The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,51

to worry about cold mashed potatoes, he would just eat them. You know.

I left soon afterward. I drove about a mile down the road and then pulled over and wept. I was thinking about Eugenie coming across those poems after her husband’s death, then sitting back on her heels to stare into space for a long time.

Dear Martin,

First, when I come home, I’m taking a nap. Then I’m taking a bath. Please make sure there’s some of that Damask Rose in the linen closet, that’s the one we both like best. Then I’m putting on that red dress you like, the one that pushes my boobs up to my chin. And my red heels. My black nylons. Like you like.

We’re going for dinner to the Capital Grill on Newbury Street and if we have to wait three hours to get seated, we’ll wait three hours. We’ll get drinks and talk, I have a lot to tell you.

I’m getting everything to eat, and I think you should, too. Appetizer. Dessert. After-dinner drinks. I like being in that restaurant, despite its nearly palpable male ambiance —dark oak walls, dim lights, a wide sense of red; even oil paintings of hunting dogs with dead birds hanging from their mouths, for God’s sake. It’s the place I’ve always felt the friendliest toward males—admired them, envied them their easy comfort and their generosity, their tendency to tip big and eat the same way. I’ve seen groups of men out to dinner there, sitting at a round table and, in the absence of their wives, cheating—with porterhouse, with fried onion rings, with cheesecake studded by chocolate chips. They talk loudly and laugh louder, move back in time to summer nights when they would meet at the all-night diner after they’d taken the girls home, to talk about what they got, to talk about cars, to talk about who was going where tomorrow. I got to do that once, hang out with the boys after their dates. I was visiting my aunt and uncle for two weeks one summer, and one of their sons was my age, sixteen. His job was to entertain me, and his notion of how to do that was to wordlessly bring me along with him everywhere he went. It was fine with me. It felt like rare privilege.

So I got to go to the all-night diner, and my cousin explained over his massive-sized cheeseburger that if someone came in with his shirt untucked, it was to cover the stain of him coming in his pants. I got to lie on the floor of my aunt and uncle’s bedroom, using their extension to quietly listen in on my cousin’s phone conversations as he paced in the kitchen below me; and I observed with a wrinkled-brow wonder how comfortable boys were with long silences on the line. I got to stay up late with him, watching black-and-white movies featuring angry gorillas, while he carped at his younger sister and brother to buzz off, to get the hell to bed. Once, alone, we tried kissing, but we frightened ourselves out of that in a hurry. We were envisioning offspring with three heads. Worse than that, we were envisioning confessing to our priests that we’d French-kissed our cousin, and gotten damp in the pants to boot.

I got to sit with the boys on the beach and hear what they said about every girl’s body that passed by and I have to say I usually agreed with them. I got to set off cherry bombs in rich people’s neighborhoods, although my slow running once nearly got all of us caught. I was called by my last name, just like one of the boys. And then one night when we were out cruising, I started making out in the backseat with Whitey O’Conner, and everything got ruined. I ended up staying home with my cousin’s younger sister after that, playing with her pet rabbit and wishing I’d kept my femaleness tucked in.

I don’t know if I ever told you this, Martin, but whenever we go to the Capital, I always want to be a man for a little while. I want to feel back in that circle. I want to be wearing a suit with a vest with the bottom buttons undone due to the deliciousness of my dinner. I want to be slouching back in my burgundy leather chair, my mouth making those fish movements in order to smoke my fat cigar, nobody around me complaining. My