The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (15 page)

“Fine,” the man growled, his eyes widening slightly at her voice and the firm touch of her fragile hands. “I'll leave it on all day if that's what you want.”

“That's what I want.” As he started to leave, she added, “What is the weather like outside today?”

He cocked his head at her. “You haven't said two words in all these months. What's happening today?”

“I'm just traveling through time.” She winked at him.

“Wow,” he said nervously. “Well, here's your pills.”

“The weather,” she asked again. “Tell me about the weather.”

“Warm stretch throughout the Midwest,” he answered. “Not expected to rain for weeks. Just lots of sun out there.”

Oh good, she thought to herself, then it won't rain the entire time the women are out walking. By the time they are finished with their journey, the rain can come and it won't matter. For now, Margaret thought to herself, we need this warm spring weather so we can get to where we need to go.

“Here,” the attendant said, placing the blue pills in her palm. “Swallow these while I check the bathroom.”

“Why, of course.” The minute the young man turned his back, she slipped the pills through her hands and watched as they dropped under her arm where she pushed them with what was left of her elbow, just a bone really, next to the other ones.

“Should we change the bed?” he asked her next, hoping she would say no so that he could run outside and have a cigarette.

“Oh, honey no, I think these sheets will be good for a while yet, don't you worry about that.”

The fellow nearly ran out of the door then, and although Margaret desperately wanted to stay awake for the news, she was exhausted again and the room swirled. She saw her beloved husband, the one she loved, the man who had showed her how to open her heart, standing so close to her she knew it must be a dream. Raymond talked to her softly, standing close to the window.

“Margaret,” he said lightly, as if saying her name was part of his breath, part of what he did every moment of his existence. “Margaret, I miss you.”

Drifting awake and then asleep with her eyes rolling back and her head sideways on her pillow, Margaret had a clear picture of Raymond. She saw him as he looked in his late sixties, twenty years ago, how he looked just before he died. His eyes were set so deep inside of his head that she seemed to get lost gazing into them. Deep lines pushed wide by the prairie winds and the winters in the barn and the pain of all those lost boys ran from the edges of his eyes across his wide face. Raymond's neck was as thick and brown as the leather gloves that always stuck out of his back pocket, and little gray hairs popped up here and there from the chest Margaret had loved to lie across. “If I could just hear his heart beating, one more time,” Margaret told herself, hoping God would listen.

In life, Margaret had memorized every line and turn in Raymond's body. She could pick out his footsteps from a crowd, smell him from one end of the manure-filled barn to the next.

“It's getting close, Raymond, isn't it?”

“We'll be together soon, Margaret, so soon now.”

While his image faded away, Margaret remembered those last years of his life—the first signs of blood in the bathroom, and Raymond dropping his head to admit that he had been sick for a long while. The cancer quickly wrapped itself around them tighter and tighter each day, until he was unable to walk or move or to look her in the eye. She washed him and turned him on his creaking bed and at night, when his sleep was erratic and he cried out, she climbed in next to him and rocked him back and forth, just as she had rocked their three sons.

After he died, Margaret thought of those months not with bitterness but with gratitude because she had learned a whole new level of love. She learned that after all the pain and suffering and loss of her life, she could go on and she could keep her heart open and unlocked, and that she could love Raymond, her wonderful Raymond, even more than she already loved him.

For twenty more years, Margaret lived her life in the same house, walking the same paths through the long rooms, sitting each morning in the chair by the window, trying to fathom how she had managed to outlive everyone.

Now Margaret didn't think of all those days alone as lonely. She had her church and her friends in town, and she had all those years of memories to keep her company from one season to the next. Yet Margaret grew old, and she could tell every day that her mind was shutting down. One morning she woke up on the kitchen floor and realized that she had slipped against the side of the refrigerator and hit her head on the counter.

Not more than a week later, she tried to make a frozen pizza in the oven but she forgot to take the plastic and cardboard wrapping off of it. The house filled with smoke. She stopped driving soon after that, and waited out another year, hiding out mostly in the bedroom she used to share with Raymond. Everything frightened her, and often she would look out the window to see all her babies playing in the corn crib and then she could hear Raymond shouting from the barn to get down and be careful.

In the second year as newspapers and mail piled up on her porch and neighbors finally noticed, her pastor came with the sheriff. All the rest of those days that followed were lost to Margaret. All the days when someone sold the farm and people from Chicago took away all the pieces of furniture she had polished for years. The days when she was shifted from side to side in this very bed, and all the days when there was no one to pull the weeds from around the graves. No one to say the prayers and to pay for those Masses on the anniversaries of those deaths.

