The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,55

should I do something about this? What do they do about this, vein stripping, is that what it is? This came to me automatically, even after what I believe I’ve started to learn. But it’s so silly. So tiresome, that kind of thinking, and so self-defeating. If I get a face lift, the skin on my back will still sag, and soften. If I get my eyes done, my joints will still ache. Life has its way, and it seems to me now that the object might only be to learn how to be graceful, to understand the value of a deep kind of acceptance.

There are those who have catastrophic events happen in their lives when they are young. Early on, they lose so much. But for the rest of us, those of us who have the luxury of being called normal, there is only the slow loss of what we see as our prime. First the half-glasses, then the hair growing where it shouldn’t, then the memory that walks half a step away from you, the way you cannot quite find the word, it goes racing by you like a fast bird in flight. “Don’t get old,” my father’s mother told me, old herself. She meant that I should spare myself this most personal of griefs. But why not get old, when what it means is more time with all that is here? Why not relish retirement when it means an alarm clock does not wake you anymore? You can take in the morning light as an offering, lie still for a while with a square patch of sun lying across your chest. The day is blank and up to you. You can twist yourself in your sheets for the pleasure of the pull, knowing it will not make you late for anything. You can dress in jeans and roll down a hill, terrified all over again, though for different reasons having to do with old bones. You leave the high place, tumble toward the bottom. Beneath you, the grass flattens, acknowledging your presence, then rises again, as though you were never there. You see this, now; and it seems to me that if you want to, you can understand the rightness of it. What I mean is, when you learn to turn from the mirror, when you look up from your hands, you have a chance to see a garden truly, because you are not in your own way. I say this because I read a poem by a farmer to his wife where he talked about that, Martin, and it made me realize I would love to circle a garden with you, both of us seeing the same thing at the same time. I remember when we first met and you gave me a bite of your sandwich and you said, “I hope you taste it the same as me.” I thought it was thrilling that you said that. (I thought it was sexual, too.) I know that feeling. I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times. More than ever, lately.

I have been waiting to be without anxiety before I start home. But I think I am waiting for something that will never come. I mean that all relationships are fraught with anxiety, even those we have with ourselves. We live on a planet that never stops turning and we are witness to the theater of the seasons. How can we expect a relationship to not change? And change makes us anxious, it just does—given the opportunity, we will nearly all of us sit in the same chair, every time. It is a tender thing, the way we always seek reassurance, the way we are never too old to reach for the outstretched hand.

I know there’s a chance you’ll be angry at me, Martin. Outraged, even, and wanting to sit in your den and sulk as soon as you see me. But there’s also a chance you’ll be glad I left, and glad I returned. There’s a chance you’ll come to the driveway to meet me before I’ve gotten fully out of the car, and offer to carry in my heaviest bag. I confess I hope for that. I have imagined it, as I have imagined you sitting at the kitchen table drinking your coffee and putting down the newspaper, to remember me.

However it is that you feel, know that I am coming home to you now. I’m not stopping for anything