The Pull of the Moon (9 page)

Last night I read a magazine article about how girls get gypped in school. I am so happy this kind of thing is finally being recognized. They also talked about twelve being the age when things start to change for girls, the time when they start to lose their power, and I think they’re right
.

I remember coming home from seventh grade at the beginning of the year and having a certain routine. I’d get six Oreo cookies and a tall glass of milk. I’d go to my room and ask not to be disturbed, say I was doing my homework. I didn’t do homework though, not right then. I’d lie on my bed eating the cookies dunked precisely to the pre-fall-apart stage and reading Hitchcock’s
Mystery Magazine. I
allowed myself one story a day, and I made the last cookie and the story end together, and to this day I have never found a
more pleasant ritual, including sex. After I finished reading, I would lie on the bed and think, I am going to be a writer. I am going to live in a fancy penthouse in Manhattan and have a martini served to me on a silver tray every night before dinner. I am going to have brown half-glasses and a big vocabulary
.

After that I would look at my rock collection, which I kept in egg cartons at the back of my closet. And then I would think, I am going to be an archaeologist. I am going to wear my digging shorts on the plane. I am going to always be the one to say, “Here it is!” I will be covered with ancient dust, holding something so valuable in my hands it will make us all tremble. I will have a helmet stained with my own sweat and a leather backpack. I had such a clear vision of what that backpack would look like. There would be a place at the bottom for my teddy bear; no one would know but me
.

After I did my homework, I would think, I am going to be everyone’s favorite teacher. I will wear scarves and beautiful earrings so I will be fun to watch as I pace in my interesting classroom where there are no grades, where everyone passes so long as they try. I will say things so intriguing kids will say “Huh!” out loud. Every day after class a bunch of them will crowd in a circle around my desk until I have to say “Come
on now, you’ll be late for your next class,” and they will all groan
.

Then, at night, before I went to sleep, I’d read teen magazines, which I’d just discovered. I read about where hems should fail and how faces should look and what to say to boys to lure them and hold them. And I thought, wait. I don’t think I can be this. It began to occur to me that I was a failure. I lost my grip. By the middle of the year, the phone replaced Hitchcock and my sure dreams of being everything. On my dresser, tubes of pink and coral lipstick and sable-brown mascara appeared, blemish creams, concealer. Concealer, yes. The rocks in my closet got lost, and so did I
.

I remember some of that old Jame coming back at one point, though. It was when Ruthie was a toddler, too young for school, too old to stay in the house for too long. I’d been making the most fantastic caramel rolls, improvising out of boredom until, if do say so myself, they were extraordinary-tasting. I used to give them to the neighbors, Ruthie and I would deliver them in a basket with a blue-and-white cloth napkin, and they would all say the same thing, they would say, “My God, Nan, these are incredible.” Most of the time their mouths would be full when they told me, they would be
all excited. And I got this idea that I would set up a little stand at the T stop close to our house. I told Martin about it, I said I’d put up a card table and cover it with some homey embroidered tablecloth and sell the rolls for seventy-five cents each and it would pay for the ingredients and give me a bit of a profit and it would be fun for Ruthie and me and it would be nice for the commuters, to have something home-made to eat on the train. And when I got done telling Martin, he said, My God, Nan, you’re serious? And when he said that, I saw all that I had said in another light, and I was so ashamed. I said Well, no, not really
.

I don’t know why I did that. I hate that I did that. I see little stands now at the T, places selling muffins and rolls and coffee and juice and everyone loves them and they turn a tidy profit and I happen to know they run out of caramel rolls first
.

Something else. There was a period of time when Ruthie was older and off with her friends all the time on the weekends; she didn’t want to do anything with her parents anymore. I would get up early on Saturday or Sunday and sit at the kitchen table and think, what should Martin and I do today? I would come up with this idea or that and then he would get up and say no to them all. Not overtly. He would
say maybe and then not bring it up again until I did and then he would say God Nan you just keep harping on this stuff until I just don’t want to do anything anymore! He’d get so angry and so would I and we wouldn’t do anything. I would sit at the table again, hours later, looking out the window and think, those windows are dirty. I have to get them cleaned. And the phone would ring and neither of us would answer it. What was going on then? What was he angry about? Or was I the one who started everything? I honestly don’t know
.

Something else. I remember when Ruthie had gotten to her time of needing to hate me. I complained about it once at a girlfriend’s house, and she said, “Oh, you know, the mothers always get it. They’re home, in the line of fire. And even when they’re not home, they’re in the line of fire.” She told me about a day she and her sister were so awful that her mother sat down on the steps and stared at them through the railing, weeping and saying, “Oh
please,
you guys.” We were very good for a while after that, my friend said. For about a week
.

