The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (34 page)

The conversation eventually drifted away into the mechanics of male and female personalities. The stars eventually shifted, and the sky grew light where it touched the horizon.

“What's that?” Gail asked. “Is all that light from the city?”

“It's the entire world, thousands and thousands of people looking for us with flashlights,” Sandy declared.

The women laughed, and Gail rose up to make certain that everyone who was sleeping was covered up. She threw two more logs on the fire and stood in the growing light, looking like a strong and brilliant light herself.

“You know we are the only ones who have been looking for ourselves,” she said, her voice a small echo above the snapping wood. “I suppose we'll look back on this and say we could have done this sooner and saved ourselves years of anguish over all our problems. But really, it's like love or sex, or knowing anything . . . it just can't happen until the stars are lined up properly and everything.”

“You mean like three months ago or last year, we could never have done this, but a week ago, that was the perfect time?” asked J.J.

“Yeah,” said Gail, shrugging against the wind that cut into her back. “Yeah, it was just the right time.”

“But you know maybe now we can make anytime the right time,” suggested Sandy. “Even me, the ballsy bitch. It's been hard these last few years for me to do what I knew I needed to do, but now I feel strong and healed and ready to reclaim everything I let slip away.”

“She'll be ready, too,” said Gail, pointing in the direction of Lenny's house. “The stars are going to be lined up just perfectly for the rest of our lives.”

J.J. jumped up. She smiled and patted Sandy on the shoulder. “Hell, if those stars aren't lined up just the way we like 'em, we'll shove the little bastards right where we think they should go.”

The women rolled into their own sleeping bags, tucked their jackets under their heads for pillows and watched the fire dance and dance, until their eyes closed and there was the simple hum of quiet bodies, even breaths and the embers burning slowly into the earth.

In the last few hours before dawn, the women walkers didn't feel the whisper of another wind roll over them. They didn't know in those sleepy hours that their hearts beat in unison, and that when one of them sighed, the rest of them felt a reciprocal push of air. They didn't know that their breaths mingled with the breaths of millions of women, and that their souls would be entwined in those whispers forever.

OFFICIALS HOBBLING PROTECTION FOR
WOMEN WALKERS

—-30—

The Women Walker Effect: Cynthia

Cynthia kept her eyes closed for the longest time. Although the small room was dark, she wasn't ready for what she might see. For what she wanted to see, for the picture of herself that might appear in front of her and change everything.

She had double-locked the door of this borrowed room, sneaking softly up the back steps of the university building in the English department that she had been told would be virtually abandoned at this time of day. At 4:15
A.M.
Cynthia had slipped from her own room, past all the closed doors and out into a morning that still held a touch of winter. Unaccustomed to being out so early, Cynthia was immediately enthralled with the quiet of that hour. She walked, almost ran, down the sidewalk and began the thirteen-block journey to the university.

In the time it took her to do that, Cynthia saw only one car, a dark green taxi, and not another human being. “Oh,” she said to herself. “There are so many colors out here, it looks like a rainbow.”

Cynthia noticed every single thing she saw on her quick journey. She saw the way the early shadows played tricks on her eyes and lingered just long enough to make her wonder if it was late or early winter, or fall. She noticed a man sitting in the last house on the left side of the highway, drinking what she supposed was a cup of coffee. He was all alone, looking out into his dark backyard.

There were no animals about, no other people walking, just the quiet sounds of her feet moving quickly, like the practiced steps of an early-morning jogger. When Cynthia got to the large building, the second building on that side of campus, she walked to the back door. She had to walk through a dimly lighted path that was almost buried by a thick grove of evergreen trees. She never thought of the danger that might be there and would have been astonished if someone lurking there had jumped her. Cynthia never thought anything bad could happen to her.

The back door was propped open with a wad of yellow notepaper. Cynthia smiled to think of her friend rolling up the paper from her own thick tablet and sticking it in the door, way past midnight, past the time when the night janitors and the security guard would be there.

This is the friend who had been her second secret. A woman who worked at the university and who had simply stopped her once in passing to ask about the time, and then followed her from one place to the next until she would sit and share something to drink with her. Cynthia had never had a friend like this before, had never dared to let someone become so close to her. It took two years for Cynthia to tell her friend, Carolyn, her real secret. One afternoon when the two of them sat for hours on a bench, they talked and talked, and that's when she knew that her friend would not harm her or laugh or look away if she shared the secret.

Less than a week ago, Carolyn had asked Cynthia if she had seen the articles in the newspaper about the women walking in Wisconsin. Cynthia had not heard about those women.

However, she did reveal to Carolyn, “I'm from Wisconsin. There were twelve kids in my family, and my mother, I can remember only how tired she was all of the time.”

