The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,10

fine, I just … And she sighed and said yeah, she loved her husband but that she ran away from him with some frequency. I said, really? She said, yes, most of the time he knew nothing about it. But once he did. They’d had a bad fight late at night and she took off in the car, meaning never to come back, meaning to drive to Alaska and begin again. But she was barefoot and this seemed to prevent her from doing anything. She said she drove to the grocery store and slept in the parking lot until three-thirty, then snuck back into the house. “But I didn’t go to bed. I slept on the couch,” she said. “I didn’t want him to know I was home.” “Right,” I said, and I thought, how can it be that two strangers are exchanging such intimate things? Well, most women are full to the brim, that’s all. That’s what I think. I think we are most of us ready to explode, especially when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with “Mommy” embroidered over the left breast, over the heart. I too sat on porches, on park benches, half watching Ruthie and half dreaming—trying, I think, to recall my former self. If a stranger had come up to me and said, “Do you want to talk about it? I have time to listen,” I think I might have burst into tears at the relief of it. It wasn’t that I was really unhappy. It was the constancy of my load and the awesome importance of it; and it was my isolation. I made no friends out of the few people I saw in the park—frazzled mothers too busy for a real conversation; discontented nannies staring blankly ahead. And oftentimes the park was empty. The swings clanked so loudly against the pole. I could hear Ruthie’s little voice carried on the wind toward me, always toward me. Watching her small back bent over her bucket in the sandbox, I ached with love for her and fingered the pages of the novel I couldn’t really read. I watched the time, because I had to have dinner ready when Martin came home. It was a rule neither of us ever thought to question or unmake. We flowered in the sixties, but the spirit of the fifties was deep in us. We saw what our parents did, and, blinking blandly like the baby chimps in the jungle, followed suit—at first in ways that felt clumsy, then in ways we called natural, though in me, I see now, there were internal earthquakes wanting to happen all the time.

I asked the woman how she was doing, how did she really think she was doing. “Oh,” she said. “Fine. Although … well, I know this is just temporary. But yesterday I shook the orange juice and the top was loose and a little bit spilled on the floor which I’d already wiped up about three hundred times that day and I just started crying. I went to sit in the bathroom, but of course I had to leave the door cracked open. I’ll bet I cried for twenty minutes. In the middle of it, I got my daughter a graham cracker. She didn’t notice a thing.” I said, but you believe you’re all right, that you’re doing fine? Well, yes, she said. Sure.

I drove the rest of the day feeling that my mind was wrapped in a blanket, insulated. I noted what I passed as though it were in someone else’s dream. I came back into myself after dinner, which was in a truck stop. There was a special area for “professional drivers” to eat where the service was extra fast. The room was filled with smoke, a blue haze. I saw one woman there—the rest were men. The menu posted over the counter was full of things that the American Heart Association would have had a collective heart attack about, and everybody there was eating them with gusto. I myself had chicken-fried steak, in the other room, the one for civilians. We didn’t get phones at our booths. We didn’t get shower services—I kept hearing over the intercom, “Roadway, your shower is ready. Carolina, your shower is ready.” I asked for a little extra gravy and the waitress brought it to me in