by Kris Radish
Lisa has a tale of great sadness. She is our domestic-violence statistic, and for her to simply voice her past is a leap of generosity that makes me reach out and take her hand halfway through her Reverse Bridal presentation. It is impossible to guess her age. Lines long and hard move to the very edge of her eye, where I always raise my eyeliner, out to the side of her face and down to a valley of red streaks that fan across her face. I think of a valley of tears. I think that she has been crying for such a long time that her face turned into a river. I think that compared to her story mine is a free lunch at a cheap restaurant.
“You think it cannot be happening. You think that it isn't happening when it does happen and that when it stops it is never going to happen again.”
Lisa speaks quietly, her voice rising in the middle of every sentence and then dipping to the edge of the last word as if she is trying to hold on to something she knows is slipping away. Everyone is looking at her, no one is moving, even the incense seems to be paying attention, and even though I suspect they have heard her story before, they have to listen. They have to hear it again.
“So much of what happened to me is classic domestic violence stuff,” she explains. “He was a professional who had a violent temper that was accelerated when he drank, and he drank pretty much all of the time.”
Lisa was embarrassed and lived in a place so surreal that she became adept at using makeup, forgiving; saying the limp in her right leg was from an old running injury, passing on family gatherings because of his workload, disappearing from any portion of her former world. Her life within three years became nothing more than a fearful attempt at survival and denial.
When I look again at Lisa, when I really look, I see that there is a tiny, soft spot in the center of her eye. I see that she has surrounded that soft view of the world with a hard line that must now and forever be the place she turns to for protection.
“I went to a terrific college and have half a master's degree. I have been to Europe and the Caribbean and I am well read and have a mind that can wrap itself around views of the world that are complicated and sophisticated and wild,” she tells me. “But I could not leave this man. I was just as sick as he was. Just as sick.”
There is something, there is always something, Lisa tells us, moving her eyes from face to face and then back to mine. For Lisa it was not one single act of violence. It was not a kick to the womb that killed her baby or a bullet aimed at her heart. It was a single streak of light that worked its way into her dining room window one night.
“I was just sitting there, and this odd light moved across the window, like the shadow of a ghost, and it fell across my arm—right over the top of my hand where there was a scar. . . .”
She hesitates, a memory rising like a ring of pain from her face, trapped for seconds, a minute, then two in a place that is dangerous to revisit. An old scar, long, horrific, terrifying.
“It was from him, from something that he threw at me, and I put my hand into the air to save my face, and my hand from finger to wrist sliced open, blood everywhere, him yelling that I was a stupid fucking bitch and I could not go back to the hospital, so I bandaged it myself.”
Lisa raises her hand and moves it from face to face. There is a jagged red scar that moves east and west and then back again. It is the kind of scar left by rough steel or broken glass. It will never go away.
“When the light hit my scar, it stopped moving and stayed right there, and I thought if I could save my face, if I could save that, then why could I not save my own life?”
Why not, Lisa? Why not?
“I got up from the chair and walked out of the house without one single thing, and I never went back.”
I am breathless. Worlds of sorrow and loss and dreams melted into piles of grief have settled in my heart, but Lisa touches me softly and places her package into my fingers, and that weight disappears.
“So you can always have that beam of light, Meg. Always.”
My new flashlight is red and will fit into the small pocket of my Levi's. It has one of those fabulous batteries that never runs out. I turn it on and flash it into everyone's eyes, and then I simply hug Lisa, because I am unable to speak.
My mother's gift comes before her words. It is a travel book filled with blank pages and a small beautifully framed photograph of my father. I look at her in wonder and she speaks softly but firmly about life and changes, and I look at her in astonishment.
“I loved your father, I really loved your father, and yet there were things that I hated about him too,” she explains. “It took me a long time to forgive him and myself for everything that went wrong and was hurtful in our lives, but at the bottom of it all was the fact that we did love each other. Times now are not like they were back then, and the gift you have is what the power of this day brings you.”
My mother talks too about the goodness of kind men's hearts. She tells me I will love again and that I should remain open to every chance, every touch of a man's hand. The light of passions, she says, is always brilliant. “Embrace your past, Margaret, just as you must embrace your future.”
The travel book, she explains, is for me to know that if love does not come to me, then I must go to it.
“Mom, that's beautiful. Thank you.”
Audre, who has jet-black hair and green eyes, tells me that the luck of her life has been the ability to finally know a good thing when she sees it. When I unwrap her gift, it is a compact pair of binoculars so that I might be able to find my own good things and then keep them.
