The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,34

night before dinner. I am going to have brown half-glasses and a big vocabulary.

After that I would look at my rock collection, which I kept in egg cartons at the back of my closet. And then I would think, I am going to be an archaeologist. I am going to wear my digging shorts on the plane. I am going to always be the one to say, “Here it is!” I will be covered with ancient dust, holding something so valuable in my hands it will make us all tremble. I will have a helmet stained with my own sweat and a leather backpack. I had such a clear vision of what that backpack would look like. There would be a place at the bottom for my teddy bear; no one would know but me.

After I did my homework, I would think, I am going to be everyone’s favorite teacher. I will wear scarves and beautiful earrings so I will be fun to watch as I pace in my interesting classroom where there are no grades, where everyone passes so long as they try. I will say things so intriguing kids will say “Huh!” out loud. Every day after class a bunch of them will crowd in a circle around my desk until I have to say “Come on now, you’ll be late for your next class,” and they will all groan.

Then, at night, before I went to sleep, I’d read teen magazines, which I’d just discovered. I read about where hems should fail and how faces should look and what to say to boys to lure them and hold them. And I thought, wait. I don’t think I can be this. It began to occur to me that I was a failure. I lost my grip. By the middle of the year, the phone replaced Hitchcock and my sure dreams of being everything. On my dresser, tubes of pink and coral lipstick and sable-brown mascara appeared, blemish creams, concealer. Concealer, yes. The rocks in my closet got lost, and so did I.

I remember some of that old Jame coming back at one point, though. It was when Ruthie was a toddler, too young for school, too old to stay in the house for too long. I’d been making the most fantastic caramel rolls, improvising out of boredom until, if do say so myself, they were extraordinary-tasting. I used to give them to the neighbors, Ruthie and I would deliver them in a basket with a blue-and-white cloth napkin, and they would all say the same thing, they would say, “My God, Nan, these are incredible.” Most of the time their mouths would be full when they told me, they would be all excited. And I got this idea that I would set up a little stand at the T stop close to our house. I told Martin about it, I said I’d put up a card table and cover it with some homey embroidered tablecloth and sell the rolls for seventy-five cents each and it would pay for the ingredients and give me a bit of a profit and it would be fun for Ruthie and me and it would be nice for the commuters, to have something home-made to eat on the train. And when I got done telling Martin, he said, My God, Nan, you’re serious? And when he said that, I saw all that I had said in another light, and I was so ashamed. I said Well, no, not really.

I don’t know why I did that. I hate that I did that. I see little stands now at the T, places selling muffins and rolls and coffee and juice and everyone loves them and they turn a tidy profit and I happen to know they run out of caramel rolls first.

Something else. There was a period of time when Ruthie was older and off with her friends all the time on the weekends; she didn’t want to do anything with her parents anymore. I would get up early on Saturday or Sunday and sit at the kitchen table and think, what should Martin and I do today? I would come up with this idea or that and then he would get up and say no to them all. Not overtly. He would say maybe and then not bring it up again until I did and then he would say God Nan you just keep harping on this stuff until I just don’t want to do