The Shortest Distance Between Two Women

by Kris Radish

  When Marty brings her head back down to earth she focuses on Debra because she knows there is more than a seventy-five percent chance that while she was dripping champagne into the orange juice, Daughter Number Three was trying to convince her sisters and the impressionable niece that their father and grandfather was not the father and grandfather. Nothing much surprises the matriarch.

  “Sweetheart, have you looked into a mirror lately? Or bothered to focus on the features of your sisters who happen to be sitting right here at the table in front of you?”

  “So? Lots of people look like us,” Debra tries to explain.

  “Are you on something, dear?” Marty asks her as Stephie moves her eyes back and forth from Grandma to Auntie Debra as if she is a bobblehead doll. This, the teenager decides, is better than anything she ever watches on television.

  “Like crack or pills or something besides mimosas,” Marty adds, tilting her head and then leaning forward to push the drink pitcher towards Emma who has refused to drink at most family events for the past two years lest she say something wildly inappropriate.

  “This is ridiculous!” Joy shouts. “Just tell her, Mom, so we can finish this meal and get on with our lives and plan this reunion.”

  “Tell her what? Tell her you all have the same father you have always had and that I was a loyal and devoted wife who slept only with one man? Debra, you know I love you, but you are such an occasional pain in the ass I am beginning to wonder if you are really my daughter. Maybe someone switched babies when I was lying on my back with my eyes closed and ice packs jammed in every conceivable location because the baby I had the day you were born had such a big mouth they could barely get her out of my womb.”

  Marty is in rare form. Stephanie is now laughing so hard that she leans over and falls off of her chair. Joy finds this funny and she starts laughing, too.

  “Debra, lighten up,” Marty admonishes. “You need to stop drinking an entire pitcher of these things by yourself every Sunday. I think you are hallucinating, dear.”

  Debra is not just embarrassed—she is also humiliated. She pushes back from the table and wobbles to her feet, smacks her palms on the table, and then apparently has no idea what to do or say next.

  There is then a brilliant pause that in the Gilford family has not so secretly become known as the Moment of Possible Salvation. It is a moment that sometimes only lasts three seconds. It can last a lot longer, but with this fascinating blend of personalities the chance to have a quiet moment stretch for more than three seconds would indeed be classified as a modern miracle.

  This moment is a very slight chance for Gilford family redemption. It’s a chance to say something like “Forget it, I was channeling a brazen nun from the fourteenth century,” or “Did I mention that last Friday I fell and hit my head on the side of the fireplace?” or “My doctor told me if it really is a brain tumor that I could have only a few months left.”

  It’s also a chance, such a brief, tiny, minuscule chance, to say “I’m sorry”—two simple and very beautiful words that for some insane reason seem to evoke near-death if anyone ever actually tries to have the Moment of Possible Salvation.

  Debra is so far from any possible moment of salvation that her sisters realize in an instant she will just say something else fairly inane and then try and change the subject. And of course that is very close to what happens next.

  So close and yet not close at all.

  Because no one has noticed that Emma has not laughed.

  Emma, who always laughs at her ridiculous family members, softly, but laughs nonetheless, could not and did not. Emma watched everyone laugh. She especially watched and listened to her mother.

  Emma watched and she yearned. She yearned for two things. She yearned like never before not to be there and to be instead in her garden with her gloveless fingers wrapped around the silky throats of her unplanted flowers and plants. And she so yearned to laugh like her mother. She wanted to be like Marty and not like her. She wanted to climb down her mother’s throat during the height of the laugh so she could see how to make the exact same sound and she also wanted to put her hands around that very same spot and say, “How do you do that, Mom?”

  What Emma finally did when her mother’s laugh gradually tapered to a soft sigh, and when everyone in her family acted as if nothing had happened since the mimosas had been placed on the table, was to rise up, push her chair away from the table and look into Debra’s shocked eyes. Then she spoke quietly because no one was moving or even breathing because Emma Lauryn Gilford was doing something totally unexpected.

  “I’m going now,” Emma said.

  Emma never left first. Emma was single. She always, and always meant always, stayed, cleaned up, took her mother grocery shopping, and only then if there was an hour left for herself, for Emma to do maybe three things before the week started all over again, she left. She could not leave now. Absolutely not at this crucial moment. Not before the GFR planning and assignment list had even started.

  She could not.

  But she did.

  Emma Gilford turned to the left, caught Stephie’s eye, smiled slightly, and then she leaned over to grab her purse and walked out of the front door without saying one more thing.

  And on the way home she so wished she had at the very least told her two sisters that if they were not on medication they should be and then long after she had locked her door, which she usually never does, Emma tried once to laugh with pure abandon and emotion like her mother.

  But she couldn’t do it.

  Emma Lauryn Gilford, who once had a man sing to her while wearing a woman’s bathrobe and who had just witnessed a familial confrontation that addressed the notion of bastardly parentage, infidelity, and her mother’s intrepid sex life, could not think of one thing that would make her laugh until her throat opened like one of her own spring flowers.

  Or like the beautiful long neck of her own mother.

