The Pull of the Moon (12 page)

Dear Martin,

Today, on the way out of town, I stopped at a Kmart. After I was done getting what I needed, I went to look at the gardening equipment. I always enjoy doing this; it’s so hopeful, seeing all the spades and trowels hung up in shiny rows, all the big bags of lawn cures stacked neatly on the floor. Standing by the hoses were a man and a woman, a married couple somewhere in their early thirties, I’d say. They were discussing a coupon the woman held. Well, the woman was discussing it. The man was yelling about it. Apparently the woman wanted to go to another store to get the hose, because it would be cheaper there. The man was acting as though she’d suggested eating poison. “It’ll take us fifteen minutes to get there!” he said. “Time is money, you know. Has that ever occurred to you?” The woman stood still, looking into his face, her own empty of expression. This kind of thing was not new to her. “I just thought …” she said. The man grabbed a hose, flung it into their shopping cart. Then he stormed off toward the checkout lane. I was happy to see that one of the wheels of his cart had been damaged, so the thing made a very loud, rhythmic, clacking noise that caused other shoppers to stare after him, smiling.

The woman stood there watching him go, the coupon at her side. And I thought, okay, Nan, this is the time you get to do something. Remember, Martin, when I called you from the airport and told you about the man who was yelling at the woman there? She was sitting in a plastic chair in an empty row, her head down, and he was pacing back and forth, just screaming at her, calling her a bitch, saying she was stupid, what the fuck was the matter with her? He went on and on and she never looked up. Her hair was long and blonde and parted in the middle, very fine, like baby hair. Her hands were in her lap. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t doing anything. Everyone around was upset, you could see people start to do something, then walk away. I had a notion to go up and poke the guy with my umbrella, saying, “Leave her alone!” but he was so huge and muscular and angry—and clearly a little crazy. I looked helplessly at other people across the room, who were looking helplessly at me. And then I thought, Martin will know what to do. I called you and you said to get the hell away from them, it wasn’t my business. You said not to speak to the man, to remember I was in New York, the guy would probably shoot me if I asked for the time.

After I hung up, I put my umbrella under my arm and started toward that couple. I wasn’t going to mind my own business. When I got close to them, though, I saw that a security guard was coming toward them, too. I thought, oh good. The security guard talked in low tones to the man and the man nodded as though he were ashamed. Then, as soon as the guard was out of sight, he started in on the woman again, and although he had lowered his voice, his fury had clearly escalated. I thought, later, she’ll really get it, because someone told the security guard to go over there. It will be her fault, just like everything else is her fault: a button that falls off his shirt, slow service at a café, the level of humidity. The woman’s legs were crossed, and as still as the rest of her. Her ankles were long and slender, thoroughbred-looking, and there was a tattoo around one of them, like a bracelet. It looked like roses and thorns. And I remember thinking, First, we’ll get rid of that tattoo. But then my flight was announced and I walked away. And I have always regretted it.

So when I saw this incident at the Kmart, I thought, not this time. I’m not walking away this time. For one thing, the husband was short, a half-bald guy, nerdy-looking in his checked pants and knit shirt. I figured, if need be, I could probably punch him out.

I nodded to the woman and she, embarrassed, nodded back. And then I said, “Would you like a ride home?” She looked at her husband, standing in line and glaring across the room at her. Then she looked back at me. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. But not home, if you don’t mind.” I said, “No problem. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” I put down my shopping basket; I’d get deodorant and gum and toothpaste somewhere else. When we walked past her husband, he said quietly, “Hey. What are you doing?” And then, loudly, as we continued walking toward the door, “Hey! What are you
doing
?” The cashier said, “Sir? Are you buying this?” And the guy pushed his cart up and got his wallet out. I led the woman to my car.

I started driving and she started talking. Her name was Lynn; she’d been married for five years; the kind of treatment I’d witnessed was not unusual. I asked if he hit her and she said oh no, never. She said that might be better actually, then she could watch something heal.