By the time Margaret woke up from her last remembering, it was almost time for the last newscast of the afternoon. She grabbed at the thin sheets, pulling herself with one aching lunge just an inch so she could slide her head down the side of the pillow toward the radio. She heard the women were still walking, and she smiled and closed her eyes, listening to a woman announcer on the radio for the first time.

“How many of us have thought about this, ladies? One day you are just fed up and you need a break and you say to yourself, ‘I'm just taking a walk and getting out of here.' That's apparently what this group of women from a rural section of southern Wisconsin are doing at this very moment.”

She knew from her vision of them in her dreams that the women had a great deal of affection for each other. As they walked past that old pond and vanished beyond the next hill, Margaret drifted away again. As she focused on the women, and saw her old childhood house in the distance, her mind was filled with the sounds of barking dogs, and her mother's hand warm and soft, and smelling the soap against her face. When Margaret rolled over in her bed, she dreamed of her mother's arms, her wonderful kind arms, and as she slept, her arm rested gently on top of the mound of blue pills.

DIVORCE—NEW FABRIC FOR SOCIETY

—30—

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

The Elegant Gathering: Gail

E
VERY DAY FOR YEARS
and years now, I have started out thinking that I will not make the same mistakes over and over again. I won't yell at the kids. I won't have them leave the house with their heads hanging down. I won't secretly wish that school lasted for fourteen hours, and that a woman with her hair up in a bun will show up to clean the house, cook dinner and do every other thing that I am sick to death of doing. I won't blame Bruce for leaving me with the whole damned mess, bills up the ying-yang, and a heart that is as hollow as the black stump on the back road that runs behind the house.

I used to call my mother on the worst mornings.

“Gail Marie Harksman, if I could raise three children by myself and send them all to college, then by God, you can get through this too.”

Well, Mother, here's some big news for you. You screwed up big time and that's another thing I keep promising to change—blaming you for my own two divorces and a life that seems to have me moving in no particular direction.

My life is the one that everyone whispers about at the class reunions. “Oh my gawd!” they all say. “Two divorces, how many affairs, who fathered which kid and she works where?” I've become the
National Enquirer
poster mom for this entire state and every other one I have run from or to.

I don't suppose my parents planned this for me. When I was a girl before my father took off with just a raincoat, a paper bag with three books, some underwear, and a bunch of junk from the garage, I did what all little girls do. I spent countless hours paging through the wedding album that my mother kept on the table next to the fireplace, imagining what it would be like to marry my own father.

For me, that album was the most beautiful and wonderful thing I had ever seen. My father wore a dark blue tuxedo that was slightly too big that he had borrowed from his friend in the show band. My mother wore my grandmother's dress, which fanned out like peacock feathers. I never ever remember seeing her look happy like she did in those photos. Often, when I was older, I would spend hours and hours watching her eyes for any sign of happiness, for some glimmer of hope or joy, for anything that might confirm for me that happiness does not have to disappear from a life.

My father did say good-bye to me, and even though I was only seven years old, I can remember everything he said, how he stood, the way he touched my face and let his hand rest there the entire time he talked to me.

Outside the window the lilac bushes swayed against the yellow siding of the house where we lived in Detroit. My mother was sleeping off one of her headaches, and my brother and sister were in their rooms pretending to do homework but really hiding from my mother.

I was in the living room, and I watched my father pull into the driveway from work but he never got out of the car. He just sat there, and I wondered if I should go out and get him. I don't know if he saw me watching him but finally he got out.

When he came into the house, he was holding a paper bag and looked startled to see me. Quite to my surprise, he came forward and knelt down in front of me as if he were about to propose marriage.

My father's eyes were so dark, they looked as if they had been set into the back of his head. His hair was longer than that of the other dads I knew; it hung down across one eye, especially late in the day when all the hair oil had been rubbed off by his soft, elegant hands. He had a way of tilting his head to the right when he was serious about something, which was practically all the time.

“Gail, do you know I love you?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“My princess,” he said, smiling just a little. “Now give me a big kiss.”

I never asked him about the paper bag or why he was whispering or why he turned on his heel and left the house.

I ran to the window, saw him backing up without ever looking around to see if I was there, then I watched the Buick disappear. I sat there for an eternity until finally the phone rang. Then I could hear my mother upstairs, yelling like my father was still in the house.

Nothing was ever the same after that, although my mother kept telling us how our life was better without him. I could never understand how she thought this because all we did was yell and cry and look out the windows, hoping he would come back. My brother got in all kinds of trouble, but finally settled down when a note came in the mail from our father. As he read it big tears rolled out of his fifteen-year-old eyes, before he ripped the note into pieces. After that he was like the perfect son.