“Twelve children,” said Carolyn, trying hard not to swear because she had promised Cynthia that she would not do that. “Your mother had twelve children?”

“Well, really she had sixteen children, but she lost two others through miscarriages and two died just after birth. Imagine that, after all that work.”

“Imagine it!” said her friend. “Some of us find the thought of all those children and no birth control and a woman who, well, we just find it disgusting.”

“Oh,” Cynthia said, amused by Carolyn's outlook. “I suppose it was a different world, even though that wasn't so long ago.”

“Cynthia, were you the baby, the last girl?”

“I was born when my mother was forty-seven years old. Imagine that now,” Cynthia shared, nodding as she spoke.

“Cynthia, how old are you now?”

“I'm thirty-nine years old, and my mother would be eighty-six now, but she's been dead for a long time.”

“Well, shit,”
Carolyn said to herself,
“of course, she's dead. Judas Priest, what in the hell were they all thinking!”
Carolyn, a clinical psychologist and part-time professor, desperately wanted to take Cynthia to her apartment and treat her to a long hot bath in a gallon of lavender essence. She wanted to take her to a salon and then shopping, and she hoped and prayed that she could do that someday. For now, just a few words, a few well-planned words, would have to do.

So the women sat on the bench out near the university library, and Carolyn told Cynthia about the walkers in Wisconsin. Carolyn had a feeling that Cynthia could well understand a woman or a man in search of something miraculous and wonderful, and she was right.

Cynthia turned her head, and then she asked to see the newspaper articles. While Cynthia read, Carolyn closed her eyes and let her mind wander to her favorite beach where she could picture her new friend lying in the sun. Carolyn finally turned and touched Cynthia lightly on the arm, and when Cynthia smiled and her eyes lit up, Carolyn wanted to jump off the chair and yell something like, “Holy shit, she's alive!”

“What do you think of this, Carolyn. You're a woman of the world and smart, and this is your field, psychology, isn't it?”

“It's a great story, Cynthia, a beautiful story really. I'm thinking that these women all had something to forget or work out, that they are great friends, and they are out there walking with nothing to bother them or nothing to be in charge of except each other. I'm thinking that some powerful communication, healing, problem solving and just some beautiful togetherness must be going on.”

“Oh,” said Cynthia, sounding to Carolyn like a little girl who really doesn't quite understand what's being explained to her.

Carolyn in all her worldliness, with her bountiful practice and research and teaching appointment, had never met anyone like Cynthia. Most of her clients were women, most of them career women sick with guilt and mothers who lacked the desire to have sex or do anything except sleep when they had five extra minutes, along with a large number of middle-aged women who needed someone to say, “Hey, it's okay to fly to Bermuda and leave your husband and change jobs and hack off your hair.” Many of her clients were also women who loved women but who had no idea how to embrace their emerging lesbian identities. Never, ever before in her twenty-one years of clinical practice had Carolyn met a semi-cloistered Catholic nun who appeared to be walking through life like a half-hearted zombie.

It took about fourteen seconds for Carolyn to become completely enchanted with Cynthia. Although Cynthia wore extremely traditional dark skirts and white blouses, there was really no way to tell that she was a nun and that she spent half her day praying in that convent not far from campus and the other half working at the monastery bakery. What she saw immediately with her trained eye and with the kind heart that had taken her into a profession where she could help and heal, was the soul of a woman who had yet to learn how to live.

For months Carolyn had pursued a relationship with Cynthia. She had come to look forward to their chance meetings, which she actually planned with great effort once she figured out Cynthia's routine. She quickly became captivated by her new friend's sincerity, by her devotion, by the simplicity that marked every hour of her day. Inside of her own hectic heart, Carolyn was also smart enough to know that she could learn many, many things from Sister Cynthia that were not obvious on the surface.

She told absolutely no one of her new relationship. Carolyn guarded her new friend like a treasure, and she had dipped into her own basket of faith to help guide where she might go with Cynthia and what might happen in the precious moments they spent together.

In the months that the two women had spent talking in the cafeteria, empty classrooms, or on the steps of the library, both of them had inched closer and closer to each other. As much as Carolyn wanted to help Cynthia learn about life and choices and blending one part of one's life with another, she also wanted to simply rest her spinning head on Cynthia's shoulder and have her talk about the arc of light that always flooded her bare bedroom when she knelt for her hours of prayer.

“It's a soft light that seems to be constant and unchanging, no matter what time of year it is,” Cynthia had explained. “Because my contact with the rest of the world has been so limited, I've . . . well, the truth is . . . I've come to look at that light as a friend, as a place to draw warmth. Sometimes I try and put my arms around the light as it comes in the window.”