The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg Read Free Book Online Page B

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 you 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