I took her to a Wendy’s. We had a Coke and talked a little and she seemed to feel better—when she smiled, I saw that her teeth crossed endearingly in the front. She asked if I would mind if she got herself a burger as long as we were there, she loved Wendy’s hamburgers. I said no problem, I was in no hurry. I said I had a fondness for singles with cheese myself, I’d join her. When we came back to the table again, she asked if I had just moved here—she’d seen my out-of-state plates. I said no, I was just passing through. And then I said, “How come you married him?”

There was a long moment. She stirred her Coke with her straw, then said, “You really want to know?” I said yes. She said it was a rebound situation, that she had been dumped by someone she really loved and it hurt so bad she just wanted to marry someone else quickly and be done with it. She said she had tried so hard to get her old lover back but the last time they were together, she’d made a fool of herself, flung her head into his lap and wept and felt only the slight movement of him trying to pull away. She said, “I thought, anything is better than this.” Her husband had always had a crush on her, he’d lived on the same block when they were growing up and he was always trying to get her to go out with him. So she called him and they went out a few times and then he proposed and she said yes. “I felt numb,” she said. “I felt like I was watching someone else do this. The last week or so before we got married I would wake up every night crying. I knew it was wrong. But I did it anyway.”

I asked if she had children. She said no. And then she said, I know what you’re going to say. But I can’t leave him. Every time I try, I just end up coming back. I don’t see that there’s anything that special out there. Everywhere I look it seems to me that even the women who are supposedly happy, they’re just pretending. I said oh no, you’re wrong. She looked at my wedding ring, asked me, are you happy? I said well yes, that we had our problems, but I would say I was happy, I was glad I’d married my husband and I’d do it again. (I would, Martin, only I would not wear that dumb dress, I would wear a nice white two-piece suit.) Lynn said, so you never get that thing, where you’re saying, here is the wife, making dinner for the husband. I said what do you mean. She said oh, you know, that thing where you feel outside yourself, you’re watching yourself, and you’re not sure at all where you
really
are. I said, well. I said I guess I feel that sometimes. And I realized that of course I do. That I watch my hands peel the carrot and realize I am not quite there. And oftentimes, then, I look up out of the kitchen window and there is a dull pain in me. I never know what the hell it is, really. I look out the window, watching for birds, and wait for the ache to pass, and it does.

I don’t mean to say this is your fault, this pain that comes, because it’s not, Martin. I do mean to say that this trip has made me aware of so much I’d kept hidden from myself. And now that these things are out, there’s no putting them back, they’re like those sponge things that grow forty times their size.

I guess this sounds like a warning. And perhaps it is. But I want you to know that I want to live with you, I don’t want to be without you, it’s not that. You’re the only one whose driving I trust enough to go to sleep in a car. Every time I ride with someone else, I feel I have to watch the road, too. Blinker, I’m thinking. Brake, brake! It’s kind of exhausting.

Oh, Martin, and you’re the one I want to watch television with, I don’t mind folding your socks, we can fart in front of each other, that means more than a new bride thinks. And you’re the one I always want to show things to. I always need to show you. Remember the last time I went to the grocery store and I called you into the kitchen to show you the smoked turkey I’d bought? Oh, you said. Uh-huh. That was gentle of you. I realized after I’d done it that you could have said,
Nan
.

I had a thought the other day, What if Martin is keeping a journal too? I got so excited by the idea. I saw your neat handwriting in a brown leather journal, a handsome, manly thing. I thought, boy, would I love to read that. I like it when I get a peek at your insides. Of course whenever I tell you that, you close up like the takeout window at that ice-cream stand we go to every summer. I always think of that, when I ask you to reveal yourself more, that you are like the man wearing that little white paper hat, sticking his face out the window to ask what you want and then slamming it shut when he hears your request. I have to come at you in more indirect ways. I remember once we made these lists that were a suggestion from some woman’s magazine. I’d bought the magazine so I could make the roast pork tenderloin shown on the cover. But there was an article I found in it, things to do to bring couples closer. We were to write the five things we prized about each other, and then the five things we’d like to change. You were in a rare, cooperative mood that night, and you agreed to do it with me. We got shy about telling each other what we prized and then we got in a fight over what we’d like to change, remember? We went to opposite ends of the house and then, an hour or so later, you came up into the bedroom where I was reading and said, “I’m going out.” I said I could not care less. You said, “I’m going to Gallagher’s.” I said, for a steak? Yes, you said. Well, wait, I said, I’m coming.

