The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg Page A

got lost, and so did I .
    I remember some of that old Jame coming back at one point, though. It was when Ruthie was a toddler, too young for school, too old to stay in the house for too long. I’d been making the most fantastic caramel rolls, improvising out of boredom until, if do say so myself, they were extraordinary-tasting. I used to give them to the neighbors, Ruthie and I would deliver them in a basket with a blue-and-white cloth napkin, and they would all say the same thing, they would say, “My God, Nan, these are incredible.” Most of the time their mouths would be full when they told me, they would be all excited. And I got this idea that I would set up a little stand at the T stop close to our house. I told Martin about it, I said I’d put up a card table and cover it with some homey embroidered tablecloth and sell the rolls for seventy-five cents each and it would pay for the ingredients and give me a bit of a profit and it would be fun for Ruthie and me and it would be nice for the commuters, to have something home-made to eat on the train. And when I got done telling Martin, he said, My God, Nan, you’re serious? And when he said that, I saw all that I had said in another light, and I was so ashamed. I said Well, no, not really .
    I don’t know why I did that. I hate that I did that. I see little stands now at the T, places selling muffins and rolls and coffee and juice and everyone loves them and they turn a tidy profit and I happen to know they run out of caramel rolls first .
    Something else. There was a period of time when Ruthie was older and off with her friends all the time on the weekends; she didn’t want to do anything with her parents anymore. I would get up early on Saturday or Sunday and sit at the kitchen table and think, what should Martin and I do today? I would come up with this idea or that and then he would get up and say no to them all. Not overtly. He would say maybe and then not bring it up again until I did and then he would say God Nan you just keep harping on this stuff until I just don’t want to do anything anymore! He’d get so angry and so would I and we wouldn’t do anything. I would sit at the table again, hours later, looking out the window and think, those windows are dirty. I have to get them cleaned. And the phone would ring and neither of us would answer it. What was going on then? What was he angry about? Or was I the one who started everything? I honestly don’t know .
    Something else. I remember when Ruthie had gotten to her time of needing to hate me. I complained about it once at a girlfriend’s house, and she said, “Oh, you know, the mothers always get it. They’re home, in the line of fire. And even when they’re not home, they’re in the line of fire.” She told me about a day she and her sister were so awful that her mother sat down on the steps and stared at them through the railing, weeping and saying, “Oh please, you guys.” We were very good for a while after that, my friend said. For about a week .
    I thought of my friend’s mother so many times after she told me that story. I saw her collapsing midstair, holding on to the poles of that railing to still her shaking hands and to beg her children to see her, to see her. I imagined her in her ironed housedress, her hair washed and held back with bobby pins crisscrossed neatly at the sides. She was trying, trying, trying, all the time, waiting at night for her husband to pass judgment on the roast beef, and that would be her grade for the day; enduring in the afternoons the spiky moods of her adolescent children. I remember my own mother serving dinner one night, dipping the big serving spoon into the casserole she’d made, and as usual one of us said we didn’t like that and then another one complained and my mother dropped the spoon on the table and left the room. Very quietly. We all sat there, the whole family, stunned. And then in a few minutes she came back out, wiping her hands busily