The Pull of the Moon (11 page)

I said, you know, it’s so small. It’s so egocentric. But I’m losing … well, my youth. My fertility. My sex appeal. I feel like I’m losing myself. It’s so scary. I feel like all the self I’ve ever been is leaving, and this new self is standing at the station. I don’t know who this new person is. Every day I look in the mirror expecting to see my old self back, and every day I have changed more into this new thing
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Well, he said, you haven’t lost your sex appeal. You haven’t lost your appeal at all, I hope this is all right to say. I sat still, said nothing. He said, you’re a very attractive woman, physically. And you’re attractive beyond that. You’re very … present
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Well, I said. I couldn’t look up
.

He said, I remember when my mother went through her change. For a while, I think for a whole year, she acted crazy as hell. She was all depressed and weepy—used to lock herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out, I don’t know what she was doing in there, but it was bad, we had only one bathroom and six kids. But then, all of a sudden, she was done with that. She launched herself into a new life where she felt she could say the hell with anything she didn’t like
,
and by God, she did say the hell with anything she didn’t like. She quit making dinner unless she wanted to, and she wanted to only about once a week. She wore these turquoise pedal pushers almost every day, big hoop earrings. She was really different, and at first this scared me, but then I realized I liked her better. She became a real person to me. She was interesting. After my father died, she moved into a small house that was entirely her. And she was happy, I swear, until the day she died. We knew exactly who we were burying
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He stopped talking then, and I thought, he’s remembering his wife, realizing she will never get older. He’s thinking, what in the world is this woman complaining about. But when I looked up at him his face was full of compassion. Of kindness. And then he asked, wide-eyed and calm, if he could please brush my hair. I stood up, and I was a little dizzy—wine and fatigue—but I went and got my brush and sat on the floor before him and let him brush my hair. And I knew that I was his mother and his wife, and it was the most tender and full thing I think I have ever experienced. I closed my eyes, and I thought probably his were closed, too. When he was finished, he laid the brush down beside him and thanked me. I turned around, nodded. I said thank
you.
He said yes
,
all right. Then he stood, stretched, and I stood too, and he held me close to him, hugged me. And then, for reasons that now seem a little bizarre but then seemed right, he kissed me. And I let him. And then I took his hand and led him into the bedroom and lay down with him. We didn’t kiss again, we didn’t do anything but lie there, holding on to being alive and knowing there was nothing permanent about it. Morning came, we had some coffee, and then he left. We didn’t say a word
.

Dear Martin,

We need to make a will. We need to talk about what we want done at our funerals. We keep saying we’re going to do this, and we don’t, but we have to. I don’t want to figure out what to do with our money, I’m sure it will not surprise you to know that. But I do know how I want my funeral, and I’m going to write it to you because you never will listen to me when I try to talk to you about it.

I don’t want to be buried. I want to be cremated and scattered into the woods behind our house. I know you don’t like that idea, but I do. I want to be loose. I want to have instant integration with the elements. Why lie in a box delaying everything? And I am sick and tired of so many cemeteries. There could be parks there, children swinging. We can’t fit all these dead people on the earth anymore. I know you say you want to come and visit me if I go first, that you want to have a spot to sit and contemplate, but Martin, why get in the car and drive, why not be standing at the sink rinsing out your coffee cup and commune with me then? Why not sit in the den in the afternoon and talk to me? I can be everywhere instead of in a box in the ground, some weirdly designed thing that costs a fortune. I can’t be buried. What if I want to go somewhere?

Now the service. I do want a service. I am going to write something and I will update it if I need to, but I am going to write something for you to read to the people and it will have to do with trying to see the whole circle. It will be designed to let people feel joy, I would really like them to feel joy. Well, I would like them to feel pain too, to blow their noses into their damp hankies and shake their heads and say, Jeez, that Nan; but mostly I want them to feel that this is a good thing, life and its hard, unexplain-able ways, it is a good thing, and although I may have gone a little crazy at fifty, I loved my life. When everyone is on the way out, I want you to play James Brown’s “I Feel Good.” Really, really loudly. I don’t care how old you are at the time or how you feel about James Brown, I want that song at my funeral. Every time I ever heard that song, I really did feel good. I always said, “Ow!” right with James a time or two, even though I was an uncool white woman who couldn’t dance. I want picnic food after the funeral service, ribs and coleslaw and potato salad and brownies. At our house. And then kick them all out, Martin, even though there will be some who want to stay. Some will want to stay and say things to you, and some will want to stay because they are always the last to leave in case anything happens. Usually it’s women, hovering around like huge flapping birds, but you just kick them out. And then you go in our bedroom and you pull down the shades and you take off your shoes and you lie down and you think of when we first met and you keep on thinking of everything you can remember about me up until the last day. Don’t you dare clean up the kitchen and put away the leftovers before you do this. You just lie down and remember everything. That will be the real service. It would be kind of nice if you would talk to me, because we don’t know, I might be able to hear you.

It’s so funny, as I write this I think, but of course that won’t really happen. Death. It won’t really happen to me. This is just in case.

