Joy For Beginners (24 page)

TWENTY MILES LATER, Ava trudged into camp at four in the afternoon, exhilarated and exhausted, the muscles of her legs twitching. She went to the storage truck, grabbed her backpack and headed for the assigned number of her campsite. While she knew the walk wasn’t a race, she was pleased to see how few tents were already pitched—jaunty little pink outposts in the midst of a vast frontier. It was a little like the Oklahoma land rush, only with better bras. Ava wondered, not for the first time that day, who her tent-mate would be. Although Ava had resisted the idea of joining a team, of spending all that time with women upending the secrets of their lives into your ears while their perfumes were telling you exactly the opposite, the downside of not being part of a team was that you didn’t know whom you would be sleeping with. It was unlikely to be a beautiful man.

She walked down the aisle of numbers, looking for E-35. Sitting in front of a neat, pink tent was a white-haired woman Ava had seen throughout the day. There were plenty of older women on the walk, much to Ava’s surprise, as she thought the walk was rigorous even for a young person, but this woman was the kind you noticed—with gloriously white hair framing a face with naturally smooth skin and cheekbones that could hold back a hurricane. But mostly it was her expression, the compassion on her face when Ava had spotted her talking with various people throughout the day. And she seemed to talk to anyone—the crew member handing out sports bars, the twin walking for her sister, the overweight woman who was sitting dejected at the pit stop, the team of young people who had made a running detour into a Dairy Queen and then shared their ice cream with her when she had laughingly stepped to the side to give them a place back in the line of walkers.

Ava approached and the older woman looked up, smiling.

“Hi,” she said. “Are you in E-thirty-five?”

Ava nodded.

“Well, I’m Elaine, and you’re just in time for mimosas.”

Ava looked at the woman’s raised hand holding a slim, sparkling plastic glass, and smiled.

“That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day,” she said, and dropped the weight of her pack to the ground.

 

AVA SIPPED HER MIMOSA, marveling at Elaine, who seemed ready to make a celebration out of anything. The only other person she’d ever known like that was Kate, the Queen of the Lopez Island Tea Party, as her father had called her. When they were young, Kate could spend hours making plates out of salal leaves, begging chipped teacups and cookies from her mother. And here was Elaine, fresh from the showers, wearing a Hawaiian batik sundress and rubbing peppermint lotion into her feet.

“I’ve found it’s the little things that make the walk better,” she commented.

“How many times have you done this?” Ava asked.

“This is my third walk. I started the year my daughter died.”

“I’m so sorry; I should have thought.”

“But that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Even those peppy little teamsters over there”—Elaine pointed to the group of boisterous twenty-somethings whose effortless stamina had been the target of Ava’s jealousy all day—“they’re walking for their boss. Whom they didn’t like at first, by the way.” Elaine smiled.

“And you?” she added.

“My friend. I mean, she didn’t die. And my mother. But that was a long time ago and . . .”

“And what?”

“And it was a long time ago.”

“I’m not sure you get your point,” Elaine commented gently.

 

AVA LAY IN her sleeping bag in the tent, listening to the sound of Elaine’s breath moving quietly in and out. She couldn’t remember the last time she had shared a sleeping space with a woman older than she was. There had been the aunts in the weeks after her mother died, ready to fold her in their arms at night, but Ava always stayed awake, kicking at carefully designated intervals until another sleeping arrangement was found. She had been like one of those babies in the experiments she read about later in college, given a series of shirts to smell. Only one from the real mother would do. She didn’t want impostors.

The truth of it was that since her mother died, she hadn’t been good at sleeping with anyone, their breath too close to her face, the way it took over the space so she couldn’t sense anything else, couldn’t tell what might be coming. Because you never knew.

