Joy For Beginners (26 page)

What would it be like, Kate wondered, to leave your eight-year-old child at home and go throw yourself into the rapids? Even when Robin was a small child, Robin had always been more comfortable leaving Kate than Kate had been leaving her. It wasn’t just the prospect of losing Robin—although the thought of that sliced through Kate like a hot wire—since the time Robin was born, Kate had become aware of her own vulnerability in a new and different way. She buckled her seat belt, even on a half-mile trip to the grocery store, because she couldn’t stand the thought of her daughter growing up wondering why her mother hadn’t loved her enough to be careful. She stopped skiing black diamond routes, bought a Volvo, pulling in the world of her activities to a circle that would always remain safe, the same. Rick had commented about her becoming domesticated, but Kate, looking at the wonder of her sleeping little girl, sprawled across her crib like a claim-jumper, knew that wasn’t it. Hers was a deal made with fate—I will give up these parts of my life if you will keep my girl safe, keep me safe for her. It was only at the meeting with the oncologist almost three years ago that she had learned that there were no deals, only options.

“Okay,” Patty declared, joy in her voice, “here we go!” Kate closed her eyes and they flew down into a blast of liquid green ice. Before Kate could even scream, they were out the other side.

 

THE MOOD WAS EXCITED that night; it seemed everyone was full of tales of their adventures on the water. The paddle boat girls radiated the satisfied glow of honeymooners, stretching their newly found confidence and touching one another with ease. The veteran rafters—and to Kate’s eyes, this meant just about everyone but her—looked at the girls indulgently and swapped stories of past trips while they filtered river water for drinking.

Kate didn’t know where she fit into this group. The past three years had made her feel as old as the river they traveled down, but faced with her minimal rafting experience, she felt younger than the girls. She didn’t know what to do with all the sky; she didn’t know who she was without a roof over her head. She wanted to be brave and strong for her daughter, but she didn’t know what those words meant here where everything was heat and sand and water.

She climbed over an outcropping of rock and saw a small curve in the river, just large enough to slow the current into a private eddy. The two older women in their group, Madge and Rita, were by the water. Madge was washing Rita’s hair and they were laughing. Kate started to retreat, but they spotted her and waved her down to them.

“It feels so much better to have someone wash your hair,” Madge called out. “Want to join us?”

At the initial introductions at the put-in spot at Lee’s Ferry, Kate had learned that Madge and Rita were in their mid-sixties, friends who had been rafting the Grand Canyon together since they were in their twenties. Every year they left behind husbands and families to travel down the rapids. Robin had found them fascinating, and she and Kate had spent the first day in their raft speculating on the lives these women had when they weren’t on the river. Robin opted for the superhero story line, summoning a vision of women who wore aprons and baked cookies and then went into a gas station restroom near Lee’s Ferry and emerged in quick-dry pants and orange life vests. Kate had hoped for broken glass ceilings at home as well as on the river.

In the end, as they had found out over dinner that night, the reality was somewhere in the middle, which was only to be expected. Rita was a hospital nurse, a wife and mother of four grown children. Madge worked with homeless youth, had a son who was a lawyer, another whose occupation seemed vague.

But here, on the river, they were two women washing each other’s hair, and the softness of it melted Kate’s hesitation and she wove her way through the rocks toward them.

“I always forget how cold the river is,” Rita said to Kate, gasping as Madge poured a bucket of water over her lowered head.

“And then”—she wrung out her long, white hair like a rope and flung it up and over so it landed with a smack against her back—“I remember how good it feels to be clean.”

“So, Kate, is this your first time on the river?” Madge asked.

Kate nodded, thinking how nice it was that some people could make a question whose answer was so stunningly obvious still sound like an honest inquiry.

“What do you think?”

“I feel like an idiot.” The words jumped out of Kate’s mouth, unbidden.