Martin. We have a lot. Some people have so little. I took that woman home and I watched her pick a few weeds out of the cracks in the sidewalk on her way up to her door. She said her husband would probably be too scared to be mad anymore. He always thought she was going to walk out on him. I said, well, you’d think he’d change how he treats you then. And she shrugged. There were no tears in her eyes. There was no frustration. There was only a flatness, which I found so frightening.

It’s six-thirty. I’m in a little town in South Dakota. There’s a great-looking movie theater here, the Grand-view, it’s called, all old-fashioned looking, an old lady with cat-eye glasses selling tickets, a blue cardigan sweater hanging on to her skinny shoulders. There’s an ice-cream shop next door, stools lined up at the counter, menu on the wall in a curly black script, and I saw they have patty melts. My night is cut out for me.

Tomorrow I’m driving exactly one hundred miles west. Then I’m turning around. Please make an appointment with that builder we like, Peter Quigley. Make it for a few weeks from now. Please.

Love,
Nan

Eight-thirty
P.M.
I’m staying at a turquoise-blue motel, a neon sign in front that’s a pink flamingo, his wing waving you in. How could I resist such a place? There’s a bathtub-sized pool, a family of four enjoying it as though it were Olympic-sized, as though it belonged to Esther Williams herself. The mother, her hair piled on top of her head, sits on the edge of the pool and occasionally dips her baby girl, maybe eighteen months old, into the water, then out again. I can hear that baby’s squeals even through my closed windows, and I smile every time. Her diaper drips happily; her legs kick the air. The father is playing ball in the water with his son, an exuberant blond boy maybe four years old, whose bright-orange trunks hang on to hips that look like little folded wings. When he gets out of the pool to retrieve the
ball, his knees knock from the cold; he wraps his sticklike arms uselessly around himself, and his teeth chatter. Close up, I know, you would see that his lips have turned a bruised color, requesting warmth. Twice now I’ve heard his mother say, Timmy? Aren’t you too cold, honey? Don’t you want to go in, now? And twice I’ve heard him say No!

A swimming pool in the summer pulls children like a magnet. They are helpless against it. The water is silk on their skin. They appreciate everything: the drops of a splash that refract into rainbows before them; the muscley pull of their own arms carrying them across the wide surface (shipwrecked! their brains scream); the sudden quiet and undulating view when they submerge themselves, the Walt Disney quality of their underwater voices. When you become a grown-up you mostly stay out of the water, sitting in an itchy plastic chair and reading a magazine, mildly irritated. You don’t go in unless you’re so hot you’re faint or you are playing with a child and therefore on duty. You have learned that the water is not jewellike, see-through blue; it is only that the sides of the pool are painted
.

I’ve been staring at the phone, wondering if I should call Martin. This is the strongest the urge has been. But every time I reach for the receiver, something stops me. I guess it’s
just not time. I guess I want to be completely finished before I start talking to him, so I’ll know the right end of my own story
.

I stopped at a farmhouse today. I’d been on a country road, passing lush field after field of this or that. Once, I came to a field full of daisies, a beautiful white house set back from it, and there was a sports car with Texas license plates parked in the middle of the field. A young black man was sitting in the car, waving at another man who was taking his picture. The man in the car was smiling widely, so happy. I thought, later, he will look at that picture and think, God, that was a good day. Where was that field? I had a notion to stop and talk to them, to say what are you doing? Where are you going? What kind of car is that? But I didn’t, I kept on as though I had an appointment, and perhaps I did. Because at the next farmhouse I came to, there was a woman sitting out on a rocker on her front porch, a big white enamel bowl in her lap, a paper bag of something at her side. I thought, oh what if those are peas she’s shelling? What if she’d let me sit there with her? I turned down her driveway, a cloud of dust rising magnificently after me
.