But Elaine’s breathing was soft; the tent was filled with the smell of peppermint and lavender—and chocolate, Ava realized. Elaine had said she was going to steal a brownie from the mess tent for the morning. Ava smiled. The evening had been more fun than she had anticipated, exhausted as she had been when she first reached the tent. But Elaine had insisted she would feel better after a shower—which was true. Ava believed she had never quite enjoyed a shower as much as the one she had in the water truck, surrounded by the usually offensive cacophony of shampoo fragrances of the women around her. But all that mattered was the warmth of the water pouring over her stretched and aching muscles, the feel of the sweat washing out of her hair, the soft fibers of the towel as she ran it over her back and legs. She felt new as her feet relaxed gratefully in a pair of loose-fitting flip-flops.

After dinner, after the last walker had lurched into camp, there had been tryouts for the karaoke contest and Elaine had gotten up and surprised them all with a rousing rendition of “These Boots Were Made for Walking.” The applause had pounded against the roof of the capacious dining tent as Elaine bowed, her white hair sweeping the floor. She returned, flushed and laughing, to the table.

“Ava,” she said, “you should get up there.”

“Not a chance.”

“Darling girl,” Elaine said, “has anyone ever told you you need to grow down a little?”

 

DAY TWO, 5:30 in the morning. Ava and Elaine stood in a line waiting for breakfast. Ava said she never had breakfast, but Elaine insisted she eat.

“This is different from regular life,” she said. “You need to start filling the tank early in the day.”

Elaine was not the only walker with that philosophy and the line at the food tent was long. A group of four women bunched together in front of Elaine and Ava, shivering slightly in the still-dark air; their shirts read “She’s My Sister.” Ava stood behind them, breathing in the smells of hash browns and onions, fantasizing about hot coffee.

The sisters in front of her had the easy camaraderie of women who had shared bedrooms, forks, crushes on the boy next door. They touched one another without thought, tucking in tags on shirts; their sentences overlapped and finished one another casually, generously, as they talked about their strategies for the day ahead. They were like a perfume, Ava thought, watching them entranced, the top and middle and low notes all playing off one another. The closest she’d ever had to anything like that was with Kate.

One of the sisters commented jokingly about the slowness of the food line and the need for a bathroom, and departed. The group in front of Ava shifted, fragmenting as they watched their sister long after she had disappeared into the accumulating crowd.

“How is she . . . ?”

“Tired.”

“But don’t . . .”

“I
won’t
, God . . .”

The fourth one turned away, looked toward the front of the line.

“Won’t it ever move?” she asked.

Their expressions bounced off one another, their hands reaching, touching nothing.

Elaine rested her hand on Ava’s shoulder, pulling her attention away from the sisters in front of her. “Will your friend be there at the finish line?” she asked conversationally.

“No; she’s on a trip down the Grand Canyon.”

“Really?”

And Ava found herself explaining about Kate’s victory party and the challenges each of the women had received. “You could tell the rest of them were glad about my getting this,” she said, motioning to the scene around her. “They were mad at me; they didn’t understand why I wasn’t there for her.”

“Would you do it that way again?”

“No.”

“Well, there you are.” They had finally reached the serving line and Elaine took a huge spoonful of potatoes and placed it on Ava’s plate. “Oh yes,” she said when she saw Ava’s reaction, “today’s a long one. You’ll need every carbohydrate in the county in that skinny little body of yours.”

 

BY MILE THIRTY-FIVE, all of Ava’s pride in her stamina, her strength, had disappeared. Her hips were wooden clothespins opening and snapping shut with each step. Her focus had narrowed to the pavement in front of her, the pit stops where she could refill her Gatorade bottle and rip open a package of chips or cookies, put moleskin on her blistering toes and heels. She remembered back to her training walks in Los Angeles and her sense of adventure in chasing a smell across the hills behind her house. This was not that. This was not stopping, not getting on one of the vans that followed the course to pick up the walkers who couldn’t make it. This was stretching at every stoplight, then feeling the muscles tighten into sharp, tight wires the moment she stepped off the curb. This was walking one foot after the other through the cheering stations where relatives and friends gathered to clap and hug and hand out red licorice and chocolate and tissues. The greeters stood, mothers, fathers, children, friends, holding photographs. Ava was grateful for her dark glasses, the screen they provided.

