The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,13

right. You can go first.” Anyway, I thought, if I can just stay alone one night, I won’t be afraid anymore.

I stayed the whole night. And I must say it was the longest night of my life. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep but there was no way I was going to have the kind of trust that would let me stop jumping at every breeze, every buzz of every mosquito (and there were many). When the sun came up, I burst into tears. Then I walked back to the car and got in and locked the doors and I drove to a gas station and washed up and put on deodorant and perfume and lipstick and a gold bracelet that was at the bottom of my purse. I guess it wasn’t exactly a vision quest. I guess it was just a woman trying not to be afraid of the dark, who still is.

One thing I want to tell you about all this is that the fear I felt lying alone in the dark was close to the anxiety I feel when I wake up at home. That sense of something out there that has no respect for my life. With the exception of my night in the woods, since I’ve been on the road, those middle-of-the-night panics have not been happening. I wake up and think about where I am, I lie awake for a while, but I am not afraid. I am just—Well, I don’t know how to say this to you. I am just realizing. I guess that’s what I’d say.

Watch out when you pay the milkman. The last three times he charged for cottage cheese which I never ordered.

Love,

Nan

I spent the night in the woods last night. I wanted to end up feeling calm and safe and a part of the orbiting earth. This was a romantic and completely unrealistic notion. I ended up feeling like a tidbit being dangled over the jaws of a wolf. I was so afraid the whole night, stiff with fear, literally afraid to move. Now it is five o’clock in the evening and I am in a filthy motel, but I don’t care. I only need sleep, and this will do for that. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to bed so early in my life. It feels very odd, yet very comforting, too, turning to pajamas in my time of need.

I will write for a while, then sleep as long as I want to.

I tried saying the rosary last night, to calm myself, but it had no effect. So I tried to remember every lover I’d ever had. This was a very interesting thing that did not lessen my fright but at least kept my mind occupied. Martin and I once did this, sat at the kitchen table and tried to write down the name of every person we’d ever slept with. It was my idea, of course. I thought that it would … well, I don’t really know what I thought it would do. Maybe I just wanted to know. Anyway, my list was longer, which surprised me. Men’s wrists should be bigger than women’s, and men’s lists of lovers should be longer, I guess that’s what I believed. We told each other about all our lovers, too, which we had never done before. We were very careful to paint them all in an unflattering light of some kind or another. Every story about every person ended up with some unfortunate inclusion—my favorite was Martin telling me that one woman snorted the first time he made love to her and he just couldn’t stand her after that. He demonstrated, snorted lightly in a rapid, rhythmic way and we both laughed. It was, in a way, a very good experience, but we didn’t tell the whole truth, I know we didn’t.

You are where I unlock myself, where I say that I have often put down my wooden spoon to stare out the kitchen window to see the men I thought were magic for their storytelling or their way of walking, or the ones I was so strongly sexually attracted to, even though they weren’t good people—at least not for me.

There is one thing I never told Martin about. When I was in high school, I met a twenty-five-year-old man who said he would teach me everything I needed to know about sex—without actually having sex with me. You can be a pre-bed student, he said, winking. I