The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,29

to be able to sit down after supper and look at what’s at the movies we can walk to. I want to take an afternoon to search out wildflowers—or, here, Martin, to look at fast cars. Wouldn’t you like to do that? Instead of sitting at some meeting in an overly hot conference room, wouldn’t you like to test-drive a Viper? We could do that, I’ll wear a silk pantsuit and those three-carat earrings you gave me, they’ll believe us.

I have a memory of my mother taking me outside in the rain. I don’t think I could have been more than five. She’d been cleaning the windows with vinegar and newspaper, and I’d been sitting at her feet for the pleasure of the squeak and the smell. She had her cleaning kerchief on her head, a bright yellow triangle knotted at the base of her neck. It started to rain and she stood at the window watching, with me hiked up on her hip. She was quiet for a long time, but then she all of a sudden ran outside with me, whooping away. It was just pouring, but her face was directed right up to the sky, and she twirled me around and around and started singing some show tune really loud, I think it was an Ethel Merman song. I’d never heard her sing before. And then we came in and dried off and I never heard her sing again. Not once, not even under her breath, along with the radio. And the thing is, I believe she had a beautiful voice. I believe my memory is correct in this.

I am so often struck by what we do not do, all of us. And I am also, now, so acutely aware of the quick passage of time, the way that we come suddenly to our own, separate closures. It is as though a thing says, I told you. But you thought I was just kidding.

Martin, while I’ve been writing, the sky has changed from a pastel yellow pink to a dusky purple and now it’s hard to see. But this dark is beautiful, too. It really is.

Love,

Nan

Today I woke up and felt the old pull of sadness back. It’s like a robe that is too heavy, weighing down my shoulders, dragging up dirt as it follows along behind me. This was disappointing. I thought I’d escaped something.

I went to the window, looked out at a sky that seemed hopelessly vast. There were thick gray clouds overhead, swollen, pregnant-looking. I closed the drapes, went into the bathroom, washed my face, looked up into the mirror, saw the gray reappearing in my hair, and began to weep. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and gritted my teeth and thought, I am not going to do this anymore. I am so tired of collapsing into this state of grief this achy regret about my thinning, graying hair, my wan-colored skin, my failing eyes and uterus, a year on top of a year on top of a year. A woman a bit older than me told me she recently found a hair under her chin and it terrified her so much she got in her car and drove for fifty miles—nowhere, just around in circles. It was a black hair, she said, stiff as a whisk broom. When she came home she locked the bathroom door and got out her eyebrow tweezers and pulled the thing out. She said she looked at it for a long time, and then she flushed it down the toilet—flushed it twice. After that she spent a good fifteen minutes checking her face for more hairs. She said she had heard about this happening, testosterone landing on the female shore, but she thought it would surely not happen to her. She was blonde, fair-skinned, had barely ever needed to shave her legs. She said it was literally horrifying, that her heart beat so hard when she found that hair she thought for a moment about going to the ER, but elected instead to drive around in circles, then come home to tweezers and a locked door and a fervent prayer that this was a one-time phenomenon, that it would never happen again. It’s so humiliating, she told me. It’s like you’re being punished for something and you’ve no idea what you’ve done wrong except age. She didn’t really hear what she said, she didn’t hear the natural acceptance in her voice of the idea