by Kris Radish
There were presents under the tree on Christmas morning. My sister was so shocked to see the sweater she had been drooling over at Dobbyn's Department Store that she burst into tears. My brother, who actually ended up becoming a scientist, got one of those chemistry kits that helps young boys explode chemicals and put holes in basement ceilings across the nation. And me? I got two sets of hardbound Nancy Drew books—three books in each set, more words for me to pore over than I could ever have imagined. Then I cried and cried until my mother left the room.
She was so funny that way. Acting all the time like breathing was a burden, making certain that we knew everything was hard and difficult, proving every day that she was sacrificing every single thing she wanted so that we could eat and stay together as a family. Then she would do something like get us each what we wanted for Christmas and throw us totally off balance. I have a constant vision of her sitting in her brocade chair with the big claw feet, smoking Salem cigarettes, her feet crossed at the ankles, her hair pushed to the side with a big gold barrette, waiting for us to discover how much she loved us.
This time in my childhood was all so confusing for me, especially because my father never came back to see us. He stayed in Detroit, kept his job, moved into an apartment, and sent “just a little” money, according to my mother, each month. There would be an occasional note, and my brother told me that my father came to see him at school three times. But I never saw him again. Never.
By the time I was jumping into puberty, I hated my father. I had come to realize that my mother and I were bound together as women and because of that, I had to share in her sorrow, in her anger and pain. After all those years of not understanding her, some bright light went on when I turned fourteen. I vowed that I would never marry, never let a man tell me what to do.
For the rest of my at-home years, my mother became my hero and I adored her. Around this time, she told me that my father had married the woman he was having an affair with when he left us—his secretary. This was big news to me. I thought he left because my mother had headaches, three children and a relentless need to treat him like an old shoe. I was old enough to be angry about what he had done. This great family shame only fueled my desire to treat men badly and to pick the men who would treat me the same way.
Eventually Mother started dating. She was—and still is—fairly beautiful. She always wore stylish clothes and hasn't gone up a dress size since eighth grade. She probably could have married a movie star or anyone she wanted. Why she chose my father remains a mystery to me. Love? I often asked myself. More likely lust, although I knew she wasn't pregnant when they married. Generally the love-versus-lust question is one my mother and I leave unanswered. But I've often imagined my parents having sex in his old office downtown; maybe this is because it is something I've done myself more than once.
After a time, it seemed as if every guy in town, married and unmarried, became Mother's suitor. To me, they resembled an endless parade of losers walking in the front door and out the back. A bunch of men no one else wanted. I had no idea where they all came from, but I was relieved when Mother would come home after each date and say, “Well, that was a waste of time.”
One guy, Harry Rasmussen, went so far as to ask Mother to marry him. I watched all this from the kitchen. We had one of those swinging doors so I knelt right by the crack of the door, pushed it open so I could peek into the part of the living room where they were sitting, and listened as if my life depended on hearing every word.
Harry was actually the best of them. He sold cars in Wasburn, and his wife had been killed driving one of them. He had two daughters who were almost grown. What I liked was that he slicked his hair back the way my father did. My mother went out with him a lot, and she was always smiling when she came home. They went dancing and drinking and dining, and it would have been just fine with her to keep going like that until she died. Alas, Harry fell in love with her. You could see it the minute he walked into the room and saw her. His eyes went droopy, and he would slide up to her and try to put his arms around her, on her, near her. Anything to draw her close.
That night they were sitting on the couch having some kind of drink, maybe vodka gimlets, my mother loved vodka gimlets. I didn't know he was going to ask her to marry him, I was just watching to see if there was anything I could pick up in case anyone ever asked me out on a date.
Right in the middle of a conversation about the new restaurant on the lake with the big picture windows, he set his glass down on top of the little white napkin. I could tell that his hand was shaking. “Oh boy,” I remember whispering to myself. “Here comes something.”
Harry got down on one knee in front of her and pulled a little box out of his suit pocket. This was like being at the movies for me. Even though I pretended to hate boys, I dreamed constantly about true love. Truth is, I still do. Anyway, Harry said, “I don't think this is sudden, Beth, because I know you know that I love you.” He gulped, “Would you marry me?”
The next few seconds seemed like an eternity. My mother uncrossed her legs, and then she did something totally uncharacteristic that made me realize she was probably in love with him too. She leaned forward, put her hand behind Harry's neck, and kissed him on the lips for a long, long time. Then she took a large sip of her gimlet, ran her fingers across her face and said, “Harry, I can't marry you. I can't marry anyone. I'm sorry.”
Harry did not move or blink. I realized that after my father, my mother would never let herself fall into the marriage trap again. Just imagine Harry in the middle of this sad mess. I suppose she was right to say no but now, just today really, I think about how happy she might have been. Harry's girls had been nice to me, and the house would have been filled with other voices, and my mother and Harry could have had a million vodka gimlets and giggled every night for the rest of their lives.