I’ve decided to stay here in Minnesota one more night. Then I’ll be moving on. As always, I’ll write from where I am.

It seems to me that your physical exam with Dr. Singerman was scheduled for some time around now. Don’t think you can cancel it just because I’m not there to make you go.

Love,
Nan

I am writing this by flashlight, which makes each word seem so important, so intentional. It is an odd feeling; a stage play by one to an audience of the same one
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I have built a bed in the woods, and it is very dark, no moon that I can find, no stars, only the very dim outline of the foliage nearest me, and then the rest of the world drops off. I can feel fear in me but it has stayed at the level of my throat: my head is clear and calm. The air is close, humid. There is the high whine of insects dive-bombing, full-time residents here who do not respect the rights of those who are not. Tomorrow I will have plenty of bites to scratch. Sometimes it is a pleasant thing; it feels good to scratch a bad itch, three bites in a neat row at the ankle can offer an odd sort of bliss
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There are the sounds of moving leaves, twigs snapping for this reason or that, a rare call from an owl or, even better, a loon. I have sat for some time trying only to be still. It is so much harder than it seems. I have always hated the notion of stillness, of meditation. It seemed, on the surface at least, colossally boring. Empty of anything I might be interested in. I tried meditation once. I bought a loose white outfit, I bought a book, I sat in a prescribed position; and my singular longing the whole time was for a watch I could sneak a look at. The book had said not to wear any jewelry, especially a watch, that time would become irrelevant. Not for me. After ten minutes, I was up looking at the clock on the dresser, thinking surely that my half hour was up. I was so resistant, nothing could enter my head: I saw no instructive images, I heard no wise words from a blurry source. No dramas played themselves out; no lighted center of peace was created inside me. All that happened in my head is that some huge foot began impatiently tapping away. Fingers drummed. My mind was straining at the leash, saying, oh, please, let me at least make a grocery list
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I put my meditation outfit in the bottom of my underwear drawer and I gave the book away. I thought, this meditation, it’s a fad. A foreign import, like falafel. We are Westerners
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and we cannot do this right, no matter what anyone says. Our specialty is rock-and-roll, cars, blue jeans. Ice cream. We are not inner-oriented. We are oriented toward sofas and television, convoluted politics, escalating sizes of popcorn at movies featuring escalating levels of violence
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Something just happened here
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I undressed, in the dark. I stepped out of my sleeping bag and took off my clothes to lie down on the earth. I lay on my back and I rested my hand on my belly, then moved it downward slowly until I came to the slight rise of my pubic bone and the tangle of rough hair there. I could see nothing, and so the feeling was more intense; and I felt more the toucher than the one being touched. I moved my fingers down farther, then pushed one inside myself, pushed up high until I found the tip of my uterus. I held my finger there for a long time, pushed across a message from me to me. Thanks. And forgiveness. Then I pulled my finger out and rubbed it along the inside of my thigh. It felt like blood, what I rubbed there. I was sure it was blood, it felt too thick to be anything else. I turned on my flashlight, excited, to look; but no, it was not blood, it was just dampness, colorless and not magical. Only of course magical. I could smell ocean. I tasted my own self’s salt. And saw there was nothing to forgive myself for
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I lay down again, turned onto my front. I spread out my arms and my legs, and I thought, here. Here I am. I felt a pine needle dig into my thigh, and then I didn’t feel it. I smelled the rich smell of black dirt; I felt something else’s pulse in my chest; I understood with my belly that the sun was on the way within the next few minutes. I stood up and large hands moved into me and then separated themselves inside me, making me wider. I breathed in all I could take. And was, suddenly, myself again, overly aware of where the night space ended and I began. I sat down, waited for the pink of dawn to slit the bottom of the black horizon
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So
.

So
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There is a feeling you have coming home at night when you are tired, and the key turns so easily in the lock, and your sheets are fresh from your having changed them that morning. There is a feeling you have after your baby has nursed and now falls asleep on your shoulder. That is something like what I just felt. Only, the me-ness seemed to be removed, so that other things could enter in. It was a feeling of finding one’s real place, I mean in the scheme of things. I felt as though I had, for once, the right perspective on death. It was a matter of the water drop seeing the falls, of losing the ego to the Wheel. But it was fleeting. I could feel my own
longing for my own self return, my insistence on my own importance, at least to myself. It’s funny; I always thought that to lose one’s sense of self would be a horrible, disorienting thing. But it’s not. It is a movement toward the deepest kind of relief I have ever known
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I feel as though this was a holy and personal event I will never share with anyone. That it cannot be shared, and should not be. Occasionally, one learns quiet, and then how to keep it. Even me, who has always felt that everything must be shared, in order for it to be
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Late morning. I am still here, outside, being inspected by squirrels and birds high up in the trees. I am sore and creaky, and a thin line of pain runs from my shoulder into the middle of my back. But I am exhilarated. I can roll up my bed and go back to the cabin for coffee and then I can drive to a new place. And then to another new place. I am only fifty
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