The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (2 page)

Susan shifts, turning to face the women who surround her, but Chris won't let go of her and pushes in her legs to hold the tiny woman against the full frame of her body. The women talk then, the same easy conversation they might have had in the living room, without a broken glass, where Susan would have eventually told them in greater detail about the boyfriend who has been standing in the wings for years, more—always more—about John, the missing husband, about the risks of a baby when you are past forty and tired and angry and sad and don't want any more babies anyway.

Another bottle of wine comes off the top of the counter, and this sad circle of friends becomes lost in remembering and talking and simply being there together on Susan's kitchen floor. An hour passes, and the voices rise and fall and rise and fall like a wave moving from one wall to the next and then back again.

The women talk about abortion, and they talk about what bastards half of the men they have married and loved and slept with are and always will be. There is a chorus of sorrow that floats from one woman to the next, and these women who have spent time together for years and shared their loves and who have talked about lust and hate and crime and passion don't see that the early evening has passed, and that there is a half moon rising outside of the high kitchen window.

They talk with great sincerity and kindness about helping Susan and driving her to the clinic and helping her to get that damn attorney to file the divorce papers and getting off the fence with the jackass she's been screwing for twelve years. The women talk about these things mostly without anger, but that rises from them too, in an unseen layer of life's tragedies and sorrows that always seems to hover close.

As the women talk, they don't see themselves as separate entities even though they are each as different from one another as the proverbial fish is to the bicycle. They are grandmothers and career women, housewives, a secretary. They are divorced, married, grieving, wildly happy, conservative, liberal and a combination of every sad tale in the universe. But those differences are overshadowed by the fact that they are all women and friends, and because they have shared their secrets and because now they are lying on the floor in Susan's kitchen and they have made the world stand still.

When their words begin to slide into each other after the fourth bottle of wine, Sandy decides they must eat. No one rises from the floor though, and the time or the place doesn't seem to matter. It becomes clear first to one and then to the next that they matter, just them, and nothing else matters for these hours, not another person or thing or problem.

“Well,” Sandy finally says, “I'm just thinking, ‘Thank God that Susan threw that glass on the floor.' I haven't done anything like this since the last time I got stoned in college.”

“Oh, Sandy,” laughs Chris, leaning back to shift her weight, “the last time you got stoned was probably this afternoon. Isn't this the day that kid drives through from Madison?”

No one looks shocked or stunned, especially because it is Sandy who has always had a hard time remembering it is no longer 1968, and they are once again and always talking about the unspeakable, about what really happens in a life, about what really matters most. There is shifting, the flush of a toilet, bowls of red Jell-O and a tuna salad, and chips and salsa, and whatever else Sandy can reach by crawling to the refrigerator and then shoving the plastic containers across the ten feet of space from the open fridge door to the pile of women on the floor.

Something else is happening during the sharing of food. There is the flow of erotic energy that has the scent of people in love in those first months when there are hours of talk and always a communication with bodies and eyes. Women especially know about this phenomenon. Women who cling to each other and who flock to female friends and say everything and anything with such ease it is often embarrassing to watch. It is like the magic moment of discovery when something finally makes sense, when someone finally says the right thing, when the pieces of life finally flow in the correct line. It is bright and sexual and the release of a thousand demons when a simple idea begins to grow until nothing can stop it, and then something that just an hour ago was unbelievable and unthinkable makes perfect sense.

Chris gets the idea first, and it comes to her just as quick as every other wonderful thought that has helped her escape death a hundred times and tackle life in every conceivable fashion. The idea is hers because she has missed this the most, this love affair women can have with each other. These hours where women talk and hold each other and pass on whatever bits of courage they need to get on with it; the times when they can become emotionally naked and turn themselves inside out and continue to love what they see anyway; and a moment just now, when you can tell someone you are pregnant and don't want the baby and hate your life and your husband and the man who made this baby with you and “could you please, right now, tell me what in the hell I am going to do about this mess of my life?”

The others, often sidetracked by the very things that they now discuss, have missed it too. It has come to them sporadically in their lives, and not often enough because there is never enough time. Luckily, during these last months these women together have become an electric charge. There is a current of life running among them, and somehow a spark of magic has risen up and the women have become powerful and invincible and now they can do anything they want.

“What time is it?” Chris begins, and the question startles everyone because they don't care what time it is and they think with great joy that they may never care again.

“Geez,” Janice says, rolling over on top of a pile of potato chips, “it's probably late, but screw it, let's just stay up all night and have a slumber party.”

Mary rolls toward her with outstretched arms. “Let's make it a party that lasts ten years, and we'll just live on the floor and eat and drink and talk and never let anyone else in the house.”

“Oh God,” remembers Joanne, moaning as if she has just had an incredibly personal physical experience. “Once when I was living in Chicago, I did that for three days but it wasn't with a room full of middle-aged women.”

