by Kris Radish
Within an hour I realize I may have underestimated the time needed to complete this terribly important job, but I am dauntless. I see that there are two lights at the edge of the porch roof. I will work all night if I have to. And it's hotter than Hell. I strip off my shirt, go inside for a beer, then another one, and work placing the stones one on top of the other for two, three and then four hours.
By four P.M. I am further than I thought I would be. The stones are beautiful, solid, a ring of life that is becoming my fortress. Every stone tells me something. I wonder where it came from, who touched it first, how many years it bounced along the bottom of a river. Some of the stones are so beautiful, flecked with gold and green and blue, that I kiss them, and each rock holds a part of my story, my life—up until this moment.
I think about my parents, my brothers, my Auntie Marcia. While I put the rocks in place, winding them in a long oval, I try and remember as much of my life as I can. My first period, a kiss, the night I made love with a long-legged boy from Florida on a beach, the dancing dogs, the sounds of my babies waking up while I stood and watched.
I remember the pain of childbirth and my wedding and my father's funeral. I am sailing and running and crying and laughing with every rock that I place, and then I am finished.
Meg, oh, Meg. Wow.
The circle is waist high. It curves perfectly. I love it.
It is just getting dark on this summer Saturday evening. The sky, blinded by the lights from the city, is still the champion, and while I walk to the car to retrieve two large plastic bags, I feel like everything I see is twinkling, whispering hello, saying, “Welcome back, Margaret.” I am trying to imagine feeling happier and I can't.
I set the bags down outside of the rocks and go inside to wash my face and to grab the bottle of champagne. I linger too. My apartment is dazzling, absolutely dazzling, and I am in love.
Back outside, the rocks look as if they are glowing. This makes me laugh out loud. First I walk around the edge and run my hand over all the stones, a thankful caress. The bags untie easily and flower petals spill out before I get a chance to line the inside of my fortress. Rose petals fall everywhere when I tip first one bag and then the other into the center of the rocks. Flakes of yellow and red and white. It's snowing for just a few minutes, and the scent is overpowering, wild, beautiful.
Getting inside of the rocks is easy. I take the bottle with me and slide down so that I can lie with my legs stretched out. The flowers are soft and silky against my legs, hands and arms.
I pop the bottle right away. There is no fancy glass, just the joyous sound of an expensive bottle of champagne breaking itself free, an exotic and sensual explosion that streams down my legs and drops into the flowers.
The wine is fabulous. I think I may never use a glass again. I think there are many things that I may never use or do again. I drink for a while and settle my ears into the new city sounds that will eventually become familiar to me. Beyond the lights and buildings and light poles, I can make out a few stars, fighting furiously to be seen beyond the soaring city.
“I see you,” I tell the stars, and then I say the same thing out loud to myself. “I see you, Meg. I see you.”
When I set down the bottle and curl around myself, a tiny breeze moves in between the holes I have left in several places in my rock house. My mind floats back to my Mexican jungle when an occasional breeze woke me up, showed me the way home, helped me stand with my feet at the edge of the ocean, the edge of the world, the edge of my life and see who I could be, wanted to be, had to be.
I tell myself that this breeze from the jungle has followed me and that I can have it and feel it and taste it anytime I want, wherever I am. I let the air curl around me and then I wrap my arms around me, myself, just a bit tighter, and I feel the glorious fineness of myself, and then I laugh, alone—happily, gloriously alone—into the breeze that has found its way into my heart.
“Something is happening at seven tonight,” Bianna says as if she has been talking and I just jumped into the middle of a long conversation she thought she was having with me.
“Huh?”
“My house, in the back studio, seven P.M.”
“Is this an invitation?”
“No, it's an order.”
“What?”
“It's what you asked for the last time we talked. You are beyond ready. Be there.”
She hangs up and I look down into the glass that covers my desk to make certain that I am really alive and standing in my office. I bend down so that I can see the bridge of my nose, my hair tumbling into my eyes and the confused look that has settled into the heart of my pupils.
“I have no idea what is going on,” I say to myself. “What in God's name is going on?”
Bianna's studio sits behind her garage on the middle half of two rolling acres just south of the city. It is one large room that is its own country, and from my new home in the city the drive takes seventy-nine minutes. She does all her work in the room, on scattered pillows, with the soft wave of ancient music, under the glow of flaming candles and through a veil of incense so thick, it often feels as if the room is on fire.
I arrive at exactly seven P.M., floating in on some kind of soft air that has me wondering what in the hell is going to happen to me next. Before I get out of my car I run through every major thing—screw the minor stuff—that has happened to me since the morning I watched Bob and the geranium woman. Could it be possible that their sex act unleashed something magical that has cascaded into my life and filled up all the empty holes that I had been unwilling to plug myself? When I walk into Bianna's chambers, I am laughing, propelled by the thought that my husband's affair has changed my life in ways that I now must be thankful for.
The room is full of more than incense smoke. There are at least eight or nine women milling about in the glow of dozens of candles.
“Darling,” Bianna calls to me, and I see her walking through the thick air with her arms open, her long caftan trailing behind her like an obedient servant, her smile wide and just a little scary.
