The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,1

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

I think the last time I had a diary I was eleven years old. At the top of every page, I would say what we had for dinner. That was the most interesting part. I thought filthy was thilthy. “Todd Lundgren is thilthy!” I wrote. Because I saw him at a party putting his hands up Maria Gonzales’s skirt. She was wearing nylons and her garters were sticking out because her skirt was pushed up so high.

Well, this is probably not what I should say.

But why not.

I know a woman who tapes pictures in her diary, presses flowers in it, she has the clipping from when John Lennon was shot. Well, she says, it’s mine, for me, for whatever I want.

I bought this black pen for you. I feel shy saying this, as though we are friends too new to exchange anything without it being too important.

I have a picture to give you, too. Here is a forties photograph of a woman that I found in last Sunday’s paper. She is seated on the grass, wearing a suit and a hat, her purse centered in her lap. She is smiling, but her eyes ache, and behind her, I know this, her hands are clenched. She can’t relax. She has forgotten the grass. I kept staring at her, thinking, this is me. Checking my purse three times for keys before I leave the house. Stacking mail in order of the size of the envelopes. Answering the phone every single time it rings, writing “paper towels” on the grocery list the second after I use the last one. I too have forgotten the grass. But I used to do one-handed cartwheels and then collapse into it for the fine sight of the blades close up. And there was no sense of any kind of time. And I was not holding in my stomach or thinking what does my opinion mean to others. I was not regretting any part of myself. There was only sun-rich color, and smell, and the slight give of the soft earth beneath me. My mind was in my heart, anchored like a bright kite in a safe place.

I think I will not use a map. And I think I would like to stop at a house now and then and ask any woman I find there, how are you doing? No, but really. How are you doing?

Dear Martin,

Well, here it is. The first morning. I had such a scary dream last night. Some men had broken into the house and they