The Pull of the Moon (7 page)

Love,
Nan

Well, I suppose I did a very foolish thing today. On the way out of the city, I picked up a hitchhiker. He seemed so nice, that’s the only way I can say it, standing there, his thumb out and his face a little embarrassed. Handsome thing. He got in and we got to talking and he told me he was coming from his girlfriend’s house, well, not his
girl
friend, just a friend who was a girl. I suspected that, this man was gay, I could see that. He said the woman was his best friend and they’d decided to have a baby together, that she was close to the end of the pregnancy now and very testy, in fact she’d just thrown him out of her apartment and he’d had no way home, they’d been out in her car. He said he thought pregnant women were supposed to be easy to get along with, all dreamy and soft
.

I said, Well
.

He said she’d been cleaning like a crazy person and I said yes, the time is close, then, that was exactly what I’d done when I was close. Martin came home and I had been washing walls which I had never done in my life. He’d taken the bucket from me, saying, “Nan, Nan.” It was kind of sweet. That night, at four in the morning, the contractions started. I’d awakened Martin and he’d said, “Well, you’d better try to rest a little more, you’ll need your strength,” and then he promptly went back to sleep. Snored! But I got up and went into Ruthie’s room, which was all ready for her. I stacked and restacked her tiny T-shirts, wound her mobile, thought, soon I will know if you’re a boy or a girl
.

I told this young man, Ethan, his name was, I said, you know, a woman who is very pregnant needs a lot of very special attention. He said, well what could he do, he was there, wasn’t he?, he came to see her every day, he tried to do things for her, but she was just so damn cranky. And then he sighed and looked out the window and said he thought what she really wanted was for him to love her … that way. And he couldn’t. I said that must be very hard. He said I didn’t know the half of it. I said maybe he shouldn’t go home, maybe he should go back to her apartment. He said yes he
knew that, in fact he was just going to ask me to let him out and he was going to hitch back there, take her out to dinner, she liked the bacon burgers at the Embers, lately, although he himself thought it was not the best thing for the baby. I said I’d take him back to her house. He said really? I said sure. He asked me to stop at a florist’s and he came out with two bouquets. He’d gotten one for me. Freesia. I said, Oh, but I’m on the road, they’ll just die. So he went back in the store and bought a vase and he put the flowers in there and anchored it with a ribbon to the door handle. I thought, what a nice thing. And I was so happy I’d picked him up
.

I used to always have interesting things happen when I picked up hitchhikers—not always pleasant, but always interesting. Once, a man had such terrible BO I had to leave the car windows open overnight. But other times I got to see the flash of a life like a peek at someone’s true hand of cards, and I liked that
.

On my twentieth birthday, I was out driving with a girlfriend and we picked up a man I have thought about a million times since. He sat in the back with his arm draped across the seat as though his invisible companion were along for the ride, too. My girlfriend and I were kidding around a little bit and he was laughing at everything we said and soon
we were all laughing, it was the kind of thing where the laughter feeds on itself, where the sound of someone else’s snorting and wheezing keeps you going until you don’t even know why you started laughing in the first place—and you don’t care. It’s so good for you, that kind of hard laughter, so cleansing—you feel like your liver’s been held up and hosed down, your heart relieved of a million grimy weights. We were driving down Lake Street, I remember, with the windows open and our elbows hanging out to an early spring day. The sun was high in the sky, “I Can See Clearly Now” was on the radio and I thought, nothing needs to be hard. I thought, I can suggest anything, and these two will say, “Sure!”

Before I had a car, I hitchhiked a lot, too. I had my fair share of nasty men pick me up; one said he “laid out stiffs” for a living, and showed me his business card:
THOMPSON MORTUARY
,
it said, in apologetic script. Then he asked if I would like to screw him, for a hundred dollars. He showed me the hundred-dollar bill, folded into quarters and stuffed into a corner of his wallet. I said, But don’t you want to be in love, have sex with someone you really care about? I really said that. I think I thought I was Mobile Therapist. He said no. I said, Well then why don’t you just get a prostitute? He
said, “I don’t want a prostitute, I want a nice girl, like you.” His voice was so oily and dark and it came to me that he could take me anywhere and do anything. When he came to a stop sign I said, This is fine, thank you, have a nice day, thank you, and I got out and went home and called my boyfriend Bob Sandler and he came over and got me to stop shaking. I wonder where Bob is now. I wonder if he still has his hair, he had beautiful hair
.

