The Pull of the Moon

  I will write for a while, then sleep as long as I want to.

  I tried saying the rosary last night, to calm myself, but it had no effect. So I tried to remember every lover I’d ever had. This was a very interesting thing that did not lessen my fright but at least kept my mind occupied. Martin and I once did this, sat at the kitchen table and tried to write down the name of every person we’d ever slept with. It was my idea, of course. I thought that it would … well, I don’t really know what I thought it would do. Maybe I just wanted to know. Anyway, my list was longer, which surprised me. Men’s wrists should be bigger than women’s, and men’s lists of lovers should be longer, I guess that’s what I believed. We told each other about all our lovers, too, which we had never done before. We were very careful to paint them all in an unflattering light of some kind or another. Every story about every person ended up with some unfortunate inclusion—my favorite was Martin telling me that one woman snorted the first time he made love to her and he just couldn’t stand her after that. He demonstrated, snorted lightly in a rapid, rhythmic way and we both laughed. It was, in a way, a very good experience, but we didn’t tell the whole truth, I know we didn’t.

  You are where I unlock myself, where I say that I have often put down my wooden spoon to stare out the kitchen window to see the men I thought were magic for their storytelling or their way of walking, or the ones I was so strongly sexually attracted to, even though they weren’t good people—at least not for me.

  There is one thing I never told Martin about. When I was in high school, I met a twenty-five-year-old man who said he would teach me everything I needed to know about sex—without actually having sex with me. You can be a pre-bed student, he said, winking. I was at a burger place with a girlfriend of mine, she’d introduced me to this man, Joey was his name. She had dated him, she always dated older men. He was obviously not the brightest guy in the world, but he was very handsome. I had a reputation—entirely deserved—for being extremely naive sexually. I got teased a lot and I was tired of it. I was off to college in the fall; I wanted to know something when I got there. On senior skip day, I told my mother I was going swimming with my class, but I went instead to meet this man, who was going to take me to a motel.

  Isn’t it funny, I fell asleep last night after I wrote the above, the pen in my hand. I woke up around four, put you on the bedside table, got a drink, and went back to bed. But you, open to this page, felt to me like a spectator dressed in black. A silent presence standing too near, crowding me. I closed you, moved you to the bathroom floor, then shut the door so that I could not hear you calling.

  I never told Martin about this event, and I never told myself, either. I realize that, now. I realize that’s why I went to sleep, because years away from it, I still don’t want to face it. But I’m going to, here. Sometimes night is outside you; sometimes it is in you.

  I still feel a kind of fear. An awful shame. I went to a lecture once by a famous psychiatrist who was talking about how women must rid themselves of the idea that they are sitting on the ground, eyes cast downward, waiting for a man to tap them on the shoulder. It is a very common feeling, I know. When he said that, the woman sitting next to me re-crossed her legs and straightened herself in her seat, the truth of what he said snaking through her, through all of us there. The air in the room seemed to change, to become charged and visible. What he did not say is how the story repeats itself over and over, how once a woman is tapped, she is likely to get up and do what she is bid, then sit down and wait again. Where does this start, I want to know? When do we leave behind staring straight at someone, not worrying if, in the middle of the conversation, there’s a mosquito bite we need to scratch?

  I believed, at twelve, that I could be a scientist. I read a book a day. I believed I could be a writer, an actress, a professor of English in Rome, an acrobat in a purple spangled outfit. Days opened for me like the pulling apart of curtains at a play you’ve been dying to see. I had a microscope on my desk, shelves full of books and treasures that I found outside: rocks, wood, abandoned nests of hornets and birds, notes to myself for things to do tomorrow because I hadn’t had the time today. I believed the way to ride bareback was to get on and go, the rising heat of the horse against your bare legs the only instruction you’d need. The how of everything was simply in the doing of it. I had a turtle in a plastic bowl, and I fed him flies I captured with my bare hands and to whom I apologized before killing. I had a crow living outside my window, I spoke to all the dogs in the neighborhood, and they understood me. I patted them so hard dust rose up off their backs in tiny, dim clouds, and they understood this, too—they stood still for it for as long as I would do it, their eyes closed in itchy pleasure. My life was like a wild, beating thing, exotic, capable of unfolding and enlarging itself, pulling itself higher and higher up like a kite loved by the wind, and it was captured beneath my cereal bowl. There in front of me, my own for the taking. And then, suddenly, lost.

