The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,52
wallet would be thick with large bills. Men always carry more money than women, did you ever notice that, Martin? All other things being equal, a woman will have maybe forty-five dollars, a man will have a good hundred and fifty.
After the restaurant, I want to walk down Newbury Street, which you never want to do, you always just want to go home and walk around the house in your underwear and then watch the news. But this time I want to walk down Newbury Street in my heels with my hair up, holding hands with you and pointing to the artwork in the gallery windows, to the outlandishly expensive wedding dresses, to the books so attractively displayed in the windows at Waterstone’s you have to ball your fists to keep from smashing the glass and stealing them. Just be ready, Martin, we are not going home right after we eat. We might go the North End, drink cappuccino at the Paradise and hope some gangsters come in to use the pay phone.
I’ll pay for dinner at the Capital. I’ll sign the receipt with a drunken exuberance that makes my penmanship curly. When we get home, I’ll screw your brains out. Like we used to. You can leave the lights on now. I don’t mind anymore, I think I understand the purpose of my body. And then you can walk around in your underwear and I’ll walk around in my robe, Kleenex in the pocket in case I want to blow my nose to Ted Koppel. Our voices will be low and sleepy; only a few lights in the house will be on. The recliners built into our family room sofa will seem less a joke and more a necessity: we will be ourselves and loosely comfortable.
Also: some Sunday we are going to rent a canoe and paddle down the Charles. We are going to music festivals when we see them in the paper, and we are going to Harvard Square to throw money into the upturned derbies of the jugglers. Think of how many weekends we’ve spent going to the cleaners and to Lechmere’s, to look at things we already have. I am so tired of that. It’s so unnecessary.
Martin, I want you to do something for me. In the family room, there’s that picture of me when I was twenty. In front of it you’ll find a silk flower. I don’t know if you ever noticed it before. I think I put it there because I was grieving for the loss of that self, it was like an altar offering to the person I used to be. Get rid of it, will you? Throw that flower in the garbage, where it belongs.
Love,
Nan
P.S. For the screw-your-brains-out portion of the evening, Martin, I wouldn’t mind your buying me a little something to wear. You know what I mean.
Last night, I was thinking about my grandmother. I was remembering a time when I was eleven years old, and lying under her kitchen table in my new pink pedal pushers and matching pink-and-white-checked blouse, my ankle crossed over my knee. I was listening to my grandmother and her five daughters—one of them my mother—talking. I loved doing that, and I knew if I kept myself under the table and out of sight it was likely that the talk would get looser. More interesting. Someone might swear. Oh, the red lipstick marks they left on their coffee cups, the way they were used to their bosoms! I was waiting so hard to grow up. It was a job, waiting, when you were eleven. Every morning you looked at your face in the mirror to see if the babyness had gone away. Every night in the bathtub, you stretched your legs out before you, seeing if they were longer. They felt longer.
It was a Saturday morning, that time in my grandmother’s kitchen. Sammy, the parakeet she kept on a TV tray by the kitchen window, was chirping happily. He liked the little symphony of voices he was hearing. He was very excited, you could tell, because he got a drink often out of his water dish—he always drank a lot of water when he was excited. His dish was one of those hooded glass ones, designs of lines on it. I thought it looked like a miniature urinal. I wondered how he could tell the difference. Later, he would die from flying into a pan where my grandmother was frying chicken. You couldn’t help