The Pull of the Moon
Read The Pull of the Moon Online
Authors: Elizabeth Berg
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Family Life, #Literary, #Women's Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Domestic Life, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Psychological Thrillers, #General, #Fiction
The Pull of the Moon
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2010 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition
The Last Time I Saw You
copyright © 2010 by Elizabeth Berg
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE & Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1996.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming hardcover edition of
The Last Time I Saw You
by Elizabeth Berg. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
www.randomhousereaderscircle.com
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Praise for
Elizabeth Berg and
The Pull of the Moon
“[Berg] has a gift for capturing the small, often sweet details of ordinary life.”
—
Newsday
“Berg’s writing is to literature what Chopin’s études are to music—measured, delicate, and impossible to walk away from.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
“Berg’s great talent is knowing how to tell stories that touch the heart…. Reading an Elizabeth Berg novel is like lingering over coffee with a Dear friend. It lets you know there are other people out there feeling the same way you sometimes do…. This is a book that women will pass around to each other with a brief handwritten note tucked inside the cover, ‘You have to read this.’”
—Charleston
Sunday Gazette-Mail
“Berg has created a woman worth listening to…. You cheer for this woman who is willing to break away from all that’s safe and familiar and find a little truth.”
—
Hartford Courant
“[The Pull of the Moon]
is upbeat from beginning to end.”
—Boston Sunday Globe
“[Berg] specializes in illuminating little truths about women’s lives, especially the nature of their relationships with men…. Berg’s work also glows with a sensual appreciation of life’s fine details: the cast of sunlight drifting through a window, the taste of food, the color of wood, the feel of rain.”
Orlando Sentinel
“[Berg] drives her narrative home with direct, heartfelt language. She has a real gift for imbuing ordinary lives with emotional weight and heft.”
—
Booklist
“Simply wonderful … [The
Pull of the Moon]
puts into perfect perspective the thoughts and worries that keep us up at night.”
—Chattanooga Times
“Berg convincingly shows the anxiety, fear, and hard choices women face when standing on the threshold between youth and age…. Berg’s fast-moving story invites us to share in Nan’s fears and to experience the joy in her discovery that ‘a certain richness happens only later in life.’”
—The Virginian-Pilot
“Amusing and poignant, involving, and candid.”
—Albany
Times Union
Also by Elizabeth Berg
HOME SAFE
THE DAY I ATE WHATEVER I WANTED
DREAM WHEN YOU’RE FEELING BLUE
THE HANDMAID AND THE CARPENTER
WE ARE ALL WELCOME HERE
THE YEAR OF PLEASURES
THE ART OF MENDING
SAY WHEN
TRUE TO FORM
ORDINARY LIFE: STORIES
NEVER CHANGE
OPEN HOUSE
ESCAPING INTO THE OPEN: THE ART OF WRITING TRUE
UNTIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG
WHAT WE KEEP
JOY SCHOOL
RANGE OF MOTION
TALK BEFORE SLEEP
DURABLE GOODS
FAMILY TRADITIONS
Table of Contents
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,
Acknowledgments
My editor, Kate Medina, read this book in installments and kept calling to say she loved it. This was rocket fuel to the fingers. Lisa Bankoff has a cool head, a warm heart, and a great sense of humor—an unbeatable combination in an agent. Jean-Isabel McNutt copy-edits with artful precision and with enormous sensitivity. Thanks too to Sally Hoffman, Renana Meyers, Linda Pennell and Abby Rose for the excellent work they do for me.
My Tuesday morning writing group was with me every step of the way, as usual. My thanks to Sally Brady, Betsy Cox, Linda Cutting, Alan Emmet, Alex Johnson, Kate Kruschwitz, Mary Mitchell, Rick Reynolds, and Donna Stein for their honest input. And for their love.
Last, but most: Thanks to my daughters, Julie and Jennifer, for being themselves; and thanks to my husband, Howard, who tolerates all my travels—inside and out.
