The Pull of the Moon (13 page)

Dear Martin,

First, when I come home, I’m taking a nap. Then I’m taking a bath. Please make sure there’s some of that Damask Rose in the linen closet, that’s the one we both like best. Then I’m putting on that red dress you like, the one that pushes my boobs up to my chin. And my red heels. My black nylons. Like you like.

We’re going for dinner to the Capital Grill on Newbury Street and if we have to wait three hours to get seated, we’ll wait three hours. We’ll get drinks and talk, I have a lot to tell you.

I’m getting everything to eat, and I think you should, too. Appetizer. Dessert. After-dinner drinks. I like being in that restaurant, despite its nearly palpable male ambiance —dark oak walls, dim lights, a wide sense of red; even oil paintings of hunting dogs with dead birds hanging from their mouths, for God’s sake. It’s the place I’ve always felt the friendliest toward males—admired them, envied them their easy comfort and their generosity, their tendency to tip big and eat the same way. I’ve seen groups of men out to dinner there, sitting at a round table and, in the absence of their wives, cheating—with porterhouse, with fried onion rings, with cheesecake studded by chocolate chips. They talk loudly and laugh louder, move back in time to summer nights when they would meet at the all-night diner after they’d taken the girls home, to talk about what they got, to talk about cars, to talk about who was going where tomorrow. I got to do that once, hang out with the boys after their dates. I was visiting my aunt and uncle for two weeks one summer, and one of their sons was my age, sixteen. His job was to entertain me, and his notion of how to do that was to wordlessly bring me along with him everywhere he went. It was fine with me. It felt like rare privilege.

So I got to go to the all-night diner, and my cousin explained over his massive-sized cheeseburger that if someone came in with his shirt untucked, it was to cover the stain of him coming in his pants. I got to lie on the floor of my aunt and uncle’s bedroom, using their extension to quietly listen in on my cousin’s phone conversations as he paced in the kitchen below me; and I observed with a wrinkled-brow wonder how comfortable boys were with long silences on the line. I got to stay up late with him, watching black-and-white movies featuring angry gorillas, while he carped at his younger sister and brother to buzz off, to get the hell to bed. Once, alone, we tried kissing, but we frightened ourselves out of that in a hurry. We were envisioning offspring with three heads. Worse than that, we were envisioning confessing to our priests that we’d French-kissed our cousin, and gotten damp in the pants to boot.

I got to sit with the boys on the beach and hear what they said about every girl’s body that passed by and I have to say I usually agreed with them. I got to set off cherry bombs in rich people’s neighborhoods, although my slow running once nearly got all of us caught. I was called by my last name, just like one of the boys. And then one night when we were out cruising, I started making out in the backseat with Whitey O’Conner, and everything got ruined. I ended up staying home with my cousin’s younger sister after that, playing with her pet rabbit and wishing I’d kept my femaleness tucked in.

I don’t know if I ever told you this, Martin, but whenever we go to the Capital, I always want to be a man for a little while. I want to feel back in that circle. I want to be wearing a suit with a vest with the bottom buttons undone due to the deliciousness of my dinner. I want to be slouching back in my burgundy leather chair, my mouth making those fish movements in order to smoke my fat cigar, nobody around me complaining. My wallet would be thick with large bills. Men always carry more money than women, did you ever notice that, Martin? All other things being equal, a woman will have maybe forty-five dollars, a man will have a good hundred and fifty.

After the restaurant, I want to walk down Newbury Street, which you never want to do, you always just want to go home and walk around the house in your underwear and then watch the news. But this time I want to walk down Newbury Street in my heels with my hair up, holding hands with you and pointing to the artwork in the gallery windows, to the outlandishly expensive wedding dresses, to the books so attractively displayed in the windows at Waterstone’s you have to ball your fists to keep from smashing the glass and stealing them. Just be ready, Martin, we are not going home right after we eat. We might go the North End, drink cappuccino at the Paradise and hope some gangsters come in to use the pay phone.

