The Pull of the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

and I remembered my desire to talk to other women. It occurred to me that I could really do it. Well, I could try. I pulled into the driveway, and the woman shaded her eyes against the sun, looking to see who I was .
    “I’m not anyone,” I said, getting out of the car. And then , “You don’t know me.” She didn’t say anything. I said I was not a salesperson or a Jehovah’s Witness and then she smiled, relaxed. She asked if I were lost. I said sort of. She was awfully young, a pretty woman, her short, dark hairdo and large round eyes reminding me of a chickadee. She wore a sweatshirt and jeans and lovely pearl studs in her ears—dressing up a bit of herself so she wouldn’t forget how, no doubt. You will see this in mothers of small children: they dress up from the neck up. Everything else is in danger of peanut butter .
    I sat down with her—although a step below her out of some sense of propriety—and one of her children, a boy who looked to be around four or so, came running up at full speed, then stopped dead in his tracks before me. I said hello and he said nothing, just looked at his mother. “She’s lost,” the mother said. “She just needs directions.” “Oh,” he said, in that kind of adenoidal voice kids often have. Then he ran off to join his slightly younger sister, who was adjusting her doll in the buggy with straight-mouthed determination. The boy faced away from her, made a gun out of a stick, fired into the woods at the enemy. The ancient roles .
    I used to play with my cousins in the basement of our grandparents’ house. They were the warriors; we girls were the nurses, left to talk quietly to each other and make a hospital from towels we found in the laundry and lawn furniture stored in the cobwebby furnace room. One by one, the boys showed up with whatever wounds they described to us: “My guts are hanging out, right here, see? Pretend it’s just all gloppy intestines, real slimy.” Or “My bone is sticking out of my arm plus my ear got shot off.” Or “I’m dead. You have to wrap me up like a mummy and call my parents.” We cared for them, smiling with a kind of bruised superiority, silent .
    The young woman asked me if I would like a cup of coffee. I said I would love one. She said she’d be right back and then when she stood up, there was just the tiniest hint of fear in her, a hesitancy—as though she were thinking, Wait, should I leave this stranger out here with my children, should I be getting coffee for someone who might be a bad headline tomorrow? But I looked at her and smiled my intentions and this worked; people still often communicate best without words. The woman came out with a yellow mug with blackberries painted on it and we drank our coffee and I told her about what I was doing. Said I’d decided I needed a trip away, just by myself, that my husband was back home, we were fine, I just … And she sighed and said yeah, she loved her husband but that she ran away from him with some frequency . I said, really? She said, yes, most of the time he knew nothing about it. But once he did. They’d had a bad fight late at night and she took off in the car, meaning never to come back, meaning to drive to Alaska and begin again. But she was barefoot and this seemed to prevent her from doing anything. She said she drove to the grocery store and slept in the parking lot until three-thirty, then snuck back into the house. “But I didn’t go to bed. I slept on the couch,” she said. “I didn’t want him to know I was home.” “Right,” I said, and I thought, how can it be that two strangers are exchanging such intimate things? Well, most women are full to the brim, that’s all. That’s what I think. I think we are most of us ready to explode, especially when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with “Mommy” embroidered over the left