I thought of my friend’s mother so many times after she told me that story. I saw her collapsing midstair, holding on to the poles of that railing to still her shaking hands and to
beg her children to see her, to see
her.
I imagined her in her ironed housedress, her hair washed and held back with bobby pins crisscrossed neatly at the sides. She was trying, trying, trying, all the time, waiting at night for her husband to pass judgment on the roast beef, and that would be her grade for the day; enduring in the afternoons the spiky moods of her adolescent children. I remember my own mother serving dinner one night, dipping the big serving spoon into the casserole she’d made, and as usual one of us said we didn’t like that and then another one complained and my mother dropped the spoon on the table and left the room. Very quietly. We all sat there, the whole family, stunned. And then in a few minutes she came back out, wiping her hands busily on her apron, her face splotchy, and she put the spoon back in the casserole and served it and we all ate it. And now I think, then what? Then, that night, she took off her skirt and hung it up on her skirt hanger and then she took off her sweater and folded it with tissue to prevent marks and then she washed her face, moisturized it, and went to bed in a blue negligee that my father bought her and later lifted out of the way while she stared at the ceiling thinking, I guess I am getting old, now
.

Something else. About a week before I left, I was lying
in bed, holding my rock, and I began weeping so loudly I woke Martin up. What
is
it, he asked, and I said my God Martin I’m just so scared and so sad. He said why? What are you so
sad
about? I said I don’t know, I just don’t feel I understand anymore what life is for, what’s it for, what is the point in it? He said there is no point. Then he sighed this big sigh and said, You know, Nan, ever since I’ve known you, you’ve looked for meaning and excitement in life. But life is by and large meaningless and dull. I said nothing, I stared at the still curtain hanging at the side of the window and in a few minutes he went back to sleep. I lay there for a good hour, not crying anymore, just thinking. And I see now that I was thinking he was wrong, although I didn’t quite know that at the time. The thought was not in words, it was in the form of a dull nudge. And it was that nudge that got me to find this journal, and get going on this trip. And now, in my own stillness, I hear something. “Where have you
been?”
my inside body whispers to my outside one. Its sense of outrage is present, but dulled by the grief of abandonment. “I
had
ideas.
There were things to
do.
Where did you go?”

What can I answer? Oh, I had some errands to run. I had a few things to do. I needed to get married and have a child
and go under ground for twenty-five years, be pleasantly suffocated. I meant to come back. But the bread crumbs got blown away
.

Now I’m away. And leaving no bread crumbs behind me
.

Well. Perhaps I will be a bit of an archaeologist after all
.

Dear Martin,

I went out to a mall today, and sat for a long time on one of the benches. I had never done this, spent such a long time watching the comings and goings of people, and I enjoyed it. At one point, a young man sat next to me, perhaps twenty years old, very attractive. He and I struck up a conversation, he told me he had just dropped out of college and his parents were furious at him. I asked what he’d been studying, and he said that was just it, he hadn’t been studying anything, not really, because he had no idea what he wanted to do. He was as drawn to astronomy as he was to medieval history as he was to Beat poetry. He even liked the business classes he took. I said that was wonderful, that kind of wide appreciation. He said he thought what it really meant was that he just wasn’t ready for college, what he was ready for was living some real life. I said that sounded reasonable to me, it wasn’t like the days when you had to worry about the draft. I said sometimes getting a job and just waiting awhile was the best approach. He said well, actually, he’d thought maybe he wouldn’t work at all, that he’d just … Ah, I said. And he looked at me and I was gratified to see that he was embarrassed. I asked him if he were living at home. He said yes, but it was no skin off his dad’s nose, he was loaded. His mother, he said, was dead. I said I was sorry and he said, well, it was a long time ago. I said that even if his father were wealthy he still should get a job, that if he wanted to live real life, he needed to do that. He said he guessed so. Then he asked where I lived and I said outside of Boston and he said oh, was I visiting here and I said, well. And then I told him the whole story. He was fascinated. At one point, he even slapped his knee in approval. And then he sat back a bit and said, “So you were my age in the sixties, huh?” I suddenly felt very old and exposed, rather like my age spots had taken on a phosphorescent hue, but I said, yes I was. He said don’t get me wrong now, but … free love. Was that real? I said, It certainly was. I wasn’t embarrassed at all, which surprised me. I thought, if Ruthie asked me about this, I’d probably be uncomfortable. But talking to a stranger, well, that’s different. What was it like? he wanted to know. I said well, sex just wasn’t a big deal. If you met someone and you liked him, you were as likely to sleep with him as not. It was like a fancy handshake, didn’t mean anything, really, didn’t mean you were a couple. He said, I thought women liked commitment. I said some did, some didn’t. He said, I thought all women did. I said, it was a different time. He looked at me rather closely then, and I could see he was trying to imagine how I looked back then, and I could tell when he saw it, too. His demeanor changed; he began flirting. He asked what was I doing for dinner, and I knew he was thinking, maybe I could get her. Maybe I could sleep with a sixties woman.