Another time I got picked up by a mother who was bringing her little son home from school, and she talked to him with great interest and respect about what he had done that day. I remember thinking, If I become a mother, let me be this kind. I was fascinated by the very notion of showing a child respect, it was outside my experience, my parents viewed children rather like puppies. The boy was about six, sitting with his book bag on his lap, idly fingering the clasp and having a conversation with his mommy and his insides felt right, I knew it. I thought, yes, let me be just like her
.

I tried, but I don’t think I succeeded. There is so much I’d do differently, if I could. Sometimes in the quiet of the afternoon, I sit in Ruthie’s room thinking, an ache of regret lying like a stone in the bottom of my stomach. Not long ago I remembered how Ruthie always said, “Thank you
,
Mommy,” whenever I bought her school clothes, and I burst into tears because she should not have felt she needed to thank me for what was her due. I shouldn’t have said, “You’re welcome.” I should have said, “Oh, Ruthie, you don’t have to thank me.” Then I thought about how she also used to ask if it was all right to roll down the window of the car and I said out loud to her bedside lamp, “My God, I was so controlling. I’m so sorry.” After I cried for awhile (and you know I’d been crying so often that week) I got up in the middle of this particular torrent of tears and made myself a bologna sandwich—anyway, after I finished crying, I called Ruthie and asked her if she thought I had done anything terrible when I was raising her. I said we were both old enough to talk about this now, and I was truly interested in knowing her real feelings. At first, she was kind of flustered, embarrassed—and she probably wondered if I were nuts—but then she said, “Well, mostly, you just taught me to trust myself.” And I said did I really do that? and she said yes. And I thought, how could I have taught you something I never learned for myself?

But maybe there was evidence for Ruthie’s strength of spirit, all along. When she was in junior high school, that most dangerous of places for girls, she went through a very
rough time with her friends. What happened is that she got pushed out of her group. I saw it coming, but I couldn’t tell her. I had no idea how to say, Honey, I don’t think they want you anymore. I thought they were crazy. I wanted to hurt them. I saw one of their group, Lindsay, in the drugstore one day when all this had started happening—the chicken calls, the way Ruthie’s Saturdays were suddenly blank—and I thought about telling the clerk I’d seen that girl shoplifting—many, many times. I thought about grabbing her by her pert blonde ponytail and holding the spiral-bound notebook I was buying up to her neck. But I didn’t. I smiled at her. I said how’s your mother. I said tell her I said hello. And when, after a period of isolation, Ruthie determinedly brought home a new friend, I made cookies. The effort of starting a friendship was showing in both of their faces, it was as though their underwear was excruciatingly tight. I overdid it, of course; I made three kinds of cookies, I folded the paper napkins into swans; I made a show of exiting so that they would know they were free to tell delicious secrets. They sat so straight and quietly at the kitchen table, and after I left I sat in the living room holding a magazine on my lap and craning my neck to listen to their soft, short sentences. I wanted to be able to tell Ruthie how to be popular
,
how to make and keep friends. But I was—and still am—pretty much a loner, one who wearies of almost anyone’s company much too soon. My mother told me that when I was four, I came inside from where I’d been playing with another little girl, my first play date, and said she should go home now. Seven minutes had passed. Even when I got older, I’d be sitting with a bunch of college friends and suddenly have to leave. They were good-natured about it, they knew me. “Uh-oh!” they’d say. “Nan’s gotta go, get out of the way!” I wanted Ruthie to be different from me, to be someone who could make casual conversation without clenching her fists, who could be comfortable at a party. Well, she is that. She is quite sociable. But she is like me, too. Thus the miracle of mothering. Thus the duck who puts her head under her wing but still watches her ducklings bustling about her, their heads held high
.

Suddenly, I miss the scent of Martin. Isn’t it funny, he has turned out to be the one I can be with the longest
.

Dear Martin,

I am pulled over in a roadside rest. The sun is starting to go down, and the colors are spectacular. I thought that rather than risk an accident, I’d pull over and watch, and write to you.

I was thinking today that maybe you should retire, take an early retirement. Now, don’t start huffing and puffing and thinking up all your fancy arguments. Just wait, I want to tell you something.

I don’t regret the fact that I was the one to stop working to raise Ruthie. When we brought her home from the hospital I hovered over you every time you even held her. I knew you were her father and half responsible for her in every way, but I have to tell you, Martin, as far as I was concerned, she was really all mine. I made her baby food, I picked out her toys and her clothes, I took her to school every first day, I pulled her shades down for her naps, I took her to the doctor, I braided her hair and buckled her shoes and mounted her artwork on the refrigerator. And I wanted to.
I
wanted to. Once she got into the teen years, you and she seemed to get closer and that was fine with me, too. I had had my hands to her when she was still wet, was how I saw it. Now I could step back—keep watching, but step back. And then back further.