Everybody smiles and Chris knows that her simple question, like the broken glass, has changed everything. She smiles. “Quick, tell me something you have always wanted to do but never did, everybody think of something, just tell us all whatever pops into your mind.”

Everyone begins dreaming. The women slide around on the floor, roll their eyes, and their thoughts come to a mutual conclusion. In unison they dream of leaving. Simply walking out the door and moving on from something or someone. The magic of friendship has spoken to each one of them so they are dreaming the same dream.

Chris says what will happen next is just for them and absolutely no one else. “No one,” she emphasizes with a half scream, because she has done this in her life a thousand times and she knows that to do it, even once, is necessary for survival, for change, for forgetting and moving on. To do it together would be a miraculous occurrence.

“We could do it, you know,” she tells them, becoming the teacher they are waiting for. “None of us have babies, hell, half of us don't even have a uterus anymore. Imagine it, just imagine it and don't think about anyone else but yourself. That's the secret here.”

The women are thinking and Chris urges them on. She reminds them of the months and months they have tried to talk away everything from menopause to rape. She tells them that sometimes a simple movement, a simple act, can be more therapeutic than a million meetings around a living room coffee table listening to old records from the '60s and drinking wine that isn't quite as good as you'd like it to be.

“Are you trying to convince yourself too?” Sandy asks her, leaning across a set of legs to bring herself closer to Chris. “Where are your demons, dear friend? You've been everywhere and done everything. We have to be in this together.”

Chris is the only one who has never cried during all these months of meetings and shared secrets, and when Sandy sees that her question has made Chris weep, she is momentarily startled. When she reaches beyond Susan to wipe Chris's cheek, she doesn't say anything else but waits. Everyone waits.

“I've never had real friends,” Chris tells them as softly as they have ever heard her speak. “My life has been so different from yours, but I would have given my left tit or any one of my adventures to have had an hour like this just once ten, twenty or thirty years ago. I could never be careless with any of you, with all of the things you have told me and being with you like this or wherever we choose to go, would just mean so much to me.”

No one is stunned by this confession or by the tears or by Susan's unborn baby. Among themselves they have seen and heard and felt so much and now they are tired, so damned tired. It is the tiredness that somehow gives them strength.

“Of course,” Chris adds, not as an afterthought but as part of her confession. “I've never been much of a friend myself, it was always too frightening for me. So I didn't quite know how to do it until I met all of you.”

There is nothing else to say then as the women bend to touch Chris as a silent way of thanking her. Susan moves out of her arms and without realizing it at first, all eight of the women—wearing glasses and stretch pants, old tennis shoes, loafers, mostly jeans and socks that are too thin at the heel and toe, find they are sitting in a perfect circle.

Everyone is anxious, ready, pensive about what will come next. They feel it coming but for minutes they can't move, and then Alice—of all people—starts them out. Alice who has a hole in her heart the size of Miami is the one to bring them up and out of their woman circle one at a time, reaching first for one hand and then the next, then pulling with such a fierceness it's a wonder her back doesn't go out. Even in this extraordinary moment she is still Alice—kind, gentle and firm all the way.

“We'll go,” she said. “I think we'll all go. Enough with all of this suffering and sacrifice and waiting for something to change. Just enough is what I say.”

Alice pauses to shift her thoughts back toward the direction they usually travel. It's a worn path of practical things like coats and warm soup and keeping your head covered in the wind, but even Alice feels a change in that wind. She shudders with pure excitement as she adds what she hopes will be the last perfect thing she ever utters. “It won't be cold even if we stay out at night because I've been watching the weather, and it's not supposed to get below fifty at night. Let's try and do the best we can for clothing with whatever Susan has around here.”

No one has exactly said what is going to happen next or what they are about to do, and that is the wild beauty of all the sudden movements, of the giggling, of the not-at-all-frightened looks the women exchange.

There is a quick raid of socks and only one shoe exchange because Susan is so small that no one but Susan can wear any of her shoes, although Sandy puts on a pair of John's hiking boots. She can't bring herself to leave them on for more than a few seconds because the thought of anything that is his makes her want to vomit. “We should throw these right out the window,” she says, flinging the boots down the basement steps. They bounce into the side of the dryer and leave a two-inch dent.

Alice makes everyone take a coat or a sweater. When they are ready, they huddle by the door waiting for the right moment to push it open and walk out into the night.

“What an unlikely marvelous mix of womanhood,” Susan shouts as she kicks open her own front door with her size-four feet, forgetting about the baby and John and her throbbing hand. She screams, “Let's walk!”

In the darkest part of the night, just after midnight, the women crush the dewy grass without hesitation, heading north down a highway that is as black as hell, but as inviting as anything they have ever seen.

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