Harry never came back, and I found out from Marcie Strumpa at school that he married some woman who had three boys, and they were always driving around in a big new car. I saw them several times, and I would imagine myself riding with him, with the sun glistening off of his bald head. I always had my beautiful silk hand-painted mauve scarf wrapped around my neck when I had this fantasy, and I would dream that my scarf was whipping and cracking in the wind just as all my dumb-ass classmates came out of the school to see me dipping by in a big honking car.
School was tough after my parents split up. I was the only kid in my entire school who had divorced parents. My friends tried hard to be nice but they were probably thinking, “How pathetic.” And I was pathetic, moping around as if I had leukemia or some terrible disease that had rendered me permanently unhappy. For a long time, I basked in the fame of being from a one-parent household. After a while, that got old and the kids weren't so nice anymore and I was simply picked on.
My mother is right about her raising us all by herself and managing to get us into college, and helping us with apartments and cars and relationships. I suspect now that because I was so young when my family fell apart, I was the one who took it the hardest. My sister Claudia ended up marrying a doctor, someone she met while she was in nursing school, and I think she is serious when she says she is happy. My brother Jonathan, the scientist, works for a huge chemical producing company in their research department.
Here comes the best part. Jonathan is gay. This, according to my mother, is totally my father's fault because he was not at home to be a role model. My brother and I are fairly close, and we joke about this all the time. “Mom's the one who made me gay,” he likes to joke. “Remember how she always told me I was a sissy when I cried? Well, Gail, she was right.”
This revelation about her only son caused a wonderfully memorable scene at our house. Dishes flew. Chairs were knocked over. Glasses broke. When he told her to stop asking about his dates because his dates were all men, I was still in college. She called me home over a long weekend to hold her hand and help her put the house back together after her scene while she pondered what had gone wro
ng with Jonathan.
“Oh hell, Mother, is it so wrong to love someone, man or woman, dog or donut? Would you feel better if he had come home to tell you he was an ax murderer?”
“It makes me want to vomit and throw more dishes and rip the lights off of the walls and damn it, Gail, it seems unnatural.” Mother said all of this with her hands waving wildly, fists clenched, eyes on fire.
“According to whom?”
“How about the rest of the world, and me. Do you mean you think it's okay?”
“For godssake, Mother. He's happy. He is not physically attracted to women. He's a brilliant scientist. Think about it.”
“I can't accept it. Homosexuality, this idea of being queer, oh Jesus, Gail, it goes against everything I believe in.”
“Look at us, Mother. You're divorced and have turned away every decent man since Daddy left, I'm so screwed up I can barely think straight, while Jon is successful, he's got someone to love him, hold him, be there for him. His boyfriend is sweet and generous. It's obvious to me that not only is Jon on to something here, but he's a hell of a lot more together than we are at this moment in our lives.”
Mother never got over the idea of Jon, her queer son, being real and satisfied. When I think about how she clings to events and conversations from the past, I wonder if she's not still feeling bad about the time she fell off of her bike when she was a little girl. So the deal is that I never got over my mother, which is fairly ridiculous considering that I am a grown woman with two children, two ex-husbands, and I possess all the tools I need to straighten out myself and my life. I've just never been able to take effective steps toward doing that.
I haven't been the worst mother in the world. For one thing, I don't believe in involving my children in all of my moaning and idiotic behavior. I figure at this point, if I can straighten up my act, I can pretty much make up for lost time. My kids have learned how to be tough, and I've been honest with them. There have been plenty of good times. To be perfectly frank, I have been thinking about crawling on all fours back to their father.
Bruce brought a sense of stability into my life. He never wanted to leave; he loves me, and he's crazy about the kids. The kids are mad about him too, even though they aren't his natural children. Bruce took to fatherhood as if he had been searching for it his entire life. My God, you should have seen his face the day we got married, it was as if he were receiving Christmas and every other wonderful holiday all at once.
He grabbed me just after we said our vows, I'll never forget this, and he was crying. He said that he was marrying the kids too, and that he loved them and would never hurt them.
“I'm not like anyone else,” he pleaded ardently. “Gail, it's going to be okay now, you can just let go of everything.”
People who know him and who think I'm a few bricks short of a load, also think I don't deserve to have a man like this even be in the same room with me. I pretty much agree with them, and that's part of the reason why it's been so hard for me to find and to deal with happiness.
I have been trying for months and months now to figure out how to do this. So many months I am totally exhausted from fighting who I am, working, raising the kids, and from years of self-doubt. That is, until all this walking started.
If only I had known I would feel this good, this confident, this humbled, I would have been walking every day of my life. I feel as if my energy is reaching out and bouncing off of everybody else and then when it springs back to me, I feel more powerful than I ever have in my life. I want so much to make something in my life work, to maintain the courage I seem to be hoarding up, to go on and finally be happy.
What I am thinking about mostly is Bruce. I know he is with the kids, and that last night he crawled into our bed and buried his face in my pillow to smell where my head has touched. That is just how he is, and how he thinks. When I imagine him lying there with one foot out of the covers as if it is too hot, I get an ache in my chest that makes me want to take a deep breath. This ache is love. My God, I love Bruce so much, like I have never loved anyone before.
