The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (5 page)

Everything after that is a blur. I remember I would only let Chester take her, and what happened after that I never knew or cared about. I stayed in the hospital, curled up in a little ball for another day until Chester beseeched me that Richard was crying and could I please come home and what about the funeral?

Life swirled around me. I acknowledged it but never joined in. No one but a few know that I never went to the church or the cemetery for the burial. Not even Richard remembers that I spent the day rocking by the window, holding Annie's blanket to my face. When Chester and Richard came home, I rose from the chair and ate with them and stepped back into their lives. But the truth is I never really lived again.

It has taken me fifty years to come to this point. Fifty years before I could empty my heart of the sorrow that has suffocated my soul. I watched my husband grow old and learn how to walk with his head bowed to the winds of the world. Not once in these years did we sit and talk about the pain and the missing and how we should somehow be able to go on. It was as if nothing else mattered after Annie, and I know now that it was wrong to let my life, my husband's life and the life of my wandering son pass me by. But I was helpless, so helpless I felt like a woman without limbs rocking on the edge of a wide cliff, afraid to look down, to do something as simple as to open my eyes.

Richard never remembered anything about Annie. We told him as he grew older when he asked us why the other kids had brothers and sisters and he didn't. Somehow Richard did just fine, and I like to think that he never knew about my deep well of sadness, about the wall of anguish that separated me from his father.

He became a bright shining star for me, went off to college, and traveled the world with his geology hammers and trucks filled with rocks. When I saw his first child, a daughter no bigger than half of my arm, I could barely bring myself to touch her because her face had the same soft lines and tiny nose of Annie Marie. Now they all live so far away, just so far away.

Today on the highway the weather has been warm. By noon I could feel the heat rising out of the asphalt against my hands. When I put one foot in front of the other hour after hour, I have a feeling that I can almost fly, that I can lift my arms and soar the rest of my life as if I have never been troubled or burdened by anything.

Somehow this feeling is familiar and I keep seeing myself lying in the brown fall grass fifty years ago with my hands on my swollen belly watching the hawks circle above the fields and thinking then that I could fly because I was so happy.

I'm closer now to that long-absent feeling, closer with each step, and although we are walking forward together, I feel as if I am stepping back. Stepping back so that I can start over, from that time in the grass when I was happy and my heart flew with the birds.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

M
AYBE IT WAS THE SIGHT
of Walter that threw Mary off course.

He was the first living thing the women encountered as they not-so-silently moved up the highway from one telephone pole to another. They were counting stars, relishing the dark night that engulfed them and laughing heartily at the sight of an unused Tampax they discovered on the ground—as if someone had left it there as a marker for them.

“Oh my God, look!” shouted Sandy, pushing at the feminine hygiene product with the toe of her dark tennis shoe. “This is a sign from heaven that we are on the correct highway.”

Mary didn't laugh as the women gathered together, stopping simply because they wanted to, because they could, because now anything was possible. She stood back, hands on hips, eyes on the horizon, her heart beating wildly.

Sandy queried, “Don't you all remember a thousand stories about the female reproductive system, cramps and babies, and the course and crimes of the uterus? How many of you have ever thrown a Tampax, used or unused, out of a car window?”

“Dear,” Alice answered immediately, in a voice as proper and calm as the sky above them. “Women my age would never throw sanitary articles out of car windows. Didn't your mother and grandmother ever talk to you ladies about rags and wringer washing machines?” Alice had her hands clasped behind her, and she talked in a voice that her friends knew was not-so-serious, but they knew too that Alice has seen a side of life that they could barely comprehend. They knew as much of Alice as there was to know. These women would drag her from a burning car, take a bullet for her, jump off a cliff if they thought that any such actions would make Alice's life happier or easier. Despite their assorted miseries, the women perceive Alice as standing alone because she is the oldest and she has seen the most and she has been poor and constantly sad. She has lived through a time when women would never ever consider walking down a long highway in the middle of a black, cool spring night to exorcise their demons and flick their middle fingers at the world.

In the hours since the women have left Susan's house, since they have moved from one field to the next and walked dozens of miles, the world has already pulled on a new face, and the women are part of that changing landscape. They are determined, gleeful, thinking and sorting through thoughts and feelings as deep as the earth they stand upon. But there is Mary, slowing her pace as they leave the side of the road and bowing her head and lifting her arms to circle herself in a kind of hug as they move ahead.

Chris, the observer of the world, witnessed Mary falter, and her mind flew in several directions at once. Because of her work as a journalist, Chris has known and interviewed one hundred Marys but it was only in that moment as she looked off into the nothing, that she had an inkling of what it might be like to be a Mary, unsure of everything, always needing someone to affirm her actions, to give permission for living and walking and breathing.

The Marys of the world, thought Chris, start out in high school creeping from one boy to the next because the idea of not having a boyfriend, or just somebody always there, is so terrifying they cannot even imagine it. In her own school, there were a good dozen Marys and their weekly dramas of breakups and new romances made her laugh and provided hours of free entertainment.

The college Marys were the same girls with different faces, and even in the days of burning bras and groping for personal sexual satisfaction, she was amazed at how many Marys made it through those years with their needs intact and strong as hell. There was no time then or need or desire to figure these women out. Chris simply had no time for the man pleasers, for the women who seemed to abandon themselves for someone else, for the Marys of the world who could never quite bring themselves to walk away from or toward anything.