  4

  THE FOURTH QUESTION:

  Why can’t I stop thinking about him?

  THE MOON DANCES OVER THE BACK SIDE of the house, a kind of slinky low movement that initiates a bizarre show of shadows, and when one long thin line of light falls directly across her face Emma imagines it as a microphone. She is lying in the center of her yard, on her back, with her hands outstretched as if she is a wind-toppled scarecrow. Emma lifts up her head a single inch as if it’s her turn to speak into the microphone and she says very softly, “Why can’t I stop thinking about him?”

  Emma waits as the shadows roll over her shoulder and down her arm like a slow, dark snake and imagines how lovely it would be to have someone else answer the question.

  Anyone.

  A total stranger.

  One of her three know-it-all sisters.

  The guy who changes her car oil.

  One of the three thousand cousins she sees once a year at the GFR.

  Anyone except Emma Lauryn Gilford.

  The shadow inches towards her hand and Emma closes her fingers around it. She keeps her hand rolled into a fist as she closes her eyes, imagining that the shadow is hers, and that if she holds it long enough an answer to her question will rise from the heat she feels trapped under the grass.

  Wrapped in the fast-fading warmth, Emma holds on to the question as she sinks her confused heart into the sounds of the night. It has been a week since she fled the planning brunch. Emma has worked diligently to avoid family phone calls, sightings of sisters, mothers and even nieces on the sidewalk, and especially the ringing in her ears that has become a constant reminder of Samuel’s phone call. And she can barely look in the mirror because she feels so guilty about everything she has done and everything she hasn’t done. Tonight there is the distant and faint noise of the far highway; birds rustling through her dozens of bushes and trees as they prepare for the last song of the day; the hum of the dim lights in the tiny alley-like street that runs behind her house; the constant rise and fall of television voices from the neighbors�
� houses; the glorious faint early evening South Carolina breeze that is a blanket for everything and everyone it touches.

  And this.

  This one extraordinarily beautiful and magical sound that Emma hears and that she thinks no one else hears, which brings her to her gardens time and time again. Emma believes that she can hear her plants and flowers moving, shifting in place, preparing for nightfall, whispering the day’s secrets through leaves and roots and the flowering branches that will blanket her entire yard by midsummer.

  She sees the leaves as arms, the edges of the thin flower buds as veins of human-like energy, their every movement as a dance of life. Her way of thinking has given her a unique connection to the seeds she plants, the flowers she grows, the trees and shrubs she nurtures. Emma communicates with her gardens like horse whisperers communicate with stallions and those who speak to the dead are linked to worlds beyond human. She believes that her plants are real way past their physical manifestations and that is why Emma talks to her gardens.

  This is also why she has never shared her lying-down-on-the-lawn secret with anyone in her family. She knows they would call her crazy and add one more thing to their “What’s Wrong with Emma” lists. Her occasional jaunts to lie in her garden are to Emma just pure and quiet moments when she can fold her own arms in between the rows of glorious hues that serenade her senses and then lift her fingers to the bottom of the precious, gossamer blossoms. And none of this seems the slightest bit crazy to her.

  Emma has walked through the city park and seen people doing yoga poses that are suggestively sexual. She once worked with a man, who has since become a Buddhist monk, who would climb on top of his desk when he was stressed, cross his legs, bow his head, and chant. She has seen men wearing dresses at the mall, and just about everywhere else, and once at a national conference when three goofballs walked into a very important meeting in their boxer shorts, and wearing those plastic Wisconsin cheeseheads, no one even moved to throw them out and they finally just got up and left.

  So lying flat in her yard, clothed, absolutely sober, and with a burning question resting near the very long lifeline in the palm of her left hand does not seem odd or unnatural to her at all. Caressing her plants, feeling the energy of night taking command over day, she can pause everything but her emotions and this most recent and persistent question—Why can’t I stop thinking about him?

  Stephie caught her once several years ago as she was stretched out between the back side of the house and a lively budding row of deep purple perennials that the local garden store unfairly warned would never bloom and rushed to her side thinking that she had fainted.

  “Auntie Emma, are you okay?”

  Emma had opened her eyes, removed her fingers from the tangled vines, and put her hand on the curve of Stephie’s lovely soft cheek.

  Then she smiled because her niece was so beautiful that she looked like a budding flower herself.

  “I’m fine, sweetheart.”

  “What in the world are you doing?”

  “Lying in the yard, silly. Does it look like I’m jumping rope?”

  “No, but it’s not often you find adults lying as if they have been crucified in their own backyards.”

  “Join me,” Emma commanded and without hesitation Stephie dropped beside her. They linked fingers, left to right, and Emma told Stephie a lie. She told her niece she was tired and had fallen asleep when she stretched out to rest for a while. She also mentioned how the chattering voices of Stephie’s mother, her other two aunties and her grandmother were thankfully eaten alive by the sounds of her plants wiggling in the wind.

  And Stephie had just laughed and then, like a typical teenager, asked if there was anything to eat in the house.