I remembered one morning not long ago when I got up and my hair was messy, but not unattractively. It was a day when I’d gotten enough sleep, and had not had too much salt or a drink the night before, and had slept on my back, so my face looked pretty damn good. Those days still happen every once in a while. I know you know that, Martin, you always say, “You look pretty, Nan,” on those days and it is kind of a bittersweet thing because we both know that tomorrow I won’t. But anyway, it was one of those days, I was having a good face day and my hair was correctly tousled and I thought I looked sexy, pleasantly whorish with my robe open too far, nothing underneath. I remember thinking, if I smoked, I’d have one right now, and I’d watch myself in the mirror. I reminded myself of women I’d seen in the movies standing around in their slips, their breasts full as melons and just hanging there, who would hold their streaked hair out of the way as they lit cigarettes at the stove. Well, I didn’t smoke that day. I didn’t even look at myself too long. Instead, I put on my waist-high white underpants and my blue bra and my gray sweatpants and T-shirt and I went to the grocery store. I picked out the best plum tomatoes I could find and I felt wasted.

Sometimes I wish I’d had an affair or two, and sometimes I wish you had too, Martin. Is this a strange thing? Do you wish it, too? There is so much we don’t talk about. Maybe you did have an affair. Did you? With that god-awful Jocelyn who used to work for you who was always making appointments to see you just before lunch or just before you were supposed to come home? I hope if you did have an affair it wasn’t with her. Take the makeup off a woman like that and you have nothing but a pinched-nose whiner, you remember how she used to whine about her health problems, telling you she had a trivial scoliosis that made her back ache and that she once got “poison ivy of the blood”? Of course she also told you her underwear always matched, I was glad you told me she’d said that, but I was furious, too, because I knew for a fact that you found it arousing, that you probably had an erection start behind your desk when she relayed that very professional piece of information.

Anyway, it came to me that if I wanted to, I could have a little session with this young, young man and you would never have to know about it, he would be making love to history and so would I. But when I looked at him again, well, there he was with his gigantic knees and his unlaced sneakers and his carefully ripped jeans, his ice rattling around in his Coke cup—someone for a girl, not for me. I wished him good luck in whatever he did, and I left. I noticed he followed me for a while in a half-hearted, non-threatening sort of way, and please understand what I mean when I tell you that I hoped my butt looked good. I mean I just hoped my butt looked good, that’s all.

Do you ever think about old lovers, Martin? Remember that party we both went to before we got together, the one where the tiny bathroom was painted black? I’d come to that party with one guy and ended up kissing another one in that bathroom. The guy I kissed—and ended up with that night—called himself some Indian name, Rishnu, something like that, anyway, he was dressed all in white and he had an incredible, calm, clear-eyed affect. He lay down with me later in the back of someone’s station wagon and put his thumb to the middle of my forehead and told me to focus on it, to let the tension drain out through that place. I swear to God it worked. I was a little stoned; I thought that he had been granted all wisdom and sent to me for enlightenment, that he was an individual-sized serving of savior, and I was very grateful because in addition to being all wise, he was very, very handsome, and a terrific lay. Yes, he was a very handsome blue-eyed man who used to dress in cowboy clothes and now dressed as a guru and it was fine, it all went together.

I just remembered that not long ago I saw your old dope pipe in the garage. Do you still smoke, Martin? Do you sneak a little now and then and not tell me? Do you think I’d yell at you? Maybe I would. But maybe I’d have a little with you. I wonder too, if you’re still smoking dope, if that is where you put your soulfulness. Because you don’t give it to me anymore, nor have you for a long time. I miss it.

You do know you can tell me anything, don’t you? Have I made it seem as though you can’t? If I have, I didn’t mean to.

This is my last night in Minnesota. Tomorrow I’m moving on. Maybe the Black Hills. Maybe some small town where there are trees lining neighborhood sidewalks. But not home yet. You probably know that, though.

Love,
Nan