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

leaving deserves to be mourned. Maybe mourning is the cleansing act that makes room for what follows.
    I know exactly what you’re thinking right now. And no, I am not cracking up.
    The house I want will have much smaller rooms than the one we have now. I think we will have it built. There will be pastel walls, Martin, not the safe off-white you always insisted upon because that heavily jeweled, heavily perfumed, heavily made-up interior designer who came out when we bought our first house told us to let the things on the wall speak—not the walls themselves. Neutralize, she said, looking at me because I had said I would like walls the color of the sun, and of robins’ eggs. I don’t know how we could have put so much stock in a woman whose clothes we both hated. The very notion of some stranger telling people how to arrange their houses seems so ridiculous to me, now. Did then, too, if you want to know. It’s like someone else deciding when you’re hungry.
    I want a place by the ocean, where you can hear the water any time you decide to pay attention, where you can see it out of the windows. The ocean will be ever-changing during the day, blue to gray to green; but always the same at night: vast black. I want a white fence around the property, tall flowers leaning against it in patches so thick they don’t suffer from the occasional thief. I want a porch, wide and long enough for an outside living room, perhaps a hammock for you, I think you might like to drink your seltzer in a hammock. You might like to read your Sunday newspaper there, too, then doze off under the business section.
    Inside the house, golden-colored wooden stairs should lead up past a small leaded glass window. The sunlight should come through that window so thickly it looks like candy. There should be no curtains in the house except for white ones in the bedroom, with trim so beautiful it’s heartbreaking. I can find those curtains somewhere, I know—they’ll be old, of course, and hopefully used, and therefore saturated with soul.
    In the bathroom, I want an old-fashioned sink with a wide pedestal base; and the presence of a clear, strong blue color—perhaps in towels, and probably on the ceiling, too. There will be a claw-footed tub, and in the summer, I will paint its toenails, and in the winter I’ll knit slippers for it. We’ll have big seashells scattered here and there on the floor as though they had stopped by to change out of their swimsuits.
    I want a small fieldstone fireplace, a bouquet of flowers always on the mantel. Multipaned windows, French doors. The kitchen should be a large friendly square and the cupboards should have glass doors to show this brown speckled bowl, perfect for making pancakes; that yellow mug, right for morning coffee. Our forks should be decorated on the ends with forget-me-nots so that each bite will carry flowers to our mouths. We can do without some of those damn wineglasses, Martin. I would just as soon drink wine out of a jelly glass, it always looks so good in the movies when the Italian men wear their T-shirts and sit at the kitchen tables and drink their wine that way. And in the background, the women standing over pots with lively smells, wearing print housedresses and white aprons and braids pinned on top of their heads, and little, foreign, dangling earrings—I bet they have a nip too, their own glass on the counter beside them. Yes, I believe we must both start to drink from jelly glasses, and I think when we do, some stubborn old stone will be loosened.
    The kitchen counters will be wooden, hip high, and a slight slope will develop in the middle from the weight of our meals. There will be a back door off the kitchen, a rope clothesline you can get to from there.
    Our bedroom will have a little wall space for paintings of flowers, but otherwise there will be windows. The bedspread will be white chenille. Our closet door will be large and heavy, and it will creak in familiar but different ways