Dear Martin,
I know you think I keep that green rock by my bed because I like its color. And I do like its color. But the reason I keep it by my bed is that oftentimes I wake up frightened, and it comforts me to hold it then. I squeeze it. I lie on my side away from you and I squeeze the rock and look out the window and think that outside are rocks just like this one, lying still and strong and silent. They are beside rivers in Egypt and in fields in Germany and at the center of the desert and on the moon. The rock seems to act as a conduit, drawing out of me whatever it is that is making my heart race, whatever is making me feel as though my own soul is one step ahead of me, saying don’t come. Don’t bother. Martin, I am fifty years old. The time of losses is upon me. Maybe that’s it. I don’t know. I saw Kotex in the drugstore the other day and began to weep. Then I saw a mother with a very little girl, helping her pick out crayons, and this, too, undid me. I had to leave without buying what I came for. I drove home and I thought about Ruthie standing next to me as I lay on the couch one day. She was two and a half, holding Legos in the basket of her hands. I had a mild case of flu; I was mostly just exhausted. And Ruthie dropped the Legos on me and used my chest to build a small city and I was perfectly happy. I think I even knew it. It was that Chinese thing, that when your mind is in your heart, you are happy.
You know, Martin, when Ruthie was a freshman in high school, I was driving home from the grocery store one day and listening to the radio and I all of a sudden realized that in four years she would be gone. And I felt like screaming. Not because I have nothing else in my life. Just because she would be gone. I pulled over and I wept so hard the car was shaking, and then I repaired my makeup in the rearview mirror, and then I came home and made dinner and I never said a thing about it, although maybe I should have. Maybe I should have started telling you then. I was afraid, I think, that you would say, “Well, she’ll visit,” and the feeling would have been of all my eggs being walked on by boots.
I’m sorry the note I left you was so abrupt. I just wanted you to know I was safe. But I shouldn’t have said I’d be back in a day or two. I won’t be back for awhile. I’m on a trip. I needed all of a sudden to go, without saying where, because I don’t know where. I know this is not like me. I know that. But please believe me, I am safe and I am not crazy, I felt as though if I didn’t do this I wouldn’t be safe and I would be crazy.
I have no idea what will happen next. I am in a small Holiday Inn one hundred and eighty miles from home. I have a view of the pool. Beside me I have a turquoise journal, tooled leather, held closed by a thin black strap wrapped around a silver button. I bought it the day before I left. Normally, that kind of thing would not appeal to me. But it seemed I had to have it. I opened it, looked at the unlined pages, closed it back up and bought it. It was far too expensive, forty dollars, but it seemed to me to be capable of giving me something I’d pay more for. I thought, I’m going to buy this journal and then I’m going to run away. And that’s what I did.
I don’t mean this to be against you. I don’t mean any of it to be against you. Or even about you. I have felt for so long like I am drowning. And we are so fixed in our ways I couldn’t begin to tell you all that has happened inside me. It was like this: I would be standing over you pouring your coffee and looking down at your thinning hair and I would be loving you, Martin, but I would feel as though I were on a ship pulling away from the shore. As though the fact of your sitting there in your usual spot with cornflakes and orange juice was the most fantastic science fiction. I would put the coffeepot back on the warmer and sit opposite you and talk about what was in the newspaper, and inside me would be a howling so fierce I couldn’t believe the sounds weren’t coming out of my eyes, out of my ears, from beneath my fingernails. I couldn’t believe we weren’t both astonished—made breathless—at this sudden excess in me, this unmanageable mess. There were a couple of times I tried to start telling you about it. But I couldn’t do it. There were no words. As even now, there are not. Not really.
I’ll call Ruthie. I’ll tell her. You can tell everyone else anything you want. I mean this kindly, Martin.
I’ll write you often. I don’t want to talk. Please Well. You know, I write that word
please
and I don’t have any idea what to say after it. But please. And can you believe this? I love you.
Nan