“I have been married for twenty-one years to a man who was relentless in his pursuit of me,” she explains. “I had a series of tough relationships before I met Jim and was determined to stay single and be alone. But he would not give up, and one day he wrote me this terribly beautiful love note—and when I put it down, I looked up and into his eyes . . . and I decided I had not been looking at him at all.”
Audre tells me not to be afraid to love again and to look into the eyes of any man who might have a kind heart with an open heart myself.
“I'll be looking,” I promise her. “Thank you.”
Elizabeth, my wonderful Elizabeth, is next. She is sitting in front of me, smiling widely. In her hands she has nothing. Empty palms. Long lines of life.
“Do you know?” she asks me.
“I'm not sure. . . . What is it?”
“Honey, everything you have always needed has been right inside of you. You are strong and beautiful and wise. The world is yours. Continue to get to know yourself. Be brave. Don't back up. You have it all, baby. You do.”
“Elizabeth, I love you. Thank you.”
“When you are not sure, simply look into the mirror. You will see exactly what you need to see.”
Then Elizabeth finishes and I put the flashlight away and look up to see them all watching me, and I know that it is my turn to give them all something at this Reverse Bridal Shower.
I think that I can give them a promise.
“You have given me courage and hope and stories of your life that are precious and intimate,” I tell them, feeling about for the right thing to say, the right way to say it. “I cannot say that I am not afraid to sign the final papers and move into the next phase of my life alone, but I promise that I will do it with a full heart and with the knowledge that I am doing what is best and right for me—me.”
They clap, but I am not finished.
“And soon—when I have filled my own space and I can feel my own life, my life, lifting me and holding me—we will have a party, all of us, we will have a party, and it will not have a damn thing to do with brides.”
The laughter carries us to our feet, and then the Reverse Bridal Shower shifts its tone toward celebration, and as women always do, we take care of each other and the food appears and we continue talking. Women. How wonderful they are. Sisters. Friends. Daughters. Women are so absolutely wonderful.
“Elizabeth . . .”
“Yes, baby?”
&n
bsp; “Thanks.”
She surrounds me with her arms, arms so familiar to me now that I fold into her as if we have done this every day of our entire lives.
“It's what we do, Margaret. It's what women who love each other do.”
“It is,” I echo.
“We can do anything.”
Elizabeth. Oh, Elizabeth.
I get home close to three A.M. and I can see dawn peeking its head around the corner. The world is asleep and I may never be able to sleep again. I do not bother to see if anyone is watching me from the window next door. I do not care.
When I slip off my top and then my shorts and sandals, I think I hear music—something ancient and pure, the whisper of wind that catches my hair and helps me circle slowly on the deck overlooking my rock fortress.
Then I dance for a long time. Alone. Naked. And when dawn breaks across my roof, I can see the edges of tomorrow.
i will
dance naked
when i first
learn
to walk . . .
and there
will be
a rainbow of light
colors
to blind
the binding minds
the closed hearts
of the men and women
who said
“never”
i will not
simply walk
but
fly
with wings of gold
woman
warrior
feeling with a heart
the fineness of the journey
and dancing naked
at the edge of dawn
is the gate
that moves my soul
into the endless
realm
of possibility
—Chesnay Susan Thomas
Chicago
From: Passing the Light—Women in Transition—1968
Meg finished dancing naked before the neighbors looked out their windows, and claimed her house that night as her new home, which was a major part of her new life.
Just before Christmas, she resigned her position at the University and spent a month in Mexico. She visited her daughter in Mexico City and then went to see the dancing dogs, Tomas and her cottage by the sea.
She spent almost all of her time at the cottage and visiting with Pancho Gonzales Quintana, who, whispered into her hair, kept uttering unbelievably beautiful phrases of love, all the while in and out of a coma that kept him in one world one minute and another the next. One afternoon Meg decided to tell him what he needed so desperately to hear.
“Pancho, go to her, she is waiting for you. Marcia is waiting.”
The funeral was a grand affair that took place at his estate. Tomas set the casket in the living room so that his father was facing the sea. The dogs danced and there was music in the gardens, food, people laughed and talked about what a wonderful man Pancho Gonzales Quintana had been—generous, kind and fair. Several hundred people came by to pay their respects and they all brought flowers.
“My father was the one who put the dried flowers in the rocks by your cottage,” Tomas told her. “We would always find baskets of flowers by the road. People knew he loved dried flowers.”
One night, two weeks after the funeral, Tomas and Meg walked on the beach. They talked about Marcia and Pancho, and how the events of the past year had forever changed them. Meg instinctively reached down and took Tomas's hand while they sat on the beach, and then she turned and asked him a very important question.
“Tomas, do you think you could make love to me?”
They talked for a long time first. Meg said she wanted to feel the hands of a man on her who cared about her. She told him that it would not bind them, that he must see it as a gift to her and a gift from her.
