The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,35

anything anymore! He’d get so angry and so would I and we wouldn’t do anything. I would sit at the table again, hours later, looking out the window and think, those windows are dirty. I have to get them cleaned. And the phone would ring and neither of us would answer it. What was going on then? What was he angry about? Or was I the one who started everything? I honestly don’t know.

Something else. I remember when Ruthie had gotten to her time of needing to hate me. I complained about it once at a girlfriend’s house, and she said, “Oh, you know, the mothers always get it. They’re home, in the line of fire. And even when they’re not home, they’re in the line of fire.” She told me about a day she and her sister were so awful that her mother sat down on the steps and stared at them through the railing, weeping and saying, “Oh please, you guys.” We were very good for a while after that, my friend said. For about a week.

I thought of my friend’s mother so many times after she told me that story. I saw her collapsing midstair, holding on to the poles of that railing to still her shaking hands and to beg her children to see her, to see her. I imagined her in her ironed housedress, her hair washed and held back with bobby pins crisscrossed neatly at the sides. She was trying, trying, trying, all the time, waiting at night for her husband to pass judgment on the roast beef, and that would be her grade for the day; enduring in the afternoons the spiky moods of her adolescent children. I remember my own mother serving dinner one night, dipping the big serving spoon into the casserole she’d made, and as usual one of us said we didn’t like that and then another one complained and my mother dropped the spoon on the table and left the room. Very quietly. We all sat there, the whole family, stunned. And then in a few minutes she came back out, wiping her hands busily on her apron, her face splotchy, and she put the spoon back in the casserole and served it and we all ate it. And now I think, then what? Then, that night, she took off her skirt and hung it up on her skirt hanger and then she took off her sweater and folded it with tissue to prevent marks and then she washed her face, moisturized it, and went to bed in a blue negligee that my father bought her and later lifted out of the way while she stared at the ceiling thinking, I guess I am getting old, now.

Something else. About a week before I left, I was lying in bed, holding my rock, and I began weeping so loudly I woke Martin up. What is it, he asked, and I said my God Martin I’m just so scared and so sad. He said why? What are you so sad about? I said I don’t know, I just don’t feel I understand anymore what life is for, what’s it for, what is the point in it? He said there is no point. Then he sighed this big sigh and said, You know, Nan, ever since I’ve known you, you’ve looked for meaning and excitement in life. But life is by and large meaningless and dull. I said nothing, I stared at the still curtain hanging at the side of the window and in a few minutes he went back to sleep. I lay there for a good hour, not crying anymore, just thinking. And I see now that I was thinking he was wrong, although I didn’t quite know that at the time. The thought was not in words, it was in the form of a dull nudge. And it was that nudge that got me to find this journal, and get going on this trip. And now, in my own stillness, I hear something. “Where have you been?” my inside body whispers to my outside one. Its sense of outrage is present, but dulled by the grief of abandonment. “I had ideas. There were things to do. Where did you go?”

What can I answer? Oh, I had some errands to run. I had a few things to do. I needed to get married and have a child and go under ground for twenty-five years, be pleasantly suffocated. I meant to