The Pull of the Moon

  This was the scenario: we would have on eyeliner, no mascara. We would be wearing black clothes, one bangle bracelet. Our hair would be loose and flowing and extremely clean. We would be on our backs, barefoot, lying on a made bed, a poetic note of explanation in our pale, pale, hands. Dangling earrings would lie still in the small valleys behind our ear lobes, minute circles of color pooled uselessly beneath the gemstones. There would be a flurry of phone calls, people would weep and sigh and we would somehow be aware of this.

  It was fun to imagine. When we were in classes we hated, we enjoyed it especially. I remember my biology professor droning on one day about invertebrates, and I closed my eyes and saw my own last breath—deep and satisfying, my young breasts rising up one last time to nothing. I was so captured by the image I jumped when a breeze came through the window and lifted my hair, reminding me of my own hereness.

  But what I felt recently was not like that. Rather, it was like this: I would be coming home from the grocery store, stopped at a traffic light. I would look out the window at a tree, at a storefront, at a person walking past and think, oh, enough. There is nothing I want to see. There is nothing left. I want to be done. The car would be smelling of scallions and my front would be aching from my collar bones to my hips. It was a pain like hunger, but more hollow. And more acute. Then the light would change, and I would go home and put the scallions away and fold the paper bags up neatly and store them under the cabinet.

  This happened frequently, this sudden drop into despair followed by the resigned resumption of my required life; and then, perhaps somewhere in the middle of making dinner, I’d notice that the pain had gone away. I would stand still to check; and yes, it had gone away.

  One afternoon, I had taken a bath and I was standing in my towel and I dropped it and had a good long look and I did not recognize myself. I stepped close to the mirror, looked into my own eyes, and did not recognize myself. I put on a robe, walked around the house, from room to room. Martin’s desk was dusty, and I used my robe sleeve to wipe it off. The phone rang when I was in the kitchen, and I stared at it, lifted the receiver and then hung it up. Then I turned off the answering machine so that when they called back I wouldn’t have to hear who it was. They did call back, whoever it was, and the phone rang and rang and rang, which you rarely hear anymore, everyone has a machine that says, What? What do you want? Just tell the machine.

  I went into Ruthie’s room and I turned her bedside lamp on and off and then I stood for awhile looking at what was left there, what she hadn’t taken with her to her apartment. In her closet were a few clothes, including the dress I bought her when we went to Mexico together. It had seemed so beautiful there, but I don’t believe she ever wore it once we got home. Still, I was happy she’d kept it. On the closet shelf were some shoe boxes and I pulled one down, looked inside and found her Doggie, his ears worn thin as paper from her using them to rub her nose when she sucked her thumb. Once, when we were on vacation, she left Doggie at a restaurant. We drove back ninety miles to get him and I didn’t say a word the whole way, I couldn’t. Now he lay in a shoebox, treasured in absentia. I smelled him and I could smell Ruthie, the way she used to smell when she was little and had just woken up. I put him back on the shelf and I left the top of the box askew, so he could breathe.

  I went back into the bathroom, intending to put on the clothes I’d brought in there with me, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat on the edge of the tub and I was thinking, first I fill up the tub with water again, to help facilitate the bleeding. That much I know. There was an emery board lying next to the bathroom sink and I picked it up and drew a line across my wrists. Then I thought, no, that’s the wrong way. You go up and down. To go crosswise is to be back in college, wanting the odd admiration that comes from wearing bandages over your wrists. This is different. This is coming from a true fatigue, a wish lacking in drama, flat with its plainness, but oh, so sincere.

  I turned on the tap, and the tub started to fill. I got a razor from the medicine chest, the kind with one side protected, the kind you use to cut off calluses. I didn’t want to hurt myself while I was hurting myself. When the tub was half full, I got in and put the razor to my wrist. I held it there, the sun glinted prettily off it, and I started to cut but then immediately stopped and got out of the tub and the next time the phone rang I answered it and I was very cheerful. I thought, most of my brain is normal. But somewhere in a dangerous corner, it is not. I thought, how long can I cross my legs and converse, put away the coffee cups, bring in the morning paper? I don’t think much longer. I am so exhausted, I just don’t think much longer.

