The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,38

moving on. Maybe the Black Hills. Maybe some small town where there are trees lining neighborhood sidewalks. But not home yet. You probably know that, though.

Love,

Nan

Early morning, the whole world seeming to be still and waiting. I am out on the porch with coffee and amazement. I spent the night with another man. How did this happen? It occurs to me that to start with seeing him come out of the woods would be wrong. It starts somewhere else.

There have been times, lately, when I have thought about suicide in a way so dispassionate I know it is serious. Oh, I thought about it in college, because everyone else was thinking about it, it was the artful thing to do. But I didn’t mean it. It was a contagious fantasy, an imagined cure for many woes. Perhaps, rather than dealing with unrequited love or a forty-page term paper, we would kill ourselves. Every woman I knew had approximately the same vision for suicide, too; we would talk about it sometimes when we got together for pizza in someone’s room late at night.

This was the scenario: we would have on eyeliner, no mascara. We would be wearing black clothes, one bangle bracelet. Our hair would be loose and flowing and extremely clean. We would be on our backs, barefoot, lying on a made bed, a poetic note of explanation in our pale, pale, hands. Dangling earrings would lie still in the small valleys behind our ear lobes, minute circles of color pooled uselessly beneath the gemstones. There would be a flurry of phone calls, people would weep and sigh and we would somehow be aware of this.

It was fun to imagine. When we were in classes we hated, we enjoyed it especially. I remember my biology professor droning on one day about invertebrates, and I closed my eyes and saw my own last breath—deep and satisfying, my young breasts rising up one last time to nothing. I was so captured by the image I jumped when a breeze came through the window and lifted my hair, reminding me of my own hereness.

But what I felt recently was not like that. Rather, it was like this: I would be coming home from the grocery store, stopped at a traffic light. I would look out the window at a tree, at a storefront, at a person walking past and think, oh, enough. There is nothing I want to see. There is nothing left. I want to be done. The car would be smelling of scallions and my front would be aching from my collar bones to my hips. It was a pain like hunger, but more hollow. And more acute. Then the light would change, and I would go home and put the scallions away and fold the paper bags up neatly and store them under the cabinet.

This happened frequently, this sudden drop into despair followed by the resigned resumption of my required life; and then, perhaps somewhere in the middle of making dinner, I’d notice that the pain had gone away. I would stand still to check; and yes, it had gone away.

One afternoon, I had taken a bath and I was standing in my towel and I dropped it and had a good long look and I did not recognize myself. I stepped close to the mirror, looked into my own eyes, and did not recognize myself. I put on a robe, walked around the house, from room to room. Martin’s desk was dusty, and I used my robe sleeve to wipe it off. The phone rang when I was in the kitchen, and I stared at it, lifted the receiver and then hung it up. Then I turned off the answering machine so that when they called back I wouldn’t have to hear who it was. They did call back, whoever it was, and the phone rang and rang and rang, which you rarely hear anymore, everyone has a machine that says, What? What do you want? Just tell the machine.

I went into Ruthie’s room and I turned her bedside lamp on and off and then I stood for awhile looking at what was left there, what she hadn’t taken with her to her apartment. In her closet were a few clothes, including the dress I bought her when we went to Mexico together. It had seemed so beautiful there, but I don’t believe she ever wore it once we got home. Still, I was happy she’d kept it. On