The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,46

want to go.” I put down my shopping basket; I’d get deodorant and gum and toothpaste somewhere else. When we walked past her husband, he said quietly, “Hey. What are you doing?” And then, loudly, as we continued walking toward the door, “Hey! What are you doing?” The cashier said, “Sir? Are you buying this?” And the guy pushed his cart up and got his wallet out. I led the woman to my car.

I started driving and she started talking. Her name was Lynn; she’d been married for five years; the kind of treatment I’d witnessed was not unusual. I asked if he hit her and she said oh no, never. She said that might be better actually, then she could watch something heal.

I took her to a Wendy’s. We had a Coke and talked a little and she seemed to feel better—when she smiled, I saw that her teeth crossed endearingly in the front. She asked if I would mind if she got herself a burger as long as we were there, she loved Wendy’s hamburgers. I said no problem, I was in no hurry. I said I had a fondness for singles with cheese myself, I’d join her. When we came back to the table again, she asked if I had just moved here—she’d seen my out-of-state plates. I said no, I was just passing through. And then I said, “How come you married him?”

There was a long moment. She stirred her Coke with her straw, then said, “You really want to know?” I said yes. She said it was a rebound situation, that she had been dumped by someone she really loved and it hurt so bad she just wanted to marry someone else quickly and be done with it. She said she had tried so hard to get her old lover back but the last time they were together, she’d made a fool of herself, flung her head into his lap and wept and felt only the slight movement of him trying to pull away. She said, “I thought, anything is better than this.” Her husband had always had a crush on her, he’d lived on the same block when they were growing up and he was always trying to get her to go out with him. So she called him and they went out a few times and then he proposed and she said yes. “I felt numb,” she said. “I felt like I was watching someone else do this. The last week or so before we got married I would wake up every night crying. I knew it was wrong. But I did it anyway.”

I asked if she had children. She said no. And then she said, I know what you’re going to say. But I can’t leave him. Every time I try, I just end up coming back. I don’t see that there’s anything that special out there. Everywhere I look it seems to me that even the women who are supposedly happy, they’re just pretending. I said oh no, you’re wrong. She looked at my wedding ring, asked me, are you happy? I said well yes, that we had our problems, but I would say I was happy, I was glad I’d married my husband and I’d do it again. (I would, Martin, only I would not wear that dumb dress, I would wear a nice white two-piece suit.) Lynn said, so you never get that thing, where you’re saying, here is the wife, making dinner for the husband. I said what do you mean. She said oh, you know, that thing where you feel outside yourself, you’re watching yourself, and you’re not sure at all where you really are. I said, well. I said I guess I feel that sometimes. And I realized that of course I do. That I watch my hands peel the carrot and realize I am not quite there. And oftentimes, then, I look up out of the kitchen window and there is a dull pain in me. I never know what the hell it is, really. I look out the window, watching for birds, and wait for the ache to pass, and it does.

I don’t mean to say this is your fault, this pain that comes, because it’s not, Martin. I do mean to say that this trip has made me aware of so much I’d kept hidden from myself. And now that these things are out, there’s no putting them back, they’re like those sponge