  So. That is what came before what happened last night.

  I was sitting out on the porch of my tiny cabin, thinking, where do I go tomorrow? In what direction? I was imagining a compass drawn on a map, a smiling sun with four of his fat rays labeled in old-fashioned script, N,S,E,W, when I heard the sound of twigs snapping. I thought for a moment it was an animal, but then I saw the shape of a person coming toward me. I stood, backed up to the door, felt my heart beating in my throat. A man said, oh, sorry, did he startle me? I said no no, not at all. Yes I did, he said, and I said you’re right. He stepped forward into the small island of yellow coming from my porch light. His hands were in his pockets, his face apologetic. He said he was from the cabin next door, he’d just arrived that night. I took a walk in the woods, he said. Didn’t see anything. Don’t know how I could have, though, I didn’t even have a flashlight. Got pretty spooked, he said, it’s some intense dark out there. I said probably there was a flashlight in his kitchen drawer, there was one in mine. Right-hand side. In with the church key and can opener, all that stuff. He said oh really he hadn’t looked in any of the drawers. I thought, isn’t that the difference. The woman makes a home immediately; the man walks in to claim it, then leaves it. In my cabin, there was a glass full of wildflowers on the little kitchen table. The towels in the bathroom hung evenly. My magazines lay neatly stacked on the small table by the sofa, a collection of rocks I’d found and admired nearby. Nan’s here, the cabin said. If anyone wants to know.

  I invited the man in for tea. He seemed so forlorn. He reminded me of little boys I’d seen standing on the edge of a group, so obviously excluded it broke your heart to watch them. He nodded, came through the door and I saw how tall he was, must have been a good 6 ’4”. I used to have a real thing for tall men—well, it was tall boys at the time. I wanted to be with a basketball player. I was tall myself, and it seemed very important to me to have the boy bend down far to kiss me. Nobody but a basketball player could do that. I only had one date with a very tall boy, and I was so excited I made a fool of myself. He never asked me out again. And he never kissed me, either, even though when he brought me home and we stood at my front door I laid my purse at my feet, signaling my readiness. “See you,” he said, and walked away. I watched him go, my tree man, my tower, my tall person who hated my guts.

  After Ruthie was born, I developed a thing for beards. I asked Martin to grow one but he said no, he’d tried it once and it didn’t work, there were bare spots all over his face where it just wouldn’t come in. I said that was when you were younger, try again now and he said no. So I fell in love with our pediatrician, who had a wonderful beard. It was a play love, with a flame that went out whenever I was really around him.

  So this tall man, Robert was his name, came in and sat in my tiny living room. Your cabin is nicer than mine, he said, looking around, and I said, oh, I’d just put a few touches in, that’s all, I’d been there a few days, was leaving tomorrow. He asked where I was from and I was suddenly very tired of explaining myself so I just said I was from Boston and I was on my way to visit my sister in Arizona, and I hoped he wouldn’t ask any questions because I knew absolutely nothing about Arizona except that I thought you could get nice turquoise there. Of course I knew absolutely nothing about sisters, either, never having had one. But what brings you here, I asked, and he started to answer me and then, I couldn’
t believe it, he put his hands over his face and began to weep—racking, ragged sobs. I sat immobilized. I didn’t know what to do. It is such a terrifying thing to see a man cry. I know it’s supposed to be wonderful, men getting in touch with their feminine side and all that, but the truth is it makes me so uncomfortable I want to scream. Even when it’s just men on the movie screens, I want to say, “Stop that!” I want to say, “Remember yourself, why don’t you! You’re a man!” It’s a bad sentiment, it’s wrong; but it’s how I feel.