I stepped out of the car, and she nodded at me, smiling. “You from the phone company?” she asked, shading her eyes
from the sun. I said no. “Oh,” she said, and took her hand down. “Well, I got a busted phone.” Then she looked expectantly at me, waiting for me to explain myself
.

“I’m just … I was passing through,” I said. “I saw that you … well, it looked like you were maybe shelling peas.”

The woman looked into her bowl, then back up at me. She said, “I am. I don’t sell them. I’ll give you some, though.” I said oh no, thank you, that wasn’t it, it was just that I’d always loved the notion of sitting on a porch on a farm, listening to the sound of peas falling … you know … into a bowl …

She was looking at me a little funny. Not like she thought I was crazy. Just short of that. I took in a breath, shrugged. I said, Well, would you mind if I just sat here a bit? She said, I don’t know, I guess that’d be all right. She asked if I’d like a chair and I said no, the steps were fine. Drink? she asked, and I said no, really, I was fine
.

She was quiet for a minute, then asked slyly, So are you one of them moviemakers or something? I said oh no, I was just an ordinary woman, out on a trip, Nan was my name. Eugenie, she said, pleased to meet you, and I heard the sound of peas kerplunking and I smiled. What, she said, smiling herself and I said, oh that sound, I just loved that sound especially
when someone else was doing it. She said she guessed she was used to it, she herself preferred the radio, only that was busted, too. I asked her what kind of music she liked, and she said any kind that would come in. Although she was partial to that Tony Bennett fella. She liked fancy music, too, them violins. Right, I said, me too. She said, ’Course, when you’re shelling with someone, why then you talk, and that’s better than the music. She said there used to be a lot of women living around her who would get together on summer afternoons, shell peas for the dinners they would be making later—shell the peas, clean the corn, slice the tomatoes, peel the potatoes. “We’d all set out here,” she said, “getting a start on things. We’d talk so
hard
sometimes.” She looked away from me, out over the land in front of her. “They is every one of them gone, now, she said. Dead, or moved into one of them nursing homes.” I’m sorry, I said, and she said, “Well what are you going to do, got to get old and move along, make room for the next wave. I just always wondered who’d be the last one gets to stay in their own home. Turned out to be me. Huh! Sure did.”

I asked her how old she was and she said eighty-six on her next birthday, which was in a month. I guess I looked surprised because she said I know, I know, I don’t look eighty-six
,
everybody tells me that. We got good skin in the family, goes a long way back. Swedish
.

Her phone rang then, and her head jerked up, eyes wide. Then, slowly, she went into the house to answer it. When she came back out, she said, “Danged if it ain’t fixed. And they never did even come here! Fixed it out … there, somewhere.” She shook her head. “I
sure don’t understand how things work no more.” She rocked a bit, then said, “I
’
spose you got one of them home computers.” I said yes, we did. What for? she asked. I said well, my husband used it for his work, and he did our finances on there, I used it to write letters … Write letters? she said. I said yes. She said, You mean you don’t write them on stationery? I said no. She said well pardon me for saying so, but that’s a crying shame. What with the stationery they got now. She said, I was in town the other day at the Hallmark, and the stationery they had there, it took my breath away. Birds and seashells and flowers and cut-lace edges, some designs so beautiful I felt the tears start. You know how they do, she said, when you like something so bad. I said yes. Well, she said, tell me true, wouldn’t you rather get a letter on that kind of paper? I said I guessed she was right. I didn’t want to get into the fact that it was a rare person who wrote a letter at all anymore
.

I said, So what’s it like, being eighty-six?