  Tonight there is no Stephie, only the persistent Samuel question. Emma moves both hands until each one finds a stem. The small plants in the section of the yard where she has chosen to lie are teenagers themselves and Emma runs her fingers up what she calls their legs; she feels to make certain that they are not growing too fast or too slow because she can tell those things by simply touching. She doesn’t, however, know why Samuel has called, what he wants, and why she is even bothering to pause and wonder.

  Emma does know something simple. She knows that when she is in her garden lying, standing, sitting, working, planting, walking through it all—her heart slows. Her breathing lengthens, and everything suddenly seems clear, work problems evaporate and her fatigue melts as if there has been a snowstorm to vanquish the heat of an already hot South Carolina April Saturday. In her garden, there are no family disagreements. No obsessive sisters. No mother hovering close by to offer ample suggestions. Not one single family-reunion-related duty to fulfill. Everything always seems clear. And she remembers.

  She remembers the shape of a man taking her hand, the hand of a little girl, and pressing it into the earth. And the instant sensation of joy, a miracle of hands knowing their place and the glorious smell of warm earth that makes her mouth water, her head spin, her lungs expand so that she feels as if she could never get enough air.

  This is the moment when Emma realizes that the answer to the seemingly overbearing, insulting, contemplative and anger-provoking question “Why can’t I stop thinking about him?” is only being accentuated by her being in her usually soothing gardens. The very dirt, the rich dark soil that she has enhanced with everything from horse dung to natural herbs and some very funky salt-like substances she ordered from Poland of all places, is making her remember Samuel even more.

  How they loved to tour gardens where his botanist’s brain seemed to her exactly like an encyclopedia. There had been picnics under flowering trees, camping trips where they’d never even bothered to take a tent but slept on the cool ground with their noses pushed up against bushes and trees and even weeds that he thought were delightful. There were roses on her pillow, daisies smiling at her from beer bottle vases on all of her windowsills, one night even hundreds of lilac petals that danced through the perfumed air when they celebrated the passing of her last final exams.

  Life was a bouquet.

  A garden just like this.

  Scented sighs times twenty.

  Petals of laughter and the soft stems of delight without interruption.

  Where did it all go?

  As this new question floats through her mind Emma is distracted by the sound of a ringing phone. It is her home phone and Emma has forgotten to close the window so she will not hear it and hear it she does. The call is most likely from Marty who has not yet received an expected phone call from her youngest daughter since the ugly brunch incident. Mother Marty who Emma assumes has taken a break from yet another illicit rendezvous.

  The daughter who is now lying on her back with garden bugs crawling across her thighs and one absolutely exquisite tiger swallowtail butterfly flipping around close to a section of stunning goldenrods so rapidly it is as if the poor thing has just had a talk with its own mother.

  The left side of Emma, the side that is suspended between earth and flower and touching nothing but the rising night air, wants to flip her body up and force her to run to the house where she will make up some lame excuse about why she has not called.

  The right side of Emma, the dominant side that possesses a hand that is always the last to let go of a leaf, or stem, or the fine skin of a flower, is unmovable. The right side wants to grab a blanket and sleep overnight in the yard and tell her mother to call one of her other daughters. It is the side that wants to creep from yard to yard to see what the other gardeners are up to and perhaps sneak into their sheds to steal precious seeds and cuttings that are waiting for new homes inside of tight plastic bags.

  The ringing phone stops and still Emma does not move. It has been too long since she has been in the yard like this.

  She does not get up to take the call, to run to the phone, to do what she thinks is expected of her.

  Emma stays in the yard until she can hear her flowers breathe deeply and the bushes begin the sw
eet soft snore that others might think is simply a mild wind rolling through the leaves.

  Later, when she has turned off all the lights, finished a glass of warm milk, and thrown a kiss towards the seedlings against the back fence, she pulls the house phone cord that also powers the answering machine out of the wall, chuckles lightly, which is as close to a laugh as she can get, and then falls into bed as if she has just finished an Ironman marathon.

  But what Emma doesn’t do, before she unplugs her phone, is to listen to whatever message her mother may have left her on the answering machine.

  When Emma finally does hear the message, days later, she will discover that it is very detailed. But Marty’s somber words do not address the family brunch, or Emma’s avoidance of anything Gilford for the past week, or who might be sleeping with Grandma. It is a very specific list of Emma’s reunion-planning duties. Duties that were handed out at the brunch after she’d left and during a quick follow-up meeting the next day in Debra’s backyard that AWOL Emma failed to attend. Duties that are time-consuming, necessary and absolutely critical components that will make or break this year’s GFR.

  And the most important instruction is mentioned at the beginning of Marty’s message and again at the end.

  Instructions that are waiting for Emma right behind Samuel’s second message on the unplugged answering machine.

  5

  THE FIFTH QUESTION:

  Is there any way to divorce your own family?

  IT IS PAST MIDNIGHT ON A WEDNESDAY and a record-setting ten days since Emma Gilford has last spoken to her usually relentless mother. When the phone she finally plugged back in rings, Emma swims through the fog of her early REM sleep to hear Stephie asking her through tears if there is any way to divorce your own family.