  Finally, he stopped crying and looked up at me, red-eyed. “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding like he had a cold, which seemed suddenly like such a sweet thing, like a pale green shoot in an early summer garden, something you’d want to bend over and protect. I said no, no, it was fine, it was all right, was there anything I could do? He asked if I had some Kleenex and I went into the bedroom to get him some and when I did I had a thought: This is sexual, being in a bedroom, getting something to bring out to a man. He blew his nose—in the usual manly, honking way, I was happy to see—and then said, “I just … I’m sorry. My wife just died. I’m here to … I needed to get away.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. He looked so young. I felt a million questions jostle for position in my brain. Died from what? Were you there? What did it feel like? What did you say to each other? And then Martin appeared in my head, alive, standing with his hands in his khaki pants, his blue shirt open at the throat. I had a thought to call him and say, “Don’t! Don’t do anything! I’ll be right home!” And then the feeling passed, like a shiver does.

  Robert said, “It was … well, the funeral was a week ago. Maybe it’s too soon to be gone, but I just had to …” He stood up and apologized again, he was so embarrassed. I said listen, you don’t have to apologize. He said it must be weird, seeing a man cry and I said oh no, not at all, hoping my face was not giving me away. He said Well, looked to the door. It was very quiet. You could hear the low buzz of the living-room lamp. I said suddenly, I have a bottle of wine, would you like a drink? He nodded, sat down again, and I poured us two coffee cups full, and we began to talk.

  He told me how his wife died, it was an aggressive form of lymphoma. From the time she was diagnosed until the day she died was only seven months. She was thirty-three. He said on the day they got the bad news, she came home and changed out of her dress and he saw her standing at their bedroom window in her slip, and he thought, this is the end of normal. I don’t know how I’ll live without her, he said, I don’t know what I am without her. They had no children—she’d not been able to conceive, and he said now he didn’t know whether that was good or bad. I know children usually offer some compensation, he said, but if I had someone around with her face, with her eyes … Then he asked did I have any children. I said yes and I told him about Ruthie. I told him little stories about her growing up, from bringing her home from the hospital all the way up to moving her into her own place. He listened, but in an abstract way that let me know my words were just a calming distraction. He listened the way a child listens to soothing words from a parent; the content doesn’t matter, it’s the fact of a kind voice that counts, that works.

  I realized at one point that my throat hurt a little from talking and I looked at my watch and it was 2:50. I started laughing and he looked at me and I said do you know what time it is? I showed him my watch and he said oh I’m so sorry and I said no, you didn’t make me do this. I wanted to do this. My hair had started to fall down from the bun I’d put in so long ago, and I pulled the pins out and he said oh, you have long hair, that’s nice. I said well, when you got to be my age it looked sort of silly, but I had always had long hair, I didn’t feel myself without it. He said what do you mean “your age,” how old are you? I had an awful temptation to say, How old do you think? but I hate it when people ask that. How they cock their heads when they ask that. Then I thought of saying, I’m sixty-four, so he would say how young I looked. But I didn’t. I said, I’m fifty, and I felt ashamed. He nodded. The age of losses, I said, and he said, pardon? I nearly yelled, This is the age of losses! as though he were some wizened geezer sitting next to me cupping his hand around his ear. What are you losing? he asked. And what I thought I was losing in the face of what he had in fact lost seemed so ridiculous. My great tragedy is that I got to live past thirty-three.

  I said, you know, it’s so small. It’s so egocentric. But I’m losing … well, my youth. My fertility. My sex appeal. I feel like I’m losing myself. It’s so scary. I feel like all the self I’ve ever been is leaving, and this new self is standing at the station. I don’t know who this new person is. Every day I look in the mirror expecting to see my old self back, and every day I have changed more into this new thing.

  Well, he said, you haven’t lost your sex appeal. You haven’t lost your appeal at all, I hope this is all right to say. I sat still, said nothing. He said, you’re a very attractive woman, physically. And you’re attractive beyond that. You’re very … present.

  Well, I said. I couldn’t look up.