She laughed, then rocked for a minute, thinking. I watched her feet, she was wearing blue Keds and the thin white socks that little girls wear. Finally, she said, Well, it’s painful, your joints hollering about something all the time, this thing kicking up, or that. She said, “Seems sometime like you get one thing locked out the front door, the other one sneaks in the back. But it’s not as bad as some folks make it out to be, folks like to exaggerate, makes them feel important. They got to make everything a red-flag emergency. You take this change of life thing, why, you can’t hardly pick up a ladies’ magazine and not see some big story about it, when it’s just as natural as a sneeze.”

I said, Well. I said, it probably depended on the person. Well of
course,
she said, everything depended on the person, but the meat of the thing was this: you accept change in your life or you might as well be dead
.

I looked down, and I said perhaps it was difficult for some people to accept certain changes, that it took some getting used to. She stopped working and leaned toward me. I could smell peppermint on her breath. She said, “Oh. I see. You’re having a hard time with it, is that it?” I said I thought I was, but that I might be getting better now, that this trip had
helped me. She said well, that’s good. Then she sat back and said, you know, I’ll tell you the truth. It hurt me at first, too. But then it was over, and I saw I’d just been scared of it, that’s all, big black thing coming down the road at me all dressed up like death hisself. But then! Why, I come to see it was just a little pocket in my life, a small place, really. I remember telling my friend Katherine about it, she was a few years older than me, she was out hanging the sheets and I was setting on her back steps. I remember thinking it was the last day she’d get to do this for a while, the weather was turning. Anyway, I said, Katherine? I think I’m over all that blue way of thinking. And Katherine, she had her clothespins stuck in her mouth and she took them out and looked at me and said, well now, what did I tell you? You were running around waiting for something so terrible to happen. Like a big wing was going to grow out your forehead, you’d be some kind of freak, when the truth is, happens to every one of us. Think of the poor men, she said, they got to go bald. And then they can’t even do it no more and that’s about 99 percent of their lives!

Eugenie said Katherine had chickens on her farm, and there were feathers on the ground here and there. What could I do, she said, but stick one of them feathers on my forehead
and then call Katherine? Yoo hoo, I said. Does it look very bad? We ’bout busted a gut, she said. Relief, that’s all, the two of us saying I’m right here with you, don’t you be scared. That’s one thing about people, Nan, you always got a lot of folks right with you
.

Then she asked if I were one of them authors. I said no. I said I kept a journal, that’s all. She said, Well, come in the house anyway, I’d like to show you something
.

I followed her in, and she handed me a thin stack of papers, folded into thirds and tied with a wide blue ribbon. These are poems my husband wrote me, she said—she pronounced it “pomes.” I’d like you to read them. I’ll make us some blackberry tea
.

I sat at the kitchen table and read his poems and I had a thought to ask her if I could copy them, but I didn’t. They were beautiful things, I remember one was about him looking at the flowers in their garden. He wrote something like, what were we, that we got to witness such a thing. He said that when he saw the shade of burgundy on one petal progress to a pale shade of pink, he couldn’t do anything but stand there with his hands at his sides, and that the emptiness of his hands felt heavy. And that that was how he felt about Eugenie, he would be coming in from the fields at
night and see the light on in the kitchen and his hands would feel heavy again
.

I wish I had copied them. I would like to read them again now. Anyway, I told Eugenie I thought they were wonderful. She sat down at the table with me, nodded, said, Yes, I think he was a regular Shakespeare type. But you know, he never did show me them poems. I found them buried in his bottom dresser drawer. I think he thought they weren’t good enough. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. Her lids looked like tissue paper, but the blue of her iris was still strong and clear. He was a good man, she said. I never did hear him complain. He never was the kind to worry about cold mashed potatoes, he would just eat them. You know
.

I left soon afterward. I drove about a mile down the road and then pulled over and wept. I was thinking about Eugenie coming across those poems after her husband’s death, then sitting back on her heels to stare into space for a long time
.