I don't say anything, but fan my hand around the room as if to ask, “What the hell?” She keeps smiling and places her hand on the side of my perplexed-looking face.
“We are doing something I call a Reverse Bridal Shower,” she tries hard to say.
“What the hell?”
“Well, it's a way for you to kick off the final stages of your divorce proceedings with help from some very smart experts and a few people who simply love and care about you very, very much.”
Do I laugh now or cry? I tumble to the edge of both emotions and stand still.
“Bianna . . .”
“It's a lovely ceremony. You'll see.”
“Do I have a choice?” I whisper.
“Of course not,” she laughs.
I feel as if I am floating above my body. Bianna introduces me to Samantha, Lisa, Carrie, Pat and Lee and Audre. Dark hair. Lovely eyes. Hair as short as a Jack Russell. Long legs. Acne scars. Plain. Beautiful. Tall. I am in the midst of a glorious group of women who are throwing me a Reverse Bridal Shower. A Reverse Bridal Shower. I have never seen any of them before. I smile. I have absolutely no clue. Then Elizabeth appears from the back room and she is holding hands with my mother. When I look as stunned as I am, my mother simply puts her arm around me, kisses me on the cheek and says, “Isn't this fun?”
Bianna offers tea and coffee for all those in recovery. I choose the wine. If this is a shower, my shower, I will have at least one part of it my way, wondering the entire time what in the world a Reverse Bridal Shower could be or do or become.
On the table with the drinks I see packages. My shower gifts. They are wrapped up in newspaper. The energy from the women sparkles through the studio. I swear to God before I take my first sip of wine that everything and everyone is glowing. When I look down to make certain that I am not on fire myself, I see a soft light moving off the edge of my fingertips. Something is already happening at this R
everse Bridal Shower.
Something is happening.
Bianna has us bring our drinks and sit cross-legged in a circle. We drop obediently onto pillows as soft as summer clouds. She has on a series of funky CDs, so that in the background it seems as if there is an orchestra playing in the bathroom. Echoes are bouncing everywhere.
“Are we ready?” she asks.
Everyone is ready. I am still smiling. I may need a much bigger wineglass. The shower has very simple rules. There will apparently be no male stripper, which is good news for me. There is no cake, and we will not go barhopping. I am certain no one in this group has wrapped up Tupperware or sexual devices as part of the shower gift-giving. I am starting to feel much better.
Bianna keeps talking. The shower rules are brilliant and beautiful.
“These women are all clients and friends of mine,” she explains. “Each one of them has been through a life transformation, a divorce, falling in love, loss, grief, rediscovered love. Each one of them has a short story and a gift for you. They are going to help you by sharing a part of their story, give you something tangible that you can take with you, and your simple job is to give them something, unburden your fears, so that you can move into the next stop on your own life ride with power and strength.”
The woman next to me, Carrie, gently touches my hand and smiles at me. I put my head down, shake myself into a place of acceptance, openness, extreme gratitude. Let the Reverse Bridal Shower begin.
Lee goes first. She has long dark hair and winds it in and out of her fingers as she talks. She only looks at me occasionally. I think this must be terribly hard for her, but she talks softly and there is firmness in her voice that is reassuring and strong.
“My husband wanted to leave me and I fought it for a long time. Months turned into years and then one day I got out a calendar and counted the exact number of days I had spent trying to save something not worth saving, and I was astounded,” she tells me. “It had taken me two years to realize my marriage was over. I could not waste another minute, another second. I put the calendar down, signed all the papers and called someone to change all the locks on the house.”
Lee, who is sitting on the other side of the circle, says, “Catch,” and throws me her package. I unwrap a calendar. There are no photos on it, no glorious sunrises, just days and days and months of blank spaces. I want to cry, but I just say, “Thank you, Lee.”
Carrie, with the ancient acne scars, tells me how she was pregnant when she married her husband and how she would wake up every morning and imagine that she was alone and raising her baby the way she wanted to raise her baby and not the way her husband, who tried to guard and guide every moment of her life, wanted her to raise their son.
“The only quiet moments I had were those fifteen or twenty minutes each morning when I woke before he did and could stare out the window and imagine a life that I thought was impossible to have,” she says, while balancing on her hands and leaning very far into the circle. “I felt so damn alone and found myself wishing away every day until my son was grown and I could leave.”
Carrie does not seem weak or weary. I find the dips in her face terribly attractive. I wonder if she could lift up the entire room with the simple strong tones of her voice.
“I found myself always looking out of the window. One day, when my son was eleven, I asked him what he wanted for Christmas. He turned to me very slowly, smiled, and I imagined he was going to ask me for something like a computer or the keys to a pickup truck. He told me all he wanted was for me to be happy.”
Wow, Carrie. Wow.
“That's when I went through the window. I literally went through the window of my bedroom, jumped onto the downstairs porch and called an attorney the second I walked back into the house.”