All during those years of Ruthie growing up, I was also the one to cook and shop and clean, and I didn’t really mind that, either. Of course there were some bad days. Remember the time Ruthie was napping on a Saturday afternoon and I sat in the living room literally tearing my hair out and saying I was too
smart
to do this, that a chimpanzee could do what I was doing—better!, that I had to have more challenge and stimulation in my life or I was going to die? I remember you trying to help, suggesting I get a job, and how I screamed at you that I could never do that, I couldn’t leave her with someone else. It is such a violent love, that of a mother for a young child. And I had to be there, no matter the cost. I knew I was missing some things, I could feel some brightness of mind dulling; but on balance I loved what I did.

I remember once when Ruthie had just turned three. I was in the kitchen, I’d just finished putting everything in the pot for stew, and the carrots were such a deep orange, the peas such a deep green, and I’d gotten a beautiful loaf of peasant bread and it lay on the cutting board looking so … French. It was time now to just wait for the smell, my favorite part. I’d put in a few extra cloves, stuck them into a whole onion, in a line like a careless necklace. I took off my apron and came out into the hall and Ruthie had lined up all her dolls and stuffed animals along the wall and she was sitting before them on her little wooden step stool, holding a book in her lap. “What are you doing?” I asked her, and she said teaching school. I said Oh, and I went into the living room and read the paper—well, I looked at ads for the fancy brassieres, read the recipes and the arts page—but mostly I was listening to Ruthie “read” her book about birds, one of her favorites. “Some birdies fly high in the sky,” she said, in a high, clear voice that was learning pleasure. “Some birdies live in the nest.” And then, ad-libbing, “with their mommies.” I put down the paper and leaned back in the chair and thought, I can never be anywhere else. There is nothing that comes close to this. Outside, it snowed; fat, lazy flakes, drifting with soft intention toward the place they were meant to land.

I mean to tell you that I was mostly content, Martin. I carried on sometimes, I know, but I was mostly deeply content.

But now I want, well, I don’t know, I guess I want a shared something with you. I want you to cook with me, to do a marinade for the swordfish while I do the salad. What have you been working for, Martin, if you don’t get the chance to do these things? I know you’re not domestically inclined; I know you’ll never take up needlepoint or quilting like some men do. But Martin, could you please just think about stopping work to see what happens? We are so lucky to have that option, why don’t we use it? I don’t want to go to Greece or Tuscany or do any of that fancy traveling stuff. I always hated traveling, you know that, the notion of figuring out how many pairs of underpants to bring used to make me depressed. You must be thinking that I’ve changed my mind, that I’ve begun to love travel, look at what I’m doing now. I know exactly how your face looks if you are thinking that, too, and the place in your cheek where your tongue is. But this doesn’t feel like travel to me. It feels too much my own to be like travel, if you know what I mean.

So with our free time, if we get to have it, I wouldn’t want to go anywhere. I just want to be able to sit down after supper and look at what’s at the movies we can walk to. I want to take an afternoon to search out wildflowers—or, here, Martin, to look at fast cars. Wouldn’t you like to do that? Instead of sitting at some meeting in an overly hot conference room, wouldn’t you like to test-drive a Viper? We could do that, I’ll wear a silk pantsuit and those three-carat earrings you gave me, they’ll believe us.

I have a memory of my mother taking me outside in the rain. I don’t think I could have been more than five. She’d been cleaning the windows with vinegar and newspaper, and I’d been sitting at her feet for the pleasure of the squeak and the smell. She had her cleaning kerchief on her head, a bright yellow triangle knotted at the base of her neck. It started to rain and she stood at the window watching, with me hiked up on her hip. She was quiet for a long time, but then she all of a sudden ran outside with me, whooping away. It was just pouring, but her face was directed right up to the sky, and she twirled me around and around and started singing some show tune really loud, I think it was an Ethel Merman song. I’d never heard her sing before. And then we came in and dried off and I never heard her sing again. Not once, not even under her breath, along with the radio. And the thing is, I believe she had a beautiful voice. I believe my memory is correct in this.

I am so often struck by what we do not do, all of us. And I am also, now, so acutely aware of the quick passage of time, the way that we come suddenly to our own, separate closures. It is as though a thing says, I told you. But you thought I was just kidding.

Martin, while I’ve been writing, the sky has changed from a pastel yellow pink to a dusky purple and now it’s hard to see. But this dark is beautiful, too. It really is.

Love,
Nan