I wish my mother could be walking with us now. She could limp along, and we would all help her get beyond whatever it is that has never allowed her to let herself fall, just fall, so someone else can catch her. She is living all alone in an apartment with a bunch of other old sour women, and when I fix this thing with Bruce, I hope he will help me go get her and bring her back here so she can live with us. I am fairly determined that she will not die with a puckered face, and that she will be able to rock the kids by the window before they are too big to sit on her lap.
Alice thinks we could walk forever if we put our minds to it. I can hear her up there muttering, “Walk, walk, walk,” under her breath, like a broken record. She has the kindest face I have ever seen and when I look at her, because she is older, I think that my mother could have the same expression if she would only let herself. Alice has her own row to hoe, and we know about her sad life, but these last few days I have seen a transformation in her where the lines in her face have loosened up and her eyes seem to glimmer. She even steps lightly as if there are mounds of air and light under her old tennis shoes.
Walking forever wouldn't be my choice, but I know we will continue to do so for a while because we are still not there yet. When we get there, I think we will all know at once. I'm really not ready yet. I have all these good things to think about and lots of plans to form in my mind. I could be really honest now, which is my goal anyway, and tell you how I am planning and thinking and aching to make love with Bruce. That is what really keeps me moving every second of the day.
I think when we do make love, the sex, the emotion, every single touch will be like nothing else I have ever felt because of what I will be able to admit to him, and mostly to myself, about how it is fine to love someone so much, so damned much. I am dreaming of lying down with him in a field like the one just beyond the big house we saw late yesterday. When I saw this field, my heart pounded. I saw a big tree where I would spread a blanket and bring him down to my breast and kiss him. I would kiss Bruce everywhere and come up for a breath now and again, only to whisper, “I'm sorry” and then, “I love you.”
Bruce will laugh at me, and he will cup his hands around my face. He will forgive me like he already has one hundred times, and when he looks in my eyes, clear inside of me, I know he will see finally that I do love him with all of my heart and that I will never make him leave again. We'll strip naked and roll clear to hell and back right through every field in Wisconsin.
I told everyone what I was thinking about, and this morning I am getting winks from my sweet friends. I wink back and smile too, and then I am back to Bruce and it seems that the farther I walk, the less I can remember about the bad things and my years of mistakes. Then I know why Alice says we could walk forever, only I am hoping it won't be that long. I have already been to forever, and I want to stay in this place of power and hope—pushing forward, my arms full, my heart flying in a direction that can only be called happiness.
CHAPTER SIX
TABOR'S POND WASN'T MUCH more than a puddle. It ran from one edge of a clearing—a massive low spot—to the other, and when spring was at its peak, so was the pond. Geese flying south through Illinois often stopped for a drink or a nibble of corn, but rarely, for unless it was a terribly wet spring, the pond would all but disappear.
Janice jumped for joy when she saw the speck of water from the highway. She loved water. Loved to touch it, see it, take off her shoes and run into it. Most of her life, Janice had fought what she considered to be primal urges to strip naked and hop into water wherever she happened to be. Her singular heroine was Katharine Hepburn, who swam in the permanently freezing Atlantic Ocean almost every morning of her life.
“Come on!” Janice yelped as she veered from the highway toward the pond. “Oh, water, water!” her pals heard her yell as she disappeared from sight into the low land.
“Holy shit,” said Sandy. “Did anyone else know abou
t this?”
“At least she still has her clothes on,” Susan answered. “I've known Janice longer than any of you, and I tell you this is one of the most interesting attractions I have ever seen in my life.”
“Attractions?” asked J.J., plodding down the hill with the rest of the women.
“Yeah. Attractions,” continued Susan. “Janice and water. She's nuts about it. Growing up, she would jump into the river or any of the lakes around here or something like this dumpy old pond at the drop of a hat. I'm sure her children were all conceived in water.”
“Oh baby,” Chris said sexily. “Now you're talkin'.”
“Once,” continued Susan, “when we were still in high school, she actually cut a hole in the ice down on Ranker's Beach so she could get in the water.”
“You're kidding?” said Gail. “This woman has it bad.” Gail shook her head.
“You don't know the half of it,” Susan sighed, then laughed as she sauntered down the hill.
Beyond the pond was an old farm that looked as if it had been abandoned for years. Every single one of the women looked over the decrepit farm buildings, as if wondering with one mind who had once lived in this place. They could see bent clothesline poles, weeded-over flower beds that ran in a circle out from the side of the house, and strips of colored cloth that had been hung on top of old wooden bird feeders.
The women knew when they saw those things that a sister had once lived there, a woman of the wilds who loved her place, who loved to watch those birdhouse streamers dancing in the wind, who probably walked through the long, rolling grass in the yard holding the hands of her children and wondered what could possibly be happening beyond the small territory of her own life.
As they followed Janice from the edge of the highway to the lip of the shallow pond, they questioned why the farm windows were boarded up and wondered out loud what had happened to the woman who must have lived here.
