this? I love you.

  Nan

  I think the last time I had a diary I was eleven years old. At the top of every page, I would say what we had for dinner. That was the most interesting part. I thought filthy was thilthy. “Todd Lundgren is thilthy!” I wrote. Because I saw him at a party putting his hands up Maria Gonzales’s skirt. She was wearing nylons and her garters were sticking out because her skirt was pushed up so high.

  Well, this is probably not what I should say.

  But why not.

  I know a woman who tapes pictures in her diary, presses flowers in it, she has the clipping from when John Lennon was shot. Well, she says, it’s mine, for me, for whatever I want.

  I bought this black pen for you. I feel shy saying this, as though we are friends too new to exchange anything without it being too important.

  I have a picture to give you, too. Here is a forties photograph of a woman that I found in last Sunday’s paper. She is seated on the grass, wearing a suit and a hat, her purse centered in her lap. She is smiling, but her eyes ache, and behind her, I know this, her hands are clenched. She can’t relax. She has forgotten the grass. I kept staring at her, thinking, this is me. Checking my purse three times for keys before I leave the house. Stacking mail in order of the size of the envelopes. Answering the phone every single time it rings, writing “paper towels” on the grocery list the second after I use the last one. I too have forgotten the grass. But I used to do one-handed cartwheels and then collapse into it for the fine sight of the blades close up. And there was no sense of any kind of time. And I was not holding in my stomach or thinking what does my opinion mean to others. I was not regretting any part of myself. There was only sun-rich color, and smell, and the slight give of the soft earth beneath me. My mind was in my heart, anchored like a bright kite in a safe place.

  I think I will not use a map. And I think I would like to stop at a house now and then and ask any woman I find there, how are you doing? No, but really. How are you doing?

  Dear Martin,

  Well, here it is. The first morning. I had such a scary dream last night. Some men had broken into the house and they had tied another man down onto the dining-room table—no one I knew—and they wanted me to help them torture him. It was worse than being tortured myself. The man on the table reached toward me with his fingers, that’s all he could move. And I stood stock-still, unable to do anything, and I was filled with a terrible fear because I knew that if I didn’t cooperate I’d be killed. I woke up, but I didn’t open my eyes, I lay there breathing fast and shallow—I thought I was home, having another bad time.

  I thought, I’ll say very quietly, “Martin, I had a bad dream,” and I was hoping you would take me in your arms and the feel of your undisturbed flesh would be enough to ground me, you wouldn’t have to speak. But then I thought, no, it doesn’t make sense to wake him, it’s only a dream, he wouldn’t want me to wake him. And then I remembered where I was and I opened my eyes and turned on the light and saw this ordinary square of motel room, this bland and functional place where sleep is business. I thought oh my God, what am I doing here. And I felt so ashamed, Martin, and I got dressed and packed my suitcase and put my purse over my shoulder—I cried, remembering you had given it to me last Christmas, and had asked me in a way that was nearly shy was that the right one—and I was going to come home, but then I thought, well, it’s four in the morning. I’ll wait. And I went back to sleep in my clothes, my car keys in my hand, and then when I woke up I didn’t want to come home anymore. I wanted to get some breakfast and go on. It has always been true of me that the mornings are my strong time. I wonder if you know that.

  I will write to you again tomorrow.

  Love,

  Nan

  P.S. If I’m not back in a week, you should water all the plants. Please don’t ignore them out of anger toward me. You needn’t do the little cactus on the kitchen windowsill. That one can wait a long time. I have so often wondered how it does it. The leaves are not so thick, you know. On rare occasions, it even blooms. You might want to pay attention, so that if it happens, you don’t miss it.

