The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,18

me grow stronger, grow leaves.

What is comparable for you, Martin? Would you tell me if something were? Do you know how much I long for you to lift the rock, to tell me about your underside? You once said, “Women are all the time asking what men are thinking about. We’re not thinking about anything!” Well, maybe that’s true. But we are. We are thinking about things. It seems to me that the working minds and hearts of women are just so interesting, so full of color and life. And one of the most tragic things I’ve seen is the way that’s been overlooked, the way that if you try to discover what the women were doing at any given time in history, you are hard-pressed to find out. Why? I want to say to you that we are not silly, that what we think about and what drives us to talk, talk, talk, this is vital.

Does this follow anything? I mean, is there a particular reason that I bring it up now? I don’t know. But I want to say it to you. And I want to say that I don’t want to live in our house anymore. I want to move. With you. To the place I pick this time. I have ideas. I’ve dreamed about the house I want. Next letter, I’ll tell you about it.

Love,

Nan

I am in a Hilton hotel in Des Moines. It was time for a little city. I took a Jacuzzi and I went down and had my nails done and I sat at the bar until the silliness drove me back up to my room. I have been sitting on the edge of the bed thinking about what I wrote in here last time. I think every woman I know has a story like that, some incident of paralyzed humiliation involving a man and sex. I’ll bet if you asked any woman, was there ever a time when you … Oh yes, they’d say. There was this one time … My best friend in college told me that she once watched her fraternity boyfriend spray semen around the room, holding his penis in his hands like a fire hose. And she lay in bed, one leg pulled up prettily, genuinely confused, thinking, is this what it’s supposed to be? Where is the romance? At least she wasn’t frightened.

I visited a trailer park today. I turned down the gravel road, drove slowly, looking at the way the trailers were all decorated: curtains, little picket fences protecting a line of garden, an attempt at a patio under an awning. So many of them seemed so desperate to look as though they weren’t trailers at all. And I wondered why those people just didn’t get a co-op, some nice little place that didn’t have wheels. There was a woman about my age outside hanging wash on a miniature clothesline. I pulled up, got out and introduced myself, said I was just having a look around. Go right ahead, she said, you can look at my spot all you want. She was one of those tough-but-kind people, hard line of black eye makeup, smoker’s breath, a fondness for hair spray—and a need, too, what with the severe French twist she wore. She had a pretty spectacular figure, if everything I saw was real. She was wearing silver backless heels, those tight black stretchy pants that look like a second skin, a short-sleeved blue sweater, large silver hoop earrings. She hiked her empty pink basket up against her hip, asked if I were considering living here. I said yes I was. She told me it was a quiet place, there was a duck pond down in the middle of their little private park, a Laundromat on site, though the dryer was pretty regularly out of order. Uh-huh, I said. Grocery store just a mile and half down the road, she said, King Savings, great beef but stay away from their chicken. Oh, I said, uh-huh. And then she said, “You’re not really looking to live here, are you?” I said well, no, probably not. She said she didn’t think so, said I didn’t look like the type. I said is that right. She chuckled and then coughed a few times into her fist, bad smoker’s cough. Then she said yeah, that was damn right, laughed again. She was looking off to the side like she was sharing the joke with an invisible ally. I said what type