  And look, now, how I avoid this still. How I use my own hand to turn my face away.

  Here. I will say it all now. No stopping. Like a dive into the deep end, intent on making it to the shallow end without surfacing.

  I took a bus to the motel. I still remember the driver, he wore a gray cardigan sweater with brown leather buttons, and his resemblance to my beloved grandfather was so strong that I nearly turned around to go home. But I didn’t. I got on the bus, sat alone in a seat by the window, feeling as though I were being pulled somewhere by an uncaring hand. Feeling also that although I had chosen this, I had not really had a choice. There was a mother sitting across from me with twins, toddlers, and I stared at them the whole time, wanting the mother to pull me into her watchful circle, to say, “Oh, honey. Don’t do that. Come with us.” I thought of how everyone else at school was going swimming, how later they’d have a big picnic, and there would be no gap left anywhere for me.

  The bus got to the stop where Joey and I had agreed to meet, somewhere near the motel, and I saw his car, the engine running, his hand out the window holding a cigarette. I got off the bus and he opened his car door, stepped out, waved at me. I waved back with one hand, pressed the other hard into my own middle. I was thinking, well, his real name is Joseph. And he was on time, he likes me. When I got in the car, he told me to lie down on the floor until he said it was all right to get up. He said no one should see me or we’d get in a lot of trouble. I lay on the floor trying to keep my sweater from getting dirty—it was a light pink, angora; and I was wearing a gray straight skirt with it, new nylons, and my black flats that I’d polished the night before. I had a barrette with pearls on it anchored to one side of my hair. When I put it in, I had imagined him taking it out, my hair falling to my shoulders in a way I thought he might admire. I thought he might touch my curls, gently, hold one strand of hair up to the light to see better the reddish color it could take on. I’d thought he might kiss my hair, then my neck, and then my lips. Now I could only see his shoes, his foot working the gas pedal and the brake with some impatience. I thought, I don’t know those shoes at all. I could hear his keys in the ignition jingling softly against one another and I wondered why he had so many keys. It seemed dangerous to me, that he would have so many keys. He stopped the car, told me he was going into the office to get a room, and not to move. “Okay,” I said, and my voice was so high and strange. And I remember I looked at each of my fingernails when I waited for him, because I wanted him to think every part of me was pretty. I’d painted my nails pearl pink the night before. I’d put perfume in places I’d never put it before.

  Well, I am just shaking! Perhaps there is no point in remembering this. I don’t think there is any reason. It was a very bad experience, over now. I am fifty. It is over, now.

  All right. I will say the worst part. Let me do that. Then it will be over.

  There was a point at which he was straddling me, we were both naked, my God, I had never been naked with anyone before, not even partially, except for the ancient
doctor I went to, and he had the sensitivity to look at the wall when he put his hands to me under the paper gown. But Joey looked directly at me and he put his penis on my chest and pushed my breasts together hard. Then he rubbed himself between them. “Doesn’t this feel nice?” he said, his voice hoarse, close to cruel. He was so far above me. If I looked up, I could see the inside of his nose, which seemed too intimate, and which seemed rude for me to do. Anyway, I didn’t want to look at him, it embarrassed me to do that. I’d caught a glimpse of his penis and the fleshy sight of it made me feel like vomiting. I didn’t know where to look. The wallpaper was peeling, the lamp buzzed, the door to the bathroom was cracked open, and I could hear the drip of the faucet. I closed my eyes and tried not to cry. I could see my bed at home, my heart-shaped pillow lying against the other pillows. And then he put his hand to my face and opened my mouth. “Don’t bite,” he said, and he was laughing a little, and then he was not, and the bed squeaked and squeaked and squeaked and squeaked. The barrette had slipped to the back of my head and it pressed into me, and I felt I could not move to adjust it. It ended up making a small wound that kept me tender for a long time.