  I am preoccupied with my body. Overly watchful of change. It’s like being a teenager again, without the cuteness. Without the promise. Without the immense naïveté. Imagine, I used to stare at photos in magazines that highlighted throats and thighs and think, what? What about it? It’s just a neck. It’s just a leg. Last night I stood in the bathroom on the edge of the tub so that I could see my whole self in the mirror over the sink. I can’t remember the last time I had the courage to do that. I remember Elizabeth Taylor saying she once stood naked in front of a full-length mirror—kind of by accident—and that’s how she realized how fat she was and she went on one of her famous diets. No chocolates. Only diamonds. When I looked in the mirror in that awful fluorescent light, I saw the age in my body all at once. I saw that the tops of my legs are sagging, like kneesocks falling down, that my belly is lower than it was, and my breasts. Of course, my breasts. I held them up in my hands, making a hand bra, pushing them high up, but they didn’t look sexy because the skin on my throat, on my chest, is beginning to get crepey and does not want breasts in its way. It wants flannel nightgowns against it. It wants a woman who is on an archaeological dig and has no time for caring about how it looks. I saw that there is more gray in my pubic hair. The first time I saw a gray pubic hair, I was horrified. I plucked it out, which hurt. And then there were three and four and five and six. And one day I got the laundry marker and colored them in. I’d thought it was time for sex, that we’d probably have sex that night, and I hated the thought of Martin against gray pubic hair. After I did that, colored my hairs like that, I thought, this is not the way to do it. Dyed hair. Moisturizers and exfoliants and wrinkle removers and toners all lined up in my bathroom drawer. My thinking has been misdirected. Somewhere, something is holding the sides of its head and screaming. Still, I went out that afternoon and bought more. Things made with hormones and placentas and who knows what all. The woman behind the counter said “Well, my dear, the effects of aging are not entirely inevitable. It’s just a matter of taking care of yourself. It can be done. Look at Sophia Loren, doesn’t she look great? You can bet she uses everything. Why shouldn’t you? I always say, ‘You don’t have to be a star to look like one.’”

  I bought everything that insane woman told me to buy. I spent two hundred and thirteen dollars and forty-seven cents, I remember. And then I went to the bookstore, to the poetry section, to find something about the beauty of older women and I found nothing. I drove home, and when I got in, I threw the bag of stuff away. With the receipt. Shameful. That is shameful. I should confess it. I should kneel down right now and say I am sorry, I regret this awful waste of things and I regret this awful way of thinking.

  There, I just did it. I got on my knees and I said that. I closed my eyes like I was praying but I let my hands hang loose and open at my sides. Because it is only me talking to myself. And it felt good. Though the carpet is awfully dirty, I must say they don’t knock themselves out cleaning here. There were rings on the night table, and I had a vision of some businessman sitting at the edge of the bed in his underwear, smoking, drinking his beer, flicking the TV through a
ll it offered. There is a sex channel here. Martin watches those channels when he goes on business trips, but he won’t pay. He watches for a minute or two until it starts blinking and then he switches channels. From blow jobs to the home shopping club. Some similarities, actually. I asked him, Don’t you get nervous, waiting for it to start charging you? I imagined the checkout clerk’s lips pressed tightly together the next morning. But he said no, he pretty much knew by now when the blinking would start. I said, “But you … so fast?” “After,” he said. “You do it after.”

  My friend Janet once told me how when she was on a trip she watched one of those movies for a while, masturbated to it. But what turned her on was the women. She is not interested in women sexually, but she said the men’s penises were all throbbing and purple and veiny and who wants to watch them come? Apparently they do. But anyway, the next morning all it showed on her bill was “movie” and she was so relieved. Imagine a motel at night, its walls suddenly removed. How many guests would be watching movies whose dialogue is “Oh baby, that’s good, that’s good, oh yes.” Is there a director on these films? Does he slam his clipboard against his thigh and say, “Cut! Cut!” Did he go to film school? If you stood behind him at the grocery store, would you suspect anything?

  Martin and I have tried those movies. It works, which is a sad thing. Of course, we never watch the whole movie. We laugh at the music, make many nervous snide remarks about the dialogue, then get a little quieter, watch a bit more and then we’re at it. I wonder what he’s thinking. I wonder if he’s making me the woman in the movie. For myself, I am thinking, well if she can do that, I can do this! I don’t know when sex changed for us. For me, anyway. It used to be a natural completion to a natural attraction. Now I am so ashamed of my body, I don’t want any lights on, I don’t want to call attention to anything. I need a jump-start to have sex, the excuse of a movie or a martini. Sometimes, even when I’m loosened up, I’ll suddenly think of how we look, two middle-aged people, going at it. I’ll feel like I’m floating above us looking at our thickening middles and thinning hair and flabby asses and any desire I had will feel like it’s draining out the soles of my feet. I’ll think, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? Martin will be moving against me, moaning a little, and I’ll be thinking, I need to clean that oven.