She looked over at Elaine, who was wearing a picture of her daughter, Diana, safety-pinned to her T-shirt. The woman in the photograph was beautiful—long, black hair, big brown eyes, cheekbones like her mother’s. An expression of pure, calm joy. Everyone who walked by commented to Elaine on how stunning her daughter had been. At the pit stops, women came up and hugged her; at the cheering stations, hands would reach out to touch her shoulder as she passed.

“Isn’t it hard,” Ava asked, “to have them all talking to you like that?” She remembered when her mother died, how she had taken her mother’s favorite perfume bottle and hidden it behind a book on her shelf. She used to pretend that she kept all her memories of her mother in there. She knew what happened to perfume when you opened a bottle.

“You might think so,” Elaine said. “But it makes it easier.”

Ava looked around her, at the signs and the costumes, the pink feather boas, the sparkled bras worn over T-shirts, the strings of fuchsia-colored beads. It was like being in some strange, huge Mardi Gras parade, with emotion—joy, sadness, exhaustion, determination—worn on the outside along with the lingerie. Trudging along in basic tan, she was at best a backdrop in such a vibrant crowd. But she realized, watching, that it was the people with the photographs who were enveloped in hugs; it was the flamboyant ones who raised the honks from passing cars and the fists held up in the air in salute, providing a moment of distraction and pouring energy over the walkers.

When Ava was young, her mother used to chide her, “You can’t just live through your nose, Ava. Get out in the world. Go climb a tree with Kate.”

Well, thought Ava, she was out in the world, all right. You can’t walk sixty miles with your nose. The image was funny, and Ava smiled. A woman walking past smiled back.

 

“SO TELL ME SOMETHING about your mother,” Elaine remarked. They had five miles left to go that day and Elaine seemed determined to talk their way through all of them. Already they had covered politics, travel, Ava’s past relationships, Elaine’s late husband—an eclectic and wide-ranging list of topics that was, Ava had to admit gratefully, diverting. By that point, Ava was feeling almost disembodied, her feet automatically landing one in front of the other, her thoughts wandering. The route was taking them along a jogging trail that followed a slim green river. Every once in a while a runner or biker would pass going in the opposite direction, eyes widening at the floodtide of pink-garbed women and men. Elaine picked a blackberry off one of the bushes lining the trail and handed it to Ava.

Ava looked down at the fruit in her palm.

“What?” Elaine asked.

“Blackberries,” Ava said. “When I was little my parents and I made a pact every April not to eat blackberries until the real ones were ripe in August. Northwest Lent, my dad called it—to make sure you appreciated the real thing.”

Ava paused for a moment, then continued, “My mom was the worst at waiting. She used to sneak down to the bushes that grew near the beach, and my dad used to catch her and carry her back to the cottage, both of them laughing. She used to slip blackberry jam onto his toast in revenge, so he would break the pact first, but he always caught her.”

Ava put the fruit in her mouth and felt its warmth spread across her tongue, deep and purple, the smell rising up, the essence of summer.

“I always forget how wonderful they taste,” she said.

 

DAY THREE. When Ava woke up, she could sense a change in the air, a rising tide of jubilation in the first murmurings in the tents around her. No matter what, it would be over that day. She checked her watch: 4:15. She declined the option of another half hour of sleep and slipped out of the tent.

At the other end of the camp, she could see the glow of the dining tent where the volunteer crew was already starting to prepare breakfast. Breathing in, she could catch the scent of bacon and hot chocolate, melting butter and scrambled eggs. She felt her stomach growl.

As she returned to her own tent a half hour later, two cups of hot coffee in her hands, Elaine was just putting her head outside, white hair floating about her head.

“Hey there,” Ava called out, “ready to finish this sucker off?”

“Good Lord, look who’s chipper this morning,” said Elaine, as she emerged from the tent and stretched tentatively. She reached over and tucked in the tag on Ava’s shirt with a smile, then took the coffee and let the steam rise up into her face.