The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,49

I said no, the steps were fine. Drink? she asked, and I said no, really, I was fine.

She was quiet for a minute, then asked slyly, So are you one of them moviemakers or something? I said oh no, I was just an ordinary woman, out on a trip, Nan was my name. Eugenie, she said, pleased to meet you, and I heard the sound of peas kerplunking and I smiled. What, she said, smiling herself and I said, oh that sound, I just loved that sound especially when someone else was doing it. She said she guessed she was used to it, she herself preferred the radio, only that was busted, too. I asked her what kind of music she liked, and she said any kind that would come in. Although she was partial to that Tony Bennett fella. She liked fancy music, too, them violins. Right, I said, me too. She said, ’Course, when you’re shelling with someone, why then you talk, and that’s better than the music. She said there used to be a lot of women living around her who would get together on summer afternoons, shell peas for the dinners they would be making later—shell the peas, clean the corn, slice the tomatoes, peel the potatoes. “We’d all set out here,” she said, “getting a start on things. We’d talk so hard sometimes.” She looked away from me, out over the land in front of her. “They is every one of them gone, now, she said. Dead, or moved into one of them nursing homes.” I’m sorry, I said, and she said, “Well what are you going to do, got to get old and move along, make room for the next wave. I just always wondered who’d be the last one gets to stay in their own home. Turned out to be me. Huh! Sure did.”

I asked her how old she was and she said eighty-six on her next birthday, which was in a month. I guess I looked surprised because she said I know, I know, I don’t look eighty-six, everybody tells me that. We got good skin in the family, goes a long way back. Swedish.

Her phone rang then, and her head jerked up, eyes wide. Then, slowly, she went into the house to answer it. When she came back out, she said, “Danged if it ain’t fixed. And they never did even come here! Fixed it out … there, somewhere.” She shook her head. “I sure don’t understand how things work no more.” She rocked a bit, then said, “I ’spose you got one of them home computers.” I said yes, we did. What for? she asked. I said well, my husband used it for his work, and he did our finances on there, I used it to write letters … Write letters? she said. I said yes. She said, You mean you don’t write them on stationery? I said no. She said well pardon me for saying so, but that’s a crying shame. What with the stationery they got now. She said, I was in town the other day at the Hallmark, and the stationery they had there, it took my breath away. Birds and seashells and flowers and cut-lace edges, some designs so beautiful I felt the tears start. You know how they do, she said, when you like something so bad. I said yes. Well, she said, tell me true, wouldn’t you rather get a letter on that kind of paper? I said I guessed she was right. I didn’t want to get into the fact that it was a rare person who wrote a letter at all anymore.

I said, So what’s it like, being eighty-six?

She laughed, then rocked for a minute, thinking. I watched her feet, she was wearing blue Keds and the thin white socks that little girls wear. Finally, she said, Well, it’s painful, your joints hollering about something all the time, this thing kicking up, or that. She said, “Seems sometime like you get one thing locked out the front door, the other one sneaks in the back. But it’s not as bad as some folks make it out to be, folks like to exaggerate, makes them feel important. They got to make everything a red-flag emergency. You take this change of life thing, why, you can’t hardly pick up a ladies’ magazine and not see some big story about it, when it’s just as natural as a sneeze.”

I said, Well. I said, it probably