  Why tell more? The silent ride home? The way he barely looked at me when we said good-bye?

  I am exhausted again. I am going to sleep until I wake up far away from this place I’ve been to.

  Dear Martin,

  Today, around noontime, I suddenly got tired of the car. And so when I came to the next town, I pulled over and parked next to a church and got out to take a little walk. It was a small town, the requisite town hall and police station and library all clustered together like gossiping friends. I sat on the steps of the town hall eating an ice cream and trying to decide which direction to go in. I could see some railroad tracks off in the distance and I decided to walk along there.

  I’d forgotten all the pleasures of walking in a place like that—the low twist of anxiety about a train coming when you’re in a narrow spot, the crunch of gravel alongside the tracks, the splintery wooden slats beneath the rusty silver rail, the rare wildflower in among the weeds, bowing to the breezes. I passed an old gentleman also out walking, and we stopped to chat for a while. He was well into his seventies, perhaps even his eighties, and still good-looking, you didn’t have to stretch to say so. He wore a green plaid shirt tucked into khaki pants, a braided belt, a pair of ultramodern sneakers. He said he lived in a nearby retirement center, and needed to get out and walk daily to get away from the girls. “No offense,” he said, “but they get to be like horseflies. Oh, I like them, like to sit and play cards with them in the evening, they’re all wearing their sparkly earrings and such, but all day …” He said the ratio of women to men in the place was 11:1. I asked him how long he’d lived there and he said seven years, ever since his wife, Honey, died. “That wasn’t her real name,” he said. “Eleanor was her real name. But I never called her anything but Honey. It fit her, she thought so, too.” They had nine children, and all of them are still close. One of his sons worked at NASA, one daughter studied opera in New York, the rest were just normal, nice people, he said—Americans, he said. He asked how many children I had and I said one; and you know, Martin, I suddenly felt ashamed that we only had one. As though we were dabbling in family, not really serious. He asked where I lived and I said outside of Boston and he said oh, far from home, was I visiting? I said no, just … traveling. He said, well if I were there at dinnertime not to miss Randy’s Lunch, right downtown, best damned meatloaf in the state. He said he went and snuck a bite every now and then even though if his doctor knew, he’d have his head. “It’s not going to hurt me,” he said, leaning close, as though his doctor might have a microphone planted in the tree nearby. “I swear to God it’s what’s keeping me alive at this point.” He had dimples like yours, Martin, deep ones on either side of his face.

  Do you know that you’re still handsome? When you look into the mirror, do you feel a tug of the old satisfaction? I’ve noticed I don’t look in the mirror much at all anymore. I used to be quite vain, I know. But it’s been a while since I turned any heads. This has been kind of hard for me. I never liked it when it was happening, it made me so nervous, used to be I couldn’t sit in a restaurant without knowing someone was watching me eat, well not just me, of course, men in restaurants graze on the good-looking women, staring first at this one, then at that one. Staring and making up their little scenes, we can feel them doing it. But now I am seen by men as a number in line, a bakery customer; some old gal who needs her sink fixed; the driver of the nice Mercedes passing through a road-construction site. I feel this loss in a kind of vague way, I guess it’s not so bad, what was I going to do, become a Mrs. Robinson? Still, it’s odd to lose the power, this thing that lets you have a little something happen with every man you come in contact with. If you are a pretty woman, you get favors, and I was pretty. Not the gorgeous kind of pretty that makes men nervous and often angry, just the calm kind of pretty that makes men be a little kinder, rub with some sensuality the keys in their pockets, occasionally have ideas they mostly keep to themselves. Although Charlie Benderman, did I ever tell you what he whispered to me at the Maxwells’ Christmas party? No, I didn’t tell you. Well, he thought we should see how heavy the guests’ coats felt if we were under them, if you know what I mean. Do you know what I said? I said, “I love my husband, Charlie.” And he got all embarrassed and went to freshen his drink. When I watched him walk away, I confess I thought about it, thought about what it might have been like. Tried to remember what underwear I was wearing, if it matched. Wondered what he kissed like.