  He said, I remember when my mother went through her change. For a while, I think for a whole year, she acted crazy as hell. She was all depressed and weepy—used to lock herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out, I don’t know what she was doing in there, but it was bad, we had only one bathroom and six kids. But then, all of a sudden, she was done with that. She launched herself into a new life where she felt she could say the hell with anything she didn’t like, and by God, she did say the hell with anything she didn’t like. She quit making dinner unless she wanted to, and she wanted to only about once a week. She wore these turquoise pedal pushers almost every day, big hoop earrings. She was really different, and at first this scared me, but then I realized I liked her better. She became a real person to me. She was interesting. After my father died, she moved into a small house that was entirely her. And she was happy, I swear, until the day she died. We knew exactly who we were burying.

  He stopped talking then, and I thought, he’s remembering his wife, realizing she will never get older. He’s thinking, what in the world is this woman complaining about. But when I looked up at him his face was full of compassion. Of kindness. And then he asked, wide-eyed and calm, if he could please brush my hair. I stood up, and I was a little dizzy—wine and fatigue—but I went and got my brush and sat on the floor before him and let him brush my hair. And I knew that I was his mother and his wife, and it was the most tender and full thing I think I have ever experienced. I closed my eyes, and I thought probably his were closed, too. When he was finished, he laid the brush down beside him and thanked me. I turned around, nodded. I said thank you. He said yes, all right. Then he stood, stretched, and I stood too, and he held me close to him, hugged me. And then, for reasons that now seem a little bizarre but then seemed right, he kissed me. And I let him. And then I took his hand and led him into the bedroom and lay down with him. We didn’t kiss again, we didn’t do anything but lie there, holding on to being alive and knowing there was nothing permanent about it. Morning came, we had some coffee, and then he left. We didn’t say a word.

  Dear Martin,

  We need to make a will. We need to talk about what we want done at our funerals. We keep saying we’re going to do this, and we don’t, but we have to. I don’t want to figure out what to do with our money, I’m sure it will not surprise you to know that. But I do know how I want my funeral, and I’m going to write it to you because you never will listen to me when I try to talk to you about it.

  I don’t want to be buried. I want to be cremated and scattered into the woods behind our house. I know you don’t like that idea, but I do. I want to be loose. I want to have instant integration with the elements. Why lie in a box delaying everything? And I am sick and tired of so many cemeteries. There could be parks there, children swinging. We can’t fit all these dead people on the earth anymore. I know you say you want to come and visit me if I go first, that you want to have a spot to sit and contemplate, but Martin, why g
et in the car and drive, why not be standing at the sink rinsing out your coffee cup and commune with me then? Why not sit in the den in the afternoon and talk to me? I can be everywhere instead of in a box in the ground, some weirdly designed thing that costs a fortune. I can’t be buried. What if I want to go somewhere?

  Now the service. I do want a service. I am going to write something and I will update it if I need to, but I am going to write something for you to read to the people and it will have to do with trying to see the whole circle. It will be designed to let people feel joy, I would really like them to feel joy. Well, I would like them to feel pain too, to blow their noses into their damp hankies and shake their heads and say, Jeez, that Nan; but mostly I want them to feel that this is a good thing, life and its hard, unexplain-able ways, it is a good thing, and although I may have gone a little crazy at fifty, I loved my life. When everyone is on the way out, I want you to play James Brown’s “I Feel Good.” Really, really loudly. I don’t care how old you are at the time or how you feel about James Brown, I want that song at my funeral. Every time I ever heard that song, I really did feel good. I always said, “Ow!” right with James a time or two, even though I was an uncool white woman who couldn’t dance. I want picnic food after the funeral service, ribs and coleslaw and potato salad and brownies. At our house. And then kick them all out, Martin, even though there will be some who want to stay. Some will want to stay and say things to you, and some will want to stay because they are always the last to leave in case anything happens. Usually it’s women, hovering around like huge flapping birds, but you just kick them out. And then you go in our bedroom and you pull down the shades and you take off your shoes and you lie down and you think of when we first met and you keep on thinking of everything you can remember about me up until the last day. Don’t you dare clean up the kitchen and put away the leftovers before you do this. You just lie down and remember everything. That will be the real service. It would be kind of nice if you would talk to me, because we don’t know, I might be able to hear you.