The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,14

was at a burger place with a girlfriend of mine, she’d introduced me to this man, Joey was his name. She had dated him, she always dated older men. He was obviously not the brightest guy in the world, but he was very handsome. I had a reputation—entirely deserved—for being extremely naive sexually. I got teased a lot and I was tired of it. I was off to college in the fall; I wanted to know something when I got there. On senior skip day, I told my mother I was going swimming with my class, but I went instead to meet this man, who was going to take me to a motel.

Isn’t it funny, I fell asleep last night after I wrote the above, the pen in my hand. I woke up around four, put you on the bedside table, got a drink, and went back to bed. But you, open to this page, felt to me like a spectator dressed in black. A silent presence standing too near, crowding me. I closed you, moved you to the bathroom floor, then shut the door so that I could not hear you calling.

I never told Martin about this event, and I never told myself, either. I realize that, now. I realize that’s why I went to sleep, because years away from it, I still don’t want to face it. But I’m going to, here. Sometimes night is outside you; sometimes it is in you.

I still feel a kind of fear. An awful shame. I went to a lecture once by a famous psychiatrist who was talking about how women must rid themselves of the idea that they are sitting on the ground, eyes cast downward, waiting for a man to tap them on the shoulder. It is a very common feeling, I know. When he said that, the woman sitting next to me re-crossed her legs and straightened herself in her seat, the truth of what he said snaking through her, through all of us there. The air in the room seemed to change, to become charged and visible. What he did not say is how the story repeats itself over and over, how once a woman is tapped, she is likely to get up and do what she is bid, then sit down and wait again. Where does this start, I want to know? When do we leave behind staring straight at someone, not worrying if, in the middle of the conversation, there’s a mosquito bite we need to scratch?

I believed, at twelve, that I could be a scientist. I read a book a day. I believed I could be a writer, an actress, a professor of English in Rome, an acrobat in a purple spangled outfit. Days opened for me like the pulling apart of curtains at a play you’ve been dying to see. I had a microscope on my desk, shelves full of books and treasures that I found outside: rocks, wood, abandoned nests of hornets and birds, notes to myself for things to do tomorrow because I hadn’t had the time today. I believed the way to ride bareback was to get on and go, the rising heat of the horse against your bare legs the only instruction you’d need. The how of everything was simply in the doing of it. I had a turtle in a plastic bowl, and I fed him flies I captured with my bare hands and to whom I apologized before killing. I had a crow living outside my window, I spoke to all the dogs in the neighborhood, and they understood me. I patted them so hard dust rose up off their backs in tiny, dim clouds, and they understood this, too—they stood still for it for as long as I would do it, their eyes closed in itchy pleasure. My life was like a wild, beating thing, exotic, capable of unfolding and enlarging itself, pulling itself higher and higher up like a kite loved by the wind, and it was captured beneath my cereal bowl. There in front of me, my own for the taking. And then, suddenly, lost.

And look, now, how I avoid this still. How I use my own hand to turn my face away.

Here. I will say it all now. No stopping. Like a dive into the deep end, intent on making it to the shallow end without surfacing.

I took a bus to the motel. I still remember the driver, he wore a gray cardigan sweater