  What I miss acutely is my periods. The last one was so long ago. I guess that was it, I guess I’m done with all that now. It feels so awful. Is that funny to you, Martin, after all the times you heard me complain about my periods? I know, I know, now you’re feeling a little nervous, thinking, ah jeez, here we go, Nan’s off on another tangent, talking about her periods, for Christ’s sake, and I’m supposed to be interested. Could you be interested, though, Martin? Could you try to be? Could you put your load of man stuff aside and just open yourself to hearing about this? It’s big as a boulder in me. It’s important.

  You wait for your period. For what seems like years. You get the pastel-blue booklet with the white rose on the cover and the lecture from which the boys are barred; you are aware that when it comes, when it comes, when it comes, you will be a WOMAN by virtue of the fact that your body, the one that yesterday swung from the monkey bars, can today have a baby. Can grow and deliver to the world a live human being. You know that hormones will course through you, whispering commands; that the pull of the moon will be shared by you and the ocean and the minds of wild things. When your period comes, you prize the mess. You examine the stain, try to read it. You touch the blood, rub it between your fingers. You say to yourself, I am forever changed. Changed. Forever. Well, I did, anyway. The day my period came, I walked down the steps on new legs and showed my mother my underwear as she sat on the sofa, sewing. “Well,” she said, blushing, “well, now.” She was shy about it, and she turned me away from her to head me upstairs to the linen closet. “You’ll need this,” she said, not looking at me, “and this.” She was leaning into the closet, her apron hanging away from her housedress, and her housedress fallen away from her chest, and I saw her freckled breasts in her old yellow-white brassiere and they looked old and superfluous to me and I felt sorry for her, so far away from my new beginning, my start, my star-spangled life now dropped before me.

  When Ruthie got her period, I think it was a better experience for her. I know we smiled right at each other, and I bought her a little pearl necklace to celebrate when we went out to lunch—it was a Saturday, clear blue sky and the kind of sunlight that felt so perfect it seemed fake. We had a nice time, and she asked me not to tell you until the next day, and I didn’t. I lay in bed that night feeling the tie between Ruthie and me grow stronger, grow leaves.

  What is comparable for you, Martin? Would y
ou tell me if something were? Do you know how much I long for you to lift the rock, to tell me about your underside? You once said, “Women are all the time asking what men are thinking about. We’re not thinking about anything!” Well, maybe that’s true. But we are. We are thinking about things. It seems to me that the working minds and hearts of women are just so interesting, so full of color and life. And one of the most tragic things I’ve seen is the way that’s been overlooked, the way that if you try to discover what the women were doing at any given time in history, you are hard-pressed to find out. Why? I want to say to you that we are not silly, that what we think about and what drives us to talk, talk, talk, this is vital.

  Does this follow anything? I mean, is there a particular reason that I bring it up now? I don’t know. But I want to say it to you. And I want to say that I don’t want to live in our house anymore. I want to move. With you. To the place I pick this time. I have ideas. I’ve dreamed about the house I want. Next letter, I’ll tell you about it.

  Love,

  Nan

  I am in a Hilton hotel in Des Moines. It was time for a little city. I took a Jacuzzi and I went down and had my nails done and I sat at the bar until the silliness drove me back up to my room. I have been sitting on the edge of the bed thinking about what I wrote in here last time. I think every woman I know has a story like that, some incident of paralyzed humiliation involving a man and sex. I’ll bet if you asked any woman, was there ever a time when you … Oh yes, they’d say. There was this one time … My best friend in college told me that she once watched her fraternity boyfriend spray semen around the room, holding his penis in his hands like a fire hose. And she lay in bed, one leg pulled up prettily, genuinely confused, thinking, is this what it’s supposed to be? Where is the romance? At least she wasn’t frightened.