The Pull of the Moon (14 page)

Dear Martin,

Last night I dreamed I was here, dreaming. It was very odd, waking up and trying to separate things. I felt hungry and I sat on the side of the bed thinking, where should I go? A diner, for two over easy? A bakery, for a blueberry muffin? The motel had a small restaurant attached, for breakfast only, “The Good Morning Café,” it was called. I wasn’t sure if that would be a good idea. Some things wonderfully named have terrible-tasting food.

But I did go, and I sat at the counter and after I ordered my Western omelet I read a local newspaper. There was a photograph on the front page of a group of people sitting around a picnic table, all of them older. It was the sixtieth reunion of the local high school, McKinley High. I thought probably this small crowd was there to see who was still alive. But when I looked closer at the faces, I didn’t see any mournful satisfaction. I saw that they were looking at each other in a way that bypassed all those years. The football player was still seeing the pink-cheeked girl in the pleated skirt, and vice versa.

I remember a man whose wife died a gruesome death telling me that he was amazed by people who were amazed that he could take care of her at the end, that he could keep her at home and offer ice chips to cracked lips that no longer said anything comprehensible, that he could uncomplainingly change sheets a few times a day because they had been soiled for this awful reason or that. “But I saw her the way she used to be,” he told me. “I mean, through the way that she was now. Through it and including it, actually, it was all always her.” And I remember thinking, that was a lucky woman. Never mind that she died a horrible death—we all are faced with that possibility. What mattered was that at the end, someone who loved her sat by her, saying, I see you.

I noticed this morning that the veins on my hands don’t look the way they used to. And the first thought that came to me was, 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 but sleep, bathrooms, and meals. When I left, I couldn’t wait to get away. Now I can’t wait to get back.

So here I come, Martin, changed a bit, it’s true. I am Nana Exsanna Popana, woman and child. I am every age I ever was and I always will be and I know that now. I am coming home and I want nothing more than to try to tell you everything. I’m so eager to see you, Martin. Perhaps we’ll see each other.

Love,
Nan

The Pull of the Moon

ELIZABETH BERG

A Reader’s Guide

On Writing
The Pull of the Moon

In the early nineties, I was in one of my favorite bookstores in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when I saw a journal that I liked very much. Its cover was tooled leather in a rich turquoise color, and it had a big silver button you wrapped a length of black rawhide around to keep it closed. I wanted to buy it, but when I saw the price—forty dollars!—I decided not to.

Still, on the way home I kept thinking about it: how satisfying the rough texture of the cover felt beneath my fingers, how smooth the pages were, and how they sang a siren song, asking to be filled with lines of black ink from a fountain pen. But the price was just ridiculous. Besides that, what happens with me and really nice journals is that they intimidate me. I find them too pretty to use; I don’t want to make mistakes in them. I thought,
Who would buy such a journal and really use it?
And into my head, fully formed, walked Nan, the protagonist of
The Pull of the Moon
. I saw her as fifty years old, mildly overweight, attractively disheveled, and full of despair about things she just couldn’t articulate. I saw her as having a good heart but a confused one. I saw her walking into that same bookstore, seeing the journal, and understanding that she needed to buy it and then run away from home. Not for forever, just long enough for her to understand what was going on inside her.

Nan is married to Martin, and as the novel begins she leaves him a note on the kitchen table, explaining that she has to go without really knowing where. She tells him that she will keep in touch with him, that she will return (though she doesn’t know when), and that she loves him.

Next comes a journal entry, and this establishes the format of the novel: letters alternating with entries in a journal. Originally, I’d thought that the content would deal with the kind of psychic avalanche that menopause brings. I thought it would talk about what it means to a woman to lose her fertility and to suffer the ancillary changes that come with that, from emotional lability to the humiliation of whiskers suddenly appearing on one’s chin. But the novel became much more than that. It became a kind of polemic against the way women continue to be underestimated and mistreated, and how aging women in this culture are not valued and often seem all but invisible. It demonstrated the worth of the spontaneous conversation, and the joy of traveling slowly down lesser-used roads, taking the time to explore everything that appeals to you, whether that’s a yellow dress in a storefront window, or fresh-picked peaches at a farm stand, or a conversation with a World War II vet who uses his local library for socializing—and for feeling that he still has something to give. Nan gently counsels a young man suffering from his parents’ recent divorce, and learns about the dangers of stereotyping from a salty woman wearing cha-cha shoes who’s hanging out laundry in the trailer park where she lives. On more than one occasion, Nan sleeps alone out in the woods, trying to overcome a fear of the dark she’s had since childhood.

Nan tries to understand the place she and her husband have come to in their marriage, and why. She learns that in the end, one must rely upon oneself more than anyone else, and that doing so can bring a grounded happiness and strength—and relief.

What has surprised me about the reception to the book is how many younger women resonated with and related to it. I continue to get letters from twenty- or thirtysomething women who thank me for recognizing that sweet satisfaction and abject boredom can coexist in the heart of a stay-at-home mom. Other letters contain metaphorical pokes in the ribs from older, long-married women who often feel like murdering their husbands, but God forbid anyone else say anything bad about them. I get letters from daughters who say the book helped them better understand their mothers, and from husbands who say it helped them understand their wives. I get letters from gay men saying that they can relate to the book and that of all my titles, it’s their favorite, and I suspect it’s because
The Pull of the Moon
is about finding safe harbor inside yourself, learning to like and celebrate the unique individual that you are.

In the years since the book came out, I have learned how much more alike than different we all are, not only women, but men, too. Literally coast to coast, people have told me that reading
The Pull of the Moon
made them think I’d been looking in their windows, eavesdropping on their conversations. They have thanked me for putting into words the things they’ve felt but couldn’t say.

The Pull of the Moon
is the only novel I’ve written that has become a play, and what a profound experience it was for me to sit with an audience in the dark and think that all of us were feeling pretty much the same thing when the eighty-five-year-old character, Eugenie, tells Nan that no matter what she may be feeling, she most likely has “a lot of folks right with [her].” I heard audiences loudly laugh at Nan telling a hairdresser to sit down and she’d cut
his
hair, and quietly weep when Nan listened to a man talk about the day he and his wife came home from the doctor’s office after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

People often ask me if I ever took the kind of journey Nan does. And I tell them no, I had to write about it in order to have the experience vicariously. Certain readers were braver than I: When I was on tour for the book in Salt Lake City, a woman marched up to me and said, “Well, I got my hair done, I got a journal, and I’m hitting the road.” There’s not a doubt in my mind that she arrived home glad she had made that trip. Because I’m pretty sure the gift you get when you do such a thing is to reclaim or even discover for the first time a certain authenticity of self, which, when we do not have it, makes for a dark and ineluctable despair.

In the end I think the book is best summarized by what a male reviewer said: “This is not a novel about a woman leaving home, but rather a human being finding her way back.” I look forward to the day when I follow my own advice and put the key in the ignition, heading off for the nowhere that leads to everything.