Her last editor had been a Mary to beat all Marys. Married and divorced three times and anxious immediately to fill the empty space next to her with anyone who had a penis and shaved something besides his legs. This editor was as complex as Chris's own heart. One minute she was making decisions that could change the course of lives, and the next she was canceling her entire life for the chance to be with someone she barely knew.

Then there is Mary Valkeen, mother of three, wife of Boyce, struggling up this highway with her arms embracing her own heart as if trying to keep it from falling outside of her chest. Chris suddenly saw in Mary's face the struggle it had been for her to walk just a few miles, and what a struggle it will be to turn away from her friends. When she slowed her pace to stay even with Mary, Chris wanted to cry out when she saw the veil of agony that had crossed her friend's face.

“Mary,” whispered Chris as they dropped back from the rest of the women and Chris laced her arm through Mary's crooked elbow. “Are you having a hard time?”

Mary looked up quickly, not surprised that someone had noticed her lack of enthusiasm. She didn't think she had the heart for it. That's what she wanted to say. “I'm embarrassed by my lack of commitment to my friends,” she wanted to admit. “I just don't need this,” she could add and then, “Oh God, I wish I could be like you. I just can't do this, because I already have what I need.”

What Mary wanted was to go home and crawl into bed next to Boyce and his thick, comforting arms. She wanted to lie there warm in her own bed with the sound of the alarm clock humming next to her left ear, and then wake up in just a few hours so she could hand her boys an apple and a granola bar before they race off for early basketball practice. “I'm not strong like you.”

“We're not that strong,” Chris responded. “You know only a few of us would do this alone, but together, well, together it's different.”

“I can't do it.” Mary clenched her fists, began to cry as they moved slower and slower behind the other women. “Don't hate me.”

“Hate you? Oh sweetie, we love you,” Chris said with love and warmth. “You don't have to stay with us if you don't want to. No one has to stay, but some of us, we just have to do this. It might seem ridiculous or goofy in a week or next year or maybe never, but right now this is the most important thing in the world to some of us.”

There was a second and then another of silence, and Chris noticed that everyone was looking down the dark highway with eyes focused somewhere else. She guessed they were thinking of everything and anything, and in a lifetime there would never be enough walking time to capture all their thoughts.

“Listen,” Chris finally told Mary. “You know it's fine to want to go home and be who you are. We'll all do that eventually too, but this walking is going to make some of us even more than who we are now. Can you understand that, Mary? You know some of us have these pains and heartaches that might only get worse if we don't do this.”

“I've never needed much,” Mary said, looking off into the night like the rest of her friends. “I used to wonder if there was something wrong with me because I wasn't like half of the other women I knew. I hate to work, hate to travel, hate to be away from the kids and Boyce. I love being in the house when the kids come home, knowing the schedules, what will happen from one day to the next. It's a comfort to me.”

Chris wished Mary would stay then just so she could prove to her that it
would
matter if she stayed. She wished she could convince her with her words that there was something so absolutely fabulous about connecting with other women on a grand adventure, that the insides of her kitchen cabinets could be blown to hell and back again and she still wouldn't have to leave the next intersection, where there might be a phone at the gas station.

One and then two cars passed by them, and when the women turned to look they were blinded, like unsuspecting deer paralyzed by headlights.

“Damn!” shouted Sandy. “Those cars scared the hell out of me.”

“How do you think the drivers feel?” Joanne laughed. “My God, they must think we've fallen off a bus or something.”

That's when Chris told everyone they needed to get off the highway for a few minutes. She led them through a row of bushes, not knowing what she might step on next, and sat down fast on a fallen tree where she expected to tell them about Mary and other practical matters.

“First of all,” she began, “this is a good place to rest, and second, Mary wants to stop.”

“Mary?” Everyone said her name at once, turning in the dark for an explanation that was totally unncessary. Mary has been a good listener all these months. She has come to the meetings and brought the best wine and made it clear that she loves each of them and the time they all spend together. As the women sat on logs and piles of damp leaves at the edge of a rolling field, they already knew that a dramatic movement, a surge into the night, a walk away from troubles of the heart could be a powerful force and they were feeling the power of what they were doing.

When Sandy got back from the bushes and Gail finally decided to squat instead of sit so she wouldn't get her pants wet, it was Sandy who made them think of heartaches, losses, regrets, the hand of a lost lover right there, of all the weight of the world that they were dragging among them.

“I think Mary knows she can do what she wants,” said Chris, “but we'd better talk about what we're going to do when dawn breaks and our husbands wake up to discover that we are missing and walking down some county highway in nothing more than our slippers and spring jackets.”

Alice laughed.

“Alice?” asked Joanne, who loves to be called J.J.

“Oh, I'm just thinking about Chester waking up and not knowing for a week or two that I'm even missing.”

“Shit,” bemoaned Gail, “my kids will miss me the minute they run out of milk or can't find clean underwear.”

Everyone smiled because they would at least be missed, except Susan, who has left a trail of tears from her front yard to this very spot. “Listen,” Chris began, steering them back on course. “We have to agree on some things, those of us who are going on, and Mary, you can help too.”

Mary rose just a bit when she heard this, maybe because she wanted to redeem herself. She wanted to do something that would keep her with the women walkers even though she was going to part from them, wouldn't be with them physically, pounding up the road. Mary leaned forward like a bird waiting for breakfast, her mouth open just a little to form an O, round and exact as a single Cheerio.

While the stars shifted and the moon dropped lower, the women made their plans. Mary would call her husband from the next gas station to come and get her, and once back at home, she would call the other husbands and tell them about this journey. No one else wanted to stop. No one blamed Mary. No one else, though, could begin to think of stopping.