“I trust you, Tomas,” she told him. “I know you would not hurt me. I need this. It is the last thing that will really set me free.”
Tomas was a sweet and gentle lover and they discovered that two people could spoon together and fit into the Stone Palace at the same time.
When Meg came back to Chicago, she began her classes at the massage school that was within walking distance of her home. The very first second of the first day of class, she knew she had found a place to rest her heart. She loved every single thing about her new profession.
During her yearlong program she took a job at the coffee shop on the other end of her block, where she met and dated several men. She made love in her bedroom with several of them, and when Tomas came to Chicago, he joined her there too and was pleased to discover that Meg's backyard rock house was also big enough for both of them.
Halfway through her massage training, Meg struck up a wonderful friendship with a woman in her class and they developed a business plan, arranged funding and located a suitable building for their massage practice. Meg made certain that her new partner realized she would be gone several months a year to Mexico.
Katie had the time of her life in Mexico, and Meg was not surprised to learn that Tomas helped her gain entrance to the university in Mexico City. He also helped her find a suitable place to live and part-time employment.
In January, during a long weekend off from school, Meg took the train to Denver and showed up at her son's home. Shaun's boyfriend answered the door; she embraced him and they were drinking wine together when Shaun got home from work.
They talked for hours, reconciled, and Shaun and his partner, Kevin, traveled to Chicago the following month to see Meg's house and to take a major step back into her life.
Shaun and Katie's father stayed with the geranium lover for less than a year and then immediately moved in with another woman. He helped Katie with her school costs, helped pay off Shaun's bills but gradually drifted out of Meg's life and world. He called her from work every other month or so to see if she was okay, and Meg was always glad to hear his voice.
Meg's mother continued her search for her lost lover, and by late winter was planning a trip to South Carolina, where the former football coach had moved. He was now a widower. Single. Free and absolutely healthy.
Jane fell back into her life as a writer with great enthusiasm and success. She put her house up for sale and began looking for an apartment closer to the heart of the city. She started dating, reconnected with several college friends from the past and began volunteering at the rape crisis center and homeless shelter. Meg threw her a huge Reverse Bridal Shower, which was featured on the front page of Jane's own newspaper.
Aunt Marcia's foundation flourished, and Meg attended her first board meeting, where she was introduced to a world and a cause that she would take on as her own. She immediately recruited her friends Elizabeth, Bianna, her new business partner, the members of the original Reverse Bridal Shower and her landlord to the cause, and within six months they were all working on fund-raisers and planning a trip to Mexico to work at the clinics and visit Meg's cottage.
By mid-summer, Elizabeth was spending so much time driving into the city to see Meg and meet with all her newfound friends that she was looking for a town house to purchase for herself. Meg would often come home from school and find her sitting on the deck, drinking wine, with her feet propped up on the rock structure.
Sometimes the two women would get into the rock palace together and talk for hours.
“Someday you'll have to put an electric ramp in here that will lower us in and out when we get arthritis,” Elizabeth told her. “One of these days my damn knees are going to blow out.”
Bianna's business continued to flourish, and Meg became a regular part of her Reverse Bridal Shower therapy sessions. By the end of the year, eight more women had found the courage to change their lives following a shower.
Dr. C broke all of her professional rules and struck up a wonderful friendship with Meg, and finally admitted that she and Elizabeth had been friends and a bit more for many years. When Meg was making the plans for her business, Dr. C proposed that she move her practice in with
the two massage therapists. That led them to find a bigger building which they decided to purchase and restore. The women added a Reiki practitioner and are now in the process of turning the business into one of the most successful treatment centers in Chicago, where women can get everything from a massage and facial to a psychological overhaul. They also started a Reverse Bridal Shower group that has downtown divorce attorneys more than excited.
One summer afternoon, while Elizabeth, Katie, Meg, the funky landlord and her partner and the three guys from across the street were celebrating Meg's two-year anniversary of moving into her home, Linda, the guide from Mexico who had helped Elizabeth and Meg find the dancing dogs, showed up miraculously in the backyard.
“What the hell!” Elizabeth and Meg shouted at the same moment.
“How did you find us?” Meg asked Linda.
“I've been back in the United States for a few months, trying to decide what to do next, and I turned my head one day and I swear to God I could feel an occasional breeze from the jungle, and I followed it right to your backyard, Meg.”
Tomas, Meg thought.
That night, while various assortments of men and women and women and women and men and men took turns going in and out of the rock palace, Meg sat on the steps and called Carol Kimbal. She told Carol everything and then asked if she could come for a visit and drink that wine they had talked about so long ago.