I’ll pay for dinner at the Capital. I’ll sign the receipt with a drunken exuberance that makes my penmanship curly. When we get home, I’ll screw your brains out. Like we used to. You can leave the lights on now. I don’t mind anymore, I think I understand the purpose of my body. And then you can walk around in your underwear and I’ll walk around in my robe, Kleenex in the pocket in case I want to blow my nose to Ted Koppel. Our voices will be low and sleepy; only a few lights in the house will be on. The recliners built into our family room sofa will seem less a joke and more a necessity: we will be ourselves and loosely comfortable.

Also: some Sunday we are going to rent a canoe and paddle down the Charles. We are going to music festivals when we see them in the paper, and we are going to Harvard Square to throw money into the upturned derbies of the jugglers. Think of how many weekends we’ve spent going to the cleaners and to Lechmere’s, to look at things we already have. I am so tired of that. It’s so unnecessary.

Martin, I want you to do something for me. In the family room, there’s that picture of me when I was twenty. In front of it you’ll find a silk flower. I don’t know if you ever noticed it before. I think I put it there because I was grieving for the loss of that self, it was like an altar offering to the person I used to be. Get rid of it, will you? Throw that flower in the garbage, where it belongs.

Love,
Nan

   P.S. For the screw-your-brains-out portion of the evening, Martin, I wouldn’t mind your buying me a little something to wear. You know what I mean.

Last night, I was thinking about my grandmother. I was remembering a time when I was eleven years old, and lying under her kitchen table in my new pink pedal pushers and matching pink-and-white-checked blouse, my ankle crossed over my knee. I was listening to my grandmother and her five daughters—one of them my mother—talking. I loved doing that, and I knew if I kept myself under the table and out of sight it was likely that the talk would get looser. More interesting. Someone might swear. Oh, the red lipstick marks they left on their coffee cups, the way they were used to their bosoms! I was waiting so hard to grow up. It was a job, waiting, when you were eleven. Every morning you looked at your face in the mirror to see if the babyness had gone away. Every night in the bathtub, you stretched your
legs out before you, seeing if they were longer. They
felt
longer
.

It was a Saturday morning, that time in my grandmother’s kitchen. Sammy, the parakeet she kept on a TV tray by the kitchen window, was chirping happily. He liked the little symphony of voices he was hearing. He was very excited, you could tell, because he got a drink often out of his water dish—he always drank a lot of water when he was excited. His dish was one of those hooded glass ones, designs of lines on it. I thought it looked like a miniature urinal. I wondered how he could tell the difference. Later, he would die from flying into a pan where my grandmother was frying chicken. You couldn’t help but smile from the irony, even though you felt terrible for poor Sammy
.

My grandmother was getting ready to tell fortunes from tea leaves; she always did this before her daughters washed her hair. She was vain about her psychic abilities, but she was even more vain about her hair, and she had reason to be. It was long and thick and silvery white, and she had it washed weekly in her kitchen sink and then combed and combed and combed by her team of daughters. When it was dry, it would be twisted into the complicated arrangement she wore—part braid, part bun, part French twist. It would
last a week, and then the daughters would all come to wash it again—and to see each other and gab, too, of course. My mother was always close to all her sisters, and she always felt badly that she wasn’t able to produce one for me
.

On that particular Saturday, my grandmother lifted the tablecloth and asked me if I would like my fortune read, too. I was honored, bumped my head hard on the way out from under the table, so eager was I to be included in this. I stood by her chair—it was the fifties kind of chair, I remember, red plastic Naugahyde with chrome trim and studs—and I had my fingers looped through the metal semicircle at the top of the chair and I was squeezing it because I was in love with Eric Underman and no one knew but me and I was scared my grandmother would say something about it and I was hopeful she’d say something about it and she did. She looked up at me and said, “Well! Your boyfriend likes you, too.”