“Lean over,” Madge directed Kate, pointing to the water. Kate felt the shock of the water pouring over her head and the comforting pressure of strong fingers working their way into her hair, her scalp. She remembered Robin, washing her hair over the sink when she felt too queasy to stand in the shower, remembered sitting on the couch, painting each other’s toenails bright blue because, Robin had insisted, Kate needed to have something fun to look at when she was in the hospital. The feeling of her daughter’s hands, holding her foot, warm and gentle.

She was not going to cry.

Madge’s fingers kept moving, firmly and rhythmically.

“Well then, we like you,” she said.

And Kate told them everything.

 

THE GROUP OF HIKERS Sloshed along the stream and scrambled up serpentine cliffs, conversations moving among them, stories becoming a psychological shelter against the heat. The rock walls of the side canyon reflected the hot afternoon sun; the few tamarisk saplings they passed sent off a dry, sepiatoned scent. For Kate, who was accustomed to walking trails through the evergreens of the Pacific Northwest on days that were rarely hot even in July, it had felt strange at first to be in a terrain and climate where hiking more often meant rock climbing or wading and the sun had a power that demanded obedience.

But she was reaching a plateau of comfort here on the river, she realized. She still couldn’t jump in and out of a boat with anything approaching grace, but after only a few nights she had come to love the firm feel of sand under her sleeping bag. Her reading glasses were lost somewhere in the depths of her dry bag, and now she spent most of her evenings contemplating the cliffs and the sky. And she no longer thought twice about hiking through water or sweating through her shirt. It would all be dry or wet again in moments, anyway, she thought as she looked at the trail up ahead, so it really didn’t matter.

They heard the waterfall before they saw it, a tumbling of water, but sweeter, gentler than a rapid. They rounded the corner and the creek turned into a deeper pool, backed by a series of fern- and moss-covered rocks and ledges, water pouring down over it all, spilling in silken threads into the pool.

“Elves live here,” Robin said in a voice Kate hadn’t heard since her daughter was young.

The young men in the group instantly threw themselves into the water and swam across the pool, climbing up a hidden route behind the rocks, emerging onto the upper ledges and leaping off with a whoop into the water. Robin and the other girls soon followed. Kate stood back, watching as they landed in the pool and then sprang to the surface, breasts jostling within the confines of their sports bras and bikini tops. Some things you couldn’t fake with prosthetic bras, she thought.

 

KATE HAD INSISTED on a double mastectomy, although it hadn’t been mandatory. By that point, her breasts were alien to her, a body part that had fed a baby and now grew death. She wanted it gone. Them gone, if that’s what it meant. And for most of the time, it was possible to believe that not having breasts didn’t matter. Undressing only happened twice a day and she had gotten rid of the full-length mirror when Rick had moved out years before, taking her sex life with him as if it had been packed in a box along with his sports equipment. It had taken years for her to even think about dating, and just when she was ready there was the diagnosis and her calendar was suddenly full with a new form of rendezvous, bar drinks replaced with other liquids that altered her state of mind.

Caroline and Marion had talked to Kate about reconstructive surgery but she always deflected the conversation, joking that there had never been much to reconstruct, anyway. Which meant she didn’t have to say that she already felt less than real, her body more chemicals than flesh, her life borrowed. She didn’t need to borrow any more.

She wished she could be like the woman in the photograph Marion had given her after the surgery. A woman with arms outspread, face to the sky in celebration, one breast full and firm, the other simply not there. Kate had put the photograph in the back of her closet.

 

SAM CAME UP next to her with the last of their group. One guide was always the sweeper, bringing along the stragglers.

“Are you going in?” he said. “You’ll be amazed how good clean water feels.”

“Maybe just to get wet.” Kate waded in, waist deep. She watched her daughter emerge from behind the first ledge, standing in an alcove of dripping green moss as if about to recite a monologue from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Robin waved to her mother and jumped, her excited yelp cut off by her entry into the water. The water was cool, not cold, and miraculously sweet-smelling.

Sam walked over to Madge and Rita and talked with them, their voices happy and quiet. Kate thought she saw Madge motioning toward Kate, but she might well have been simply pointing out the antics of Troy, the young buck guide playing in the water behind her. After ten minutes or so, Sam did his summoning whistle.