Carrie's gift to me is a photograph of the window she climbed out of. I smile at her, imagining what that Christmas must have been like. I imagine the morning she rolled over in bed and could move her arms without touching a man she did not care to be with. I imagine she slept with the window open every night, even when it was twenty below zero.
“Thank you, Carrie. Thank you for the window.”
Samantha is quiet. I do not think of her as a woman who could be wild and brassy. Her legs take up almost two of the floor spaces. Her long fingers are laced together when she speaks, and it looks as if she is praying.
“I was in love with another man,” she confesses. “My husband was not bad or evil, he was just, well, he was just my husband. We never made love, he worked too much, and I fell in love with a man from college who moved back to town and called me. I could not bring myself to move the love affair past meetings for coffee, phone conversations, a gentle kiss on the cheek. My husband always looked desperate, and we were simply sharing space, a kitchen and a place to park our cars.”
Samantha has us all spellbound. She did not want to cheat on her husband but she was desperately in love with someone else. She had an official piece of paper that announced to the world that she was married, but she did not feel married. Her friend was also desperately in love and desperate to make her see that her husband was equally as miserable.
One afternoon, she found a note in her car, the key to a hotel room and a bottle of wine. She went to the hotel room, sat alone on the bed drinking the wine, and then her man showed up.
“I could not have done it without the wine,” she says, blushing. “I stayed in the hotel room with him for two solid days. When I came home to tell my husband, he was happy for me, relieved, thrilled. It's unusual, but we are still very good friends. Once a year my new husband and I go spend an entire weekend in the same hotel room, but I don't need the wine anymore.”
She tells me that as she remains friends with her ex-husband, she wants me to never give up on love. She tells me the world is full of kind, wonderful, generous men and that some of them will find their way into my arms.
Samantha's gift is a tiny bottle of wine. “Whatever it takes,” she says, smiling wildly and pulling at the top of her sweater as if she is trying to let out a long wave of hot, exotic air. “I wish to hell I would have done it sooner, so much sooner.”
“Samantha, bottoms up, baby. Thank you.”
I take breaths now, deep and wide, filling my lungs with the same air that these women are sharing with me, waiting desperately to fan myself with the same wind that has given these women whatever they needed to step forward. They are lovely, so damn lovely.
Pat, short and round and with eyes as wide as the top of my glass, tells me she is embarrassed to even say why she could not dive into a divorce. But she does, dropping her head into her hands and then rising with a simple smile to say: “I thought my mother would be mad, because the wedding cost so much.”
We all laugh, but we also know exactly what she means. The embarrassment of failure, the elaborate charade of ceremony, the unnecessary extravagance, the piles of useless gifts and, of course, the most ridiculous bridal showers one could possibly imagine.
“It wasn't one thing, it was more like three thousand things that led me into a total pile of unhappiness,” she explains. “I limped along waiting for someone to come pluck me from my life and drop me into another one, but no one ever showed up. It wasn't my husband's fault. It was my fault for not realizing the failure of my marriage and my life up to that point was all of my own doing.”
She takes a breath, and we all wait. What could it be?
“I got really sick one morning, just violently ill, and I went to call my husband to take me to the doctor, and when my hand was on the phone, I realized that he was the last person I wanted to be with when I was ill, the last person I would call if I was an inch from being delirious—the one person in the world who was supposed to love me, who probably did not love me at all,” she says, closing her eyes so that she could recall exactly how she felt. “I decided to drive myself to the doctor. I was drenched in sweat, had a horrific pain in my abdomen, and I realized the second I put my hand below my waist
that I probably had a burst appendix.”
Which is exactly what Pat had. From her hospital room as she was prepped for surgery, she called her best friend and not her husband. When she woke from surgery, with rocks in her mouth and her entire body floating in narcotic ecstasy, she looked up to see her friend, standing guard over her wedding ring wrapped in a wad of Kleenex on the table, and a bright light shining above the door—which was really the bathroom light—but she decided that the light was her path to singlehood.
“The first call I made from the hospital room was to a divorce attorney,” she says, smiling. “Here,” she says, pushing her gift toward me, “I threw away the appendix, so this will have to do.”
Her gift is a Barbie doll–sized hospital kit that makes me laugh, which I am discovering from these terrific women is a fine and wonderful thing to do.
“It's lovely,” I tell her.
Elizabeth gets up then and comes over to hand me a piece of paper. It is a note from Katie.
“She knew we were doing this and she wrote this for you.”
I take one look at it and ask Elizabeth to read it for me.
“. . . Mom, my gift for you is myself, everything that I am becoming, the woman I am going to be. When you thought you were failing me—you were not. Without your help and encouragement, I would never have the courage to go to Mexico for six months or to work so hard for the grades that got me here. The divorce does not change anything about how I feel toward you or Dad. Sometimes people just fall out of love, and that is an important lesson as well. I just want you to be happy, Mom, just really happy, and to know that I am really excited about your new life and our new home. You are a wonderful mother, and I will always be your daughter. As I am a gift to you, you have always been a gift to me.
Love always,
Katie”
Oh, Katie.
“Thank you,” I tell her, throwing a kiss into the air that I hope will land right on her lips all those miles away in Mexico.