There was a loud and immediate response from my aunties—a chorus of “Oh!”s and “Ah-ha!”s and I was mortified, but I was also proud. At last, I was moving into the circle of mysterious, scented womanhood. Soon I could sit at the table with them. I could swear. I had it planned, already. “That SOB,” I’d say
.

But after my fortune was read, I went back under the table to dream about what I’d say to Eric the next time I saw him. I didn’t pay attention anymore to the low chatter that went on in the kitchen. Those exchanges that used to be as delicious to me as the scent of warm bread became suddenly mundane. The next Saturday, I didn’t go with my mother to wash her mother’s hair. I stayed home, hoping to run into Eric, and I did. We were both on bikes. I offered him a butterscotch LifeSaver, and he took it; and I wrote about that supercharged exchange in my white leather diary and then hid it in a new place
.

Now I see myself so ready to be back in that kitchen, to take my grandmother’s heavy hair in my hands and whisper into her ear, “Why did you kick Grandpa out of the house?” She did kick him out for a while, for a period of a few months, when she was in her fifties. No one ever talked about why she did that, but I see myself asking her about it now, and I see her answering me. “Well,” she’d say. “I couldn’t leave, so he had to. Until I was through it.” Isn’t that possible? I think it is. She didn’t have the option of a trip away. So she created an artificial distance
.

I stopped at a lemonade stand today. I never can pass one by. There was a little girl working it, maybe ten, long blonde
ponytail, blue glasses. She had a lawn chair to sit in when business was slow, but when she saw me pulling over, she stood up professionally. “May I help you?” she asked, when I was too far away to answer without shouting. I held up a finger. When I got to the stand, I said, “Yes, I’d like a lemonade. How much is it?”

“Fifty cents,” she said
.

I was disappointed. I thought it was too much. I thought it would have been cuter if it had been five or ten cents
.

“Fifty cents, huh?” I said
.

And she, unblinking, said, “Yes.”

I paid for the lemonade and she poured me some, then watched me drink it. “Want another one?” she asked, when I was done. I said oh no, that was plenty, that was just right. “What if I had some cookies out here,” she said. “Would you have bought one?”

I considered this. “What kind?”

“Chocolate chip AND peanut butter,” she said, and I said well, of course. She pulled a fat tablet from behind the stand, wrote in it. I asked her if she were taking notes on how to improve business. No, she said, she’d just gotten an idea for a poem. Later, she’d write it. I said oh, you write poetry? Wrote it and sold it too, she said. Sold it with the lemonade
,
but she was out of poems for today, she usually did run out of them before lemonade. I asked her how much the poems were. She said fifty cents. I said okay, I’ll give you fifty cents if you’ll do one for me right now. She smiled, then said, but I have to watch for customers and if one comes, I’ll have to stop. Neither of us liked that idea. Tell you what, I said, I’ll watch the stand. All right, she said, and she went to sit at the base of a nearby tree
.

I sat in the lawn chair and I admit to feeling a certain nervousness. How much should I pour? What if I do it wrong? But this passed, and eventually I sat back in the chair and thought, maybe she should slice a lemon, have it floating on top. Maybe she should branch out a little, have iced tea, too. I snuck a look at her now and then. She was concentrating fiercely, her face drawn inward as though she were in pain. She scratched at her ankle, then stuck her finger inside her sneaker near the arch of her foot and kept it there, as though now she were plugged into herself. After a while she called over, “What’s your name?” And I told her Nan and a light came into her face. “Good,” she said, “that’s good,” and she started writing. In a few minutes she came over and handed me a poem. It was about crossing a bridge over a river full of monsters, into a land of purple
fields and yellow clouds. I loved most of all the last line, where she said my name was Empress Nana Exsanna Popana. Best fifty cents I ever spent. I told her so, too. “Oh,” she said, tightening her ponytail, prettily embarrassed. “Yeah.”