“Okay, guys,” he yelled. “Out you get. Gals-only pool for a while.”

“What?” the men in the group protested. “Really?”

“It’s tradition,” Sam said calmly. “We go back and start dinner. Gals do the dishes later.”

As Sam left at the back of the pack of men, he passed Patty. Kate heard her say in a low voice, “Since when, Sam?”

 

WITH THE MEN GONE, the pool quieted. The girls swam lazily, congregating in a small group under the flow of the waterfall, pressure-washing their hair. Patty had climbed up several ledges and sat with her eyes closed, her face peaceful and private. The other women relaxed along the rocks or floated on their backs, looking up at the sky. Madge and Rita lounged on a ledge, swinging their feet in the water like children.

“Okay,” Madge called out, “the guys are gone, we can skinny-dip!”

The girls under the waterfall looked over in surprise.

“We do it every year,” said Madge. “But usually, we’re just sneaking in a quick dip upriver from camp.”

At the top of the waterfall, Patty stood up, grinning, and pulled her sports bra over her head, tossing it into the pool below. The girls under the waterfall laughed and started taking off bathing suits and shorts.

Rita unbuttoned the long-sleeved sun protection shirt she always wore and casually dropped it on the rock ledge, followed by her tank top and shorts. She stood on the rock, naked and at ease, her legs long, her stomach soft, her breasts heavy and relaxed.

“Your hat,” Madge prompted her, and Rita laughed, taking off her baseball cap and letting her white hair fall loose about her shoulders.

She was beautiful, Kate thought.

Rita lowered herself in the water, smiling at the contact of the water against her skin. She looked over at Kate.

“Now you,” Rita said. “And yes, you are.”

“What?”

“Beautiful.”

Kate turned her back on the group and unbuttoned her shirt, feeling the sun against her stomach, her chest. She undid the hooks on her bathing suit, the prosthetic padding heavy in her hands, like small, dead bags of rice, and laid it on the rocks next to her. In the sun, the scars were still purple-red, cutting across her. Tire tracks, she always called them, from the truck that ran her over.

She sank down into the water and the coolness welcomed her, running along her skin, the reflected light playing over the scars like soft fingers. She looked at the green of the moss and ferns, at the rocks around her, rounded by air and water, heaved and fallen into place, making a pool for the water to spill into. Quiet. There.

 

“SO I’VE GOT a question for you.” Kate and Robin were setting up their tent for the night, shaking out the nylon fabric between them and laying it flat on the ground.

“What’s that?” Robin asked.

“Why this trip?”

“You mean, why not a spa?” Robin’s voice shimmered with amusement.

“Well, yes.”

“I don’t know.” Robin paused. She threaded a long metal pole through the loops on the outside of the tent and then found a rock to place on the corner. “I guess—after the last couple years—I just wanted to be scared by something I could put my hands on. Does that make sense?”

Kate nodded.

“I should’ve really asked you, though.”

“No.” Kate laughed quietly. “I would have said no.”

Robin grinned. “That’s what I figured.”

 

THE GUIDES HAD WARNED them about rattlesnakes, had directed them not to lay out their sleeping bags ahead of time and to carry a flashlight if they were going to the groover in the dark. Kate had seen the evidence—undulating trails left in the sand and disappearing between rocks. Initially she had been terrified at the prospect of the hollow clatter of rattles, the spiraling muscle of a snake body, but that fear had dissipated as the days passed.

So it was a shock to see the rattlesnake coiled across the path, lazy in the late afternoon sun. She stopped, suddenly aware of how hopelessly cumbersome her feet were, slapping about in her flip-flops, how exposed her legs were in her nylon shorts, a target expansive as a Kansas cornfield. But the rattlesnake moved not at all, as if any interest in her was easily outweighed by the satisfaction of warm sand and hot sun.

She stood, caught in indecision. She wondered if she was more likely to spook the rattlesnake if she moved later rather than sooner, but in the end, she was unable even to shift her weight in preparation to leave.