The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,47

things that grow forty times their size.

I guess this sounds like a warning. And perhaps it is. But I want you to know that I want to live with you, I don’t want to be without you, it’s not that. You’re the only one whose driving I trust enough to go to sleep in a car. Every time I ride with someone else, I feel I have to watch the road, too. Blinker, I’m thinking. Brake, brake! It’s kind of exhausting.

Oh, Martin, and you’re the one I want to watch television with, I don’t mind folding your socks, we can fart in front of each other, that means more than a new bride thinks. And you’re the one I always want to show things to. I always need to show you. Remember the last time I went to the grocery store and I called you into the kitchen to show you the smoked turkey I’d bought? Oh, you said. Uh-huh. That was gentle of you. I realized after I’d done it that you could have said, Nan.

I had a thought the other day, What if Martin is keeping a journal too? I got so excited by the idea. I saw your neat handwriting in a brown leather journal, a handsome, manly thing. I thought, boy, would I love to read that. I like it when I get a peek at your insides. Of course whenever I tell you that, you close up like the takeout window at that ice-cream stand we go to every summer. I always think of that, when I ask you to reveal yourself more, that you are like the man wearing that little white paper hat, sticking his face out the window to ask what you want and then slamming it shut when he hears your request. I have to come at you in more indirect ways. I remember once we made these lists that were a suggestion from some woman’s magazine. I’d bought the magazine so I could make the roast pork tenderloin shown on the cover. But there was an article I found in it, things to do to bring couples closer. We were to write the five things we prized about each other, and then the five things we’d like to change. You were in a rare, cooperative mood that night, and you agreed to do it with me. We got shy about telling each other what we prized and then we got in a fight over what we’d like to change, remember? We went to opposite ends of the house and then, an hour or so later, you came up into the bedroom where I was reading and said, “I’m going out.” I said I could not care less. You said, “I’m going to Gallagher’s.” I said, for a steak? Yes, you said. Well, wait, I said, I’m coming.

Martin. We have a lot. Some people have so little. I took that woman home and I watched her pick a few weeds out of the cracks in the sidewalk on her way up to her door. She said her husband would probably be too scared to be mad anymore. He always thought she was going to walk out on him. I said, well, you’d think he’d change how he treats you then. And she shrugged. There were no tears in her eyes. There was no frustration. There was only a flatness, which I found so frightening.

It’s six-thirty. I’m in a little town in South Dakota. There’s a great-looking movie theater here, the Grand-view, it’s called, all old-fashioned looking, an old lady with cat-eye glasses selling tickets, a blue cardigan sweater hanging on to her skinny shoulders. There’s an ice-cream shop next door, stools lined up at the counter, menu on the wall in a curly black script, and I saw they have patty melts. My night is cut out for me.

Tomorrow I’m driving exactly one hundred miles west. Then I’m turning around. Please make an appointment with that builder we like, Peter Quigley. Make it for a few weeks from now. Please.

Love,

Nan

Eight-thirty P.M. I’m staying at a turquoise-blue motel, a neon sign in front that’s a pink flamingo, his wing waving you in. How could I resist such a place? There’s a bathtub-sized pool, a family of four enjoying it as though it were Olympic-sized, as though it belonged to Esther Williams herself. The mother, her hair piled on top of her head, sits on the edge of the pool and occasionally dips